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This meeting was going to be a hellscape, the Meta Liberation Army was just a massive cult with an uncomfortable lack of government oversight, and while that was something the League needed, they still sucked to talk to. With all that fanaticism, they could have caused some actual change in the world, could have made life easier for people like Toga, Dabi, and Twice, but instead, they decided to hide in the shadows of society, barely even doing anything. Compress was deeply disappointed in them, they had no flair and no confidence despite the greatness they advertised.
Despite this, they could still be useful, they had power despite their unwillingness to actually make use of it. If the League could get their hands on that power, some legitimate damage could be done to Hero Society, and things could be changed for the better. Unfortunately, the League hadn’t actually started doing in-person meetings with the leaders of the army until just after Dabi had gotten captured a week ago, so they ended up having to meet up with a society that valued powerful quirks without one of their most powerful quirks on hand, which greatly slowed down the process of producing an allyship.
Compress still thought that it was stupid to leave Dabi captured if they knew his location and could get him out with Kurogiri, especially given how much harder it was making his job of getting the army on board with their plans. Apparently, Shigiraki had a plan that he didn’t want Dabi to hear about rattling around in his skull, but that excuse was sounding less and less true by the day, and Compress was starting to think that he just wanted to get rid of Dabi and chose to send him to Eraserhead to do so.
All that is to say that when Compress stepped out of the elevator on the top floor of the Detnerat Company building, he was not expecting to see Dabi escaped from his hospital room with no signs of injury or restraints despite the number of people that should have been guarding him. He was also not expecting to see one of the hero course kids the League had been targeting for the last three years peacefully coexisting with someone who would have gladly murdered him a week ago.
With all this in mind, Compress should be excused from his choice to completely ignore the situation at hand and instead continue forward to talk to Curious and Trumpet, who were not in the middle of a conversation with someone who should be chained to a bed in the hospital.
Sure, he probably should have told Shigiraki about Dabi’s escape the second he found out, but he had a job to do, and by god was he going to do it and do it well at that. It didn’t matter that he had stated multiple times that he hated these meetings and would rather be doing anything else, this was the most important thing in the world, and he should not be getting sidetracked under any circumstances (according to Shigiraki, who sent him to this incredibly important meeting), and Dabi was clearly not important enough to interrupt this very bland conversation for, no siree.
And if Compress conveniently forgot to tell Shigiraki later, then well, humans forgot things all the time, and with how riveting his conversation with Trumpet and Curious was, it makes sense that he would forget something so trivial as someone he had spent so much time with being at a meeting he should have been at in the first place. Whoever would blame him for such an honest mistake?
And if he decided to talk to Dabi after formalities were over with to figure out what was going on, that was nobody's business but the people currently in the head courters of Detnerat Company.
All that preface noted by Compress’s imaginary lawyer, he headed over to Dabi and the concerning gaggle of white-haired people standing around him.
“So, are we going to discuss this, or are we going to pretend that the hero student and collection of people who have your original hair color are normal?”
“...Don’t tell Shigiraki, I think he’s trying to get rid of me.”
“Oh, nice! No one else has noticed how weird your capture and the subsequent excuses about it are, so it’s great that you have at least.”
“Toga and Twice didn’t notice? They were the ones who were supposed to make sure the plan would go well.”
“No, with how they act, you’d think they would at least point it out, right?”
“They were probably in on it then.”
“How unfortunate.”
“Yeah, anyway, these are the members of my family that I don’t hate with every bone in my body, just most of them.”
He gestures to the others in the group, including the hero student and a member of the Meta Liberation Army, explaining that the reason the hero student wasn’t being shredded was that he had started the process of breaking Dabi out of the hospital with literally no prompting. The kid gave him a blank-faced thumbs up, and Compress looked away.
He also proceeds to explain his entire backstory in a (frankly) undeserved show of trust, which none of the other members of his family seem even in the slightest surprised about (genetic trauma dumping maybe??). Interestingly, he also seems to be telling the Meta Liberation Army leaders about his backstory, which could be accidental, but given the bloodthirst in all of the Himura’s eyes, may have already been discussed and decided on to subtly get back up for a murder. Given Compress’s opinion on the matter, they would be getting backup no matter what.
