Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The sunlight spilled through the thin green curtains of the Midoriya apartment, casting golden lines across the hardware floor. Six-year-old Izuku sat at the kitchen table, swinging his sock-covered feet as he poked at his scrambled eggs. They were fluffy and warm, a little cheesy– just the way he liked them–but today, something felt… off.

His mother, Inko, bustled around the kitchen behind him, humming the opening theme to his favorite hero cartoon as she cleaned dishes. The melody was cheerful, almost too much so, like a smile stretched too tight.

Izuku's fork paused mid-stab. He tilted his head and watched her back.

“Mom?”

She turned startled. “Yes, sweetheart?”

“Are you sad?”

Inko blinked. Her smile softened, faltered just slightly. “Of course not, honey! Why would you think that?”

Izuku didn't have a good answer. All he knew was that her back felt sad. That her hum, even though it was cheerful, vibrated weird in his chest. That his heart felt too big and too full, like it was trying to soak up something heavy.

He lowered his eyes. “I dunno.”

Inko crouched in front of him and touched his cheek. Her hands were warm. “Are you feeling okay?”

Izuku nodded. He wasn't sure. “My tummy’s weird,” he offered. “But not sick weird. Just… like it's heavy.”

“Maybe you’re nervous about class?” She guessed gently, brushing a curl behind his ear. “Did Bakugou say something again?”

Izuku's brow scrunched. “He said my face looks like a potato.”

Inko sighed and kissed his forehead. “You're the cutest potato Ive ever seen. Finish your breakfast, baby. We don't want to be late to school.”

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Izuku Midoriya was six years old when he began to understand that something about him wasn’t like the other kids.

It wasn’t his green hair, though that got him teased. It wasn’t that he cried easily, though that only made it worse. It wasn’t even the fact that he was still Quirkless–or so the doctor had said. It was something else. Something harder to name.

He could feel things.

Not just his own feelings, but other peoples. When his mom got scared watching the news, her fear would twist in his chest before she even spoke. When Katsuki Bakugou got mad on the playground, the heat of his rage pressed against Izuku's skin like summer air. And when the teacher snapped at the class with a clipped voice and a forced smile, Izuku could feel the tight coil of stress under her words like a rubber band about to snap.

It made his head hurt. It made the world loud. Yet he still doesn’t tell anyone what he is feeling, not even his mother.

And it made him think there was something wrong with him.

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That morning started like any other. His mom had packed his lunch and kissed the top of his head twice–once because she always did, and a second time because he asked her to. He wore his favorite All Might hoodie, even though it was a little too warm for it. He liked the way the sleeves swallowed his hands.

“Remember to listen to your teacher, sweetie,” Inko said as she straightened his backpack. “And don’t let Bakugou get under your skin, okay?”

“I won’t,” Izuku lied.

He waved goodbye and trudged towards Aldera Elementary School, the All Might hoodie flapping behind him like a cape. It wasn’t far but every step made his stomach twist.

The emotions were already there, prickling at the edge of his senses.

A girl across the street cried because she forgot her homework. Her dad’s frustration came in waves—hot, sharp.

Two boys on the corner wrestled over a toy, their irritation bubbling like soda shaken too hard.

A man shouted into his phone on the sidewalk, and Izuku nearly stumbled from the force of his anger.
He pressed his sleeves to his cheeks and kept walking.

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School was never easy, but lately, it had become exhausting in a way that Izuku couldn't explain. The moment he walked through the gates, something tightened inside his chest. As he passed clusters of students in the yard, little jolts of tension pricked at him–anxious whispers, nervous giggle, a girl who was trying to hide that she had been crying, a boy pretending he wasn't mad at his friend.

It wasn't the sounds that got to him. It was the way being around them made his chest throb and his breath shallow. Like everyone’s feelings were leaking into his body, bit by bit, and there wasn't enough space inside him to hold it all.

Class started normally. He sat in the back next to the window. He liked the window seat–it was quiet, and he could watch the trees sway in the wind, But even here, the storm inside didn't settle. Ms. Tanaka took attendance while the kids chatted about Quirks and heroes. Today, someone’s cousin had grown wings. Another boy claimed his dad was training to be in the police force. Katsuki sat with his feet on the back of Izuku’s chair, smirking like he knew something no one else did.

Izuku tried to focus. He really did. He even took notes, though his handwriting was crooked and the pencil kept slipping. But he could feel it building—like a storm pressing against a window. The class was buzzing with energy, too much of it. Excitement, irritation, boredom, nervousness.
It pooled around him. Stuck to his skin.

Ms. Tanaka wrote math problems on the board, her expression tight. She was worried about something. Rent, maybe. Her mom was sick—he remembered that from last week. She hadn’t said anything, but the sadness was always there now, like background noise.

“Okay, class!” said Ms. Tanaka, clapping her hands with forced cheer. “For your mid-day assignment, write about what you want to be when you grow up!”

Izuku's hands immediately darted to his pencil. That part was easy.

I want to be a hero.
Like All Might.
I want to help people and save them.
Even if I don't have a Quirk.

The pencil scratched furiously on the page. Writing made him feel lighter, like squeezing a sponge. But then…

“You can't be a hero without a Quirk, Deku.” came a snide voice from the row behind him.
Izuku flinched before he even registered the words. The voice was familiar. Sharp. Bright with mockery.

Bakugou.

Izuku didn't look up. He didn't need to. The wave of mean satisfaction that came with the insult was already crawling over his shoulder like ants. He squeezed his pencil trying to say quiet. Bakugou always made fun of him, but lately it felt different. Not just annoying–but loud. Like Katsuki’s anger and superiority were thumping in Izuku's chest alongside his own heartbeat.
Ms. Tanaka either didn't hear or chose to ignore it. She was scribbling something on the whiteboard.

“I’m not Deku,” Izuku muttered. “My name’s Izuku.”

“Sure, Deku, Whatever you say.”

The laughter being him–half-hearted from the kids who were just following along-added a bitter flavor to the air. Izuku's stomach twisted. Not from fear. Not exactly. From something else.
From shame.

From disappointment.

But… not his own.

He blinked, confused. Whose was it?

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Recess was supposed to be a break. A time to breathe, to run, to feel free. The sun was too bright. The playground was too loud. The swings creaked, the metal hot from sunlight. Laughter and shouting echoed off the walls.

Izuku sat on the edge of the sandbox, watching the other kids. His notebook awas open in his lap. The drawing he’d started–a smiling version of All Might giving a thumbs up. He didn’t play much. Not because he didn’t want to—but because every group was so loud inside his head. Too much noise, too much feeling. Excitement buzzed off the other kids like static. Shouts of “I win!” and “No fair!” and “Race you to the slide!” all hit his ears normally, but something else hit deeper–like vibrations in the ground only he could feel.

He pressed a crayon down hard, outlining All Might's cape. The tip broke.

Izuku stared at the broken wax in his fingers. His hands were shaking, just slightly. He didn't know what was wrong with him.

“Izuku?”

He turned. A girl from class–Kyuma–stood a few feet away. Her cheeks were red and arms crossed. “Do you want to play tag?”
He opened his mouth to say yes. He wanted to. He liked Kyuma. She was nice. But before he could speak, something shifted.

Her face smiled. Her body language said it was an invitation, But her emotions screamed something else. Fear. Tight, darting fear, like a rabbit listening for footsteps.

“No thanks,” he mumbled.

Her face dropped into disappointment–genuine this time. She looked down then walked away.
As she did, the fear peeled off her like mist in the sunlight. Izuku felt lighter again, but not better. He sat very still for the rest of recess.

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By the afternoon, Izuku's mind felt like it was full of bees. Tiny emotions crawling everywhere, stinging his thoughts.
He couldn't concentrate. He couldn't read his book during his free time, even though it was about heroes. He couldn't answer the math question even though he knew what four plus three was.

He didn't understand what was happening. He just wanted the feelings to stop.

Then the incident happened.

It started simple–too simple.

Katsuki was arguing with another boy—Sora. They’d been butting heads for a week now, something about whose Quirk was stronger. Sora had sharp teeth and a temper. Katsuki had explosions and a point to prove.

“Say it again!” Sora shouted, shoving Katsuki in the chest.

“Go ahead, bite me, freak!” Katsuki snarled back.

Izuku stood. His head pounded.

“Stop,” he said, too quietly. No one heard.

Katsuki shoved back. Sora stumbled and fell on his butt. Kids gathered in a circle, whispering, half excited, half afraid. Laughing at him.

“Oops,” Bakugou said mock-innocently.

Izuku took a step forward. His breath hitched.

“Stop it,” he said louder. His voice cracked.

Sora’s fists clenched. Katsuki’s palms sparked.

“No more,” Izuku pleaded. “Please. You’re scaring people.”

And then—

Something inside him broke open.

Izuku felt a surge of heat. Not from bakugou–but from Sora. Humiliation. Anger. Wanting to disappear. It punched Izuku in the chest like a fist.

Then another surge hit. From a girl nearby, who looked uncomfortable but didn't speak up–guilt. A boy laughing too hard–cruelty. The teacher not reacting fast enough–resignation.

They all poured into Izuku at once. Hot. Cold. Loud.

His breath caught in his throat. His vision blurred. His heart started hammering. He didn't know where he ended and they began. And then…

He screamed.

It wasn’t loud, not at first. Just a raw, sharp sound like a wounded animal, the kind of cry that wasn’t meant for words, only for release.

And then the world changed.

A ripple tore through the classroom—silent, invisible, but undeniable.

Katsuki’s smirk vanished. He stumbled backward, blinking rapidly. “What the hell—?”

A girl in the front row dropped her pencil and began sobbing, loud and sudden, as if something inside her had cracked open.

Sora clutched his desk and let out a shaking breath like he’d just surfaced from drowning.

Another student dropped to the floor, hands over their ears. One boy started hyperventilating. Another just sat frozen, staring ahead as if he’d seen a ghost.

And through it all, Izuku sat in the middle of the chaos, shoulders shaking, wide green eyes unfocused and brimming with tears. His mouth was open in a silent sob now, the scream gone but its echoes still pulsing outward.

The room had become a pressure cooker of emotion—not just the students, but magnified, fed back to them through Izuku like a mirror turned into a floodlight.

Ms. Tanaka was shouting something, but Izuku couldn’t hear her. Couldn’t hear anything. His senses had turned inward. All he could feel was everything—too much, all at once, like his skin had been stripped away and the whole world was pouring into him.

Then, just as suddenly, it stopped.

Or maybe he stopped noticing.

He collapsed forward, head hitting his arms on the desk, breath coming in ragged, choked sobs.
The last thing he felt before darkness took him was his teacher’s fear.

Not for him.

Of him.

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The phone call came mid-morning.

Inko Midoriya had just sat down with a cup of tea, hoping for a few minutes of quiet before she returned to folding laundry. The apartment was peaceful—sunlight poured through the kitchen window, catching in the steam curling from her mug. The television murmured faintly in the background. She hadn't even taken her first sip when her phone buzzed across the table.
Unknown number. She frowned.

"Hello?"

“Mrs. Midoriya?”

The voice was tight, strained—female. The kind of voice someone used when they were trying not to panic.

“This is Tanaka, from Aldera Primary. I’m calling about your son, Izuku. There’s been… an incident.”

Inko's stomach dropped.

“What happened? Is he hurt?”

“No, he’s physically fine. But there was… a disturbance on the playground. We need you to come immediately.”

The tea went forgotten.

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Inko barely remembered the train ride.

The world outside the window blurred by in streaks of gray and green, her thoughts racing too fast for her to focus on anything. Her hands trembled in her lap. She clutched her phone so tightly her knuckles turned white. Dozens of thoughts screamed through her head, all of them louder than the one before:

What happened? Did he fall? Was he attacked? Did someone use their Quirk on him?

Or worse… did Izuku do something?

The idea clawed at her.

Her son was kind. Empathetic. Sensitive to a fault. But she couldn’t deny what she’d noticed, even if she’d kept it quiet from doctors and teachers alike: Izuku felt things. Not just in the way children do—but deeply, viscerally, as if everyone else’s emotions were part of his own.

He’d always been that way.

As a baby, he would cry when she cried, even if he hadn’t seen her tears. As a toddler, he’d wrap his arms around her legs on bad days and say, “It’s okay, Mama,” before she’d spoken a word. Sometimes he knew what she felt before she knew it.

And lately, it has gotten stronger.

Too strong.

By the time she reached the school and stepped through the front gates, she already felt a knot of dread coiling deep in her stomach.

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The world returned slowly, like light bleeding through cracks in a curtain.

Izuku's first sensation was warmth–something soft and heavy draped across his chest. A blanket. The next was sound. Not the sharp clatter of a classroom or the high, tiny laughter of children, but hushed voices. Muffled. Careful. Like the people speaking were afraid of being too loud.

Then came the ache.

It sat low in his skull, behind his eyes, throbbing like a heartbeat. Not sharp enough to cry over, but enough to feel like something had been ripped open and hastily stitched back together. He shifted slightly, blinking against the low lights overhead, and was met with a figure hunched beside the bed.

“Izuku,” his mother whispered, as if the sound might break him. “Baby. You’re awake.”

Her hands cupped his face instantly, warm and trembling. She kissed his forehead, his cheeks, his brow, anywhere she could reach.Izuku didn't have the strength to pull away. He didn't want to. The fear radiating from her was so potent–but he let her hold him anyway, because if he didn't, she might fall apart completely.

“Mama,” he whispered, and then his lips trembled and he cried, all over again.

She rushed to his side, kneeling so quickly her knees slammed the tile. She wrapped her arms around him, pulling him against her chest.

“It’s okay, baby,” she murmured, stroking his hair. “I’m here now. You’re okay.”

“I'm sorry,” he mumbled, his voice hoarse and cracked. “I didn't mean too–”

“No, no, no,” she interrupted quickly, shaking her head, eyes already wet again. “You didn't do anything wrong. You hear me, Izuku? Nothing. You’re okay. You’re okay now.”

But he wasn’t.

He shook in her arms like a leaf in a storm.

“I didn’t mean to,” he sobbed into her shoulder. “I didn’t mean to make them cry. I didn’t mean it…”

“I know,” she whispered.

“I just wanted them to stop fighting.”

She stilled.

“I just wanted them to stop yelling,” he continued, his voice cracking on every other word. “They were so loud, Mama. Inside. I tried to make it stop—but then everyone started yelling and crying and—and—”

His breath caught. He let out a strangled noise, halfway between a sob and a gasp, and clutched at her harder.

Inko held him like he might disappear.

There were other people in the room. A woman in a professional gray suit, tall and composed, stood near the window with a clipboard tucked under one arm. Her eyes were sharp, but not unkind. Next to her was the school principal, face pale with concern. And by the door stood the school nurse, half in shadow, clutching a file and looking uncertain whether she should come closer.

Izuku didn't like the attention. He felt like a specimen on display.

The woman in the gray suit stepped forward first, her heels silent against the tile floor. There was something precise about the way she moved—like each gesture had been rehearsed and edited to perfection. She didn’t loom, exactly, but she carried an authority that seemed to press on the walls of the tiny nurse’s office. Inko instinctively curls tighter around her son, like some part of her already knew this woman wasn’t here to offer comfort.

“My name is Agent Saitou,” the woman said, her voice calm and modulated, like a therapist or a well-trained AI. “I work with the Early Quirk Development Division under the Quirk Regulation Bureau. I understand this is all overwhelming, Mrs. Midoriya, but we need to begin documentation immediately. Your son may be exhibiting a Class C mental-type Quirk—potentially involuntary—and in such cases, preliminary records are mandatory.”

Izuku flinched in her arms at the word involuntary.

Inko didn’t answer right away. She was still holding him, still trying to press all of herself into him—as if love could act like glue, sealing up the cracks she couldn't even see. But Agent Saitou’s presence made it impossible to stay in that bubble. The warmth of mother and son, the quiet horror and the need to protect—they all began to suffocate under the weight of bureaucracy.

“We’re not… we’re not ready for that,” Inko said softly, without looking up. “He’s six. He’s just a little boy. He was scared.”

The agent did not soften. “That may be true, but five students were removed from the yard by ambulance, one was sedated after showing symptoms of acute hysteria, and your son’s classmates are currently being evaluated for secondary trauma. This was not an incident, Mrs. Midoriya. This was a mass psychological event.”

Izuku whimpered again.

Inko’s heart twisted.

“I understand you’re doing your job,” she said, more firmly this time, “but my job is being his mother. And right now, he doesn’t need paperwork. He needs to know he’s not a monster.”

The principal cleared his throat awkwardly in the background, stepping forward just enough to be heard without drawing too much attention.

“The staff are, of course, cooperating fully with the Regulation Bureau, but I assure you, Mrs. Midoriya, this situation is… unprecedented. We’ve never seen anything like it. But we don’t believe Izuku is dangerous. The children were unsettled, yes, but there was no lasting harm. We simply… weren’t prepared.”

That last line struck Inko with bitter irony.

No one ever is.

The nurse finally spoke, her voice gentle and hesitant. “He collapsed immediately after. He was unconscious for several minutes. His blood pressure was elevated, and his pupils were responsive but sluggish. I ran a cognitive reflex test—he’s stable now, but it’s clear he experienced some form of overload. Like his mind went too far, too fast.”

That got a reaction from Saitou, whose eyes flicked to her clipboard. She jotted something down without looking.

“Mrs. Midoriya, under Article 22 of the Quirk Monitoring Act, you are required to report your child for evaluation within seventy-two hours. If you refuse to comply, we will have to escalate this matter to the local regulatory board.”

Inko’s throat tightened.

“And what happens after that? Will you lock him up in a room and poke at him until he breaks? Put a label on his file that says ‘unstable’ before he even knows what his Quirk is?”

The agent didn’t blink. “We assess. We recommend. We ensure safety. That is all.”

But it wasn’t all, and everyone in the room knew it.

Izuku had gone very still in her lap, his small body drained and boneless, like a bird too tired to fly. His face was blotchy, eyes red-rimmed and empty now, like the crying had stopped only because there was nothing left to give. But Inko could still feel the hum of emotion under his skin—the buzzing, aching pressure of a Quirk he hadn’t asked for and didn’t understand.

“I didn’t want them to be scared,” he said suddenly, voice barely audible.
“I just wanted them to be quiet. I just wanted them to stop yelling. It was so loud, Mama. In my chest. In my head. I couldn’t make it stop.”

And then, quieter still: “I think I broke something.”

The silence that followed that sentence was worse than the sobbing.

Because it wasn’t the kind of thing a six-year-old should say.

It wasn’t the kind of thing a child should know how to say.

But Izuku wasn’t guessing. He wasn’t parroting something he’d heard. He was describing something he had felt. Something that had bloomed inside him like a storm and erupted outward with no filter, no dam, no safe stop.

Inko swallowed hard. She wrapped both arms around him again, pulling him tighter.

“No, baby,” she said softly. “You didn’t break anything. You’re just… sensitive. That’s all. That doesn’t mean something’s wrong with you. It just means you feel a lot. And feeling a lot isn’t bad. It’s beautiful. It means your heart works really, really well.”

Agent Saitou said nothing.

The principal adjusted his glasses and looked away.

And the nurse smiled faintly, like someone remembering something they weren’t allowed to say aloud.

Inko stood slowly, gathering her son in her arms. He was light—lighter than she remembered, or maybe it was just that the weight she’d feared would crush her had never belonged to him in the first place. She looked the agent dead in the eyes.

“I’ll take him home now.”

“You’ll still need to—”

“I know the law.”

There was a pause, then a nod.
Inko turned away without another word and walked out of the nurse’s office, her son pressed against her, his cheek tucked under her chin.

And even though she felt the eyes following them, even though she knew the storm was only just beginning, she walked with her back straight.

Because for the first time since the phone call, she understood something:

She wasn’t just protecting her son from the world anymore.
She was protecting the world from what they’d already done to him.

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Agent Reina Saitou’s office was quiet—too quiet for someone already three meetings deep into her morning. Her coffee had gone cold an hour ago, its bitter scent mixing with the sterile tang of air conditioning and fluorescent lights. She sat at her desk, posture perfect, expression unreadable, eyes fixed on the glowing screen in front of her.

The incident report had come in as a standard emergency flag from a local elementary school. Her assistant had marked it for review, expecting nothing more than a temperamental emitter-type quirk or maybe a spontaneous mutation that gave a child fangs or a tail. But as Reina clicked open the attached video footage from the schoolyard, the image froze halfway through, and she found herself holding her breath.

Dozens of children screaming.

One collapsed on the ground of the classroom, clutching their chest.

A teacher on the ground, eyes wide, sobbing uncontrollably.

And in the center of it all, one small boy—unmoving, pale, and wide-eyed. Izuku Midoriya. Age: 6.

She replayed it again, slower.

No visible quirk activation. No glowing eyes.No hand movements. No sound. Just a shift—like the air pressure had dropped. And then chaos.

It wasn’t energy projection. It wasn’t telekinesis.

It was emotional rupture.

She leaned back in her chair, lips tightening. Then she reached for her encrypted phone and dialed a number she didn’t use often—only when protocol met uncertainty.

It rang once.

“Agent Saitou,” said the voice on the other end. “Report.”

“Possible empathic-type Quirk. Child. Catastrophic discharge. High sensitivity. No training. No prior registration.”

“Location?”

“Aldera Elementary. Musutafu district.”

There was a pause.

Then: “He’s not listed in the Gifted Census.”

“I know.”

Another beat. “Unstable?”

“Severely. And unaware. Subject displayed immediate emotional collapse post-incident. Civilian oversight at the scene is weak.”

“Understood. Deploy at once. Quietly. You’re cleared under HC protocol shadow-level three. Collect preliminary behavioral data, but do not trigger containment until full review.”

Reina’s jaw clenched slightly. “Understood.”

“And Saitou?”

“Yes.”

“If the child shows potential—if this is more than just another empath—tag him. We’ll fast-track the file to Kamura.”

She swallowed once, then nodded to the empty room. “Yes, ma’am.”

The call ended with a soft click. Reina stared at the black screen of her phone for three full seconds before sliding it away.

Kamura.

That was where the Hero Commission sent children they didn’t want to lose—but couldn’t afford to let grow wild.

She stood, smoothing the lines of her gray blazer, and plucked a thin clipboard from her filing rack. Her heels clicked softly against the tile as she crossed to the cabinet behind her desk, withdrawing a red-stamped folder marked HC–E.Division. She added a blank intake sheet to its file, then opened the drawer beneath it—a locked, nondescript compartment—and withdrew a thin silver badge engraved with the Hero Commission’s seal.

Reina Saitou didn’t wear a costume. She didn’t flash lights or smile for cameras. Her quirk wasn’t loud or showy, and the world didn’t know her name.

But when children like Izuku Midoriya broke the world just a little with their existence, she was the one who came first.

Not to save them.
To evaluate them.
And if necessary—

To decide what kind of cage would be quiet enough to hide them in.

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The apartment was too quiet.

Inko had always loved the hush of their home—the warm, lived-in stillness that followed a long day, broken only by the gentle clatter of dishes or the hum of the kettle. But now, with Izuku curled on the couch under two blankets, that silence stretched unbearably. It felt like the air itself had grown heavier, like the walls were holding their breath along with her.

She set a cup of warm milk down on the coffee table, steam curling gently in the air. Izuku didn’t move. He was awake—his eyes were open, blinking slowly at the window where sunlight filtered in through sheer curtains—but he hadn’t spoken since they left the nurse’s office. He hadn’t asked for cartoons. Hadn’t reached for his All Might figure. His hands were tucked tightly beneath the blanket, fingers curled into fists so small, so tense, they trembled.

Inko sat beside him slowly, careful not to startle him. The couch shifted with her weight, and still, he didn’t look at her. His face was pale, lips chewed pink, and his lashes clumped together from earlier tears.

She touched his hair, gently, combing her fingers through the dark green curls. “Baby,” she whispered, “you want to talk?”

Izuku didn’t answer.

She tried again. “Do you want to tell me what you felt? What happened?”

He blinked once.

“I felt…everything,” he whispered finally, voice fragile as glass. “Like all of them were inside me.
”
Inko’s heart broke anew.

“They were mad. They were scared. Even the teacher.” His voice wobbled. “And it got bigger. Like I couldn’t hold it in anymore. Like I was gonna explode.”

“And then what happened?” she asked softly, though she already knew.

His lip trembled. “Then… I did.”

He tucked his chin down, shoulders curling inward, small body folding like he wanted to disappear into the couch.

“I didn’t want to hurt them. I swear, Mama, I didn’t want to. I just… I just didn’t want them to be mad anymore.”

“Oh, sweetheart.” She gathered him gently into her arms, even though he stiffened at first. “You didn’t do anything wrong. You were scared. And it’s not your fault—none of it is.”

“But it is,” he cried into her chest. “They looked at me like I was a monster. Even Kenta. He was my friend and he… he screamed.”

Tears soaked through her blouse. She didn’t care. She held him tighter, rocked him gently the way she had when he was a baby, when all he needed was warmth and motion and a quiet heartbeat to feel safe.

“You’re not a monster,” she said firmly, her voice low and shaking. “You’re my little boy. You’re kind. You were trying to help.”

He was trembling again, like earlier in the nurse’s office. “But what if I do it again?”

Inko didn’t answer right away.

Because she didn’t know.

They hadn’t gotten a doctor’s report yet. The school hadn’t called with a final decision. All she had was a pamphlet hastily handed to her by a nurse—Potential Quirk Emergences in Children: What to Know. Inside were bullet points about common side effects, hormonal spikes, unusual energy fluctuations.

Nowhere did it mention emotional detonation.

Nowhere did it talk about a six-year-old accidentally setting off a storm of fear and rage so powerful that three adults had to be sedated.

“I’ll help you,” she said at last. “We’ll figure this out. Together.”

He hiccupped. “But what if I can’t stop it?”

“Then I’ll be there to stop it for you.”

And she meant it.
Even if no one else would.
Even if it scared her, too.

Even if she didn’t understand what was happening to her son.

She’d stand between him and the world if she had to.

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The room was frigid—not in temperature, but in design. Walls of sterile gray. A conference table stripped of clutter. One sleek monitor embedded into the wall blinked to life with lines of encrypted data, slowly cycling through.

Hero Commission Regional Office – Private Briefing Room

Agent Ren Saitou stood at the head of the table, posture perfectly straight, hands folded behind her back. Her gray suit bore the faint insign

Across from her sat Commission Analyst Takeda, a pale man with sunken cheeks and permanent frown lines etched into his face like scars. Beside him, Director Kamura swiped lazily through a tablet, nodding without looking up.

“So,” Kamura finally said, voice low, disinterested. “The Midoriya boy.”

Saitou tapped a button on the remote in her hand. The monitor behind her flickered again, this time displaying a still image: a classroom mid-panic, chairs overturned, children screaming—one child at the center, eyes wide with panic, face twisted in silent horror.

“The incident occurred at 13:42,” Saitou began calmly. “Elementary School No. 4. Initial reports described what the teachers believed to be a gas leak or psychological mass hysteria. After initial debriefing, it was determined to be a quirk-related incident.”

“Unregistered,” Takeda muttered, adjusting his glasses.

“Yes,” she confirmed. “No genetic markers from the mother. The father is currently overseas—no confirmed registry. The boy, Izuku Midoriya, is six years old. No prior quirk manifestation until today.”

Kamura finally looked up. “And what kind of quirk are we dealing with?”

Saitou didn’t hesitate.

“Emotional projection. Possibly emotional amplification. Range: unmeasured. Duration: ten minutes, with residual aftershocks lasting over thirty. Secondary effects include panic, aggression, confusion. The subject appeared unaware of his activation trigger. From all observations, it was involuntary and reactionary.”

Takeda whistled lowly. “And he did this in a fit of fear?”

“Attempting to calm a fight,” she clarified. “He perceived tension in his classmates, attempted to soothe them. Instead, he triggered a feedback loop. Every child and adult in the vicinity experienced an emotional cascade—each person essentially overwhelmed with their own emotional state, magnified tenfold. One teacher suffered a stress-induced seizure. Two children are still under observation.”

Kamura raised an eyebrow. “And the boy?”

Saitou’s tone never changed. “Currently recovering at home. No visible physical injury. Mental state is fragile. The mother is… attached.”

Kamura smirked without humor. “They always are.”

Silence stretched thin for a moment.

Takeda leaned forward. “Do we have quirk category analysis?”

“Preliminary results suggest Type-C: Indirect Control. However, given the breadth of emotional influence and lack of physical manifestation, it may require reclassification. Possibly Type-B: Neurological Manipulation.”

Kamura steepled his fingers. “And the potential?”

Saitou didn’t blink. “Unclear. But significant. This boy affected twelve people simultaneously, without training, without intent, and without stability. If cultivated—”

“—or controlled,” Takeda added.

“—he could become a high-tier asset. Or a national security threat.”

The words hung in the air.

Kamura’s eyes flicked back to his tablet, expression unreadable. “The mother. Inko Midoriya. What’s your read?”

“She’s protective. Distrustful of authority, particularly now. Emotionally saturated—grief, guilt, fear. But not a threat.”

Takeda tapped the side of his pen. “Will she cooperate?”

“In my judgment? No. Not willingly. She already questioned school staff extensively. She doesn’t want attention on her son. She wants privacy. Healing.”

Kamura leaned back in his chair. “She won’t get it.”

He waved at the monitor. “Mark the boy. Set a flag in the registry. If the quirk manifests again, we move in officially. In the meantime…”

He trailed off.

Takeda filled in the silence: “Surveillance. Psychological profiling. Quiet, of course.”

Saitou nodded once. “Already in place.”

Kamura turned off the tablet. “Keep your distance for now. No hero visits. No public contact. We don’t need sympathy stories. We need results.”

Saitou stepped away from the monitor, picked up her file, and tucked it neatly into her briefcase. Her voice, when she spoke again, was still utterly devoid of judgment—clinical and composed.

“The boy won’t last long like this. He’s cracking.”

Kamura didn’t look up. “Then he’s exactly where we want him.”

Chapter Text

The Midoriya apartment was too quiet.

Not silent—never silent—but the kind of hollow quiet that made everything louder. The clink of a spoon in a ceramic bowl echoed too harshly. The faint hum of the refrigerator sounded like distant thunder. Even the muffled footsteps from the upstairs neighbor felt intrusive.

Inko moved carefully around the kitchen, the hem of her soft cotton apron brushing her knees as she stirred a pot of miso soup. She kept her movements light, deliberate, like she was afraid of spooking someone.

Or maybe she was just afraid of breaking the thin film of peace holding the apartment together.

Izuku sat at the table, small shoulders hunched, his face resting on his folded arms. He hadn’t said much since the incident. He’d cried, once or twice, in the middle of the night—quiet sobs that drifted down the hallway to her room and shredded what was left of her heart—but by morning, he would always be silent again.

He wasn’t sulking. He wasn’t misbehaving. He was… empty.

Inko set the soup down in front of him gently. “I added the little star noodles,” she said, trying to sound cheerful. “You like those, right? You used to call them ‘All Might pasta’ when you were little.”

Izuku didn’t lift his head.

Inko sat down across from him. Her hands, once always moving—pouring juice, folding napkins, adjusting his shirt collar—stayed folded in her lap. “Sweetheart,” she said softly. “You need to eat something.”

He looked up at her, finally, and for a moment, it was like someone had peeled back his skin and left nothing but raw nerves behind. His eyes were too wide. Too quiet. He tried to smile. It broke halfway through.

“Okay,” he whispered.

He picked up the spoon with two hands and started to eat. Inko kept watching, pretending not to notice how he flinched when a burst of laughter came from the TV still playing softly in the living room. A cartoon. One he used to love.

Now the noise made him shrink.

Inko rose from the table and turned the volume down until it was barely a whisper. Then she sat beside him and rubbed his back in slow circles.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The store used to be his favorite place.

He’d come here after school with his mother, skipping past stacked onions and dragonfruit, pointing out his favorite hero snacks on the top shelf. The jingles from the overhead speakers used to make him smile. The rice aisle smelled like home. He knew which floor tiles squeaked, which shelves had dents, which freezer hummed a little too loudly.

But today… it was different.

The air was too tight. The walls, too narrow. The space between people, too loud.

Izuku walked stiffly beside his mother, one hand clenched in the crook of her coat. She was talking softly—about miso or cabbage or tofu, he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t focus. His eyes stayed on the wheels of the shopping cart, which squeaked every few steps like a scream trying to hide.

They turned the corner into the cereal aisle.

And that’s when he felt it.

Not saw—felt. Like the air thinned around him, a ripple in a still pond. Like when you enter a room and someone has just stopped talking about you.

Two women stood near the end of the aisle, chatting beside towers of cereal boxes. One had a baby strapped to her chest; the other held her toddler’s hand, gently tugging him away from the snack shelf. Their voices dropped the moment Izuku and Inko appeared.

He kept his gaze low, but his ears were sharp. His chest hurt. His skin prickled.

“...that’s him, right?” one whispered. “The boy from the news.”

“The Midoriya kid?”

“They said he made the whole classroom scream. Like a psychic bomb or something—”

“I heard the school might expel him. Can’t risk the others…”

Izuku’s legs slowed. He couldn’t stop listening.

They whispered to each other. One mom moved her kid behind her. “That’s the one.”

The words carved themselves into his chest like knives.

He didn’t know what to say. What could he say?

He shouldn’t have come. He shouldn’t have let his mom bring him. He should’ve stayed home, stayed hidden, kept his head down and let people forget.

But they wouldn’t. They never would.

The emotions pressed against him like fogged glass—nervousness, unease, the flicker of fear spiking in their hearts like static shocks. It wasn’t just that they were talking. It was how they felt about him. Like he might explode at any moment. Like he was a fuse, just waiting to be lit.

He tugged at his mother’s coat. “Mama,” he said, voice barely above a breath. “Can we go home?”

Inko turned immediately. Her eyes searched his face, reading the tension in his shoulders, the tremble in his lip. She glanced down the aisle—saw the women and their poorly hidden stares. Her back straightened like a shield.

“Of course we can,” she said gently. “We’ll just grab the tofu and go, alright?”

He nodded, but the tofu was past them—further down the aisle, closer to the women still watching.

She hesitated for a heartbeat, then took a step forward, her hand firm on Izuku’s shoulder. She pushed the cart calmly, deliberately. Her expression was neutral, but inside, Izuku felt her pulse spiking—anger and fear and sorrow swirling beneath her skin.

As they passed, one of the women nudged her child behind her legs, murmuring, “Don’t get too close.”

Izuku flinched.

They didn’t even bother whispering anymore.

His head dipped low, shoulders curling inward. He wanted to disappear. He wanted to melt into the floor, fade into the shelves, become invisible. He didn’t even want the cereal anymore. He just wanted—

“Izuku,” his mother whispered, the gentleness in her voice fraying at the edges.

He couldn’t answer. Couldn’t breathe.

By the time they stepped out into the cold, gray air, Izuku’s fingers were white from clutching his sleeves. The wind stung his face. Inko took a deep breath like she’d been holding it the entire time.

They walked home in silence.

About halfway down the block, Izuku spoke. “They hate me.”

Inko stopped. “Izuku—”

“They do,” he said, quieter. “I heard them. I felt them. They think I’m dangerous.”

Inko crouched down, mittened hands cupping his cheeks. “They’re scared,” she said gently. “That doesn’t make it right, but they’re afraid of what they don’t understand. And they don’t understand you. Yet.”

Izuku’s eyes burned. “They moved their kids away from me. I didn’t even do anything. I just wanted cereal.”

Tears welled up in his mother’s eyes, too. She pulled him into her coat, wrapping him tightly in her arms.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” she whispered. “You’re not dangerous. You’re not a monster.”

“I feel everything,” he sobbed. “All of them. Even when I don’t want to.”

“I know,” she whispered. “I know, baby.”

Across the street, parked beside a dull silver sedan, a woman in a charcoal coat leaned against the hood, watching the scene with unreadable eyes. A man next to her murmured into a small radio.

“Target shows signs of social distress. Emotional feedback loop confirmed.”

Agent Saitou didn’t look away. She simply said, “Record everything. We wait until the mother cracks.”

Then she turned and walked away.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

“They stared at me again,” Izuku mumbled suddenly. “At the store.”

Inko froze. His voice was quiet, but she heard every word.

“They whispered to each other. One mom moved her kid behind her. I heard her say, ‘That’s the one.’”

He didn’t cry. His spoon clinked against the bowl.

Inko swallowed the lump in her throat. She wrapped her arms around him from behind, resting her chin on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “They don’t understand. They’re afraid.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” he said.

“I know.”

“Why are they scared of me?”

She had no answer.

The wind rattled the windowpane. Somewhere, several blocks away, a siren wailed. And in a nondescript black van parked down the street, two silent men passed a clipboard back and forth.

From her perch in the rear, Agent Saitou watched through the lens of a mounted scope.

Inside the apartment, Midoriya Inko’s lips moved again—comforting, repeating something. Saitou tapped her earpiece.

“Still no incident,” she murmured. “They’re quiet today. Emotionally flatlined.”

A voice on the other end crackled. “Log it. Continue surveillance.”

Saitou narrowed her eyes as the boy reached up to touch his mother’s hand. So small. So unaware.

She made another note.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Back inside the apartment, Inko’s phone rang.

The shrill sound made Izuku jump. Inko kissed the top of his head before she stood to answer it. The caller ID read Mitsuki Bakugou. She hesitated, then swiped to answer.

“Hello?”

“Hey,” Mitsuki’s voice was blunt, hushed—like she was calling from behind a closed door. “You okay?”

Inko let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. “We’re… getting through it.”

“Yeah.” Mitsuki paused. “Katsuki won’t stop asking questions. He says it wasn’t Izuku’s fault. That the fight was already happening before—before whatever happened.”

Inko leaned against the wall, her grip tightening. “I appreciate that. Izuku—he needs to hear that, someday. Just not yet.”

There was another pause, longer this time.

“Look,” Mitsuki said finally. “This may sound crazy, but… do you feel like someone’s watching you?”

Inko blinked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I was walking with Katsuki yesterday, and I swear I saw some guy with a camera outside your building. And there’s a car that’s been parked on your street for three days. Don't move.”

Inko’s mouth went dry.

“I’m probably overreacting,” Mitsuki added quickly, trying to pass it off with a scoff. “But—watch your back, alright?”

“I… I will,” Inko said softly. “Thank you.”

They ended the call soon after. Inko returned to the table and sat beside her son again.

He had stopped eating.

He was staring at the television now, where a hero news report scrolled quietly at the bottom of the screen. A breaking story about a villain attack somewhere across the city. The volume was low enough that they couldn’t hear the words, but the headline said enough:

IS SOCIETY PREPARED FOR UNSTABLE QUIRKS IN CHILDREN?

Inko quietly turned the screen off. 

Izuku didn’t blink.

—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

HERO COMMISSION – Division 4 Surveillance Log

Case File: A-EM011

Subject: Midoriya, Izuku

Age: 6 years, 9 months

Classification: High-Risk Quirk Potential – Possibly Unstable 

Quirk: Empathy?

“Commence visual track,” said Agent Kuroda flatly, lifting his binoculars.

The van was dark inside, lit only by the quiet blue glow of multiple monitors. Three men and one woman sat in silence, watching the small screen feeds flicker—side angles of a green-haired boy walking down the sidewalk, clutching his mother’s coat, expression withdrawn.

“I have eyes,” said Agent Nakamura from the passenger seat, adjusting the directional mic mounted on the dash. “Subject is in proximity to the maternal guardian, Midoriya Inko. Estimated stress level—medium. Subject appears listless. Slight tremor in the right hand. Possible post-manifestation fatigue.”

Kuroda scribbled something in his notepad.

“Affirmative,” came Agent Saitou’s voice through the comms. Her tone was always the same—low, sharp, clipped. “Record. Continue.”

Kuroda kept his eyes trained on the pair walking slowly toward the corner market. Izuku’s gait was small, stiff. No bounce in his steps. Not a word spoken. The mother’s arm constantly hovered near him, protective. Paranoid.

“Elevated co-dependence observed,” Nakamura muttered. “Potentially compromising parental objectivity. Mother may be inhibiting behavioral baseline.”

“Noted,” Saitou replied coolly. “Prepare transcript and psychological snapshot.”

Inside the van, Agent Tsuda zoomed in on the street-level camera feed. Izuku and Inko stepped through the automatic doors of the store. The camera feed flickered, then sharpened.

“Store interior active,” Tsuda said. “Three adult civilians, two minors in aisle proximity. Watch for subject triggers.”

They watched in silence.

Feed A-17 showed Izuku clinging tighter to his mother’s sleeve as they passed a woman with a toddler. The mother subtly shifted her child behind her, gaze lingering too long.

“Pause there,” Kuroda said.

They rewound the moment. Zoomed in. Watched again.

“Heard something,” Nakamura said, tapping the directional mic. “Boosting gain.”

A faint voice came through the speaker—just clear enough to catch.

“That’s the one.”

“The Midoriya kid.”

“Don’t get too close.”

Izuku’s shoulders hunched. He whispered something to his mother. She leaned down. The pair pivoted around the aisle and out of frame.

“Rewind ten seconds. Rewatch expression shift,” Kuroda said.

The playback ran again. This time, slower. Izuku’s face twitched almost imperceptibly when the words were spoken—his eyes didn’t look at the women, but the faintest tremor crossed his mouth. His fists clenched into his sleeves.

“There,” Tsuda pointed. “Micro-expression. Lip quiver, shoulder tension. Subject absorbed the hostility. Did not outwardly react, but observed internalization likely.”

Kuroda opened his notepad and scribbled in tight, angular print:

Log Entry: 14:12 JST – Surveillance of Subject A-EM011

Subject accompanied maternal guardian to local store. Civilian recognition confirmed—two separate adult entities displayed aversion behavior. Subject displayed minimal outward emotion. High reactivity to external stimuli. Did not initiate contact. No vocalization observed beyond request to leave. Mother exhibited defensive posture. Heightened maternal protectiveness. Conclusion: Emotional suppression pattern forming. Quirk manifestation suppressed. Long-term retention risk is high. Recommendation: Escalate containment proposal. Sooner, rather than later.

“Back out,” Agent Saitou’s voice cut through again. “Maintain tracking until they return home. Relay to Behavioral Analytics.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Kuroda said, folding his notepad.

In the back of the van, Tsuda tapped through video files, tagging frames, timestamps, and relevant behavior patterns. “Cross-referencing with yesterday’s footage—subject still not engaging with peers. No verbal initiations. Does not make eye contact with passersby. Displays signs of ambient emotional detection but takes no action to express or redirect. May be adapting.”

“Dangerous if so,” Nakamura murmured. “He learns restraint before control. Makes him unpredictable.”

A long pause followed.

Then Saitou’s voice returned, lower than before.

“Keep him under pressure,” she ordered. “But don’t force a burst. We need organic escalation—fear-based, not reactionary. No interference unless safety becomes an issue. Let the paranoia settle into the mother. The more isolated she feels, the easier the agreement.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

They followed the feed until Izuku and Inko exited the store.

Kuroda stared as the child stood beside the sliding doors, head down, the cold wind tugging at the hem of his coat. His mother leaned close, wrapping her arms around him.

“He doesn’t understand yet,” Tsuda said softly.

“He will,” Saitou replied over the comms. “They all do, eventually.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Later that evening, the van remained idling across from the Midoriya apartment. The interior had gone quiet, save for the rustle of pages as Kuroda reviewed the day’s recordings and notes.

“Agent Saitou requests readiness for Phase Two,” Nakamura said after checking his encrypted tablet. “Mother has begun showing signs of emotional fatigue. Subject remains passive.”

“Clock’s ticking,” Kuroda muttered, closing the file with a soft snap. “And the bomb’s still ticking with it.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

It started with a knock—three, steady, exact. Not rushed. Not urgent. Just calm. Intentional.

Inko paused mid-motion, halfway through folding the laundry on the coffee table. Izuku sat on the floor nearby, his favorite All Might blanket draped over his shoulders like a cape, eyes glazed as he stared numbly at the TV. The cartoon played on, laughter echoing from the speakers—he didn’t laugh with it. He hadn’t laughed in a week.

The knock came again. Firmer this time. Less patient.

Inko stood, smoothing down her sweater with trembling hands. Her heart raced. Her breath caught. There had been a call earlier in the day from someone she didn’t know. A clipped voice, a familiar voice, female, asking if she would be home this afternoon. She hadn’t said yes, but she hadn’t said no either. She didn’t know why she hadn’t.

“Izu,” she whispered gently, walking past him, her hand brushing the top of his head. “Stay here, baby.”

He nodded, barely.

When she opened the door, they were already waiting—two figures framed by the cold gray light of the hallway. A man and a woman, she recognized her, both in immaculate dark suits. It was the woman she met the day of the incident. She was tall, severe but not unkind-looking, with black hair pulled tight into a twist and eyes that flickered with unreadable calculation. The man was broader, heavyset with square shoulders and a face that looked carved from stone. No smiles. No frowns. Just… composed.

“Mrs. Midoriya,” the woman said calmly. “May we come in?”

“I…” Inko hesitated. Her hands tightened on the doorknob. “I wasn’t told—”

“We understand,” the woman said, voice softening just enough to sound human. “We’re here about Izuku. We want to help.”

That word—help—lodged in Inko’s chest like a thorn. It was the same word they’d used at the hospital, when they took his blood and hooked up strange wires to his skin. The same word the teacher had used when she called the principal in tears. Help. Always help. Never comfort. Never kindness.

Still, she stepped aside.

The agents walked in with controlled steps, the man giving a slight nod to Izuku on the floor, who had now turned to watch them. Quietly. Warily. The TV continued to play, forgotten. The woman waited until the door clicked shut behind them, then folded her hands in front of her.

“My name is Agent Saitou, we met before, remember,” she began. “This is my associate, Agent Kuroda. We’re part of a special division within the Hero Commission—one that handles early quirk development in children. Especially those who… exhibit unique needs.”

Inko’s throat dried. “Is he in trouble?”

Saitou shook her head. “No, not at all. This isn’t about punishment. This is about protection. For him. For others.”

Kuroda stepped forward, retrieving a slim black folder from inside his coat. “There’s a program,” he said, opening it to reveal clean pages filled with charts, statistics, and pristine facility photos. “Quiet. Discreet. Designed for children who are struggling to adjust. It's voluntary, but highly recommended in cases where emotional regulation and quirk control are still developing… especially after traumatic events.”

“Traumatic,” Inko echoed. Her voice felt thin. “You mean… the incident.”

“Yes,” Saitou said smoothly. “We’ve reviewed the reports from the school. From the hospital. And we’ve spoken with some of the other families. As you can imagine, there’s concern.”

“He didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” Inko whispered.

“We understand that,” Kuroda said, with the barest tilt of sympathy in his voice. “But intent and consequence aren’t always aligned. What matters now is preventing anything else. Preventing escalation.”

Saitou stepped closer, her voice gentle now—almost maternal. “This isn’t about locking him away, Mrs. Midoriya. He’ll receive care. Guidance. He’ll be with professionals who can help him develop his quirk safely. Your son could be something… incredible. But if he’s left untrained, unbalanced… even someone with the kindest heart can become dangerous.”

Inko flinched.

The implication was clear. Izuku—the boy who still cried at sad commercials, who collected bugs because he didn’t want to step on them—could become a threat.

“What if it happens again?” Saitou continued. “What if someone gets hurt? Not just students… but him. Children like Izuku are often misunderstood. The world doesn’t always wait for understanding.”

Inko’s eyes shimmered. She looked past the agents to her son, who had shrunk into the blanket like it could swallow him whole. His eyes were wide, green as spring, and glassy. He’d been so quiet since the hospital. So small.

“Where would he go?” she asked, barely above a whisper.

Saitou opened another photo—this one of a sleek, sterile building nestled in the mountains. “A rehabilitation center,” she said. “Small population. Highly specialized staff. It’s not a prison. It’s a school. Just a… different kind of school.”

“He wouldn’t be alone,” Kuroda added. “And you’d be updated regularly. He’d have structure. Safety. The tools he needs.”

The words were smooth. Practiced. Dipped in honey and painted with concern. But to Izuku, they tasted like ash.

He shifted on the floor, suddenly rigid beneath his blanket. His fingers curled into the soft fabric, eyes locked onto Agent Saitou.

“You’re lying,” he said.

The words weren’t loud, but they cracked the silence like glass. Saitou paused. Just for a second.

Inko blinked, startled. “Izuku—baby—what?”

Izuku stood slowly, the blanket falling from his shoulders. “You don’t mean it,” he said, voice trembling. “You’re scared. You think I’ll break things again.”

Kuroda’s expression did not change.

“I can feel it,” Izuku whispered. “You’re afraid. Of me. Of what I might do. You don’t want to help. You want to hide me.”

Silence.

Inko looked between them, her heart pounding in her ears. Saitou’s face had grown unreadable again, her eyes narrowing ever so slightly—not in threat, but calculation.

“Your son is very perceptive,” she said finally. “That’s… exactly why we believe early intervention is essential.”

Izuku looked at his mother then, and for the first time in days, his voice cracked—not from fear, but pleading.

“Mama… don’t let them take me.”

Her knees nearly gave out.

Saitou didn’t press. She merely held out a card, pale and precise.

“When you’re ready,” she said. “Call this number. We’ll have everything arranged.

The agents turned and left without another word.

The door clicked shut behind them, but their presence lingered like smoke.

Inko stood frozen, the card trembling in her hand. Her mind a blur. Her heart aching. She didn’t know what the right decision was anymore—only that the world outside was growing colder. And her little boy was being buried beneath it.

She looked at him—so small, so scared. The fear in his eyes was not for what he could do, but for what the world might do to him.

She clutched the card like a lifeline.

And somewhere deep inside her chest, something cracked.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

It began with a whisper.

Then a headline.

Then a roar.

The name of the school was released first—Aldera Elementary, a quiet public school tucked near the edge of Musutafu’s residential blocks. Then came the leaked footage: shaky cell phone clips from a student who had been filming in the hallway the day Izuku’s quirk surged out of control. The video was grainy, but the impact was clear—children crying, some collapsing in panic, a teacher curled against the wall with a hand over her chest, hyperventilating.

The news picked it up like a fire catching on dry grass.

“MASS PANIC AT LOCAL SCHOOL — QUIRKED CHILD UNLEASHES ‘EMOTIONAL EVENT.’”

“QUIRKLESS OR UNSTABLE? CHILD AT CENTER OF PANIC INCIDENT IDENTIFIED.”

“SOURCES CONFIRM: EMOTIONAL MANIPULATION QUIRK. CAN FEELINGS BE A WEAPON?”

At first, they didn’t name him. Just vague descriptors: a green-haired boy. Young. Quiet. Possibly unstable. But soon enough, it didn’t matter. A parent’s comment during a street interview sealed it:

“I heard his name’s Izuku. Midoriya, I think. That’s what my son said. The one who… you know. Cried and made everyone cry too.”

That was enough.

And the headlines changed again:

“THE EMOTIONAL BOMB: IS THIS CHILD DANGEROUS?”

“EXPERTS WEIGH IN: WHEN QUIRKS CROSS THE LINE.”

“IS THIS HOW VILLAINS START?”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Inside the apartment, Inko watched the media unravel day by day, her body tensed as if bracing for impact that never stopped coming. She began turning the TV on with dread and off with guilt. Online articles popped up even when she wasn’t looking—on her phone, in the emails she didn’t sign up for. The pictures were always edited to blur his face, but the words burned.

They made him sound like a monster. A tragedy in progress.

She stopped taking him outside after the second week. Too many eyes. Too many whispers. At the grocery store, a woman had moved her child behind her and said, “That’s the one.” Izuku had clung to her sleeve the rest of the day, his voice gone silent.

He didn’t cry. He didn’t scream. He just wilted.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

From across the street, behind tinted glass, Agent Saitou’s team recorded everything.

“Subject has remained indoors for eight days. Only excursions appear to be closely supervised outings with mother. Subject displays continued signs of emotional detachment, reduced verbal engagement, frequent dissociation. Likely onset of depressive state.”

“Subject visibly startled when exposed to sudden laughter, sudden noise. Increased flinching around adults. Displays no signs of quirk activation since initial incident. Recommend continued observation.”

Still, even their cold confidence had a crack in it by the third week.

It was during a quiet moment. Izuku had been left alone in the kitchen while Inko stepped away to take a delivery downstairs. When she came back, she found him standing in front of the fridge—trembling, staring at a drawing held in his hand.

It was one he’d made before the incident. A smiling version of himself with a cape and All Might beside him. He was crying—but happy. The word “Hero” was scribbled above in messy green letters. Now the colors seemed too bright, unreal.

In that moment, he dropped the paper.

And the light above the fridge flickered violently—then shattered.

Agent Kuroda, watching from the opposite building through a scope lens, jotted a note with quick precision.

“ Spike in atmospheric tension observed. Room temperature dropped approx. 2.4 degrees. No visible sign of quirk activation. Electrical feedback noted. Possible emotional suppression breach.”

Saitou narrowed her eyes. “He's not lashing out,” she muttered. “He's absorbing. Internalized energy is still energy. ”

“Could destabilize,” Kuroda replied.

They both stared at the boy on the screen—still as stone now, staring at broken glass on the floor.

“Recommend escalating timetable.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

By week four, the headlines were worse. Sharper. More paranoid.

“THE MIDORIYA CASE: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN A CHILD’S QUIRK TARGETS THE MIND?”

“SOCIAL CONTAGION VIA EMOTION: IS HE A THREAT TO NATIONAL PEACE?”

“THE EMOTIONAL BOMB AND SOCIETY—ARE WE READY?”

One afternoon, Inko forgot to change the channel fast enough. A panel of quirk theorists debated on-screen. Their voices were calm, but clinical.

“He doesn’t understand the power he’s wielding.”

“Emotion-based quirks are notoriously unstable. Especially in children.”

“If he can project panic to an entire room, what happens when it’s hatred? Or fear? We’re lucky no one died.”

Inko moved to shut it off—too late.

Izuku had been walking past, clutching a stuffed All Might figure to his chest. He stopped mid-step.

On the screen, a newscaster said it, clear and cutting:

“ He’s what some experts now refer to as an emotional bomb —a child who doesn’t need to lift a finger to cause chaos. ”

Izuku froze. Slowly, he turned to look at his mother.

His lip trembled. “Mama… am I a bomb?”

Inko’s heart fractured.

“No,” she breathed, turning off the TV with shaking hands. “No, no, no. You’re not—” She reached for him, arms wrapping around his tiny frame. “You’re my baby. You’re my baby.”

“But they said…” His voice was barely there. “They said I might hurt people.”

Tears fell into her hair as he buried his face in her shoulder.

“I don’t wanna hurt anyone, Mama…”

“I know, baby. I know.”

But she didn’t say they’re wrong. She didn’t say they don’t understand.

Because deep down, a voice she hated whispered: What if they’re not? What if they’re right?

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

That night, long after Izuku had gone to bed, Inko sat at the kitchen table, staring at the Hero Commission’s card. It lay between her fingers like a threat and a promise.

She heard again the way Saitou had spoken. Gentle. Controlled. Calculated. “This isn’t punishment.” “It’s for his safety.” “For others.”

She could still feel Izuku’s little heart beating against hers as he cried.

Outside, across the street, a red light blinked behind a tinted window.

Watching.

Waiting.

And inside, Inko Midoriya made a quiet decision that would change everything.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

It was quiet in the apartment again. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that settled not with peace, but with tension—like dust in the corners of a forgotten room. Inko stood in the kitchen with her arms wrapped around herself, not from cold but from something deeper. She watched the steam rise from the kettle but forgot why she’d turned it on. She hadn’t slept properly in four days. Izuku’s room remained closed most of the time now. He stayed inside with the lights dimmed, coloring in his notebook—heroes with sad eyes and cracked smiles. He didn’t speak unless spoken to. He didn’t laugh anymore. His All Might figurine sat limp at the edge of the bed, like it had given up.

The walls felt thinner now. Like everyone could hear them.

Outside, the neighbors had started avoiding them. The woman in 4B—once friendly, always offering rice cakes—had pulled her child behind her the last time she saw Inko in the hall. Didn’t meet her eyes. Just turned, key shaking in the lock as she hurried inside. The hallway emptied faster now when they stepped out. No one lingered to talk about weather or work. Silence had replaced kindness. Distance had replaced decency.

And then the school called.

The voice on the other end was stiff and polite, like someone reading from a script. “We believe, given the media attention and the emotional nature of the child’s quirk, it would be in everyone’s best interest if Izuku did not return for the time being. We are not expelling him—we just feel it may cause discomfort… to the other children.”

Discomfort.

As if he were a rash. A side effect.

Inko didn’t cry during the call. She only thanked them and hung up, her hands trembling. That night, she sat on the floor of the laundry room and cried into a pile of clean towels. She didn’t want Izuku to hear.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The Bakugou household had never been known for quiet. Yelling was normal, slamming doors even more so, and Katsuki’s explosive temper was practically a soundtrack to Mitsuki’s evenings. But now—now there was only silence. Thick. Tense. Wrong.

Mitsuki leaned in the doorway to her son’s room, watching him from behind folded arms and anxious eyes. Katsuki sat on the floor, back against his bed frame, knees pulled to his chest like he hadn’t done since he was five. His blonde hair was unkempt, sticking up in wild, neglected tufts, and his hands—usually restless, twitching with impatience or fury—just sat limp at his sides. The only sound in the room was the quiet fizz of the hero news broadcast still playing on loop from the living room beyond.

His hands were scuffed from training. His notebook was open beside him—half filled with sharp, aggressive sketches and circled names. But today, he hadn’t touched it. His mother, Mitsuki, hovered in the doorway, arms crossed tightly over her chest, a rare look of restraint on her face.

Katsuki wasn’t watching it.

But he’d heard it.

They were still talking about him. Midoriya Izuku. The Emotional Bomb. The kid who cried too much. The kid who never fought back. The kid Katsuki had spent years mocking, dismissing, ignoring.

And the kid who, in a single moment, had cracked his soul open like glass.

Katsuki’s hands tightened into trembling fists.

“He was your friend, wasn’t he?” she asked gently.

Bakugou didn’t answer right away. His jaw clenched, and he shook his head slowly. “He was a crybaby,” he muttered. “Always was.”

Mitsuki sighed. “Katsuki—”

“I saw what he did,” he snapped. “I felt it. It was like... someone poured everything I hate about myself into me. Fear. Weakness. Regret. Like drowning in it.”

He stared at his hand as if it were foreign.

He remembered it too clearly. One second, he was yelling—pushing, loud, like always—and the next, he was on his knees. Overwhelmed. It hadn’t felt like pain. Not physical pain, anyway. It was deeper than that. Like drowning in a memory that wasn’t yours. Like being forced to taste every sharp edge of someone else’s sorrow. He felt powerless. Like he’d been exposed, ripped open, and all the ugly things he kept buried were right there, spilling out where everyone could see.

He hated it. No—he hated himself for it.

“But I wasn’t scared of him. I was scared of what he made me feel. And I’m gonna get stronger. I’m not gonna let anyone do that to me again.”

“Even him?”

Bakugou didn’t answer.

“You gonna talk about it or just keep sitting there like a lump?” Mitsuki finally asked, voice low but edged. She hated silence even more than yelling.

Katsuki didn’t look up. “You wouldn’t get it.”

“Try me.”

He shot her a look, red eyes sharp and raw. “He made me feel things that weren’t mine. He didn’t touch me. Didn’t say anything. But it was like I could feel him hurting, Mom. And then—I felt every time I made him hurt too.”

Mitsuki didn’t flinch. She was used to her son’s venom. But this wasn’t rage. It wasn’t an explosion. It was a confession.

“And I hated it. I wanted to scream. I wanted to rip it out of my head. I thought he was just a weak little crybaby but… it was like he wrapped me in it. Like I couldn’t move.”

He slammed his fist into the floor suddenly, but there was no spark. No pop. No explosion.

Just a boy.

Shaking.

Mitsuki crossed the room and sat beside him, awkward but firm. She didn’t hug him—Katsuki had never been good with softness—but she put a hand on his back and kept it there.

“You didn’t cry,” she said after a while.

“I did,” he muttered. “After. When I was alone.”

There was shame in his voice, thick and bitter. Like he’d broken some unspoken rule of what strength meant.

“I’m supposed to be strong. Heroes don’t cry. Heroes don’t lose control. Heroes don’t…” His throat caught. “They don’t break down because some quirk makes them feel.”

Mitsuki’s hand tightened slightly.

“But I did. I broke, Mom.”

He pulled his knees closer, eyes burning but dry now.

“And what scares me most is that if it happens again—I don’t think I can stop it.”

Mitsuki’s voice, when it came, was quieter than usual. Not sharp. Not sarcastic. Just steady. “Maybe that’s the point.”

He blinked at her, confused.

She gave a tired smile, lines creasing around her eyes. “Maybe it wasn’t supposed to be something you could stop. Maybe he wasn’t trying to hurt you. Maybe you just felt what it was like to be him. And maybe, that’s why everyone’s scared. Because if they felt it too, if they understood—they’d have to admit how much they’d ignored it.”

Katsuki didn’t answer right away. He looked at his hand again. Calloused. Scarred. Too young to be this damaged.

“I was supposed to be better than him,” he said, almost to himself. “But now I don’t even know who I am when I’m not angry.”

Mitsuki brushed a bit of his hair from his forehead and sighed. “Then maybe it’s time to figure it out. Not by fighting. Not by yelling. Just… by feeling it. All of it.”

Katsuki didn’t move.

But he didn’t pull away either.

Outside the window, the wind picked up. The whole city was still buzzing about Izuku Midoriya, the boy with the bomb inside him. But in one bedroom—one small, flickering corner of a world gone too sharp—another boy sat with his fear, letting it sit in his chest like embers that hadn’t yet burned out.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Back at the apartment, Inko sat at the kitchen table, a blank notebook page before her. A pen in hand. The number the Hero Commission had left was on a slip beside her, underlined twice. She hadn’t called yet. She didn’t want to. But the walls were pressing in. Her son was fading. The world was treating him like a grenade with a loose pin. If she didn’t move first—someone else would. The thought terrified her more than anything.

She scribbled a list of questions. Then crossed them all out. Then rewrote them.

The sun dipped below the edge of the buildings.

Finally, she picked up the phone.

The call rang once. Twice.

Then a voice, calm and velvet, answered. “Agent Saitou speaking.”

“This is Inko Midoriya.” Her voice was sharper than she expected. “I want to talk about the program you mentioned.”

A pause. The faintest shift in breath.

“We can arrange a meeting immediately.”

“No more meetings. I need to know exactly what this program is. I need to know if he’ll be safe.”

“You have my word,” Saitou replied smoothly. “Your son will receive specialized support, in a controlled environment, designed for his needs. He will be monitored, cared for, and protected.”

“I need to see him. I need to be able to visit.”

“There will be visitation periods,” Saitou said. “They will be supervised, but they will happen.”

“I want to write to him. Send him letters.”

“You may write. We will provide a forwarding system to ensure the letters reach him, once he’s settled in.”

Inko paused. She could feel it. Something in the tone. Too rehearsed. Too calm. There was no emotion. And yet—

From down the hall, a soft voice cut through the silence.

“They’re lying.”

She turned, startled.

Izuku stood there, in his pajamas, holding his notebook to his chest.

“They’re not scared for me,” he whispered. His eyes were heavy with exhaustion and pain too old for six years. “They’re scared of me. I can feel it. They’re hiding it under their words, but it’s loud.”

Saitou’s voice came through the receiver again, unfazed. “Children often misinterpret adult concerns. His quirk may be amplifying his anxieties.”

“I’m not wrong,” Izuku said. “You’re scared. He is too.” His eyes flicked to the phone. “The other one listening.”

Inko’s hand shook.

“I don’t want to go,” Izuku said, smaller now. “But… if you say I should, I will.”

That broke her. It shattered her into a hundred bleeding pieces. He trusted her. Even as the world painted him as a weapon, even as strangers watched him from rooftops and cameras followed their movements, he still trusted her.

“I’m doing this for you,” she whispered. “I don’t want to. But I need you to be safe.”

“I’ll be good,” he said softly. “I’ll try not to feel so loud anymore.”

Inko nodded, swallowing the scream in her chest.

She put the phone back to her ear.

“When does he leave?”

Chapter Text

The room was quiet—too quiet for something so permanent.

Inko Midoriya sat at the edge of the metal chair, her hands folded tightly in her lap, nails digging into her palms so hard she feared she might draw blood. Across from her, Agent Kuroda smiled with something between professional pity and polite condescension. His badge caught the overhead light when he leaned forward, voice syrupy and reassuring.

“I know this is difficult, Mrs. Midoriya. But I want to be very clear. Your son’s case is… exceptional. We don’t take situations like his lightly. Emotional quirks, especially ones with volatile feedback loops, can become dangerous not just to others—but to the children themselves. What he’s experiencing right now—this hypersensitivity to the emotional states of others—it can be overwhelming. Disorienting. It’s no way for a child to live.

Inko swallowed hard. She nodded, but it felt like someone else was doing it. Everything felt distant. Wrong. She glanced to the side where Izuku sat, legs dangling off his own too-tall chair, hands gripping the sleeves of his hoodie. His eyes were wide, rimmed red. He hadn’t said anything since they arrived. He looked like he was trying to disappear into the fabric.

“We understand your concern,” Agent Saitou next to the man added, her tone warmer, more practiced. Her kind eyes didn't quite reach her voice. “Facility 11 is designed for children exactly like Izuku. It’s not a prison. It’s a therapeutic care center. He’ll have structure, counseling, medication that will help with the emotional overload. He’ll be surrounded by professionals trained to help him live a healthy, safe life.”

Inko turned to her son. She reached out and gently touched his cheek, running her thumb along the curve of his jaw. “Sweetheart… do you remember what I told you?” Her voice trembled, barely above a whisper. “You’re strong, baby. No matter what they say.”

Izuku nodded, a tiny movement, almost imperceptible.

She looked back at the Commission officers. “I want to visit him.”

“Of course,” the man said quickly. “We’ll arrange monitored visitations as part of his adjustment schedule. Weekly updates, daily logs. You’ll be informed of everything. Facility 11 believes in transparency.” His smile widened. “You’re doing the right thing. You’re protecting him—and others.”

A lie, she would later realize. A lie with clean shoes and a laminated badge.

They signed the paperwork. Inko’s hands shook so hard she could barely hold the pen. Izuku didn’t cry, not then. Not even when the van pulled up to the curb outside, cold and silver, with dark windows and a soft, mechanical hum. He simply looked at her like she was already fading into memory.

Two uniformed agents stood by the door. One opened it, and the other gestured. Izuku hesitated. Then he climbed in.

The last thing Inko saw before the door shut was her son’s hand pressed against the glass. His mouth moved silently. She couldn’t hear it.

She would come to believe he had said, “Don’t let them take me.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Inside the van, it was cold. The seats were plastic and smelled like antiseptic. There were no windows in the back—only white walls and a single overhead light that flickered as the van rolled over potholes. Izuku sat alone, belted in, his arms crossed tightly over his chest.

No one spoke to him. Not the driver. Not Kuroda in the passenger seat who kept glancing back through a slit in the wall.

His legs swung, barely touching the floor. His heart pounded, too fast. Every time he thought about his mom, about the way she hadn’t fought them—hadn’t grabbed his arm and said no—something sharp twisted in his chest.

He tried to remember her words, how her voice sounded when she said he was strong. He clenched his fists. You’re strong. No matter what they say.

But he was already starting to believe what they said might matter more.

The facility appeared like a wound in the earth—tall, pale walls rising from the ground in geometric patterns. The sky above it was gray and unmoving. A gate opened with a hydraulic hiss. Security cameras rotated toward them like blinking, indifferent eyes.

As the van passed through, the gate closed again with a hiss-like breath being held.

Then the silence began.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The hallway was too long.

Izuku’s feet made soft sounds against the polished floor—too soft, almost swallowed by the hum of overhead lights and the low mechanical buzz in the walls. One of the agents—Kuroda—walked behind him, silent except for the faint click of his shoes. The other, Saitou, stayed beside him with a hand gently placed on his back, guiding, not pushing. Her touch wasn’t cruel, but it wasn’t kind either. It was practiced. Measured.

The hallway smelled like bleach. Like something had been scrubbed too many times. The walls were white—not cream or warm-white or even hospital white. Just… white. Like paper. Like nothing. And the longer he walked, the more the air felt too clean, like it didn’t want to be breathed in.

They passed doors with no labels. Just narrow slits of reinforced glass and keypads mounted beside the frames. The lights flickered when they passed under them, and each flicker made Izuku flinch, just a little.

His fingers clutched the sleeves of his hoodie again. He kept his head down. He didn’t ask where they were going. He didn’t know if he was allowed to.

Saitou broke the silence first. “We’re just going to get you settled, Izuku. This is a safe place. You’re going to be okay here.” Her voice was soft, but something about it didn’t sit right. She didn’t look at him when she said it.

They turned a corner. The air got colder.

Another door opened with a hiss. A nurse waited inside, standing next to a rolling cart with a plastic tray. Her uniform was crisp, her posture straight. She didn’t smile. She didn’t look at Izuku. Her eyes flicked to Kuroda, then to the clipboard in her hands.

“Room 11 has been prepped,” she said. Her voice was dry. “Initial vitals will be recorded. Orientation packet already uploaded.”

“Excellent,” Kuroda replied, his tone breezy like they were talking about a hotel check-in. He looked down at Izuku, offering something that might have been a smile. “You’ll get used to the routine here soon enough. The first few days are just about settling in.”

Izuku looked around the room. There were no toys. No posters. Just white walls, a metal table, and the tray of instruments. He didn’t know what half of them were for.

He blinked rapidly. His chest felt tight. His fingers curled tighter into his sleeves. His mom’s voice echoed in his head again—You’re strong, baby. No matter what they say.

A sudden rush of warmth pulsed behind his eyes. The tightness in his throat rose. He tried to swallow it down, tried not to cry—

The lights above flickered. Once. Twice.

The nurse paused, looked up. Made a note.

Saitou stepped back. Kuroda said nothing.

Izuku pressed his lips together and clenched his jaw. His stomach twisted. The warmth in his chest faded into something cold.

The nurse took a step forward. “Subject’s emotional state appears unstable. Recommend immediate baseline suppression and sedation prep.”

She didn’t say boy. Didn’t say child. Just subject.

No one told him what that meant. No one asked how he felt.

No one even looked him in the eyes.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The room Izuku was taken to next looked nothing like the sterile intake corridor, but it wasn’t any warmer. It was smaller—too small for comfort—and the ceiling felt low even for someone his size. The walls here weren’t blank, but paneled with cold blue tiles that glinted faintly under the fluorescent lights. There were no windows. Just a vent in the upper corner that hissed softly like it was breathing.

The chair they sat him in was too big and too hard. It was bolted to the floor.

There was a camera mounted in the upper corner, its red light blinking at steady intervals like a heartbeat. He couldn’t tell if anyone was watching, but the air buzzed with the heavy certainty that someone always was.

Dr. Hiruma arrived a few minutes later. He didn’t look like a villain. He didn’t even look unkind. He had short black hair, silver at the temples, and thin glasses perched perfectly on the bridge of his nose. He wore a white coat, ironed flat, with a laminated ID that read Dr. Naoya Hiruma – Lead Researcher clipped neatly to his chest. When he entered, he didn’t greet Izuku. He didn’t kneel down or smile.

He simply pressed a button on the desk behind him, and a red light above the door turned on.

“Subject 13A,” he said aloud, turning toward the one-way mirror on the wall. A small recorder on the desk clicked on with a mechanical tick. “Midoriya, Izuku. Male, age seven. Emotional Quirk—spontaneous feedback-based empathy reaction. Initial containment response: promising. Initial medication begins today. Commencing dampening protocol.”

He turned toward the cabinet behind the desk. Retrieved a small white pill from a bottle. Held it between gloved fingers.

“It’s just a vitamin,” said the nurse who had brought him in earlier. She stepped into the room again, a paper cup of water in one hand. Her face was unreadable.

Izuku looked at the pill. Then at her. Then at Dr. Hiruma.

His body had gone very still.

He didn’t know why he didn’t want to take it. He just didn’t. Something deep inside him was screaming that this was wrong. That once he started, he wouldn’t be able to stop.

“I don’t want it,” he whispered.

Dr. Hiruma didn’t even blink. “Noncompliant.”

“Please,” Izuku said again, a little louder. “I don’t—I don’t want it.”

“Izuku,” the nurse said, voice still calm, still soft. “You need to take your vitamins, okay? It’s important. It’ll help you feel better. You’ll stop hurting so much all the time.”

But Izuku was already crying. Quietly, silently, like he was trying not to let anyone see it. His shoulders shook. His hands curled into fists on his knees. The edges of the room felt too sharp. His mother’s voice felt like it was slipping away.

Two more people entered the room.

Orderlies.

They were tall. Dressed in black. One of them reached for him without a word.

He panicked. Tried to bolt, but the chair was too high and they were too fast. They held his arms down, one on each side, and he struggled until the grip on his shoulders turned painful.

The nurse stepped forward. Tilted the pill toward his mouth. He clenched his teeth.

“Open,” she said.

He didn’t.

She sighed. “Okay.”

The next part was quick. Brutal. His nose pinched shut. Fingers pressed hard against his jaw. The pill went in. Water followed. He choked, gagged—but swallowed.

Then silence. The hands released him.

He sat frozen for a long moment, shaking. Snot running down his lip. Tears on his cheeks.

Dr. Hiruma spoke again.

“Record reaction. Emotional resistance is minimal. Delay in compliance suggests reinforced hypersensitivity. Administer daily, monitor dosage response. Recommend secondary observation in social simulation. Consider increasing dosage 20mg by the end of the week.”

The recorder clicked off.

The nurse took the cup. The orderlies left.

And for a few minutes, Izuku just sat there. Chest heaving. Face burning.

And then something began to change.

It started in his fingertips—a tingling sensation, like they had fallen asleep. Then it spread slowly to his arms, his chest, his throat. The panic didn’t go away. Not exactly. It just… dulled. Like a volume knob being turned down. Everything became soft. Muffled. Even his own thoughts.

He blinked.

He didn’t feel better. He didn’t feel anything.

Dr. Hiruma watched him from behind the glass, hands steepled in front of his face.

Outside the room, in the hallway beyond the mirror, a different nurse paused at a computer terminal, watching from just out of sight.

She was younger than the others, with her dark hair tied back into a low braid. Her name tag read Kaede Hisashi. Her eyes were fixed on the monitor, but her expression didn’t match the others. There was no indifference there. No calculated detachment.

Only worry.

She tapped something into the computer. Then hesitated. Her fingers hovered over the keys before she typed a private note into the system log—one she would later erase before morning shift.

Subject 13A—fear response high. Unusual emotional resistance. Request psych eval before dosage increase.

No one would listen, not really.

But she still wrote it.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The days didn’t feel like days anymore. They were sequences—blocks of time that began and ended with the same dull buzz overhead, the same synthetic voice through the intercom:

“All residents: Rise for Schedule One. Proceed to the medical queue in silence. Emotional assessments begin in five minutes.”

Izuku stopped counting what day it was. He had no window, no clock, and no sense of time beyond the rhythm of the facility. Wake. Pill. Test. Therapy. Lunch. Pill. Observation. Isolation. Sleep. Repeat.

They gave him a new set of clothes when he arrived. Gray shirt, gray pants. No shoes with laces. No colors. No name tag. Just a stitched patch on his chest:

13A

He was no longer “Izuku Midoriya” here. Just a letter and a number. A slot in a system designed to suppress, correct, contain.

The second morning, they brought him to the common corridor.

It wasn’t much—just a long hallway with reinforced glass panels, doors on either side leading into identical rooms. He wasn’t allowed in most of them. The staff guided him down the center line with small gestures, boots clicking softly on the polished floor. The lights here buzzed faintly, like insects trapped in a jar.

That was the first time he saw the others.

Children. Maybe ten of them—some older, some his age. All wearing the same blank uniforms. All sitting or standing or simply staring. A few looked back at him when he passed. Most didn’t. One girl sat on the floor against the far wall, whispering into her hands like she was praying or reciting something to herself.

There was a boy pressed against a window, tapping his fingers rhythmically on the glass. Tap tap—pause—tap tap tap. His eyes were glassy. Vacant.

None of them spoke.

One child—a tall girl with an oxygen mask strapped to her face and a buzzcut—watched Izuku walk past with sharp, animal eyes. She didn’t blink. Didn’t move.

Izuku tried to smile. Just a little. Just enough.

She turned her head away.

The staff didn’t say who they were. No names. No introductions. Just “residents.” Like this was a dormitory and not a lockbox for children with quirks too scary for society to handle.

He learned not to ask questions after the first time he tried.

“What’s his name?” he asked, pointing to the tapping boy through the glass. The orderly walking beside him didn’t even look.

“Eyes forward, 13A.”

So he stopped asking.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

His room was small and square, with white walls and a single bunk cot nailed to the floor. No sheets. No pillow. The mattress was plastic, slick and easy to clean. A sink. A toilet behind a partial divider. No sharp edges. No hooks. Everything designed for safety. Sanitation. Control.

Every morning, he was escorted to the medical wing for a pill. Always the same white one. Sometimes two. Dr. Hiruma would appear behind the glass and make a note. Nurse Kaede—her face softer than the others—sometimes handed him the cup with water.

She never smiled. But she didn’t look through him either.

One time, after he gagged on the pill and started to cry, she gently placed her hand on his shoulder and whispered, “Breathe through your nose. You’re okay. Just breathe.”

It was the first kind voice he’d heard in days.

She wasn’t there every time.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

After medication came the emotional regulation tests.

He was placed in a small, gray-walled observation room with speakers embedded in the ceiling. They played recordings—sounds meant to trigger responses. Babies crying. Screams. Laughter. Fire alarms. Sometimes it was his mother’s voice, distorted and slowed down.

Each time, his heart raced. His mind tumbled. Emotions from nowhere surged up—fear, sorrow, joy, pain. Then a voice would say calmly, “What are you feeling right now, 13A?”

And he’d have to answer.

“Sad.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

If he answered wrong—or didn’t answer fast enough—they increased the volume. Or repeated the track again and again until his nose bled or his throat clenched.

They called it empathy calibration .

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The next part was cognitive exercises —identifying facial expressions on a screen. “Which of these faces is angry?” “Which of these people is sad?” “What is this person feeling?”

Sometimes, the faces were people he knew.

Once, it was Kacchan.

He stared at the screen so long the orderly had to repeat the question twice. He got it wrong. Kacchan was “angry,” but he clicked “afraid.”

The punishment wasn’t physical. Just removal.

They took away his ten minutes of “quiet time”—the only part of the day where he was allowed to sit in a padded room with books or soft music. That day, they put him in the sensory deprivation chamber instead.

Pitch black. Total silence. No sound but his own heartbeat.

He came out shaking.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Lunch was flavorless and colorless. A pale paste. Nutritionally complete. Always the same amount, doled out on gray trays. No utensils—just plastic spoons.

Nobody talked. Nobody made eye contact.

He saw the girl with the oxygen mask again. She had a tray, but didn’t eat. Just stared straight ahead until a staff member gently forced her hand around the spoon.

Another child, maybe five years old, banged her head against the table until an orderly pulled her away.

Izuku didn’t finish his food that day.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

After lunch came therapy.

It was a small room with two chairs and a woman who called herself “Dr. Miyasaki.” She asked him the same questions in different ways.

“How do you feel today?”

“What were you thinking about earlier?”

“Do you miss your home?”

He didn’t answer at first. Then he started giving the answers they wanted.

“Better.”

“I don’t remember.”

“No.”

She always smiled and made a note in her folder.

The folder had his number on it. Not his name.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

At night, he lay on the plastic mattress and stared at the ceiling. The lights never went fully out—just dimmed to a soft white glow.

Sometimes he whispered to himself just to hear a voice. Sometimes he mouthed words to the ceiling, pretending his mother could hear.

He didn’t cry anymore.

He wasn’t sure if that was the medicine or something else.

He wasn’t sure if he liked the difference.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The girl in Room 09 always sat facing the door.

Room 09 was across the hall from his own. He’d seen the girl through the small observation window, sitting in the corner, staring blankly at the wall. Her eyes were too wide—too hollow for someone so small. She didn’t look like the others. There were no tears in her eyes, no screams in her throat. Just an eerie silence that stretched between her and the world.

She never looked through the window, never turned when staff passed, but she always faced that door—knees pulled to her chest, arms wrapped around them like she might unravel otherwise. Her dark hair was buzzed short except for the back, where a few strands curled rebelliously behind one ear. Her hands moved constantly—braiding and unbraiding a single loose thread on the seam of her pants.

Izuku had been told nothing about her. They never mentioned the other children, not by name or even by quirk. But every day, he found himself glancing over, trying to catch a glimpse of her when the staff wasn’t watching.

Izuku had passed by her room three times before he saw her eyes.

They were sharp. Gold-brown. Not blank like the others. Not gone. Watching.

Noticing.

It was during his fourth week—maybe fifth, he’d lost track—when he saw her again. This time, she wasn’t in her room.

She was in the common rec space, seated alone in the corner. No books. No puzzles. No “stimuli.” Just a soft mat and a pillow she didn’t use. Her fingers danced again—braid, unbraid, braid—and when Izuku was brought into the room for his ten-minute reward time, she looked up.

Their eyes met.

He looked away first.

But she spoke.

“You don’t blink when the lights buzz.”

Izuku turned. The girl was still braiding. Still not smiling. Still watching.

“They flicker. That sound—it’s like something cracking. Most people blink when it happens.”

Izuku said nothing.

“Do you have a number?” she asked, quieter this time.

He nodded, and pointed to his chest. “Thirteen A.”

She nodded back. “I’m Nine C. But my name’s May.”

He hesitated. Then: “Izuku.”

The corners of her mouth twitched. “Don’t tell them your name. They like it better when we forget.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Over the next few days, Izuku started noticing her more. In passing, during testing rotations, sometimes through the window of Room 9. She always sat facing the door. Always watching. She wasn’t like the others. She didn’t pretend the staff weren’t there, but she didn’t react either. Like she’d seen them too long to be afraid.

It took two days before she noticed him.

The first time she did, it wasn’t with words or even a wave. She just stared at him through the glass, eyes empty yet somehow still reaching out. And then, in the dull, oppressive quiet of the facility, she did something so small, so fragile, that it almost made Izuku’s chest tighten with something he hadn’t felt in so long: hope.

She pressed her palm to the glass. It wasn’t a signal for help or a desperate plea. It was just… an invitation. A way of saying, I see you, too.

Izuku didn’t know what to do. He had learned early to hide, to avoid drawing attention. But there was something about the girl in Room 9 that made him want to reach out. And so, slowly, he moved to his window. He wasn’t sure why he did it, but he placed his own hand against the glass, mirroring her gesture.

She blinked, then tilted her head just slightly, almost as if considering him.

It became their quiet ritual. Every day, when the lights flickered and the doors to their rooms closed behind them, they’d find each other through the glass. Sometimes, she would draw pictures. At first, it was just random squiggles, but over time, the shapes began to form into pictures. Faces. A tree. A flower. 

A sad-looking sun.

Izuku, in turn, started to draw his own pictures, copying what she’d done, then trying to make it his own. He drew things he remembered from before—the green of his mother’s apron, the smile of the neighbor’s dog, even his own hands. They weren’t anything spectacular, but the act of drawing became a small escape, a way to share a piece of himself.

One day, after several weeks of this quiet exchange, Yung May pressed a drawing to the window with an urgent look on her face. It was a picture of a little girl standing in front of a house, her face tilted upward. The sun above her was smiling.

Izuku stared at it for a long time. He didn’t know what to say, or if he should say anything. Instead, he just pointed to the picture, then to himself.

She nodded.

You want me to come closer? Izuku thought. You want me to come out?

May’s eyes softened. She didn’t nod again, but her gaze held him in a way that made his heart ache. It was the first time he felt seen. The first time he felt understood, if only for a moment. Even though he was still trapped in this cage of silence and drugs, there was someone who understood what he was going through. Someone who felt as small, as invisible, as he did.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered to no one in particular, his voice barely more than a scratch. “I’m sorry I can’t help you. I don’t know how.”

The words hung heavy in the sterile air, but May didn’t seem to mind. She just pressed her hand to the glass again, a silent promise. I’m not alone, and neither are you.

Days turned into weeks, and the little rituals continued. Sometimes, they would "talk" through the glass for hours, passing drawings back and forth. Sometimes, when the fear of being watched became too much, they’d just sit in silence, their eyes locked, hands gently pressed against the cold glass that separated them. It was a strange, quiet connection—like two souls reaching across a vast and unfeeling divide.

When he shared space with her again, he asked, “How long have you been here?”

May shrugged. “Long enough to lose count. They move us around sometimes. Between wards. They say it’s for balance. I think it’s so we forget what’s real.”

She stared at him then, intense and unblinking. “Don’t forget your name, Izuku.”

He nodded. “I won’t.”

“Promise?”

He hesitated. Then whispered, “Promise.”

She reached over, picked up the soft pillow, and placed it gently between them. Then she closed her eyes and leaned back like the conversation never happened.

That night, Izuku whispered her name to himself. Not her number. Not her designation.

Just May.

Like an anchor.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Two Months Later

The apartment was too quiet now. No hum of cartoons from the living room. No late-night mumbling from the blanket pile in Izuku’s room. No footsteps. No laughter. No Izuku.

Inko kept his room exactly the same. Not out of denial—out of duty. His notebooks were still stacked near the bed. His All Might blanket still crookedly tucked into the edges. His pillow still smelled like kid shampoo and salt.

The first week, she cleaned everything twice. Scrubbed the sink until her hands blistered. Wiped down the fridge like she could control something. Anything.

The second week, she called the Commission line daily. Asked when she could visit.

“We’ll notify you once the adjustment period has stabilized,” they said.

“We appreciate your cooperation.”

“Facility 11 is a restricted-access zone. Safety protocols must be maintained.”

By the third week, she stopped calling.

She wrote instead.

Letter 1 was short. Scared. Careful. She didn’t know what was allowed, so she kept it bland.

My sweet boy,

 I hope you’re eating well and sleeping okay. I think about you every day. I’m so proud of you for being strong. I know it’s hard right now, but I believe in you. Love, Mom.

She sealed it and mailed it to the Commission address they gave her.

No reply. No confirmation.

Letter 2 was longer. Angrier.

Why haven’t I heard anything? He’s just a child. My child. I need to see him. Please. He needs to know I haven’t forgotten him.

She never sent Letter 3. She kept it in her drawer, folded into a hundred creases, rewritten a dozen times. It started with I’m sorry. Ended with Don’t let them take you from yourself.

By the end of the month, Inko sat in the living room clutching her last envelope, praying to no one in particular that someone—anyone—would pass it on. Her handwriting was getting worse. She’d started shaking. Eating less.

One night, after three glasses of wine and a nightmare where she couldn’t find Izuku in a crowd of identical, gray-uniformed children, she scrawled a final message.

Izuku. My sweet boy,

They told me I can’t visit yet. I’m trying, I swear. I know you must be scared. I am too. But please, remember what I told you. You are not wrong. Your feelings are not wrong. You are not a monster. You are my son. No matter what they say, you’re still you.

Love always, Mom.

She sealed it. Addressed it. Left it at the door.

The next morning, she walked to the post office with swollen eyes and blistered heels.

Behind the scenes—though she didn’t know it—someone would read it.

And someone would keep it.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Back at Facility 11, May leaned against the glass window of her room, watching the security guards switch shifts. She turned to Izuku through the crack in her door where the orderlies had forgotten to fully close it.

“They say the trick to surviving here is forgetting what you miss,” she said.

Izuku hugged his knees. “I don’t want to forget.”

May smiled faintly. “Good.”

A long silence passed.

Then she said, “If I disappear… will you remember my name?”

Izuku turned sharply. “Why would you disappear?”

Her smile didn’t change.

“Promise me anyway.”

“I promise.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The knock came just as Inko Midoriya finished brewing her second pot of tea.

She hadn’t been expecting anyone. She hadn’t expected much of anything these days—just the weight of the still apartment pressing in around her, and the fading echo of Izuku’s voice in her ears.

Her feet padded softly across the wooden floor as she opened the door, and her heart caught when she saw the man standing there.

Tall. Clean-cut. Government-issue black suit. Sharp jaw, unsmiling. An armband with the faint insignia of the Hero Commission barely visible beneath her coat.

“Mrs. Midoriya?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said, eyes instantly wide. “Is—has something happened to Izuku?”

Saitou gave a practiced smile. Not warm, not cold—precisely engineered to seem calm, even reassuring. “I’m here to deliver something to you from your son.”

Inko’s breath stalled.

“From… Izuku?”

She nodded and reached into a thin, black folder. With careful precision, he pulled out a crisp envelope bearing her name in neat handwriting—Izuku’s handwriting.

And then, something even more staggering: a printed photograph.

Inko’s hands trembled as she took the items. The picture was glossy and smooth, still warm from lamination. Her eyes locked on it, wide with disbelief, then swelling with something deeper.

It was Izuku.

Her baby.

He looked… well. Smiling. Standing among a small group of children in pale grey uniforms. Some were laughing, a few were looking at the camera shyly, but Izuku—he was front and center, his messy hair brushed gently to the side, his mouth curled up in a small, subdued smile. His eyes weren’t quite as bright as she remembered, but they weren’t hollow either. He looked… okay.

Inko’s breath hitched.

“Oh, my baby…” she whispered, cradling the photo close to her chest.

“We understand the past few months have been hard, Mrs. Midoriya,” Agent Saitou said smoothly. 

“Facility 11 has strict communication policies. But given your persistence and the exceptional nature of your case, your son was allowed to respond to one of your letters.”

She tore open the envelope, hands trembling as she unfolded the sheet. The handwriting matched. Every curve of every letter was Izuku. Her eyes flew across the page.

Dear Mom,

Thank you for writing me. I miss you so much. I’m okay here. The place is kind of boring, but the people are nice. I have some new friends. There’s a girl who draws really well. She made me laugh yesterday with a picture of a giraffe flying a plane.

I’ve been doing classes and some special training. They say I’m getting better at controlling my quirk. I haven’t hurt anyone in a long time. I promise I’m being good.

The doctors said I can maybe see you soon if I keep doing well. I’m trying really hard. I want to come home, Mom. But until then, please don’t worry. I eat every day. They even gave me a cupcake last week for my birthday. It was blue. I liked it.

I love you.

—Izuku

Inko read the letter twice. Then a third time. Each word landed softly in her chest like rain on parched earth. For the first time in weeks—months—she let herself believe.

Tears sprang to her eyes, spilling freely as she clutched the photo and letter to her chest. The ache in her body loosened. The coil of constant anxiety inside her finally began to unwind.

“He’s okay,” she whispered, more to herself than to Saitou. “He’s really okay…”

Saitou’s smile sharpened ever so slightly, the corners of her mouth tugging with just a hint of triumph.

“Yes, ma’am,” she said gently. “He’s doing well. We’ve seen excellent progress. His caseworker even described him as gentle. He’s becoming a model resident.”

“Izuku… he must’ve been so scared,” she whispered.

“He was,” Saitou admitted smoothly. “But he’s strong. Like his mother.”

Inko’s shoulders sagged with emotion. “I thought… I thought they wouldn’t let him talk to me. I thought he hated me for letting them take him.”

“Children don’t understand decisions like that in the moment,” Saitou said, stepping subtly into her apartment at her unspoken invitation. “But he doesn’t hate you. That letter is proof.”

She poured Saitou tea with shaking hands, thanking her over and over. She accepted the cup but barely touched it. Her eyes scanned the small apartment, noting the stacks of unopened mail, the cold leftovers on the stove, the framed photo of Izuku at four years old sitting beside her shrine of incense and prayer beads.

“I’ve wanted to visit him,” Inko said after a long silence, her voice suddenly small again. “I’ve written so many letters. I wasn’t even sure if they were being delivered.”

“They were,” Saitou lied effortlessly. “But most kids need time to adjust before they can respond. Izuku has been through a lot. This… this is progress.”

She nodded, wiping her eyes. “Thank you. Thank you for bringing this to me in person.”

“It’s the least we could do.”

She stood, folding her coat over his arm. “And just so you know—this isn’t a one-time thing. If he continues progressing, you may receive another letter soon. Maybe even a video call.”

Inko’s breath caught. “A video call?”

“It’s possible,” Saitou said. “Not guaranteed. But possible.”

That was enough. Even the idea of seeing Izuku’s face again, hearing his voice… it was enough to light a fire of hope deep inside her chest.

After she left, Inko sat at her kitchen table for over an hour, simply staring at the letter and the photo. She traced his name again and again with her fingers. She held the picture up to the light, studied every detail of his face—his tired eyes, his faint but genuine smile. The other children in the photo were unfamiliar, their eyes looking vaguely in opposite directions, but she didn’t care. They were kids. Normal, like him.

Her son was okay.

And maybe—just maybe—she could sleep again tonight.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Back at the Commission's document lab, the real letter from Izuku sat crumpled in a file marked “Red-Level Quirk Detainment – High Risk.” His actual message had never made it past review:

Please help me. They won’t let me sleep. I don’t know where I am. There’s something in the walls. The food tastes wrong. Mom I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. I just want to go home. I just want you.

Agent Saitou handed the forged photo to a technician.

“Make sure next week’s letter has a drawing included,” she said. “He’s artistic, right? Let’s sell it.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Facility 11 was always too bright.

The lights hummed with sterile consistency—cold, clinical, unwavering. Time didn't flow here; it flickered between routines. Every hallway, every room, was scrubbed of personality. Blank walls. White tiles. Stainless steel fixtures. Smiles were regulated. Voices measured.

But amid all that glass and concrete, there was someone who moved like she didn’t belong.

Nurse Kaede Hisashi.

She wore the same slate-gray uniform as the others, but the way she carried herself was different. Softer. Her steps didn’t echo like heels on tile—they whispered. Her hands weren’t stiff with protocol; they fluttered, quietly gentle, like the petals of the faded sunflower pin she wore near her collar. A gift from a younger sibling, though no one here knew that.

Kaede hadn’t set out to work for the Hero Commission. She’d joined the medical division straight out of university, burdened with student debt and driven by a heart too big for her own good. The Commission’s youth quirk program had promised stability, funding, and—on paper—a chance to help the most vulnerable kids.

By the time she saw what Facility 11 really was, she was too deep in. Transfers were blocked. Quitting was discouraged. Surveillance was constant. The best she could do now was stay close. Soften the edges. Slip kindness through the cracks.

And the boy in Room 3A… he was a crack in the wall if she’d ever seen one.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Izuku was strapped to the chair again.

He hated this one. The straps weren’t tight, but they didn’t need to be. The lights were already flickering overhead. A monitor beeped steadily behind him. There were sensors on his temples and pulse cuffs on both wrists.

A voice crackled from the overhead intercom.

"Begin Phase Two. Increase auditory load to 40 decibels."

The noise started as a hum. Then a buzz. Then voices layered on top of each other—crying, laughing, whispering, screaming. Not real voices. Recordings. Played in reverse, distorted, designed to trigger his quirk.

The goal was simple: observe emotional spikes, then suppress them. Repeatedly. Relentlessly.

Izuku grit his teeth. His eyes flicked to the glass observation window. Behind it, shadows moved—technicians. Doctor Hiruma, probably. The man always stood with his arms folded, like he was waiting for Izuku to fail. Like that would prove something.

In the corner of the room, almost invisible, was Kaede.

She sat silently, clipboard in hand, jotting vitals. But her eyes—soft and tired—flicked toward him more than the machines. Watching. Worrying.

He could feel the pressure building behind his eyes, the emotional noise clawing at his chest like ants under his ribs.

You are alone. You are dangerous. You are broken.

“Stop,” he whispered.

The machine beeped louder. The voices grew more warped. A sobbing child overlapped with someone yelling his name.

He clenched his fists. His wrists strained against the cuffs.

Kaede looked up from her clipboard.

“Izuku,” she said softly—not to interrupt the test, but as an anchor. Her voice was small. Meant only for him. “Breathe in. Count to three. Can you do that for me?”

He focused on her. The soft oval of her face, the threadbare sunflower pin. Not the voices. Not the straps.

One breath. Then another.

The machine began to quiet. The readings leveled.

From behind the glass, a voice: “Test concluded. Acceptable suppression thresholds. Prepare the subject for return.”

Kaede stood silently, her fingers already working at the straps, gentle, never rushed.

Izuku’s hands trembled as they came free.

“I didn’t—lose control,” he mumbled, ashamed of how much effort it took to say the words.

“No,” she said gently. “You didn’t.”

His eyes met hers, searching for something—anything—that proved he was still a person, not a subject. Her gaze didn’t flinch.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Later in the Infirmary Storage Closet. Kaede’s hands were shaking.

She’d seen the letter. The real one. Intercepted by accident during a shift rotation. The envelope had been opened, the contents photocopied and cataloged for review, but the original—creased and smudged from Inko Midoriya’s hands—had been left unattended for thirty seconds.

Just long enough.

Izuku. My sweet boy,

They told me I can’t visit yet. I’m trying, I swear. I know you must be scared. I am too. But please, remember what I told you. You are not wrong. Your feelings are not wrong. You are not a monster. You are my son. No matter what they say, you’re still you.

Love always, Mom.

It was folded now, tight and small, wrapped in the thin foil of a disinfectant wipe for disguise. She knew what would happen if she got caught.

But she also knew what would happen if she didn’t try.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Izuku sat on the edge of his bed, knees drawn to his chest. The routine was predictable now: dinner, therapy video, then silence. The other kids passed in the hallway like shadows—faces he’d seen but never really met. They didn’t talk much here. They were tired, like him. Drained by days that blurred together. 

Only face that did somewhat of a smile was Yung May.

Kaede entered quietly. She checked his vitals again even though she’d done it that morning. She moved like she always did—efficient, warm, careful.

Then her hand slipped something beneath the folded edge of his blanket.

“I’ll be back in fifteen,” she said aloud, for the camera. “Rest well.”

She left.

Izuku waited until the hallway light dimmed, then reached under the blanket. His fingers closed around the object. Cold. Smooth. Not medical equipment.

His heart jumped.

He unfolded the foil. Inside: a letter.

His mother’s handwriting.

 Izuku. My sweet boy

 They told me I can’t visit yet. I’m try–

He didn’t get past the second line before the door slammed open.

Two agents entered without warning. One yanked the blanket off his bed. “What’s that?”

Izuku panicked, clutching the letter, heart pounding like a war drum in his chest. “Nothing—it’s mine—!”

The taller agent wrenched it from his hand. The paper tore slightly. The edges crumpled. “Unauthorized material,” he said coldly. “Who gave this to you?”

Izuku didn’t answer. Couldn’t. His jaw locked. His heart felt like it was being crushed in a vice. Kaede was nowhere in sight. The agents left with the letter. He stared at the door long after it closed. His breath was shallow. His fists clenched. It was real.

She had written to him.

They were lying to her.

He pressed his forehead against his knees, shaking. Not from fear. Not from exhaustion.

From anger.

And that anger—it was quiet. It didn’t scream. It simmered.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Yung May sat cross-legged on the edge of her bed, fingers weaving invisible patterns into the fabric of her hospital-issue pajama pants. The light in Room 9 was dim, casting soft amber tones over the pale walls. The soundproofing in this part of Facility 11 wasn't perfect—when it was quiet, you could hear the hum of pipes or a door clicking closed three rooms down. But now it was just the two of them. Her and Izuku.

He sat across from her on the tile floor, legs tucked beneath him, hands clenched awkwardly in his lap. He looked smaller tonight. Like the white of the walls had drained something from him. His hair was messy from another stress test. His eyes, normally sharp and searching, were glassy at the edges, as if they'd been open too long.

She looked up. “Hey,” she said gently. “You okay?”

He gave a small nod that meant no.

“I just… wanted to talk to someone,” he admitted. “Not like the doctors. Not the recordings. Just… someone.”

May tilted her head, something soft blooming in her chest. “Then you picked the right room.”

A faint smile passed between them.

“What’s your quirk?” he asked, blurting it out before he lost the nerve. “I mean—you don’t have to say. I just… I’ve been wondering.”

Her fingers paused, hovering over the hem of her sleeve. For a second, Izuku thought she might not answer.

Then she said, “It’s called Mirror Bloom.” She looked up, her voice low, steady. “When someone touches me, I reflect their strongest memory for them to see. Not always clearly—it’s like… a reflection in water. But they feel it. All of it.”

Izuku blinked. “That sounds…”

“Invading? Creepy?” she said, smiling without humor. “Yeah. That’s what my old friends said, too.”

He shook his head quickly. “No—I mean, it sounds… hard. Like it’s a lot to carry. Seeing people’s memories like that. Feeling them.”

Her eyes softened. “It is. I stopped hugging people pretty early on. You’d be surprised how many people don’t want to see their own truth.”

She leaned back against the wall, gaze drifting up to the ceiling. “When I was nine, I touched my cousin by accident during a game. She saw her dog dying again. Screamed so loud the neighbors called the police. After that, my parents started keeping me inside.”

A silence settled between them. Not uncomfortable, but heavy. Real.

“I’m sorry,” Izuku said quietly.

“Me too.”

They sat like that for a moment longer before he spoke again. His voice was almost a whisper. “Why are you here?”

She blinked. “Same reason as you, I guess. Too different. Too risky. Too… much.” Her eyes met his. 

“They said I was being brought in for training. To help me use it safely. But once I got here, they just kept testing. Probing. Waiting for me to make it dangerous.”

Izuku swallowed hard. That mirrored his story too closely. “Have you ever… tried to leave?”

May gave a dry laugh. “Every kid in here has thought about it. Some have tried. Room 5 used to be a boy named Kenji. Strong quirk. Could control magnetic fields. He tried breaking the ventilation shaft open.” She paused. “They transferred him. Or said they did. We never saw him again.”

His stomach twisted.

“Do you think anyone’s ever made it out?

She looked at him. Her eyes weren’t empty, but they carried years of disappointment. “Not that I’ve seen. But I don’t know everything.

He dropped his head, shame washing over him. “I hate it here. I hate the lights. The voices. The straps.” 

“I know,” she whispered. “Me too.”

He looked up. “Do they test you like that? Like with the screaming sounds and the rooms that are too bright?

She nodded. “They try to trigger reactions. They once locked me in a room with recordings of people crying, just to see if I’d snap and reflect memories by accident. They want control over what they don’t understand. That’s what this place is. A cage built by fear.”

Izuku was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “My mom writes me letters. But I never get them.”

May’s expression darkened, sympathy knitting between her brows. “They keep them. Say they’re too emotional. That they’ll ‘disrupt your suppression conditioning.’ But sometimes… sometimes a nurse or someone will sneak one through.”

“I had one. Just one,” he said. “I didn’t even get to read all of it before they took it.”

He didn’t cry. Not really. But something in his chest felt like it was cracking, just beneath the ribs.

May leaned forward, voice low and serious. “Izuku… remember this. They can take the paper. They can tear the words. But if you read even one line—just one—you’ve got it. In here.” She touched her temple, then her chest. “They can’t erase that. No matter what tests they run.”

He looked at her, really looked at her. This girl with the soft voice and the heavy quirk, the one who knew too much and smiled too little. She wasn’t just surviving here. She was resisting.

“Can I ask… what about your quirk?” she said suddenly.

Izuku stiffened.

“I mean,” she added gently, “you don’t have to say. But… if you want to talk about it…”

He hesitated. For a long moment, he stared at the tiles between his knees. Then his voice came, small and uncertain. “I don’t fully understand it. Not really.”

She waited.

“It’s called Empathy. At least… that’s what they’ve been calling it.” He wet his lips. “I… feel other people’s emotions. Sometimes too much. But I can… send feelings too. When I get overwhelmed, it’s like everything I’m feeling pours out into everyone around me.”

May’s brow furrowed. “That sounds…”

“Dangerous,” he said bitterly.

“No,” she replied, “just powerful.”

He gave a humorless laugh. “You didn’t see it. I—back in school, before this place—I lost control. The emotions in my class got too loud. My heart was racing. And then I snapped. Everyone started crying. Screaming. Some of them said it felt like their hearts were being crushed. One girl fainted.” He looked up, guilt burning in his throat. “They said it was like being hit with their worst feeling all at once. Like I tore it out of them and shoved it back in.”

May didn’t flinch. Her eyes softened instead. “And they blamed you.”

He nodded. “I didn’t mean to. I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. I just… wanted it to stop.”

She reached out, stopping just before touching his hand. “You were scared. That’s not a crime.”

“No. But it was enough to get me locked away.”

They sat in silence again, but it felt different now. Closer. The kind of silence that only exists when you’ve shared something private, something true.

“Why are you helping me?” he asked, suddenly.

She tilted her head. “Because you’re the first person who asked questions and didn’t flinch. You still care if someone gets out. You haven’t gone quiet like the others. Not yet.”

She paused. “Also… I like your voice. It’s honest.”

His face flushed a little, and he looked down, embarrassed.

They sat in silence again, but it felt different now. Closer. The kind of silence that only exists when you’ve shared something private, something true.

“Will you come back?” she asked softly.

“To talk?”

She nodded.

He gave a small, earnest smile. “Yeah. I will.”

May stretched her legs out and yawned, like a cat curling under a window. “Then maybe next time I’ll show you how I braid the sheets. Not to escape—just to feel like I’ve changed something in this room.”

Izuku laughed. It was small and hoarse and cracked in the middle, but it was real.

And in Facility 11, that meant something.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The lights overhead buzzed in their usual sterile way, too bright for comfort but never flickering. Izuku sat with his back to the wall of Room 9, legs crossed, arms folded across his chest. The day’s test still left tremors in his hands—bright strobe pulses, shrieking audio, the smell of ammonia pumped into the walls. They told him it was for “response conditioning.” They never called it what it really was.

Yung May was already seated across from him, a folded cloth spread neatly between them like a ritual. The cameras were dormant in this section for the night cycle—or at least, appeared to be. It didn’t mean they weren’t still being listened to. So everything was in code now. Everything soft. Careful.

“I think it’s starting to wear off,” May whispered, her voice barely audible over the hum of the vents.

Izuku tilted his head. “The pills?”

She nodded. “A little. Enough for a flicker. Maybe a shade.” She looked at him carefully. “I want to try something, if you’re okay with it.”

He blinked, pulse quickening. “You mean…”

“Mirror Bloom.” She glanced at the corner of the room, where the false mirror likely hid a lens. “It won’t be strong. Probably won’t last. But you might see something. And I think… you need that. Don’t you?”

He didn’t answer immediately. His heart was beating in his throat. She was offering more than just her quirk—she was offering risk. If they were caught, they’d lose visitation hours. Be transferred to solitary. 

Maybe worse.

But she was right. He needed something. Anything that wasn’t fluorescent light and concrete and the sound of his own thoughts banging around in a hollow chest.

“Yes,” he said. “I want to try.”

She nodded once. Slowly, cautiously, she reached out a hand.

“Touch my wrist,” she said, low. “Lightly. You don’t have to do anything else.”

Izuku hesitated, then placed two trembling fingers against her skin. It was warm. Alive. So rare in this place. It felt like the first real contact he’d had in weeks.

Nothing happened at first.

Then—slowly—the white of the walls dimmed in his periphery. A fuzziness took hold at the edges of his vision. Like a fog rising behind his eyes.

He gasped.

The tile faded beneath him. The bed. The walls. Even May’s face.

And then, her. Just a flicker.

Inko Midoriya, hunched over a tiny kitchen table. Her hair tied back in a sloppy bun, soft strands falling in her face as she wrote furiously into a folded piece of paper. Her eyes were puffy, but she was smiling. The smile was cracked, forced at the corners, but it was love. Raw, desperate love. She paused as if listening for someone—maybe the mail carrier—and then picked up a small photograph from beside her teacup. It was of Izuku, age five, covered in cake frosting, grinning wide.

“Izuku…” she whispered, though it was muffled.

He could smell something faint. Tea. Or maybe her shampoo. Apple blossoms?

His vision blurred.

The memory distorted, curling in on itself. Her kitchen became watercolored, the scene melting at the edges like paint caught in rain. Her voice faded into static. Her face rippled and split into light—

—and then it was gone.

Izuku jerked back, the connection breaking.

He gasped aloud, shoulders shaking. “She—she was—”

“I saw it too,” May whispered, clutching her chest. Her eyes shimmered with unshed tears. “It was her. Your mother."

He stared at his hands. They were trembling worse now.

“She was writing to me. I think I saw the photo she keeps on the fridge. That stupid one with me and the cake. I—”

May reached forward and squeezed his hand. “It’s real. That memory is yours. They can’t take that.” He leaned forward suddenly, pressing his forehead to her shoulder. Not crying. Not sobbing. Just… holding onto something solid.

“Why are they doing this to us?” he asked, voice hoarse.

“Because they’re afraid of what they don’t understand,” she murmured. “And afraid of what we might become if we’re allowed to grow.”

He stayed like that for a long time. The moment had passed—the memory dimmed again, swallowed back by the pill-dulled chemicals running in his blood—but the truth of it lingered. A tether. A breath of home.

“They’ll take that from me too,” he muttered. “If they find out.

“No,” she said firmly. “They can’t. Even if they take every letter. Burn every photo. You saw her, Izuku. You saw her smile. That’s yours.” He nodded against her shoulder.

May leaned back slightly, her voice lowering again. “We won’t do that again for a while. It’s too risky. But… if you need it, if you really need it… I’ll show you another.”

He looked at her, eyes wide and wet. “Why?”

“Because I know what it feels like to almost forget the people who love you,” she said softly. “And I don’t want you to forget her.”

Silence stretched long between them. Not cold. Not tense. Just quiet. Holy.

Izuku sat there long after their hands parted, his thoughts humming with fragments of apple blossoms, worn paper, and a photograph that no amount of lies could erase.

For the first time in months, he didn’t feel like a weapon waiting to be used.

He felt like a son.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The next morning, Room 9 was empty.

Izuku stood in the doorway, staring at the neatly made bed. The corners were tucked in military-tight, pillow untouched, blanket smooth. Her cloth was gone. The small scrap of fabric she always laid out between them when they spoke—folded, patterned with faint green florals—was nowhere to be seen.

She hadn’t even left a wrinkle.

He stood there for a long time, barely breathing.

A white-clad staff member brushed past him briskly and muttered, “Keep moving, Subject Thirteen. You have diagnostics in Block D.”

Izuku didn’t move.

His feet stayed rooted to the floor, his fingers curling into small fists at his sides. He glanced at the walls—the camera light was on. Watching. Always watching.

He forced his legs to turn toward the staff member. “Where is she?” he asked quietly.

The staffer paused, their face unreadable behind the surgical mask and cap. “She’s been transferred. Facility orders.”

“To where?” His voice cracked. “Why?”

“That information is classified. Continue to Block D. Now.”

They walked off before he could speak again.

Transferred.

The word echoed in his skull like a steel bell. It didn’t sit right. It wasn’t real. She hadn’t said anything. Not even a whisper the night before. She would’ve told him. She would’ve said goodbye.

In the cafeteria, she didn’t appear. Her tray spot was empty, left unnervingly clean. Izuku didn’t eat. He stared at the seat across from him until someone nudged him to leave. In the therapy chamber, the whiteboard where schedules and subject numbers were occasionally listed had her designation wiped clean.

And by evening, the name "Yung May" had been erased entirely from the internal logs on the tablet used by staff. As if she had never existed.

Izuku checked Room 9 again that night. Still empty. Still untouched.

He stood just inside the doorway, shaking, his chest heaving with shallow, restrained breaths. Panic was crawling up his throat like fire.

She wasn’t transferred. She was gone.

Gone gone.

He felt it in the marrow of his bones. In the hollow of his gut. He couldn’t explain it, but something deep and animal inside him knew.

She had used her quirk.

They had found out. And now… she was gone.

He began searching. Subtly. Quietly. Over the next few days, he lingered in halls longer than permitted, peered through reinforced glass slits into other rooms, tried to catch fleeting glimpses of other subjects during testing rotations. He asked questions—always calmly, always with the thin veil of innocence they had forced him to perfect.

But every inquiry was met with the same dead-end language.

“She was reassigned.” “She’s in a different sector.” “She’s being transferred for evaluation.”

Cold phrases. Too rehearsed. Too smooth.

At one point, he was pulled into a side hallway by Agent Kuroda, who crouched to his level with a placid smile. “You’re too curious lately,” the agent said in a voice that tried to sound kind. “You need to focus on your schedule. Curiosity can get in the way of progress. Do you understand, Subject Thirteen?”

Izuku looked into Kuroda’s eyes and said nothing.

He didn’t sleep that night. Or the night after.

Images haunted him—of May’s hand wrapped around his wrist, her quirk blooming quietly like petals in a storm. Her smile, so tired but so alive. Her whisper: “If you really need it… I’ll show you another.”

Had she been punished for that?

Or… was it worse?

Did they take her somewhere?

Did she scream?

He replayed the moment over and over in his head, trying to find the point where he should’ve said no. Where he could’ve protected her. Where he could’ve stopped it.

You saw her. That’s yours.

Her words were all that remained of her now.

On the sixth day after her disappearance, Izuku returned to Room 9 one last time. The bed had been stripped. Even the mattress looked different. No trace of her scent, her presence, her softness. He sat on the cold tile floor for several minutes.

Then something broke inside him.

Not all at once. Not loud. It wasn’t the kind of break that made you scream or shatter. It was quiet. Like a thread snapping somewhere unseen.

His breathing slowed. His limbs curled in, knees drawn to his chest, forehead to the floor. He didn’t cry. There were no tears left for this place. But his body ached with the weight of what was missing. Of what he had lost.

No one came for him for hours. No one noticed he was gone.

When he finally rose and walked back to his assigned chamber, he didn’t speak again for three days.

And when he did—when the white coats asked him to recount the incident logs from the day of May’s disappearance, when they asked him about her behavior, her “disruption,” her “noncompliance”—he said only one thing, barely above a whisper:

“It was my fault.”

That night, as he lay in his sterile cot staring up at the flickering ceiling light, the guilt rooted itself deep in his chest like a second heartbeat.

She used her quirk for me.

She’s gone because of me.

And even though he had no way of knowing what had really happened—no proof, no answers—he carried the crushing belief that if he had said no, if he had pushed her hand away, if he hadn’t looked so lost…

Maybe she’d still be here.

Izuku Midoriya blamed himself.

And the weight of that blame would never fully leave him.

Chapter Text

The days at Facility 11 had taken on a mechanical rhythm, carefully engineered to suppress curiosity, individuality, and most of all—emotion. White pills before breakfast. Group observation hour. Cognitive restructuring therapy. Nutrient bar lunch. Lights out precisely at 2100. Any deviation was marked down, quietly but firmly, in red ink on slim black tablets that all staff carried clipped to their coats like extensions of their limbs.

Izuku Midoriya was learning how to survive within the rhythm.

But survival was not compliance.

They had increased his medication. That much he knew. The white pills were larger now, with a bitter aftertaste that clung to the back of his throat long after he swallowed. His thoughts didn’t drift as easily as they used to. He no longer cried when the loneliness came, because the loneliness was too distant, too foggy. That scared him most of all—forgetting how to feel.

And yet.

Something was growing beneath that fog. Something deep and warm and waiting. Like a candle under a glass dome. Izuku didn’t know what to call it, but he knew it was part of him. Something no dose could erase.

He was starting to understand his quirk.

It wasn’t clear, not like in stories. There was no sudden switch or clear discovery. It was slow, messy. It began with tiny things—how he’d be walking with his head down, past one of the nurses, and feel a sharp flash of something that didn’t belong to him. Panic. Guilt. Sadness. Sometimes even joy, though those were rare and brittle, like leaves in winter.

And then, something stranger.

Sometimes when he focused—if he really thought about it—he could push back. Just a little. Just a nudge. Not like he was forcing feelings into people, but more like he was tugging on something they already had. Turning the volume up or down.

He had stopped asking questions weeks ago—ever since Yung May vanished like she’d never existed. The other children were careful not to mention her. When he tried to ask one of the older boys if he’d seen her, the boy just shook his head slowly, eyes wide with the unspoken warning that everyone now understood: don’t get close. Don’t connect. Don’t feel too much. Especially not for someone else.

So Izuku learned to make his feelings smaller. Quieter. Tucked away, like May’s hair ribbon folded into the inside hem of his sleeve.

But beneath that quiet, something else had begun to grow.

It started subtly. He would feel the strange hum in his chest when he walked past certain staff—an instinctive thrum, like standing near a live wire. He’d feel them before they noticed him. Some were calm, like Nurse Hisashi, whose aura had a soft blue tone that reminded him of quiet rain. Others were jagged, tense. One guard—he didn’t know the man’s name—always felt like nails on glass. That man made Izuku’s head ache whenever they were too close.

He began testing himself.

Not the way the Commission did, with electrodes and needles and machines that monitored brainwaves for spikes in cortisol or adrenaline. His tests were small. Quiet.

He would brush past a technician in the hallway, thinking of laughter—real laughter, the kind that made your stomach hurt. And sometimes, just sometimes, he’d catch a flicker of surprise on their face. A stutter in their expression. A sudden, out-of-place smile.

Other times, he would press his hand against the cafeteria tray, focus on the memory of his mother’s voice—soft, trembling, loving—and he’d watch the staff in the room. A few would pause. One sat down for no reason and stared blankly at the wall, tears pooling in her eyes before she wiped them away with trembling fingers.

It wasn’t much. But it was real.

And it was his.

They didn’t know. The doctors. The guards. The people who spoke in acronyms and half-smiles and said things like “emotional output calibration.”

They didn’t know he was learning. They didn’t know he was starting to understand that his quirk wasn’t just a curse or a bomb waiting to go off.

It was a connection. It was invisible, but powerful. Intimate. Unstoppable when it worked. And dangerous, yes—but not in the way they thought.

They were afraid of him for the wrong reasons. They thought they could control him with silence and sedatives.

They didn’t realize that every pill dulled the noise—but sharpened the edges of his focus.

And so Izuku started charting the emotional terrain of Facility 11 in his mind like a secret map. He knew where the fear lingered—in the labs, in the white rooms with two-way mirrors. He knew where there was cold detachment—in the offices of Commission agents who used words like “containment threshold” and “response lag.”

But he also knew where the warmth still flickered—rare, fleeting. Like in the nurse’s station, when Kaede Hisashi would quietly fix a child’s collar or offer a second packet of juice without asking. She always kept her eyes on the cameras, but sometimes her hand would linger a moment longer when passing a cup, her fingers brushing against his like a secret message: I see you. You're still human.

Izuku never spoke to her directly about what he was doing. He didn’t dare. But something told him she might understand.

And that mattered more than he expected.

That week, the Commission agents began showing up more often. Clipboard discussions. Walkie-talkies buzzing with phrases like “pre-phase escalation protocol.” One morning, Kuroda passed him in the corridor and offered a rare, too-wide smile.

“You’re progressing,” he said. “We’re very proud.”

Izuku nodded blankly and said nothing. Because inside, he was terrified.

Progressing meant they were watching him more closely. That the tests were about to intensify. That they were pushing toward something.

But it also meant that they hadn’t figured it out yet.

That he was still a step ahead. That he still had some control—however fragile.

So Izuku did the only thing he could: he kept his head down. Took the pills. Sat still during therapy. Made his emotions small, like a candle behind glass.

But inside, something else was forming.

A defiance born of grief.

A spark born from May’s memory.

He would survive Facility 11.

But he would not leave it unchanged.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The room was too white.

Not the comforting white of clouds or snow or hospital sheets that meant care. This white was harsh. Glaring. It buzzed under the fluorescent lights like it was trying to erase shadows, erase warmth—erase identity. It made everything in the room feel sterile and wrong, including the boy seated at the center.

Izuku sat with his arms folded in his lap, the hem of his sleeve twitching slightly where his thumb fidgeted unseen. He had learned to keep his hands still in front of the cameras. Still and quiet and compliant. But now his thumb moved like it had a mind of its own—an invisible pulse of anxiety he could not swallow.

Three scientists stood behind a one-way glass panel, murmuring into microphones. Above Izuku, the ceiling hummed with tiny cameras embedded like stars—always watching.

“Phase 3 calibration ready,” one voice said.

“Begin stimulus sequence,” another replied.

A door hissed open behind him.

Izuku didn’t turn. He didn’t need to. He could feel them enter.

Two facility staff—one of them the tall male nurse with tired eyes, the other a young aide whose fear bled off her like heat. The boy didn’t know their names, but he could feel them clearly. One was emotionally numb, like stone. The other, brittle and fraying at the edges.

“We're going to try something new today, Midoriya,” said Dr. Hiruma’s voice through the overhead speaker. “You're doing very well. This test will help us understand how your ability interacts with external subjects.”

Izuku said nothing. He’d stopped responding days ago unless prompted.

“The individuals in the room with you have volunteered for this procedure,” Hiruma continued. “We are going to ask them to focus on neutral emotional states. Calm. Detachment. You, however, will be exposed to a specific emotional stimulant, and we will observe the response transmission. Understood?”

His mouth felt dry. He gave the required nod.

In the corner of the room, a screen flickered on. A slow, almost dreamlike sequence began playing—images of cities in flames, of children crying, of wreckage and twisted metal. Screams—not real, not loud, but too real—drifted through the speakers. The kind of noise that burrowed under your skin.

Izuku’s breath hitched.

“Subject Midoriya, please focus,” came Hiruma’s voice.

So he did.

The ache that had been building in his chest all morning now swelled. He didn’t try to stop it. It was part of the test.

His eyes blurred as tears crept silently down his cheeks.

And then—

Like a thread snapping loose—

The man on the left dropped to his knees. The woman gasped, clutching her chest like she couldn’t breathe.

“Make it stop,” she whispered, eyes wide, locked on nothing.

Izuku trembled. He didn’t want this. He hadn’t meant to do this. He tried to pull it back, tried to shove the feeling deep into his gut, but it was too late. It had already taken root, already bled out into the room.

“I said stop,” she choked out, crawling toward the door.

The room filled with their despair. Their grief. His grief.

And it wasn’t even real. It was simulated suffering, curated horror—and still it overwhelmed them. Because he was the vessel. The amplifier.

The mirror. The screen cut out. The experiment ended.

Guards rushed in. The subjects were dragged out, sobbing.

Izuku curled into himself. His stomach heaved. He didn’t want to see anyone’s face.

“Remarkable response rate,” one of the doctors murmured behind the glass. “The transference delay is nearly zero.”

“Notice the intensity curve,” another said. “It’s not static. His projection amplifies over time even after the original emotional impulse has plateaued.”

Dr. Hiruma, clinical as ever, added, “Increase the dosage. He’s still destabilizing too quickly.”

The door hissed open again.

A pair of white-gloved hands approached. A paper cup with two more of the small, bitter white pills was pressed into his palm. Water followed.

“Take it,” said the voice. Cold. Efficient.

He did. Because he had to.

But the pills didn’t work immediately. Not on the part of him that mattered.

As the guards left and the room emptied, Izuku sat alone in the silence of his own mind. He could still feel the echo of their pain. The way it had leapt from him like a wave, slamming into them—breaking them open.

What am I becoming?

He pressed his forehead to his knees, clutching his arms tightly, trying to will himself small again. Invisible. Contained. But the truth wouldn’t go away. This wasn’t an accident. This was exactly what the Commission wanted.

And for the first time, Izuku realized that his fear wasn’t just of what he could do—it was of what they would make him do next.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The apartment was quiet.

Too quiet, Inko thought—not the kind of peaceful quiet that came with a long day’s end, but the kind of silence that made the air feel wrong. She stood by the window, fingers nervously worrying the edge of a tea towel, and stared down at the courtyard below. Children were playing in the spring dusk, their laughter faint and fragile, floating up from the open world her son no longer belonged to.

The packet had arrived that morning.

Stamped with the insignia of the Hero Commission, marked “CONFIDENTIAL.” The woman who delivered it was the same as before—Agent Saitou. Clean suit. Bland smile. Voice like worn-out velvet. Saitou handed it to her with a practiced softness, the way someone might give a grieving woman a casserole dish.

“There’s another letter from your son,” she said. “He’s adjusting well. The doctors are very pleased.”

Her words had curled around her like a hug laced with barbed wire. She handed the packet to Inko, bowed, and promptly left. 

Now Inko sat at the kitchen table, the photos spread before her like a shrine.

There was Izuku.

Or… someone who looked like him.

His face was thinner. Paler. But he was smiling—sort of. A strange, not-quite-right smile, like something pasted on. He stood among other children, all dressed in neutral grey uniforms. The background looked like a school hallway, clean and white and… sterile. So very sterile. An older woman in a lab coat hovered behind the group, her hand resting awkwardly on one girl’s shoulder. No one else was smiling.

Inko traced her fingertips across her son’s face. She could almost convince herself it was fine. He looked clean. Fed. Safe.

But a mother knows.

She turned to the letter next.

The handwriting looked like Izuku’s, but… more measured. Less frantic. Gone were the loops and cramped margins of a boy who always wrote like his thoughts outran his hands. This was neat. Practiced.

“ Dear Mom, ” it began.

“I’m doing really well here! The people are nice and I’ve made some friends. We do lessons and eat meals together. The doctors are helping me understand my quirk. I miss you a lot, but I know I’ll see you soon. Please don’t worry about me. I’m happy. Love, Izuku.”

Inko read it once. Twice.

By the third time, her stomach twisted.

There were no specific details. No names. No stories about new friends or favorite books. No mention of how he slept, or whether they let him draw, or if he still counted the tiles on the ceiling like he used to do when nervous. It was… hollow. Like someone imitating her son from memory.

And yet, part of her wanted to believe it. Needed to. The ache in her chest had gnawed at her for weeks.

She missed him so badly it felt like she was carrying an invisible, howling wound inside her ribs.

Still, something was wrong.

She reached for the previous letter—last month’s—and lined them up side by side. The wording was nearly identical.

“I’m doing really well here. The people are nice.”

“I miss you a lot, but I know I’ll see you soon.”

The same. Word for word. Her hand trembled.

“No,” she whispered to herself. “No, that can’t be right. Maybe he’s just… trying to make me feel better. Maybe they told him what to say.”

But even that excuse didn’t sit well. Izuku had always over-shared when he was upset—he couldn’t help it. When he was five, he’d come home from school crying because a girl had tripped and he didn’t know how to make her feel better. He’d written her an apology letter that was three pages long.

Now, he could only manage three lines to his mother.

She stared at the photo again. Zoomed in with her fingers on her phone. The boy’s smile faltered under scrutiny. The eyes weren’t lit. Not like his eyes used to be—those endless green galaxies bursting with energy and hope.

This wasn’t right.

Inko stood up so suddenly her chair screeched against the floor. Her heart pounded. She wanted to call someone—anyone. The number Saitou had given her was buried in a drawer, next to the Commission brochure and pamphlet on “High-Intensity Quirk Rehabilitation for Minors.”

She rummaged through the papers until she found it.

Dialed. It rang once. Twice.

Then: “Hero Commission Liaison Office. How may I direct your call?”

Inko hesitated. “I—I'm the mother of Izuku Midoriya. He’s in Facility Eleven. I just received another update. I… I need to speak to someone about it. It didn’t feel… real. Is he okay?”

A pause. Keys clacked.

“Yes, Mrs. Midoriya,” the voice replied smoothly. “We have regular check-ins from Facility Eleven. Your son is progressing well in his adaptation cycle. Emotional calibration is within standard parameters.”

That phrase chilled her. “Emotional calibration?”

“Just a standard term for adjustment, ma’am. He’s doing fine.”

“But the letters—he doesn’t sound like himself.”

“Children under specialized observation often communicate differently. It’s part of the process.”

“And the photo—he looks so tired.”

“Natural lighting in that part of the facility can cause pale tones, ma’am. He is healthy and safe. I assure you.”

But her gut screamed liar.

Inko ended the call with a numb “thank you,” then slumped against the counter. Her head fell into her hands. Her eyes burned but refused to cry. She wanted to believe. But belief without truth was just denial dressed up in hope.

Somewhere, deep in her bones, Inko Midoriya knew.

Her son was not okay.

And worse—no one was going to help him.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The glass was cold beneath Director Kamura’s fingers.

High above the city—Level 92 of the Hero Commission Headquarters—he stood in silence, watching as the morning light spilled across the skyline. Tokyo’s buildings stretched like blades into the sky, gleaming and self-assured, a testament to the Hero Age he had helped engineer.

Behind him, a secure console hummed. Streams of data flowed across the screens: biometric logs, behavioral reports, quirk reactivity scans—all flowing from Facility 11.

Kamura exhaled slowly. There was no emotion in his face, only quiet calculation, the kind that made grown heroes stand straighter in his presence. His suit was immaculately pressed, his grey tie the only splash of softness in an otherwise steel-colored silhouette. Every detail of him had been sharpened over decades of quiet power.

He turned away from the glass at last and approached the main console.

The footage was already cued.

Test Subject 13A-M.

Midoriya, Izuku.

Age: 7.

Quirk: EMPATHY. Status: UNSTABLE. Classification: RED.

The file glowed with a warning emblem in the upper corner—just beneath it, a report labeled “Unauthorized Emotional Transfer: Room 9.”

Kamura tapped the report open. Lines of clean, cold text blinked into view.

Subject 9C-F (Yung May) used latent quirk abilities in proximity to 13A-M.

Both subjects exhibited escalated emotional feedback.

Subject May removed from program 0400 hours.

All footage sanitized. Staff reassigned.

No breach in facility protocols.

Kamura read it three times. Not because he doubted it—he rarely doubted anything—but because he knew how to listen to what reports didn’t say.

A girl disappeared.

The boy remained.

 And something had changed in him.

“Midoriya,” Kamura murmured aloud, tasting the name like a foreign flavor on his tongue. He pressed play.

The screen flickered to life. Surveillance footage from a high corner camera: Room 9. Sterile walls. Thin mattress. A girl with dark hair and an oversized sweater. She was laughing—softly. She was holding Midoriya’s hand. Her eyes glowed faintly. There was a pulse—barely visible—a ripple in the air like warm water trembling.

Midoriya smiled. Kamura paused the footage.

A smile.

Not the reflexive mask they’d conditioned him to wear for photos. Not the dulled compliance of a medicated child. No, this was genuine.

And that was unacceptable.

He tapped another screen. A second feed lit up—more recent. Izuku in the testing chamber, hooked to monitors. A technician placing electrodes on his temples. In the corner of the frame, Nurse Kaede Hisashi stood quietly, her face unreadable, hands folded.

Kamura narrowed his eyes slightly. That one again. She always lingered just a second too long. Never broke protocol, but never quite followed its spirit either.

He bookmarked the timestamp for review.

“Director Kamura.”

The voice came through the intercom. It was Agent Saitou—one of the few field operatives Kamura allowed direct access.

“Yes?”

“The mother—Inko Midoriya. She’s asking more questions. Cross-referencing letters. We advised her accordingly, but the pattern is escalating.”

Kamura didn’t answer for a moment. He stared at the paused image of Izuku again, noting the subtle tension in the boy’s jaw, the way his hands curled slightly in his lap, like he was holding something back.

“Let her escalate,” Kamura said finally. “When people fight the story too hard, they become unstable. Give her another photo. Rewrite a letter. Tell her he’s thriving.

“And the nurse?”

“Continue observation. No action yet.”

“Yes, sir.”

Kamura ended the transmission and turned back to the footage of Izuku and May. They had connected. That was dangerous.

Not because of sentiment—Kamura had no patience for such things—but because connection meant clarity, and clarity meant power. That boy, so small and frightened, had once forced a room of trained evaluators to break down sobbing with a flicker of uncontrolled grief.

Now he was learning to hide it. To aim it.

Kamura leaned forward, studying the boy’s face again. Behind that mop of green curls and shaking hands was a threat—not just to their policies, not just to the Hero Commission’s narrative of control—but to the entire structure of emotional compliance they had spent years engineering.

They had built an empire on detachment. Heroes who did the job without crying over casualties. Civilians who stayed calm when buildings collapsed. A society where emotions were regulated like water pressure.

And here stood a child who could crack it wide open.

Kamura turned off the feed and walked back to the glass.

“Watch him carefully,” he murmured. “When he breaks, we’ll learn everything.”

A faint buzz came from the wall terminal.

“Chairwoman Fujima requests a briefing on the Facility 11 progression.”

Kamura’s expression barely changed. “Tell her to wait.” He straightened his tie. His reflection glimmered faintly in the glass.

There were a thousand things to be done. Adjustments to dosage. Tactical redirection of media narrative. Reinforcement of staff loyalty. But above all, Kamura knew one thing with brutal certainty. If the boy survived long enough to understand what he was…

He would be unstoppable.

And that was something they couldn’t allow.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The elevator doors opened with a soft chime, but neither of the two staff members moved at first.

Technician Rei Watanabe and Security Officer Daisuke Honda stood side by side in the Hero Commission’s elite executive floor—Level 92. The air smelled like cold steel and money. The walls were too clean. No one lingered up here unless summoned, and summons from Director Kamura came rarely—and never for good news.

Daisuke adjusted the collar of his security uniform. Rei kept her arms folded across her lab coat, jaw tight. They walked the long hallway in silence. The doors to Kamura’s office opened without sound.

Inside, the Director stood with his back to them, once again staring out over the city skyline as if measuring the distance between people’s illusions and his truths.

“Come in,” he said, without turning.

They stepped inside. The doors closed behind them with a whisper like a sealed vault. Kamura finally turned. His face was unreadable. His hands clasped neatly behind his back.

“I reviewed your biometric data, when you volunteered” he said. “Specifically from last Thursday’s test involving Subject 13A-M.” Neither Rei nor Daisuke spoke.

Kamura moved to the edge of his desk, then leaned slightly on it—not casual, but calculated. Every inch of him commanded silence.

“Tell me,” he said calmly, “what did you feel?” Rei blinked. “Sir?”

“During the test,” Kamura clarified. “When the boy… began to cry.”

Rei’s lips parted, then shut again. Her mind flashed back to that sterile room, the chill in the air, the way she’d been smiling professionally—and then the crash. The overwhelming sense of despair that had gutted her from the inside.

“I felt…” she began carefully, “like I was falling into something. Like my chest cracked open. It was sudden. Unreasonable. I—we were instructed to monitor his output. But I couldn’t—I forgot—”

Kamura tilted his head.

“You forgot protocol,” he finished for her.

Rei stiffened. “Yes.”

“And you, Officer Honda?”

Daisuke shifted uneasily. His hands were clenched at his sides.

“I felt like I wanted to disappear,” he said slowly. “Not like I was in danger. More like I was wrong. Like I didn’t deserve to be in that room. Like… like I had failed someone. Deeply. Personally. But I hadn’t, sir. I was just—standing there.”

Kamura said nothing for several seconds. The silence prickled.

“So,” he said finally, “you both experienced a personal emotional crisis—at the precise moment the boy became distressed.”

He walked behind his desk again, tapping the screen built into the surface. Data screens bloomed silently around him, showing waveforms of Izuku’s emotional resonance patterns during the event.

He pressed a key. The security footage played on the glass behind him—Izuku hunched on the floor, clutching his knees, silent tears running down his face. Around him, staff broke into mirrored fits of sobbing and despair. Rei, visible in the corner, had her head in her hands. Daisuke had dropped his clipboard and sunk to his knees.

The footage ended.

“Do you know what this proves?” Kamura asked.

Rei didn’t answer.

“That Midoriya has begun to understand what he is,” Kamura said. “That he’s learning to focus his quirk. Not just to feel—but to project. Quietly. Subtly. And with alarming precision.”

He stepped closer again.

“You were chosen for that test because your files noted prior trauma—Rei, your brother’s accident. Daisuke, your failed first assignment. Our scientists assumed the boy would pick up residual pain. But we didn’t anticipate amplification. We didn’t anticipate synchronization.”

He let that word hang in the air like a blade.

“You were infected,” Kamura said simply. “Emotionally. Without touch. Without sound. You are no longer in control of your own feelings in his presence. You’re extensions of his emotional field.”

Rei swallowed hard.

“Sir,” Daisuke said slowly, “if that’s true… if he can do that now, then isn’t this out of control?” Kamura didn’t flinch.

“No,” he said. “It means we’re exactly where we need to be. But it also means protocols must change. The boy must be sedated before every test from now on. No direct eye contact. Emotional monitors on all personnel.” He turned away from them again.

“And if either of you ever experience his emotions, don't be weak." They both stiffened. That was a death sentence in a pretty uniform.

Kamura gave them a final look.

“You may go.”

They left as quickly and quietly as they could. The doors hissed shut behind them. Kamura remained in silence, staring at the screen showing Izuku’s face again. He enlarged the image. The boy’s eyes were still red, tearstained, empty—but there was a depth now that hadn’t been there before.

A mind behind the fear.

And minds could grow into weapons.

“Interesting,” Kamura murmured. “He’s starting to listen.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The facility at night was sterile, humming with low fluorescent light behind frosted bulbs. The kind of silence that didn't feel peaceful, but watched. Monitored.

Izuku lay curled under the coarse white blanket on the cot in Room 11. The corners of the room were too sharp, the ceiling too low. He’d long since learned not to ask for more pillows, or to say when he was cold. The white pills dulled the feelings during the day, but at night, when they wore thin, everything came rushing back. He wasn’t sure anymore what was real—his emotions or someone else’s—or what had once been his and had now become borrowed pain.

He was asleep when it started.

The dream didn’t announce itself. It simply was. A swirl of colorless noise, the air heavy with static, and then: Yung May, laughing in the corner of a room that no longer existed. She was there—barefoot on linoleum, her hair tied up like always. “You’re not broken,” she whispered. “You’re just too loud for them.”

Izuku reached for her hand. The light around her flickered.

“Where did you go?” he asked, though in the dream his voice didn’t sound like his own. It was stretched, aching. “I didn’t mean to—” Her body jerked like a marionette, head twitching. Behind her, white-clothed shadows loomed. Eyes without faces. Hands with needles.

“They said I was too close to the heart,” she said, her voice slowing like a broken tape. “So they buried me where it’s quiet.”

“No—wait—don’t go—”

May dissolved into pale dust. The room cracked open like glass under pressure, and suddenly Izuku was standing in the middle of the testing room—alone. Strapped to the chair again. But this time, no one was watching. The staff were gone. Every monitor was turned toward him, endless looping screens of his face. Crying. Screaming. Smiling when he didn’t mean to. Screaming again.

He screamed now—except not out loud.

The quirk answered first.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Down the corridor, alarms began to flicker.

Nurse Kaede Hisashi was on her overnight rotation when she saw it—an emotional bio-feedback spike across three different monitor stations. One of the security aides had dropped his clipboard and was now sobbing silently by the elevator. Another tech sat frozen at his desk, hands over his ears.

“What the hell?” Kaede muttered. She pushed off from the wall and rushed to the main monitoring hub.

Inside, chaos.

One of the med techs had collapsed into a chair, rocking. Two others were arguing—loud, furious, then suddenly crying in tandem. There was no clear trigger. No spoken words. No contact.

Kaede's eyes darted to the control board. Room 11. Izuku Midoriya.

“Get someone to override the sedative release,” she snapped. “Now.”

“But he’s asleep,” one of the night staff said, clutching his chest. “He’s not even awake—how—?”

“That’s not the point,” Kaede said sharply. “He’s projecting in his sleep. Do it now!”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Inside Room 11, Izuku’s body twitched under the blanket. His fists clenched. Tears leaked out of closed eyes.

In the dream, he was standing in front of a long line of doors. Each one marked with numbers: 1 through 40. Behind them, he felt children—other kids like him. All crying, all calling for someone, all trapped inside emotions they couldn’t name. He reached for Door 9.

It opened by itself.

Yung May stood behind it again, but this time she wasn’t smiling. She had no mouth. Her hands were outstretched, but her eyes were hollow, bleeding shadows. “You made them look,” she rasped. He stumbled backward. The hallway bent at impossible angles.

“It’s my fault,” he whispered, the truth slicing into him like a blade. “I wanted them to feel what I feel. I—I just wanted someone to understand.”

And then the entire dream collapsed into white.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The staff flooded Room 11 within minutes.

Two security officers in padded gray armor pulled the door open. Izuku was drenched in sweat, still unconscious but trembling violently. Kaede shoved past them with a loaded syringe in hand.

“3ccs of tranquilizer mix,” she muttered. “His pulse is through the roof.”

“Do we restrain him?” one of the guards asked.

Kaede hesitated. Then: “Yes. Just in case.”

His wrists were buckled into place. Ankles next. Then Kaede injected the sedative into his upper arm. She pressed the back of her hand to his cheek. Still burning up. Behind her, several staff were sitting on the floor in emotional disarray. One woman muttered the names of her children over and over. Another had broken down in prayer.

“What happened to us?” one whispered.

No one answered.

The hallway lights flickered. A recorded voice over the intercom declared, “EMPATHIC QUOTA BREACH DETECTED—PSYCHOSOMATIC CONTAGION RESPONSE INITIATED.” Kaede didn’t look up.

Instead, she quietly pulled the thin blanket over Izuku’s chest. His body had gone still, but his eyes twitched behind closed lids.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The world returned to Izuku in pieces.

First, there was the sensation of pressure—tight, unrelenting bands crossing over his chest, his arms, his legs. His fingers twitched, but something held them fast. His head lolled to the side, heavy and uncooperative. The harsh glow of fluorescent lights painted the inside of his eyelids with sharp white slashes. Every sound felt like it was happening underwater: muffled voices, the low buzz of a monitor, the sharp click of boots against tile.

He shifted, a small, broken movement. Immediately, the restraints bit into his skin. A startled whimper slipped from his throat before he could stop it.

“He’s waking up,” someone said sharply, close by. A man. Older. Authority in his voice. “Vitals are spiking.”

Izuku forced his eyes open.

The ceiling above him was unfamiliar, even compared to the sterile halls of Facility 11. It was higher, ringed by cameras and blinking red sensors. The room smelled like bleach and sweat and something more metallic—blood, maybe. He turned his head sluggishly and found two figures standing near a console at the far end of the room, partially obscured by glass partitions. Staff members. Clipped white coats. Ear-pieces. Their body language screamed tension, their shoulders tight, their movements quick and terse.

The taller of the two, a woman with iron-gray hair, tapped a screen aggressively. “Emotional resonance levels off the charts. We need to re-stabilize him before—”

Izuku didn’t hear the rest. His mind was too loud.

Something was wrong. Very wrong.

He struggled against the restraints again, a panic rising from deep inside his chest like a storm. Images flickered behind his eyes—dreams, no, nightmares. A place twisted and wrong, people with hollow faces reaching for him, screaming without sound. He remembered the terror, the grief, the suffocating helplessness. But that had only been a dream... hadn’t it?

Another voice joined the chaos, nearer now. Calm, detached. “Sedation is holding at sixty percent. We’ll need to increase if he destabilizes again.”

Izuku’s breathing quickened. He tugged harder against the straps. His quirk—it had done something. Even through the heavy numbness of the white pills, he could feel the lingering static of it crackling under his skin, the aftershocks of something bigger than himself that had torn through the facility. He didn’t know how he knew. He just did.

Another memory surfaced—faces. Staff members crying, screaming, some collapsing in the halls clutching their heads. Fear. Despair. Anger. Emotions that weren’t their own bleeding into them like ink in water.

Izuku whimpered again. It was me. I did it .

He squeezed his eyes shut, fighting the rising wave of guilt and confusion. He hadn't meant to. He had just been dreaming—dreaming about being trapped, alone, forgotten. About May disappearing. About his mother, her voice fading. About everyone leaving him.

Something warm slid down his cheek. It took him a moment to realize it was a tear.

A sharp buzz drew his attention back to the present. The staff moved closer now, their faces carefully blank, their hands gloved. One carried a syringe filled with something clear and viscous. Izuku tensed instinctively, his body trying to shrink away even though the restraints kept him pinned like a specimen.

“No sudden movements,” the iron-haired woman said. She wasn’t unkind, exactly, but her voice had the detached chill of someone who had seen too many broken things to bother pretending anymore. “You had an… episode, Midoriya. Your quirk spiked during REM sleep. Do you understand?”

Izuku tried to speak, but his throat was raw, his voice shredded into nothing but a hoarse croak. He nodded instead, the motion jerky.

“You affected nearly a quarter of the facility staff,” she continued, consulting a clipboard. “Panic attacks. Hallucinations. Temporary emotional paralysis. It took over forty minutes to fully re-contain the breach.”

The man next to her—young, tired-looking, with a long scratch across his cheek—glanced at Izuku warily, as if he might lash out again at any second. “We had to evacuate three wings.”

“We're lucky it wasn't worse,” the woman muttered, almost to herself.

Izuku felt cold all over. He tried to form words around the lump in his throat. “M-May?” he rasped. His voice cracked painfully.

The woman paused. Something shifted in her eyes—pity, maybe. Annoyance. It was hard to tell. “The girl from Room 9 was transferred days ago. You know that.”

Another lie. It burned as it entered his ears.

The man stepped forward, lifting the syringe. “Hold still, Midoriya. This will help calm you down.”

Panic flared in his chest, but he was too weak, too trapped to fight it. He clenched his fists as tightly as he could, nails biting into his palms, as the needle slid into his arm. Warmth spread almost instantly through his veins—thick, heavy, dragging him back toward unconsciousness.

I didn’t mean to, he thought desperately, the words looping in his mind like a broken record. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.

The last thing he saw before darkness claimed him was the reflection in the glass partition across the room: a small, broken boy strapped to a table, eyes wide with terror, swallowed whole by a power he barely understood.

And the staff—watching him like he was a bomb about to go off again.

They’d felt him. Even in sleep.

And now, they were afraid.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The containment footage looped in silence, flickering across the projection wall in Director Kamura’s private viewing chamber. The boy thrashed in his sleep, his face twisted in pain. And then—detonation. Not a physical explosion, but something far more insidious. One moment he was still. The next, waves of invisible pressure rolled outward from the child’s trembling body, distorting the emotions of every staff member in a wide radius.

Kamura didn’t need the sound. He had already reviewed the data: biometric spikes across forty-two personnel, two needing hospitalization for prolonged psychotic distress, one attempting self-harm under the influence of a fear delusion. Emotional contagion had spread through multiple sectors before suppression teams sealed the wing. All originating from a sleeping, drugged seven-year-old boy.

He reached forward and paused the feed at the moment Izuku’s eyes flew open, wide with confusion and fear, his face bathed in sterile light and sweat.

Power. Pure, uncontrolled power.

Kamura leaned back in his leather chair, folding his hands beneath his chin.

So. The sedation wasn’t enough. The suppressants worked on his conscious mind—but not in sleep. Dreams, it seemed, were immune.

There was a knock on his door. Sharp. Measured.

“Enter,” he said.

Two agents stepped inside. One was Doctor Naoya Hiruma, the lead psychologist assigned to Izuku. The other, Agent Saitou—still in a blood-specked uniform from the containment breach, his face pinched and pale.

Kamura didn’t offer them chairs.

“You were present during the event?” he asked Saitou without preamble.

“Yes, sir.” His voice was hoarse. “I was stationed near Wing C during the night rotation. At approximately 0300, I began experiencing acute dread—irrational, paralyzing fear. I was... crying, sir. For no reason. I couldn’t move.”

Kamura raised an eyebrow. “And this emotional state, it lasted how long?”

“Five minutes. Maybe more.” Saitou’s eyes flicked to the frozen image on the screen. “Once the boy woke up, it stopped, although some part of his quirk still lingers..”

Kamura tapped a button. The video resumed briefly: Izuku, sobbing into restraints, the chaos playing behind glass.

“And you’re sure you had no conscious knowledge that it was coming from Midoriya?”

“I didn’t. No one did. Not until the aftermath reports.”

Kamura turned to Hiruma. “What’s your assessment?”

The woman didn’t hesitate. “He’s growing stronger. The white pill dosage is no longer sufficient to contain subconscious activity. Emotional output during sleep was more potent than any recorded waking experiment. It bypassed logic centers entirely—raw empathy output.” Kamura let that settle. Then, coldly: “Could this have been intentional?”

“No, sir,” Hiruma replied. “He was asleep. This wasn’t a calculated release. It was instinct.” Kamura stood, moving to the edge of the projection screen. He stared into the frozen image again—at the boy’s expression. Fear. Loss. Guilt. All magnified into a weapon. One the Commission had failed to anticipate.

“And the dead girl?” Kamura asked flatly. “Room 9. Yung May.”

Hiruma hesitated. “We suspect she may have triggered a reciprocal bond. Emotional pairing is rare, but possible among isolated subjects. It’s likely she awakened something in him—stability, trust. Her removal could’ve contributed to the outburst.”

Kamura gave a short exhale, half sigh, half scoff. “Remove a variable, destabilize the equation. We underestimated the depth of his attachment.”

He paced slowly, hands behind his back.

“What we have,” he continued, “is a child capable of emotional warfare. He doesn’t lash out physically. He doesn’t scream or set fires. He infects. Like a virus.”

Hiruma didn’t flinch. “Then we isolate further. No visual contact. No shared corridors. Enhanced restraints.”

“No,” Kamura said sharply. “We’ve already tried that. Fear and suppression won’t control him. Not fully. We need understanding. Calibration. We need to teach him to aim it.”

He turned to Saitou.

“How long did the effects linger after containment?” Saitou swallowed. “Sir?”

Kamura’s voice was soft. Dangerous. “Emotionally. How long before you felt normal again?” Saitou looked at the floor. “...I still don’t, sir.”

Kamura let the silence stretch.

“Then imagine if he learns to direct that feeling. Channel it with intent. Not a burst in a dream. But a targeted release. A room full of enemy agents, all doubting their cause. A riot stopped with a single heartbeat. A war ended by one boy in chains.”

He smiled faintly, almost reverently.

“This is no longer a question of if. It is a question of how.”

Kamura turned back toward the window overlooking of Facility 11 from far away. In facility 11 the lights below flickered, clinical and cold. Somewhere down there, Izuku Midoriya lay sedated again, unaware of the storm gathering above him.

“Keep him compliant,” Kamura ordered. “But allow the dreams. Let them continue, monitored. I want more data.”

He faced Dr. Naoya Hiruma one last time.

“And if he dreams of her again… let him.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The world felt heavier lately.

Not just from the pills—though those always made him feel like he was moving through water—but from something deeper, something Izuku couldn’t name. Like he was unraveling, one thread at a time, and nobody else noticed the pieces falling.

The walls of Facility 11 never changed. The lights always buzzed. The food always tasted like air. And the quiet was always too loud.

But she was different.

Nurse Kaede didn’t speak often during the rounds, but she never avoided his eyes. When the others saw a hazard wrapped in a child’s skin, she saw a boy. When they clipped wires to his chest, she smoothed his hair. And sometimes, when the monitors blinked green and the hallway cameras swiveled elsewhere, she would pause just a moment longer than necessary.

Tonight, it was in the post-test recovery room. Izuku sat curled on the corner of the cot, knees drawn up, the thin hospital blanket bunched around his shoulders like armor. His head was heavy, his chest heavier. The last experiment had left him raw again. Another round of “emotional projection tests” — that’s what they called it. Another dozen strangers forced to feel what lived in his bones.

He hadn’t cried this time. But something inside him had fractured further.

The door slid open with its usual hiss. He didn’t look up.

“I brought a warm pack,” came a soft voice. “They told me you were shivering.”

Izuku blinked. Nurse Kaede was already crouched beside him, her white uniform somehow softer under the low lights. She held a small cloth-wrapped bundle in her hands. It steamed faintly. Real warmth. Not just another regulation heat blanket.

“Can I?” she asked gently.

Izuku gave a small nod, and she slipped the pack into his hands. His fingers curled around it instinctively, grateful for something that didn’t sting or buzz or demand something from him.

“Thank you,” he whispered. His voice was hoarse, like he hadn’t used it in hours. He probably hadn’t.

Kaede sat on the edge of the cot, just close enough for him to feel her presence. “I read the reports,” she said quietly. “You were very brave today.”

He didn’t answer. What was there to say? Brave didn’t mean anything in a place like this.

“They keep calling it power,” he muttered. “But I don’t even know what I’m doing. I just feel things and… they feel it too. That’s not a power. That’s a problem.”

Kaede’s gaze was steady. Kind. “Feelings aren’t the enemy, Izuku. They’re a language. Yours is just... louder.”

His chest ached at her words. They sounded too gentle for this place. Too real. He looked up at her. “Do you ever get scared? Around me?”

She didn’t blink. “Not once.”

He swallowed hard. “Everyone else does. Even when I’m quiet. Even when I’m asleep.”

Kaede reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a small, folded square of paper. She turned it over in her hand, hesitated—and tucked it back. Izuku didn’t ask. He knew not to.

But she caught his glance, and smiled softly. “It’s not time yet. Their watching.” She eyed a distance camera.

A silence fell between them—warm, not heavy. He leaned his cheek slightly against the heat pack, feeling his eyelids grow heavy.

“Did you ever have a dream?” he asked suddenly, eyes half-closed. “Like… before all this?”

Kaede tilted her head, caught off guard. Then, slowly, “I wanted to be a school nurse. Just a regular one. For kids with scraped knees and stage fright during exams. Not… this.”

Izuku gave the tiniest huff of breath. “I think you’d be good at that.”

Kaede looked down at him, and for a moment, something flickered in her eyes. Something almost maternal. Then the lights in the hallway blinked—a shift change warning.

“I have to go,” she said softly.

Izuku’s shoulders tensed. “Will I see you tomorrow?”

“You will,” she said, brushing a piece of hair from his face. “And maybe… maybe soon, it’ll be time for a real letter.”

He blinked up at her. She smiled again—tired, but full of something no one else here gave him.

Hope.

As she stood and slipped quietly through the door, Izuku clutched the warmth tighter to his chest and let himself believe, just for a little while, that he wasn’t completely alone.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The door hissed shut behind her, sealing off the boy and his dim cot like he was something toxic. Kaede lingered a moment in the sterile hallway, her hand resting on the scanner panel longer than necessary, as if her palm could somehow reach through the reinforced walls and still offer warmth.

But warmth didn’t survive in places like this. Not for long.

She inhaled slowly through her nose, exhaled through her mouth. Then again. Three-counts. Just like they taught her. Her fingers trembled slightly, so she curled them into her palm. She had learned long ago how to make her face unreadable. Kaede turned on her heel and walked.

Facility 11 was quiet at this hour. Quieter than usual. Most of the staff had rotated out after the dream breach—an event already tucked behind clinical terms like “uncontrolled manifestation” and “Type-3 reaction episode.” But the air still held it. The unease. The knowledge that whatever Izuku Midoriya had inside him was growing.

And worse: that they were nurturing it like a blooming weapon.

She passed the security node in Hall C—barely nodded at the guards who didn’t look twice. They didn’t suspect her. They never did. Kaede had that gift, the one that let people overlook her, chalk her up to a harmless nurse with tired eyes and careful hands.

In truth, she had once believed she was harmless.

But not anymore.

She turned the corner into the staff lounge, slid her ID card through the scanner, and stepped inside. Once the door sealed, she locked it manually. A clock ticked somewhere in the background. A pot of untouched coffee burned slowly on the warmer.

Kaede exhaled and leaned against the wall, pulling the letter from her pocket.

The letter. The one Inko Midoriya had written weeks ago. The one that should have been incinerated per Commission protocol. The one Kaede had read before ever deciding to slip it past security.

Izuku hadn’t gotten to read it yet—not really. The moment he reached for it, the sensors triggered and the cameras caught the movement. The letter was confiscated before he could even unfold the first line.

Still. He had seen it. He knew it existed. And that was something.

Kaede unfolded the letter again, slowly, reverently, like a sacred thing. The paper was worn, edges soft from hiding it against her skin under her uniform. The handwriting was neat, careful, obviously rewritten several times.

My sweet Izuku,

   I know you’re scared. I’m scared too. But I believe in you. I always have. No matter what they say your Quirk is… I know your heart. You’re still my boy. My sunshine. They told me not to visit, but I’m trying. I’m trying so hard. I hope you can feel me, even from far away. You’re not alone. I’m with you. Every breath. Every beat.

Love,

Mom.

Kaede pressed her lips together as tears stung the corners of her eyes. She hadn’t cried in years. Not since her first year under the Commission, back when she thought she'd be making a difference. Helping the "volatile" children learn to control themselves. Prevent tragedy. Save lives.

But Facility 11 had nothing to do with saving anyone. She’d seen too much.

Children who never left. Children who forgot their names. Children who smiled once, then never again. And now, Izuku—this soft-spoken boy with trembling hands and a grief that leaked out of him like light from a cracked lantern.

He was too much for this place. And they wanted to make him worse.

Kaede folded the letter gently, tucked it into the hollow panel behind the maintenance cabinet. One of her few hiding places. She couldn’t risk destroying it. Not yet. One day, she’d try again. She had to.

The door beeped—emergency override access. Kaede straightened instantly.

Agent Saitou stood on the threshold, unreadable behind her glasses and grey suit. “Nurse Hisashi. Debriefing in Sub-Level 3. Now.”

Kaede nodded. “Of course.”

She followed her without a word, but something inside her had already shifted again. The same way it had when she lied during the last report. The same way it had when she kept the letter. And tonight, when she gave Izuku warmth without wires.

Every small act of kindness was a risk. But Kaede had already decided. If no one else would fight for that boy, she would.

Even if it killed her.

Chapter Text

Inko sat hunched in front of her old TV, the volume muted, eyes locked on the moving images like a woman trying to memorize a dream before waking. On screen, Izuku smiled—wide, peaceful, still missing his front tooth—his face faintly overexposed like the photo had been edited too cleanly. He was surrounded by three other children she didn’t recognize, all in matching white uniforms. One of them waved at the camera. Another gave a stiff thumbs-up.

The background was sterile, a little too perfect. The lighting was off. There was no ambient sound.

It was a silent video.

“Just a brief visual update,” the agent had told her, lips curling around the lie like it tasted sweet. “He’s doing well. The facility's been good for him. He’s… adapting .”

Inko had said thank you. She had held her breath while they watched her reaction. Then she waited until the door shut behind them before she collapsed.

The curtains were closed now. The tea had gone cold in her hands. Her apartment was silent save for the soft hum of the television and the clock ticking just a little too loud.

She reached for her journal again—pages worn thin by the weight of a hundred unsent letters. She’d bought the journal the day after Izuku was taken. Green cover. Plain pages. No stickers. No color. It felt wrong to decorate it when he had nothing. Each letter was a scream into a void, a desperate tether to a boy who might never read her words.

But she still wrote. She had to.

Dear Izuku,

    It’s late. I can’t sleep again. I keep hearing things in the quiet—little creaks that sound like your bedroom door, the soft pad of your feet in the kitchen when you tried to sneak snacks, the way the kettle whistles like your laugh when you got excited.

I watched the video they sent me again. I’ve seen it so many times the corners of the tape are starting to warp. You smiled. I don’t know if it’s real. Maybe they asked you to smile. Maybe you had to.

I want to believe it. I want to believe you’re safe and being taken care of. That they’re helping you. That someone tucks you in and asks you how you’re doing and lets you hold something soft when you’re scared. That someone says your name like it matters.

But the truth is… I don’t know anymore.

They don’t let me visit. They say it’s not safe. For me. For you. For the staff. For society.

They told me your letters are being sent through “a secure channel.” They told me you’re getting my messages. But I don’t believe them. I think you don’t even know I’m writing.

So I’ll tell you again.

I love you, Izuku. I love you with everything I am. Nothing they do will change that. Nothing they say about you will erase the boy I raised—the one who cried when ants drowned in the rain, who gave his favorite toy away to a kid crying at the park, who held my hand when I cried after your father left.

You are not a monster.

You are not dangerous.

You are my son.

Please hold on. Please remember that.

Even if the lights go out. Even if they try to make you forget your name. I’ll keep saying it.

You’re Izuku Midoriya. My boy. My light.

Love always,

Mom

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

She folded the letter carefully, placed it into the box marked “Sent – Not Confirmed.”

Inside were dozens more. No responses. No returned mail. Just silence.

She rose from her seat slowly, her legs heavy. The flat was dim now, only one light on in the kitchen. Her plants were dying. She hadn’t touched her sewing machine in weeks. She barely ate. And yet, she kept writing.

When the knock came at the door, she jumped.

It was late. No one came by anymore.

She opened it hesitantly to reveal a man in a grey coat. His eyes were sharp, his smile far too practiced. “Mrs. Midoriya?” he asked, voice clipped. “May I come in? I represent the Public Quirk Safety Bureau. I’m here regarding… your son.”

Her blood froze.

She stepped aside without a word.

He didn’t sit. He didn’t take off his shoes. He paced the small living room as if calculating its square footage.

“We understand you’ve been… struggling,” he said. “This is natural. It’s difficult. For all of us.” He turned and met her eyes.

“Your son’s case is unprecedented. Emotion-based Quirks with wide-range psychic effects are, as you can imagine, extraordinarily dangerous if uncontained. You must understand the burden he represents.” She opened her mouth to speak, but he held up a hand.

“I’m here,” he said gently, “to offer you a solution. Closure, of a kind.”

She blinked.

“What do you mean?”

He paused.

“We’ve prepared a statement. With your approval, we will release it to the media. It will say that your son died during early quirk containment for public safety reasons. We will include words of honor. Respect. He’ll be seen as a tragic hero.”

Inko stared.

“No.”

“You don’t have to decide now—”

“No,” she repeated. “Absolutely not. He’s not dead.”

The man’s face didn’t change. Not really.

“Sometimes,” he said softly, “grief looks like denial. And denial delays healing. This is for your peace. And the country’s. We need the public to feel secure again. This would help them… move on.”

Inko’s chest shook. “Get out.”

“Mrs. Midoriya—”

“Get out.”

He did.

And when the door clicked shut, she slid down against it, hands over her mouth to hold back the sobs. She rocked slowly, eyes shut. Somewhere deep down, she started to believe he might never come home.

But she would never call him dead.

Not until she touched him again.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The morning news opened like a circus dressed in suits.

Bright graphics, a triumphant jingle, the anchor’s voice polished and warm like honey dripping over glass. It was everything the public had come to expect from ProHero: Now!, Japan’s premier media machine for digestible hero updates, human-interest fluff, and carefully manicured “controversial” topics—always delivered with a practiced neutrality that never quite risked outrage.

And today’s headline spun slowly across the bottom of the screen:

UPDATE ON “EMOTIONAL BOMB” CASE – MISSING BOY WITH DANGEROUS QUIRK

Behind the desk sat Mina Okano, veteran journalist, thin as a scalpel and just as sharp. Her hair was pulled back in a silver coil, eyes rimmed with liner darker than the expression she wore. Across from her sat a man in a soft grey blazer—Public Safety Liaison Hiro Tanaka, known for his non-answers and pitbull-like loyalty to the Hero Commission.

They were both smiling, but the tension on the screen felt like glass about to crack.

“Thank you for joining us this morning, Mr. Tanaka,” Okano said. Her tone was pleasant. Too pleasant.

“A pleasure to be here, Mina,” he replied with that commission-trained cadence. “We always appreciate the opportunity to clarify information for the public.” She gave a half-smile, then pivoted like a blade.

“Let’s talk about the boy everyone’s asking about,” she said. “He was six years old when he was labeled an emotional hazard. The Emotional Bomb, some outlets called him after the incident at his preschool. And then—poof. Vanished. No location. No further press conferences. No photos for over a year.” Tanaka’s smile didn’t flicker. “The child you’re referring to is under protective containment, for his safety and the safety of those around him. I assure you, he is alive, well-fed, and monitored by some of the nation’s most advanced quirk specialists.”

“But not seen. Not heard from. Not even a single verified letter to his mother. Can you confirm what kind of facility he’s in?” Tanaka folded his hands. “That information is classified.”

“Can you confirm if he’s even in the country?”

“That’s also classified.”

The silence stretched long enough for the message to land. Okano leaned back in her chair, tapping her pen once on the desk. “Some people are beginning to ask if he’s been disappeared.” Tanaka chuckled softly, as though she had made a joke.

“Let’s be clear,” he said, eyes cool. “This is a child with the power to manipulate, broadcast, and override human emotion. During a single outburst, twenty-seven children and two teachers suffered temporary psychological breakdowns. That’s not an ordinary tantrum. That’s a tactical weapon.”

“A weapon you’ve chosen not to update the public on.”

Tanaka smiled again. “We’re protecting your children.”

Later in the segment, the camera cut to a different interview: live footage from a small press conference hosted on the Hero Commission’s campus. The room was full of reporters, flashing cameras, and staged banners that read STRENGTH, SERVICE, SACRIFICE .

And behind the podium, for the first time in months, stood All Might.

His face was calm, sculpted into the heroic mask that the world still wanted to believe in. His muscles filled the frame of his suit, but to anyone paying attention, his shoulders sagged just slightly.

“I’ve been made aware of concerns surrounding the emotional quirk incident,” he said, voice steady. “I want to be clear—this child is not forgotten. He is being monitored, guided, and supported by professionals who understand the gravity of his ability.” The crowd murmured.

A hand rose in the back. “Can you confirm if you’ve spoken to the boy yourself, All Might?”

All Might hesitated.

That pause—half a second, maybe less—was enough for every camera in the room to record it. “…I have not,” he said finally. “But I trust those who are overseeing his development.”

Another reporter: “There’s been speculation that the child is being used in experiments. Some are calling it unethical quirk research.” All Might’s jaw tightened.

“The Hero Commission is committed to safety and transparency,” he answered. “But emotional-type quirks are complex. Difficult. We must be cautious. We must act responsibly.”

Okano’s voice returned in the overlay, narrating from the newsroom as the camera panned back to her desk.

“The public appears divided. Some say the boy is a ticking time bomb. Others say he’s a child being punished for something he can’t control. But one thing’s certain—the silence surrounding this case has grown loud.”

She turned to the camera directly.

“And in that silence, more questions are beginning to rise.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

In chat rooms, forums, and late-night talk shows, the story refused to settle.

There were parents who posted panicked blogs claiming their children had once met Izuku. Teachers who swore the Hero Commission had come to their school with black vans and unmarked files. Protestors quietly slipped flyers under apartment doors with the boy’s face, captioned in bold:

WHERE IS IZUKU MIDORIYA?

No one had answers.

But the lies were starting to show their seams.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

It started with a knock.

Not the polite kind that waited patiently—this was rhythmic, sharp, persistent. Inko Midoriya had been washing dishes at the time, her thin wrists trembling as she stared down at a mug she hadn’t realized she’d scrubbed raw. Her eyes were raw too, ringed with exhaustion that never seemed to lift.

She didn’t need to look through the peephole. The moment she opened the door, the camera flashes hit her like a sudden explosion of white noise. Shouting reporters crowded the narrow hallway of her apartment complex, shouldering one another with foam microphones raised like weapons. A security guard tried—and failed—to hold them back.

“Inko Midoriya, can you comment on the whereabouts of your son—?!”

“Have you been in contact with the Hero Commission?”

“Do you believe your son is still alive?!”

“Was the letter they gave you a forgery?!”

Each voice was louder than the last, stacking over one another until it became a blur of static. Inko stepped back instinctively, blinking in the bright hallway light. Her heart kicked once—hard—before beginning its familiar staccato rhythm of panic.

She hadn’t dressed for this. She hadn’t prepared for this. She wasn’t ready.

A young woman reporter pushed to the front, notebook in hand, her voice softer but no less invasive. “Mrs. Midoriya,” she said. “You’ve stayed quiet for over a year. Some say you’re being silenced. Others think you’re hiding the truth about your son. Which is it?”

“I’m not—” Inko’s voice cracked before she could finish. She tried again. “I don’t have anything new to share.”

“But you received letters from him, yes?” the woman pressed, eyes narrowing. “Were they real? Did they sound like your son?” That made her pause. The world slowed just slightly.

The last letter had been carefully written, every line polished with an almost robotic warmth. It had said all the right things—he was happy, he was safe, he was learning—but something had felt off. It hadn’t smelled like him. It hadn’t sounded like him, either, not really.

But she couldn’t say that out loud.

“Of course they were real,” she said instead, too quickly. “They came with… with photos. He looked happy.”

“Would you show us the photos?” another reporter asked, shoving forward. “No.” Inko’s hands were clenched so tightly at her sides the knuckles were white. “They’re private. He’s just a child.”

A different voice: older, colder. “Your son caused a national incident, Mrs. Midoriya. Some say his quirk could be weaponized. Don’t you think the public deserves transparency?”

Something deep inside her twisted at that.

“He was six,” she whispered. “He cried too hard and people got scared. That’s what happened. He didn’t want to hurt anyone.”

“But he did, didn’t he?” the voice fired back. “Twenty-nine people affected. That’s not just a tantrum. That’s a crisis.”

The crowd shifted forward, leaning in. Cameras clicked. The hallway seemed to pulse with heat and suffocation. Inko shook her head. “No more questions.”

She stepped back and closed the door.

But even once it clicked shut, their voices still poured through the thin apartment walls like a slow, relentless leak. She stood there for a long moment, forehead pressed to the wood, heart pounding.

Later that night, she sat in her dim kitchen with every light turned off.

The photos the Commission had sent her months ago lay spread across the table like puzzle pieces: Izuku smiling stiffly in what looked like a garden, surrounded by unfamiliar children she’d never met. One photo showed a nurse gently holding his shoulder—Kaede, she’d been told. Another featured Izuku holding a picture he had “drawn” of the facility. But something in his smile was glassy. His eyes didn’t wrinkle at the edges.

They’d told her not to worry. They’d said he was adjusting. But now the letters had stopped. Now, the staged updates had gone quiet. No more glossy packages in the mail. No more polite phone calls.

And now the press had come to her door, ravenous.

Inko picked up one of the letters. Her fingers hovered over the words. She reread it—again. And again.

Then she whispered, voice trembling, “You didn’t write this… did you, baby?”

She began to cry.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Shota Aizawa had never trusted the Hero Commission. Not really.

Even in his early days patrolling Tokyo's underbelly, before Eraserhead became a name whispered between criminals, he’d seen how power operated behind curtains — how control mattered more than compassion, how certain threats were “handled” quietly, far from the public’s eye. He’d seen promising children disappear from the hero pipeline, labeled unstable or “dangerous.” Their files would vanish soon after, rewritten or buried. And every time, the Commission’s name lingered like smoke in a burned-out apartment: not explicitly there, but unmistakably present.

When the news first aired about a boy in Musutafu—six years old, green-haired, bright-eyed, powerful and emotionally unstable—he watched from the corner of a ramen shop, his hood up and eyes sharp. The term “Emotional Bomb” flashed across the screen in bold red headlines, the kind of branding you couldn’t erase. The media ate it up. The child’s name was Izuku Midoriya.

The boy’s mother had been swarmed. Aizawa remembered seeing her tear-streaked face projected on the shop’s tiny TV, her voice shaky but defiant.

“He’s just a boy,” she said. “He didn’t mean to hurt anyone—he’s good. Please, let me see him. Let me—please—”

Then the broadcast cut. Switched to a smiling official. Reassurances. Safety measures. The narrative was under construction, carefully edited and reassembled by the time it reached the public. Aizawa didn’t forget her face. Or the boy’s.

He waited. Watched. Months passed.

And now, almost a year later, the media didn’t mention the Emotional Bomb anymore.

They’d moved on.

But Aizawa hadn’t.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He moved in silence through bureaucratic shadows, leveraging what little sway his Pro Hero status gave him. Not the flashy kind, no. But he had a reputation — as a quirk specialist, a pragmatist, someone who understood threat management better than most. That made him useful. And useful people earned access.

So he began pulling threads. Quietly.

He started by reviewing every documented incident involving emotional projection quirks. Most were registered. A few had follow-ups. But Izuku Midoriya’s file was… thin. Sanitized. Redacted in places that made no sense. His quirk was never formally named. Just labeled “volatile.”

Facility 11 didn’t appear in the registry.

Not directly.

He only found it because a confidential memo — buried under layers of internal cross-reference — mentioned a “quarantine reassignment site” for unstable juvenile quirks. The name was redacted, but the coordinates weren’t. Northern outskirts. No public roadways. No waypoints.

But it existed.

Aizawa sat hunched in the corner of a dim hero agency records room, lit only by the soft green glow of a digital console. Security footage played in silence. Weeks-old feeds from a Commission hallway. Two agents—Kuroda and Saitou—delivering an envelope to a weeping woman on her doorstep.

Inko Midoriya. They gave her a photo. A boy smiling. Surrounded by blurry children. The image was too perfect. He paused the footage. Zoomed in. His eyes narrowed. The smile wasn’t real. He could see it in the eyes. Flat. Staged.

He leaned back, sighing. His capture weapon hung loosely around his shoulders, like a weight of quiet judgment. Something was very wrong. This was a child being buried alive under the Commission’s version of mercy.

And now, Aizawa had seen enough.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Two years had passed, but the unease in Shouta Aizawa’s gut had only deepened.

He stood outside the Hero Commission’s reinforced regional office, a cold drizzle soaking the ends of his scarf, eyes narrowed beneath heavy lids. The structure towered like a monolith—uncompromising, steel-gray, and windowless. It had taken him nearly a year and a half of networking, infiltration, and gathering whisper-thin strands of evidence to even reach this point. Facility 11. Children detained for "national safety." On paper, it didn’t even exist.

He was here for one child. A boy he had never met, but who had been haunting him since the morning he read the redacted report marked EMOTIONAL BOMB—Midoriya Izuku. Shouta wasn’t one for sentiment. But even the Commission’s euphemistic labels couldn't disguise the raw fear buried beneath their language. A six-year-old child with a quirk that made people feel… things. Too much. Too strongly.

They didn’t know what to do with him, so they buried him.

“Eraserhead,” a woman in a black suit greeted him, voice clipped, professional. “You’ve been granted fifteen minutes in the interview chamber with Subject 13-A. Observed, recorded, and no physical contact. Do you understand the terms?”

He nodded once. “That’s all I need.”

The hallway they led him through was sterile, humming faintly with hidden energy lines. The deeper they walked, the more he could feel it—the wrongness. Shouta had spent years watching teenagers grow into heroes, and he knew how to read emotional residue in a room. Here, there was none. Not even fear. It had all been suppressed—chemically, environmentally, maybe even quirk-induced.

They arrived at a reinforced viewing chamber with one-way glass. “Wait here. Subject will be escorted shortly,” said the agent.

Shouta crossed his arms, watching. A small table and two chairs sat in the center of the concrete space. His eye twitched subtly when a child was led into the room—thin, underslept, with a collar fastened around his neck and wrists loosely bound by a control cuff. This… was Izuku Midoriya?

He looked no older than eight now. But the way he moved—deliberate, restrained—spoke of trauma far beyond his years.

The door buzzed open. They let Shouta in.

“You’re not my mom,” Izuku said. His voice came out flat. Blunt. But a tremor still lived beneath the words.

The man didn’t flinch. He stepped forward, carefully, as if approaching a wounded animal. “No,” he said quietly. “I’m not. My name is Shouta Aizawa. I’m… a hero. And a teacher.”

He stepped inside, keeping his movements slow, casual. “Hey, kid,” he said, voice softer than usual. “I’m Eraserhead. I work underground. I just want to talk.”

Izuku lifted his eyes slowly, green but dimmed, dulled by medication and years of isolation. “Then why are you here?” he asked, voice hoarse. Aizawa studied him, sitting across from him. “I asked to meet you. I wanted to know how you’re doing.”

The boy blinked. “They said heroes don’t come here.”

“I’m not most heroes,” Shouta replied.

There was a pause. Izuku tilted his head slightly, studying him. “You’re not scared of me.”

Shouta met his gaze evenly. “Should I be?”

The boy’s lip twitched. “Everyone else is.”

“I’m not here to hurt you,” Shouta said. “I’ve read the files. I don’t trust the Commission to tell the truth. So I wanted to hear it from you.” Izuku stared at him for a long time. “No one’s ever asked me that.”

Shouta noticed how the boy's fingers trembled. A side effect of the drugs, maybe. “They say you have a quirk that makes people feel things. How does that work?”

“I don’t know,” Izuku answered. “When I was little, I felt too much. I think I still do. Sometimes when I’m scared, other people get scared. Or angry. Or… sad.” His eyes dropped. “Sometimes they don’t know it’s me.”

“You’ve been practicing,” Shouta said quietly.

“Secretly,” Izuku admitted. “They don’t like it when I do. They increase my dosage when they notice. But… I can still push a little. Just enough to get someone to leave me alone.”

That confirmed more than Shouta wanted to know.

“What do they do when they test you?” he asked carefully.

Izuku flinched. “They put people in the room. And then they make me feel something. They say it’s for ‘measuring stability.' Sometimes it’s happy stuff—music, toys, or praise. But… sometimes they make me feel pain. Loneliness. Fear. They want to see how much I can push into other people.” His voice cracked on the last word.

“They want to turn you into a weapon,” Shouta muttered, half to himself. “I don’t want to be that,” Izuku whispered. “I just want to go home.”

The silence that followed felt unbearable. Shouta wanted nothing more than to remove the cuff, walk the boy out, and put him somewhere safe. But the system didn’t work that way. Not yet. Aizawa reached slowly into his jacket and placed something small on the floor between them. A folded napkin. Nothing official. Nothing traceable. On it, a name:

" Yamada. Kiyo ."

“Don’t say it out loud,” Aizawa said. “But if someone reaches out to you with that name… you can trust them.” Izuku stared at the napkin. He didn’t nod. He didn’t speak. But he didn’t look away, either.

He leaned forward slightly. “If I come back, would you talk to me again?”

Izuku looked at him as though no one had ever offered that before. “You’d come back?”

“I’ll try.”

The door buzzed. The handlers were waiting.

“Izuku,” Shouta said, before standing. “You’re not the problem. The people doing this to you are.” The boy looked up again, hope flickering briefly behind dulled eyes. “Then… don’t forget me.”

“I won’t,” Shouta said.

He walked out slowly, heart pounding with a mixture of guilt and fury. He couldn’t promise rescue. Not yet. But now that he had seen the boy behind the label, behind the cold case files and redacted footage—Shouta knew with certainty:

This system was going to break before that child did.

And he would be the one to crack it open.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Izuku Midoriya did not mark time in days anymore.

In the sterile clockwork of Facility 11, time had become a feeling. Not a number or a ticking second—but a fog that settled behind his ribs and filled his throat when he tried to remember what his mother’s voice sounded like. Or what the sky looked like without a reinforced glass ceiling.

He had been six when he arrived. Now he was eight.

Two years. They had carved those years out of him slowly. Not violently—Facility 11 wasn’t brutal in the way of fists or blood—but with silence, and clinical efficiency. The walls never changed. The voices never changed. The pills were always white. Breakfast at 0600. Emotion Assessment at 0700. Physical Isolation Rounds at 1000. Quirk Compliance Check at 1300. Lights out at 2100. Every day. Without fail.

At first, he had fought. Not with his hands, but with his heart—pleading eyes, begging questions, emotions that leaked from him like light through a cracked window. But now? Now, he was quiet.

Izuku sat cross-legged in the corner of his assigned room. Not a cell, they said, but a “Personal Regulation Unit.” The bed was bolted to the floor. The walls were foam-insulated, the camera in the ceiling blinking a silent red. The quirk-suppression collar remained fastened to his neck, tighter now—sensitive to even the smallest emotional fluctuation.

He could still feel. But he had learned to hide it.

He knew what to say now. What not to say. He could track staff rotations by voice and footstep. He knew which nurses were kinder, which doctors enjoyed the tests too much, which orderlies were scared of him. Sometimes, he smiled at them. It put them at ease. That made them sloppy.

The pills dulled everything, but not completely. He had found small ways to resist—pressing them beneath his tongue and spitting them out later, or letting one dissolve half-finished before swallowing. It was dangerous. But so was forgetting what it felt like to feel anything.

His quirk had evolved, too.

In the early days, it had overwhelmed him—a floodgate with no control. But two years of isolation and silence had given him space to study it. Izuku had begun experimenting when he was alone. Tiny pulses of emotion. A ripple of calm sent toward the guard through the wall. A spike of irritation directed just right so a staff member would fumble his clipboard. It was delicate work. Quiet rebellion.

He never let it build. He never let them know.

But even in secrecy, Izuku felt it growing—his understanding of others' emotions, his ability to push or pull them with more precision. His power was no longer just a bomb waiting to go off. It was becoming a scalpel. And beneath it all, beneath the silence and the numbness, one question had begun to harden in his chest like a stone:

Why me?

Why had he been taken, when no one else had? Why was he locked away like a weapon too dangerous to name? He remembered the early days when he still believed someone would come. That heroes would intervene. That his mother’s voice would call out to him from the other side of the glass.

Now he knew better.

Heroes. Pfff. Don't make him laugh.

Now he didn’t cry. Not because he had stopped hurting—but because crying made the collar tighten. Because crying drew more tests. Because crying gave them exactly what they wanted: proof that he was unstable. So he sat cross-legged, eyes open, mind sharpening in the silence.

He was not the same boy who had arrived here, trembling and tear-streaked. That boy had been soft and open, terrified of hurting anyone.

This Izuku had learned that the world didn’t fear what he could do. It feared that he might learn how to do it better.

And one day, if no one came for him—

He would walk out on his own.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The announcement came without ceremony.

A knock at the glass door. A voice through the speaker grill—sterile and controlled, like everything else in Facility 11.

“Subject 13A. You have been approved for a monitored interaction. A visitor has arrived.” Izuku blinked from his place on the floor. His back was against the far corner of the room, knees drawn loosely to his chest. He had been lost in thought again, watching the faint reflection of himself in the steel trim beneath the door—wondering if his face looked like her anymore.

The words registered slowly.

A visitor.

It wasn’t part of the schedule. Visitors were never part of the schedule.

His heart stuttered. For the first time in a long time, a surge of emotion rose without his permission. Sharp. Trembling. Could it be—?

His body moved before the rest of him did. He was standing. Breathing faster. His hands twitched, and the collar around his neck hummed faintly, detecting the spike.

The staff who entered with restraints avoided his eyes. They said nothing as they secured his wrists—not harshly, but mechanically. Like a box being packed for delivery. Izuku’s mind had already run ahead.

It’s her. It has to be her. She found a way. She’s here. She didn’t forget.

They led him down the narrow hallway, fluorescent lights flickering overhead. The familiar antiseptic smell of the interview wing made his chest tighten. He hadn’t seen this part of the facility in nearly a year. He’d almost forgotten the texture of the carpeted waiting alcove, the way the ceiling curved into cold metal arches.

His breath quickened. The door hissed open. He stepped inside. And stopped.

The man waiting for him was tall. Shrouded in black, with tired, sunken eyes and hair like a tangled curtain of night. He didn’t look like a doctor. Or a Commission agent. Or—anyone Izuku had ever seen in this place.

The moment he turned, Izuku felt it.

He’s a Pro Hero.

It was like stepping into sunlight after two years in the dark. The man’s presence didn’t scream power—it whispered control. A stillness honed over a lifetime of danger. Izuku’s instincts clenched. But he wasn’t who Izuku had been hoping for. The hope that had bloomed in his chest wilted without a sound.

“You’re not my mom,” Izuku said. His voice came out flat. Blunt. But a tremor still lived beneath the words. The man didn’t flinch. He stepped forward, carefully, as if approaching a wounded animal.

“No,” he said quietly. “I’m not. My name is Shouta Aizawa. I’m… a hero. And a teacher.” Izuku’s mouth tightened. “Then why are you here?” Aizawa studied him for a long moment.

“To talk. To understand you. And maybe… to help.”

There was no table in the room—just two chairs set across from each other, spaced carefully under the watchful eye of the cameras above. Izuku sat stiffly when prompted. The metal was cold even through his facility uniform. His shackled hands rested in his lap, and he made no move to meet Aizawa’s gaze.

The silence between them stretched.

Finally, Aizawa spoke. “I’ve read your file. But I wanted to meet you. Not the version they wrote down.”

Izuku didn’t respond.

“I know what they say about your quirk. About what happened before you came here.”

Izuku’s jaw clenched. He thought of Bakugo. Of the classroom. Of the screaming. “They call me a bomb,” he muttered.

Aizawa’s brow furrowed. “I know. That isn’t what you are.” Another silence.

Izuku looked up slowly, his voice barely audible. “Why are you really here?” Aizawa hesitated. Just for a second. Then, “Because I think the Commission is wrong. And I think the kids in here deserve someone who sees them as more than a risk assessment.” 

The collar hummed again, reacting to the swell of conflicted emotion in Izuku’s chest. He tried to contain it. He tried not to feel. But his voice cracked anyway:

“ I thought it would be my mom .”

It hit harder than anything Aizawa could’ve prepared for.

“I thought she finally found a way,” Izuku said, more to himself now. “I thought maybe… maybe she didn’t believe the lies anymore.”

Aizawa’s expression softened. “She’s still trying, Izuku.”

Izuku froze. “You… you know her?”

“I’ve seen her. I’ve read her letters. I have an idea with what they did with them. She hasn’t stopped fighting for you.” Something in Izuku shattered. His breath hitched, and a single tear escaped before he blinked it away. The collar squeezed around his neck briefly before easing off.

“She doesn’t know what this place really is,” he whispered.

“No,” Aizawa said. “She doesn’t.”

Silence fell again—thicker this time. Heavier. Aizawa reached slowly into his jacket and placed something small on the floor between them. A folded napkin. Nothing official. Nothing traceable. On it, a name:

"Yamada. Kiyo."

“Don’t say it out loud,” Aizawa said. “But if someone reaches out to you with that name… you can trust them.” Izuku stared at the napkin. He didn’t nod. He didn’t speak. But he didn’t look away, either.

The door opened behind them—an audible reminder that their time was over. As the guards stepped in, Aizawa stood and met Izuku’s eyes one last time.

“I’m not going to forget about you,” he said. “And I’m not going to stop trying.” Izuku didn’t reply. But as they led him back into the hallway, he clutched the memory of that voice, that quiet promise, like a flicker of warmth he hadn’t felt in years.

Not hope.

Not yet.

But something close.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The house still smelled like him.

Even after two years. Even after she’d boxed up most of his childhood things and folded his bedding neatly at the foot of the twin-sized bed. Even after she stopped going into his room entirely. The scent clung to the corners—sunlight and cotton, a faint memory of the shampoo he used. It attacked her when she wasn’t braced for it. And it always, always left her breathless.

Inko stood in the doorway now, arms crossed over her chest, her sweater sleeves pulled over trembling fingers. The curtains were drawn. Dust floated through the shaft of late afternoon light across the floorboards like ash.

She hadn’t touched his desk in months.

There was still a pencil sitting on his notebook, the pages blank, waiting for a boy who no longer came home. She reached for the edge of the doorframe and held it like an anchor.

Some days, it took everything just to breathe.

The letters she had written were stacked in a shoebox under her bed. Unsent. Or rather—unread. The Commission had told her, politely, bureaucratically, that written correspondence “would be filtered and delivered accordingly.” But something in her knew they were never being passed along. Not in full. Not with the words she poured into them, bleeding heart and ink across dozens of pages.

She had started writing them every week. Then every month. Then… less.

But not because she stopped believing he needed them. Because some part of her had begun to believe she was writing to a ghost.

And yet, the updates kept coming. Clean, cold reports. Photographs with flat expressions and forced posture. Izuku, upright in a sterile hallway, surrounded by grey. Izuku, staring into the lens with a look that didn’t belong to her son. Izuku, thinner. Paler. Wearing something that didn’t fit.

No bruises. No marks. No screams. But there was something worse. The stillness.

Her Izuku had never been still. He had bounced on his heels. Talked too fast. Cried over animals in movies. His eyes had shone with uncontainable empathy, with wonder, with life.

In the photos… they were dull. Lifeless. Extinguished.

She remembered the first time she showed one to the neighbor, Mei-san, who’d helped babysit him as a toddler. The woman had frowned, turned the image sideways, then muttered quietly, “This isn’t… this doesn’t feel right.”

Exactly. It didn’t.

And yet, every time she called for more information, every time she politely pressed the Commission representative for something personal—something real—she was handed another clinical update. “Progress is steady.” “No behavioral incidents.” “We are committed to his well-being.” “Thank you for your cooperation, Midoriya-san.”

Cooperation.

As if this were a two-way exchange. As if she hadn’t been forced to give up her only child under duress, under the threat of legal action, social exile, and whispered warnings from former friends who no longer returned her calls.

And now…

Now the walls felt like they were closing in. The living room still had the old photo of them at the beach. She was sunburned. He had a popsicle mustache. That had been the summer before everything changed. Before the quirk. Before the panic. Before the government letters. Before the headlines.

EMOTIONAL BOMB—DANGEROUS CHILD DETAINED FOR PUBLIC SAFETY.

She had burned the newspaper. That didn’t erase the memory.

Inko turned away from the door and walked down the narrow hall to the kitchen, where a single suitcase sat open on the table. She had started packing that morning. Half her dishes were already boxed up. The landlord had agreed to terminate the lease early—probably out of pity. Or discomfort.

No one wanted to live next to the mother of that boy.

She hated the thought of leaving the house where she had raised him. Where he’d taken his first steps. Where he’d cried into her shoulder after being told he was “too much” again. But staying was killing her. Slowly. Silently.

And there was no one left to visit anymore. Her hand rested on the edge of the suitcase. The clothes inside were plain. Neutral. Easy to fold and forget. She would move out to the suburbs, far enough to disappear, but close enough to return if—when—he came home.

She still dreamed about that day.

He would knock softly, like he always had. His voice would sound the same. He’d cry, and she would cry harder, and she would wrap him in every apology her body could carry.

But in her dreams, he never smiled. Not even once.

Inko lowered herself into a chair, the weight of years settling in her spine. A soft breeze moved the curtain by the window, and for a moment, it looked like a figure was passing by.

Her heart leapt. Then it sank. Nothing. Just wind.

She covered her face with her hands and let herself cry. Not the loud, messy sobs of the early days. These were quieter. Hollowed-out tears. The kind that came when grief no longer had energy to perform. “I’m still here,” she whispered to no one. “Izuku… I’m still waiting.”

The kitchen clock ticked above her, merciless. Time moved forward.

And she—she moved out.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The gymnasium stank of sweat and singed fabric. Mats were scorched, some sparring dummies half-shredded from overzealous quirk use. Nine-year-old Bakugou Katsuki stood in the center of it all, shoulders heaving, a fine haze of smoke curling off his fists. His palms were raw and tingling. One of his shoes had a hole scorched through the toe.

Across from him, another kid—Yuta—curled on the floor, crying. Not from pain, not exactly. But shock. Fear. Maybe shame. Bakugou couldn’t tell. He wasn’t even looking at him anymore.

“Bakugou!” shouted a sharp voice from the entrance of the gym. It was their instructor, Ms. Sasaki, face pale with both anger and concern. “What the hell was that?!”

“He was cornered,” Bakugou barked, not even trying to hide his fury. “Those two were shoving him around, calling him a ‘quirk dud.’ He wasn’t even fighting back!”

“And you thought exploding them was the right answer?”

“They deserved it,” he said flatly, arms still trembling. “Heroes stop bad guys. That’s what I did.”

Ms. Sasaki crouched beside the other boy—Yuta—checking his hands, which were scraped from falling, then turning to glance at the two kids who’d run away after Bakugou had detonated his hands in the middle of their bullying circle.

“No one’s seriously hurt,” she muttered under her breath, almost to herself. “Thank God.”

But Bakugou was still standing there, motionless, stiff. His face wasn’t smug or self-satisfied, not like usual. His jaw was tight, lips pressed in a thin line, as though he was daring her to punish him.

“You think that’s what heroes do?” she asked after a beat. “Go off like a grenade because they feel something’s unfair?”

Bakugou’s eyes flashed. “I’m not letting it happen again.”

Ms. Sasaki blinked. “What?”

He looked away, fists clenched so tightly they shook. “People just stand there. Pretend they don’t see stuff. Or say it’s ‘complicated.’ And then someone disappears and they all pretend he never existed.”

His voice cracked on the last word, and suddenly he was six again. Just a kid. A scared one. His anger wasn’t armor anymore—it was the whole body underneath it.

Ms. Sasaki softened, but she was quiet for a long moment. Bakugou didn’t give her more.

He didn’t say Izuku. He hadn’t in years. Not since the media labeled him a hazard and the adults in his life all said they didn’t know anything. Not since his own parents started changing the subject whenever he asked. He never saw the green-haired boy again—not on the news, not on the streets. It was like he'd been erased.

But Bakugou remembered. And somewhere deep inside, though he’d never say it out loud, he hated the way it all ended.

That night, Katsuki sat in his bedroom on the edge of his bed, the light of the moon slanting through the blinds. His hands were bandaged—just lightly. Precaution. The nurse had scolded him about burns and overexertion. But he didn’t care.

He opened the drawer beside his bed. Inside were crumpled pieces of paper—most half-burned. But one remained intact, folded four times, and tucked in a pencil box beneath his old All Might trading cards. It was the letter.

He hadn’t read it in months, hadn’t dared look at it again. But he unfolded it slowly now, his fingers tracing the familiar words in his own messy scrawl:

“ You were dumb, Deku. You always were. Crying and falling over and dreaming too big. But… I didn’t think they’d actually take you. I didn’t think they’d be scared of you. That you’d disappear. Maybe I should’ve said something. Maybe I should’ve helped. I dunno. I’m not good at this stuff. But if you’re still out there, you better come back, idiot. I’ll be the Number One Hero. You’ll see. I’ll be stronger than all of them. ”

Bakugou stared at the words. His throat tightened.

Then, with a rough exhale, he shoved the letter back into the box, snapped it shut, and pulled the blankets over his head.

He wasn’t going to cry. Not now. Not ever.

But maybe—just maybe—he could still be the kind of hero Deku would have needed.

Even if he’d never see him again.

Chapter Text

The hallway past the west wing was always colder. It wasn’t the kind of cold that came from faulty vents or bad insulation—but the sterile, haunted chill of something left to rot under fluorescent light.

Facility 11 didn’t allow cross-ward interaction, especially between those labeled “Red Class”—like Cell 32—and the rest. But sometimes, just sometimes, schedules overlapped. Mealtimes delayed. Corridor doors malfunctioned for half a breath too long. And that’s how Izuku saw him.

The boy was taller than most, though his age couldn’t have been more than fifteen. Pale, wiry. Burn scars webbed one side of his face, like glass had exploded next to his cheek. His hair hung over his eyes, which glinted red—not from mutation, but the kind of raw, coiled anger that sizzled under the skin.

He sat in a wheelchair. Not because he needed it, Izuku would later realize, but because restraints could be more effectively fastened that way.

Cell 32. They didn’t use names in the Red Wing.

Izuku had passed him once in the hallway, their eyes meeting for only seconds before staff barked at them to look away. But that brief moment—that silence—was louder than most of Izuku’s monitored days. The boy hadn’t flinched. Hadn’t smiled or scowled. He had simply looked at Izuku… and understood something.

Izuku had felt it—a ripple of tension buried beneath the surface. Like a black hole of emotion compacted into a single body, ready to explode.

Later, during recreation time—barely thirty minutes a day in a walled-off courtyard—Izuku had overheard staff whispering.

“He melted a teacher’s face off during middle school.” “Pyrokinetic hybrid, right? Fire and corrosion.” “No. It’s not just fire. It’s chemical ignition at the molecular level. Breathing around him for too long gives people nosebleeds.”

But more than anything, what Izuku absorbed was the fear. They weren’t just handling a dangerous quirk—they were handling someone they believed was evil.

And that kind of belief... it infected everything.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

On one rare day of courtyard “freedom,” Izuku had ended up on the opposite end of the chain-link perimeter near the restricted sector. Cell 32 had been outside too. He was alone, an armed handler standing just two feet behind him. His head was tilted up slightly, eyes closed like he was soaking in the sun—though the sky was overcast and gray.

Izuku approached, not deliberately, but with a slow, almost drawn pull. Like gravity. He stopped just close enough to make out the other boy’s features.

“You’re the ghost,” the boy murmured, without opening his eyes. “The one that makes people weep in their sleep.”

Izuku blinked. “…What?”

“That’s what they say. That you ‘project’ sadness. That you’re a hazard no one can explain.” A pause. Then, “They’re scared of me. But they’re terrified of you.”

Izuku clenched his fists. “I’m not trying to hurt anyone.”

The boy chuckled. “Neither was I. Until I learned it didn’t matter.” He finally turned to look at Izuku. “They decided I was a weapon. So I became one.”

There was silence again, but not empty. Heavy. Saturated.

“…What’s your name?” Izuku asked.

The boy’s face didn’t change. “They call me Ignis now. A nice, clinical name. Makes me sound less like a cautionary tale and more like a cautionary system error.” He let out a low breath. “But I remember my real name. It’s hidden in a place they can’t monitor. Right behind the hatred.” Izuku swallowed. He didn’t know what to say.

Ignis leaned closer, just slightly, voice low. “They’re going to push you until you snap. You know that, right? Until the only thing left is what they fear you’ll become.”

Izuku shook his head. “No. I can fight it.”

Another laugh. Darker this time. “You think this place gives medals for resistance? They just take your name. And then they take your face.”

Suddenly, staff whistled. Time was up. Reinforcement officers swarmed the outer perimeter, gesturing for separation. Ignis didn’t move until the last second. As handlers descended, he cast one last look over his shoulder. “When I go… you’ll feel it. And they’ll blame you anyway.”

That was the last time Izuku saw him.

A week later, the alarms blared across the facility like a war had erupted inside the walls. The power failed for twelve minutes. Screams echoed down the steel corridors.

And Cell 32 was gone.

But not without leaving something behind.

A dead guard. A trail of fire-eaten walls. And the rising terror that Facility 11 had underestimated the storm it had bottled up.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The first thing Izuku noticed was the silence.

Facility 11 was never truly quiet. Even in the dead of night, the vents hummed, the doors clicked, and boots passed like clockwork on the outer floor. But now—there was nothing. No intercom updates. No food cart wheels. Not even the buzz of overhead lighting.

Izuku was seated in his assigned room, a square box lined with padded walls and a flickering monitor he was meant to "check into" every thirty minutes to confirm mental stability. He hadn’t moved in ten. Not since the silence began.

A prickle ran up the back of his neck. Then he felt it. Terror .

It wasn’t his. It hit him like a cold fist to the chest—raw, instinctual, primal. Somewhere in the facility, someone was screaming internally. A guard, he thought immediately. Not panicked. Not surprised. Dying. Izuku staggered up from the floor, grabbing the wall for support. He’d felt fear before—his own, others’—but this wasn’t just fear.

This was agony.

The monitor on the wall glitched, scrambled, then shut off completely. A mechanical hiss echoed from the hallway outside—doors opening too fast, too wide. Then another wave hit him.

Rage. White-hot. Furious. Melting everything in its path.

Ignis. The boy from Cell 32.

Izuku collapsed to one knee, covering his ears even though there was no sound. His quirk didn’t need noise to bleed through. It came in through breath, through blood, through intuition. And it was everywhere now. People were dying.

They were screaming through clenched teeth and glassed-over eyes. Not from wounds—but from the emotions flooding through them. Not from physical destruction—but psychological collapse.

And then—it was like something inside him snapped. No one was doing anything. No one was stopping it. They were trapped—again. Just like always.

Izuku's fingers clawed at the padded wall, body shaking. His mind splintered under the weight of the emotional storm. His breath hitched, rapid and shallow, the way it always did when panic crept in like a shadow behind the heart.

"You’re not supposed to feel this much," he remembered a scientist saying. "No child should feel this much."

But he did. And now, everyone else would too. His body convulsed, not from pain—but from release.

And then, like a dam bursting, his quirk expanded outward—raw, unchecked, and unforgiving.

He didn’t scream.

He just let go.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

In less than three seconds, every conscious staff member in Facility 11 collapsed to the ground.

Doctors, handlers, psychologists, even guards who hadn’t drawn weapons—everyone dropped as if gravity had quadrupled. Their eyes went wide, lips parted in silent horror. Many of them sobbed. Others clutched their chests or shook uncontrollably, crawling for cover from phantoms that weren’t there.

The emotional wave had no shape, no edges. It simply was—a projection of concentrated dread, grief, and helplessness so complete it short-circuited the cognitive ability to think or move. In the security room, one agent vomited over the console before passing out. In the lab hall, a senior researcher wept like a child beside the corpse of a guard, unable to process the fact that they were alive while someone else wasn’t.

And somewhere on sublevel three, a supervisor shot themselves in the leg just to break the hallucination of burning alive.

But Izuku just stood there.

Eyes glassy, hands trembling, the storm inside gone now—but only because it had left him. His legs gave out, and he dropped to the floor, gasping. He didn’t know how long he stayed like that. Time didn’t exist when everyone around you had been swallowed by your own pain.

Eventually, footsteps echoed.

But they weren’t Kaede’s. Or any of the usual staff. These boots hit the ground like metal.

A new team. Black-armored. Helmets sealed tight. No names, no words, just fast, efficient movements. Like they were cleaning up after a gas leak. One of them jabbed a needle into his neck without warning. As the sedative pulled him under, he heard the first voice in hours, flat and metallic through a radio:

“Subject 13-A secured.”

Not Izuku. Not even Midoriya. Just a letter and a number.

A hazard.

Later, reports would quietly circulate through encrypted Hero Commission lines.

“ Subject 13-A exhibited class-5 projection capability during hostile encounter with Red-Class escapee, Ignis. Emotional vector deemed unmanageable. Unable to obtained escapee.

Recommendation: Change13-A status from At-Risk Youth to High-Priority Red Class Containment Threat. Quirk reclassification pending.

Public records sealed. Media access restricted. Effective immediately, the subject is no longer considered a civilian minor.

Code designation: 13-A.

Real name: Redacted. ”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The heavy iron doors of the Red Wing slid shut with a sharp, metallic clang, and the fluorescent lights hummed overhead, casting a cold glow over the stark, concrete hall. The facility had never felt so lifeless, so devoid of warmth. It had always been a place of sterile control, but now, it felt like a prison—a real one. And this time, Izuku Midoriya wasn’t just another patient. He was an experiment gone dangerously awry.

Izuku sat in his new cell, a far cry from his old room—a tiny, windowless space with reinforced walls and a bed bolted to the floor. The bed had been a source of false comfort before, a place where he could curl up and try to ignore the pain of his isolation. But now, in the Red Wing, it felt like a holding cell for a creature no one understood, no one wanted to understand.

Two years.

Two years of experiments, tests, and suppression. Two years of draining emotions from others, and the more it went on, the more the isolation turned into something darker. He had become something far worse in their eyes: a liability. A child who felt too much—and now, he had been placed in the facility’s most secure wing, with no one to talk to. No friends like Yung May. No one to help him through this. Only cold silence, metallic floors, and the ever-present hum of electricity.

The door to the observation room opened with a swish, and two figures stepped inside—handlers dressed in black tactical gear. Both wore expressionless masks, but there was something in their posture that said they had no interest in the well-being of the boy behind the glass.

"He's here." The man’s voice was low, muffled by the mask, but his tone was grim.

Izuku looked up at them, his eyes hollow, a faint tremor in his hands. He had no intention of speaking. No interest in the orders they would give him. He knew what would come next. More tests. More manipulation.

The female handler, tall and broad-shouldered, paced around the observation room as she began speaking to her partner, a large man with a thick neck. "Subject 13-A, formerly Midoriya Izuku. Two years under Commission care and already we’ve had three containment breaches. No one’s seen this kind of emotional volatility before. This kid’s a weapon, a ticking bomb."

The male handler grunted. "And then Ignis broke out."

She glanced at the monitor, the faces of their superiors flashing briefly across the screen. "Don't remind me. That little bastard with the flame quirk almost burned the entire facility to the ground. It’s a miracle that he didn't and that we were able to control the fire."

"We should’ve been able to stop him." He muttered, glancing at the blank face of the boy in the cell. "We should’ve never let him get this far. He’s dangerous, and the worst part is, he knows how dangerous he is."

"Ignis didn’t break out alone, you know. Midoriya… 13-A... he helped."

The man paused, brow furrowing beneath his helmet. "What do you mean, helped?"

The woman let out a frustrated sigh, fingers running through her short-cropped hair. "The wave of dread, the chaos—it wasn’t just Ignis. Midoriya projected his emotional disturbance all over the facility. You know this, right?"

"Yeah," the man growled. "I know. But what exactly do you think happened? You can’t tell me that was just a fluke. That kind of power doesn’t happen by accident."

"No," the woman agreed, staring into the glass as if she could see right through to the boy who was quietly crumpled on the bed. "It’s a controlled force. A weapon waiting to be used." She paused, her voice quieter now. "And if we don’t contain it, really contain it…"

The man turned sharply. "You’re suggesting what? That we just put him down?"

She shook her head slowly, looking over at the monitors again, her gaze distant, contemplative. "No. We can’t just ‘put him down.’ There are too many eyes on this kid. He’s too valuable—in a way. But we can’t let this power go unchecked. The Commission has already reclassified him. You know the reports."

He frowned. "Yeah, I know. From ‘at-risk youth’ to ‘potential villain.’ Now located in the red wing. What are they calling him now? Subject 13-A? He longer has a name. No longer a kid."

"Exactly." She took a deep breath, eyes narrowing. "And the worst part is, we’re still testing him like he’s some kind of project, but we have no control over the results anymore."

"Then what do you propose we do?"

She glanced back at Izuku, who was staring blankly at the wall, his back pressed against the corner of his cell. His eyes, once bright with energy and curiosity, were now dull and empty. "We escalate," she said, her voice cold. "We push him harder. He needs to understand what he is. What he’s capable of. We have to teach him that he’s not like the others. He’s not like the failed candidates, like Ignis or the others we’ve had to dispose of. Midoriya is... something different. We keep him in the Red Wing, we test him, we isolate him. And when we know for sure that he’s completely broken, we use him as a tool. We use him before he uses us."

The man grimaced. "Sounds like a lot of work."

The woman’s lips curled into something like a smile. "That’s the plan. We don’t get rid of him. We just... control him. We make him work for us." The man stayed silent for a long moment, watching the boy in the cell, and then muttered under his breath, "And if he resists?"

"Then we make sure his quirk is the only thing left to break."

The words hung in the air, thick with the unspoken weight of what they meant. No longer would Izuku be treated like a child. No longer would he have the luxury of hope. They would grind him down. Break him into something darker, something far more dangerous.

A weapon.

Izuku had no idea what was happening on the other side of the glass. He had no idea the change in his status. All he felt was the emptiness—the hollow ache of being alone, trapped in this cage. He had known pain before, but this was different. This was systematic.

Outside, the world turned its gaze away from him, like a sickening dream, the government quietly erasing his existence.

The boy who had once been a hero’s hopeful son was now nothing but a name on a file.

Subject 13-A.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

1 Year Later

The sterile, white room was colder than usual. The walls seemed to close in on Izuku as he sat across from the psychologist, hands curled tightly in his lap. The soft hum of the air conditioning was the only sound, punctuating the silence between the two. The psychologist, a middle-aged man with glasses perched on the edge of his nose, flipped through a clipboard with clinical detachment, his eyes occasionally flicking up to look at the boy in front of him.

Izuku’s gaze was distant, not really seeing the man or the room. He had been through so many of these sessions by now, so many evaluations, that his mind had already drifted to the cold, unfeeling emptiness of his cell. The Red Wing was where he now lived—was made to live—a cage within a cage. He was ten years old, but he felt like he had lived a lifetime in the suffocating silence of this place. Three years of tests. Three years of being treated like something less than human.

His fingers twitched, the familiar thrum of suppressed dread crawling beneath his skin. It was always there now—his quirk. Always there, lurking. Always wanting to burst free.

The psychologist cleared his throat, breaking the silence. “Subject 13-A, you’ve been making progress with your emotional regulation exercises.”

Izuku’s eyes didn’t meet his. “Progress,” he repeated quietly, the word tasting bitter in his mouth. “Yes. Your ability to project and absorb emotions has been more controlled in recent weeks. You’re responding well to the prescribed techniques.”

Izuku didn't respond, and the doctor seemed to notice. The man’s pen hesitated over his clipboard as he glanced at the boy, his eyes softening just a fraction. A small flicker of humanity seemed to glimmer beneath his clinical demeanor. He set the clipboard down with a soft exhale.

“Midoriya… Subject 13-A, I understand this has been difficult for you. But we’re doing what we can to help you. To make you better.”

Izuku finally looked up, his gaze hollow and uncertain. “Better?”

The psychologist nodded, his voice trying to sound reassuring, though the words felt hollow. “Yes. You’re not alone in this, you know. You’re here because we can help you. You’re receiving treatment.”

Izuku didn’t know what to say to that. Treatment. They’d never really treated him like a person—just a tool to be managed, to be controlled. They took his name away, changed him into Subject 13-A. A number. He had stopped feeling like a person long ago.

But there was something in the way the psychologist spoke, something almost kind, almost human, that made Izuku’s chest tighten. His voice came out raw and fragile, the words escaping before he could stop them.

“Am… am I a villain?”

The question hung in the air, a threadbare whisper. Izuku had never truly asked anyone before. But he’d heard the murmurs in the facility, seen the way the staff looked at him like he was a ticking bomb, like he was something dangerous that needed to be locked away. The fear and the whispers. The quiet, controlled terror that followed him wherever he went. He had to know. Was he?

The psychologist froze, his hand stilling over the clipboard, his gaze softening with something almost like pity. It was brief, barely a flicker, but it was there. His eyes dropped to the paper, and the room fell into another stretch of silence as the doctor took a deep breath.

“No,” he said, his voice lower, his words carefully measured. “You’re not a villain. You’re just… misunderstood.”

Izuku’s heart gave a small, painful lurch at the lie. Misunderstood. That was what they had told him all along. But now, after everything, he knew better. He knew exactly what he was.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Izuku whispered, barely above a breath.

The psychologist’s eyes darted to him, a brief flicker of panic crossing his features. His fingers tightened around the clipboard, his lips pressed together in a thin line. There was a hesitation—a soft, almost imperceptible pause—before he forced a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

“You’re being helped,” he said, the words rehearsed, too smooth to be believable.

Izuku didn’t respond. His mind reeled, a thousand thoughts colliding with one another. He had asked the question hoping for some kind of reassurance, some flicker of hope, but instead, he felt more empty than ever before. The lie hung in the air like a thick fog. His quirk was the only thing they wanted to control. His emotions were the only thing they could manipulate.

He would never leave. He had known that for a while now, but it was only in this moment, sitting in the cold, impersonal room, that the full weight of it pressed down on him.

He would never leave.

The thought settled in his chest like a stone, cold and heavy. His mind went numb as the psychologist continued speaking, but his words no longer mattered. Izuku could no longer hear him. All he could hear was the steady beat of his own thoughts: He would never leave. He would never be free .

The psychologist, clearly sensing the change in Izuku’s demeanor, began to stand. “We’ll continue working on this next session, 13-A. I’ll see you next week.”

Izuku didn’t answer him, didn’t even look at him as the man left. The door clicked shut behind him, and the room was left in suffocating silence once again.

Izuku stayed in his chair for a long time after the doctor left. The words "misunderstood" echoed in his head, but the more he thought about them, the more they lost their meaning. He wasn’t misunderstood. He was broken. A tool. A weapon. He could feel his quirk pushing against him, a constant undercurrent of dread, of pain, of things he couldn’t control.

That night, after the lights dimmed in the facility, and everything was still, Izuku stood in front of the small mirror in his cell. He barely recognized the boy who stared back at him. His hair had grown a little longer, but his face was hollow, pale. His eyes were dark, sunken with the weight of all the days spent trapped in this place.

For the first time in two years, Izuku let out a deep, shaky breath. And as the last of his hope flickered out like a dying star, he let go of the name Midoriya Izuku.

It wasn’t his name anymore. It was just 13-A now. A number. A subject. A failure.

And as the final shred of who he once was vanished, so too did the last thread of hope. The boy who had wanted to be a hero was gone.

All that was left was a broken child—isolated, abandoned, and nameless.

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The sterile, lifeless halls of the facility were the same as always, but today, they felt heavier. Kaede walked through them with a sense of emptiness she hadn’t experienced in a long time. Her footsteps echoed against the walls, a quiet reminder of the distance between her and the boy she had grown so close to. She had been with Izuku from the beginning, offering him the small kindnesses that others didn’t, standing as a quiet barrier against the coldness of the facility. But now, that was gone. She couldn’t see him anymore. She couldn’t even speak to him.

She had always known it would happen. After all, Subject 13-A had been moved to the Red Wing. The most dangerous. The most restricted. The most isolated. A child, just ten years old, now deemed too volatile for even the most basic of care. It didn’t make sense. He wasn’t dangerous, not in the way they said. His quirk, yes, it was powerful, but it was a product of pain. A reflection of everything he had endured. And Kaede had always believed—had hoped—that she could make a difference, that maybe, just maybe, she could help him heal. But with him now sealed behind the highest security, there was nothing she could do.

Kaede paused in front of the small office that had once been a place of comfort for her. It was a tiny, impersonal room where she had filled out reports, monitored medical records, and, on more than one occasion, silently watched over Izuku as he slept, trying to soothe the nightmares she couldn’t touch. But now, the office felt empty. The chair where Izuku used to sit, the one she had pulled close to talk to him, to offer him some semblance of comfort, was vacant. Her heart tightened as she looked at the room, the stark reality sinking in.

Her eyes flicked to the corner, where a small, unassuming plant sat. She had given it to him on one of the good days, when he had smiled just a little bit more than usual. It was small, green, and fragile—just like the boy. She had hoped it would remind him that he wasn’t alone, that there was life even in the sterile emptiness of the facility. But now that same plant felt like a painful reminder of what she had lost.

Kaede took a deep breath, trying to force the lump in her throat down. She couldn’t afford to break down. Not here. Not now. But it was hard. It was so hard. She had seen the shift in Izuku. She had seen his gradual breaking. The more isolated he became, the more distant he had grown. She had always tried to reach him, tried to give him a sliver of warmth, but now he was out of reach—physically and emotionally.

She knew the reason for his move to the Red Wing. It was what they had been grooming him for all along: to be a test subject. To be the perfect weapon for the government, a tool to be used and discarded when no longer needed. That was all he was now. And Kaede had seen it in his eyes. The moment he stopped calling himself Izuku and let go of his name, she had known. It wasn’t just his quirk that had been altered. It was his spirit. They had broken him, in every sense.

The hardest part wasn’t just his silence, though. It was the way the staff had looked at him after his move. The cold indifference that had replaced the pity, the understanding they once had for him. They treated him like a monster, like something to be contained. It made her sick. And it made her feel powerless.

But even more than that, it made her question the choices she had made, her role in all of this. She had helped create the systems that held him, even if she hadn’t directly participated in the cruelty. She had been a part of the care team that monitored him, evaluated him, helped them figure out how to better control his powers. Was she complicit in this? In his suffering?

Kaede didn’t have the answer, and maybe she never would. But the guilt gnawed at her, a constant presence that she couldn’t escape.

Walking through the corridors of the facility felt even more oppressive now. As she passed the other containment rooms, she tried not to think about what Izuku must be going through. The Red Wing was known for its extreme isolation. No visits, no contact with anyone from the outside world, just endless observation and control. He would be locked away behind thick walls, under constant surveillance, with only his quirk to keep him company.

Her fingers brushed against the door to the Red Wing, a subtle, almost unconscious gesture. She had been told to stop checking in on him. She had been given orders—direct orders—to no longer have any contact with him. They had even replaced her monitoring role with another nurse. A nurse who didn’t care. A nurse who followed the rules without question. Kaede had seen the expression on the woman’s face when she took over the paperwork for Izuku’s case—clinical, cold, like he was nothing more than an object to be documented.

But Kaede couldn’t do that. She couldn’t turn her back on him. Not now. Not ever.

A sudden thought came to her, one that filled her with a sense of dread. She hadn’t seen any updates on Izuku recently. No reports. No new observations. Everything had gone silent. Too silent. Was something happening to him in the Red Wing? Was it worse than they had told her? The possibility that Izuku was suffering alone, without any help or even a hint of care, was almost more than she could bear.

She took a few more steps down the hall, her mind racing. She knew she was just one person—one nurse in a facility of hundreds—but she couldn’t just let this go. She couldn’t just pretend everything was fine when she knew it wasn’t. She had to do something. Anything.

The quiet buzz of her pager brought her back to the present. She checked the message, another routine assignment, another list of things to do, another list of tasks to follow. But for the first time in a long time, she felt the weight of the choices she had made in this place. She felt her resolve harden, but also crack.

Kaede walked back to her office, feeling more alone than ever before, her heart torn in two. She couldn’t save him. She couldn’t even reach him anymore. And that was the most painful truth of all.

As she sat down at her desk, her hand hovered over the stack of papers in front of her, the blank pages seeming to mock her. There was no way out of this system. No way out of this place.

But that didn’t mean she couldn’t try.

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The letters from her son had stopped coming. It had been months now since she’d last received any updates from the facility, and with each passing day, she felt the thread between them grow thinner and thinner. The last time she had written to him, she had poured every ounce of her remaining love into the words, but she hadn’t received anything back. At first, she’d convinced herself that it was just a delay, that perhaps the letter had gotten lost in the bureaucracy or that something had happened at the facility to cause a pause in communication. But deep down, she had known.

She sat at the small desk in her new apartment, the one that had taken her months to force herself to move into after the house became too quiet. Too empty. The apartment was cold, bare, and impersonal. She had to tear herself from the place they had lived together, the memories too much to handle. There was no longer a need to hold onto a place filled with ghosts. But no matter how far she’d run from their old home, her heart still clung to the past.

Inko’s eyes glazed over as she stared at the pen in her hand, then at the paper before her. She had been writing letters to Izuku for years, and though she had never received a reply, she had continued to write. Each letter was a thread that tied her to him, even when the world told her that she should let go. Her grip tightened on the pen, the weight of the finality creeping in. She had promised herself that she would never stop fighting for him, but she couldn’t ignore the emptiness that had begun to swell inside her. The uncertainty. The fear that Izuku might be lost to her forever.

With a deep, trembling breath, she began to write:

Dear Izuku,

I don’t know what else to say.

The updates they give me are always the same—censored, rehearsed, and cold. They tell me you’re “fine,” that you’re “progressing,” that you’re “being well taken care of,” but I know those words don’t mean anything anymore. Not when they don’t let me see you. Not when I can’t hear your voice. Not when they’ve made sure that I’m the one left in the dark, day after day.

I don’t know if you still remember me. I don’t know if they’ve done something to erase our connection. They’ve taken so much from us, Izuku. The life we dreamed of, the life I hoped we could have, they’ve stolen it from us without a second thought. And every day, I wonder if you’re still in there—if you’re still my little boy, the one who used to tell me about your dreams, about being a hero, about saving people. I can’t help but feel like I’ve failed you.

I know you’re not the same. The world doesn’t know what you can do. The facility doesn’t know the true extent of your power. And maybe that’s a blessing, because the last thing I want is for you to be trapped in a place where they treat you like a weapon.

But I’m losing hope, Izuku. The more I hear about the things going on behind those walls, the more I see how much the world has turned its back on you, the more I start to believe that you may never come back.

I don’t know what they’ve done to you, but I’m sorry, my love. I am so, so sorry. I thought I could save you. I thought I could protect you. But I’ve realized that the system we live in won’t let me save you. And the pain of not knowing, of not being able to hold you and tell you everything will be okay, is unbearable.

I will always love you, Izuku. You are my heart, my everything. I don’t know what they’re doing to you, but wherever you are, please know that I never stopped believing in you.

But I can’t keep doing this anymore. I can’t keep pretending that things are going to get better. I don’t think I’ll ever hear your voice again, and it’s tearing me apart inside.

This is the second to last letter I’ll ever write. 

Please, my dear, if you can, find your way back to me. If not... just know that you were loved, and that you will always be my son.

Yours forever,

Mom

---

Inko folded the letter carefully, staring at the words on the page, letting the weight of it sink into her bones. She could feel her heart cracking, the last of her hopes slipping through her fingers like sand. She had hoped, prayed, and dreamed for so long, but the truth was that she had no more fight left in her.

For the first time in two years, Inko Midoriya allowed herself to let go.

She set the letter aside, then reached for the small box on her shelf—one that contained a faded picture of Izuku. She had kept it all this time, a constant reminder of the boy she once held in her arms.

With trembling hands, Inko placed the photo in the box, closed the lid, and whispered softly to herself. "Goodbye, Izuku. I’m sorry."

And then, for the first time in a long while, she allowed herself to cry.

Chapter Text

Izuku’s transformation over the past six years is a testament to the brutal efficiency with which the Hero Commission operates. At the age of sixteen, he is no longer the hopeful, kind boy he once was. The walls of Facility 11’s Red Wing—the most secure and dangerous area of the facility—have molded him into someone unrecognizable to anyone who might remember him. He is emotionally numb, calculating, and eerily quiet. The fierce emotions that once radiated from him have been subdued, and only the cold, sharp edges of his mind remain. The boy who once sought to save others now seeks only survival, and a methodical, almost mechanical version of it.

Over the years, Izuku’s quirk—his “empathy”—has evolved in ways even the facility’s doctors couldn’t predict. He has learned to suppress the waves of emotion that once overwhelmed him, controlling them with a cold precision. His quirk is no longer a tool of confusion and chaos; instead, it has become a scalpel he wields with terrifying accuracy. He can now project feelings of apathy, confusion, dread, and despair with ease, all while keeping his own emotional state tightly guarded. But this control has come at a cost.

Relationships with other inmates are few and far between. The Red Wing houses the most volatile and dangerous quirk-users—those whose abilities are considered too dangerous for society to allow freedom. As a result, Izuku is surrounded by individuals who are either too aggressive, too broken, or too isolated to connect with him. He has observed them from a distance, studied their quirks, learned their patterns, but no one has ever reached out to him. He is kept separate, monitored, and controlled. The few interactions he has with other inmates are limited to stares or brief exchanges, and even these moments are quickly stifled by the facility’s constant monitoring and isolation.

There was one individual—a girl named Yuri, who had a destructive quirk that involved amplifying the pain of others by touch. She was a year older than Izuku and, like him, had been in the facility for most of her life. Yuri was unpredictable, volatile, and often driven to violence by the overwhelming sensations of others’ pain. Despite this, there was a strange, unspoken bond between her and Izuku, as they were both outsiders, trapped in the same hell. 

Yuri would occasionally try to reach him, attempting to break through the emotional wall he had built around himself. But the power of her quirk, combined with his growing ability to control his empathy, eventually caused her to back off. She never got close enough to form any real connection with him, but her presence lingered in his mind for a time—until, one day, she was transferred to another facility. Izuku never learned what happened to her, and the loss didn’t hit him the way it should have. Not like how Yung May did. Over the years, his emotional responses to others had dulled to almost nothing.

The facility staff, on the other hand, remained the closest thing to a relationship Izuku had. He was still subject to regular psychological evaluations, and the doctors and psychologists—at least, the ones who weren’t too afraid of his abilities—would occasionally try to probe his mind, test his emotional state, and measure the extent of his quirk’s evolution. However, as his control grew, so did their fear. He could project emotions without lifting a finger, and his ability to manipulate the staff with subtle waves of apathy or unease made their jobs harder. The psychologists would often leave frustrated, never able to penetrate the walls he’d built around himself. They no longer saw the boy who was once full of fear and confusion; they only saw the monster they had helped create—a machine capable of bending others to his will without ever needing to raise his voice.

Of all the staff, the one who had the most profound impact on Izuku—though in a much darker way—was Doctor Hiruma, the lead psychologist in charge of his emotional evaluations. Hiruma had a cold, calculating demeanor, and over time, he had come to see Izuku not as a troubled child, but as a tool. A potential asset. He pushed Izuku to his limits, attempting to unlock the full potential of his quirk, even encouraging him to experiment with manipulating the staff in ways that would normally have been considered unethical. At first, Izuku resisted, struggling with the impulse to feel sympathy for others, but as the years passed, the lines between right and wrong blurred. Izuku no longer felt guilt when he used his quirk on the staff, as they were all complicit in his suffering. They were just another piece of the system that had kept him locked away.

One of the only staff members who ever showed him any genuine compassion was Nurse Kaede Hisashi, who had been a steady presence during his early years in the facility. Her kindness stood in stark contrast to the cold, clinical demeanor of the other staff. She would slip him small, or at least try handwritten notes when she thought no one was looking, offering him comforting words and small acts of rebellion against the system. It was Kaede who had once smuggled one of Inko’s letters into his hands, a rare, precious connection to his mother. Despite her compassion, however, Izuku had been taken to the Red Wing; he hasn't seen Kaede since , replaced by a more aggressive team of handlers. Izuku hasn’t seen her since, though he occasionally allows himself to remember the brief moments of tenderness she showed him. Those moments were now as distant as any other part of his life, buried under layers of survival instinct and emotional detachment.

In this emotionally desolate environment, Izuku has learned to survive not just physically, but mentally as well. His days are consumed with strict routines, psychological evaluations, and the occasional experiment involving his quirk. Most of the time, his power is used in tests—subjecting the staff to waves of emotion to observe their reactions, or forcing them into situations where they must confront their own feelings of fear, guilt, or anger. The experiments are both monotonous and draining, but they are also his only form of control in a world where he has none.

Six years of this routine have hardened him. He has no hope left, and every ounce of warmth in him has been erased, replaced with cold, calculated detachment. When he does speak, it is measured, precise, and emotionless. He has become a tool, a weapon for the government’s use, and he knows it. But deep inside, beneath the walls he’s built around himself, there’s a flicker of something darker—a quiet resentment for the system that has stolen everything from him.

Now, at sixteen, Izuku Midoriya no longer exists. Only Subject 13-A remains—a boy who has learned that the world is cruel, and that only by becoming as cold and calculating as the people who hold him captive can he hope to survive.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The dim fluorescent lights of the Red Wing flickered above, casting long shadows over the sterile concrete floors. Izuku sat in his usual corner of the cell, a space where the soft hum of the facility’s ventilation system and the distant shuffle of guards were the only sounds that accompanied him. It was a peaceful kind of silence, one he had grown accustomed to over the years. His eyes, now hardened with the cold detachment of someone who had long since given up any semblance of hope, were fixed on the small window across from him. The outside world, a memory he could scarcely remember, seemed as distant as any other illusion.

But today, something was different.

Footsteps echoed down the hall, an unfamiliar rhythm. The door to the wing opened with its usual groan, but this time, the air shifted. There was a new presence. A new recruit. Izuku’s sharp eyes narrowed slightly as he observed the figure approaching. She was young—probably in her early twenties—with a nervous energy radiating off her. The trainee was accompanied by two senior staff members, their expressions stern and unyielding.

Her quirk, they had told her during orientation, was supposed to be a perfect fit for assessing high-risk individuals like Izuku. Sensory quirk. She could perceive and experience the emotions of others on a heightened level, an ability that could be useful for monitoring dangerous inmates and understanding the deeper layers of their psychological states.

The girl was assigned to his block for a routine evaluation. Izuku didn’t care for her quirk. He didn’t care for any of them. They were all just distractions. But something about her presence caught his attention in a way nothing else had in years.

She stepped closer to the cell, her pale face filled with a mix of anxiety and curiosity. Her eyes flickered nervously toward Izuku, but they quickly snapped away, as though she knew she shouldn’t look at him too long. Izuku didn’t react, though inside, something twisted—a flicker of amusement at her unease. It had been so long since anyone had looked at him that way. The staff had grown used to him, even indifferent. But this girl—her discomfort, her hesitation—it felt… almost refreshing.

The senior staff members spoke briefly, instructing her to begin her evaluation. The girl stepped closer to the bars of his cell, her posture rigid, as though she was trying to prepare herself for whatever was to come. Izuku didn’t flinch. He didn’t move. He merely watched, his eyes calculating, his mind sharpening.

“Subject 13-A,” she spoke hesitantly, her voice wavering slightly. “I’m going to attempt to gauge your emotional state. I need you to relax and allow me to connect with your feelings, okay?”

Her voice was soft, tentative—much different from the usual cold, authoritative tone of the doctors and guards that had come before her. She was trying to be kind, trying to appear confident, but Izuku could feel the tremor in her emotions. Anxiety. Fear. Hesitation. She was projecting them in waves, and it made him smirk internally.

He was used to the fear. It was something that had been embedded in the world around him for as long as he could remember. Fear of his quirk, fear of his ability to manipulate and overwhelm. But for some reason, this girl—this new recruit—her fear felt different. It felt… weaker. He could sense that beneath her fear was something more fragile. Her quirk could only connect with surface-level emotions, but she couldn’t touch the rage, the emptiness that had festered in Izuku for years. She couldn’t touch the deep, boiling pit of resentment he had cultivated through his isolation. And that made him… curious.

Izuku didn’t respond to her request. Instead, he remained seated, his face impassive, his eyes cold. She took a step closer, eyes widening as she extended her hands, trying to reach out with her quirk. The moment her sensory ability made contact with him, Izuku felt it—the connection.

And that’s when it happened.

It wasn’t a wave of empathy or sorrow. It wasn’t the usual hum of emotions that flooded him during his earlier years. No, this was something more primal. Her quirk, as delicate and refined as it might have been, came into contact with the rage he had buried deep inside, the dark, suffocating resentment that had only grown with each year spent in this hellhole. It was raw, unchecked, and explosive—a sharp, venomous presence that erupted like a storm. She had no idea what she was about to experience.

Izuku’s quirk, though refined, still worked on instinct, on reflex. And in that moment, his mind focused on the feelings that the girl’s quirk was trying to access—the fear, the curiosity, and, beneath all of that, the weakness he saw in her. The soft underbelly of her emotions. And with a flicker of his control, he turned the dial.

He projected his rage into her mind, wrapping it around her senses like a vice, suffocating, unrelenting. He didn’t feel it for himself. He no longer felt anything. But for her, it was overwhelming—a tidal wave of fury that wasn’t even his own. It was as if the very air around her thickened with hatred, with violence.

The girl froze, her face going pale as she struggled to maintain composure. Her quirk was powerful, but against the torrent of emotions Izuku was sending her way, it was nothing more than a fragile thread in a storm. Her hands trembled as she gasped for breath, her heart pounding in her chest.

Then, without warning, she screamed—loud, high-pitched—and collapsed to the floor, her body going limp as her senses overloaded. She couldn’t handle it. She had tried to reach into the abyss of his soul, and it had consumed her.

Izuku sat there, unmoving, his expression still cold, but a flicker of something stirred deep within him.

Amusement .

He smiled, a thin, almost imperceptible curve of his lips that lasted only a second. It was the first time in years that he had allowed himself to feel anything resembling enjoyment. She had felt his rage. She had touched the core of his emotional landscape, and she had been broken by it.

Good.

The staff rushed into the room, shouting orders, trying to help the girl, but Izuku didn’t move. He had no intention of helping her. She had chosen to step into his world, and now she would live with the consequences.

As the chaos unfolded, Izuku’s gaze remained fixed on the scene, his smile still lingering in his mind, even as it faded from his lips. He didn’t feel sorry. He didn’t feel remorse. The years of being conditioned, of being forced to repress every ounce of emotion, had given way to a more dangerous creature—a version of Izuku Midoriya that didn’t just survive anymore.

He thrived.

And in that moment, as he watched the recruit being rushed away, he realized something—a fact that had been growing clearer for some time now. He was not the broken boy they had once contained in this facility. He was not the hopeful child who had begged for help.

He was Subject 13-A, and he had learned to enjoy the suffering of others.

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The fluorescent lights buzzed above, casting long shadows in the stark, gray hallways of Facility 11. For Izuku, it had been a routine day—quiet, uneventful. He had spent most of it in his cell, the cold concrete walls that had been his prison for so long. The hum of the ventilation system, the occasional clink of metal as guards moved past, and the muffled voices of staff were the only sounds he had known for the past six years.

But today, something felt different. The air was thick with anticipation, and even the guards seemed more on edge than usual. Izuku’s senses, finely tuned over the years, caught the faintest shift—a change in the atmosphere, a ripple in the rigid order of Facility 11. He didn’t know why or how, but he could feel it. Something was about to happen.

He didn’t cause it. But he would take advantage of it.

Izuku’s gaze lingered on the small plastic cup sitting on the corner of the desk in his cell. The white pills. They had been his prison too, a chemical suppressant to keep his quirk under control—to keep him in check. They muted everything. His emotions. His powers. They kept him in line.

But for the first time in years, Izuku hadn’t taken them. He had stopped taking the pills weeks ago. His body had grown used to the withdrawal by now, and his powers had only grown stronger in response.

He didn’t need the pills anymore.

And today, as the sounds of agitation and whispers from the staff grew louder, Izuku knew. This was it .

The door to his cell opened with its usual mechanical screech. Two guards stepped inside, their faces blank, almost emotionless. One of them spoke, a familiar cold tone in his voice.

“Time for your daily evaluation, Subject 13-A. Let’s go.”

Izuku didn’t respond. He simply stood up from his corner, his body moving with a fluid grace. There was no fear in him, no hesitation. He didn’t need to speak. He didn’t need to protest. His quirk was all he needed now.

The guards followed him silently, their expressions still unreadable. But Izuku could feel it—their confusion, their uncertainty, their sudden unease. His quirk was reaching out now, clouding their judgment, making their minds sluggish, disconnected. He projected his apathy into their thoughts, a thick fog that dulled their awareness.

By the time they reached the common area, the place where staff gathered for briefings, Izuku had already seen it. The subtle chaos unfolding around him. The recruit he had encountered earlier was nowhere to be seen. In her place were a few senior staff members, whispering urgently to each other. There was a sense of urgency in the air, but Izuku didn’t care about that.

The guards that escorted him began to argue with one another. Their eyes darted back and forth as they exchanged increasingly frantic words. “Where’s the backup?” one of them muttered. “Is the gate down?”

“Can’t get in touch with the control room,” the other guard replied, his voice tight with panic. “We’re being locked out—something’s wrong.”

Izuku felt the subtle ripple in their minds as their confusion deepened, their frustration growing. It was the perfect moment. He pushed a little harder.

The air around them thickened with confusion—like a fog rolling in. The staff in the area were also starting to lose focus. Some of them stumbled, blinking as though they couldn’t remember where they were. Others stood frozen, their minds blank, unable to act.

Izuku walked through the disarray without a second glance. The guards didn’t even notice. He didn’t hurry. He didn’t need to. His quirk had set the stage for him. Now, he just had to move.

He passed through the hallways, the sounds of alarms beginning to rise in the distance, but no one tried to stop him. No one even saw him. The staff members he passed were in a state of paralysis—too lost in their own confusion to notice the boy who was slipping through their fingers. Their eyes were glassy, distant, like they were stuck in a trance.

As Izuku neared the main exit, the door to the facility’s outer gates, he saw the security guards stationed outside. They should have been prepared. They should have stopped him.

But they didn’t. They couldn’t.

The air was thick with his projected indifference. The guards’ minds were filled with apathy—they didn’t care anymore. They didn’t question why the boy was walking towards them. They didn’t care that he didn’t belong here.

The gate doors slid open, and Izuku stepped outside. No one stopped him.

He didn’t even glance back. He didn’t need to. The facility, with all its twisted walls and dark corridors, was now behind him. And with every step he took into the outside world, a quiet satisfaction blossomed in his chest, though his face remained a mask of cold detachment.

He was free.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Back inside the facility, chaos erupted. Guards scrambled to regain control. The security alarm blared, its shrill sound filling the empty hallways. Hallways on fire. Staff members rushed to contain the breach, but it was already too late.

Izuku was gone. And so were a few others.

Hours later, the Hero Commission would issue a statement: “ Security Error .”

A “miscommunication” had led to an inmate walking out of the facility. The public was told nothing of the circumstances surrounding the escape. They would not know that the breakout had been triggered by a coordinated assault on the facility—one that had begun with the facility’s own inmates and had been amplified by the growing disarray inside the building.

Izuku’s name was redacted from all public records. His status as a high-risk individual was quietly erased, and his escape was swept under the rug. The Hero Commission did not want the public to know that the boy who had once been known as Izuku Midoriya—the child with the dangerous quirk—had escaped.

They wanted to keep the truth hidden. They didn’t want the world to know what he had become.

And as the public remained blissfully ignorant, Izuku walked into the unknown. The boy who had been broken by the system was no longer a child.

He was now a force of nature.

And the world would soon feel his presence.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The sterile, high-rise office was unusually quiet, save for the distant hum of security systems and the soft rustle of papers. The walls, lined with monitors, flickered with a variety of surveillance footage: blurry images of Facility 11’s corridors, flickering alarms, the still figures of confused staff members, and—most concerning of all—the blank face of Subject 13-A, walking through the exit gates without resistance.

Director Kamura stood rigidly before one of the central monitors, his eyes narrowed, his fingers digging into the edge of his desk. His breath was slow, deliberate, but beneath it, a storm was brewing. Izuku Midoriya—no, Subject 13-A—had escaped. Along with a few others. Kamura didn't have much care for the others though. Subject 13-A was the most dangerous one.

The footage replayed in loops, each time more incomprehensible than the last. The boy walked down the hall with mechanical precision. His face was expressionless, devoid of fear, sadness, or joy. He was a ghost in the facility—an anomaly. The worst part was that he didn’t break out. There were no alarms or breaches that were from him, no visible signs of struggle. He simply walked out, past every single guard, past the locked doors, and through the security checkpoints as though nothing was wrong.

"How did this happen?" Kamura muttered under his breath, his fingers tapping against the table with growing irritation. His eyes never left the screen as the footage played again, showing Izuku slipping past the last line of security with the same unbothered expression on his face.

Behind him, the faint sound of footsteps made him stiffen. A team of agents stood at the door, all of them hesitating for a moment before stepping in. Their faces were pale, their uniforms stiff, as though they were walking into the eye of a storm. Kamura turned to face them, his sharp gaze cutting through them like a blade.

"Report," he demanded, his voice low but seething with anger.

The lead agent, a tall man with a thin face, swallowed hard before speaking. "Director Kamura, there was no sign of forced entry or sabotage. The others from the yellow wing had banned together and planned an escape. During their escape subject 13-A took advantage of the chaos. He just—he walked out. The facility’s defenses weren’t breached, but… but the personnel inside were… disoriented. They couldn’t stop him. They couldn’t even stop themselves."

Kamura’s jaw tightened as he turned back to the screen, watching the footage again. "Disoriented? What the hell happened? He walked out? "

The agent hesitated for a moment before nodding, unsure how much to divulge. "Yes, sir. It seems like… his quirk. It’s… affecting people in ways we didn’t anticipate. He didn't have to do anything—he just projected a sense of confusion, apathy…"

Kamura gritted his teeth, cutting the agent off. "I know what his damn quirk does. Do not underestimate him again." He stared at the screen, his mind racing. He had underestimated Izuku for years. They all had. And now it had come to this.

He grabbed the remote on his desk and rewound the footage, this time stopping on the moment when Izuku passed the last security checkpoint. There was no fear in his eyes, no panic or excitement. It was as if Izuku had simply decided he was done. And in that moment, the boy—now 16—had left them all behind.

"Where the hell are the others?" Kamura snapped, his temper flaring. He motioned toward the agents. "The others. What happened to them?"

Another agent, a woman with short-cropped hair, stepped forward. "The other inmates were part of the initial disturbance that led to this… situation. We believe they were part of a coordinated attempt. But their breakouts were more physical. They caused a direct breach. Subject 13-A didn’t do anything. He was just… there."

Kamura’s lip curled into a sneer. "And they let him go? Unbelievable." His mind raced through a dozen thoughts at once. His own team, his own staff—completely paralyzed, caught in the web of this boy’s power. He had known for years that Izuku was dangerous, but this? This was something different.

"Director," the agent continued cautiously, "we’ve tracked the escape route. There’s no sign of 13-A’s location, but the others have been located. They’re being contained as we speak."

Kamura let out a sharp breath, clearly struggling to maintain control. "And Izuku? Where the hell is he now?"

The agent faltered, eyes darting to the others. "We… don’t know, sir. He’s not in the public system. There’s no trace of him. He’s just… gone."

Kamura slammed his hand against the desk, his voice rising. "Gone? What do you mean, ‘gone’? This is a failure on all levels. We—" He paused, drawing in a breath and regaining his composure, though his voice still trembled with fury. "He is the most dangerous person we have ever contained. He’s one of ours, and now he’s out there, God knows where."

The agents exchanged uneasy glances. Kamura’s mind was turning, working through the problem like a puzzle he couldn’t quite solve. They had controlled him for years, kept him isolated, drugged, subdued. They had assumed he would always be a tool for their agenda, a pawn they could manipulate and control. But now? Now, he was free. And the public? The public didn’t know a thing.

He looked back at the screen again, watching as Izuku stepped out of the facility, his body moving like an automaton. For a moment, Kamura almost couldn’t recognize the boy. He had become something else. Something more. And Kamura hated it.

"This will not stand," he muttered, his fingers tightening around the arm of his chair. "He will be found. And when we do find him, he’ll be brought back. By any means necessary."

One of the agents, who had been silent until now, spoke up cautiously. "Sir… what about the public? Do we release any details?"

Kamura’s face twisted into a bitter grin. "Absolutely not. We don’t tell the public a damn thing. He’s a security error, a glitch. Nothing more. We’ll continue to keep this under wraps. He’s our problem now, and it’ll stay that way. The world doesn’t need to know about him. Not yet."

He turned back to the screen, watching the footage one more time. "And as for the others…" Kamura’s voice darkened. "The others from yellow wing will be dealt with. The same goes for anyone else who thinks they can escape. This is far from over."

The agents nodded, ready to carry out the next phase of the Director’s orders. As they turned to leave, Kamura remained by his desk, his fingers steepled in front of his face, his gaze focused on the screen. The escape had been too easy. Too clean.

And now, the boy he had created was out there, somewhere, free. Kamura had no intention of letting that freedom last long.

The hunt had just begun.

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Kaede had been pacing the halls of Facility 11 for hours, long after her shift ended. Her movements were slow, methodical, but there was no mistaking the tension that lined every muscle in her body. The facility had gone eerily quiet after the chaos. The alarms had stopped. The security lockdowns had been put in place, but all of it felt hollow now. The only thing that remained was the weight of something much darker, something Kaede couldn’t escape.

She had been waiting for a sign. A text, a call, anything from him.

But there was nothing.

No word on the children. No information about Izuku. No indication of what had happened after the breach. She had been in the process of moving to the restricted zones to check on the red wing when she heard the commotion—a sharp burst of voices, hurried footsteps, and the unmistakable sound of something—loud blaring alarms then, silence.

The Director hadn’t even bothered to contact her.

Kaede felt a dull ache in her chest as she stopped pacing. The worst thing about all this was how quiet it had been. No one was telling her anything. Not even her colleagues. They avoided her gaze. They didn’t speak when she entered a room, as though they were all trapped in some unspoken understanding that none of them wanted to acknowledge.

“Subject 13-A is gone.” One of the coworkers finally spoke and told her what happened. The words echoed in her mind as she replayed the events from the previous night. Izuku had slipped through the cracks, not with force, but with a calm apathy. He had become something different—something unreachable. And she hadn't been able to stop it. Not that she wanted to. 

She had seen him only days ago, barely a shadow of the boy she once knew. But he hadn’t been the same Izuku. The fire, the hope, the fragility… all of it was gone. In its place was something colder, more dangerous. His eyes had been distant, calculating. He had already been closing himself off from the world, a learned mechanism of survival. But she never thought it would go this far.

Kaede leaned against the wall, her arms crossed tightly around her chest as she tried to collect her thoughts. Izuku had always been a difficult case. She knew that. But deep down, she had never stopped believing that the boy inside him could still break free, that one day he could learn to trust again. The bond they had shared, however brief, had kept that flicker of hope alive for her. But now?

She closed her eyes, pressing her fingers to her temples as if trying to push away the ache in her head. She had been complicit. She had watched him suffer for so long, helping him only in small ways, pushing his brokenness aside, doing nothing to stop the system that had twisted him. And now, as the cold walls of the facility seemed to close in around her, she couldn’t help but feel the weight of the responsibility she had carried all along.

“He’s gone,” she whispered to herself, her breath shaky. The words felt final, a truth she didn’t want to acknowledge. She felt the gnawing emptiness inside her grow sharper.

Her fingers curled around the cold metal of the railing by her side, and she squeezed her eyes shut tighter. She had once believed there was a chance—a faint hope—that the boy would be able to escape the facility, that he would find a way to break free. She had always imagined that she would be there, quietly supporting him, helping him heal. But that dream had shattered like glass when he left.

In his place, a more dangerous boy had emerged, someone she was terrified of but couldn’t abandon. His quirk had manifested with devastating clarity, and now, at the age of sixteen, he was unrecognizable—not just in appearance, but in the cold, hollow way he moved through the world. He wasn’t the hopeful Izuku Midoriya who had once walked through these halls. He wasn’t even Izuku anymore. He was something else entirely.

Her breath hitched, her eyes glistening with unshed tears, as the finality of it all settled in. She had failed him. She had let him fall through the cracks, just like everyone else.

But that wasn’t the worst part.

The worst part was knowing that the last time she saw him, he didn’t ask for her help. He didn’t reach out to her for comfort, for some sign that he hadn’t been completely abandoned. No. He walked away from the only person who might have cared enough to save him.

She could still feel the weight of the cold metal walls closing in on her. It felt like everything was slipping through her fingers. There was no turning back now. He had already been labeled—a potential villain, a threat to society. They would hunt him down, contain him again. She couldn’t stop them. She knew that. But there was one thing she could still do.

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying to calm the storm inside her. As much as the darkness of the situation gripped her, she couldn’t afford to fall into despair. She had to keep going, for herself. For him. Because despite everything, there was a part of her that knew Izuku hadn’t truly left her. And even though it felt hopeless, she had to keep that sliver of hope alive, just as she had kept it alive all these years.

Her fingers trembled as she reached into her coat pocket and pulled out the crumpled, old letter she had written for him a few weeks back. She hadn’t given it to him. It had been buried beneath the weight of everything else that had happened. But now, as she read through the familiar, heart-wrenching words, she realized that maybe—just maybe—she could still hold on to that piece of him, even if he was out there somewhere, lost in the world.

And so, with trembling hands, she folded the letter, tucked it safely into her pocket, and walked toward the door.

Izuku may be gone, but she wasn’t ready to give up just yet.

Not completely.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The news broke, but it didn’t break the way it should have. The public wasn’t allowed to know the full truth. The story they got was a sanitized version—less a story of escape and more a story of security failure. But the whispers were already there, growing louder as details slipped through the cracks. It started with a small news outlet, one of the few independent stations still functioning in a world where the government controlled most media.

The anchor sat in front of the cameras, her face professionally neutral, but the tension in her eyes was unmistakable. The backdrop of the broadcast showed a clip of Facility 11, blurred, clearly taken from a security feed. The words "Security Incident" appeared on the screen in bold red letters.

“ Tonight’s top story: a breach at the controversial Facility 11. Officials are confirming that a ‘security error’ allowed several detainees to escape, with one, in particular, slipping past security measures unnoticed. Authorities are calling this a rare, unfortunate glitch in the system that led to the escape of a dangerous individual known only as Subject 13-A. ”

The anchor paused, allowing the words to settle.

“ The individual, who had been housed under extreme containment measures due to their unstable quirk, managed to leave the facility without triggering alarms, according to sources within the facility. While the public is being told that no major injuries occurred during the breach, the escape has raised significant concerns about the security and management of high-risk detainees. ”

The camera cut briefly to a video of empty halls, some doors hanging open, but nothing out of the ordinary.

“ Government officials are asking the public to remain calm, assuring that efforts to recapture the escapees are already underway. However, many are questioning the adequacy of the facility’s safeguards, especially in light of recent reports about the increased volatility of the detainees inside. A source who wished to remain anonymous told us that Subject 13-A, in particular, had been under special surveillance due to the ‘complications’ posed by his quirk. ”

The anchor turned her attention back to the screen. " Authorities have also refused to comment on reports suggesting that this was not a simple escape but a highly coordinated event—though sources have hinted at possible breaches of protocol. Whether these reports are true remains to be seen. ”

The anchor’s face hardened slightly as she closed the segment.

" We’ll keep you updated on the situation as it develops, but for now, officials have assured us that the public is in no immediate danger. For now, though, many will be asking—just how much are we being told? "

The screen went black for a moment before a flood of generic images of calm citizens and government reassurance filled the airwaves again, an attempt to quell the swelling unrest that the brief segment had sparked.

Across the country, people shifted uncomfortably in their seats, but the story would fade. The government, with its iron grip, ensured it would fade. But the truth hung in the air, lingering on the edges of people’s minds, growing darker with every unanswered question.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Aizawa stood in front of the mirror in his modest apartment, his hand gripping the edge of the sink as he stared at his own reflection. The exhaustion was evident—beyond the physical toll of his nightly patrols and his underground hero work, there was something deeper in his eyes. Something that had been eating away at him for years.

Six years.

Six years since he’d promised the boy, Izuku Midoriya, that he would be there for him. That he wouldn’t leave him. That he’d find a way to get him out. He could still hear the desperate, small voice of the child who had begged for any kind of hope—begged to know that someone, anyone, would be there to help.

And Aizawa had failed him.

He had watched the footage of the recent security breach at Facility 11, watched as the boy—no, Subject 13-A, as they called him now—had slipped through their cracks with eerie, calculated ease. How he got the footage would remain unknown. It wasn’t a breakout; it was a quiet walking out, the kind of escape no one should have seen coming. Izuku, or whoever he was now, had used the apathy he’d honed so well to bypass security without so much as a second thought.

Aizawa clenched his fist, the sound of his knuckles cracking under the pressure making him wince. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go.

He had tried. God, how he had tried. He’d spent years slipping into Facility 11, trying to visit the boy every chance he could. He’d built a rapport with the staff, taken the back roads, but he still couldn't find a way to speak with Izuku again. It just wasn’t enough.

The moment he’d walked in on that quiet, emotionless boy, face cold and hardened, it had been like a punch to the gut. Izuku was gone. The boy he had met, the boy he had wanted to save, had been swallowed whole by the system.

The worst part was the crushing feeling that Izuku hadn’t even remembered him. Or worse—didn’t care to. The fire in his eyes was gone, replaced by something colder, something that calculated every move, every second. The little boy who had been terrified of his own emotions was now a mirror of the system that had imprisoned him. Aizawa couldn’t even begin to imagine the kind of mental conditioning Izuku had gone through, the kind of hell he had endured.

But it wasn’t just Izuku he was angry at. It was the system that had allowed this to happen. The one he couldn’t break—no matter how hard he tried.

And now, with the escape, it was all slipping through his fingers.

Aizawa let out a low growl of frustration and slammed his hand against the sink, the metal ringing in the silence of his apartment.

He had promised Izuku. He had promised him he would keep fighting. But now? Now the boy had vanished into the world, and the government would hunt him like a dog, branding him as a villain. They’d never stop.

Aizawa ran his hands through his disheveled hair and turned away from the mirror, his eyes hard with resolve. It didn’t matter that he had failed. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t gotten Izuku out when he had the chance.

The fight wasn’t over. The boy had escaped, but he wasn’t free yet. And Aizawa was going to make sure he found him—no matter the cost.

This wasn’t the end. It was just the beginning.

“Damn it,” Aizawa muttered under his breath. “I’ll find you, Izuku. I’ll fix this.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Izuku walked the streets of the city, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. He didn’t know where he was going. He didn’t care. Everything around him felt foreign, like a dream or a memory that wasn’t his own. The streets were noisy—too noisy—and the people moved in and out of his peripheral vision like flashes of light. He was in a place where no one knew who he was, where the world felt far too large, and yet, somehow, unbearably small.

Ten years. Ten years had passed since the last time he’d seen the outside world. Ten years since he had been a child, full of fear and hope. Now, at sixteen, he was nothing but a ghost wandering through the remnants of the life he had lost.

He had walked out of the facility as if it had been nothing. No resistance. No fight. He had simply left. His quirk had done the rest, letting him slip through unnoticed, unseen. It had been too easy. And it had felt—right. Like he was meant to be free.

But now, in this new world, freedom tasted bitter. It didn’t feel like the relief he thought it would. There was no joy in being outside. No sense of accomplishment. Only... confusion. Everything felt off, disjointed. The world had moved on, and he had been left behind, a ghost of a boy that didn’t belong here anymore.

His only thought, his only need, was to find her. His mother.

She had always been his anchor, his only source of warmth in the coldness of his life. She was the one who had loved him. The only person who had ever given him kindness when everything else had been harsh, cold, and isolating. He had to find her.

Izuku’s heart raced as his mind fixated on the thought of his mother’s embrace.  He hadn’t seen her in years—hadn’t spoken to her in what felt like a lifetime. She had to be here. She had to be.

As he walked, the emotions were unbearable. Each and every person he walked past all had different emotions. He hadn't felt like this before. It was different from being in facility 11. It was freedom

He walked through streets that seemed endless, walking past people who didn’t even notice him. His eyes darted from one building to the next, scanning for some sign of her, some clue that would tell him she was nearby. He didn’t know the layout of the city. The streets blurred together in his mind. He had no plan, no map. He was just searching.

Then, he saw it.

The small apartment building he had once called home. The place where he and his mom had lived before he had been taken away. His legs moved without thinking. He approached it slowly, like a prisoner approaching an old, familiar cell. A feeling of dread twisted in his stomach, but he shoved it down. She had to be here. She had to be.

Izuku reached the door and knocked, once, twice, then waited. His breath was shallow, his pulse quickening with every second that passed. A few moments later, the door creaked open, and a young woman appeared. She looked at him quizzically, her brow furrowing.

“Can I help you?” she asked, her voice polite but distant.

Izuku opened his mouth, but no words came out. His eyes darted past her into the apartment, searching for signs of life, for signs of his mother. But it was empty. The walls were bare. No warm, familiar scent lingered in the air. No photographs, no knickknacks that his mother used to leave around the house.

“I’m looking for my mom,” Izuku finally managed to say, his voice sounding hollow even to his own ears. “She used to live here. Inko Midoriya...”

The woman’s face softened with a faint look of recognition, but it was short-lived.

“Ah, I’m sorry, but she moved out some time ago. She... left a while ago, actually,” the woman said, her tone now tinged with a slight sadness. “She left when things got tough. I don’t know where she went.”

Izuku’s breath caught in his chest. His heart pounded in his ears, and for a moment, the world seemed to tilt beneath him. His hands trembled as he reached out, the sensation of dread settling deep into his bones.

“She... left?” His voice broke. “She didn’t—she didn’t even tell me?”

The woman nodded, her eyes filled with pity. “I’m sorry, kid. I think she was... just trying to move on. She left everything behind. Her things, her name, even her past. I’m really sorry.”

Izuku stood there, his mind reeling. He wanted to shout, to demand answers, but his words failed him. How could she leave him? After everything? After everything he’d been through, had she really just disappeared from his life?

The world felt like it was crashing down around him, and the numbness he had been holding back—the apathy that had been a constant companion for so long—suddenly broke through. He didn’t know what to feel. Anger. Sadness. Despair. They all mixed together in a cloud of suffocating emotions. Izuku was tempted to use his quirk on the lady in front of him. Someone to take his anger out on. But she was an innocent and knew it would be cruel to subject her to that.

Izuku turned away from the woman, unable to bear her pity any longer. He walked away from the apartment building, his steps quick, urgent, though he didn’t know where he was going. His heart felt heavy, his chest constricted with the weight of betrayal. His mother had left him. He was alone in the world.

And the rage... the rage boiled inside him, igniting like a fire in his veins. She had left him.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

As the night deepened, Izuku found himself on a darkened street, aimlessly wandering. His thoughts were a jumbled mess, his mind barely able to process everything that had just happened. He had walked miles without realizing, his feet carrying him further and further from the place he once called home.

The streets were quiet now. The sounds of the city had faded into an eerie silence. It was in this silence that Izuku stumbled upon a sight that hit him like a wave.

A mother. A real mother. Holding her child.

The woman had a young girl in her arms, no older than five or six, nestled against her chest as they walked along the street. The child was giggling, her small hands clutching at her mother’s shirt as the woman softly whispered to her. The woman smiled down at her child, the kind of smile that was full of warmth, full of love.

Izuku froze, his heart sinking into his stomach. The sight of it—the softness of it, the love and care that was so easily shared between them—was too much. His legs shook as he watched them, and for the first time since his escape, a sob caught in his throat. The tears burned at the corners of his eyes, but he refused to let them fall. He wouldn’t allow it.

But it was too late. The grief, the longing, the loneliness that had been building inside him for so long burst free, and he collapsed to his knees on the cold sidewalk.

He wasn’t a child anymore. He wasn’t the little boy that had been stolen away, but at that moment, he felt like one again. A lost, broken boy who had been abandoned.

He curled his fists against the ground, his body wracked with sobs that he couldn’t contain. His chest felt as if it were being crushed under the weight of it all.

The mother and her child passed by, oblivious to the boy who was left broken on the street. And for the first time in years, Izuku didn’t care. He didn’t care if anyone saw him. He didn’t care about anything anymore. He only cared about the aching emptiness inside of him.

The world had moved on without him. And now, he had nothing.

Chapter Text

The streets were louder than he remembered.

It wasn’t just the sounds—shoes tapping against pavement, the low roar of cars, the laughter of strangers—but the weight of it all. The aliveness of the world. The press of it against his skin like static. Izuku kept his head down, his hood up, the faded gray fabric of a borrowed jacket doing little to make him invisible. The city pulsed around him, indifferent to his presence. A thousand people moved past, and not one of them knew his name.

Not that it matters, he thought dully, I don’t have a name anymore.

He had tried walking with purpose the first day—tried to act like he belonged. But his steps betrayed him, unsteady and too careful. His eyes kept darting to reflective windows, to security cameras, to the flicker of a blue light that reminded him too much of the pills. He hadn’t slept. Not really. Only dozed in alleys and forgotten stairwells, a bundle of shadows and tension, flinching at the sound of every passing footstep.

The third morning, he found himself in front of a playground.

It was different now, cleaner maybe, or smaller than he remembered. The metal slide had been replaced with plastic. The tire swing was gone. But when he stepped past the rusted gate and stood in the middle of the soft mulch, the air changed. A faint scent of cut grass, of warm sun on plastic and asphalt, filtered into his chest like a memory.

He could see it—six-year-old Izuku, running across the field, yelling something about All Might, his mother laughing from the bench as she juggled a juice box and her handbag. His throat clenched.

“She used to bring me here…” he whispered aloud, as if the silence needed explaining.

No one answered.

Izuku crouched in the center of the field, fingers curling into the mulch. The world tilted a little as he tried to remember how it felt to be that boy. That boy who believed heroes could save everyone. That boy who thought if he smiled hard enough, if he tried long enough, he could be good enough .

But the feeling was gone.

“I’m not him anymore.”

The words tasted foreign in his mouth. Heavy. Final.

He sat there for a while, head bowed, until a mother called her child away from the park with a cautious glance at the boy in the hoodie crouched by the slide. Izuku watched them go, a flicker of something—grief? guilt?—cracking through the numbness like frost on glass.

By nightfall, he found himself standing in front of the old bookstore.

It was still there, wedged between a ramen shop and a nail salon, but the sign had changed. The handwritten “New Hero Releases!” posters were gone, replaced by generic flyers about manga sales and study guides. The clerk behind the counter didn’t recognize him when he walked in, didn’t look up when the little bell above the door chimed. Not that he expected to be recognized, it has been 10 years since he was free.

Izuku drifted toward the back, to the corner that used to house the hero encyclopedias. They’d been his treasure trove—pages he’d devour, scribble in, memorize. But now, they were gone. Replaced with educational books, test prep manuals.

His fingers brushed the empty shelf.

He didn’t notice the tears until they hit the wood. One. Two. Slow and hot. His body didn’t tremble. His breath didn’t hitch. But something inside cracked. Something old. Something ten years buried.

“Why did you leave me…?” he whispered. It wasn’t clear if he meant All Might, his mother, or the world. Maybe all three.

He walked out without a book, without a purpose. Just the echo of his younger self trailing behind like a ghost he couldn’t quite shake.

The streets got colder. He pulled the jacket tighter. The city never slept, but Izuku needed silence.

Lights blurred his vision. Every laugh, every shout, every car horn needled his nerves like static. The buzz of electricity overhead made the back of his skull ache. He moved aimlessly, guided only by the need to get away—from the brightness, from the noise, from the memories scratching under his skin.

He turned a corner and paused at the mouth of a stairwell that sank into shadow. A cracked sign flickered above it, one letter dark. Metro Line—Northbound. The sharp scent of rust and damp concrete drifted upward.

The subway. 

Cool. Dim. Forgotten.

A place beneath the world—where no one asked questions, and no one looked too closely. His feet moved before he could think. Down the steps. Into the dark.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The subway was mostly empty at this hour. A few rats darted across the tracks. Flickering lights overhead buzzed like dying fireflies. The silence wasn’t peaceful—it pressed in on Izuku like a too-tight coat, every breath echoing off the tiled walls. His footsteps sounded too loud.

He stopped near a bench, sagging into the cold steel like he’d aged twenty years. His eyes were blank, tired. His hands rested limp between his knees. The stillness dug in.

“You look like someone who’s been underground longer than the trains have,” a voice called out.

Izuku flinched, eyes darting to the far end of the platform. A man was mopping the tiles. Older—late 50s maybe—with gray in his beard and shoulders slightly hunched, like life had taken a bite out of him and never gave it back. He wore a worn blue janitor’s uniform, name tag long faded. His eyes, though—warm. Human .

The man gave a crooked smile. “Didn’t mean to scare you, kid. Just talking.”

Izuku didn’t respond. Not verbally. Just stared, cautious.

The janitor didn’t press. He wrung out the mop with a squeak and resumed slowly working the floor, whistling a tuneless melody. After a moment, he added, without looking up, “Bad day?”

Izuku swallowed. His voice felt rusty. “Bad life.”

The janitor chuckled. Not cruelly. Just sad and knowing. “Yeah. Those happen, too.”

For a moment, the silence stretched. Then Izuku asked, “Why are you here? It’s late.”

“Someone’s gotta clean the shit no one wants to see.” The man shrugged. “Trains run tomorrow, don’t they?”

Izuku tilted his head. “Why do it if no one cares?”

The janitor stopped. Looked up at him. “Because I care. Even if no one else does.”

That silenced Izuku. He lowered his gaze. The janitor leaned on his mop. “You on the run?” Izuku stiffened.

“Relax, kid. I ain’t a hero. Not anymore. I just clean the floors.”

“…Not anymore?”

The janitor hesitated. Then gave a sigh. “Used to work in rescue. Long time ago. Before the paperwork mattered more than the people. I lost some good ones. After that, saving folks turned into counting policies. So I quit. I mop. Doesn’t mean I stopped helping.”

Izuku stared. His heart ached. This man had seen the world, and been chewed up by it—but he was still kind. “You look like you got something inside you that’s trying to eat its way out.”

“…Maybe I do.”

The janitor nodded slowly. “You hold onto it too long, it’ll turn to poison. You gotta learn when to let it out.”

Izuku’s voice trembled. “What if letting it out hurts people?”

The janitor was quiet for a moment.

Then he said, “Then you figure out the difference between hurting because you can’t help it… and hurting because you want to. And if you ever start liking the second one more?” He met Izuku’s eyes. “You stop. No matter what it takes.”

Izuku felt like his chest had cracked open. The janitor gave a small, weary smile. “You got a name?” Izuku hesitated.

“…Not anymore.”

The janitor nodded, not asking further. “ Then make one someday. One that means something to you. ” A train rumbled in the distance. The janitor picked up his mop again.

“There’s two kinds of people in this world, kid. Those who clean up after the mess… and those who make it.”

He began to walk away. “ Figure out which one you wanna be. ”

And just like that, he disappeared around the corner.

Izuku stayed there long after. Still. Silent. And for the first time in years… truly unsure of which kind of person he was.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Izuku didn’t sleep that night.

He stayed in the subway until the morning, tucked into a shadowed corner behind a forgotten maintenance cabinet. His legs pulled to his chest. His head on his knees. His eyes wide open.

The janitor’s words haunted him like a lingering dream—“You figure out which one you want to be.”

But what if he didn’t want to be either? What if he already was both?

By sunrise, Izuku moved like instinct. His body followed shadows. His breath synced with silence. His thoughts drifted in and out like tides—barely tethered to anything. The world aboveground was loud. Too loud.

He flinched at every honk, every shout, every blur of movement. Pedestrians bumped shoulders with him without apology. Music bled from shopfronts. Children laughed. Someone cried. A dog barked. A couple fought on a street corner.

It was too much. After ten years of sterilized silence, every noise now felt like a knife.

He ducked into alleys when the tension in his chest built too high. Hid behind dumpsters. Curled under staircases. Watched. Listened.

And soon… he began to understand.

Empathy was never meant to be used like this. But it was all he had. He walked crowded sidewalks and brushed past strangers, skimming the surface of their emotions.

That woman—nervous, rushing, her purse clutched tightly to her chest. Not her.

The teenager scrolling through his phone—bored, detached. Safe, but useless.

The man by the corner store—hungry, bitter, desperate.

Dangerous. Izuku veered away.

Instead, he turned toward a boy his age waiting outside a bakery, arms crossed and frustration rising like a balloon. Annoyed. Impatient. Distracted. A mother inside the shop buying something, probably. Izuku stepped close, brushed against the boy just enough to skim deeper. Spoiled. Careless. Never had to fight for anything .

Perfect.

Izuku didn’t even use his quirk heavily—just enough projected calm to keep the boy passive, just enough masked guilt to make himself invisible. When the boy turned to yell into the bakery, Izuku took his wallet.

He didn’t even feel bad.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Later that afternoon, he watched a woman at an outdoor café, gently sobbing into her phone. Her grief tasted raw—too recent. A breakup? A funeral? He didn’t intrude. But the croissant on her table was untouched. When she got up and left, he took it.

The same night, he broke into a laundromat’s backroom and stole a pair of shoes and a dark hoodie from the donation bin.

No one stopped him. No one saw him. Because he didn’t let them.

Izuku realized he didn’t need to hide in alleyways anymore. Not when he could walk through the world invisible.

All it took was a nudge of projected emotion—indifference to be ignored, passivity to avoid attention, fear to keep threats away. It was effortless now. Precision, not chaos. Surgical.

The kind of control Facility 11 had tried to teach him through violence… he now wielded with ease. Not because of them. Despite them. 

He learned the city’s patterns. When the convenience stores dumped expired food. Which cafés left tips unattended. Where public restrooms didn’t ask questions. How to map street cameras by feel, not sight—tracing the nervous tension of those who feared being watched. He started choosing safer rooftops to sleep on. He found an abandoned apartment stairwell that didn’t reek of piss. He stopped stealing from people with children. Not out of guilt. Just… principle.

His empathy kept him safe.

It told him which cops were bored and lazy versus those aching to swing a baton. It told him which teens would fight him, and which would run. It told him when to be invisible—and when to let people feel just enough pity to leave food behind “accidentally.”

It told him everything—except how to feel human again.

One night, two weeks in, he passed by a small neighborhood playground. The swing creaked gently in the breeze. A mother was there, kneeling to zip up her child’s coat. Her hands were gentle. Her voice soft. The little boy looked up and laughed—pure, bright, warm.

Izuku stopped.

He watched them from the shadows, his heart pounding. The woman lifted the boy into her arms. He giggled, wrapping tiny arms around her neck.

“Love you, mama!”

Her laugh echoed into the dark. Something inside Izuku split open. His knees buckled. He stumbled into the alley beside the park and dropped to the ground, gasping for air like he was drowning. He tried to scream, but no sound came. Just heaving sobs and silent tears that burned as they fell. His chest ached like something had been ripped from it years ago—and only now did he feel the hole it left behind.

He curled in on himself, clutching his ribs like it would keep him from coming apart. She left me.

The thought stabbed through his mind again and again. She left me.

He couldn’t stop crying. He was free. He was alive. He was alone.

And for the first time in a decade, he realized freedom didn’t mean safety. Freedom meant surviving with the ghost of what could’ve been.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The moonlight barely reached the cracked pavement of the old warehouse district. Izuku walked with quiet footsteps, his breath misting in the cold air as he hugged his jacket close. It had been over three weeks since he’d escaped, and each day without pills or sedatives felt like walking on thin ice. He’d learned quickly that freedom didn’t mean safety—it meant uncertainty. Hunger gnawed at him constantly. Trust was a luxury. People were unpredictable. The city was a jungle built on rules he didn’t understand anymore.

Tonight, his empathy buzzed with tension like static. He was following a familiar pattern now—slink into populated spaces, feel for emotional heat, and disappear when things turned volatile. Most of his meals came from scoping out late-night diners and reading the emotions of patrons. He knew which people would ignore him, who was feeling generous, who might leave food behind. He never stole directly, not yet. But desperation had teeth.

He’d picked this industrial street thinking it would be quiet. It wasn’t.

From an alley up ahead, a scuffle broke out—sharp yells and the crunch of fists. Izuku flattened himself against a rusting dumpster, reaching out instinctively with his quirk. Fear. Rage. Amusement. Someone was enjoying the violence. Someone else was terrified.

He peered out.

Three men—mid-twenties, dressed in patchy street gear—were cornering a boy no older than thirteen. Small, wiry. Probably had a weak quirk. One of the attackers conjured a whip of light from his palm, cracking it threateningly.

Izuku’s fingers trembled. That used to be him—weak, alone, outnumbered. But this time he could feel their emotions: dominance, adrenaline, cruelty. They liked doing this.

He stepped out before he could think better of it.

“Hey.”

They all turned. The light-whip vanished as its user blinked in confusion.

“What the hell do you want, greenie?”

Izuku stared. Blank. Numb. He let his aura slip—not the full flood, but enough to infect the attackers with unease. It crept in like cold water soaking into their shoes. Doubt. Guilt. Anxiety.

“Leave him alone,” Izuku said quietly.

“What—” one started to say, then stopped, rubbing his neck like something had suddenly curled around his spine.

The tension spiraled. One attacker took a step forward, then halted.

“Let’s just go, man,” said another. “Something’s wrong with this guy.” The whip user spat on the ground, but didn’t argue. They backed away, glancing nervously at Izuku like he was a stormcloud about to burst. They vanished into the shadows without another word.

Izuku exhaled. Then he felt it—someone else watching.

A faint shift in the emotional current. Not aggressive. Not scared. Something far more dangerous: composed. Behind him, a voice said, “You didn’t fight them. You made them feel like they were already losing.” Izuku turned slowly.

A tall figure stood at the edge of the alley—draped in dark, fitted gear. Leather gloves. A simple utility mask covering the lower face. Piercing gray eyes under short, ashen hair.

A girl.

“I didn’t want to fight,” Izuku replied.

The boy who had been cornered bolted the second he saw her. Izuku didn’t blame him. She stepped forward. Their presence didn’t overwhelm, but commanded attention. They had the quiet weight of someone used to danger—and disillusionment.

“Name’s Raika. You’ve got an empathy-based quirk.”

Izuku didn’t respond.

Raika tilted their head. “I can feel deception. It’s hard to lie around me. And you—” they paused. “You’re full of truth. But the kind people can’t handle.”

Izuku shifted back, uncertain. “Are you a hero?”

Raika shook their head. “Pff seriously, do I look like a hero.”

Something about that answer made Izuku want to ask more. But he didn’t.

“You’re young,” Raika said. “And alone. But not helpless.” They studied him for a beat longer. “What’s your name?”

Izuku hesitated. For years, he hadn’t used it. Not since they started calling him Subject 13-A. Not since his mother stopped writing back. “Doesn’t matter,” he said. Raika didn’t press.

Instead, they pulled something from their coat—a protein bar. “You’ve been surviving. You’ll keep surviving. But if you’re smart, you won’t let yourself get used to it.”

Izuku accepted the bar slowly. His hands shook as he tore open the wrapper. Raika turned to leave.

“Wait,” Izuku said.

Raika glanced back.

“Why help me?”

A small flicker of a smile beneath the mask. “Because someday, you’ll have to choose what kind of ghost you want to be. You’re not done haunting the people who made you.” Then they were gone.

Izuku stood there for a long time in the silence. Something new flickered in him. Not hope. Not yet. But something that watched hope from far away.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The tunnels beneath the city breathed in a different rhythm—cool air flowing like whispers over concrete, steady, mechanical, distant from the pulse of surface life. Izuku had made these shadows his home. Not for safety. Not for comfort. But because they were familiar. Controlled. Silent. He could breathe down here.

He didn’t move quickly. Not anymore. Every step was deliberate, every target carefully chosen. He studied people with the same meticulous observation he once used on All Might videos as a child—only now, it wasn’t admiration in his eyes. It was calculation.

Emotionally, he was efficient. He no longer broadcasted his empathy like a beacon. He funneled it through himself like a current, sharpening it. He could brush past someone in the street and know exactly what to say to break them. Or guide them. Or manipulate them. Sometimes, he used it to avoid trouble. Other times, he used it to provoke it.

And then came Daichi.

Izuku first noticed him at the edge of a black market meeting held in an abandoned train station. The gathering was filled with outcasts, mercenaries, small-time vigilantes, and unaffiliated quirk users looking to survive or sell their power. Izuku didn’t speak. He just watched. He liked the way Daichi stood apart from the others. Head down. Eyes flicking around. Like he was watching for something that would never show up.

Daichi didn’t speak until later, when the group had dispersed and only silence remained.

“You’re not scared of anyone in this room,” he said without looking directly at Izuku. “But you scare everyone else.”

Izuku turned to him slowly. “I heard you used to be a hero student.”

Daichi gave a bitter chuckle. “Used to be. U.A. let me go after what happened during my second-year internship. My quirk destroyed three city blocks when I panicked. They said I ‘needed support outside the hero path.’ I know what that meant.”

Izuku’s eyes didn’t blink. “They discarded you.”

“Like trash,” Daichi nodded. “And now the Commission sends people like Echo Diversion to make sure ‘mistakes’ like me stay buried.”

That name—Echo Diversion—had begun to swirl in rumors. Not many survived encounters with them, but the few who did spoke of surgical raids, emotional inhibitors, and erasure tactics designed to make people disappear without headlines.

Izuku thought of the red wing. Of the white pills. Kamura's face twisted in rage. Of the files marked Subject 13-A. His voice came out low.

“Do you want to burn it all down?” Daichi’s gaze sharpened. “I want to remind them that we never stopped existing.”

It wasn’t an alliance, not yet. But it was something. A shared ache. A shadow of something bigger. This boy, with the too-quiet voice and eyes like sharpened glass, understood pain in a way the world refused to acknowledge.

He still dreamed of his mother. Her arms. Her warmth. But each dream ended with an empty house. And each day, his vision sharpened: not justice, not heroism—but redefinition.

If they called him a villain…he would show them what they created.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

It was raining. Not the clean kind. The kind that came down oily, speckled with black grit that stuck to your skin and left streaks on rusted metal. The streets in the lower districts never dried—just gathered puddles that mirrored a broken sky.

Izuku stood beneath the lip of an old billboard frame, his hood soaked, eyes dull. He hadn’t eaten in two days. He didn’t feel hunger the same way anymore—not since the facility. His body learned to silence most needs. But the rain, the cold, the noise of the city he didn’t understand—they scraped at his mind like tiny knives.

He tried not to look anyone in the eye as they passed. He’d already accidentally sent a market vendor into a rage earlier that day just by brushing too close. He was still learning. Still trying to control it.

A static pulse of stress licked at the edge of his perception. Not fear. Not anger. Focus. Frustration. He followed it through a back alley of fried neon signs and dumpsters, down an old stairwell covered in graffiti and peeled warning tape.

There was a broken maintenance door kicked in. Beyond it: humming. Electrical buzz. The sharp smell of solder and burnt plastic.

Then: clang. He stopped at the threshold. Inside, someone cursed. “Damn it! Come on, you piece of junk…”

A girl—around his age, maybe younger—sat cross-legged on the floor of an old subway maintenance room. Cables, busted screens, circuit boards scattered around her like a nest. She had grease on her cheeks, wild black hair pulled into a frayed bun, and her knee was bouncing like a jackhammer.

She looked up—and froze.

Izuku stayed silent. Dripping. Watching. She reached slowly toward her hip. Some kind of device was clipped to her belt. Not a weapon exactly. More like a scrambled-together EMP grenade. Sloppy build, but dangerous in close quarters.

“You Commission?” she asked, voice hard.

Izuku’s throat tightened. “No.”

“You sure? You’ve got that whole... freaky stalker vibe going on.”

“I don’t work for them.”

She eyed him again. Sharp eyes. Mistrusting, but not panicked. “Then what do you want?”

“I felt you,” he said quietly.

“…You felt me?”

He gestured vaguely toward the wires. “Your signal’s loud. Emotional clutter. Fast thoughts. Frustration. You’re trying to fix something without the right tools.” She stared.

“…That’s either the creepiest thing I’ve heard today or the most accurate. Maybe both.”

Izuku stepped into the room slowly. “What are you building?”

“Not building. Rebuilding,” she muttered, not taking her eyes off him. “Old data spike node. Used to be a surveillance tap. I’ve been gutting it for parts. Thought I could turn it into a sniffer to track the Hero Commission.” He tensed slightly at the name. She noticed.

“We’ll take care of them as well. Don't worry.”

She relaxed a little. Not fully—but her hand moved away from the device on her belt.

“I’m Mika,” she said cautiously. “My quirk lets me read frequencies—wireless, bioelectric, emotional. And short stuff out if I’m pissed enough.” Izuku didn’t offer his name.

After a moment, she stood, dusted her pants off, and grabbed a crooked screwdriver. “You got a name or are you just gonna keep standing there like a wet ghost?” He looked around the room—at the flickering bulb, the dented toolbox, the spray of cable-twine chaos. It reminded him of something—but he couldn’t remember what. Maybe a memory from when he was still Izuku Midoriya. Before the pills. Before the testing.

“…No name,” he said finally.

Mika raised a brow. “Okay, ‘No Name.’ You got a place to stay?”

He hesitated.

“Didn’t think so,” she said. “I don’t do charity. But I owe you for not frying your nervous system when you snuck up on me. So here—” she shoved a half-wrapped protein bar into his hand. “Eat. Then go crawl back to your sewer pipe or whatever.”

He took it. Slowly. Nodded.

She turned back to her wires. “And hey... if you ever figure out what you're doing in this hellhole, maybe come back. I could use someone who sees things I can’t.”

He lingered in the doorway, watching her work. And for the first time in weeks—maybe months—he felt something shift. A thread. A pull. She didn’t ask for anything from him. She just saw him.

He walked away without saying another word. But that night, as he found shelter in a rusted tunnel with nothing but rain and rats for company, he remembered her face. The sparks behind her eyes. The stubbornness.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

2 Weeks Later

Izuku’s hideout wasn’t easy to find. It wasn’t meant to be.

Buried beneath a long-abandoned rail line, sealed behind a half-collapsed maintenance shaft, the only way in required crawling through jagged concrete and timing it between the echo of freight trains. Most people would’ve given up before they even noticed the hidden hatch behind the stack of scrap metal.

But they found him anyway.

He felt them before he heard them—three distinct emotional signatures approaching. Tense. Measured. Watching. He didn’t panic. Just stepped away from the flickering monitors he’d scavenged, turned down the sound on a radio tuned to police signals, and waited.

Then: footsteps. A soft knock on the rusted metal door. He didn’t answer it. A pause. Then a voice: dry, calm, unreadable.

“I know you’re in there.”

Raika.

He’d met her first—weeks ago, when his power had rippled too wide and touched a group of bullies, bullying another person. She’d shown up out of nowhere, unmoved by his quirk, like she was standing in the eye of a storm. Said she could sense truth like it had a scent. She hadn’t tried to hurt him. She just asked questions. Too many.

Her quirk let her feel lies like a scent in the air. She was older, maybe seventeen or eighteen, and her voice was like the scrape of flint.

Next voice was gruffer.

“Come on, man. You knew we’d find you.”

Daichi.

His emotions always hit heavy. Not chaotic—just… burdened. He carried guilt like a coat he couldn’t take off. Former U.A. dropout. Earth-cracking quirk. Broken history.

Finally, Mika.

“You know, for someone who skulks around and avoids everyone, you leave just enough breadcrumbs. Like, were you trying to be found?”

She was twitchy. Always thinking too fast. She’d been the one to connect the signals—spike patterns in surveillance zones, tech tampering, police reports that didn’t match. And she hated not knowing things. That’s probably what drove her more than anything. Izuku sighed and moved to the hatch, twisting the latch loose with a groan of metal. 

The door opened. Three figures stepped in.

Raika went first—stoic, dressed in dark grays. Her gray eyes, watching, wondering. Daichi ducked through the entrance, wide-shouldered, his clothes worn and patched from travel. Mika was last, her jacket half-zipped and tool belt clinking, boots leaving muddy streaks as she looked around with the full intensity of a feral raccoon.

Izuku didn’t say a word.

The room was a mix of old tech, scavenged data servers, and makeshift supplies. Strings of dim lights hummed above. A mattress on the ground. A map of the city painted across one wall, full of red marks and tacked-on photos.

“This is... wow,” Mika muttered. “Creepy. But also, like, ten percent genius.”

“Eleven,” Raika corrected.

Izuku’s voice was low. “Why are you here.”

It wasn’t a question. It was a warning. They knew better than to take it personally. Raika answered first. “Because we’ve seen what you’re doing. And we’ve been doing the same.”

“You’ve been watching me?”

“Yes,” Raika said.

“For how long?”

“A while,” Mika admitted. “We didn’t know it was you at first. Just rumors. A silent presence at the edge of every stir-up. Civilians reporting 'ghost pressure.' The more I tracked it, the more I realized—this was someone like us. Smarter than us, probably. Stronger. Doing things we couldn't. And I needed to know who.”

Daichi stepped forward. “I came because I know what it’s like to be thrown out and told you’re dangerous. Because when I heard what you can do, without laying a hand on them, I knew you were something different.” Izuku leaned back against the wall, half-shadowed.

“You want something.”

“We want change,” Raika said simply. “Same as you.”

Mika crossed her arms. “Maybe not exactly the same as you. I’m not into breaking the system just to burn it down. I want control back. I want to live without hiding. Without seeing people disappear in the middle of the night.”

“I want to destroy the Hero Commission,” Daichi said, voice harder than expected.

Raika stayed quiet. Then: “I want the truth.”

They all looked at him. He stayed quiet for a long time.

“…You don’t know what I am,” he finally said.

“No,” Raika said. “But we know what you’re not. You’re not a killer. You’re not a tyrant. You’re not the hero commission.”

Mika added, “You’re not running scared either.”

Raika tilted her head. “You’re not just angry. You’re thinking long-term. That’s what I want. Someone who won’t burn everything down just to feel powerful.”

Izuku’s gaze dropped to the ground. His fists clenched slightly. The pressure in the room thickened.

“…This isn’t a team.”

“We’re not asking for a team,” Daichi said. “We’re offering a direction.”

He paused.

“You’re already leading it.”

That struck something. Izuku looked up—just slightly. Conflicted. Haunted. But not alone.

“…You can stay the night,” he said finally.

And just like that, the moment became something more. The four of them—damaged, dangerous, unwanted—became a quiet storm gathering underground. 

That night, the four of them sat around a broken table—Daichi throwing dice into a cracked mug, Mika disassembling a stolen comm device, Raika with her hands folded in silence, and Izuku at the head. No one called him Midoriya. They all called him “Misery” now. The name had spread—first in whispers, then in rumors. The boy who could break your mind without lifting a finger. Who didn’t need to fight to win.

This was the start. Not a family. Not even friends. But something aligned. They didn’t need speeches. Or costumes. Or names.

Just the understanding that they saw the world breaking. And they weren’t going to wait for someone else to fix it.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The hideout was dim, lit by old filament bulbs and the flicker of outdated monitors. A soft hum of machinery underscored the tension in the air, like a warning buried under stillness.

Izuku stood at the edge of the room’s centerpiece—a chalk-marked table covered in files, photographs, surveillance feeds, and handwritten notes in thin, almost surgical penmanship. Maps of hero patrol zones. Hero Commission reports. Schedules of known villain sweeps. Emotional profiles of selected heroes.

Around him, Raika leaned against the wall, arms folded, expression unreadable as always. Daichi sat on a reinforced crate, thumbing through a bent file. Mika crouched near one of the laptops, her fingers dancing over keys as she skimmed through hacked Commission networks.

No one spoke for a while. Then Izuku finally said, “We start with what they trust most.” They all turned.

“Heroes,” he continued, “trust each other. That’s their weak point. That illusion of unity. The belief that they all stand on the same side.” He looked up slowly, green eyes glowing faintly in the monitor light. “We break that.”

Raika raised an eyebrow. “By killing them?”

Izuku shook his head immediately. “No. I don’t want martyrs. I want doubt.”

Daichi leaned forward, nodding slowly. “You want them to fear each other.”

“Yes,” Izuku said, voice low but firm. “We start small. We pick target zones. Places where patrols overlap. We let two heroes arrive at the same scene—and one of them panics. Attacks first. Or hesitates and causes damage.”

Mika’s fingers paused. “…You can do that?”

“I don’t need full control,” Izuku replied. “I just need to feed them what’s already there. Paranoia. Stress. Their own buried guilt. I don’t make them do anything. I just… press at the right time.”

Raika spoke next. “That alone won’t shake the system. People will think it’s an isolated incident.”

Izuku nodded. “That’s why it needs to happen again. And again. Different heroes. Different emotional triggers. Mid-battle collapses. Freezes. Lapses in judgment. All while civilians watch. While it gets caught on tape.”

Daichi grunted. “The public starts to see heroes break. And once that image cracks…”

“It never reforms,” Izuku finished.

Mika pushed back from the computer and stood, pacing now. Her nerves always buzzed when a good plan came together. “We could feed audio to their comms—pre-recorded lines that match their worst memories. That last scream. A command they ignored. Something their brain connects with failure.”

Raika added, “We also isolate ones who are already mentally stretched. Hound Dog's evaluations. Interviews from off-records. Mika can find those.”

Mika gave a small salute. “Already scraping. The Commission tracks everything. Even trauma is filed like inventory.”

Daichi exhaled through his nose, jaw clenched. “If we’re doing this, we need to be ready for retaliation. Echo Division. Blacksite operatives. They’ll come for us when they realize this isn’t random.”

“We won’t give them a pattern,” Izuku said. “This isn’t a war of strength. It’s erosion.” He stepped closer to the map on the wall and tapped three red-circled locations.

“Shinjuku. Osaka. U.A. periphery patrols. All sites with overlapping hero teams. All with known tension between members. We hit them first.”

Mika tilted her head. “And you’re sure you can… trigger them?”

Izuku nodded once, but his voice dropped softer. “I don’t control thoughts. But emotions… I can guide them. Heighten them. I know how people spiral.” There was a quiet beat after that. No one moved.

Then Daichi spoke again, softer this time. “Hey… you never talk about where you came from. Hell, you never even told us your real name.”

Izuku’s posture stiffened slightly. Daichi continued, awkward but not unkind. “I mean, we all got wrecked by the system in different ways. You’re the only one who doesn’t say how.”

Mika glanced up from her screen. “Yeah, I’ve always wondered. You act like someone who’s seen the inside of something worse than prison. Is that what happened to you?”

Raika didn’t say anything, but her eyes never left him. Quiet pressure. Izuku stayed still, staring at the maps like they might protect him.

“…I was put somewhere,” he said eventually. “Facility Eleven. It was supposed to help. It didn’t.”

Mika’s brow furrowed. “That’s Commission-level. They don’t put people in there unless—”

“They thought I was dangerous,” Izuku interrupted, tone dry and final.

Another silence. Daichi looked away, jaw tight. Raika’s voice was low. “Your mom put you in there?” Izuku blinked. Then said quietly, “She tried to protect me. She… didn’t win.”

Mika looked down. “Shit.”

“No one ever wins against them,” Raika muttered. Izuku didn’t respond. He just turned back to the table, hands tightening on the edge.

“I’m not doing this for revenge,” he said. “This isn’t about anger. This is about breaking what breaks people.”

And with that, the moment passed. Not gone—but buried beneath the weight of what they were planning.

They stood not as rebels, not yet, but as architects of a collapse no one would see coming. No explosives. No assassinations. Just... psychological fractures, slow and deliberate, until the world began to question who its protectors really were.

His fingers grazed the side of a newspaper clipping pinned nearby: “Symbol of Peace Fading?” The title was worn, smudged. But the idea was still fresh in his mind. “They’ve made people believe heroes are infallible. We show them they’re human.”

Raika’s eyes lingered on him. “And if they come for us?” Izuku looked at her, something cold flickering beneath the exhaustion in his face. “Then they prove we’re right.”

Silence settled again. Not awkward. Not afraid. Just heavy—with purpose. It would begin soon. But tonight—they planned.

And Izuku, withdrawn in his corner of shadows and monitors, finally had a shape to his rage. A direction for the pain. A method to his empathy.

He was no longer a child broken by the system. He was the fault line forming beneath it.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The rain had slicked the rooftops with a gleam like oil. Neon signs bled red and green across the glass of the skyline. Below, in the shadowed belly of an industrial district where the Hero Commission's eyes rarely reached, the crew moved like ghosts.

Izuku crouched at the lip of a ventilation shaft, eyes narrowed behind the hood of his jacket. Below him sprawled a three-story logistics depot—a front. Officially it was a shipping company subcontracted by a Pro Hero agency, moving generic tech and quirk-repair parts. Unofficially, it stored confiscated villain tech, black-market emotion suppression units, faulty Quirk-canceling cuffs, and high-grade surveillance disruptors. Exactly what they needed.

“We’re not robbing them,” Izuku had said the night before. “We’re reclaiming tools they stole first.”

Raika stood beside him, quiet and unreadable, visor glinting in the dark. Behind them, Daichi adjusted a support brace on his arm—his quirk destabilized physical material, and without the brace, it could collapse a building if triggered by panic. Mika, lower to the ground, had already slipped through the outer sensors and was waiting by the rear stairwell, her voice a whisper in their comms.

“ North cameras looped. I’ve tapped the motion sensors for nine minutes. After that, it resets.”

Izuku nodded once. “Move.”

Like synchronized muscle, they flowed into the building. Daichi took the north corridor, pushing through weakly sealed loading bays. Raika dropped silently to disable a guard with a jolt of pressure-point precision. Mika was already inside, fingers stripping a reinforced lock with magnetized tools and soft curses in her breath.

Izuku moved through it all like water—silent, observant, surgical.

Inside the central room, crates lined metal racks: boxes labeled with innocuous codes hiding powerful tools meant for suppression. One contained collar-type emotion inhibitors—exactly the model used at Facility 11.

Izuku stared at them for a moment, something hollow opening in his chest. He gritted his teeth and moved on.

Mika slid a crate toward him, eyes sharp. “This one’s filled with neural confusers. Can overload communication headsets or scramble coordination in a squad.”

“Perfect,” he said flatly.

“Don’t need to kill them if they can’t think straight,” Mika added with a grin. Izuku didn’t smile, but he didn’t disagree either.

A thump echoed from the next room. Raika’s voice came through the comms. “ Three guards rerouted. No injuries. ”

Daichi entered with a steel case under his arm. “Found the mapping drone cache. With this, we can model full patrol zones in real time.”

“Good,” Izuku replied. “Let’s move before they notice anything’s gone.”

But of course, something did go wrong.

An early patrol—off schedule. Probably a rookie hero testing his field autonomy. He dropped into the building just as they moved toward the exit. Flash of bright armor. “HEY! You’re trespassing!” The moment snapped like a cord.

Daichi moved forward. “I’ll handle—”

Izuku raised a hand. “No.”

He stepped forward, slow and deliberate. The young hero froze. “Stop—don’t move! I said stop!” But he couldn’t move. His hands trembled. His voice cracked. He stared at Izuku and suddenly felt his chest seize with unease—no, not fear. Guilt. Self-loathing. The memory of a child he failed to save last week surged forward like a wave.

“I told them I wasn’t ready,” the hero whispered.

Izuku’s eyes flicked green in the dark, but he never touched him. Never moved. Never raised a fist. “You didn’t fail,” he murmured, his voice soft, insidious. “They did. They left you out here alone.”

The hero dropped to one knee, gasping, not even sure what was happening. Mika and Raika slipped past him. Daichi followed last, but paused to look at the young man.

“He’s not gonna remember this, right?”

“He’ll remember enough,” Izuku said, walking past, leaving the hero slumped and shaking. They vanished into the night.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Back at the hideout, the haul was spread across the table like a war offering.

Cuffs. Scramblers. Drone tech. Audio distortion loops. Patches for heat cloaking. Everything they'd need to confuse, disorient, and unravel heroes in real-time. Raika sat back, arms crossed. “No one dead. No one even bleeding. You’re making a statement.”

Izuku didn’t look up. “The system made me a ghost. So I’ll haunt it.”

Mika laughed quietly. “People are gonna start wondering who’s behind this.”

“They’ll know soon,” Izuku murmured. “One breakdown at a time.”

And for the first time, all four of them stood in the flickering light, not as scavengers or rebels—but as tacticians of a coming storm. The mission was done. The plan was in motion.

And the world had no idea what was coming.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The screen lit up with dramatic red tones. Bold text stretched across the bottom:

“ HERO SUPPLY DEPOT RAIDED—FOUR UNIDENTIFIED SUSPECTS VANISH INTO THE NIGHT ”

The camera cut to footage captured from a distant traffic drone: smoke curling out of a busted upper window, a glowing green pulse blinking from inside, and panicked agency personnel scrambling behind barricades.

The anchor’s voice came smooth and clear.

“ Late last night, a logistics facility subcontracted by the Yoroi Hero Agency was the target of a highly organized break-in. Officials claim the damage was minimal and no one was seriously injured—but insiders suggest otherwise. ”

Cut to a close-up of the depot’s battered exterior. Steel panels buckled outward, vents blasted open, and scorch marks laced the third floor. A security camera hung from a wire, sparking.

Anchorwoman Jun Hayashi leaned forward at her desk, eyes gleaming with a tension that could pass for curiosity.

“ Officially, the building stored minor tech supplies—nonlethal repair equipment, patrol drones, quirk-safety regulators. But sources within the Commission hint at a more disturbing truth.”

“This site may have been used to store confiscated villain tech, including emotion-suppression rigs and decommissioned quirk-interference prototypes—gear that was never made public. ”

Images flicked across the screen: black helmets with faint red visors, broken crates marked “ DO NOT REGISTER ,” a blurry figure cloaked in shadow stepping over debris—caught for only a second before the feed cut.

“ Four individuals. No masks. No monologue. No name claimed. And yet… the name 'Misery' is once again circulating in online forums. ”

Cut to a panel of talking heads—a retired hero and an older Pro Hero wearing a tight expression.

Retired Hero, Crimson Fox :

“ This wasn’t some random villain hit. It was surgical. Coordinated. They didn’t trash the place—they took exactly what they wanted and disappeared. ”

Pro Hero Aegiron :

“ We don’t have confirmation this 'Misery' even exists. But the idea alone—some manipulative ghost picking us apart psychologically—is already doing damage. Whoever started this rumor... knew exactly what they were doing. ”

Back in the studio, Jun Hayashi lifted a printed still frame. A green glow on the corner of a shattered console. No face. No identity.

“ What we do know is that the strike team left no trace. No DNA. No prints. The only physical clue was this— ”

She gestured to the photo of a small black card found near the depot's mainframe.

Burned into it, the word:

Misery.

“ No manifesto. No demands. Just… silence. But silence is beginning to feel very loud. ”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Director Kamura stood before a wall of reports. His hand hovered over a glowing screen where grainy heat signatures tracked the intruders’ path.

“Minimal casualties. Precision coordination. They knew what they were looking for.”

Agent Kuroda frowned. “We kept the inventory off-grid. How did they even know it was there?”

Kamura didn’t answer. His eyes stayed locked on a single word:

Misery.

He exhaled. “If he’s building something… we’re already behind.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

It was supposed to be a break night.

No planning. No prepping. No raids. Just the crew holed up in the hideout with half-functioning heaters and a pirated movie streaming on a projector Mika had rigged up from parts she claimed “literally fell off a hero drone.”

Daichi had dragged in a crate of old snacks from a black market run—slightly expired, likely stolen from a warehouse, but edible. Raika, unusually silent even for her, sat at the back wall with her arms crossed, watching the screen but also watching them. Always watching.

Mika, halfway lying on a beat-up couch, popped a handful of popcorn into her mouth. “This is the best part,” she said, nudging Izuku who sat beside her, stiff as a post. “He’s about to confess he’s been the ghost the whole time.”

Izuku’s eyes narrowed slightly. “But he died in the first act.”

“Right, but that’s the twist.” She grinned. “It’s art. Just go with it.”

He stared at the screen like it was written in another language. Then he frowned deeper—not at the plot, but at the popcorn in his hand.

“What… is this?” he asked quietly.

Daichi glanced over, brows raised. “You mean the movie?”

Izuku shook his head. “This.” He held up the fluff in his fingers. “It… smells like burnt plastic. But it’s soft.”

Mika blinked, then laughed, but it wasn’t mocking—it was confused, then realizing. “Wait—have you never had popcorn?”

Izuku looked at her, expression unreadable, then looked away. “No.”

There was a pause. A long one. Even Raika straightened slightly, looking toward him now.

“No movie nights in your concrete box, huh,” Daichi muttered, half-joking, then immediately regretted it. Izuku didn’t respond.

He placed the piece of popcorn back in the bowl carefully, like it didn’t belong to him.

Mika sat up. “Hey… it’s just food, nothing weird. Look.” She tossed a kernel in the air and caught it in her mouth.

Izuku flinched a little. He tried one. Just one. Chewed slowly. Paused. Then nodded once, very faintly, like he wasn’t quite sure how to process it. His voice was almost a whisper.

“It’s… salty.”

And that was it.

They watched him quietly after that. Even the movie’s sound seemed to fade into the background. He’d missed ten years of life.

Ten years of dumb films and bad snacks. Of birthdays and junk food and the ability to recognize simple comforts without suspicion. The small rituals that made people feel normal.

Izuku was brilliant. Dangerous. Unpredictable. But right now he was just… disconnected.

Like a ghost flickering into a world he was never meant to rejoin. Mika finally said, soft but certain, “We’ll show you the rest.”

He didn’t answer. Just watched the screen, eyes distant. Somewhere behind the static of his expression, a part of him ached. But he nodded.

And for tonight, that was enough.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Rain pelted the windows of the temporary patrol outpost, gray streaks blurring the view of the empty street beyond. Inside, a group of Pro Hero interns gathered around a small TV bolted to the wall, grainy footage replaying on loop.

The camera panned over scorched concrete and shattered glass—the aftermath of a raid on a logistics depot three nights ago. No confirmed casualties, just stunned guards and stolen tech. But what caught the attention of the country, and of the heroes in this room, was the word left behind:

Misery.

Bakugou stared at the screen, arms crossed tight over his chest. He hadn’t spoken since the broadcast began.

“They’re calling him a myth,” said Uraraka, her voice quiet, thoughtful. “Some kind of ghost. Rumors say he can break people without touching them.”

Todoroki, seated nearby, didn’t look up. “That footage... one of the guards collapsed mid-sentence. Just… dropped to his knees and started screaming about a failed rescue.”

Silence. The flickering light of the TV danced across their faces.

“They say it was emotional warfare,” added Kirishima from the corner. “No physical attack. No signs of a quirk being used. But every time this guy shows up… people snap. Or turn on each other.”

“Or disappear,” muttered Bakugou, finally.

Everyone turned toward him. “I’ve heard those Commission bastards talk about this kind of thing,” he said, jaw clenched. “Back when I interned under Hawks. Black-bag operations. Tech that screws with your brain. But this—this isn’t tech.”

He nodded once at the screen, eyes sharp. “This is someone.”

Uraraka glanced between them. “Do you think he’s working with villains? Or alone?”

Bakugou didn’t answer right away.

Then: “No villain leaves people alive when they can silence them. This guy… he wants people to talk. Wants us to see him.”

A quiet pause followed. Todoroki, calm as ever, said, “He’s drawing lines. Choosing who gets broken. Who gets spared.”

“And who gets to watch,” Uraraka added, voice tight.

The news anchor’s voice buzzed again, still listing off speculations. Nothing concrete. Just shadows and stories.

Todoroki finally looked at Bakugo. “You think he’s the real threat?” Bakugo’s gaze didn’t leave the screen.

“I think,” he said, low, “we’ve seen something like this before. We just didn’t know it at the time.”

And somewhere in the static, in the gaps between facts, a memory stirred—of a quiet, green-eyed boy who used to mumble strategies under his breath. A boy who vanished ten years ago.

But Bakugou never said that name out loud.

Not yet.

Chapter Text

The air in Shinjuku was thick with the scent of oil and damp concrete. Neon signs buzzed overhead, flashing offers no one believed in, illuminating the cracked sidewalk in hues of sickly green and candy pink. Late evening foot traffic dragged its way along the street—salarymen with slack ties, teenagers in wrinkled uniforms, mothers gripping children by the wrist and muttering warnings. All of them ignored the man on the ground.

He sat hunched beside a rusted light pole, cradling an empty paper bowl in shaking hands. Dirt blackened the creases of his face. His nails were cracked and yellowed. The food wrappers scattered around him had long since dried in the wind, but still, he whispered in a hoarse voice, over and over:

“Please. Just one bite. Just one... please.”

No one met his eyes. No one stopped.

Until they did.

Two pro heroes rounded the corner, scanning the sidewalk with practiced efficiency. They wore matching jackets over their combat gear—Urban Tide and Phosphor. Mid-tier heroes. Known for crowd control and small-patrol coordination. Not flashy, but reliable. Urban Tide walked with a slight limp from an old patrol injury, and Phosphor’s visor gleamed in the streetlight, eyes hidden beneath amber glass.

“Disturbance, ten meters ahead,” Phosphor said, voice clipped. “Vagrant presence. No immediate threat.”

“Yeah, well, it doesn't take a villain to start a panic,” Urban Tide muttered. “Let’s just move him along.”

But as they approached, something in the air shifted. A weight—not physical, but heavy all the same—settled over their shoulders like waterlogged cloth. The noise of the street dimmed, muffled, like the city was holding its breath.

The begging man looked up. And Urban Tide stopped cold.

There was nothing remarkable in the man’s face—no weapon, no flash of a quirk, no sudden movement. But his eyes… they were drowning. They were endless. Sadness, so pure and bottomless it felt like gravity, stared back at him.

“I know you,” the man rasped. “You looked away from me last winter. You passed by like the rest.”

Urban Tide opened his mouth to refute it—he’d never seen this guy before—but the words caught in his throat. A memory surfaced unbidden. A cold alley. A man with frostbitten hands. His own voice saying, "Not my problem." And suddenly that moment wasn’t just a footnote—it ached. It accused.

“You could’ve helped me,” the man whispered. “You should’ve helped me.”

“I didn’t— I couldn’t—” Urban Tide backed up a step. His breathing hitched. “You don’t know what I— I tried—”

“Did you?” The man’s voice was soft, almost kind. “Then why do you feel guilty?”

Phosphor turned sharply. “Tide. What the hell are you doing?”

But his partner had begun shaking. Visibly. “Don’t you get it? I left him. Just like the others. I walked away—”

“Snap out of it,” Phosphor growled, grabbing his arm.

And then everything cracked.

“Don’t touch me!” Urban Tide roared, shoving Phosphor so hard he stumbled backward into a trash bin. “You always act like you’re better than everyone. Like you're not hiding something, too.”

Phosphor pushed off the bin, eyes flaring. “Are you serious right now? This isn’t me! This is— this is you, freaking out again!”

And that was it. The words sliced too deep. Urban Tide lunged.

What followed was a fight, a breakdown in motion. Screams echoed down the alleyway as both heroes turned on each other—tackling, swinging, shoving, throwing errant bursts of power. Phosphor’s energy shields flared in jagged bursts. Urban Tide retaliated with water-pressure blasts meant for crowd dispersal. Windows shattered. A car alarm screamed. One of them bled.

The begging man vanished. No one saw when.

Bystanders screamed. Some ran. Others pulled out phones. Cameras clicked and rolled as two pro heroes, both shouting fragmented confessions and accusations—You left me behind! You never cared! I saved your life and you spat on it!—tore into each other in full public view.

Somewhere above, on the edge of a rooftop, a shadow stood perfectly still.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Later that night, as emergency crews picked glass from the gutters and loaded both heroes—bruised, wild-eyed, and muttering—into restraint vans for mental evaluation, a group of shaken civilians huddled behind caution tape. Their phones glowed with replayed footage. Hashtags bloomed like digital bloodstains across the net.

#HeroBreakdown

#ShinjukuIncident

#ProHeroMentalCrisis

#EmpathyEmergence

A girl in a school uniform whispered to her friend, “Did you see their eyes? Like they were somewhere else.”

“They were fighting each other,” the friend muttered. “And honestly, it looked like they were fighting themselves.”

A vendor shook his head. “Not right man. They were being puppeted, I swear. Like something got in their heads.”

“I saw someone,” another voice said suddenly. A man with a grease-stained jacket and wide, frightened eyes. “In the alley. I was dumping trash, and I felt… wrong. Like I remembered everything bad I ever did all at once. Like someone pressed their hands into my thoughts.”

The others stared at him.

“What did they look like?”

He hesitated. “I… I don’t know. I didn’t see their face. Just—just green, glowing eyes. Like they weren’t even angry. Just… watching.”

From a broken skylight far above, hidden beneath layers of shadow and silence, Misery watched the crowd disperse.

No gloating. No laughter. Just his breath, barely visible in the cold.

He pulled his hood tighter, eyes dull beneath the dim green hue of suppressed emotion. In the distant street, a medic cradled a dazed Urban Tide’s head and asked, “Can you tell me what happened?”

Urban Tide sobbed quietly. “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to…”

Misery turned and slipped into the dark.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

It started during a hostage call at a convenience store in the Osaka district.

Two pro heroes—Redstorm and Steeltrack—stood outside the scene perimeter, preparing to breach. A civilian had triggered the panic button inside, and security feeds showed a frantic man waving a weapon near the register, clearly unwell. No hostages harmed yet. Minimal threat. A standard call.

“Why’d they send us to babysit a cracked-out thief?” Redstorm muttered, checking the charge on his quirk amplifier. His gauntlets sparked with restrained plasma.

“Because we’re efficient,” Steeltrack replied coolly, adjusting his wrist rig. His eyes swept the digital map displayed on his visor. “Let’s just clear it and go home.”

On a nearby rooftop, lying flat on his stomach, Daichi exhaled slowly through his nose. The stolen Hero Commission recon tablet balanced on the ledge beside him hummed faintly. It was tapping into the pro heroes’ comms, visual telemetry, and vitals. One touch and he could spike their HUDs with ghost images, reroute their tracking feeds, or pump in controlled stress signals.

He didn’t speak. He didn’t need to.

Behind him, crouched in a broken skylight window, Misery stood still as stone, eyes flickering green. The alley behind the store was empty save for a discarded toy and a splash of oil. Emotion radiated outward from him in invisible waves, like slow, curling fog.

Inside the store, the man with the weapon dropped it suddenly and collapsed into quiet sobbing.

Redstorm flinched. “Subject is down?” He checked the feed again. “No way. No contact.”

Steeltrack lowered his weapon slightly. “That’s... not normal.”

Misery didn’t step into view, but they felt him.

A sudden chill brushed the back of Redstorm’s neck. Guilt he’d buried years ago—the civilian he didn’t save during a landslide rescue, the broken body under rubble—rose with gut-twisting force. The scent of blood filled his nose.

He staggered back.

Steeltrack turned, confused—then his world shifted. A crack in his father’s voice at the hospital years ago: “I’m not proud of what you became.” The one thing he’d sealed up behind pride and precision returned like a roar.

Daichi tapped the screen once. Their heart rates spiked in real time.

“Control,” Redstorm gasped into his mic, “I— I'm getting interference. Someone’s—someone’s in my head—”

Steeltrack stepped toward him, disoriented. “Back off. What are you doing? Why are you doing this?!”

“Doing what?!”

“*You always wanted me to crack. You think you’re better than me. You said it—*you said it in Hokkaido!”

“I never— That was years ago!”

The fight exploded without a villain.

Glass shattered as Redstorm slammed Steeltrack into the hood of a responding squad car, sending sparks dancing. Pedestrians screamed. Cameras caught the moment Redstorm yelled, “You think I forgot what you did?!” and Steeltrack answered, “You buried it like a coward!”

A frozen image from the livestream captured them both mid-punch, tears on one face, rage on the other.

From the rooftop, Daichi winced. “That one’s gonna leave a mark,” he muttered.

“On them,” Misery murmured, “or the world?”

Daichi didn’t answer. He looked back at the feed. Steeltrack’s emotions had shifted sharply—his wave pattern dipping into despair. He wouldn’t remember what he said afterward, but the words were already on the net.

"I never wanted to be a hero. They made me."

A block away, a civilian live streamed the incident from a fire escape, her voice shaky.

“Two pro heroes just lost it. It’s like… it’s like something broke them. There was no villain. Just… each other.”

She panned the camera upward, toward a flicker of movement on the rooftop. For a second—less than a second—green eyes stared back. And were gone.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The Hero Commission had planned the event for weeks.

A gleaming white stage was erected in the Chiyoda ward, right outside the Commission’s central office. Banners fluttered overhead in red, gold, and blue. Behind a row of spotless podiums, the Commission had gathered a lineup of rising stars—Pro Heroes from the newest “Integrity Initiative,” a PR project to restore faith in public safety after the the distrust shown by the public.

Among them stood Hawks’ former protégé, Vantage , now a solo pro known for charisma and crowd control, hailed as “the future face of transparency.”

He smiled as the cameras turned to him.

“Trust,” Vantage said, voice smooth and practiced, “is the most valuable quirk we have. The world is chaotic, yes. But we are stable. We are strong. We are not afraid.”

A few rows back in the crowd, Raika exhaled through her nose.

She wore a plain courier's uniform and dark glasses. One earbud fed her a low, rhythmic pulse—the real-time resonance frequency of the heroes’ speech patterns, tapped through a salvaged Commission scanner in her bag. The tech was originally used in high-stakes interrogations to detect microfluctuations in emotional regulation and deception.

Now, it was used for something else entirely.

She tilted her head. There. A flutter in Vantage’s voice. His heartbeat spiked mid-sentence. Not fear—dissonance. He didn’t believe what he was saying.

Misery was already nearby. She didn’t see him, but she felt it: the low-pressure weight in the air, like a storm about to burst. Raika’s own mind was iron-tight against it—her quirk made her unusually resistant to emotion-based manipulations—but the crowd?

Not so lucky.

Vantage paused midsentence. The teleprompter kept rolling. A long, uncomfortable silence formed.

Then: “We are not afraid,” he repeated, voice cracking. “We—We are not—afraid.”

He turned slightly toward his colleague on the podium—Lady Dusk, a defensive hero known for barrier generation—and squinted.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked quietly. “Is this… another test?”

Lady Dusk froze. “What?”

“You don’t trust me. You’ve never trusted me.” He looked out at the crowd. “None of you do.”

Gasps and whispers escaped from the crowd.

“You think I got my license early because of talent? That was a cover-up. You all know that. You just smile and nod because it's easier to pretend.”

Lady Dusk tried to calm him, reaching out—but the moment her fingers touched his shoulder, Vantage shoved her away, eyes wild.

“You all lied to me!”

The crowd rippled with panic. The cameras kept rolling. Hero Commission staff moved in, too late.

Raika’s scanner beeped three times in fast succession. Micro-emotional collapse detected.

Across the plaza, hidden high on the catwalk of a floodlight scaffold, Misery watched with unreadable eyes. Emotion flickered outward like a slow-motion pulse. From this distance, it didn’t knock people flat—it just tilted the balance. Just enough to let the pressure inside them leak out.

Raika turned slightly, whispering into her comms line. “Subject cracked. Live. Expect tactical response. Get me the backdoor route.” Daichi’s voice came through: “Way ahead of you. North service alley. Mika’s on overwatch.”

As sirens rose and PR teams scrambled, Vantage collapsed to his knees on live TV, sobbing into his palms.

“I didn’t want this! I didn’t want any of this! I cheated—I cheated on my hero exam…!”

People didn’t cheer. They didn’t boo. They stood there, stunned. Watching the face of a movement fall apart, not in flames, but in raw honesty. And from the crowd, Raika turned and walked away without looking back.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The hospital smelled of antiseptic, blood, and carefully curated optimism. White walls. White floors. White smiles.

In one of the pediatric recovery wings, three pro heroes stood at the foot of a young girl’s hospital bed, posing for cameras. She’d lost her leg during the villain attack that morning—but her face beamed as she clutched a gift bag in her lap, fingers trembling around the card signed by her favorite hero, Starflare .

“You’re brave,” Starflare said, kneeling beside the bed with a practiced softness. “Your light didn’t go out. It just changed shape.”

The little girl blinked at her through swollen eyes. “Will I be a hero too someday?”

Starflare opened her mouth. Stopped. That pause—the hesitation, the flicker of doubt—was all it took.

From the corner of the room, standing just behind the equipment cart, Mika lowered her eyes. She wore a nurse’s scrubs and a surgical mask, a fake ID clipped to her collar. No scanners. No tech. Just a hidden earpiece and her heartbeat synced with the one person not in the room.

Misery was here.

Not visibly. Not physically. But he pressed.

Not like a storm this time—no violent surge. No collapse. Just… the slow unraveling of the seams. Hope twisted into guilt. Joy inverted like a mirror image.

Starflare swallowed.

“I… I don’t know,” she said at last. “Sometimes it’s not about becoming a hero. Sometimes it’s about surviving.”

The girl’s smile dropped.

One of the other heroes—Greywolf, a veteran—stepped forward to recover the moment, but his voice trembled.

“Don’t say that in front of cameras,” he muttered under his breath. “What’s gotten into you?”

Starflare stood. Her expression was pale. Tight. “What if I’m lying to her? What if I’ve always been lying?”

The third hero, Blink, gave a sharp laugh—too loud, too sudden. “Okay, let’s maybe not have an existential breakdown in front of a child.”

“You think I’m breaking down?”

Greywolf stepped between them, eyes narrowing. “I know you’re breaking down. You haven’t been the same since Daitoshi.”

“Don’t say that name!”

“Why not? It's not like you're over it.”

The room tilted on its axis, the fluorescent lights above blurring into streaks as the child clutched his head and began to sob—a raw, high-pitched sound full of panic and pain. One nurse stumbled back, hand over her mouth, her clipboard clattering to the floor. Across the ceiling, the surveillance cameras kept whirring—silent, unblinking—recording every fractured breath, every tremor, every second of unraveling.

Mika didn’t flinch.

From her position in the corner, she whispered into her earpiece, lips barely moving. “They’re ready.” There was no reply. Not audibly.

But she felt it—like the instant before a storm breaks. The air grew heavy, thick with static, and then it hit: a sudden, crushing wave of emotion that didn’t belong to anyone present. It surged through the room with no source, no warning—grief, fear, rage, all tangled together in a suffocating tide that made her breath hitch and her skin crawl.

Misery didn’t speak. He didn’t need to. The air around him pulsed with an invisible force—emotion made manifest, coiling off his skin like heatwaves from a furnace. It radiated outward in sharp, choking currents. Starflare dropped to her knees, sobbing uncontrollably, clutching her face as if trying to hold herself together. Greywolf lashed out, knuckles swinging wild with a roar of confusion and fury, but the punch never landed—he was already unraveling. Blink vanished mid-breath, reappearing on the ceiling in a flicker of light, gasping, clawing at his chest like he was suffocating under a weight only he could feel.

A child nearby let out a shrill scream, covering their ears as if the pressure was a sound too loud to bear. And through it all, Mika turned away—silent, unaffected, her steps steady as she walked out of the room. No fear. No urgency. Just the calm of someone who had seen it all before, long before security burst in too late.

Just before she exited the floor, Mika paused at the end of a dim hallway, the air stale and humming faintly with old electricity. A single exit sign flickered overhead, casting intermittent red light across the tiled floor. She turned her head toward a small observation window—just a slit of reinforced glass in a heavy door. Inside, the room was still. Quiet. Shadows draped over the bed like a shroud. And there, standing at the bedside of a sleeping patient, was Izuku Midoriya. No costume. No mask. No threat. Just a hooded figure cloaked in silence, watching—not menacing, but deeply present, like grief taking human shape. He didn’t move. Didn’t speak. But he felt her, just beyond the glass. And somehow, she knew he always would. He turned slightly, not enough to show his face—just enough to acknowledge her. He didn’t need to look. Mika’s expression didn’t change, but she gave the barest nod. A signal. A goodbye. A promise. Then she turned, and walked into the dark.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

It had been six months.

Six months since the name “Misery” began to haunt the edges of the hero world like a rumor no one wanted to confirm. Since the first wave of unexplained breakdowns—heroes collapsing mid-mission under the weight of their own guilt, rage, or doubt—had left emergency briefings full of uncomfortable silences and Commission officials whispering behind closed doors. Since fear stopped coming from villains with flashy quirks and started seeping in from within. Quiet. Personal. Unstoppable.

And yet, tonight, the warehouse was still.

Izuku Midoriya stood barefoot on the concrete floor, his silhouette painted in the glow of a salvaged monitor—the screen pulsing faint blue like a heartbeat. The space around him was stripped down, skeletal. Wires ran like veins along the walls. Scavenged tech buzzed faintly from makeshift tables. It wasn’t a base, not really. That word felt too permanent, too proud. This was a hiding place. A war room. 

A grave.

He didn’t speak.

Didn’t need to. The weight in the air did it for him.

The emotional static that always lingered in the air around him was low, a gentle thrum beneath his skin—like a storm that hadn’t hit yet. In the solitude, it settled into a numb sort of pressure. Not quite pain. Not quite peace.

Daichi’s last mission had been a success. He’d caused enough panic in a hero patrol zone that three sidekicks had turned on their leader in a blur of guilt and unprocessed fear.

Raika’s manipulation of intel lines had gotten a hero squad into a screaming match in the middle of a rescue.

And Mika… Mika had done something more delicate. Quietly tuned communication equipment to carry Misery’s emotional field in tiny, unnoticeable pulses. Enough to cause mistakes. Doubt. Accidents.

Izuku didn’t watch the news. He felt it. Ripples of consequence echoing off him like sonar.

Still, for all the chaos he’d stirred—for every hero left shaken, every facility breached, every Commission lie dragged into the light—He couldn’t feel proud.

Not when the cost was carved into his bones. Not when each step forward meant more sleepless nights, more silence where a voice should have been, more lines crossed in the name of a truth no one wanted to hear. The system was breaking, yes. But he wasn’t standing above it, victorious.

He was buried in it, dragging the pieces down with him.

He crouched beside the rusted pipe wall and began to sketch in chalk. Not a map. Not a plan. Just motion. Something to keep his hands from trembling. He hadn’t seen Kaede since the escape. Didn’t know where she’d gone. And Inko—his mom—

He didn’t know if she was alive.

He shouldn’t care. That was what they’d trained him to do. Suppress. Compartmentalize. But the thoughts slipped in, uninvited, like water through broken glass.

Had they told her he was dead? Had she stopped looking? Had she believed them?

He inhaled sharply and dropped the chalk. A rush of panic spiked in the room—a wave of shame and sorrow and rage—and then vanished just as quickly, as if the walls themselves had learned to brace for it. Behind him, a light blinked green on one of Mika’s modded receivers. Someone was broadcasting more news.

Izuku didn’t turn it on. Not yet.

Instead, he stood and faced the cracked mirror they'd leaned against a support beam. His reflection looked like a stranger—green eyes dim, hair overgrown, posture curled in like he was still expecting impact. But when he stared long enough, he could still see the boy who cried too easily. The boy who wanted to save everyone.

Now he was the reason they were all afraid. And still…

Still no one knew his name. Misery. They hadn’t said it out loud yet. But they would.

And when they did, he wanted to be ready.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The room was cold in the way only government buildings could be — sanitized, silent, and somehow always smelling faintly of metal and stale coffee.

At the head of the conference table, Director Kamura’s fingers tapped a quiet rhythm against the surface — not impatient, but calculating. Around him, a half-dozen high-ranking Commission analysts, field coordinators, and containment specialists sat in various degrees of tension. Each of them had a tablet in front of them, screens aglow with timestamps, redacted footage, emotion-pattern data, and a singular word at the top of every file:

“Empathy?”

No one spoke first.

It was Agent Saitou — one of the few field operatives old enough to remember Facility 11’s earliest years — who broke the silence. Her voice was low. Grim.

“It’s not isolated. These aren’t random spikes. They’re structured. Targeted. Coordinated across multiple districts.”

 “We have evidence that someone is amplifying emotion-based dissonance. Fear. Guilt. Trauma. We think they’re using stolen Commission tech to transmit fields beyond normal Quirk range.”

Kamura didn’t look up. “And the frequency?”

“Matches the residual data from the Redstorm incident. From the Shinjuku breakdown. From the hero commission stunt last week. All of it traces back to the same neuro-empathic pattern.”

Another analyst leaned forward, tapping quickly through an emotion-mapping overlay. “There’s more. Every incident aligns with confirmed sightings of one of three individuals: a tall female with tectonic manipulation; a female, vigilante-class unknown with truth-based perception; and a male, believed to be ex-UA affiliated. The link between them is this.”

He turned the monitor.

A still frame appeared on screen. A wide surveillance shot of a rooftop in Shinjuku City, blurred by rain — but in the far back, mostly hidden by a tangle of antennae and power cables, was a figure. Hooded. Slight build. Just the suggestion of green in the hair. A shimmer of raw, crackling emotion bleeding through the image like static.

They couldn’t see his face. But they didn’t have to. Agent Kuroda’s voice was quiet. “We have a name.” No one breathed.

Kamura’s hands finally stopped tapping.

“Midoriya Izuku,” Kuroda said, placing a file in the center of the table. It was thin. A record erased, reclassified, buried so deep only the Commission’s oldest ghosts even knew it existed. “Escaped Facility 11. Quirk classified as Class A hazard. Originally labeled as emotional reception. Actual manifestation is full-spectrum emotional manipulation and projection. Codename internally logged as ‘Empathy’” 

The word landed like lead.

Kamura’s eyes narrowed slightly. He opened the file — inside was the only surviving image from before the boy’s intake. He couldn’t have been older than six. Wide-eyed. Tearful. Standing just behind his mother at a press conference no one remembered anymore.

“Empathy,” Kamura repeated softly, as if testing the weight of the name. Then louder: “Six months. Six months since he resurfaced, and not one of you linked these incidents back to him?”

Someone started to speak—stopped. The air was tight with shame and fear.

“We buried this,” She continued. “We told the public he was stabilized. That his Quirk was neutralized. That the program worked.” She voice didn’t rise, but it sharpened. “We dismantled Facility 11 the moment he escaped and scattered the children to obscurity because it was the only way to keep people from questioning the system.”

Saitou spoke again, slower this time. “He’s not just out. He’s building something. Using others. Quiet. Coordinated. He’s taken the name Misery publicly, but internally, we need to use the correct designation.”

She handed Kamura a new file — a blacklist order.

At the top, in bold red:

MIDORIYA, IZUKU — QUOTE: “EMPATHY”

Status: Active threat. Tier I anomaly. DO NOT ENGAGE.

Kamura signed it without blinking.

“Activate Echo Diversion. Track his associates. Freeze all media references to ‘Misery’ — redirect the narrative to a new scapegoat. Initiate Phase Black: if public perception cracks, we lose everything.”

The lights flickered slightly. Outside, somewhere deep in the city, sirens wailed.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The light from the projector cast a pale blue glow over the U.A. classroom, cutting a rectangle across the faces of half-dozing students. Aizawa stood at the front, arms crossed, scarf lazily coiled around his shoulders, eyes scanning the room through tired lashes.

“…And that,” he finished, clicking through the final slide of a hostage rescue case-study, “is why emotional escalation on-scene can compromise more than just your objective. You’re not just heroes. You’re people. Learn yourselves, or someone else will.”

He clicked the projector off. The room brightened as the overheads buzzed back to life. 

“Questions?”

Bakugou yawned loudly. Uraraka glanced over at Todoroki, who seemed distracted, his hand still frozen halfway to raising it. Aizawa noticed the stillness but said nothing. He didn’t have the energy to drag another reluctant emotion out of a teenager today.

“Alright. Don't forget, you have that practice patrol with midnight coming up soon. Dismissed.”

Chairs scraped. Backpacks were slung. The buzz of youth returned in a wave — conversations about lunch, training drills, gossip. Aizawa watched them go, eyes lingering only briefly on Todoroki’s tense posture, Uraraka’s distracted frown.

He waited until the last of them had filed out before he let the weight fall back into his body. When the door clicked shut, he stayed where he was.

He opened a drawer in the podium and pulled out a worn folder — thick with red-marked reports, incident logs, satellite footage, unexplainable emotional spikes cross-referenced with crime scenes and patrol breakdowns.

At the top of the folder, a name was written in his own handwriting.

Midoriya Izuku.

He hadn’t written the name anywhere else — not in Commission reports, not in UA databases. Too dangerous. Too easily flagged. But he hadn’t forgotten him. Not for a single day. It had been 7 years since Facility 11. 7 years since he’d sat across from a too-thin boy in a cold room with an observation mirror and watched him try not to cry. Aizawa had offered his name, his scarf, and his word.

“You don’t belong in there. I’ll come back for you.”

But he hadn’t. Red tape. Reassignments. Then the official line: Izuku Midoriya was transferred. Classified. And eventually, forgotten. Until now.

Aizawa sat down at his desk and powered up the console. A fresh report had come in from an agency contact in a hospital: three pro heroes hospitalized after doing a media stunt with an injured little girl after turning violently on one another. Emotional contagion suspected.

He fed the data into a private filter he’d built — nothing fancy, but it searched through incident logs for irregular emotional triggers. Every incident that matched showed a pattern he couldn’t ignore: sudden guilt spikes. Repressed memories resurfacing. Sudden paranoia without environmental cause. Izuku’s emotional fingerprint.

But more than that — his pain.

This wasn’t a quirk running wild. It was deliberate. Focused. Someone out there was directing it with surgical precision. Aizawa leaned back in his chair and rubbed his eyes.

“You’re not just acting out,” he muttered to the empty room. “You’re sending a message. And no one’s listening.”

But he was. He always had been.

He clicked open the next log — a city camera frame. Just a blur in the rain, a hooded figure vanishing through an alley in the background. Barely noticeable if you didn’t know what to look for. But Aizawa had seen that shape before. That hesitation in his step. That posture like someone trying to take up as little space as possible.

It was him. Izuku. Alive.

The classroom door opened again without a knock. Present Mic poked his head in, sunglasses low on his nose.

“Yo. You alright? Class B’s running a collab op later, you still good to observe?” Aizawa nodded, slow. “Yeah. I’ll be there.”

Mic hesitated, his usual grin dimmed. “You’ve been staying late. Again. Something up?”

Aizawa didn’t answer for a long beat. Then: “Just… a kid I used to know. Slipped through the cracks.”

Mic didn’t press, which was why they were still friends.

When he left, Aizawa stood. He looked out the window toward the city skyline beyond U.A., distant and blurred by smog and clouds. Somewhere out there, a boy who had once asked him — not for rescue, but for hope — was weaponizing the very thing that made him human. Not out of hate. Not yet.

Aizawa could still feel it. Underneath the static, the fear, the anger — a pulse of something small and hurting. Something still hoping someone might come back. He intended to answer it.

“Hang on, Midoriya,” he murmured. “I haven’t forgotten.”

And this time, he wouldn’t be too late.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The city air hung heavy, oppressive like a storm trapped behind the clouds, just waiting to tear through. In Naruhata District, the light struggled to filter through the smog and dense overcast, casting a grayish hue over the narrow, cluttered streets. The wind barely moved. The atmosphere wasn’t just heavy with humidity—it pulsed with unease, like something unseen was crawling beneath the skin of the city itself.

Student patrols had doubled in the last few weeks. Strange emotional episodes had started cropping up throughout the district—civilians collapsing from panic attacks without warning, violent outbursts with no provocation, quiet, soul-deep despair settling over entire blocks. At first, these were dismissed as stress symptoms. A collective burnout. Coincidence. But now, with each new report, that excuse wore thinner.

Everyone in hero society was uneasy. But none more so than the students. They were still learning how to recognize true danger—how to distinguish between a threat that could be punched and a threat that could break you before you even knew you’d been touched.

“Eyes open,” Midnight called back to her team, voice crisp and commanding despite the stagnant air. “And don’t separate.”

She walked a few paces ahead of the group, her long boots striking pavement with sharp precision. Her deep violet costume shimmered faintly in the dim daylight, her whip coiled at her hip and ready. At the next intersection, she paused—one hand raised. Instinct, more than anything else. Something felt wrong. Off-beat. She glanced back at her students.

Uraraka was closest behind, her expression serious but anxious. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, eyes scanning the alleyways with growing tension.

Todoroki followed, silent as always, but his heterochromatic eyes weren’t calm. They flicked across the street, locking onto a man aggressively arguing with a vendor. Two children nearby were crying as their mother tried to comfort them, her own face drawn and tired. Todoroki’s brow furrowed. This wasn’t just a bad mood in the air. It was pressure.

“Something’s off,” Bakugo muttered, standing to his left, arms crossed tight across his chest, scowling at nothing.

Todoroki glanced sideways. “You feel it too?”

“I ain’t stupid,” Bakugou growled.

Behind them, Jirou and Yaoyorozu jogged up to join the group, forming a tight semicircle. The formation wasn’t planned, but it was instinctive. Defensive. Everyone felt it—the prickle of being watched. There was no visible enemy, no known threat. And yet, the street felt like a wire stretched too tight.

Then, it snapped.

A scream cracked through the air like lightning. Not one of fear, but pure, unbearable grief. All heads turned.

A woman had collapsed on the sidewalk, her hands clutching her chest as she sobbed uncontrollably. Her face was twisted in raw anguish. A few feet away, a man began thrashing in place, howling incoherently as he clawed at his own arms, screaming about insects under his skin. Further down, a delivery worker threw his package to the ground and began furiously kicking in the glass of a storefront, his eyes unfocused, his breathing ragged.

“Midnight!” Yaoyorozu called out, her voice tight with alarm.

“I see it!” Midnight snapped, immediately on alert. She pulled her whip free with one swift motion, her stance shifting into a combat-ready position.

Then the air changed. Not like wind. Not like smoke or sound.

It thickened—turned syrupy and suffocating. Breathing became harder. Movement became sluggish. Something unseen slid through the streets like a rising tide. And then, without sound or signal, it struck.

It wasn’t a blast. It wasn’t visible. It was grief.

The force of it hit like a sledgehammer to the soul. Unseen, unstoppable. Each student staggered under its weight, like they’d suddenly been forced to carry years of buried sorrow all at once. They couldn’t block it. Couldn’t reason with it.

It simply was.

Todoroki gasped and dropped to one knee. He couldn’t breathe. The gray of the street blurred as memories tore loose in his mind. Cold halls. His mother’s scream. The sound of boiling water. His father’s boots.

Uraraka fell backwards, hands over her ears. Her throat burned. She tasted dust—her room, when she was little, when her parents whispered at night about money, about bills, about how they’d survive. She didn’t understand why she was crying, only that she couldn’t stop.

Jirou’s hands clamped over her ears, but it didn’t help. The ache wasn’t coming from outside. It was inside. She heard a heartbeat that wasn’t hers, pounding like a war drum beneath her ribs.

Yaoyorozu shook where she stood, murmuring something over and over—I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine. But she wasn’t. None of them were.

And Bakugou—

Bakugou froze.

Every instinct inside him pulling taut like a wire about to snap. His body tensed on reflex, muscles coiled and ready to explode into action, to fight, to run, to do anything, but his mind was already spiraling—fast, chaotic, uncontrollable. The world around him blurred, the sounds of the street warping as memories crashed through his defenses. He saw explosions—not the ones he created, but the kind that left him hollow. Izuku’s notebook flashed in his mind’s eye, scribbled full of dreams of being a hero. Pretend hero costumes pages he once ridiculed. He saw Izuku’s face—wide-eyed, devastated, full of that quiet, crushing confusion the day everything changed. He remembered the betrayal, the fear, the unspoken pain that clung to every second of their fractured childhood, and most of all, the silence that followed the day Izuku was hauled and taken away by the Hero Commission. Just gone, promised that he would be okay And somewhere deep in his chest, beyond the guilt and anger, was the ache of something far worse: the certainty that he would never come back and that we wouldn't be okay.

“Stop it—!” Bakugou snarled through clenched teeth, but the words broke halfway out, his voice splintering with the helplessness he couldn't burn away. His hands curled into trembling fists, the heat of his quirk crackling faintly at his palms, unstable and unsteady, as if even his power didn’t know what to do with this kind of pain.

Midnight staggered two steps forward, her whip still loose in her hand, mouth set in a tight line as she tried to speak, to command, to pull herself together—but the weight pressing down on her made it nearly impossible. Her knees buckled slightly. Her breath came uneven. She looked less like a trained pro hero and more like a puppet whose strings had been cut, swaying beneath the invisible burden of emotions that didn’t belong to her. She wasn't weak—but whatever this was, it went deeper than strength.

And then, someone noticed it—just barely. A shift in light, a shimmer of movement where there should’ve been nothing. Slowly, one by one, their eyes turned upward.

He was there. The one the was the talk of the city. A villain who could cause misery wherever he went. 

Not clear. Not centered. Not in a blaze of power or the flash of dramatic confrontation. Just a figure, still and dark, standing at the very edge of a nearby rooftop. Cloaked in black, the fabric of his coat fluttered lightly in the breeze, his hood pulled low to obscure any identifying features. There was no glowing emblem, no theatrics, no need to announce himself. And yet, his presence filled the space more completely than sound ever could. It reached them before they even knew they were looking.

That presence—the dreadful, suffocating awareness that someone was there, someone who shouldn’t be—seeped into every crack in the street, into every breath and every heartbeat. It didn’t scream. It didn’t threaten. It weighed. And with it came a shift in the air, a turn in the emotional tide. What had been a chaotic storm of feeling now began to narrow, condense, sharpen.

Emotions no longer burst wildly from the environment—they moved with purpose. Civilians on the sidewalks dropped to their knees in agonized waves, some letting out keening wails as they collapsed, others merely crumbling inward with silent, ghostlike expressions. It wasn’t madness. It was method. Every reaction, every collapse, was tailored and intentional. The grief was no longer ambient—it was targeted. Specific. Intimate.

Controlled.

From the figure, there was no sign of exertion. No gesturing. No glowing eyes or flexing power. Just focus—quiet, suffocating, and utterly unwavering. It was as if the city itself had turned inward under his gaze, as though he had reached into the deepest corners of every soul present and twisted just the right nerves to send them crashing down. Aizawa had once described his quirk as a scalpel—sharp, calculated, and deliberate.

But this wasn’t a scalpel.

This was open-heart surgery, performed without anesthesia. Slow. Meticulous. Brutal in its precision.

Bakugou’s hands still sparked, but he made no move to raise them. He could feel it in the marrow of his bones—any action would be meaningless. The figure on the roof didn’t radiate invincibility in the way most powerful villains did. He didn’t need to. Because this wasn’t about overwhelming force. It was about control. And in that moment, he held all of it.

And then, as if he were never fully there to begin with, the figure dissolved into shadow. There was no dramatic exit, no flash of light or burst of speed. He simply faded—like a bad dream slipping out of memory the moment one wakes up. And with his disappearance, the emotional pressure evaporated. The grip on their minds and hearts loosened.

The air cleared all at once, as if someone had ripped open the sky and let it breathe again. It felt almost wrong—too fast, like a vacuum sucking the life out of a room and then pretending nothing had happened.

But the damage lingered.

Uraraka sat crumpled on the pavement, her eyes vacant and rimmed with unshed tears, blinking as though still trying to understand why she couldn’t stop shaking. Todoroki stared at his open palms, visibly disturbed to find them wet, as if the tears there had appeared without his permission. Jirou had pressed herself against the wall of the building, both hands still clamped over her ears, trying in vain to silence a heartbeat that now felt foreign and thunderous. Yaoyorozu was curled in on herself, whispering softly—I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine—but it sounded more like a plea than a statement.

Bakugo remained standing. He didn’t speak. Didn’t fall. But his hands continued to tremble, sparking with barely restrained power he had no outlet for. And for the first time in years, he looked completely lost.

Midnight lowered herself beside Yaoyorozu with uncharacteristic caution, her face pale and drawn, chest rising and falling in short, shallow bursts. She looked out across the street where the chaos had just occurred, eyes scanning the space where the figure had stood only moments ago. And then, in a voice rough with disbelief and certainty, she said, “It’s him.”

There was no need to clarify. No one asked for a name.

They all knew.

Above them, as if on cue, the clouds finally split open and began to weep—fat, cold raindrops striking the pavement like punctuation to a sentence no one wanted to read.

A soft mechanical hum broke the silence next. One of the newer surveillance drones hovered overhead, its red light blinking quietly, its lens still rolling. It hadn’t been affected. It had filmed the entire encounter from beginning to end.

The woman’s breakdown. The civilians’ collapse. The students unraveling. The silhouette against the sky. The quiet devastation. All of it, captured in chilling clarity.

Already, the footage was transmitting—beaming through the network and straight into the world’s bloodstream. It would hit news stations, government feeds, hero forums. The public would see the footage before the students had even caught their breath.

And there would be no doubt left. Misery had arrived.

And he had not come to be ignored.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The rain hadn’t stopped. It poured without rhythm or mercy, a cold, steady cascade that blurred the edges of the city into watercolor streaks of neon and gray. The rooftops glistened with it, every surface slick and unforgiving, as if the sky itself had decided to mourn what had happened and refused to let the world dry off from its grief. Bakugo sat alone on the top of the patrol building, soaked through to the bone. His uniform clung to him like a second skin, heavy and cold, but he barely noticed. The chill didn’t bother him. The sting of the wind didn’t either. Not compared to what was twisting like a knife in his chest.

His jaw was clenched so tightly that it sent tremors through the muscles in his face, a constant ache building along the sides of his head. Blood still crusted on his knuckles, faint and diluted by the rain, from where he’d lost control earlier—where his fists had met the rusted metal vent again and again until the pain in his hands became the only thing anchoring him. Even now, the sharp sting of split skin grounded him better than words ever could. But it didn’t fix anything. It didn’t change what he saw. What he felt.

His gaze hadn’t moved from the rooftop across the street—the one now dark, empty, and unremarkable, just another piece of the endless skyline. But Bakugou saw it differently. In his mind’s eye, that rooftop still burned with the image of a cloaked figure standing silent and still, wreathed in grief like smoke. The silhouette had imprinted itself behind his eyelids, an afterimage more stubborn than the glare of an explosion. The way he had stood there—so calm, so focused, so intentional—had told Bakugou everything he needed to know before his brain even caught up to the truth.

It was him.

It had to be.

“Fuck,” Bakugou muttered under his breath, his voice barely audible beneath the soft hiss of rainfall. “It was him.”

And just like that, the floodgates in his mind opened. Images and sounds he’d long since buried—or tried to—came rushing back with relentless clarity. He was six years old again, standing in a crowded school hallway, his voice high and cruel as it shouted, “Go ahead, bite me, freak!” A moment later came the chaos: a girl vomiting beside a locker, classmates crumpling to the ground in shock, the deafening confusion that followed. But Bakugou remembered something else too—something worse. He remembered the look in Izuku’s eyes. Wide with panic. But there had been something underneath it too, something darker, deeper. Like a storm forming beneath a calm sea.

He had told himself for years that he didn’t remember the details. That it had all been a blur. That it wasn’t really his fault. That Izuku’s quirk—whatever it had been—was just unstable, dangerous. That the Commission had done what needed to be done. He let himself believe it because it was easier than questioning it. Easier than facing what it meant.

But now? After today?

He couldn’t lie to himself anymore. That presence, that grief that had gripped the streets and gutted them from the inside out—it hadn’t been wild or chaotic. It hadn’t lashed out blindly like an accident waiting to happen. It had been calculated. Directed. Controlled like a blade in a surgeon’s hand. Not just power—it was intent. It had felt like someone had reached into Bakugo’s chest and ripped open every memory he had tried to smother with anger, every mistake he tried to justify with pride.

“Deku,” Bakugou whispered, the name breaking past his lips like a bruise being pressed too hard. It felt foreign in his mouth now, raw and painful, echoing with everything that had gone unsaid. “What the hell did they do to you?”

He closed his eyes, pressing the heel of his palm hard against his temple, trying to silence the low hum of emotion that wouldn’t stop vibrating beneath his skin. His brain was on fire with recollection—not just fear, but something far worse. Shame. Remorse. A sickness that no wound could cauterize. That pulse from earlier hadn’t simply frightened him. It had unmade him. It had cracked open the dam and forced him to look—really look—at all of it.

He had never apologized.

Never asked questions when the news began to change, when reports started calling Izuku “unstable,” then “dangerous.” When word came that the Commission had taken him into custody, Bakugo had just accepted it. No questions. No visits. No doubt. He told himself that this was what the system was for—that heroes couldn’t afford to second-guess the law. But beneath that thin shell of conviction had always been a trembling core of fear. He hadn’t wanted to know the truth. He hadn’t wanted to look. And now?

Now it was too late.

Izuku wasn’t gone. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t forgotten.

He was out there. Alive.

And whatever the world wanted to call him now—“Misery,” “villain,” “threat”—Bakugou knew better. This wasn’t a random act of terror. It wasn’t vengeance for its own sake. Izuku had reached into the city and shown everyone exactly what he felt. Not rage. Not fire. But pain. Precise, weaponized pain. And Bakugou had helped build the cage that caused it. That broke him.

His fingers curled into tight fists atop his knees, the leather of his gloves creaking under the tension. Every scrape across his knuckles throbbed, but he welcomed it. It was real. It was earned. And in the pit of his stomach, he knew the truth he’d been avoiding since the moment he saw that silhouette.

That figure—the cloaked presence who’d shattered a patrol of student and brought a city to its knees with a single surge of emotion—was Izuku Midoriya.

And somehow, after all these years, he had looked into Bakugo’s soul and made him feel it. Every sin. Every silence. Every failure that had built the boy the world had thrown away. He hadn’t just reminded Bakugo of the past—he’d handed it back to him and made him hold it.

Bakugou didn’t cry. He couldn’t. The tears just wouldn’t come, not even now. But the absence of them didn’t make the ache in his chest any smaller. If anything, it made it worse. Because for the first time in as long as he could remember, he didn’t feel like a hero. He didn’t feel powerful. He didn’t feel right.

He just felt small.

And late. So goddamn late.

The door to the rooftop creaked open behind him, a quiet groan of metal hinges echoing across the wet concrete. He didn’t turn around. Footsteps followed—soft, hesitant, the kind made by someone who didn’t want to interrupt but couldn’t stay silent either.

“You okay?” Yaoyorozu’s voice was barely more than a murmur, gentle and restrained.

Bakugo didn’t answer at first. For a long moment, he just stared out across the city, watching the way the lights blurred in the rain, the way the wind curled around the rooftops like a warning. When he finally spoke, his voice came out hoarse, scraped raw from the inside.

“No,” he muttered, without any attempt to mask it. “Not even close.”

They didn’t speak after that. There was nothing else to say. The storm raged on above them, steady and relentless. Below, a siren wailed in the distance, swallowed quickly by the wind. And on every screen in the city, from storefronts to phones to hero headquarters, a single piece of footage began to loop.

A black-cloaked figure. A street collapsing under invisible weight. The faces of young heroes unraveling in public view.

And a name—whispered first in confusion, then repeated in fear, and finally spreading like wildfire across the nation.

Misery.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The broadcast began innocuously enough — a generic morning news program with anchors trading pleasantries, the soft hum of a city just waking up, stories of the day’s weather and upcoming sports events. But that quickly changed.

The screen flickered, the image of the well-groomed anchors vanishing, replaced by raw footage: a series of disjointed shots, chaos unfolding on the streets, set to an unsettling score of distortion and urgent voices. A man’s voice crackled over the footage, panicked, breathless.

“ It’s all happening again... the attacks... and the people... they’re... they're losing it! They’re just losing it! Look! Look at them! It’s him! ”

The camera zoomed in on a half-collapsed storefront, a figure in black standing eerily still. In the blurred moment before the feed was abruptly cut, the silhouette of the figure — hooded, faceless, and looming — was unmistakable.

The anchors returned to the screen, visibly shaken. A moment of uncomfortable silence followed. One of the male hosts cleared his throat, eyes darting to the corner of the screen as if searching for the right words, or perhaps searching for something that could anchor him back to reality.

“...Ladies and gentlemen, what you’re seeing right now is unprecedented. Unbelievable. The so-called ‘incident’ earlier today... what we’ve seen is no longer a question of rumors.” The woman beside him nodded gravely, the calmness in her voice belying the tension beneath. She adjusted her microphone, her fingers trembling slightly.

“We have multiple sources now confirming that the... individual responsible for these emotional breakdowns and... civilian chaos is a single person. A figure—known only as Misery—has emerged as the face of this new wave of terror.” She turned her eyes briefly to her co-anchor before continuing, her voice gaining strength. “But that’s not all. Some experts suggest this is no isolated incident. Several reports are surfacing across the city, detailing bizarre emotional episodes. Heroes, civilians, even children... all caught in a wave of panic, guilt, and anguish they can’t explain. All triggered by this figure. This Misery.”

Footage of the incident earlier that morning, captured from the drones in the skies above, flashed across the screen. Images of heroes struggling to maintain their composure, civilians collapsing to the ground, the powerful tremor of anguish spreading outward. But it wasn’t just the visuals — it was the weight of the unseen emotions that spoke louder than anything. The sense that something truly unnatural was unfolding.

The screen briefly cut to interviews with civilians, trembling in front of the camera. One woman, clearly shaking, her face streaked with tears, stammered into the microphone.

“ He was... there. I—I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t stop crying... He didn’t do anything to us! He didn’t even move! But... he was there... I felt him. Inside my head. Like a pressure, like a weight I couldn’t get off my chest... ” Her voice cracked, the desperation in her eyes clear.

The newscasters struggled to maintain composure, but it was clear that something was shifting.

“A figure in a black cloak... unmoving, barely visible, standing in the shadows.” The woman’s voice took on an increasingly serious tone. “We can only assume that this ‘Misery’ is the individual responsible. Experts are calling this a ‘psychic’ or ‘empathic’ attack — with the ability to manipulate emotions from a distance.” She paused, her face contorting with confusion as the weight of what she was saying settled in. “But the real question remains: Who is this person? And why now?”

The camera zoomed in on a police spokesperson who had been hastily summoned to answer questions.

“We’re doing everything in our power to control the situation,” the officer said, his face pale, eyes darting from side to side. He tried to speak with authority, but the tremble in his voice betrayed his unease. “We’ve heightened patrols and are actively searching for this person—this Misery. But until we understand what we’re dealing with, until we can ascertain exactly how far this person’s influence reaches—”

He was cut off as the camera swiveled back to the studio.

“We now have more footage. This... is crucial.” The male anchor’s voice was grave. “A new report just came in. It seems that a group of U.A hero students were on a practice pratrol — some of the best, if the sports festival has anything to say about them — have been involved in a disturbing confrontation.”

The camera flashed to a recording of Todoroki Shouto and Ochako Uraraka, both struggling to maintain composure while on patrol, their bodies stiff and rigid. The scene replayed in a loop, their visible confusion, the breakdowns mid-battle, the sharp emotional shifts. Neither of them had ever seen such raw anguish break over them — so completely, so suddenly.

The anchors exchanged a quick glance, but neither of them said anything. The footage was damning.

“You’re seeing it now,” the female anchor said softly, her voice faltering under the weight of it all. “He’s even targeting hero students, and they are... breaking... in the line of duty. It’s clear that this Misery has something far beyond a physical quirk. We have no idea where it came from... or who it really is. But this is not just an isolated incident anymore.”

The camera switched back to the interview with the police officer. He was sweating now, visibly straining to keep his answers coherent. “We’re still working on this. We don’t know everything yet. But what we do know is that this individual is incredibly dangerous. We don’t know what kind of power this person has, but we’re not taking chances. If you see anyone exhibiting strange behaviors—feeling sudden emotional shifts—report it immediately.”

A different voice, a news analyst, cut in. His tone was steady, but his words were sharp.

“This is bad. We’re talking about someone who has an incredible power to manipulate emotions. That’s far beyond any known quirk we’ve encountered before. And it’s no coincidence that all this started after a high-profile incident seven months ago at the Hero Commission's containment facility 11.” He paused, looking directly at the camera. “One of the facility residents had escaped from the facility. The hero commission deemed that everything is under control, but is it. Is the hero commission telling the truth?”

The entire studio seemed to shudder with the realization. Newsrooms across the country lit up as they further talked about the distrust they have with the hero commission, broadcasted live into the homes of millions. Each viewer felt the weight of the revelation crash down on them — as if reality itself had just bent and cracked. Rumors started to surface of a young male that was sent to facility 11 ten years ago.

The woman anchor spoke, her words trembling. “This individual... this Misery... they have been linked to a series of high-profile incidents, emotional breakdowns, and now, it appears they have become a figure of terror. If this misery, is the escapee from facility 11, then it seems that we aren't being told the full story. The Hero Commission, sources say, has been tracking this person’s movements since their escape. They have been looking for him. But now... if this is him, he’s made his presence known.”

A long silence followed.

And then, a final statement from the male anchor — his voice subdued, almost a whisper. “This... isn’t over. Not by a long shot.”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Over time, news outlets and theorist brought back the name of a boy who disappeared 10 years ago. The incident that happened 10 years ago at a elementary school. An emotional collapse. He was brought back up due to his quirk being a known empathy quirk and being sent to facility 11. The world was still reeling from the chaos. News outlets had been buzzing with the emergence of Misery, the cloaked figure responsible for the emotional breakdowns and violence sweeping across cities. But with the name Izuku Midoriya now attached to the shadowy figure, the media was scrambling to understand how it all connected.

The scene begins with the familiar hum of a news station's opening segment. This time, however, the usual headlines were replaced by something more chilling: a full-screen banner reading "Is Misery Izuku Midoriya?" It was followed by a chilling, almost conspiratorial voiceover.

Voiceover: "The name Izuku Midoriya — it hasn’t been heard in public for over a decade. But is the child who disappeared at the age of six now the very figure responsible for the wave of chaos sweeping the country?"

The feed cuts to a photo of a young Izuku Midoriya at six years old, taken from the limited footage and news reports that had circulated years ago. The soft features of the boy contrasted sharply with the horrifying footage of Misery from earlier broadcasts. The juxtaposition was stark, unsettling. How could a child who had been written off and forgotten be behind something so terrifying?

Anchor 1 (female): "We’ve received countless reports of strange occurrences — emotional outbursts, sudden violence, and mass confusion — all linked to the figure known as Misery. But who exactly is Misery? And why has the Hero Commission been so tight-lipped about Izuku Midoriya's disappearance?"

Anchor 2 (male): "It’s a question on everyone’s mind tonight. Secret sources within the Hero Commission have confirmed that Misery is indeed connected to Izuku Midoriya, but how? How could a six-year-old child, one who was sent to facility 11 to become better, suddenly return as the figure causing such widespread fear and destruction?"

The camera cuts to an old, grainy news clip from years ago, showing an interview with Inko Midoriya, Izuku’s mother. Her eyes were heavy with grief, her voice trembling as she spoke about her missing son.

Inko (from the old footage): "He was just a boy... He didn’t deserve any of this. He didn’t even understand what was happening to him. I—I thought I was going to lose him... and now, I—I don’t know where he is, or if I’ll ever see him again."

The screen freezes on Inko’s tear-streaked face, and a caption appears underneath: " Izuku Midoriya: Gone within the wall of facility 11. The Story of a Disappeared Child."

Anchor 1 (female): "That was Inko Midoriya, the mother of the boy who vanished from public life at age six. Izuku Midoriya was believed to be taken to one of the hero commissions rehabilitation centers for quirk assistance after an incident regarding his childhood school. Now, the chilling question remains: Is this man — this ‘Misery’ — the same child who disappeared over a decade ago?"

The broadcast cuts to a panel of experts. Among them, Nurse Kaede Hisashi—a woman who had worked closely with the children of Facility 11, and who had known Izuku—sits down with a heavy sigh. She was the first to care for him, the one who had seen the boy behind the quirk that was too powerful to control.

Nurse Kaede Hisashi (softly, with sorrow): "I... I know him. I was one of the few who had the privilege of seeing the boy behind the name, behind the quirk. Izuku Midoriya was a gentle soul. He wasn’t a monster, but I knew... I knew his power was too much for him to handle. It wasn’t his fault... none of it was. But the system... the system failed him. And I—I couldn’t save him."

Her eyes are filled with both grief and helplessness, as though the weight of her past actions weighs heavy on her shoulders.

Anchor 1 (female): "You knew Izuku Midoriya? You were one of the few staff members at Facility 11 who seemed to show him compassion. What can you tell us? Is facility 11 really a good place like we were told. Is it possible that this—this ‘Misery’—is indeed him?"

Nurse Kaede (gently, her voice cracking): "It is. It’s possible. In fact, I fear that it is. Izuku... his quirk, his emotional manipulation... it wasn’t something he could control. It twisted him, slowly. And when the Hero Commission locked him away, they thought they were protecting the public from his potential danger. But they didn’t protect him. They broke him. I can't go into much detail about facility 11, but I can tell you this. It's not what the hero commission makes it out to be. If this is truly him... I— I don’t know if there’s anything left of the boy I once cared for."

The broadcast now shifts to footage from a few years earlier. There are images of Izuku Midoriya's case file — redacted and marked with bold, ominous lettering. The file’s contents are hard to read, but the message is clear: classified, sealed, access restricted. The voiceover picks up as the screen fills with the case file and the camera zooms in.

Voiceover (female): "Official reports from the Hero Commission state that Izuku Midoriya's case was one of the most classified and sensitive investigations in history. The official story is that he was a child with a dangerous, uncontrollable quirk, which led to his ‘reclassification’ and eventual disappearance. But the question remains — why the cover-up?"

The scene cuts to social media feeds, where the public has begun to weigh in on the mystery. The debate is fierce, the posts flooding in by the second.

Post 1 (from a citizen): "Izuku Midoriya was just a kid! I remember hearing about him when I was younger. What happened to him? Why is he being blamed for this?"

Post 2 (from a forum user): "There’s no way it’s him. The kid was too weak to hurt anyone. This has to be someone else, or he’s being controlled somehow."

Post 3 (from a concerned citizen): "I remember Izuku Midoriya from my time in school. The kid was always kind, always tried to do the right thing. There’s no way he could be the one behind Misery. If this is him... something’s wrong."

The screen flashes between comments, showing a diverse mix of disbelief, anger, and concern. The hashtag #IsIzukuMisery is trending worldwide. It’s a fight to piece together what happened to the little boy, and whether the name Izuku Midoriya should even be associated with this monster.

Anchor 2 (male): "In our investigations, we’ve also discovered disturbing rumors circulating online. One theory gaining traction is that the child who once struggled with his emotions, who was forced into a system designed to suppress his quirk, may have snapped. That what we’re seeing now is the result of years of suppression — and emotional misery — that has manifested in the form of this destructive figure."

As the broadcast continues, the camera pulls back to show images of Izuku’s mother, Inko Midoriya, sitting in front of her home. Her eyes are red from crying, but her expression is firm.

Inko (from a recent interview): "I never wanted this. I never wanted him to be anything but happy. I just wanted my son back. If he’s out there... if he’s really Misery... I don’t know how to fix this. But I won’t give up on him."

The segment ends with a stark message across the screen:

“ Is Izuku Midoriya Misery? Will the truth ever be known? Stay tuned for further updates. ”

The uncertainty hangs heavy in the air as the camera zooms in on the now-famous image of Misery, silhouetted in the shadows. The figure was a mystery, but now, it seemed more likely than ever that Izuku Midoriya—the child lost to history—had become a force the world could no longer ignore.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The room was dim, the only light flickering from the television screen. Izuku Midoriya, now going by the name Misery, sat hunched in the shadows, his eyes glued to the broadcast that was airing across multiple channels. The words flashed across the screen like a haunting refrain: "Is Izuku Midoriya Misery?" His hands tightened into fists at his sides, the fabric of his old jacket creaking from the tension.

His face, still a pale reflection of the boy he once was, remained unreadable as he watched the scene unfold. The media had finally caught up. They were piecing together the truth, but it wasn’t the truth they wanted to hear. They wanted a villain, a monster—someone they could understand. Not a boy who had been abandoned, broken, and left to rot in the shadows of a broken system.

Izuku’s heart tightened, but he couldn’t tear his gaze away from the screen. The name Izuku Midoriya echoed in his mind. It didn’t belong to him anymore. It belonged to a child who had been swallowed up by a world that didn’t care.

On the screen, the news anchor was speaking about the connection between Misery and Izuku Midoriya, and how this connection was just beginning to unravel. His image was compared to the six-year-old boy who had once been featured in public broadcasts, the same boy who had vanished under the Commission’s control.

The soft, innocent face of that child was so far removed from the figure they were now calling Misery. But to Izuku, it felt like looking at a ghost—a past life that had been forcibly erased.

“They don’t know anything... They can’t. They’ll never understand.”

The room was silent except for the crackling sound of the television. His fingers twitched, the familiar ache of a quirk he had learned to control, but never fully mastered, stirred within him. The urge to feel something—anything—was overwhelming. But Izuku clamped down on it, forcing himself to breathe through the rising panic in his chest.

" Stop. Focus ." He had learned to push his emotions down, burying them beneath layers of thought and resolve. He had a purpose now. He knew exactly what he wanted to do.

The Hero Commission—the people who had locked him away, broken him, and thrown him into the darkness—were the ones he needed to take down. They needed to pay for what they had done to him. And for what they were still doing to children like him.

Izuku clenched his jaw. The Commission had done so much more than just lock him away. They had stolen everything—his childhood, his humanity, his mother. His anger flared, but he quickly extinguished it, feeling the tendrils of Misery beginning to crawl across his mind. It was easier to give in—to let the rage consume him, to release the crushing weight of his emotions onto anyone who dared to stand in his way. But he couldn’t afford that. Not yet.

He had to keep it together.

His eyes drifted to the makeshift map spread out on the floor in front of him. Strewn across it were photographs, government reports, and documents detailing the movements of the Hero Commission, particularly Director Kamura—the man who had orchestrated everything. Izuku’s eyes narrowed.

Kamura. He was the face of the machine that had torn apart everything Izuku had ever known. The man who had never once seen him as a person, but as a tool. He could still feel the cold indifference in Kamura’s eyes, the way the man had dismissed him as just another failure. Izuku wouldn’t forget that.

There were other names too, scattered across the map. Raika. Daichi. Mika. His crew, his allies—people who had seen the world for what it was and joined him in the pursuit of something greater. They all had their roles to play, but Izuku was the driving force. He would be the one to bring it all down.

"Children like me... they’re still out there. They’re still locked away, suffering. And as long as the Commission exists, they’ll keep making more of us. I’ll put an end to it. I have to."

His hand rested on the map, his fingers lightly brushing over a photograph of Facility 11, where everything had started—the place where his life had been altered forever. The place that had broken him.

He had spent so many years trying to outrun the fear, the pain. Trying to find some sense of peace, but it had never come. Every step forward felt like a mistake. Every action, a consequence. And now he was Misery.

Izuku’s breath came in shallow bursts. It was a name that fit, but it wasn’t the one he had chosen. He had once dreamed of being a hero, of protecting people like he had always wanted. But now he knew the truth: the system was broken beyond repair. And if he had to burn it to the ground to make sure no one else went through what he had, then that was exactly what he would do.

His thoughts were interrupted by a soft sound—the quiet click of a door opening behind him. Raika, one of the few people who could move silently, stepped into the room, her expression unreadable. Izuku didn’t need to look at her to know she was there. He could feel her presence, the slight pressure of her eyes on him.

 "You’ve been watching the news."

Izuku didn’t respond. His focus remained on the map in front of him. He could feel her watching him, but he didn’t care. Misery had no need for comfort. It only had need for results.

"You’re getting closer, aren’t you? To them." She said slightly softer.

Izuku didn’t look up. His voice was low, filled with something that could have been a whisper of regret—or determination. Perhaps both.

"It’s not enough. We’re not enough. But I will make them see. I’ll make them regret everything they’ve done." Finally speaking but voice strained.

Raika’s silence was thick, but she didn’t push him. She knew better. Instead, she glanced at the documents, then back at him, as though calculating the next move in a game she had no control over.

"We can do this. Together."

Izuku glanced up at her, finally meeting her eyes. There was a strange sense of unity in her words, but it didn’t reach him. He wasn’t doing this for anyone but himself.

"No, Raika. This is mine to finish."

Her eyes softened, but she didn’t argue. She knew what he had become. What he was capable of. With one last look at the screen, Izuku stood, his resolve hardening. The path ahead was unclear, but the destination was set. He didn’t care if he broke. He didn’t care if he lost everything in the process. This was his fight.

And he would bring them all down. One by one.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The room was dimly lit, the sound of rain lightly tapping against the windows. Their base of operations, felt colder than usual. Raika leaned against the wall, her arms crossed, her eyes distant. Daichi sat on the couch, one hand gripping a glass of water, the other drumming nervously on his knee. Mika was pacing near the window, her usual calm mask slipping. Only Izuku remained still, his back turned as he stared out into the night. He wasn’t really seeing anything, though. His mind was elsewhere.

"That was too much," Raika said quietly, breaking the silence. Her voice, usually composed, now carried a subtle edge of concern.

Izuku didn’t respond at first, but his shoulders tensed. He could feel the weight of their gazes, the unease settling into the room like smoke. He wasn’t blind to it. He knew the others had been quieter lately, and Raika’s statement was the first clear sign that the tension had boiled over. But he didn’t want to acknowledge it. Not yet.

"What do you mean?" Izuku finally asked, his voice colder than he intended, but his focus never wavered.

Raika pushed herself off the wall and walked over to where Izuku stood, her steps deliberate. "You targeted the hero students," she said, her words soft but firm. "They’re just kids. They haven’t had the time to see the kind of corruption we’re fighting against. I... I don’t know if that was necessary, Izuku."

Daichi shifted uncomfortably on the couch, avoiding eye contact. "It felt wrong," he muttered, his voice betraying a hint of doubt. "They were still in training. Are we really going to make them our enemies?"

Izuku turned to face them, his eyes narrowing. "They represent the system," he said, his tone colder now, more calculated. "The system that created us—created me. They’re part of the problem."

"But they're not the ones who locked you away," Mika spoke up, her voice calm but laced with concern. She stopped pacing and looked at Izuku with a small frown. "They’re just following orders, same as anyone else. We don’t need to hurt them to prove a point."

A heavy silence settled in the room. Izuku’s gaze flickered to Mika, and then to Raika and Daichi. He could see the doubt in their eyes, even if they didn’t outright say it. They were still with him, but the cracks were starting to show.

Raika's voice was softer now, more hesitant. "I’m not saying we should stop. I’m not saying I regret being part of this, but... sometimes I wonder if we’re doing the right thing. You said we were going to save people, Izuku. But if we’re causing this much pain..." Her words trailed off.

Izuku felt his chest tighten. He wanted to snap back, to remind them that they were doing this for a cause, for the greater good. But the words stuck in his throat. He knew Raika wasn’t wrong. He knew that they had all signed up for something bigger than just revenge. They had all believed in a system that would bring change.

But was this still change? Or had they become what they hated?

“I’m doing what needs to be done,” Izuku said finally, his voice low but filled with a steely resolve. “You all agreed with me, right? We’re not just hurting these people for no reason. We’re doing it so kids like us—kids like me—don’t end up locked away, forgotten.”

There was a pause, and for a moment, it felt like the room held its breath.

"I get it, Izuku," Daichi said, his voice low, but there was an underlying tension in his words. "But sometimes... I wonder if we’re becoming the monsters we’re trying to stop."

Mika stopped pacing and turned to face the group. "I don’t think we’re monsters," she said quietly, but there was a hint of sadness in her tone. "But I don’t know how much longer we can keep doing this... We’re all carrying so much weight, and I—" She paused, her voice trailing off as if unsure of how to finish her sentence.

Izuku felt something shift inside him at her words. Mika, the quiet one, was always the first to absorb the weight of the group’s actions. She never spoke out of turn, never questioned him openly. But this... this was different. This wasn’t just about the mission anymore. It was about them, about the people they had become.

"We keep going," Izuku said firmly, his resolve sharpening again. "We have to keep going. The Commission won’t stop. They’ll come after us, after you, after everyone we’ve helped. If we stop now, everything we’ve done, everything we’ve sacrificed—it’ll be for nothing."

Raika and Mika exchanged a look, their faces unreadable. Daichi looked down at his hands, his fingers fidgeting with the water glass in his grip.

Raika took a deep breath, her expression softening, but the doubt remained in her eyes. "I’m with you, Izuku. I always will be. But just... think about it, okay?"

Izuku didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he turned away from them, walking toward the small table where their plans were laid out. His back was to them, the weight of their unspoken words hanging in the air.

"I’m not like the others," Izuku muttered, more to himself than anyone else. "I can’t be. I can’t go back to being that powerless kid."

His crew stayed silent, unsure of how to respond, but they remained in the room, lingering in the tension that Izuku had created. It wasn’t the first time they had felt uneasy, but now it was different. Now it felt like the mission had become something else entirely. And no one knew where this path would lead them, least of all Izuku.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The underground hideout was a labyrinth of rusted pipes and discarded equipment, a far cry from the sterile environment of Facility 11 that Izuku had once known. The air was thick with the scent of damp concrete, and the low hum of machinery only added to the oppressive atmosphere.

Izuku sat at the center of the room, the dim glow of a single lightbulb above him casting long shadows across his face. His crew had left him to his thoughts, the tension of the past days lingering like an unspoken word. He knew they were worried. But right now, his mind was focused on the next steps—the next target, the next blow against the system that had created him. He couldn’t afford distractions.

The sound of footsteps echoed from the doorway, breaking his concentration. He didn’t turn around, knowing instinctively who was entering the room.

“We need to talk,” Shigaraki’s voice was rough, almost casual, but there was an edge to it that Izuku didn’t miss. He slowly lifted his gaze, seeing the group of figures stepping into the room. Shigaraki, dressed in his usual attire, was flanked by Kurogiri, Toga, and Dabi.

Izuku’s hand tightened around the table, his knuckles turning white. He knew this moment would come. The League of Villains, trying to make their own move. But he wasn’t stupid. He’d seen what they were capable of. He’d seen their cruelty. The killing And he didn’t need any of them in his plans. He wasn't like them.

“I’m not interested,” Izuku said quietly, his voice cold, distant. There was no warmth, no hesitation. “I’m not interested in working with you.”

Shigaraki chuckled, his voice low and filled with malice. “Oh? You think you can do this alone? You think you’re different from us, kid? We’re after the same thing—you want to burn down the system, don’t you?”

Izuku’s gaze sharpened. “The system is broken, yes. But I’m not like you.” His voice held no empathy now, only icy conviction. “I’m not a villain. I’m not trying to destroy everything for the sake of destruction. I’m trying to save people from becoming like me.”

Toga stepped forward, a manic smile on her face as she eyed him with something like fascination. “You’re cute. All alone, fighting against the whole world. How long do you think that’ll last, hmm? Maybe we can help you. We could be a big happy family.”

Izuku's eyes flickered to her for a brief moment before he turned his attention back to Shigaraki. "I don’t need your help. I’m not like you, and I’ll never be."

Dabi let out a quiet laugh, his arms crossed. "Guess the kid’s got some pride. Can’t say I blame you. But don’t forget, there’s power in numbers. And we could get you anything you want—if you’re willing to stop pretending to be some lone hero."

Izuku stood up slowly, his eyes meeting Shigaraki’s. “I’m not a hero. But I’ll destroy anyone who stands in the way of me ending the system that created me.” He paused, his words biting into the tension of the room. “But you’re not my ally. And you never will be.”

Shigaraki’s smile faded, replaced by something more sinister. "Then we’re enemies, I guess. But don’t think you can keep going on like this without us noticing. You’ll regret it one day."

Izuku didn’t flinch. “I don’t regret anything I’ve done.”

Without another word, Shigaraki turned to leave, his voice cold. “We’ll see about that.”

As the group disappeared into the shadows, Izuku remained standing, his chest tightening with a sense of loneliness. But he knew this path was his. He couldn’t afford to let anyone else in—least of all the League. He was fighting for something bigger than they would ever understand.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Izuku sat alone on the rooftop of an abandoned building, his legs dangling over the edge as the cool night air rustled through his hair. His mind raced, the weight of his mission pushing him further into the depths of his own resolve. He was alone. Always alone.

The sound of footsteps broke through his thoughts, and Izuku’s gaze flickered toward the figure that emerged from the shadows. A man, dressed in a tattered cloak and a mask covering his face, stood before him. Izuku didn’t flinch—he knew who it was before the figure spoke.

“You’re the one they call Misery,” the voice was gruff, low. “Izuku Midoriya. You’ve been causing quite a stir.”

Izuku’s eyes narrowed. “Who are you?”

The man stepped forward, his presence radiating a quiet intensity. “I’m Stain. I’ve heard about you—what you’re doing. And I have to say, I like it.”

Izuku’s brow furrowed. "You’re a murderer."

Stain chuckled, though it was devoid of humor. “I only kill those I consider false heroes. They’ve turned this world into a joke, wearing their capes like it means something. But you... you’re different. You understand what it means to suffer. To be ignored. They’re afraid of you.”

Izuku stood, the darkness of the night seeming to swallow him whole. “I don’t need your approval. I’m not like you. I’m not killing people just because they’re not heroes in my eyes.”

Stain’s eyes narrowed, his gaze sharp. “You’re fooling yourself, kid. You’re no different. You’ve already taken your first step down the path of destruction. You think the world will change if you destroy the system from the inside? That’s what they all think. But they’re wrong. You can’t save a world built on lies without burning it down completely.”

Izuku’s hands clenched at his sides, the weight of Stain’s words sinking in. “I’m not here to become like you,” he said firmly. “I’m here to stop children like me from becoming like you. That’s what’s wrong with the system—it doesn’t care about us. It just uses us, until we break.”

Stain tilted his head, his eyes never leaving Izuku’s. “And you think you’ll be able to fix that? You’re a fool. People like you and me... we’re the future of this world. And I don’t need you to tell me what’s right. You’re already too far gone.”

Izuku stepped closer, the tension between them thick enough to cut with a knife. “I’m not a killer. I won’t destroy everything like you did. I’m going to tear down the system, piece by piece. But I won’t become a monster to do it.”

Stain’s expression softened, almost pitying. “You’ll change your mind. You’ll see.”

Without another word, Stain disappeared into the shadows, leaving Izuku alone again, his thoughts swirling.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Inko Midoriya sat alone in the dimly lit living room, the flickering glow of the television casting shadows across her tired face. The hum of the broadcast blended into the stillness of the room, but she wasn’t listening to the words. Not really.

Her hands trembled as she gripped the edge of the couch, her eyes fixed on the screen in front of her. The news anchor's voice was low and steady, but the words were anything but—words that pierced her heart with the force of a blade.

" Misery, the infamous figure behind a series of emotional manipulations across the country... The once-believed child held at facility 11, Izuku Midoriya, now emerges as a force to be reckoned with. Known for his quirk, now confirmed to be the cause of chaos, the Hero Commission is scrambling to contain the situation. "

The rest of the news was a blur. Inko’s gaze never wavered from the screen, though her mind wasn’t focused on the broadcast. Her thoughts were a swirl of guilt, fear, and longing. The boy she had carried, the child she had raised, was out there—alive, but twisted in ways she couldn’t comprehend.

Her hands, once so sure as they held him as a baby, now shook as if they had no purpose. The world had taken him from her in ways she never saw coming. The quirk that had marked him as a monster to the very people who should’ve loved him. The government that had torn him away from her side when he was just six years old. And now... now, he was something else entirely.

A villain? A monster? A broken soul, manipulated by his own powers?

Her throat tightened, the words to call out to him choked in her chest. She had promised herself she would never give up on him, that she would fight for him, but how could she fight against what he had become? He was no longer the bright, hopeful child who believed in saving the world, no longer the innocent boy who wanted to be a hero.

And yet, in her heart, she knew—he was still Izuku. Tears welled up in her eyes, a quiet sob escaping her lips. How had it come to this? How had she failed him?

She stood suddenly, her heart pounding in her chest. The TV broadcast continued to drone on in the background, but she wasn’t listening. She was making up her mind. She had to find him.

“I’ll fix this… I’ll fix everything…” she whispered to herself, wiping the tears from her cheeks. The words felt hollow, but she had to try. She had to.

Inko had seen the look in his eyes on the news—the look that sent a chill straight through her bones. It was the look of someone who had suffered too much. The look of someone who had been broken by the world, and in turn, had begun to break it. His eyes, once full of hope, now held nothing but a bitter coldness that she couldn’t even begin to understand.

She couldn’t help but wonder, if she’d been there for him, if she’d fought harder, would it have been different? Would he still be her Izuku? Or had he become something else entirely in the years they were apart?

Taking a deep breath, Inko turned away from the television, her mind made up. She couldn’t sit idly by anymore, waiting for the world to fix what it had broken. She had to find him.

But there was another part of her—another thought that whispered through her like a distant echo. What if she couldn’t fix it? What if he didn’t want to be fixed?

Her heart clenched painfully at the thought. She remembered the promise she had made to him, to never let him face the world alone. But now, the boy who had once clung to her for comfort was out there, a dangerous figure, consumed by his pain.

Yet Inko couldn’t let that stop her. The love she had for her son hadn’t wavered, not even for a moment. Even if he didn’t want to be found, even if he never forgave her, she would find him. She had to try.

With one last glance at the television, the news anchor’s voice a faint blur in the background, Inko grabbed her coat and stepped out into the cold night. Her mind was focused, her heart heavy, but she couldn’t stop. She couldn’t let Izuku down again.

The night stretched out before her, a vast unknown filled with the echoes of her son’s pain. She didn’t know where he was. She didn’t know what she would say when she found him. But she couldn’t stand by any longer, haunted by the knowledge that he was out there—alive, broken, and in need of someone who would fight for him.

She would fight for him. No matter what it took.

And so, she began her search, determined to reach the boy who had once been her entire world.

Izuku. Her son.

She hadn’t lost him yet.

Chapter Text

The air hung heavy with the smell of damp concrete and old cigarette smoke, the kind that clung to brick walls and sank into your clothes long after the smoker had gone. Yo Shindo tightened the straps of his patrol vest with absent fingers, the nylon tugging slightly against his shoulder as he stepped over a warped section of sidewalk in Naruhata’s decaying warehouse district. The evening had long since slipped into night, but the buildings still carried the warmth of the day like faint echoes, radiating it back through rusted steel and concrete skeletons. The subtle heat brushed against his fingertips like a fading heartbeat.

It was quiet. Unnervingly so.

No reported disturbances. No triggered alarms. Just a simple walkthrough shift—routine surveillance to satisfy protocol and put boots in the area. Shindo liked assignments like this: low stakes, minimal fuss, no need to overthink his presence or posture. Just him, the sound of his boots on broken pavement, and the soft hum of the occasional streetlight flickering with half-dead fluorescence. He exhaled slowly, phone in hand, thumbs halfway through typing a half-joking message to Tatami about how dull the route was. A lazy emoji. A light complaint. Something normal.

Then it hit.

Not a sound. Not a light. Just a pressure—immense, unseen, and soul-deep. It crashed into him without warning, like being thrown headfirst into a cold ocean, pulled under before he could breathe. His body recoiled on instinct, chest tightening in confusion and sudden dread. It wasn’t pain. Not yet. It wasn’t even fear. It was something worse. It was grief.

Not his own.

Older. Heavier. Unspoken.

The kind of sorrow that tasted like rust and memory, like mourning something you were never allowed to name aloud. The kind that built monuments in silence. It spread through him, behind his ribs, up his throat like smoke, and suddenly his vision blurred—not from panic, but from the sheer, aching intensity of it. His knees wobbled, and he staggered sideways into the cool metal pole of a streetlamp, gripping it with both hands as his phone slipped from his grasp and cracked against the asphalt with a sharp snap.

His breathing came shallow. Sharp. Like every breath dragged pieces of someone else's agony with it.

Then he saw it.

A figure, faint and distant, stood across the street at the far edge of his peripheral vision. The night’s moisture rose from the pavement like a ghostly mist, curling around the base of buildings and wrapping around the silhouette as though the world itself bent away from him. Black cloak. Hood drawn low. But no attempt to hide. Not really. Not anymore.

Even before his mind caught up, Yo’s instincts screamed the truth.

He knew who it was.

He’d watched the same footage over and over during briefing. Read the redacted files. Heard the quiet rumors whispered after long shifts at the Commission’s side. The headlines had been scrubbed, the name suppressed—but the image stayed burned into every patrol officer's mind.

Midoriya Izuku. Facility 11 escapee. Unregistered emotional quirk user. Code name: Misery.

His presence wasn’t loud. It wasn’t wild or chaotic. It was still. Distant. Terribly human. There was no dramatic stance, no firework display of quirk power to announce his return. Just a boy standing still in a street long abandoned by heroes and hope alike. But the emotional radiation surrounding him bled into the air like ink in water—warped heat ripples that shimmered faintly around his figure, except they carried no warmth.

Only cold.

A loneliness that stretched beyond reason.

Yo’s feet didn’t move. Couldn’t move. His body felt detached, like his own weight betrayed him. His heart was still hammering from the emotional whiplash, but his eyes remained locked on Midoriya’s figure, studying the vacant tilt of his head, the stillness in his limbs. The boy wasn’t looking at him. Wasn’t focused on anything in the physical world at all. He was somewhere else—miles away, buried under the sheer volume of whatever storm lived inside him.

And then Yo understood.

The quirk wasn’t being used in any deliberate sense. It was leaking. Seeping out of the boy like blood from a wound too deep to clot. That wave of grief hadn’t been an attack. It had been a cry. A bleed of pain from a mind that had long since forgotten how to contain it.

Yo felt his breath hitch as the grief morphed—just slightly—into something colder and more jagged. The sadness remained, but now it carried teeth. Rage began to build beneath his skin, though it didn’t feel like his own. It was surgical in its detachment. A fury forged not from hatred but from betrayal. From abandonment. From being broken too many times and finally snapping at the seams.

The emotions rippled across the space between them without warning or mercy, and Yo’s knees buckled just enough to make him grasp the lamp again. God, he thought numbly, he’s hurting so much.

Then, as abruptly as it had come, it stopped.

A flicker. Midoriya blinked. His head turned slowly. Their eyes met.

No words. No threat. No surge of power. Just a moment of shared awareness, sharp and fleeting. It wasn’t a stare of warning or challenge. It was recognition—an acknowledgment of presence, of mutual humanity that existed even in the space between predator and prey.

And then, Midoriya turned. He walked away. No flourish. No retreat. Just a slow, quiet departure into the mist, vanishing into the same shadows that had birthed the rumors of his existence.

Yo remained rooted to the spot, muscles locked in place as though his very bones had been hollowed out. His pulse still thundered in his ears, steady and unrelenting, each beat echoing like a warning bell across the hollow streets. His chest rose and fell in ragged bursts, the kind of breathing that came after sprinting through fire—only he hadn’t moved. Not really. The street around him was still silent, still empty. The figure in black had disappeared into the mist, leaving nothing behind. No sound. No trace. And yet the weight of his presence still lingered in the air like humidity after a storm.

Shindo’s hand hovered near his earpiece, trembling faintly.

He could still call it in.He should. That’s what the manuals said. That’s what the Hero Commission briefings had drilled into them: If spotted, do not engage. Do not speak. Report immediately. Dangerous. Unstable. Capable of mass-scale emotional manipulation. Target: Misery.

But his hand never moved. He didn’t reach for his communicator. He didn’t activate his Quirk. He didn’t issue a warning, didn’t shout orders into the night, didn’t even flinch toward pursuit. His body refused to obey the protocols etched into his bones from years of training. The hero in him—at least, the version the system had tried to shape—was quiet. Muffled. Uncertain.

And beneath that silence, something older stirred. Something human.

His mind raced with instinct, with fear, with procedure—contact HQ, initiate lockdown, escalate response, track the suspect—but his heart refused. It stood firm, like a wall rising between obligation and understanding. Because in that moment, despite everything he’d been told to believe, despite every redacted file and grainy image that labeled Midoriya Izuku a walking threat to public stability, Yo knew the truth.

He didn’t let him go because he was scared. He didn’t freeze because he was weak or indecisive. He made a choice.

Because for one fractured second, under the suffocating weight of all that barely-contained emotion, he saw something the reports hadn’t prepared him for.

Midoriya hadn’t come to attack.

He hadn’t raised a hand. Hadn’t spoken a word. Hadn’t projected a single command.He hadn’t postured like a villain or acted like a soldier in some war against heroes. He hadn’t even looked angry. Just tired. Distant. Like someone caught between the gravity of memory and the emptiness of the now.

Midoriya had been bleeding—not outwardly, but spiritually, emotionally, in a way that soaked the street in invisible grief. He hadn’t meant to touch anyone, and yet Yo had felt it all the same. Felt the unspoken wound. The fracture so deep it radiated through the air like a silent scream. Not directed at anyone, but incapable of being ignored.

And Yo had stood inside the quiet ache of that wound and felt it. Let it settle in his lungs, wrap around his heart like ivy, sink beneath his skin with a sadness so raw it bypassed language. It wasn’t a weapon. It wasn’t malice.

It was suffering.

And somehow, through all the fear, all the confusion, all the danger he knew he should be prioritizing—he understood. Maybe not everything. Maybe not the how or the why. But something elemental. Something simple.

Midoriya hadn’t come there to destroy. He’d come there because he had nowhere else left to go and so Yo did the only thing that made sense in a world that no longer did.

He let him go.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The fluorescent lights above buzzed with a harsh, artificial persistence, casting a sterile white glow that bleached the interrogation room of anything resembling warmth. It was the kind of light that made everything feel two shades too bright—clinical, cold, and inescapably aware of your every movement. Yo Shindo sat motionless in the chair bolted to the floor, his posture upright but far from at ease. His hands rested neatly on his knees, fingers twitching ever so slightly, betraying the calm he was trying to project. His patrol jacket, damp from rain and sweat, was folded with deliberate care on the metal table before him—a symbol of professionalism that felt increasingly hollow.

The room wasn’t silent, not really. The hum of the overhead lights filled the air with a low-grade tension, a vibration that settled into Yo’s bones like static. Every few seconds, one of the two Hero Commission officials across from him flipped a page, tapped a screen, or shifted their weight in a way that somehow made the silence feel louder. Neither man had spoken in the last five minutes, and Yo could feel the waiting stretching around him like a noose. His breath came slow, shallow, controlled. His heart still echoed faintly with the remnants of that earlier encounter—the weight of grief and rage and something deeper that refused to let go.

Finally, the older of the two men—a tall, gray-haired figure with sunken eyes and a stiff jawline—set the file down with quiet finality. He folded his hands, his expression unreadable, though the corners of his mouth curled upward in what could barely be called a smile. It was the kind of expression that mimicked civility, not out of courtesy, but out of condescension.

“Trainee Yo Shindo,” he said at last, his voice smooth but sharp-edged, like ice under pressure. “Tell us again. From the beginning.”

Yo exhaled slowly, grounding himself. He’d rehearsed this. Not because he was trying to lie—he wasn’t—but because he knew how easily the truth could be twisted. He’d run through every word in his mind like a checklist, knowing they wouldn’t believe what he felt. Still, he had to try.

“It was a routine patrol,” he began evenly. “Scheduled sweep through Sector Nine, warehouse district. Low-risk zone. No active threats or reports. At approximately 21:50, I experienced a sudden quirk-based emotional surge. Unprovoked. It was... intense. The primary sensation was grief. Secondary emotions included suppressed rage and a sense of prolonged emotional trauma.”

The older official nodded, scribbling something into a pad. Beside him, the younger agent—narrow-eyed, impatient, the kind who always smelled like cheap cologne and self-importance—spoke up without looking up from his datapad.

“You saw him.”

“Yes,” Yo replied, meeting their gaze without hesitation. “The source of the quirk was confirmed visually. Across the street. I believe the individual was Midoriya Izuku, listed as missing since the breach at Facility Eleven. Current unregistered alias—‘Misery.’”

A beat of silence passed. The younger agent tapped his screen once, then again, as if trying to make Yo’s answer change. When it didn’t, his mouth twisted into a scowl.

“Then why didn’t you alert dispatch?”

Yo’s jaw flexed, and for a moment, he didn’t speak. He measured his words, forced his tone to remain neutral even as something bitter swelled in his chest. “He wasn’t attacking. There were no civilians harmed. No buildings damaged. At first, I don’t think he even realized I was there. The emotional effect felt... ambient. Not directed. Like a passive leak. Like—”

“Like a containment failure?” the younger agent interrupted, voice laced with disbelief.

Yo didn’t take the bait. “No. Not like a weapon going off. Like someone grieving so deeply it couldn’t be contained anymore. Like pain just radiating outward.”

The older agent’s pen stilled. He leaned forward, the temperature in the room seeming to drop with the movement.

“So you let him go.”

It wasn’t a question. It was a verdict.

Yo held the older man’s stare for a long moment, then looked down—not from guilt, but because there was no point explaining something to men who only saw data and threat levels. They hadn’t been there. They hadn’t felt that presence—hadn’t stood in that storm of silent agony and recognized it for what it was.

He remembered standing in the rain, face to face with a boy who hadn’t spoken a word but had somehow communicated a thousand buried screams. Not through power. Not through violence. Through grief. Through raw, broken humanity. And for the first time in his life, Yo had understood that some people don’t fall into villainy. They’re pushed. Bent until something breaks. And when it breaks, it doesn’t roar.

It mourns.

“I didn’t see a threat,” Yo said quietly, fingers curling into the fabric of his pants. “And based on my judgment, escalation would have risked far more than it solved. Civilians were nearby. Power lines overhead. Narrow streets. If I had engaged, or even startled him—it could’ve triggered something catastrophic.”

The younger agent scoffed under his breath, but it was the older one who responded, voice cool and unwavering. “You had clear visual. You had the element of surprise. You had a duty.”

That word landed harder than it should have, not because it was incorrect—but because Yo had been thinking about it since the second Midoriya turned and walked away. He had fulfilled his duty. Just not the one the Commission wanted.

“I didn’t engage,” he said, lifting his gaze again, steadier now. “Because he wasn’t there to hurt anyone. He wasn’t attacking. He was... hurting. And for a moment, I think he forgot the world could see him.”

The room went still. Not out of surprise—but disdain.

The older agent set down his pen with deliberate weight and folded his arms. “Trainee Yo Shindo,” he said, voice now stripped of even the pretense of patience, “effective immediately, you are suspended from field operations. Your conduct will be reviewed under Article 7-B as a potential dereliction of responsibility. You will remain off active duty until such time as an internal panel reaches its conclusion.”

Yo’s breath caught, but he didn’t react outwardly. He didn’t rise. Didn’t argue. He simply stared back with a quiet fury burning just beneath the surface of his calm.

“I didn’t fail my duty,” he said, not loud, but with iron in his voice. “I failed yours. There’s a difference.”

The younger agent smirked with smug satisfaction as he stood, tucking the datapad under his arm like a weapon holstered after a clean kill. The older man offered nothing—no further instructions, no closing statement. Just a final glance that said everything about how little his words mattered in the end.

They left the room. Yo didn’t.

He sat alone beneath the buzzing lights, the hum of them louder than ever, echoing against the hollowness that had nothing to do with guilt—and everything to do with how blind the system had become.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The screen was cracked—spiderwebbed across the middle like it had been struck by something soft but insistent, held together now by layers of translucent tape that had yellowed with time and grime. The battery icon blinked in the corner, a final red sliver threatening to vanish at any moment. Izuku Midoriya sat cross-legged on the cold floor, back pressed to the crumbling wall of what had once been a maintenance office. The walls were streaked with rust and water stains, and the air was thick with that dense, metallic scent of abandoned infrastructure—dust, mold, oil, and time. Wires spilled from the ceiling like veins torn from the skin, swaying ever so slightly in the draft of forgotten ventilation. A single solar-powered battery pack buzzed quietly behind him, its faded blue light casting pale reflections over the laptop’s dying screen. Every breath Izuku took felt like it echoed too loud, like even the air didn’t know how to live here anymore.

Static flickered across the busted speaker. Then a voice—dry, polished, and utterly detached from the consequences of the words it carried—cut through the silence like a scalpel.

“Provisional hero Yo Shindo, known publicly as Grand, has been suspended following his recent failure to report a Class A villain sighting—”

Izuku’s hand jerked slightly, eyes narrowing, body instinctively tensing. He didn’t move otherwise, but something inside him flinched. A silent wince that went unacknowledged by the world.

“—despite visual contact and confirmed quirk activation from the suspect, the trainee did not attempt engagement, detainment, or contact with law enforcement. The Hero Commission has released a statement declaring this breach of protocol ‘unacceptable and dangerous.’”

A grainy surveillance still filled the screen. Not a face. Not an action. Just a figure—a silhouette half-shrouded in the mist of a late city night, his coat trailing like smoke, his posture heavy and distant. Izuku recognized the image. It was him. Caught walking away, back turned, steps slow. Not charging. Not attacking. Just… leaving.

“Shindo’s provisional license has been revoked. An internal review is ongoing. No comment from Ketsubutsu Academy at this time.”

The news clip ended with a click, replaced by a clean-cut panel of media analysts who spoke with all the gravitas of political commentators discussing tax reform. Their eyes were cold, their tones clinical. They dissected Yo Shindo’s failure like it was an equation, an algorithm with too many emotional variables. Words like “mental compromise,” “indoctrination,” “sympathy corruption,” and “villain influence” rolled off their tongues as if they were objective truths—things measured in charts, not lived by people.

Izuku didn’t watch the rest.

He closed the laptop slowly, the lid shutting with a soft click that felt heavier than it should have. His hands hovered over the device for a moment, trembling faintly. His breath hitched without warning, a sharp pull through clenched teeth. He didn’t realize how tightly he’d been clenching his jaw until the ache reached his ears. He touched the side of his face with the back of one hand, then let it fall, limp, to his lap.

He hadn’t done anything. That night—he hadn’t raised a hand. He hadn’t even spoken. He hadn’t meant to feel, not out loud, not so loud someone else could pick it up like broken glass. And yet…

And yet, a good person—someone who had looked at him and not flinched—was paying the price.

“…He didn’t do anything,” he whispered into the stillness. The words came out small. Flat. As if trying to shrink away from what they meant. Like they might carry less weight if he said them soft enough.

But they weren’t true. He had done something. Even if not intentionally. Even if only by existing. He had felt. That was the crime.

He had allowed himself—unguarded, even for a second—to bleed emotion into the air around him. And someone nearby had been caught in it, not as a target, but as collateral. Shindo hadn’t tried to fight him, hadn’t reached for cuffs or shouted threats. He had stood there and seen him, seen something that no database or villain profile could explain. And for that, he was condemned.

Izuku’s hands curled into fists. One of them closed around the edge of his coat, gripping the thick, ragged hem so tightly his knuckles paled.

Why? Why was this always the pattern?

He had been four when the first incident happened. He hadn’t known what his quirk even was. He was a child. But they looked at him like a weapon waiting to go off. He cried once in class—once—and the next day, the school counselor had already made a report. His mother’s hands had shaken every time she signed the new forms, the new waivers, the new declarations of safety.

He didn’t strike anyone. He didn’t attack the agents who dragged him from her. He didn’t scream when they strapped him down in Facility 11, when they flooded his mind with suppression frequencies, when they told him over and over again that he was dangerous just for feeling.

And now, years later—after escaping, after hiding, after surviving—someone who merely stood in his shadow was being punished for the audacity of not treating him like a threat.

Izuku rose slowly, the movement more like a breath than a decision. His limbs ached, not from effort, but from the weight of years. He walked to the small metal desk at the edge of the room, a repurposed workbench now cluttered with scavenged tech. Cracked SIM cards, disconnected burner phones, busted comms relays, jury-rigged transmitters, tangled wires like a nest of broken voices. This was his world now—pieced together from the scraps of one that had tried to erase him.

He didn’t need to be seen to change things. He didn’t need to fight in the streets or hijack a TV broadcast. That night had taught him something vital: he didn’t need to touch the system to break it.

He only had to feel. Izuku closed his eyes.

The darkness came to him willingly, not as an escape, but as a space where memory lived loudest. First came grief. Not the fresh kind—but the old, sticky kind that lived in marrow. His mother’s voice—soft, then slurred, then gone. The letters she sent to Facility 11, each one shorter than the last. The way her penmanship started to shake, and eventually stopped.

Then fear. The hallways of Facility 11, white and endless and humming with cruel efficiency. The tranquilizer needles. The lights that never dimmed. The other children’s screams, filtered through layered glass and concrete. Yung May’s fingers, clutching his in the dark of isolation. Her voice whispering stories into his ear before the guards pulled her away.

And then, abandonment. Aizawa’s name, seen once in a security document, redacted and forgotten. Heroes who looked the other way. Teachers who turned silent. A society that refused to look beneath the surface of his pain and only saw the shape of threat.

He drew it in—not like a bomb, not like fire, but like breath. His emotions didn’t crash or surge. They pulsed. A heartbeat of sorrow. A rhythm of pain. Not cast out like a weapon, but felt. Deep and steady, a signal beneath the skin of the city.

They called it a quirk. But it was more than that. It was memory. It was mourning. And now—it was a message.

He channeled all of it—not in a burst, but a pulse. Like a heartbeat. 

Spike.

The first hit was subtle. Intentional. A test.

It landed in the heart of Hosu City’s bureaucratic district, at the municipal records office—a squat, concrete building wedged between a pharmacy and a parking deck. A place few people ever looked at twice. There were no heroic emblems on its doors, no grand declarations carved in stone. Just a rusting city seal, a flickering overhead light, and rows upon rows of dusty files tucked behind glass counters and outdated software terminals. People didn’t visit it for emergencies or victories—they came to register marriages, apply for licenses, contest tax documents, or report lost birth certificates. It was a liminal space. A place that existed not to serve life, but to record it.

Izuku barely looked at the building as he passed. He didn’t pause. Didn’t slow down. His hood was drawn, hands in his pockets, coat heavy with rain that hadn’t yet fallen. The sidewalk was cracked beneath his boots. The air smelled like smog and ink. The building wasn’t significant. It wasn’t tied to a personal trauma or a specific memory. It wasn’t a symbol of pain or power.

And maybe that’s why he chose it.

Because there was nothing overtly evil about the place. Nothing corrupt or cruel. But it was part of the machine. A quiet cog in a system that had misfiled his future and stamped “dangerous” on his name. This building, in its blandness, helped structure the society that discarded him. That buried his mother’s case. That logged his disappearance with no further action. That erased a life without ever acknowledging the grief behind it.

He kept walking.

But the weight in his chest cracked open as he passed—just slightly. Not enough to drop him. Not enough to overwhelm. Just enough to bleed.

He didn’t push it outward. Not with force. Not with rage. What he released was quieter than that. Gentler. A slow, aching tide of grief, like water swelling behind a dam that had always been one breath from bursting. There was no scream. No spike. No violent signature that could be tracked or catalogued. Just sorrow. Pure, unfiltered, directionless sorrow.

Inside the building, the change was invisible at first.

A low-level receptionist, hunched over a desk stacked with permit forms, paused mid-sentence while explaining a zoning form. Her voice trailed off. Her fingers trembled slightly on the keyboard. She blinked, then blinked again, then looked around as if trying to remember what she’d been doing.

An intern sitting near the back stood up too fast, heart pounding. His vision swam. There was a ringing in his ears that wasn’t real. Something was pressing on his chest—no, not pressing. Weighing. He stumbled into the breakroom, clutching his jacket like it might keep him from falling apart. When his supervisor found him ten minutes later, he was on the floor, curled against the vending machine, sobbing and unable to say why.

Phones rang. None were answered.

A clerk in her forties, five years from retirement, found herself staring at a childhood photo tucked inside her drawer. It was her son’s fifth birthday—before the divorce, before the depression, before she’d started measuring her weeks by how often she cried in her car. She didn’t remember pulling the photo out. She didn’t know why she was crying now. But she couldn’t stop.

One man locked himself in the third-floor stairwell. When a security officer found him, he was sitting on the landing, knees pulled to his chest, mumbling that someone must have died—because that was the only thing that could explain the feeling. Like the world had lost something and hadn’t noticed. Like he had.

By early afternoon, people were leaving in waves.

Not in a panic. Not with shouts or sirens. Just in silence. Heads low. Hands shaking. Some told their managers they needed air. Some didn’t bother. They just… walked out. Unable to sit at their desks, to stare at screens, to answer questions they no longer had the heart to ask. Something had seeped in between the pages of their lives and turned their routines into shadows.

By sunset, the office was locked. Emergency calls had been made—some vague, some urgent. Paramedics arrived but left confused. No one was physically injured. No chemicals were found. Nothing toxic in the air. Just a pervasive emotional contamination that defied logic and clung to the walls like mold.

One of the medics, after speaking to the fourth affected staff member, said softly into her radio:

“It’s like they forgot how to keep going.”

No alarms were triggered. The building’s surveillance footage showed nothing unusual. Izuku’s face never appeared. His voice never echoed. His quirk signature was undetectable in the static noise of the city’s ambient emotional clutter.

They wouldn’t find him. Because he was already gone—lost again in the pulse of a city that had never made space for his pain. A ghost in a coat, invisible in daylight, moving not with fury but with intention. With emotion.

And that was only the first. Just a test. To see if the world could feel what he did. To see if it would break under the weight of something it never bothered to carry.

Suffocating Grief

Spike.

The next target wasn’t a facility or a broadcast station or a government building—it was U.A. High School’s eastern wing.

Izuku didn’t go near it. He couldn’t. Not physically. Even the thought of stepping within view of its gates twisted something in his chest—a nausea that wasn’t from fear of confrontation, but from memory. From the old ache of dreams abandoned. Of corridors he’d once imagined walking as a student, not a threat. But the tower was still online.

Buried beneath the surface of U.A.’s tech infrastructure were dozens of networking anchors—old security nodes, reinforced telemetry loops, blind spots even the Commission hadn’t patched because they assumed no one would ever find them. Izuku had found one.

He sat hunched over a stolen console rigged with scrambled relays and dumped every ounce of emotional calibration he could spare into a single, controlled burst. He lace it with anger. And the words of the Hero Board, read aloud on a cold winter day when he was too young to defend himself:  “This quirk is not fit for society.”

He sent it through the tower like a pulse. Sharp. Focused. And timed. The wave hit during a practical exam in the eastern wing—a simulation environment designed to push students to their limits under pressure. The instructors were watching closely from the overhead booth. The floor buzzed with activity. Partner teams from Class 2-B were mid-drill, weaving through debris fields and rapid-response scenarios built to mimic urban rescues.

And then it happened. It lasted no longer than a breath. A pause—less than a second—but deep. Penetrating. Subtle only in how quickly it passed, but not in what it left behind. Every student stopped moving.

It was immediate and instinctive. Half of them didn’t even realize they’d frozen in place, arms half-raised, mid-sprint or halfway through an incantation. The boy with the sensory thread quirk blinked in confusion and forgot what he was doing entirely. Another girl stumbled mid-leap and landed hard enough to scrape her palms raw.

Uraraka’s hands went slack. The gravitational field she had carefully constructed for a stress-load lift snapped without warning, and the weights she had neutralized—twenty kilograms of reinforced alloy—dropped with a crash inches from a classmate’s legs. No one was injured, but the sound startled a shriek out of two nearby students.

Todoroki’s fire guttered out completely. His right hand, raised in defense, lowered. His expression blanked as if something had reached into his chest and wrung his confidence out like water from a rag. He didn’t speak, didn’t move, just stood there with his breath caught and the cold rising around him without purpose.

A deep unease filtered in through the simulation room like fog under a doorframe. It didn’t strike as panic. It struck as uncertainty—deep, gnawing, paralyzing uncertainty. A quiet voice whispering in every student’s mind at once:

Are you sure you belong here? What if they made a mistake? What if you're not cut out to be a hero. What if every person who doesn't believe in you is right about you, too?

One girl clenched her teeth so hard she cracked a molar. Another, a newer transfer, dropped her gloves and ran off the course mid-scenario, hands over her mouth. She made it to the bathroom before she vomited, but didn’t come out again. Not for an hour. Not until the exam had long ended and her friends stopped knocking. One instructor tried to reset the course. Another sent in a staff medic, assuming a gas leak or minor panic event. But the telemetry didn’t show toxins. No quirk activations registered out of the ordinary.

Yet something had changed. Not in the room. In them.

The instructors noticed first. They didn’t say it aloud. Not right away. But in the evaluation logs, their notes darkened. The patterns became hard to ignore. Every student had stumbled, yes—but not in the same way. It was as though they’d each been struck in their weakest point. Not physically. Emotionally.

Todoroki’s report simply read: “ Mental break in focus. No external trigger. ”

Uraraka’s was longer. It ended with: “Eyes unfocused. As if she heard something that shook her.”

The whispers began before the final bell rang. Something got in. Not a villain. Not a quirk attack. Something deeper.

Not every student admitted what they felt. Some refused to talk about it at all. A few insisted they didn’t feel anything. But more than a handful later confessed—quietly, in private, away from cameras and teachers—that they’d been overcome by a rush of doubt so sudden and so sharp it left them breathless.

One student, in a message sent hours later to a mentor, summed it up best:

“It felt like someone cracked open my chest, stared inside, and told me everything I was afraid to believe about myself was true.”

Izuku didn’t watch the camera feeds. He didn’t tap into the post-event logs. Didn’t want to see the faces of the classmates who might’ve once stood beside him in a different world. In a better one. He didn’t need to see them. Because he already knew what they’d felt. It was the same thing he carried every day.

Crushing self-doubt.

Spike .

It happened live.

No warning. No buildup. Just a routine Thursday morning broadcast—a segment meant to ease citizens into the day with light updates, sponsored wellness tips, and, that morning, a formal address from the Hero Commission regarding rising public unease.

The camera panned in on the anchor: Midori Soy, a seasoned professional with a calm voice and a practiced smile. She’d hosted for nearly seven years, never once breaking under pressure, not even during the Training camp incident or the Hosu incident . She was known for being unshakable. But that day, she barely made it past the opening paragraph.

She was reading a prepared script. A neutral statement. “The Hero Commission wishes to reassure the public that recent reports of unauthorized emotional disturbances in the capital are being thoroughly investigated—”

And then her breath caught.

It was subtle at first. Her throat tightened. She paused, blinked once, then again—too fast, too deliberately. The teleprompter kept scrolling, but her words didn’t follow. Her lips parted like she meant to speak again, but no sound came out. Her expression shifted, barely noticeable to the average viewer. But to those who knew what to look for—there it was. A fracture.

Her lower lip trembled. Her eyes glistened, confusion swimming behind them. Her voice finally returned, but it cracked halfway through the next line. “We, uh—we ask that citizens remain calm as…” She trailed off, swallowing hard. A breathless pause.

And then she whispered, almost involuntarily:

“…it feels like someone died.” That was when the producers cut the feed.

They switched mid-word to the co-host seated beside her, a younger anchor in his late twenties with polished charm and a manufactured calm. But the effect had already spread.

He tried to speak—tried to carry on like nothing had happened—but the weight hit him seconds later. It was visible in the tightening of his jaw, the way his shoulders curled inward like he was bracing for impact. His voice came too fast, then too slow. He stumbled over his script, misreading a name, then paused and stared into the camera like he didn’t recognize himself. His hands trembled as they gripped the desk.

Behind the cameras, the control room had erupted into chaos. One of the senior producers clutched his headset and dropped to a crouch, breathing heavily like he was choking on something invisible. A technician pushed back from her chair so fast it toppled, fleeing the studio as bile rose in her throat. Another editor—young, fresh out of university—was later found curled beneath a desk, sobbing into her sleeves and mumbling apologies to no one.

They all described it differently. But the themes were the same.

“It was like all the worst parts of myself were dragged to the surface.”

“I felt ashamed. Not just embarrassed—ashamed. Like every bad thought I’ve ever had was tattooed across my face.”

“I remembered my sister’s funeral. But it was like I was in it again. Alone.”

“Like I was naked. Not physically. Just… exposed. Like my whole soul was showing and everyone could see what I was.”

It lasted less than a minute.

By the time the studio managed to cut to commercial—an emergency feed of pre-recorded hero safety tips—the entire morning team was compromised. Not by force. Not by violence. But by emotion. Raw, unfiltered, and deeply personal emotion that didn’t belong to them but had somehow become theirs.

The Hero Commission responded quietly. The station issued no formal statement. Midori Kaede was listed as “on leave for personal health reasons.” The co-host was reassigned to a lower-profile weekend slot. Three of the producers didn’t return to work. One filed for early retirement.

And for a week, the morning program aired with new faces. Stiffer smiles. Shorter segments. More scripted. But the city remembered. Not the words. Not the broadcast itself. Uninvited grief.

A broadcast that accidentally turned into a confession booth—without a priest in sight.

The feeling.

Naked Humiliation.

Spike.

This one took time.

It didn’t crash in like a storm or sweep through like a siren call. It bled in quietly—an unseen pressure settling beneath the skin of a place that already breathed tension. The spike began subtly, too slow to trigger suspicion, like a low fever building in the bones of a building that had learned how to ignore its own pain.

It started in the break rooms.

A nurse forgot how many hours she’d been awake. Another left mid-shift and never came back. One of the overnight staff began humming lullabies under her breath—songs she couldn’t remember learning, soft and mournful, echoing down the hallway like something meant for ghosts. The fluorescent lights in Wing C began to flicker, not because of faulty wiring, but because one of the interns kept turning them off, whispering that the brightness made the quiet too loud.

No one linked it at first.

It was just stress, they said. Too many cases. Too many evaluations. The children were harder to process these days, harder to predict, harder to numb. One therapist began canceling her appointments with no notice, then started leaving sticky notes on her office door—small, sad things like “Be kind to them, even when they’re screaming” and “We shouldn’t need permission to feel.”

One doctor—senior level, fifteen years with the Commission—sat down mid-evaluation and began to cry. Not sob. Just cry. Tears slow and unblinking as he listened to a ten-year-old ask, in a voice too quiet for their file, “Am I dangerous if I dream wrong?”

Still, no alerts were sent.

No security breach. No confirmed incident. The surveillance logs showed nothing out of place—no violent quirks, no containment failures. But deep in the staff logs, in the part of the system no one ever read unless things went really wrong, a single comment was flagged and then ignored:

“It’s like our empathy turned on us.”

And somewhere in the city above—far from the sealed doors and clinical whispers—Izuku kept walking.

He didn’t linger to watch the fallout. Didn’t track the ripple effect or monitor the damage. He’d stopped needing that kind of proof. The silence told him enough. The way people stopped laughing in certain cafés when the wind shifted. The sudden uptick in sensor recalibrations. The subtle absence of noise when he crossed through crowded spaces—like the air itself held its breath around him.

He moved like a signal, drifting across rooftops and through alleyways, the hem of his coat dragging echoes of pain behind him like ink spilled in water. He didn’t look back anymore. The past was already stitched into his body—why keep reopening the wound?

He wasn’t trying to terrify anyone. Not truly. He didn’t want panic in the streets or chaos in the headlines. That wasn’t the point. He just wanted them to feel it.

What he had carried, all those years. What they refused to see. What they locked away and called unstable. He wanted the city, the Commission, the heroes behind those polished screens to ache with the same weight he’d been forced to bear—silently, endlessly, completely alone.

But fear came anyway. It always did.

At first it was whispers. Anonymous threads on public forums. Jittery video clips of a shadow in the corner of a frame, a figure in a long coat seen crossing rooftops near emotional flare events. Some said he was an urban myth. Others believed he was a failed hero turned rogue. A few called him a ghost—a remnant of something the Hero Commission had buried too deep to admit.

The label arrived next. “Empathy Villain.” Trend tag. News term. Police lingo. It didn’t matter where it started—it spread like wildfire. They said he could break you with a glance, make you relive your worst memory with a heartbeat. They said he didn’t have to touch you to destroy you. That he didn’t fight, but felt you open.

And then the Hero Commission issued the alert.

It came in the form of a public statement, crisp and clean:

“Priority One threat classification confirmed.”

No specifics. No incident record attached. Just enough to spike fear. Enough to silence doubt. Enough to give them permission. Izuku saw the rest through a feed he hacked from a buried node. A classified memo, not yet public.

Task Force Authorization: Issued.

Target: Codename ‘Misery.’

Initiative Division: Echo Diversion (rumored activation pending confirmation).

That name struck harder than anything else.

The Echo Diversion.

He had heard rumors, even in Facility 11. Whispers of a group that operated in the cracks of legality. Heroes who didn’t wear costumes. Who didn’t give warnings. Who cleaned up “dangerous quirks” before they became public relations problems. A shadow of the Commission’s deepest impulse—to erase, not reform.

He stared at the screen. Jaw tight. Hands motionless. The air around him barely stirred. They didn’t use his name. They didn’t have to. The words on that glowing monitor carried all the intent they needed. It wasn’t about proof anymore. Not about evidence or justice or peacekeeping. They were coming for him. Because he felt. Because someone had let him go. Because he hadn’t turned his pain off like they demanded.

Izuku reached forward and closed the screen with careful fingers. Not in a rush. Not afraid. Just… tired. The laptop gave a soft whir as it powered down, the last light vanishing from the dust-smeared screen. His reflection lingered for a second before disappearing.

He sat back, staring into the dark. The hum of his makeshift power bank buzzed softly behind him. The station groaned faintly above.

His voice came like a breath caught between two ribs. Quiet. Hoarse. Raw.

“…It’s not me who’s broken.”

The words hovered, half-swallowed by silence. His heart thudded, low and steady in his chest—like a countdown he no longer feared.

His hand curled into a fist. His eyes didn’t blink.

“ It’s all of you. ”

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The common room was too damn loud. 

After the event that happened earlier with U.A and everyone's emotions going haywire, the wanted a piece of normalcy. They just wanted to forget that it even happened. People from other classrooms got affected harder than others. Their teacher, Mr.aizawa, instructed them to just stay in the common area and take a breather. Be children. Don't let the actions that are happening in the world affect them. 

The Students congregated in groups, slouched on couches or half-perched on windowsills, their voices rising and falling in chaotic waves. Laughter mixed with anxious speculation, gossip slipping like oil through every conversation. Although that laughter wasn't real, just something to feel normal, to forget about the emotional event that happened not too long ago. Just nervous tension with a pulse. The kind that festered in the gaps between bad news and worse expectations. A hollow kind of energy that tried to pretend everything was fine.

Bakugou sat alone, hunched on the edge of an aging couch near the back corner of the room, elbows resting on his knees, arms folded tightly across his chest like a shield. His foot tapped out a steady, hard rhythm against the tile floor, the only part of him moving, the only thing keeping him grounded. He wasn’t listening, not really—not to Kaminari babbling about hero rankings, or to some underclassmen whispering about new rumors on the forums. Names were being tossed around like baseball cards, like this week’s villains were just more fuel for conversation. Some students even grinned while they speculated, like it was a game.

Soon the conversation changed to what was really on everyone's minds.  They were talking in clipped, anxious bursts—names flying like knives, terms like “Quirk-terrorist” and “Villain-class empathy surge” passed between them with nervous urgency. Like saying it made it smaller. Like labeling him made it safer.

Misery.

That was the name on everyone’s lips. He wasn’t listening. But his blood was.

And then the broadcast changed.

“Breaking news,” said the anchor’s strained voice. “Another confirmed empathy surge has been traced to Misery—formerly known as Izuku Midoriya—this time targeting U.A.’s Hero School. Sources confirm several students experienced emotional trauma and disorientation, though no serious injuries were reported…”

The room shifted. Conversations died. All eyes turned to the screen.

The footage was grainy and quick. A teacher collapsed behind a desk. A weight dropped dangerously from the air and nearly crushed a student. One girl sprinted from the room in tears. Todoroki stood frozen mid-move, fire flickering weakly from his hand before it extinguished completely. The emotional blast hadn’t lasted long—just seconds—but it left a mark like a scar carved directly into the soul.

No flames. No blood. Just devastation.

The word Misery hung at the bottom of the screen in bold red font. Below it, the subtitle:

 “Priority One Threat: Emotional Disruption Crisis Expands.”

Bakugou’s spine went rigid. He didn’t move. Couldn’t. His jaw locked, fists curled, knuckles pale and trembling. His heart slammed into his ribs like it was trying to escape.

The name hit him harder than the footage.

Izuku Midoriya.

He was out there. Not as a rumor. Not as a maybe. Publicly. Declared. Named. The entire world knew it was him now. The boy who had vanished. The boy who had cried blood and vanished under the weight of a world that called him dangerous for feeling too much. And no one in this goddamn room understood it.

They were afraid. They were fascinated. But none of them knew what it meant to look into those eyes and feel that much pain pour out. None of them knew what it had done to him.

But Bakugou did.

He remembered the day they took him. The silence afterward. The empty chair in the classroom no one wanted to acknowledge. The way the Commission spun it, covered it up, painted it clean. And Bakugou had let them. He hadn’t spoken. He hadn’t fought. Because a part of him believed what they said—that Midoriya was dangerous.

But now? Watching that screen? Feeling that same crushing weight press against the base of his spine? He knew the truth.

Izuku had been hurting. And now he was showing them what that pain looked like. What it felt like. No fire. No warpath. Just grief, amplified and weaponized—not to destroy, but to make them feel it. Make them feel what they had ignored.

Bakugou stood up so fast the couch jolted backward. Sparks danced along his fingers before he could control them. The sudden movement drew startled glances from nearby students, but he didn’t care. He didn’t see them. His eyes were locked on the screen as it cut to footage of the Echo Diversion—the Commission’s new task force—being deployed into Hosu. No words. No questions. Just quiet, military precision and the grim weight of escalation.

They were hunting him. Again. Bakugou’s throat went dry.

And yet… Izuku hadn’t killed anyone. He hadn’t unleashed hell. He’d just made them feel. And the world called him a monster for it.

Bakugou stormed from the common room, fists clenched at his sides like firecrackers about to ignite. The hallway swallowed him in silence, the noise of the others fading behind thick walls and his own racing thoughts.

Why now? Why reveal himself like this? Why not lash out the way villains were supposed to? Because Izuku wasn’t trying to burn the world. He was showing them a mirror. Forcing the system to see the rot in its own reflection. The betrayal. The containment. The erasure. The abandonment.

And Bakugou—Bakugou couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t about revenge.

It was a cry. A roar wrapped in silence.

He stopped halfway down the hall and slid down slowly until his back pressed hard against the cold, unforgiving wall. The weight of it grounded him—more than the chaos in his mind ever could. His eyes drifted upward, fixating on the sterile ceiling tiles above, as if searching for answers in the empty white expanse. But all he found were memories crashing through him like relentless waves, each one hitting harder than the last. The playground, sun blazing overhead, where cruel taunts and whispered rumors had clung to Izuku like a second skin. The way Midoriya’s small frame had trembled when his quirk flared uncontrollably for the first time, how his hands had shaken not with power, but with sheer terror—fear of hurting others, of being rejected again. The panic in those wide, desperate eyes the last time they’d met, the way Izuku had looked at him—not with anger, or blame, but with a fragile hope that maybe Bakugou would say something. Anything. Something that would mean he wasn’t alone.

And Bakugou? He had said the worst things. Words sharp enough to cut deeper than any punch, words born from envy, frustration, and the raw confusion of a kid who didn’t know how to be a friend. He had pushed Izuku away, hardened himself against the boy’s vulnerability. And now, all these years later, that guilt settled over him like a suffocating fog. He could still hear the echo of his own harsh voice, feel the weight of what he’d denied in that moment—not just to Izuku, but to himself.

His breath hitched sharply in his throat, shaky and ragged, as the sting of those memories turned into a physical ache. Sparks fizzled involuntarily along his fingertips, tiny flashes of energy born from his anger and regret. It was as if his body refused to let go of the storm that raged inside. The bitterness, the pain, the helplessness—all tangled together, clawing for release.

“They’re all wrong,” he muttered, his voice barely more than a whisper, but heavy with conviction. “They don’t see him.”

Not like he did. Not like anyone truly should.

Bakugou’s eyes burned with something fierce, raw, and unyielding. He wasn’t just thinking about the boy they called Misery, the villain they feared and hunted. He was thinking about the scared, broken kid he had known—the one whose heart had carried more weight than anyone could understand. The kid who hadn’t disappeared, who hadn’t given up, even when the world tried to erase him.

For the first time in what felt like forever, Bakugou felt something that wasn’t just guilt or anger. He felt resolve. A sharp, unbreakable determination that coiled deep in his gut and stretched out through his limbs like wildfire. This wasn’t over. It couldn’t be.

He didn’t know where Izuku was—if he was hiding in the shadows of the city, or out there in the open, pushing the world to feel what he had carried alone for so long. But Bakugou swore to himself, with every beat of his racing heart, that he would find him. Before the government, before the Echo Diversion, before anyone who wanted to cage that pain and silence that voice.

And this time, he wouldn’t let Izuku face it alone.

Not anymore.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The night hung over the city like a thick, suffocating blanket, heavy and unyielding. The moon cast its pale, ghostly light across the rooftop, where shards of broken glass and twisted scraps of metal glinted faintly like forgotten constellations scattered across the concrete. A soft wind pushed at Izuku’s cloak, tugging gently as if trying to whisper secrets he wasn’t ready to hear. He stood near the edge, arms folded tightly across his chest, his gaze fixed on the sprawling cityscape below. The streets wound beneath him like veins pulsing with life and chaos, but all he saw was a blur of shadows and distant sounds that felt too far away, too detached from the restless storm brewing inside his mind. He searched those tangled streets for answers, for something—anything—that might slice through the thick fog of doubt and exhaustion that had settled over him like a second skin these past weeks. But the city remained silent. Indifferent. 

Cold.

Footsteps approached behind him—steady, familiar, neither threatening nor urgent but measured in their own quiet way. Raika was the first to break the silence, her voice cutting through the stillness with a rough edge of tired amusement. “You keep doing that,” she said, voice low enough not to disturb the night but sharp enough to make him flinch inwardly. “That stare you give the city, like it’s some kind of secret diary about to spill its sins.”

Izuku didn’t turn to face her. Instead, his voice came out soft, barely more than a whisper carried on the breeze. “It already has,” he said quietly, “but it’s not saying sorry.”

There was a pause, a slow settling of the air, before Daichi dropped down next to a rusted air conditioning unit with a grunt, tearing into a protein bar like it was the most normal thing in the world. “You’re getting weirder by the day, man,” he said, muffled by a mouthful of food. “Used to just mumble trauma stuff in your sleep, but now you’re all poetic and cryptic, like some brooding anime protagonist.”

Mika, sitting cross-legged on the ledge with her boots dangling over the edge, chuckled softly. “He’s always been weird,” she said lightly, nudging Izuku’s leg with her boot. “Brooding tragic hero with a side of apocalypse vibes. It’s honestly peak aesthetics.”

Izuku let out a quiet snort, a sound caught somewhere between a laugh and a sigh that seemed to lighten the heaviness pressing down on him for just a moment. Raika settled against the ledge beside him, arms crossed, her gaze steady and serious. When she finally spoke, her voice dropped even lower, filled with an unspoken concern that seemed too big to fit into words. “We’re worried about you,” she said plainly.

The wind stirred, the night holding its breath as silence stretched taut between them like a wire. For a long moment, no one said anything. Izuku’s defenses crept up, like an invisible wall forming around him. “I’m fine,” he insisted quietly, almost too quickly.

Mika’s voice was gentle but firm. “No, you’re not. And that’s okay. We don’t need you to be fine all the time.”

Daichi kicked a loose pebble off the rooftop, watching it clatter over the edge. “We’re not asking you to break down or give some grand speech about your pain. Just… don’t disappear. Don’t go full ghost and vanish for days.”

Raika’s eyes locked on his. “What happened with Shindo—you felt that, didn’t you? It hit deeper than you want to admit.”

Izuku’s fingers twitched involuntarily at the mention of the name. His throat tightened, a familiar ache curling in his chest like a fist. He lowered himself onto the ledge beside Mika, staring down at his hands as though they might betray the turmoil inside him. “I didn’t mean for any of it,” he said softly. “I wasn’t even really there. Not in the moment. I was… inside my head. Thinking about something else. Then it just… happened.”

Raika’s voice was steady, full of understanding. “We know. And Shindo… he let you go.”

Mika nodded, eyes softening with quiet respect. “That means something. About you. About him.” Izuku’s gaze darkened. “But he still got punished.”

The group fell into silence again, the wind picking up and carrying distant sirens through the night like reminders of a world that never slept. Daichi finally spoke, his voice heavy with bitter experience. “It’s not your fault. The system… It's always been a machine built to chew people up and spit them out. I was swallowed whole before I even had a chance.”

Mika’s voice was quieter, almost hesitant, but honest. “You never talk about your past. The facility. Why do you fight the way you do?”

Izuku glanced at each of them, their eyes lined with shadows and scars that told stories no one else would hear. For a moment, the mask slipped. The walls he’d built cracked just enough to let something raw and fragile through. “I was six,” he said, voice low and steady, “when it all started. My quirk… it came out in the school hallway. Two classmates of mine had gotten into a fight. I tried to stop it. Tried to get them to reason with one another. But neither listened. One minute, I was nervous, scared maybe. The next… half the room was screaming, some of them on the floor crying. If I were to see any of them again, I doubt they would forgive me. Some of them would probably never want to see me again, let alone get near them.”

Daichi sat straighter, the usual edge of sarcasm gone from his expression. “They took me away not to long after that,” Izuku continued, voice flat but eyes shimmering in the darkness. “Told my mom it was for our safety. Mine and hers. Facility 11—white walls, endless hallways, everything sterile except the screams you were trained not to hear.”

Raika’s jaw clenched, the anger palpable beneath her calm exterior. “I met a girl there, her name was Yung May,” Izuku said quietly. “She disappeared one night. They never said why.”

Mika reached over and brushed her fingers lightly against his, a silent promise of support. “That’s enough,” she whispered.

Izuku shook his head, meeting their eyes with fierce honesty. “No. You asked.”

“They tried to erase me,” he said, voice dropping to barely above a breath. “Not by breaking me physically, but by scrubbing me clean inside. Like if they wiped away all my emotions, I’d be safe. Contained.”

Daichi’s jaw clenched tight. “You’re not a weapon.”

“No,” Izuku said, eyes narrowing with grim certainty. “I’m what’s left after the fire.”

They all stared at him, understanding filling the space between them. And still, despite everything, none of them moved away.

“Look,” Raika finally said, her voice softer but unwavering, “we didn’t sign up to follow some perfect hero. We followed you—the angry, hurt, restless one who stands in the fire instead of running from it.”

Daichi gave a crooked grin, a flicker of old humor returning. “We’ve all been called dangerous. Broken. Unfit.”

“Exactly,” Mika added, eyes fierce. “You’re our kind of broken.”

Izuku looked down, releasing a breath that carried a trace of a laugh, bitter and tired but real. “If you keep pushing like this,” Raika warned, “you’re going to burn out. These emotional spikes you’re sending—”

“I know,” he cut in sharply.

“Do you?” she challenged him.

“I feel every one,” Izuku said, voice raw. “Every moment of panic, every wave of confusion. It’s like I’m being eaten alive from the inside out. But they have to feel it. They need to understand. Even if it breaks me.”

The silence that followed wasn’t heavy or awkward—it was real. Honest. Four broken kids sitting on a rooftop, holding each other up in a world that had tried to tear them apart. They sat there together in the cold night, the city sprawling endlessly below, as if somehow their shared pain made the burden a little lighter.

Eventually, Daichi stretched, breaking the moment with a crooked smile. “Alright, tragic rooftop hangout’s over. Let’s go grab food before Mika decides to start chewing on wires again.” Mika flipped him off with a grin.

Raika lingered a moment longer, voice soft but sure. “You’re not alone, Midoriya.”

He nodded, watching as they left him behind in the quiet. The rooftop emptied, the city humming beneath the night sky.

But Izuku didn’t move.

Because deep inside, despite the fierce bonds, the battles, and the fights, he still felt that gnawing loneliness—the kind that never quite went away.

And the worst part was, he was beginning to believe maybe that loneliness wasn’t just a curse.

Maybe it was his fuel.

Maybe it was his fate.

—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The scent of grilled meat mingled effortlessly with the sticky sweetness of yakitori sauce, curling through the warm air and wrapping around the four of them like a soft, comforting blanket. The little yakitori joint they’d found was tucked deep into a narrow alleyway—an unpretentious hole-in-the-wall that reeked of familiarity, faded wooden tables, and the hum of quiet conversations. It was the kind of place that didn’t bother with formalities, never asked for IDs, and certainly didn’t care who you were as long as you had enough yen jingling in your pocket to buy a skewer or two. Its dim lighting cast gentle shadows that blurred edges and softened faces, making it easier to slip into the moment, away from the chaos and scars of the world outside.

They were squeezed into a corner booth, bodies pressed close enough to share warmth in more ways than one. Izuku sat closest to the rain-streaked window, the city lights beyond blurry and muted in the low light. His hood was down for once, the rare vulnerability as foreign to him as the delicate taste of grilled chicken on a stick. The constant hiss and pop from the kitchen steamed up the glass, drawing a blurry curtain that gave him a small pocket of anonymity even here. Around him, the others were comfortably themselves—alive, teasing, loud—while he found himself slowly sinking into a rare, fleeting sense of normalcy.

Daichi was mid-complaint about the skewer in his hand, his brows furrowed in exaggerated irritation as he poked at a piece of chicken that was barely seared. “I swear, these jokers are trying to sabotage me. How is this supposed to be ‘well done’?” he grumbled, holding it up for Mika and Raika’s inspection.

Mika, ever the artist even in the simplest moments, was bent over a napkin, her finger dancing lightly in a puddle of soy sauce as she drew tiny hearts that grew increasingly elaborate with each pass. “Maybe they just want you to eat with more suspense,” she said, eyes sparkling with amusement as she glanced up. “Like, ‘Will this skewer betray you or not?’”

Raika snorted, leaning back with a smirk that held equal parts sarcasm and affection. “You’re being dramatic, Daichi. It’s just chicken, not a life-or-death mission.”

“Easy for you to say,” Daichi shot back with a grin. “You eat everything like it’s a snack for the apocalypse.”

Izuku, chewing slowly on his own skewer, listened quietly. The crackle of the charcoal grill and the soft murmur of voices around them faded into the background as he let the flavors ground him. The chicken was hot, tender, and rich with smoky sweetness, but it was the warmth of the space and the easy camaraderie that made it feel like something he hadn’t tasted in years. Something almost like home.

“So,” Raika finally said, turning to Izuku with a teasing glint in her eye, “you’ve been out of the loop for a decade. That’s ten years of weird slang, tech, and everything in between. Care to catch up on what you’ve missed? Or should we start with how to order yakitori without accidentally insulting the chef?”

Izuku blinked, a faint smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. “I… yeah. I’m not even sure where to begin.”

Mika laughed softly. “Alright, let’s start simple. You know how smartphones are basically your lifeline now? Everyone’s glued to those little screens, texting or scrolling through endless streams of pictures and videos. It’s like a constant background noise. You missed the whole ‘social media’ explosion—people sharing their lives like it’s a nonstop reality show.”

Daichi nodded, crunching on his skewer. “Yeah, and memes. You’ve gotta get memes down. It’s like a secret language. Sometimes it’s nonsense, sometimes it’s genius, but it’s everywhere. You’ll never survive without at least a few go-to memes.”

Raika leaned forward, voice dropping to a mock-serious tone. “Also, fashion changed. Like, a lot. Those school uniforms you remember? Out the window. Now everyone’s mixing styles—vintage with streetwear, classic with cyberpunk. It’s wild. And yes, there are still hoodies. Lots of hoodies.”

Izuku took it all in, his eyes wide but thoughtful. “I see… It’s like the world didn’t stop while I was gone. It changed in ways I never imagined.”

“Exactly,” Mika said. “And it can be overwhelming. But it’s also kind of beautiful. People find new ways to connect, to laugh, to make sense of the chaos.”

Daichi chimed in, “And food like this hasn’t changed much. Yakitori’s a classic for a reason. People still need simple pleasures. Things that remind them there’s warmth in the world.”

They lapsed into silence for a moment, the quiet only broken by the sizzle from the grill and the soft clink of chopsticks on plates. Then Raika nudged Izuku playfully. “You’re not gonna disappear on us again, right? We’re your reality check, your weird little family.”

Inside Izuku, something colder, heavier, was stirring—an undercurrent beneath the surface of his carefully constructed calm. His gaze softened, and for a brief moment, the walls around him seemed to lower. “No. I’m here. For once, I want to be,” he said quietly, a fragile vow that barely felt real even to himself.

The food was hot. Outside, the city’s restless heartbeat pulsed faintly beneath the distant hum of traffic and the scattered chatter of passersby. The air was thick with human warmth—the steady presence of friends, the soft clatter of chopsticks, the gentle crackle of conversation—but Izuku’s focus was elsewhere. Not yet spiraling, but on the razor’s edge of a tipping point.

Not yet.

Then, without warning, it hit him. Like a current brushing against the edges of his consciousness—soft, persistent, and achingly familiar—forcing its way into the dim recesses of his mind. His chopsticks trembled in his fingers, nearly slipping from his grasp. He stiffened, breath catching in his throat as a sudden, sharp awareness washed over him.

Raika was the first to notice the shift, her voice low and cautious. “What is it?” she asked, eyes narrowing as she followed his gaze out the window.

Izuku didn’t answer. Because across the street, weaving slowly through the evening crowd, he felt her presence. Her. It wasn’t the flash of a face or the scent on the air—it was something deeper, an emotional frequency unique and unmistakable. Small, weathered, and quietly aching, wrapped in a fragile veil of hope tangled in a dense knot of sorrow. Though buried beneath layers of resignation, it was unmistakably her.

Inko.

She moved with careful steps, clutching a grocery bag to her chest, her coat worn thin at the seams, shoes uneven from years of wear. Time had touched her—etched lines in her face, bent her posture, softened her once-bright eyes. The woman who had once been his whole world was now a fragile silhouette against the glowing streetlamps.

Izuku’s breath hitched, heart twisting painfully as his fingers trembled around the skewer. His chest tightened, a wave of emotion crashing over him—equal parts longing, love, and crushing guilt. He shrank instinctively, ducking into the shadow of the booth as if to disappear from sight, as if hiding might somehow protect her from what he was about to unleash.

No. Not here. Not now.

But his body betrayed him. Panic surged through his veins—not for himself, but for her. His empathy quirk, volatile and raw, flared without warning, beyond his control. It was never meant to reach her. Never meant to touch her like this.

And yet—

Across the street, Inko staggered. The grocery bag slipped from her grasp, cans clattering harshly against the concrete. Her hand shot to her chest, eyes wide and uncomprehending. Her face paled as if the world had suddenly shifted beneath her feet, every sound a cruel noise, every light a stabbing glare. The heavy weight of sorrow—not her own, but dragged through the psychic tremors of Izuku’s fractured empathy—clung to her like a shroud.

It wasn’t sharp or violent. It wasn’t a scream or a storm. It was a crushing, relentless ache, like the soft, desperate wail of a child echoing deep in her bones.

Izuku watched from behind the glass, frozen, his heart shattering with every moment. “No,” he whispered, barely audible.

Raika’s voice was firm but gentle as she turned to him, eyes wide with dawning understanding. “Izuku—”

“Don’t,” he choked out, rising from the table in a rush, eyes glistening with unshed tears. “I didn’t mean—she’s not supposed to—I didn’t mean to hurt her.”

“She’s still standing,” Mika said quietly, her tone steady as she remained seated, eyes locked on the figure outside. “But we should go.”

Inko leaned heavily against a nearby streetlamp, her fingers gripping it like a lifeline. A concerned passerby approached, asking if she was okay. She nodded slowly, managing a fragile, shaky smile before gathering her scattered groceries with trembling hands.

Izuku’s breath hitched again as he watched her steady herself and walk away—alone—through the shadowed streets.

He wanted to follow. God, how desperately he wanted to. But what could he say? What words could bridge the chasm between them?

“I’m alive.”

“I’m broken.”

“I’m the reason everything you love was taken from you.”

Instead, he turned away, collapsing back into the shadowed booth. His hands clenched the edge of the table so tightly it hurt, the only tether holding him to the world around him. “I shouldn’t have come,” he muttered, voice cracking.

Daichi’s voice was softer than usual, laced with an unexpected tenderness. “You needed this. You’re still human, Izuku. And you miss her.” His jaw clenched, the weight of self-loathing pressing down hard. “I shouldn’t be allowed to.”

Raika reached out, gripping his wrist firmly—not in sympathy, but to anchor him in this moment. “You didn’t choose this.”

“I didn’t stop it either.”

“You’re still here,” Mika said quietly. “Still fighting.”

Izuku’s eyes fell to the swirling steam rising from the cold food they’d left untouched. His appetite had vanished, swallowed by a heavier hunger—the ache of being unable to touch the one person who mattered most without causing her pain. His love was poison. His presence, a threat.

And the boy who had clung to Inko’s letters in the silence of his dark cell, the boy who had whispered endless apologies into cold walls—he felt something inside him curl tightly and go silent. Maybe this distance was mercy. Maybe it was the only kind of love he was allowed.

The night stretched on without words. When they finally returned to the hideout, Izuku didn’t find sleep. Instead, he stood alone on the rooftop, staring into the infinite blackness, the city lights flickering like distant stars.

And far away, where she could never hear him, he whispered into the wind—bitter and broken, desperate and full of regret—“I’m sorry, Mom.”

But the night carried it away, unheard and unanswered, as if the world itself had forgotten to listen.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The conference room at the Hero Commission’s Central Office was dark—by design. The overhead lights were off, replaced by the cold blue glow of half a dozen projection screens. Footage flickered across each one: news reels, satellite surveillance, emotional heat maps, and coded psychological reports scrolling like lifelines.

A technician whispered updates from a control booth.

“Another spike occurred in Minato Ward this morning. Mild panic, six calls to emergency dispatch, two anxiety-related collapses at UA’s support campus. No physical damage. Same signature.”

Commission Director Reiko Kamura sat at the head of the table, back straight, fingers steepled. He didn’t blink as the footage rewound—first-person helmet cam showing a pro hero buckling against a wave of invisible pressure.

Behind him, the latest news broadcast played on loop, bright and sickly sweet.

“The Hero Commission assures the public that these disturbances are merely the result of quirk-compatible hacking technology, not a sentient attacker. Please report any unusual emotional states to your local hero agency—standard suppression protocols are being reinforced.”

A lie. Every word of it. And the people bought it—because fear craves simplicity.

Beside him, a thin man in a gray suit clicked through slides. “This pattern lines up with the incidents in Musutafu, Shibuya, even the UA dorms. We believe he’s testing range. Controlled, escalating. It’s not an attack. It’s a message.”

Another official spoke—Agent Fushida, lead psychological analyst.

“It’s not random. He’s choosing locations that represent state power. Schools. Studios. Assembly halls. We believe the targets are chosen for emotional impact—not destruction. He’s planting doubt. Seeding panic.”

There was a brief silence. Even in a room full of trained agents, that quiet had weight. He tapped a command pad. The main screen changed: a still image of a boy. Green hair, sharper now than in old files. A cold expression. Shadowed eyes. No name printed beneath.

Just a red tag:

PRIORITY ONE

 “Subject 13-A” – CLASSIFIED

“We’ve confirmed his presence in five zones. He’s alone, but connected. His signature pulses differently depending on stress levels. When passive, it radiates. When reactive…” Kamura paused. “It chokes.”

The tech analyst stepped forward again. “We believe he’s lost conscious control of the upper levels of his quirk. He’s not attacking deliberately—but he is spreading. The more he represses, the worse the bleed gets. His body is the epicenter. But the emotion is metastasizing.”

“Like a psychic virus,” someone murmured.

“No,” Kamura said. “Like a storm looking for a place to break.”

Then came the words no one wanted to say aloud—but someone finally did.

“What if he’s right?”

Kamura didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to.

“Then we remind the world why chaos is not an option. We feed the public just enough truth to fear, and we keep the rest locked behind black tape.”

Another screen lit up. A new project.

Echo Division .

Name: Redacted.

Purpose: High-threat quirk deterrence.

Status: Pending final assembly.

“Hand-picked. Off-book. No oversight. No red tape,” Kamura said. “We move quietly. We extract cleanly. No public hero theatrics. No All Might speeches. This isn’t a villain. This is an anomaly.”

A senior agent’s voice broke the heavy silence, hesitant yet edged with a cold certainty. “And if we fail again—like Facility 11?” His words hung in the air, fragile but loaded, as if testing the weight of the room’s resolve. Kamura’s face remained impassive, carved from stone beneath the harsh fluorescent lights. Not a muscle twitched. His eyes, cold and unyielding, locked onto the speaker with unwavering clarity. “Then we make sure no one remembers the name Midoriya.” The words were a decree, sharp and final, slicing through the tension like a blade.

Behind them, a lower screen flickered to life, casting pale blue light onto the darkened room. Muted security footage played silently, looping the same haunting image: a lone teenage boy crouched on a rain-soaked rooftop, water streaming down his coat, the night swallowing him in shadows. His face was a mask—expression unreadable, impenetrable, a quiet storm contained within a still frame.

No sound escaped the screen, but in the charged silence, his presence was deafening. It pressed against the walls, a quiet roar that filled the space between the agents, settling deep in their bones like a pulse they couldn’t shake.

A whisper seemed to ripple through the gathered group, barely audible yet sharp as broken glass. It crept through their minds, a collective shiver: He’s not done.

And neither were they.

The room tightened with resolve and dread—an unspoken promise that the hunt would continue, relentless and merciless, until the name Midoriya was erased from memory. Until the boy was no longer a threat. Until the shadows swallowed him whole.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

The rain had been falling for hours, soft at first, now steady—an endless rhythm on rusted gutters and empty asphalt. The city around them slept in ignorance, but this alley—tucked behind a forgotten warehouse in an old industrial sector of Musutafu—was wide awake, filled with tension and the quiet ache of memory. Eraserhead, known to the world as Shouta Aizawa, stood alone beneath a half-collapsed awning, hood drawn low, scarf loosely coiled around his neck like a promise of violence. He didn’t shiver despite the cold. He didn’t move. He was waiting.

Footsteps finally came—rushed and light, almost hesitant, splashing through shallow puddles. From between the shadows, she emerged. Kaede Hisashi. She looked thinner than he remembered from the footage. Paler. Her nurse’s uniform had long been traded for a plain hoodie and a too-large raincoat that dripped water like she was unraveling in real time. Her face was gaunt, lips bitten raw, and her eyes—once warm—held only fatigue and watchfulness. She stopped a few feet from him, breathing hard, clutching something to her chest like it might vanish if she let go.

“I almost didn’t come,” she said, voice low and brittle, carried only by the hush between raindrops. “They’re following anyone who spoke against them. My neighbor’s cat disappeared two nights ago. I don’t know if that was a warning or if I’m just… paranoid now.”

Aizawa didn’t respond immediately. He studied her with that same impassive stare that unnerved even pro heroes. But his silence wasn’t judgment. It was understanding. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet, even gentle.

“You did what no one else would. You told the truth.”

Kaede gave a small, sharp laugh—so bitter it almost cracked.

“I thought maybe telling the truth meant something,” she whispered. “But they don’t care. They made me out to be hysterical. Unstable. Said I fabricated it all. The Hero Commission’s version always wins.”

She stepped closer and extended her hand. In it was a plastic-sealed envelope, weatherworn and creased from where she’d held it too tightly for too long. The name on it was written in soft, trembling ink: To my son. Her hands shook as she passed it to him, her breath hitching.

“She wrote this to Facility 11.” Kaede swallowed, eyes glinting with tears. “They didn’t want her words to reach him. They didn’t want her humanity to make it out. But I kept it. I hid it in my boot for weeks.”

Aizawa took the letter without a word. He didn’t open it. Just held it for a long moment in his callused fingers like it weighed more than paper ever should. The rain pattered on the envelope, leaving no trace. His eyes darkened beneath his hood, something old and wounded flickering there.

“I thought you could get it to Izuku,” She broke off, voice catching. “You were the only one I trusted. The only one who still seems to care about what happens to him. I saw when you visited him in facility 11. I saw your other attempts as well.”

Aizawa’s jaw tightened. His silence grew heavy, dangerous. He had seen so many things in this world. Betrayals. Systems dressed up in capes. But nothing stung like this—like watching a child be turned into something hunted, then having to pretend it was for the greater good.

“I’ll keep it safe,” he said at last. His voice was rough now. Frayed. “He’ll get it. One way or another.”

Kaede stepped forward again, sudden and desperate, reaching out to grip his arm.

“Promise me,” she whispered. “Promise me they won’t erase him. That they won’t rewrite him into some monster. He was kind, even when they hurt him. He was kind. That kind of soul doesn’t just disappear.”

“I promise,” Aizawa said.

She let go, her touch lingering like static. No more words passed between them. She turned and slipped back into the rain, swallowed by the mist and alley shadows. A ghost of resistance. A mother’s last ally.

Aizawa remained in the rain a while longer, unmoving. The letter sat in his coat pocket, warm against his chest like a pulse. That night, he didn’t sleep. He read the letter. Then he read it again. Every word carved into him. Inko’s voice was soft even on the page, full of fear and hope, love and guilt. She hadn’t hated the world for what it did to her son—only begged that someone, someday, might see him again. Might see the boy under all the fear.

And as thunder rolled over the city, Aizawa whispered to the silence, “You’re not gone. I’ll find you before they do.”

Chapter Text

The rooftop was still, a hush lingering in the spaces between buildings like held breath. Neon lights from the city below cast long reflections on glassy windows and dull aluminum vents. It was late—edging into the kind of hour where the city slowed, but never truly stopped. The hum of distant traffic buzzed like a memory beneath the hush, and the occasional bark of laughter or a siren reminded them all that life still moved somewhere out there, just out of reach.

Izuku sat cross-legged on the ledge, hood up, a takeout container balanced on his lap, untouched. The scent of soy sauce and fried rice curled up into the night air, but his appetite was absent. His gaze was fixed on the skyline, where glass towers blinked like constellations in a too-close sky. His fingers flexed around the cheap wooden chopsticks, but he didn’t move to eat. The city looked peaceful from up here—beautiful, even. It almost made it easy to forget that there were wanted notices with his name on them hanging just a few floors below.

Below, Daichi laughed at something Mika said, the two of them crouched on their haunches like kids at recess, tossing fries back and forth with chopsticks like they were competing for a gold medal in absurdity. Daichi's laughter was loud, easy, the kind that made you feel like it wasn’t all falling apart. Mika grinned, eyes gleaming as she faked a solemn bow before dramatically missing her next catch. A fry bounced off her nose. They erupted into another fit of laughter.

Raika stood a few feet behind them, her back pressed to the crumbling concrete wall, arms folded tight. Her dark eyes scanned the skyline methodically, taking in the red strobes of passing aerial drones, the flicker of ads on digital billboards. Always watching. She never really relaxed—not even here, on this temporary island of calm.

The wind shifted. A gentle breeze stirred Izuku’s bangs under his hood and rustled the paper bag beside him. He didn’t look down. His body was here, but his mind—his mind was still looping through fragments. The static edge of suppressors in Facility 11. It all clung to him like smoke.

Still, he stayed quiet. Let the others have this moment.

A pigeon landed nearby with an indignant flutter, its tiny claws scraping on the gravel. It eyed Mika’s fry like it was planning a heist. She noticed and flicked one toward it with a soft tsk. “Go on, featherbrain. You’ve earned it.” Raika’s voice cut in quietly. “One of the drones turned north. Usual pattern.”

That was all she said, but Daichi’s laughter dimmed a little, and Mika’s smile faded at the edges. The air shifted. The rooftop didn’t feel quite so removed anymore.

Izuku finally set the container down beside him and stood, hoodie rustling. He walked to the edge, not recklessly, just… tired. The wind tugged at the hem of his jacket. From here, the city stretched like a sleeping giant, unaware or pretending to be. Lights flickered in apartment windows—families watching TV, lovers arguing, someone washing dishes. All those lives, untouched by the fallout of a boy with too much emotion and nowhere safe to keep it.

He whispered, not expecting a response, “Do you ever think we’ll stop running?”

Mika looked up, catching his tone, then exchanged a glance with Daichi. Raika didn’t answer. None of them did—not really. The quiet stretched long between them.

Finally, Daichi rose and dusted off his knees, trying to smile. “Not tonight,” he said. “Tonight we eat garbage fries and pretend Raika’s not glaring holes in our backs.”

Raika blinked. “I don’t glare.”

Mika snorted. “You totally glare.”

And like that, the heaviness broke just a little. Izuku didn’t smile, but he allowed himself to breathe deeper. For a moment, that was enough. Then a flicker caught Mika’s eye—down in front of them.

“Hey,” Mika said, pointing with her chopsticks, her playful grin fading as something else caught her eye. “That TV down there—what’s that?”

Her voice cut through the low hum of rooftop laughter like a tuning fork, drawing the others’ attention. Izuku turned just slightly, his eyes drifting downward with vague disinterest—until they landed on the flickering storefront screen from below them across the street.

It was a small convenience store, glass front glowing in the city dark like a lantern in fog. Mounted above the entrance, an old TV played a muted news broadcast. The picture was grainy and oversaturated, but clear enough. Behind the glass, surrounded by blinking drink advertisements and cold beverages, a woman sat in a studio, her green cardigan soft against the clinical set. Her hair was pinned in a loose bun. Her shoulders hunched slightly, like the words she carried were heavier than her frame could bear.

The headline scrolled across the bottom in sharp white letters:

EXCLUSIVE: INKO MIDORIYA BREAKS HER SILENCE .

Time stopped.

The world around him dropped out of focus. The glow of neon, the wind across the rooftop, the soft sounds of city life—all of it blurred into static. Izuku’s lungs drew in half a breath, then stopped. His throat closed. The air turned thick, unbreathable.

His fingers went numb.

The takeout container wobbled on his lap. He clutched it tighter without realizing, the edges creasing beneath his grip. The chopsticks slipped through his fingers and clattered softly against the rooftop gravel. The sound was light—barely a whisper—but it rang in his ears like a shattering window.

“No…” he whispered. Barely audible. Not a protest—more like a prayer.

The crew fell silent. Mika’s brows drew together, confused and already sorry. Daichi sat still for once, eyes shifting from the screen to Izuku. Raika, tense at first, softened just enough to step closer. Izuku was the first to make it down onto the street to listen to the T.V.

On the television, Inko looked older than he remembered. Not by years, but by weight. Her face was thinner, paler, threaded with the kind of worry that no sleep could ever undo. Her hands were folded in her lap, knuckles white from how tightly she gripped them. She sat in a clean, sterile studio—nothing behind her but a soft blue backdrop and a polite anchor barely visible at the frame’s edge.

And then—her voice.

Soft. Shaky. But unbroken.

“My son is not a monster,” she began.

Izuku’s knees locked. The sound of her voice—real, not imagined, not remembered—hit him like a physical force. A thousand memories surged forward: the way she’d brush his hair back when he cried, the warmth of her arms after nightmares, the soft lullabies hummed into his shoulder when he was too overwhelmed to speak. That voice had been home.

“They said his Quirk was too dangerous. That it affected others without his control. But he was six. He was six years old.”

His chest tightened. He couldn’t move—wouldn’t. If he did, the spell might break. Her words sank into him like light through stained glass. Fragile. Holy. Impossible. Raika stepped up beside him, her movements slow, careful. She placed a hand on his shoulder—steady, grounding—but said nothing. She didn’t need to.

“Izuku has always been sensitive. He felt things too deeply. And yes—he could affect people. But he never wanted to. He tried so hard to be good.”

Her voice broke slightly on good. Izuku flinched like he’d been struck. Something behind his ribs gave way—something he’d thought long since locked down. The camera zoomed in slightly. You could see the pain in her eyes. The way she swallowed hard between sentences. The determined set of her jaw as if her heart were dragging every word out by force.

“They said he cried too much. That he didn’t smile enough. But the world never gave him a reason to.”

His lips parted, but no sound came. A breath, maybe. A ghost of one.

“He needed help. He needed kindness. They gave him fear and walls.”

He remembered the walls. He remembered the silence. The cold metal of restraints that beeped when his pulse spiked. The fake smiles of Facility 11. The scent of ammonia and bleach and crushed hope. But none of that hurt like this did—hearing her say it. Hearing that she knew. The anchor across from her shifted in his seat, leaning forward like he might speak, might pivot the conversation. But Inko was faster.

She leaned forward too, gaze piercing the camera like she could see through it—see him.

“He was scared. And he was alone. And I was powerless. They told me it was for the best. They told me he was dangerous.”

“But they lied.”

The rooftop held its breath. The city noise faded to a far-off murmur. Even the wind seemed to hesitate. Izuku didn’t realize he’d been holding his breath. He didn’t flinch. His hands were clenched at his sides, his body vibrating like a struck string.

He barely heard Raika’s voice beside him. “Izuku—” But the screen had her again. Inko leaned in close, her gaze burning, voice lower now—just for him.

“If you’re watching this,” she said, raw and trembling, “I love you, Izuku. Please believe that.”

And in that moment, something inside him cracked open—quietly. Not an explosion. Not a scream. Just a slow, aching break, like thawing ice.

Mika’s voice was barely a whisper, almost reverent.

 “…Is that your mom?”

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. The tears hadn’t come yet, but they would. Later, maybe. When no one was looking. For now, he just stood there—still, hollow, and suddenly six years old again. Izuku’s expression was blank. But his hands—his hands trembled violently at his sides, fists curling so hard his knuckles went white, and his nails bit into skin. His aura, usually invisible, began to flicker faintly around his silhouette. Not violent. Not aggressive. Just... uncontained.

“He wasn’t dangerous. He was abandoned. And the world punished him for what it did to him.”

Daichi hadn’t moved. He stood there frozen in place, caught in the uncanny stillness of someone watching something too big to process. Mika’s usual warmth had drained from her face. She’d tucked her legs in, the box of fries forgotten beside her, her gaze flicking rapidly between Izuku and the flickering screen. Raika had moved first, her instincts like clockwork—always the soldier, the guardian. She stepped closer, her boots nearly silent against the gravel. She didn’t touch him again, not yet, but her presence hovered nearby like a safety net waiting to catch someone mid-fall.

The television kept playing, but something shifted. The signal stuttered—subtle at first. A single frame skipped. Then two. The image of Inko Midoriya glitched briefly, her soft features contorting for a breath of a second into warped digital nonsense.

Then—static.

A harsh, sudden burst of noise and light swallowed the screen, drowning her voice mid-sentence. Her expression—torn between sorrow and defiance—was the last thing to vanish. The streets where Izuku stood flinched with it. Not physically. But emotionally—like some invisible thread had snapped. The footage vanished.

In its place: a sharp, sterile blue screen. The insignia of the Hero Commission appeared, bold and unblinking in the center. The edges of the broadcast pulsed with electronic certainty, the same way emergency alerts did. Below it, a new banner began to scroll in a mechanical crawl:

“ UNAUTHORIZED MESSAGE INTERRUPTED. SUBJECT MIDORIYA REMAINS A NATIONAL THREAT. DO NOT ENGAGE .”

It was a clean severing. Precise. Cold. And it echoed louder than Inko’s confession ever could.

The shift in the city was tangible. Subtle—but there. In the street where they all stood, many people paused. A man waiting to cross the street tilted his head toward the flickering screen. A couple stepping out of a ramen shop stopped mid-conversation. A teenage girl holding a shopping bag furrowed her brow at the sudden blue interruption. No screams. No panic. But something unmistakable had passed through them all—a tremor of confusion, unease, recognition. A breath held too long. A seed of doubt.

And then, just as easily, they moved on.

The pedestrians resumed their late night walks. The delivery bike kept pedaling. The girl with the shopping bag went back to scrolling through her phone. The city, trained by years of Commission messaging, swallowed the moment without question—like a body rejecting foreign truth before it could take root.

But on the streets where Izuku stood, time didn’t move forward. Izuku’s breathing had grown ragged now. Uneven. Tight, like every breath had to claw its way up from somewhere deep inside him. He stood frozen, facing the screen that no longer showed anything at all—only the insignia of the same institution that had stolen his childhood, buried his name, and told his mother he was too dangerous to keep.

He didn’t blink. He didn’t speak. His gaze was locked onto the blank blue glow like it had reached through the glass and gutted him.

“She…” he whispered, voice so thin it was almost lost to the breeze. “She tried…”

The words were wet with disbelief, with awe, with heartbreak. A sentence spoken to no one in particular—maybe not even to them, but to the version of himself who still believed no one would ever fight for him again.

Raika stepped closer, slow and careful. Her movements were deliberate, but not cold. She wasn’t trying to console him with words—Raika didn’t use words for things like this. She only spoke when she had to, when silence didn’t carry the truth well enough. “Izuku.”

Still, he didn’t turn to her.

His eyes hadn’t moved. Not once. His fists had tightened even further, fingers digging into the soft, ruined meat of his palms. Blood now dripped freely—thin streams trailing down his wrists and soaking into the hem of his hoodie sleeves. It wasn’t the wound of violence—it was the wound of restraint. The kind you get from holding back something massive inside you for far too long.

“She tried,” he said again, voice cracking now. “And they still…”

His jaw trembled. His eyes fluttered shut. Just for a second. And in that second, everything went still again. The sidewalk settled into silence like snowfall. There was no wind anymore. No laughter. No flicker of neon.

Even Mika, usually the first to speak when things grew too quiet, stayed still. She didn’t try to lighten the mood. She didn’t throw a joke into the tension. Instead, she shifted silently and placed her food container down next to him. Not a gesture of comfort. Not pity. Just presence. Just… here.

Daichi looked down, jaw tense, brows drawn low. He’d seen a lot in his life, but this hit differently. He’d seen Izuku fight, manipulate, burn the air with nothing but his presence—but he’d never seen this. Not the moment a boy tries to understand why love wasn’t enough to change the world.

Izuku moved at last. Slowly, like gravity had thickened around him, he turned away from the screen. Away from the storefront. Away from the city that never stopped moving. And he sat. Not collapsed. Not broken. Just… folded in on himself. He lowered himself onto a bench and drew his knees up close to his chest, resting his arms over them, tucking his face deep beneath the shadow of his hood.

There were no tears. No scream of rage. No burst of emotion or power. But something was breaking inside him. Something invisible but real. The kind of break that didn’t make noise because it had been splintering for years—and had finally run out of room to bend.

“I’m fine,” he muttered at last, voice barely audible. No one moved. No one agreed. Because they all knew it wasn’t true. But they let him lie. Because sometimes, the lie was the only thing that kept the pieces from falling apart too fast.

Above the city, on that forgotten rooftop, the wind began to stir again—gentle and indifferent. As if nothing had happened. As if the world hadn’t just failed someone twice. And Izuku Midoriya, eyes hidden beneath the shadow of memory, sat in silence with people who refused to leave.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

They had all decided that night to sleep on the rooftop. It was decided due to wanting some fresh air, instead of the air in their hideout. 

The morning rooftop was cold. Not the kind of cold that bit skin, but the kind that crept—soft and damp with dew, laced through the cracks in concrete and the rust of old vents. The city below was beginning to stir again, yawning itself awake in the orange-pink haze of early dawn. Headlights blinked through misty streets. Delivery bikes hummed along wet asphalt. Neon signs, once bold and bright, now flickered weakly against the growing light.

But on the rooftop—everything was still.

A stray pigeon fluttered overhead, cooing softly before perching on a bent antenna. A takeout container—Izuku’s from the night before—lay sideways near the ledge, its lid open, rice hardened by the night air. A pair of chopsticks, one snapped at the tip, rested beside it like bones.

And the others were just beginning to stir.

Mika was the first to shift, curled in the corner beneath her oversized hoodie, face smushed into the crook of her arm. She blinked against the morning light, groggy, squinting. Her first instinct was to check if the food she’d left by Izuku was still there—it was. Unmoved. Untouched.

Daichi rolled onto his back with a grunt, stretching long limbs and groaning as his joints cracked. “Morning already?” he mumbled, voice gravelly. “Feels like I just closed my eyes.”

Raika was already sitting up.

She hadn’t truly slept. Not all the way. Not with the way Izuku had folded into himself the night before—fractured and silent. Something about the way he’d gone still had scratched at the edges of her instincts like a dull blade dragging across skin. She hadn’t said anything then. Hadn’t pushed. But now, in the bright honesty of morning, the emptiness in the air confirmed what her gut had whispered all night.

Izuku was gone.

It wasn’t just that he wasn’t lying where he had been hours ago. It was the way the space felt—hollow. Like something essential had been taken in the quiet hours before dawn.

No note. No message through their private comms. Not even a whisper of his fading presence.

Raika stood, her movements sharp, controlled. She scanned the rooftop first with her eyes, then with the quiet click of her comm device. Channel open. No response.

“Zuku,” she said, evenly, “report.”

Static. Daichi sat up, rubbing his eyes. “Wait—he’s not—?”

Mika bolted upright now too, alert in an instant. “What? He’s not—he didn’t say anything?”

“No,” Raika said, already scanning the ledge. “Nothing.”

She walked to the edge where Izuku had stood the night before, the same spot where his food had been abandoned, uneaten. The same place he had stared out over the city with that haunted, hollow look in his eyes after the broadcast. There were no signs of a struggle. No marks of a fight. Just the faint smudge of blood where his hands had dripped the night before, and a few pale footprints leading to the edge—then vanishing.

“Shit,” Mika muttered. “Shitshitshit. He said he was fine.”

Daichi rose to his feet, brushing crumbs off his hoodie. “We all knew that was a lie.”

Raika didn’t speak. She crouched near the ledge, eyes narrowing as she scanned the buildings across the street, the alleyways below. No figure in green. No shadow darting across rooftops. Not even the distant hum of emotion that sometimes accompanied Izuku’s movements when he didn’t bother hiding his presence. It was like he had erased himself entirely.

It wasn’t unusual for him to vanish for hours. He needed space sometimes. Time to think. To breathe without being perceived. But this felt different.

Raika stood again. The wind shifted. She turned her face into it. It was subtle—but different. Not colder. Not stronger. Just… off. Like the rooftop had lost its center of gravity. Like something important had left, and the air hadn’t quite figured out how to rebalance around it yet.

“He left,” she said finally.

Mika’s voice cracked. “Why wouldn’t he tell us?”

“Because he didn’t want to be talked out of it,” Daichi muttered, jaw tight. “Because that broadcast broke something.”

“No,” Raika said, quieter now. “It didn’t break him. He was already broken. This was… something else.”

They stood there in silence. Three figures on a forgotten rooftop, staring out into a city that didn’t even know it had lost someone. And beneath it all, the understanding settled: Izuku hadn’t just gone for a walk. He hadn’t wandered off to cool down. He had left. Vanished.

Not as Misery. Not as the strategist or the ghost who haunted their underground plans. But as a boy whose mother had tried—tried too late, and not loud enough—and who had watched the world silence her all over again.

Raika turned back toward the center of the rooftop. Her eyes lingered on the crumpled hoodie he had used as a pillow, now abandoned. She picked it up, brushed off the dew. Something small and metallic clinked against the gravel.

She knelt. Picked it up. It was Izuku's comm piece. Still warm from skin. He hadn’t just left quietly—he’d cut the line entirely. And that, more than anything else, told her he wasn’t coming back anytime soon. Mika finally sat back down, stunned, hugging her knees. Daichi exhaled hard through his nose, fists clenched at his sides.

Raika stood alone in the center of the rooftop, clutching the abandoned comm like a tether that had snapped in her hand. She didn’t say anything else. She didn’t need to. The sun kept rising. But without Izuku, it felt like the day hadn’t really begun.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

After Izuku had left his crew on the rooftop that night, he decided he wanted to do this alone. He decided that if he was going to be alone, he was going to go to the place where it all starts. The path to Facility 11 wasn’t mapped anymore.

It hadn’t existed on public records for nearly two years—scrubbed from municipal blueprints, rerouted from satellite feeds, and folded neatly out of public memory like a corner of the city no one was meant to look at. After Izuku’s breakout, the place had been sealed off and swallowed by nature, closed “for restructuring,” then quietly left to rot.

But maps didn’t matter to Izuku.

He didn’t need coordinates or satellite images. He didn’t even need signs. The location lived in his bones, etched into the deepest nerves like scar tissue—an ache he didn’t think about but never truly forgot. The pain had become directional, magnetic. All he had to do was follow the hollow pull in his chest, the one that had tugged at him ever since the screen cut to black.

It took him the better part of a day to get there.

He moved like a shadow through the underbelly of the city, slipping between half-abandoned subway lines and the soot-streaked arteries of freight tunnels. No footsteps echoed where he walked. The only sounds were distant train brakes, wind passing through grated vents, and the soft drag of his boots over gravel. He kept his hood low, scarf wound tight across the bottom half of his face. But it wasn’t the cold that gnawed at him. It was something deeper—older. Like the air near Facility 11 had always tasted metallic, laced with something antiseptic and wrong.

When the gates finally came into view, he stopped.

Facility 11 loomed like a skeleton unearthed too soon. The once-imposing fence had folded inward, chain-links curled like broken ribs, sagging under the weight of years without maintenance. Grass grew tall around its base, curling through the links and swallowing the warning signs whole. The lettering— AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY —was faded to a pale whisper. Above it, the remnants of an old security camera sagged like a blind eye, rust streaking down the pole beneath it.

The entire structure slouched to the left, as if the earth itself had decided to let it sink. One of the old watchtowers had collapsed in on itself, half-eaten by a nearby tree that had grown crooked with age, its roots reaching into the very foundation. Dead vines wrapped the concrete like veins. The reinforced windows were cracked, some entirely shattered, littering the entrance path with fragments of mirrored glass that crunched beneath his steps.

There were no guards. No drones. No alarms waiting to scream. Just the quiet hum of wind and the distant, invisible presence of old ghosts.

Izuku stepped through the open maw of the front gate, barely recognizing the archway he’d once passed beneath in shackles. The rusted metal detectors, which had once buzzed with red lights and scanned for quirk signatures, were dead. One of the scanners still blinked red occasionally, a pathetic little flicker in a screen long drained of purpose. The welcome chime—falsely cheerful, falsely human—was gone. He waited for it anyway.

Nothing. He stepped forward. He didn’t breathe for ten full seconds. He told himself he came to confirm what he already knew: it had been a prison. A lie dressed in soft tones and institutional smiles. A place built not to help but to contain. He wanted to see it hollowed out. Wanted to see with his own eyes that it was over. That the walls could no longer whisper. That the silence here no longer had the power to smother.

But his body said otherwise.

His chest trembled—just a flicker at first, a twitch in a rib, a skip in his breath. He swallowed it, pressed it down. This wasn’t about feeling. It was about knowing.

The front atrium was in ruins. The security desk had collapsed inward from rot. The synthetic potted plants placed there for “comfort” had decayed into tangled husks. Posters with therapeutic slogans—“Control Is Possible!” and “Every Emotion Is a Choice”—peeled from the walls, their pastel colors turned to gray. Dust hung in the air in slow, lazy spirals, disturbed only by the faint movement of his coat as he walked.

He moved slowly. Each step was deliberate, as if the building itself might recognize his footsteps and remember him.

He passed the inner courtyard. The playground still stood, barely.

A plastic slide leaned to one side, sun-bleached and brittle. The see-saw was locked at an angle, rusted stiff. The swing set—he paused at that. One of the chains was broken, the swing hanging limp and crooked. The other swayed gently in the breeze, squeaking faintly. He remembered the girl with the bright laugh, the one who had pushed him once, maybe twice, when no one was looking. She had vanished weeks later. Her bed had been stripped by morning.

Yung May.

Inside, the corridors greeted him like a grave.

Once white and sterile, the halls were now stained with water damage and mold. Some doors had been forced open—others remained stubbornly locked, as if they were afraid of what they held inside. The lights no longer worked, but pale morning sun poured through the broken windows, casting long shadows that made the floor look cracked.

He walked past old rec rooms, classrooms, sleeping halls. Past the dining wing where trays once clattered and eyes never met. And then he reached it.

The isolation chamber.

His muscles tensed before his brain registered where he was. His body remembered. His breath hitched involuntarily, chest seizing with a phantom ache that no longer had a cause.

The door—always locked, always cold—was wide open.

The room inside was small. A padded cell with scuffed white walls, one overhead light now long shattered. The air smelled like dust and something old beneath it—antiseptic soaked into concrete. He stepped in.

The crayon marks were still there. They had tried to scrub them out, but desperation had a way of leaving stains that never quite faded. Bright colors, dulled by time, curled across the padding like cries that had nowhere else to go.

“I’m not bad.”

“Mom?”

“It’s too loud. Stop crying.”

“STOP. STOP. STOP—”

A scrawl of jagged red cut into the corner where he used to curl himself into the wall: “Don’t feel. Don’t feel. Don’t feel.”

He could almost hear it. The hiss of the door sliding shut. The silence thick with static. The way his own breath had felt too loud, like it might shatter something fragile and forbidden. The way the walls seemed to shrink the longer you stayed, until there was no room left in your head.

He staggered back. His hand touched the frame of the door. It came away streaked with dust. He didn’t know how long he stood there. Minutes, maybe. Hours. Time, like everything else in Facility 11, had no meaning anymore. But when he finally stepped away, something had changed. Not fixed. Not healed. But shifted. He wasn’t here to rage. He wasn’t here to mourn. He was here to remember what the world had let happen—and what it still tried to forget.

And the next time they called him a threat, a monster, a mistake— He would know exactly where that story had started. And he would burn it down to the roots.

Further into the facility, where the halls twisted tighter and the ceilings grew lower as if weighed down by the memories trapped inside, Izuku pushed open the warped double doors of what had once been the central monitoring hub. The metal creaked, swollen with rust, groaning like something alive. A gust of stale, electrically-charged air rushed to greet him as he stepped inside, as if the room still remembered its purpose and resented his return.

The monitoring room—once the pristine nerve center of Facility 11—was in ruins. Long rows of consoles, once sleek and silver, had turned to graveyards of outdated technology and dust-choked circuitry. Broken monitors flickered lazily across the far wall, feeding static into the silence, their black-and-white ghosts twitching like dying memories. One screen sparked briefly, casting a twitch of artificial light over the panel beside it. Another blinked red—just once. Then again. Like a heartbeat. Like something waiting.

Izuku’s boots echoed on the cracked tile as he walked, each step slower than the last. His breath, shallow and uneven, fogged faintly in the cold as he stepped between fallen ceiling panels and shattered observation glass. One console still hummed, an impossible relic amid the decay. His eyes narrowed, instinct warring with dread, but his hand reached out anyway.

The panel was dust-covered, buttons faded by years of disuse, but somehow operational. As his fingers hovered, it responded with a mechanical whine—like it hadn’t been touched in a long, long time but still remembered what to do. He pressed a blinking key. The monitor above it crackled, the static curling inward until a grainy image came into focus.

A six-year-old boy appeared onscreen.

Curled in the corner of a white room. Limbs pulled inward, chin tucked tight to his knees, shaking so violently he looked as though he might snap in two. The camera’s cold lens stared down at him with clinical indifference. A moment passed—and then, slowly, the image began to ripple. Lights in the footage flickered. A chair scraped across the floor without anyone touching it. Onscreen, the boy—he—gasped once and then—something burst. An unseen pulse, raw and invisible, sent the camera feed warping for a moment. The timestamp jittered. The sound—barely there—caught a high, broken cry.

Izuku stepped back, swallowing hard, his throat suddenly dry. But he didn’t look away. His hand hovered back over the controls, shaking now as if his body knew something his mind hadn’t yet caught up to. He pressed a second key. Then a third. The screen blinked again.

New footage.

The same child, strapped down to a reclining table, foam pads around his head. Thin wires snaked across his temples, pulsing faintly. Men in long coats stood nearby, tablets in hand, not a single pair of eyes meeting the boy’s. One of the doctors made a motion, and the footage skipped. The boy’s mouth opened in a silent scream. Glass fogged behind the lens. The camera cut again.

Another screen activated automatically beside it.

Color-coded logs scrolled across a data feed, one after another.

EMPATHIC EVENT: LEVEL 2 — Subject induced rapid sadness in three adjacent cells.

LEVEL 3 — Hyperventilation, Crying, Nausea in exposed staff.

LEVEL 4 — Subject’s emotional output caused mild seizure in Co-Subject D9. Subject tranquilized. Emotional inhibitor increased.

And then it appeared. A line that froze Izuku’s breath in his chest.

SUBJECT: YUNG MAY

STATUS: TERMINATED

He stared at the words for what felt like an eternity, blinking slowly, as if that might force them to change. His lips parted, but no sound came out. A low, rising panic surged up his throat, but it never reached his voice. It was as if the screen had become a wall, pressing all the air out of the room.

The footage snapped black. A loud click of static hissed through the air like a slap.

Izuku stumbled backward, shoulder slamming into the panel behind him. He didn’t feel it. His feet were already moving—carrying him out of the room, out of the glow of the monitors, out of the eyes of those long-dead doctors and analysts and guards who had stood by and done nothing.

His chest felt like it was folding inward with every step. He didn’t think. He didn’t plan. He just knew. He knew where her room had been. Where she had once laughed. Where she had once pushed a broken swing and whispered secrets in the dark.

It was halfway down the eastern corridor—just past the cafeteria, beside the solarium no one was allowed to use. Hers had been one of the few cells with a window. A mercy, they said. A kindness. A lie. He ran.

His boots slapped the cracked tile, loud now, breath ragged. The hall twisted past in blurs of shadow and decay. Doorways yawned open on either side, every one of them filled with ghosts. The air thickened as he went, as though the walls themselves were choking on what they’d seen.

And then he reached it. Her room. The door was gone—ripped from its hinges, twisted and blackened like it had been blown inward. The hallway light spilled inside in a soft gray wash. He stepped over the frame, heart hammering, and froze.

The room was small. Smaller than he remembered. Just a bed, pushed upright against the wall like someone had tried to make more space. The mattress was torn in one corner. Stuffing leaked out like cotton guts. On the wall opposite, a collage of childish drawings clung stubbornly to the plaster.

They were fading. But they were there. Simple crayon sketches, scrawled in pink and purple and red. Hearts. Stars. Stick figures with lopsided heads. One figure had bright green scribbles for hair. Another had a scarf. And in the corner, a misshapen cat with three legs, drawn over and over again like a comfort object.

He dropped to his knees.

The floor was dust-choked. Undisturbed for years. But beneath the shadow of the mattress, half-hidden by old cloth and splinters, he saw it.

A scarf. Small. Purple. Frayed at the ends. Torn near the middle where someone had gripped too hard. He reached for it like it might vanish. His fingers trembled as he pulled it free. Dust clung to the fibers. The fabric had lost its warmth long ago, but it was hers. Hers. He pressed it to his face. No scent. No memory in the threads. Just silence. And still, he couldn’t stop shaking.

Something crinkled beneath his palm.

Beneath the mattress, just at the corner of the frame, a flap of tape had come loose. He reached in, carefully, and pulled free a small envelope. The paper was brittle. Yellowed. He turned it over with care, heart in his throat, and saw his name—written in blocky, misspelled letters across the front in pink crayon.

“ Izuku ”

He opened it with hands that refused to steady. Inside, a single folded page. The writing was jagged and uneven, the kind of letter written by someone too small for the words they carried.

“ Dear Izuku.

When I get out we’re going to have a real picnic. Not the pretend one. With real food. You can cry if you want and I won’t be scared. You make me feel warm. You’re my best friend.

P.S. I think the doctor is lying. They keep asking me about you. ”

He didn’t mean to cry. But as his eyes moved over each word, tears fell anyway. Silent at first, trailing down his face and hitting the page like rain. He clutched the note to his chest, curling over it, breath coming faster now, mouth open but soundless. No scream. Just grief. Pure and ancient.

He rocked back slowly, the scarf clutched in one hand, the letter in the other, as his shoulders heaved with emotion too big to hold in. And for the first time in years, he let himself mourn her. Not just her death. Not just her absence.

But the hope she’d carried in her tiny body. The faith she had in him. The idea that they might’ve escaped together. That the world might’ve made room for them, if only for a moment longer.

He stayed there a long time.The room didn’t move. The drawings didn’t fade.And as the wind howled softly through the broken window, Izuku Midoriya knelt in the dust and ruin of what had been taken from him—and finally wept.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

His old room was last.

He stood in front of the door for a long while, unmoving, as if the rusted number plate above it had the power to turn him to stone. It still read 13-A, the same as it always had, though the edges were beginning to peel. One screw had come loose, so the sign hung crooked—tilted like it no longer wanted to belong to the wall that birthed it. The walls here had never been kind. They had been soft, yes, and clean, padded to “protect”—but never kind.

Izuku stared at the door, his hand hovering over the handle. He didn’t know what he expected. That the room might look the same? That maybe the air inside would still remember his breath? That some echo of the boy who used to live here might greet him like a reflection in the glass?

When he finally pushed it open, the hinges gave a dry groan, like even the door was reluctant to remember.

The space inside was smaller than he remembered. He took one slow step, then another, as if crossing the threshold into some sacred tomb. The cot against the wall—once a looming piece of furniture in his childhood—now looked laughably small, narrow enough for a child but barely fit for comfort. The frame was bent slightly at the corner, a scar from a panic episode he barely remembered. The sheets were gone. Only the metal remained. Cold. Uninviting. A ribcage without a heart.

To the left was the desk, a single slab of metal built into the wall, welded at the sides to prevent removal. He used to sit there for hours, tracing his fingers over the grooves in the surface, not because he was writing or drawing—he rarely had permission to do either—but because it gave him something to do with his hands. The chair was still there, bolted into place, tilted at a slight angle where he’d kicked it too hard one day and bent the leg.

Above the desk was the shelf. That damn shelf.

They had given him space for exactly two personal items. Two. Like it was an act of generosity. One book—his favorite, though the title had long since escaped him—and one drawing. A crayon mess he’d made the day he was given art privileges for “compliance.” A stick figure with bright green scribbles for hair and a sun overhead. It was childish. Sloppy. But it was his.

Now the shelf was empty. Not even dust had the decency to gather there. Just absence. Stark and hollow. He stared at it for a long while, jaw clenched, throat tightening like it wanted to speak but couldn’t find the language. And then he saw it. On the desk. A crumpled piece of paper.

It was curled in on itself, the edges yellowed and the center warped by age and moisture. If it had fallen from the shelf above, it must’ve been waiting there for years—untouched, unnoticed, maybe even forgotten by the people who had swept through to strip this place bare. He approached slowly. Reached out with shaking fingers, heart thudding so loud in his ears it nearly drowned out the silence.

He lifted it gently, as though it might disintegrate at his touch. Carefully, he unfolded the crinkled paper, smoothing it flat against the cold metal of the desk. The creases resisted him, like old bones refusing to yield. But then—it opened.

And he saw it.

A drawing.

Simple. Childish. Crayon lines, uneven and enthusiastic. A green-haired boy with comically large eyes, smiling wide. One hand outstretched. Holding hands with a girl in a bright pink scarf, her hair scribbled in soft loops of brown. Above them, two suns—because she’d always said one wasn’t enough—and several clouds shaped like teardrops and lopsided animals.

And written below in careful, unsteady handwriting, big letters etched with hope:

“ May + Izuku = Friends Forever ”.

He stared at it for a long time.

At first, he didn’t move. His breath caught somewhere behind his ribs, locked in place. The longer he looked, the more the lines blurred—not from time, but from the sudden, unexpected tears welling in his eyes. Not violent tears. Not loud. Just slow. Warm.

He ran his fingertips along the edge of the page, brushing against the places where the crayon had dug deep into the fibers. She’d pressed hard when she drew, he remembered. Always did. Like if she didn’t push the color into the world, it might never come out. He could almost hear her voice again. High, a little squeaky. Full of stubborn cheer.

“You can’t erase forever,” she had told him once, swinging her legs off the edge of her bed. “If you write it big enough, it stays.” He swallowed around the lump in his throat. Blinked. Failed to stop the tear that fell onto the page. He gathered the drawing with reverence, folding it with aching care, and slipped it into the inner pocket of his coat—pressed close to his chest.

This room, this tomb, had nothing left to offer him now. But that paper? That memory? That was something he would carry.

Forever. Just like she wrote.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He didn’t know what guided his feet—maybe instinct, maybe memory—but his body remembered paths his mind had spent years trying to erase. The deeper he moved into the ruins of Facility 11, the more the air changed. The sterile white halls became narrower, shadows lengthened, and the temperature dropped with every step like the building itself resented him for returning.

Past the admin wing—now gutted and collapsed in places—he crossed a shattered reception desk where broken glass glittered like ice around the fractured “Facility Code of Ethics” plaque. It lay in two pieces, face-down, as if the walls themselves were trying to forget the lies they’d once upheld.

Then he saw it: a steel door tucked behind a half-collapsed support beam, sealed with an outdated keypad. The screen was still glowing. Dim. Flickering. Holding on by threads of leftover voltage from a backup generator long past its intended lifespan. He stared at the keys for a long moment. And then, with slow fingers, he typed in four numbers.

09-08. One of the facility members birthdays. He could at least remember that. The lock clicked with a tired hiss, like something waking from a coma. The door slid open an inch, creaking as he pushed it inward.

Beyond was a hallway he didn’t remember—but his bones seemed to. Barely wide enough for a stretcher. No windows. No signs. Just pressed steel walls and humidity-thick air that smelled faintly of oil and rust. Dust drifted like ash. His boots left trails in the untouched grime. The hallway sloped downward. Sublevel.

At the end, another door. This one wasn’t locked. He pushed. The records vault exhaled like a tomb breached. Cold, still air rolled out. Inside, metal shelves sagged under decades of government secrets. Labeled boxes, files, and hard drives lined every wall. The emergency lighting bathed everything in a dull orange haze.

SUBJECTS A–D.

EMPATHIC OUTLIERS.

SUPPRESSION TRIALS – COHORT 03.

TERMINATION REPORTS.

He walked past each row slowly, the titles tugging at scars deeper than skin. When he reached a tall cabinet near the back, something pulled at him. He opened it. Inside: a row of USB drives, each labeled with white stickers in blocky black type.

MIDORIYA, IZUKU – VIDEO LOGS.

He took one at random and slotted it into the rust-speckled terminal nearby. The monitor buzzed to life like a groan of protest. The screen filled with static. Then—video.

Grainy security footage. He was maybe seven. Small. Curled into a ball in the corner of a blinding white cell. Shoulders shaking. Tears running freely. The overhead lights above him flickered, triggered by the waves of emotion rippling outward from his trembling form. No sound. Just timestamps and color-coded warnings.

Empathic Event – LEVEL 4: Induced Crying, Panic, Seizure Risk to Nearby Subjects.

He clicked ahead.

Another video: strapped to a table, writhing. A needle. His body going limp. Another: him standing stiff, terrified, while a technician held up flashcards. Another—two doctors watching a live feed.

“Subject Midoriya continues to display exponential instability when distressed. I recommend escalation to long-term viability testing.”

“He’s too unpredictable.”

“He’s too valuable.”

Then—another label appeared on the screen.

YUNG MAY — TERMINATION CLEARANCE: LEVEL RED

Izuku’s hand froze on the mouse. He didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink. It was as if the room itself had gone quiet, like even the failing hum of the old monitor knew better than to intrude on what was coming. His heart slammed once, painfully hard in his chest, then seemed to forget how to beat altogether. The glow of the screen reflected off his eyes as if he were staring into a flame, but he couldn’t feel the heat—only the numb, hollow chill that had begun to spread through his limbs like ice water in his veins. His fingers twitched once, hovering above the button. Then, almost against his will, he clicked.

The screen was black at first. A long, unnatural pause that made something inside him tighten with dread. Then a timestamp appeared—one he instantly recognized. The date that Yung May had disappeared. The day he never saw her again.

The feed came into focus.

It wasn’t a lab. Not yet. It was a hallway—one of the interior corridors used only by staff, far from the main dormitories. Yung May walked down the middle of it, small and quiet, scarf wrapped neatly around her neck as always, her arms hugging herself in the same way she had done when the night terrors came. She wasn’t shackled. She wasn’t struggling. But there was a weight to the way she moved that made Izuku’s breath catch. She looked like a child being led into the woods after already realizing no one planned to let her come back out. There was no resistance, only the kind of silence that came when someone had finally stopped hoping.

Her eyes were wide, but dry. She turned her face up to one of the guards walking beside her—not angry, not afraid. Just… lost.

“Am I getting moved?” she asked. Her voice was soft. Almost hopeful. “Like some of the others?”

No one answered. They kept walking. When they reached the end of the hall, a heavy metal door blocked their path. No windows. No markings. Just a keypad. One of the guards typed in a code, and the door hissed open.

She hesitated then, just for a second.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she whispered.

No one acknowledged her.

The camera feed switched. Now inside the room, the angle came from the ceiling, like an executioner’s vantage point. The space was clinical and clean. Too clean. No restraints. No gurney. No padded walls like in the isolation chambers. Just a metal table pushed against the wall, two chairs, a drip stand, and a medical cart. The kind of room they used for interviews—or dissections.

She was led to one of the chairs. She sat. Her small hands trembled in her lap. She kept glancing at the IV stand like she didn’t want to understand it, but already did. One of the guards adjusted something out of frame. Then the door opened again.

An older man stepped in. Not someone Izuku recognized. He wore a white lab coat, thin glasses, and a smile so empty it may as well have been drawn on paper. He carried a clipboard and a capped syringe filled with something pale blue. He approached May slowly, speaking words the camera didn’t carry—gentle, coaxing ones, no doubt. But his hands never stopped moving. He uncapped the syringe. Checked the line. Stepped closer.

May pulled her arm back slightly. The first flicker of fear crossed her face. He said something again—maybe an apology, maybe a lie. She shook her head. She tried to scoot away in the chair, just an inch. Just enough to say no.

Then the guards stepped in.

One grabbed her shoulders and held her still. The other took her arm. She kicked once—tiny legs flailing in slow motion—but the second the needle pierced her skin, all movement ceased. Her eyes widened. Her mouth opened like she might scream, but nothing came out. Her fingers twitched, then spasmed. A full-body tremor rolled through her—and then stopped. She went slack.

Just like that. No monitors. No beeping. No last words. Just… silence. The man in the coat checked her pulse with two fingers. He nodded to himself. Calm. Detached. Then he looked up at the camera and gave a thumbs up.

Izuku’s lungs collapsed in on themselves.

The video ended with clinical finality—no fade-out, no soft closure—just a stark red screen with cold white letters:

Subject Y.M. – Termination Confirmed

Filed Under Compliance Protocol E.13

“Containment executed with zero collateral.”

And then nothing. Nothing but the faint flicker of the monitor. The room was dead quiet, and still, and unbearably full of ghosts.

Izuku didn’t move. Couldn’t. He was seated, but it felt more like he was falling—slowly, endlessly, into something so deep there would never be a way out. His eyes remained glued to the screen even though it had gone black. His hand had slipped off the mouse. His mouth hung slightly open, breath rasping in uneven pulls. There was a pounding in his ears that might’ve been his heart—or maybe not. Maybe that had stopped too.

A sound built in the back of his throat. Not a sob. Not even a scream. Just a hollow, broken exhale that shivered out of him like air escaping a punctured lung. He leaned forward until his forehead touched the edge of the console, fingers gripping the desk so tightly the metal groaned beneath his knuckles. His entire body began to shake.

They had killed her with poison like it meant nothing. Like she wasn’t a child. Like she wasn’t May. Like she wasn’t his only friend. His only warmth in a place that had stolen everything else from him. They hadn’t even looked scared. They hadn’t hesitated. They hadn’t treated it like a mistake or an emergency or even a mercy.

They had just done it. Neatly. Cleanly. Without mess.

He could still see her. That tiny pink scarf. Her legs swinging above the floor. The way she turned to the guard and asked where he’d gone. Her voice echoing in his memory with such unbearable clarity: