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The rain in Musutafu's red light district didn't clean anything. It just moved the filth around, washing cigarette butts and broken glass into the gutters where they clogged the drains and created shallow pools of oily, rainbow-slicked water. Izuku Midoriya stepped over one such pool, his red shoes—mandatory, unmistakable, unchangeable—squelching slightly against the cracked concrete. The color hadn't faded in six years, not since he'd learned the hard way that the crimson dye wasn't just pigment; it was a target.
He was fourteen, technically. Birthdays didn't mean much when you were quirkless. The law said you became an adult at sixteen if you lacked a quirk, which really meant the government stopped pretending to care about your welfare two years earlier than everyone else. Izuku had been self-sufficient for four years now, ever since Inko had finally worked up the courage to open her mouth and say what her eyes had been screaming since his fourth birthday: *Get out.*
The apartment he rented was above a shuttered yakitori place that had failed inspection three owners ago. The current landlord—a man with a quirk that let him sweat sulfuric acid—didn't ask questions about the red shoes that climbed his stairs every night. He just took the cash Izuku earned from his various enterprises and pretended the kid didn't exist. That was the best you could hope for, as quirkless. Invisible was safe. Noticed was dangerous.
Izuku unlocked his door—three locks, all electronic, all coded by his own hands—and stepped into the darkness. He didn't turn on the lights immediately. Instead, he stood still, listening, his mind automatically cataloging the silence. The hum of his server array in the bedroom. The drip of the faucet he'd been meaning to fix. The soft, rumbling purr of the cat winding between his ankles.
"Hey, Schrödinger," he murmured, reaching down to scratch behind tattered ears. The cat—a scarred tom with one eye and a kinked tail—had adopted him two years ago, showing up on his fire escape with a broken paw and a look of mutual understanding. They were both survivors of a system that wanted them dead. They recognized each other.
Izuku flicked on the lights. The studio apartment was sparse, organized with the precision of someone who had learned that chaos could kill you. Three monitors dominated the desk by the window, covered with black fabric to prevent light leakage. A mini-fridge hummed in the corner, stocked with cheap convenience store food and a bottle of whiskey that was three-quarters empty. Next to it, a mason jar with a lid screwed tight, filled with dried cannabis buds. His medication, self-prescribed.
He sat down at his desk and woke the monitors. The middle screen displayed a chat window with the handle "Eraser"—his longest-running client, three years of back-and-forth that had started when Izuku was ten and had hacked the police database to prove a point about their laughable cybersecurity. The left screen showed market trends for various cryptocurrencies he dabbled in. The right screen was dedicated to his true passion: analysis.
Izuku pulled up the file he was working on. A series of villain attacks in the Kansai region, patterns that the heroes were too busy or too stupid to see. He saw them, though. He saw the way the attacks formed a spiral, tightening inward toward something. He saw the timing, synchronized with lunar cycles. He saw the victims, all connected to a pharmaceutical company that was developing quirk-enhancement drugs.
His fingers flew across the keyboard, compiling data, cross-referencing, building a web of connections that glowed red on his screen. This was what he was good at. This was what made him valuable, what made him real, in a world that told him every day that he was less than human because he lacked a genetic lottery ticket.
The chat window pinged.
**Eraser:** You there, Ghost?
Izuku smiled despite himself. Ghost. The name he'd earned in the forums, the shadows, the places where quirkless hackers and information brokers traded secrets for survival. He'd chosen it himself, partly for the irony—he was very much alive, despite everyone's best efforts—and partly for the truth of it. He was a ghost in the machine, in society, in the eyes of the law.
**Ghost:** Always. You have something for me?
**Eraser:** Other way around. The Spiral case. You were right. Lab in Osaka, owned by Phoenix Pharmaceuticals. We raided it tonight. Found the stockpile.
Izuku's fingers paused. He hadn't told Eraser about the pharmaceutical connection yet. He'd been planning to, tonight, after he finished confirming his suspicions. But Eraser was already there, already acting on information Izuku hadn't shared.
**Ghost:** How did you know?
**Eraser:** Didn't. Tsukauchi had a hunch. Different angle, same destination. Good work, kid.
Kid. Eraser didn't know how young he was. Didn't know he was quirkless. Didn't know that three hours ago, Izuku had been stitching up a gash in a quirkless woman's arm because she couldn't go to a hospital and the clinic was closed. Didn't know that Izuku had thrown up twice today from anxiety, or that he'd smoked two bowls before leaving his apartment just to be able to walk down the street without screaming.
Izuku liked that Eraser didn't know. The ignorance was clean. It meant their friendship—if you could call a transactional relationship built on mutual respect and encrypted messages a friendship—was based on something other than pity or cruelty.
**Ghost:** Send me the after-action report. I want to see if my predictions about the distribution network hold up.
**Eraser:** Will do. You eating okay?
The question made Izuku's chest tight. Eraser asked this sometimes, out of nowhere, these sudden flashes of concern that felt like sunlight on skin after weeks of winter. Tsukauchi did it too, though his concern came with more jokes, more levity. They were the only two people in the world who cared if Izuku was eating, and they didn't even know his real name.
**Ghost:** Fine. Busy night. Talk tomorrow.
He closed the chat before Eraser could respond, before the warmth of being cared about could turn into something sharp and painful. He couldn't afford to need people. Needing people meant vulnerability. Vulnerability meant death, or worse.
Izuku stood up and walked to the window, pulling back the black curtain just enough to look down at the street. The red light district was waking up for its nightly business. Women and men with quirks that made them beautiful or terrifying or both were taking their positions outside clubs and love hotels. Drunks stumbled past, their laughter too loud, too sharp. And there, across the street, a group of teenagers—maybe sixteen, seventeen—were harassing an old man who was sweeping the sidewalk.
The old man wore red shoes.
Izuku watched, his hand automatically finding the taser he kept in his pocket. The teenagers were laughing, shoving, one of them using a quirk that made their fingers glow with heat to burn holes in the old man's coat. The man didn't fight back. He couldn't. Fighting back when you were quirkless was assault. Assault by a quirkless person carried a mandatory twenty-year sentence. Self-defense didn't exist for his kind.
But the teenagers got bored eventually, wandering off to find easier entertainment. The old man continued sweeping, his movements mechanical, practiced. Izuku memorized his face. He'd check the clinic database tomorrow, see if the man was part of the network. If he was, Izuku would make sure he got a new coat. If he wasn't, Izuku would find him and bring him in. Recruitment was part of his job at the clinic—finding the lost ones, the ones who didn't know about the safe zones and the codewords and the community that kept them alive.
He let the curtain fall and walked to the mini-fridge. He poured two fingers of whiskey into a chipped mug—he didn't own glasses, too easy to break, too easy to weaponize—and drank it straight. The burn helped. It dulled the edges of the panic that was always there, humming beneath his skin like a second heartbeat.
Then he reached for the mason jar.
---
The clinic was hidden in the basement of a laundromat three blocks from Izuku's apartment. Officially, it didn't exist. Unofficially, it was the worst-kept secret in the quirkless community, which meant it was completely invisible to the quirked world above.
Izuku worked there three nights a week, plus emergencies. He was the youngest medic they had, self-taught from stolen medical textbooks and online courses that he'd hacked access to. He'd performed his first suture at eleven, guided by a retired nurse who'd lost her quirk in a villain attack and subsequently her license to practice. She'd died two years ago—sepsis, from a cut that got infected because she refused to go to a hospital until it was too late. Izuku had held her hand while she faded, promising that he'd keep the clinic running.
He descended the stairs at 9 PM, his backpack heavy with supplies. The laundromat above was running, the machines creating a constant rumble that masked the sounds from below. The basement door had a sign that read "Employees Only" in faded letters, and a keypad that Izuku bypassed with a code that changed weekly.
"Password?" The voice came from a speaker hidden in the wall.
"Red shoes walk silent paths," Izuku recited.
The lock clicked. Izuku pushed through into the clinic.
It was a long room, poorly lit by fluorescent tubes that flickered with the building's irregular power. Cots lined the walls, most occupied. In the center, a makeshift operating area with a table that had once been a door, now covered in sterile sheets. The air smelled of antiseptic and desperation.
"Midori!" The call came from the reception desk, really just a folding table with a laptop. Yuki, a woman in her thirties with burn scars covering half her face, waved him over. "We've got three new ones tonight, plus the regulars. And a kid in the back with a fever we can't break."
Izuku nodded, shrugging off his backpack. "Age?"
"Twelve. Parents dropped her off yesterday, said they'd come back when she's better." Yuki's voice was flat. They both knew the parents weren't coming back. Parents of quirkless children did that sometimes—used the clinic as a dumping ground, a way to absolve themselves of the shame of defective offspring.
"I'll see her first," Izuku said. "Then the new intake. What's the story?"
"Two adults, one kid. Adults are a couple, got evicted when their landlord found out they were quirkless. The kid... we don't know. Found wandering in Shibuya, red shoes but no ID, won't talk."
Izuku processed this as he walked to the back room, the "pediatric" wing that was really just a closet with a cot and a space heater. The girl was lying on the cot, her skin flushed, her breathing rapid. Izuku knelt beside her and placed a hand on her forehead. Burning up. 40 degrees at least.
"Hey," he said softly. "I'm Midori. I'm going to help you, okay?"
The girl's eyes opened—dark, unfocused, terrified. "Don't... don't touch me."
"I'm a doctor," Izuku lied. He wasn't licensed, wasn't legally allowed to practice medicine, wasn't legally allowed to exist in most spaces. But he was the only doctor she had. "I need to check your throat. Can you open your mouth for me?"
She hesitated, then complied. Her throat was inflamed, tonsils swollen and white with pus. Tonsillitis, probably, maybe strep. Easy to treat with antibiotics, if you had access to a pharmacy that served quirkless people. Which she didn't. Which none of them did.
"I need penicillin," Izuku called out to Yuki. "And ice water. And bring me the red bag."
The red bag was his emergency kit, stocked with antibiotics, painkillers, sedatives—everything he could steal, buy on the black market, or synthesize himself. He'd learned chemistry the same way he'd learned everything else: out of necessity.
He administered the antibiotics and spent twenty minutes coaxing the girl to drink water, to stay awake, to keep fighting. She didn't tell him her name, and he didn't push. Names were dangerous. Names could be used against you. He'd been "Midori" for so long now that he sometimes forgot the sound of "Izuku," the weight of his real identity.
When the girl finally slept, her breathing easier, Izuku moved to the intake area. The couple was easy—dehydration, malnutrition, stress-induced hypertension. He gave them fluids, food vouchers for the community kitchen, and the address of a safe house in Osaka that would take them in. They cried when they thanked him, pressing their foreheads to his hands in a gesture of gratitude that made him uncomfortable. He wasn't a hero. He was just someone who hadn't died yet.
The boy was harder.
He sat in the corner, knees drawn up to his chest, staring at the floor. He wore the red shoes—everyone here did—but his were newer, less scuffed. Recent exile.
"Hey," Izuku said, keeping his distance, sitting cross-legged on the floor a few feet away. "I'm Midori. You don't have to tell me your name. You don't have to tell me anything. But if you're hurt, I can help."
The boy was silent for a long time. Then: "They said I could stay here."
"Yeah. You can. As long as you need."
"I'm not going back."
"Okay."
"They said I was a mistake. That they should have..." The boy's voice broke. "They can try again. Have a real kid. A better one."
Izuku felt the familiar coldness settle in his chest, the armor he'd built around his heart clicking into place. He remembered this conversation. He'd had it with himself, in the mirror, at three in the morning, for years.
"Your parents are wrong," Izuku said. "Being quirkless doesn't make you less. It makes you invisible to the law, yeah. It makes you a target. But it doesn't make you nothing."
The boy looked up. His eyes were red-rimmed, his face pale. "You're quirkless too?"
Izuku lifted his foot, showing the shoe. "Fourteen years. Still breathing."
"How?"
"Community," Izuku said. "We look out for each other. We have to, because no one else will. You're in the safe zone now. Red means family here. It means you're one of us."
The boy—Kota, he eventually admitted—stayed at the clinic for three days. Izuku treated his dehydration, the bruises on his back from where his father had kicked him out the door, and the deeper wounds that didn't show on X-rays. When a family in Yokohama agreed to take him in, part of the underground railroad of quirkless families that moved children to safety, Izuku watched him go with a mixture of relief and envy.
Kota was getting out. He was going to a home, a real one, with people who would care for him. Izuku would go back to his empty apartment, his whiskey, his weed, his screens full of other people's tragedies.
He was happy for the kid. He was. And if he drank a little more than usual that night, if he stood on his balcony and considered whether the fall would be enough to end it, if he called Schrödinger inside and held him too tight, breathing in the smell of cat and survival—well, that was just the cost of being Ghost. Of being Midori. Of being Izuku, whoever that was anymore.
---
The message came at 2 AM, three days later.
**Eraser:** Meet. Urgent. The usual place.
Izuku stared at the screen, his heart rate spiking. Eraser never asked to meet. Three years of encrypted chats, dead drops, and voice disguises, but never a face-to-face. Izuku had made sure of that, maintaining the barriers that kept him safe. If Eraser saw his face, saw his age, saw his shoes...
But Eraser was one of the only good things in his life. One of the only people who treated him like a person. If he was asking, it was serious.
**Ghost:** When?
**Eraser:** Tonight. 3 AM. The bridge.
The bridge meant the Kiyosu Bridge, an abandoned pedestrian walkway over the train yards where they'd done their first dead drop four years ago. Izuku had been ten, small for his age, starving, and furious. He'd hacked the police database looking for information on a villain who'd been terrorizing the quirkless district, not because he cared about justice, but because the villain had destroyed the community garden that fed thirty families.
Eraser—Aizawa Shouta, though Izuku didn't know his real name then—had been waiting. They'd never spoken directly, but Izuku had left the information in a dead drop, and three days later the villain was arrested. A month later, the first message came: *You have talent. Waste it or use it. Your choice.*
Izuku had chosen to use it.
Now he stood in front of his mirror, trying to look like someone who belonged in the world after midnight. He wore black—always black, to hide the thinness, the bruises, the way his hands shook. He pulled on gloves to hide the scars. He wore a hood that shadowed his face. And he looked at his shoes.
The red shoes.
He had tried to change them once, when he was eight. Found a can of black spray paint in a dumpster and gone to town on them in an alley, thinking—hoping—that if he couldn't see the red, no one else would either. He'd made it three blocks before a group of high schoolers with strength quirks caught him. They'd beaten him until his ribs cracked, until he coughed blood for a week, until he understood that the red wasn't just a color. It was a brand. It was a warning to the quirked world that said *this one is prey, this one has no protection, this one is free to hurt.*
He'd never tried to hide the shoes again. He just learned to move in shadows, to avoid crowds, to be faster and smarter and more invisible than anyone expected.
The Kiyosu Bridge was cold, wind whipping through the girders with a sound like screaming. Izuku arrived at 2:55, early by habit, and perched on a support beam where he could see the approaches. He didn't call out. He didn't announce himself. He just waited.
Eraser appeared at 3:05, stepping out of the darkness like he'd been formed from it. He was taller than Izuku expected, thin, with long black hair and exhausted eyes. He wore a capture scarf loose around his neck and clothes that looked like they'd been slept in. He looked, Izuku thought with a bitterness that surprised him, like a man who understood what it meant to be tired.
"Ghost," Eraser said. Not a question.
Izuku didn't respond. He just watched, his hand near his taser, his mind calculating escape routes.
"I know you're young," Eraser said, his voice rough. "I know you're careful. I don't care about your secrets. I care about your skills." He took a step closer, close enough that Izuku could see the shadows under his eyes, the way his hands trembled slightly. "There's a case. A trafficking ring. Quirkless children, being sold to labs for experimentation. The police can't touch it—legal gray area, the kids aren't considered citizens, no jurisdiction."
Izuku's breath caught. He'd heard rumors. Whispers in the clinic, in the chat rooms, about children disappearing from the safe zones. He'd thought—hoped—it was just paranoia, the ever-present fear that manifested as conspiracy theory.
"How many?" Izuku asked, his voice disguised by the modulator he wore at his throat, making him sound robotic, inhuman.
"Forty confirmed. Maybe hundreds. They're being held in a facility outside the city. High security. Hero-proof, supposedly."
"Nothing's hero-proof," Izuku said automatically. Then, quieter: "Why tell me?"
"Because you know the safe zones. You know how they think, how they move, how they hide. Because..." Eraser hesitated, something raw crossing his face. "Because I trust you. And I don't trust many people."
The words hit Izuku like a physical blow. Trust. This man, this hero, trusted him. A quirkless child living in a condemned building, self-medicating with alcohol and cannabis just to survive until morning. It was absurd. It was painful. It was everything Izuku had ever wanted and everything he knew he couldn't have.
"I'll need access," Izuku said, his voice steady despite the storm inside him. "Their network, their security feeds, their financials. Everything."
"Done. Tsukauchi will provide."
"And when it's over," Izuku continued, "you forget this meeting. You forget what I look like. You go back to knowing me as Ghost, or you don't know me at all."
Eraser studied him, those exhausted eyes seeing too much. "You're protecting yourself."
"I'm surviving," Izuku corrected. "There's a difference."
"Is there?"
Izuku didn't answer. He just held out a hand, palm up, the universal gesture for *give me what you have.*
Eraser handed over a drive. "Forty-eight hours. Then we move."
"Then we move," Izuku agreed, and melted back into the shadows before Eraser could say anything else, before the temptation to stay, to talk, to be known could overwhelm his survival instincts.
He made it back to his apartment before the shaking started. He locked the door, engaged the electronic safeguards, and slid down the wall until he was sitting on the floor, his knees drawn up like Kota's had been. Schrödinger came to him, purring, and Izuku buried his face in the cat's fur, breathing in the smell of dust and life.
He was going to help them. He was going to save those kids, if he could, or die trying. And then he was going to go back to being invisible, because that was the only way to stay alive in a world that wanted him dead.
But for the first time in years, as he sat there on his floor, holding his cat and shaking apart, Izuku Midoriya allowed himself to cry.
---
The hack took eighteen hours.
Izuku didn't sleep, didn't eat, just drank coffee and smoked and let his mind become the code, the system, the digital architecture of the enemy. The trafficking ring was sophisticated, funded by quirk-enhancement corporations that operated in the legal gray zones where quirkless rights dissolved like smoke.
He found the facility. He found the security codes. He found the names of the children—forty-three now, three more taken in the last week. He mapped the ventilation systems, the guard rotations, the blind spots in their surveillance. He created a backdoor in their network that would let him control their systems remotely, turn lights on and off, unlock doors, trigger alarms.
He did this all while his body screamed at him, while his anxiety made his vision tunnel and his hands shake, while the depression whispered that it didn't matter, that the kids would die anyway, that he should just go to sleep and never wake up.
He finished at 6 PM the next day, sending the complete package to Eraser with a simple message: *Midnight. Be ready.*
Then he threw up in his bathroom sink, washed his face, and prepared his kit.
He wasn't supposed to go. He was support, intelligence, the ghost in the machine. But there were medical supplies in the facility, according to the manifests he'd uncovered. Supplies that could save lives in the clinic. And there was a part of him—a stupid, broken part that still believed in heroism despite everything—that needed to see those kids walk free.
He dressed in black, covering his shoes with cloth wraps that would muffle the sound and hide the color. He took his taser, his lockpicks, his medical kit. He left a note for Schrödinger—ridiculous, as if the cat could read—and climbed out his window, down the fire escape, into the night.
The facility was forty minutes away by train, but quirkless weren't allowed on public transport without a quirked escort, so Izuku ran. He ran through back alleys and safe routes known only to his community, his lungs burning, his legs aching, the red shoes wrapped and silent against the pavement.
He arrived at 11:30, hiding in the treeline outside the compound. It was a warehouse, innocuous, pretending to be a storage facility for a logistics company. But Izuku could see the guards, the electrified fence, the subtle hum of a quirk-suppression field that would keep the children from fighting back, from escaping.
At 11:55, his phone buzzed. Eraser's team was in position.
Izuku activated the backdoor. The lights went out. The alarms blared—false alarms, triggered by him, drawing guards to the wrong sectors. The electromagnetic locks clicked open.
And then he ran.
He wasn't a hero. He wasn't a fighter. But he knew the layout of this building better than the architects, and he moved through it like smoke, dodging panicked guards, slipping through doors before they closed. He found the holding cells first—forty-three children, ages six to fourteen, all wearing red shoes, all staring at him with terrified eyes.
"Midori," he said, using his clinic name, the name that meant safety in their community. "I'm from the clinic. Follow me. Stay quiet."
They followed. Of course they did. He was one of them. He wore the shoes, even if they were hidden. He knew the language, the signs, the way to move that said *I am quirkless, I am family, I will not hurt you.*
He got them out through the emergency exit he'd identified, into the woods where Eraser's team was waiting. He saw Eraser's eyes widen when he saw the children, then narrow when he saw Izuku—the size, the build, the obvious youth.
"Ghost?" Eraser asked, disbelief in his voice.
"Get them to the safe house in Yokohama," Izuku said, his voice still modulated, still mechanical. "I have to go back in. Medical supplies."
"You're a child," Eraser said, grabbing his arm. "You're—"
"Quirkless," Izuku finished. "And if I'm caught, I'm nothing. No crime, no victim, no paperwork. Let me go."
He pulled free and ran back into the building before Eraser could stop him.
The medical wing was on the second floor. Izuku moved fast, loading his bag with antibiotics, surgical tools, painkillers—everything he could carry. He was heading back to the stairs when he heard the footsteps.
Three guards, armed, blocking his path.
"Well," the lead one said, smiling. "Looks like we found a stray. Red shoes under those wraps, kid? Let's see."
They advanced.
Izuku didn't fight. Fighting was suicide. Instead, he talked, his voice modulator disguising his terror as calm. "You know who I am? I'm Ghost. I just shut down your entire security network. I have backups ready to send to every news outlet in Japan, exposing this facility, your bosses, your funding. You touch me, and everything goes public."
The lead guard hesitated. "You're bluffing."
"Try me," Izuku said, his hand hovering over his phone. "Or you could let me walk out of here, and I forget your faces."
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the guard laughed. "Nah. Boss said no witnesses. Especially not quirkless brats who think they're smart."
He raised his weapon.
Izuku closed his eyes.
The shot never came. Instead, he heard a thump, a grunt, and opened his eyes to see Eraser standing over the unconscious guards, his capture scarf wrapped around the last one's throat.
"Idiot," Eraser said, but his voice was rough, almost tender. "Absolute idiot."
"Medical supplies," Izuku repeated, his voice shaking now, the adrenaline crashing. "I needed them."
"I know." Eraser stepped over the guards and took Izuku's bag, slinging it over his own shoulder. "Come on. We're leaving. Together."
They walked out of the facility as the police—Tsukauchi's people, the few who cared—swarmed in. Izuku kept his hood up, his head down, his modulator on. But when they reached the treeline, Eraser stopped him.
"Thank you," Eraser said. "For the intel. For the kids. For... everything."
Izuku nodded, not trusting his voice.
"Will I see you again?" Eraser asked. "As Ghost?"
Izuku hesitated. He thought of his apartment, his cat, his whiskey and his weed and his screens. He thought of the clinic, and Kota, and the forty-three children who were right now being driven to safety. He thought of the red shoes, and the law that said he didn't matter, and the two men who treated him like he did.
"Yeah," he said. "You'll see me."
He pulled away and disappeared into the night, back toward the red light district, back toward his life that was barely a life but was his. He didn't look back, but he felt Eraser watching him go, and he allowed himself—just this once—to believe that maybe, in some future that he couldn't quite imagine, things might be different.
---
The morning after the raid, Izuku slept until noon. Schrödinger woke him by walking on his chest, demanding breakfast, and Izuku obliged, feeding the cat before he fed himself. He checked his messages—Yuki thanking him for the medical supplies, a forum post celebrating the rescue of the children, Eraser's simple *Thank you* that sat unread in his chat.
He didn't respond immediately. Instead, he sat by his window, watching the rain fall on the red light district, and he thought about survival.
He was fourteen years old. He was quirkless in a world that hated him. He was addicted to substances that dulled the pain, and he was damaged in ways that might never heal. He was a ghost, a hacker, an informant, a medic without a license. He was alone, and he was lonely, and he was tired.
But he was also alive.
He had saved forty-three children. He had a community that would hide him, heal him, help him. He had a cat who loved him, and two friends who respected him, and a purpose that was bigger than his pain.
It wasn't enough. It would never be enough, not really. The red shoes would always mark him. The law would always exclude him. The depression would always whisper, and the anxiety would always scream, and some days he would still stand on the balcony and wonder if the fall would hurt more than living.
But some days—days like today, when the rain washed the blood off the streets and the children were safe and Schrödinger purred in his lap—some days, survival was enough.
Izuku opened his laptop and typed a message to Eraser.
**Ghost:** Next case. Send me the files.
Then he stood up, pulled on his red shoes, and went to work at the clinic. The day was gray, the world was cruel, and the future was uncertain. But Izuku Midoriya was still walking, still breathing, still fighting.
And for now, that was victory enough.