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“Technically,” Mioriya says, and Aizawa sighs heavily, pressing his fingers into his forehead just above the eyebrows. Midoriya shoots him a skittish look before continuing, “Technically, we didn’t break the law.”
“Officer,” adds Uraraka quickly.
Unlike Aizawa, Naomasa doesn’t have to put up with these kids on a daily basis, and instead of the exhaustion he probably ought to feel over having Midoriya Izuku, Tenya Iida, and Todoroki Shouto in his precinct again, this time having dragged Uraraka Ochako and, somehow, Asui Tsuyu into their nonsense as well, he feels primarily a sense of curiosity, and under that, dare he say it, amusement. They clearly don’t feel bad about whatever apparently borderline illegal thing they did.
“For the last time,” Aizawa says, “none of you are in trouble.”
“Forgive us for not believing that,” Todoroki says. “We are in an interrogation room in a police station.”
Naomasa taps his pen against the long table. “This isn’t an interrogation room. It’s just one of our conference rooms.”
“Oh.” Todoroki thinks about that. “Well, we’re still in a police station, talking to a detective. I think we’re at rights to think this isn’t all it seems.”
Naomasa waits for one of them to be the voice of reason against this, but they’re all nodding like it makes perfect sense. The kids are lined up side-by-side on the wide end of the table across from Naomasa, Iida on the right, then Midoriya, then Uraraka, then Asui, and then Todoroki on the left, sitting so closely together it looks almost like they’re sharing the same seat. Aizawa, on the other hand, has taken the chair farthest possible from them and has become a grumpy shadow in the corner.
“You’re here to report a crime,” Aizawa says.
“But we didn’t do a crime,” Uraraka says. “That’s what we’re saying.”
Aizawa looks as if he would rather be six feet under than have to continue this conversation. “The other crime. The one you walked into.”
“Oh, that crime.”
Naomasa knows that Aizawa is a very competent teacher and that he has instructed countless heroes into being the best of the best. He also knows that sometimes, particularly with this class, his students lack a certain amount of common sense. He flips open his notebook. “Why don’t you start from the beginning?”
“Well, we were on a trip to the mall,” Uraraka says, “because we wanted to be there for the opening of the new hero merch store. We have sort of a competition going of who can buy the most Deku merch.”
Midoriya flushes a shade of red that shouldn’t be possible and tangles his fingers together on the table, avoiding Naomasa’s eyes.
“I’m winning,” Todoroki says.
“Shouto is winning,” Uraraka agrees. “Because he keeps cheating and using Endeavour’s credit card to buy the really specialty stuff.”
“Is that cheating?” Todoroki says.
“You commissioned an entire clothing line—”
“Stay on topic,” Aizawa says.
“This is on topic, ribbit,” Asui says, the first thing she’s said since she said hello to Naomasa when she walked in. Naomasa thinks, out of the group, he trusts Asui’s judgment on what is and is not on topic the most, so he gives her his full attention. “There’s all sorts of rules about what Deku merch counts. Every item has to be different. We also have a value system, so, ribbit, the basic stuff everyone has isn’t worth much to the competition, but the more unique the item is the more points you get for it. We have a spreadsheet.”
“I don’t like this competition,” Midoriya mumbles.
“You love hero merch,” Uraraka says.
“Yeah, when it’s other people’s.”
Iida tells Naomasa, “Izuku refuses to buy his own merchandise, beyond the few items that first came out on the market back when he was excited to even have merchandise. He’s in second place anyway because he’s especially talented at finding vintage merchandise for the vestiges, which counts per the competition rules, and he already has a vast All Might collection.”
“Anyway,” Uraraka says, “we were at the mall in this super long line, and we were all wearing…” she gestures at herself and her friends.
Naomasa had noticed this before, but he had chosen not to comment since he didn’t have the context. All of them, except Midoriya, are completely decked out in Deku merch, head to toe, to the point it’s almost ridiculous. Todoroki in particular has gone all out—he’s wearing multiple layers of shirts, a beanie, and what looks like a temporary tattoo on his cheek under the scar.
“They’re really mean to me,” Midoriya says, when Naomasa’s gaze hits him. Midoriya, in contrast to his friends, is in normal clothes: a t-shirt that says “t-shirt” and a Uravity jacket with a hood. He had the hood up and sunglasses on when he walked in, but they’ve since been removed. “They told me they were going to be low-key.”
“It’s called being supportive,” Uraraka says.
Midoriya sinks lower in his seat. “I can’t go anywhere with you all,” he says, “without getting dragged into a million autographs.”
“You enjoy signing autographs,” Iida says.
“I have chronic joint pain!”
“Can you please,” Aizawa gets out through gritted teeth, “get back to the actual crime report?”
“Yes, yes,” Uraraka says. “So we were in this long line, getting bombarded by Deku fans because Izuku doesn’t know how to blend into a crowd. It was kind of funny because another line started to form, perpendicular to the original line, for Deku. It wrapped around the corner of the store.”
Aizawa grumbles something incoherently. Naomasa cannot imagine having these students as his own. It would be, if not hell, the closest thing to it imaginable.
“We should probably stop going to the mall with Izuku, ribbit,” says Asui.
“You live and you learn,” Uraraka says.
“So,” Midoriya says, which Naomasa considers a small mercy, given that Uraraka does not, apparently, know how to tell a story with any sort of efficiency, “we finally got to the front of the line to the store, and the people at the store realized I was in the line and got kind of excited and asked me to sign a whole bunch of stuff in the store—”
Asui cut in, “Which Todoroki immediately bought, ribbit. Now that you mention it, Ochako, that does feel like cheating.”
“It definitely doesn’t seem fair to the second line of people who just wanted Deku to sign stuff for them,” Uraraka agrees.
“You guys ask me to sign stuff for you all the time,” Midoriya says. He sends Naomasa a helpless look and says, “Imagine trying to go about your day and then your terrible friends bombard you with your own merch and force you to sign it.”
Naomasa is starting to get a headache. “So then…what happened?”
“Ugh.” Midoriya’s head disappears behind his hands.
“I’m not certain if you know this,” Iida says, “but Izuku tends to get dragged into crimes much faster than the average person.”
Naomasa does know this. From Aizawa’s expression in the corner, it is clear that Aizawa also knows this.
“It literally isn’t my fault,” Midoriya mumbles.
“So, ribbit, Izuku noticed something seemed a little fishy,” Asui says.
“The store had a really weird layout.” Midoriya’s face reemerges from behind his hands. “They had basic merch behind the counter, like you had to ask for the 2042 All Might figurine, which almost everyone already has and is worth almost nothing on the market. I already thought it was kind of strange because they had a section for Endeavour, but I thought, hey, I don’t know how capitalism works, maybe they have to do that to survive. But the longer I was in there, the weirder it got. I’ve studied blueprints of the mall before, and this particular store seemed to use only half the space it should have been allocated, which is really weird in a hero merch store because generally you want to be using as much space as possible since there’s such a variety of heroes and everyone comes in looking for a different thing, so you really need to use the floor space.” He demonstrates the shape of the store with his hands. “So I was asking myself why would they cut their store space in half? What’s in the back? Like it seemed strange to only have—”
“To abridge,” Iida interrupts, “Izuku started to think maybe something was weird.”
Asui adds, “And Izuku thinking something is weird usually leads to something being weird, so we obviously pay attention when he says something’s off.”
“It was a little funny,” Uraraka says. “One second, Shouto and I were fighting over a signed hoodie, and the next second Izuku was pulling us aside and telling us he needed to get into the back room because he thought the entire store was a front. So naturally, we got into the back room.”
“It wasn’t against the law,” Iida says, which is foreboding. Naomasa searches Midoriya’s expression to verify, and Midoriya cringes, shoulders hunching up to his ears.
“Are you even allowed to interrogate us without a lawyer present?” Uraraka says out of nowhere.
Naomasa remembers suddenly why he always feels glad he didn’t ever want to be a teacher when Aizawa’s class is around. “This isn’t an interrogation, but you’re welcome to a lawyer if you want one.” He could certainly use the break from this story they would need to take while a lawyer travels to the precinct.
The kids bunch together, heads down, and start whispering among themselves. Naomasa gives Aizawa a wide-eyed look of confusion. Aizawa sighs again and reminds his terrible students, “We are on a time crunch.”
“Right,” Iida says, chopping his hand down onto the table.
“We can just use Yaomomo, ribbit,” Asui says.
The expression on Aizawa’s face can only be described as abject pain. “Yaoyorozu isn’t a lawyer.”
“But she’s very smart and very level headed,” Uraraka objects, “unlike the rest of us.”
“I’m level headed,” Todoroki says.
“No,” Uraraka says, “you are not.”
“Izuku’s smart,” he says.
Uraraka turns to Midoriya and grasps his hands in hers. “You know I consider you one of my best and closest friends. And you know that it is with all the love in the world that I say this.”
Flushing beet red, Midoriya nods.
Uraraka returns to Todoroki. “Izuku,” she says, “is a complete dumbass.”
“Hey!” Midoriya squawks.
“We need Yaomomo here,” Uraraka says.
“I must agree.” Iida pushes his glasses up his nose.
“Great,” Naomasa says. “How soon can she get here?”
“She’s already on her way,” Midoriya says. “I texted her to bring some of my notebooks. “
Long-suffering, Aizawa says, “Why do you need your notebooks?”
“For his notes,” says Todoroki. “Obviously.”
Aizawa makes the sort of dead expression that implies he isn’t about to touch that logic with a ten-foot pole and sits back in his chair, apparently done trying to corral his students on Naomasa’s behalf.
“Maybe,” Naomasa ventures, “you could continue the story in the meantime? Since, I feel that I have to remind you, you’re not in trouble.”
“Yes,” Midoriya says. “So I asked Ochako to get us into the back room, because Ochako’s very, um…”
“Charismatic,” Uraraka supplies, smiling brilliantly.
“Persuasive,” Midoriya says instead. “But the store managers really didn’t want me to go back there, which really just further made it seem to us that they were hiding some sketchy business. So while Ochako and I were negotiating with the managers, Todoroki broke into the back.”
“That is actually illegal,” Naomasa says, closing his notebook. He cares about these kids—he is going to do everything he can to make sure they can skirt around the law here.
“It isn’t,” Midoriya protests, “because he heard someone screaming.”
Just like that, the story takes a complete one-eighty. “He what?” Naomasa says, flabbergasted.
“I heard someone screaming,” Todoroki says, flat-faced. Naomasa’s quirk resolutely does not ping. It’s true.
“And if you look at the law, breaking and entering is not illegal if you think someone is dying.” Midoriya sends Aizawa an anxious look, as if worried he’s getting graded on this. “That’s not an exact quote.”
Fingers numb, Naomasa opens his notebook again. “So Todoroki heard someone screaming.”
“I broke down the back door with ice and walked in,” Todoroki says.
“Quirk usage in public is legal in an emergency,” Midoriya adds.
“Yes,” Naomasa agrees. He’s not sure what exactly he has to say to get these kids to realize he’s on their side, but clearly the message has not come across. “And what was in the back room?”
“Nothing,” Todoroki says. “It was completely empty.”
“Weirdly empty,” Asui adds. “There was actually nothing back there. No boxes, no shelves, nothing. It was just an empty room.”
“Then…” Naomasa looks between the kids, baffled. “Then who was screaming?”
“It was someone in the second line,” Uraraka says. “The store was on a corner, and the Deku line had wrapped around enough that it sounded like the screaming person was in the back of the store. Someone out there must have been excited about the opportunity to see Deku in the flesh. That’s a great reason to start screaming.”
Midoriya winces, his shoulders scrunching up again, at “in the flesh.”
Naomasa closes his notebook again. “I’m sorry, what exactly is the crime you’re reporting?”
“Oh,” Uraraka says, “we haven’t gotten there yet. This is only the first part of the story.”
Naomasa sends Aizawa a horrified look. “Wait, but…didn’t you come here from there?”
Aizawa sighs.
“No?” Uraraka says. “This was weeks ago.”
“But you’re…” Naomasa waves at their terrible eyesores of outfits. “You’re wearing the clothes…”
“This is how we dress,” Todoroki says. Everyone else nods gravely. Midoriya gives Naomasa a miserable look.
“We don’t always do Deku,” Uraraka says, as if this clarifies anything. “But we’re up and coming heroes who have to support each other, so when we go out in the full group like this, we always wear each other’s merch. And it happens that we have more Deku merch than anything else, so it ends up this way often.” She gestures.
“I see,” Naomasa says, although he does not.
“We thought the store was probably a front.” Midoriya, thankfully, gets them back on track. “We just didn’t have any real proof yet.”
“We apologized a lot for damaging their store,” Asui says, “and we all bought so much of their merch I think they decided they didn’t really care that much, ribbit. Then we went back to the school.”
“Did you actually hear someone screaming?” Naomasa asks before he can think better of it.
“Yes,” Todoroki says, expressionless.
Naomasa’s quirk hasn’t pinged yet. He still has a feeling there’s an undetected lie somewhere in there, but he decides he doesn’t want to investigate further than that.
“Going home was good because Izuku’s really good at stalking people on the Internet,” Uraraka says.
“It isn’t stalking,” Midoriya says.
“He did a deep dive of research into the store, ribbit,” says Asui.
“I thought the website looked kind of weird,” Midoriya says. “It was the same sort of thing, like certain common bits of merch were listed as out of stock even though we’d clearly seen them in the store and even though those pieces of merch are so common it would be weird for the store not to have them. At first I thought maybe their website was just out of date, but I noticed…” He devolves into indecipherable muttering.
Eventually, Iida cuts in to say, “Then he dug up the records of the store’s managers.”
“Which also isn’t illegal,” Midoriya emerges from his muttering to add anxiously, “because we had a school project going on at the same time that was all about digging up records, so we had temporary permission to look into stuff as long as it was relevant to the project. I just changed my project a little so this would be relevant.”
“The project,” Aizawa abruptly adds, “is how I eventually found out about this.”
“Right,” Naomasa says. “And what did you find in the records?”
“Nothing,” Asui says.
Naomasa puts his pen down and then thinks better of it and picks it up again. He’s no longer sure what is relevant for him to take notes on.
Midoriya twists his fingers together. “Obviously there’s not much you can do with a clean record, so then I went back to the website. After a while, Shouto said maybe the website was a secret code of some kind. Shouto says stuff like that a lot and is usually wrong, but I’d been looking at it for so long I thought he might actually be right, so I went back through it and it is a code. I need my notebooks.”
As if on cue, the door opens and an officer pokes her head in. “Yaoyorozu Momo just arrived?”
“Our lawyer!” Uraraka cheers.
Naomasa waves an okay to send her in, and the officer whisks away. Before the door can close, Yaoyorozu appears, nervously pushing her way in and nodding a hello to everyone. Her arms are full of notebooks. “I wasn’t sure which one you wanted…” she says, plopping them on the table. Iida gestures at her to join the group. She eyes the mass of her classmates all sitting directly next to each other and puts a seat of space between herself and Iida when she sits.
“This is perfect,” Uraraka says, helping Midoriya sift through the pile. She finds the one they’re looking for and hands it to him; he flips through it to one of the pages and slides it open across the table to Naomasa.
“Those are the notes I took when I was trying to figure out what the code was.”
The pages are covered in indecipherable handwriting and diagrams. Naomasa doesn’t know where to start looking.
“And then in a couple pages is the actual decoded website.”
“They hold secret meetings in the empty back room,” Iida says as Naomasa flips to a page with much neater, organized writing. “The dates and times are communicated through which merchandise pieces are out of stock or in stock, and there’s a password to get in, which typically involves asking for a particular piece of merchandise from behind the counter in a specific way.”
In a different, more peaceful world, Naomasa thinks, these kids would have at this point told Aizawa or their mentors what they had found and let the professional heroes take over. He does not believe for one moment that this is what they did.
Sure enough: “We figured this out on a day that a meeting was scheduled, so we snuck off campus that night to investigate,” Uraraka says.
Iida adds, “You might be thinking that that’s where we went wrong and did something illegal, but you would be incorrect. It’s frowned upon and against school rules for students to leave campus, but it is not illegal for them to do so.
Naomasa looks at Asui, who previously he had believed to be sensible. “Why didn’t you get a teacher involved?” he asks.
“These guys,” Asui says, waving at her friends, “will not wait for a teacher to get involved, ribbit, and I have learned that it’s either go with them to try to mitigate the damage or be left behind.”
“At the time, it didn’t seem to be an insurmountable problem,” Iida says. “We thought it was a money-laundering scheme at worst, in which case there wouldn’t be any need for an adult present.”
“Also, I am an adult,” Midoriya says.
“No.” Aizawa glares at him from the corner.
“I turned eighteen over the summer!” Midoriya insists. “Tenya turned eighteen just last week!”
“Whatever you are,” Aizawa says, “it is not an adult.”
“Happy birthday,” Naomasa says to Iida.
“Thank you.”
“How did you sneak off campus?”
The kids hesitate, sharing looks. They turn as one to Yaoyorozu. “Should we answer that?” Uraraka asks.
Yaoyorozu casts a nervous glance to the corner where Aizawa is sitting. “It’s in the best interest of the class,” she says, “to not disclose the exact method.”
“We didn’t break any laws,” Midoriya says. Funnily enough, the more this is said, the less Naomasa believes it, lie-detecting quirk or not.
“Nedzu probably knows how we do it,” Uraraka adds. “And if he hasn’t stopped us, it’s probably okay.”
“I hope you mean ‘how we did it,’ past tense,” Aizawa grumbles.
“She doesn’t mean that,” Todoroki says. “We do it all the time.”
Aizawa closes his eyes and inhales deeply through his nose.
“Right, so.” Naomasa clicks his pen closed and open again once. “You snuck off campus somehow without breaking any laws.”
“It was ten p.m. and Iida was having a conniption about curfew,” Uraraka says. “But we went back to the mall.”
“The mall— Wouldn’t the mall have been closed?”
Uraraka opens her mouth to answer that, then stops. She turns to Midoriya. “Did we break a law? It’s private property.”
Midoriya’s eyebrows furrow. “Um…”
“I emailed mall security beforehand,” Asui cuts in, “and told them we wanted to look around after hours. I told them we didn’t have a warrant, ribbit, but that we were hero students, and I asked if it would be okay if we patrolled the main areas. They said there was some sort of special event keeping the mall open late that day and gave us written permission.”
Uraraka hugs her. “You are our only braincell.”
“We went into the mall,” says Iida, “and we went to the store. The lights were off, but we could see movement near the counter. Luckily, we had all donned identity-concealing outfits. Yaoyorozu made them for us.”
Naomasa looks at Yaoyorozu, who seems to have just realized she may have messed up. She glances nervously at Aizawa again. Aizawa seems to be far past caring and waves her off.
“It was really creepy in there,” Uraraka says. “The mall was so quiet. I kept thinking we were going to get jumped.”
“There was someone behind the counter in the store,” Iida continues. “We gave them the password we’d found on the website, and they opened the back door for us.”
“And was there anything back there?” Naomasa asks. Against his better judgment, he’s become invested in the story.
“Yes,” Todoroki says. “They were hosting an exhibition.”
Naomasa stares at him. “A… An illegal exhibition? What, of animals? Stolen art?”
“No.” He looks confused about why Naomasa’s even asking that. “It was totally legal.”
“Then…” Just like that, Naomasa’s lost again.
“It was actually really cool,” Midoriya says. “It was a hero-themed specialty merch exhibition. We talked to the managers while we were still undercover and apparently they’re planning to do one every month or so. They want to keep it pretty quiet because they don’t have a lot of space, so it’s just in-the-know people who can come. Mostly rich people, I think. The merch was crazy expensive.”
“I bought Deku’s prototype arm guard from I-Island,” Todoroki says. “We’re not sure how they got it, because Izuku thought it was completely destroyed, but we looked at it closely and it really is the early model Melissa made.”
“I wept at the price tag,” adds Uraraka.
“It’s a little disturbing that you bought a worn-out part of my old costume,” Midoriya tells Todoroki.
“It’s not disturbing,” Todoroki says. “It’s awesome. You own part of an All Might costume.”
“That’s totally different.”
“Hold on.” Naomasa flips back through his notes, trying to make sense of this. “I’m not sure I understand what the crime was?”
“We haven’t gotten there yet,” Uraraka says again, in a tone that makes it seem that she thinks Naomasa’s the problem here for rushing them. Aizawa is pinching the bridge of his nose between both his hands and looks like he regrets his life choices.
“Okay, can we maybe…” Naomasa makes a small circling motion with his hand, “fast forward to the part where there’s a crime?”
“This is all important context, ribbit.” Asui says. Naomasa’s starting to regret his decision to trust her judgment. “Also Todoroki skipped the crime part of the story.”
“Right.” Iida chops one of his hands into the other. “Before Todoroki bought Deku’s prototype arm guard, we obviously were looking at it together because of our competition. And because we are experts in Deku merch by now, and because we were there on I-Island together, we knew it was not in reality his arm guard. It was a forgery.”
“It wasn’t a very good forgery,” Asui says. “We could tell right away.”
Naomasa looks between Iida, Todoroki, and Midoriya. “But I thought you said it was…”
Uraraka shushes him. “We’re trying to explain,” she says.
Naomasa tries to shoot Aizawa a bewildered glance, but Aizawa is not available to receive such a thing and he ends up catching Yaoyorozu’s eye instead. She looks just as lost as he feels and seems to have an equal desire to flee the room.
“We thought at the time that this was proof that the store was up to some sketchy business stuff,” Midoriya says, “so we confronted the managers about it. They insisted that they had been sold the prototype by one of David Shield’s old coworkers and that it really was legit. They had a lot of paperwork proving it.”
“Obviously the only thing to do then,” Uraraka says, “was to explain that we are the foremost experts on Deku’s old costumes.”
“I had to do an identity reveal,” Midoriya says wretchedly. “It was horrible. Everyone wanted me to sign stuff.”
Naomasa’s starting to feel a little bad for the kid. He really does seem to have to sign a lot of stuff.
“Anyway, the managers still said they had the actual prototype arm guard,” Uraraka says. “Which they obviously did not.”
Asui says, “We took them over to look at the arm guard with us, and then, ribbit, they realized that it wasn’t the prototype they had bought. They said someone must have stolen the actual prototype.”
“We thought they were lying,” Todoroki says.
“So we asked them to pull the security footage,” Iida says, “because we thought they wouldn’t let us see the footage and therefore we’d know they were lying about the thief. But then they did let us see it and it turns out that on camera someone did steal the prototype arm guard and replace it with a forgery.”
“A bad forgery,” Asui reiterates.
“Just to clarify,” Naomasa says, because over the course of this conversation he has lost his mind, “the store doesn’t do anything wrong in this story and you all were suspicious of them for no reason?”
“Correct,” Iida says.
Somehow, Naomasa feels more confused than ever before. “I see.”
“So then we set Izuku after the thief,” Uraraka says, “which is legal because he’s an adult and has his hero license, and Izuku caught her in like five minutes, because he’s Izuku, and then he brought her back to the exhibition so we could get the real prototype back, and then Shouto bought the actual prototype like a total nerd—”
“Thank you.”
“—not a compliment, and then we went back to school and went to sleep.”
“And where…” Naomasa says, “is the thief?”
If Aizawa’s sighs were made of water, they all would have drowned by now.
“We’re not sure at this exact moment in time,” Iida says.
“I see,” Naomasa says. But the more he says it, the less he truly sees.
“We weren’t in a position to make an arrest,” Asui says, “because we were breaking school rules by being off campus.”
"But we weren't breaking the law," Iida assures him.
Uraraka says quickly, “Obviously we were responsible and got all her information written down so we could track her down again later. But. For reasons. We decided maybe it would be for the best if we didn’t track her down again later.”
“For reasons,” Naomasa repeats.
“Yes.”
They all sit uncomfortably. None of them meet anyone’s eyes.
“See, what happened was,” Midoriya says, fidgeting anxiously, only to be immediately shushed by Uraraka. The awkward silence crashes down again.
Naomasa rubs his forehead. Yes, this is proof that he does not envy Aizawa, nor his job. He feels a little like thirty minutes of his life have just been wasted. “I’m not sure what you want me to do here.”
“The issue,” Aizawa says, “is that the store does want to press charges, but the store doesn’t have the name of the woman who did the theft, and the security footage gets wiped every twenty-four hours. Only these five have the information the store needs. And they won’t say.”
“We have to believe she had good intentions for what she was doing,” Midoriya says.
“I’m not convinced,” says Asui.
They fall quiet again. Naomasa flips helplessly through his notebook of useless information.
It’s Yaoyorozu who breaks the silence. “Excuse me, but do I still need to be here?”
Todoroki says immediately, “Yes.”
“You’re our lawyer,” Uraraka says.
“Ah,” Yaoyorozu says, her eyebrows scrunched together. “But I’m not a lawyer?”
“If the store wants to press charges,” Midoriya says, drumming his fingers on the table, “it probably is actually illegal for us to keep the information away from the police about it.”
“Aiding and abetting,” Asui agrees.
All the kids share looks. They keep arching their necks to look down the table at Yaoyorozu as well, who looks like she’d enjoy nothing more than running far from here. Finally, she says, “If you’re looking to me for lawyerly advice, my unprofessional opinion is that you should tell him.”
The kids have a quick discussion and take a vote. Naomasa watches the proceedings with a bemusement that only Class A can produce in him.
“Okay,” Midoriya says, “so what happened was, we asked her for her name, and she told us, and we realized that we knew her.”
Uraraka covers her face with her hands.
Todoroki says, “It’s Yaoyorozu’s mom.”
Yaoyorozu’s mouth drops open in shock.
“Also,” Midoriya says, “I have the security footage. I acquired it…legally.”
For the first time this entire conversation, Naomasa’s quirk pings the lie. He is so unbelievably tired that he brushes it aside. He no longer cares. He just wants these kids out of his precinct. “Can I just have the phone number of the store?”
“We’re not in trouble?” Uraraka asks.
“As Aizawa and I have said repeatedly,” Naomasa answers, ripping off a sheet of his notebook and sliding it and a pen to Asui, who seems like she’d have the best handwriting of the group, “you’re here to report a crime, not to get arrested for one.”
“We didn’t break any laws,” she assures him.
“So I hear,” he mutters.
Asui slides the paper and pen over to Midoriya, who writes out a phone number from memory in typewriter-perfect print letters, and beneath it writes a few other things. Apparently he can have nice handwriting if he tries.
“My mom?” Yaoyorozu says suddenly, as if her voice has just caught up with her.
“We think she wants you to marry Izuku and this is a method of courtship,” Todoroki says. “We’ll save you, don’t worry.”
Uraraka rolls her eyes. “Only Shouto thinks that, because he’s messed up. I think she just wanted to sell it. Shouto spent like a million bajillion yen on it.”
“It wasn’t that much,” Todoroki says.
“Close, though.”
“I think maybe she’s trying to replicate the design for some reason,” Midoriya says, sliding the slip of paper back to Naomasa. To Yaoyorozu, he asks, “Her quirk’s similar to yours, right?”
“Yes,” Yaoyorozu says. “But, um…I think Ochako might be right… Actually, I might need a lawyer?”
“No.” Aizawa gets to his feet. “We’re all going back to campus. If the police need a statement from you, Yaoyorozu, they will go through the proper channels for it. Tsukauchi, do you need anything else?”
If anything, Naomasa has been given too much information. He holds up the slip of paper on which Midoriya has written the store’s and Yaoyorozu’s mom’s details. “This covers it.”
“Then we’re done here.” Aizawa gestures from the seats to the door. “Everyone out.”
They all get up dutifully, almost all of them in their terrible outfits, which are even worse when the pants and shoes get involved—Todoroki is wearing themed shorts over themed pants and themed knee-high socks over the pants. Yaoyorozu scans over them, absolutely bewildered, and Midoriya pulls up his hood and puts the sunglasses back on.
“You need to be more proud of your friends, Izuku,” Todoroki tells him.
“I refuse to be seen in public with you people,” says Midoriya.
As they leave the room, Naomasa hears Uraraka say, “We’re really not in trouble?”
“For the last time—” Aizawa says, but the slam of the door cuts the rest of it off.
Naomasa sits in the perfect, uninterrupted silence of the conference room. He flips aimlessly through his notebook. He systematically frees from the binding all the pages he wrote in over the course of that meeting and rips them into tiny pieces. He throws them in the trash.
What he would really like to know, he thinks as he lingers by the conference room door so he can avoid running into those chaos demons again before they officially leave, is how they got someone to scream in the line so they’d have a good reason to break into the back of the store. That’s what he’d really like to know.
Some mysteries, he supposes, will never be solved.
He opens the door, steps out, and puts that horrible experience behind him.