Chapter Text
The interview room had no window and a table bolted to the floor. Izuku had been sitting in it for six hours.
They had taken the mask, the knives, and the notebook. They had left him the cuffs, a thin gray blanket, and a paper cup of water he hadn't touched. Twice the door had opened and a stranger had looked at him the way people look at a dog that might bite. Twice it had closed again.
The third time, it was a tired man in a rumpled brown coat, carrying a folder and a second paper cup.
"Midoriya Izuku," the man said. "My name is Tsukauchi Naomasa. I'm a detective with the Public Safety Division. Is it all right if I sit?"
It was the is it all right that made Izuku look up.
"You're Tsukauchi," he said. His voice came out cracked from disuse. "Your quirk is Lie Detector. If someone says something false in front of you, you know it. It works at close range and doesn't need eye contact. You've used it on over two hundred testimonies, mostly in villain cases, and you only testify when a court asks, because you think an accusation made with your quirk carries too much weight." He stopped. "Sorry. I do that."
Tsukauchi sat. "That's all in your notebook?"
"Page forty-one of volume nine."
"Ah." Something close to a smile crossed his face and went. "It's very thorough. We read it. Not all of it, there's a lot. But enough."
Izuku's stomach tightened. The notebook had Stain's methods in it, and Himiko's throwing habits, and thin notes on the League he had never quite been able to make himself delete. He had written it all in the same careful handwriting.
"Then you know what I'm going to say," Izuku said. "I can't lie to you. So I won't try. But I'm not going to answer everything, either."
"That's fair." Tsukauchi opened the folder and didn't look at it. "I'd rather have you silent than false. Silence tells me where the walls are."
The door opened again.
Aizawa came in without knocking. He had a fresh cast on his left arm and a bruise along his jaw from Kamino. He took the chair against the wall rather than the one at the table, and said nothing. Izuku understood that this was deliberate. Aizawa was here to watch.
Izuku kept his eyes on Tsukauchi and did not look at the wall.
"I'll start with the simple things," Tsukauchi said. "Your name is Midoriya Izuku. You're fifteen."
"Yes."
"You were reported missing nine months before the USJ incident, and later presumed deceased."
"Yes."
"Where were you?"
Izuku's mouth was dry. "With Chizome Akaguro. Stain."
He heard the chair against the wall creak. Tsukauchi's pen didn't move.
"Did he hurt you?"
"No." And it was true, and Izuku saw Tsukauchi register that it was true. "He found me after I was beaten up. He fed me. He taught me how to fight. He never hit me except in training."
"Is that why you stayed?"
"I stayed because nobody else came." It came out flatter than he meant. "My mother left. The police stopped looking. Stain was the only one who asked how I was."
Tsukauchi nodded slowly. He did not say I'm sorry, and Izuku was grateful for it.
"Let's talk about Kamino," Tsukauchi said. "You stood between All Might and All For One. You blocked the final strike."
"I was in the way. I wasn't trying to block anything."
The pen paused. Tsukauchi's eyes narrowed a fraction, the way a person's did when they were hearing something that didn't sit right.
Izuku swallowed. "I stepped between them to make All Might hesitate. I wanted a few seconds."
"For what?"
"So the others could get out."
"The League."
Izuku said nothing.
"Bakugo Katsuki had been taken," Tsukauchi said gently. "He was freed. By the time you stepped forward, he was already safe. So the seconds you bought weren't for him."
The silence stretched. Izuku looked at the table. At his own hands, still faintly scarred across the knuckles.
"No," he said. "They weren't for him."
Behind him, Aizawa shifted.
"Midoriya." Tsukauchi's voice was quiet. "I need to ask about the training camp. Two heroes were hurt. A child, Kota Izumi, was nearly killed. Mandalay was abducted. Did you know about the attack?"
"No."
True. Izuku watched Tsukauchi hear it.
"Were you at the camp?"
"No. I was on a surveillance mission. They sent me away so I wouldn't find out." His throat tightened. "I told them one thing. No kids. It was the only condition I set. Then I come back and Kacchan is tied to a chair, and I didn't—"
He stopped.
"You didn't what?"
"I didn't ask about the others." The words came out raw. "I walked in and there was Kacchan, so I only saw him. I only thought of him. I took him to my room and I didn't ask if anybody else got hurt. I didn't ask about any of them."
Nobody spoke. The fluorescent light hummed.
"I should have," Izuku said. "That was the rule. I'm the one who made it."
Tsukauchi set down his pen. "Thank you for telling me that."
"Don't thank me."
"I'm not thanking you for a confession." He leaned back slightly. "I'm thanking you for not pretending."
There was a long pause. Then, from the wall, Aizawa spoke for the first time.
"How long have you known you were going to hand yourself over?"
Izuku flinched. He turned in his chair.
Aizawa's dark eyes were steady. He didn't look angry. He looked like a man who had been awake for two days and had finally found the answer to a question he'd been asking for months.
"I wasn't," Izuku said. "I wasn't planning anything. I just..." He stopped. Started again. "I saw him raise his arm, and I thought, if this happens, it happens on camera, and everyone sees it. And I thought, that can't be the last thing he does. And my feet were already moving."
"You were protecting All Might."
"No." Izuku's voice shook.
Aizawa said nothing for a long moment. Then he stood, crossed the room, and set something down on the table in front of Izuku.
The notebook. The singed edge, the scorch mark that had never faded.
"Your handwriting is the same," Aizawa said. "I recognized it the second I saw it. At the festival."
Izuku stared at the cover.
"I knew," Aizawa said quietly. "I wasn't sure. But I knew. And I let you walk."
"Why?"
"Because you called me before the police." Aizawa's mouth tightened. "Because you said you'd answer for it. I'm here to hold you to that."
The door of the office was too heavy for the small creature behind the desk. Principal Nezu sat in a chair three sizes too large for anyone his height, a teacup balanced between his paws, and watched Aizawa read the file for the third time.
"You're frowning," Nezu observed.
"I'm reading a proposal that says a fifteen-year-old who aided the League of Villains should enroll at UA."
"Provisionally. Supervised. Under what I'm calling the Rehabilitation Track."
"He was in the League."
"He was with them," Nezu said. "That is a distinction his testimony supports, and one Detective Tsukauchi's quirk confirmed. He set conditions. He broke none of them himself. He told us, unprompted, that the one rule he made had been violated and that he had failed to notice." The whiskers twitched. "In my experience, Aizawa, the children who are dangerous to us are the ones who can't say that sentence."
Aizawa shut the folder. "The Commission will never approve it."
"The Commission will approve it if the alternative is a minor in a cell for a decade while the public watches the footage of him standing in front of All Might. The optics are, shall we say, complicated." Nezu sipped his tea. "I have already spoken to several parties. All Might has asked to be involved. Mirio Togata has volunteered, unasked."
"And if Midoriya doesn't want it?"
"Then he says no, and we find another path." Nezu set down the cup. "But I suspect, based on the notebook, that what he wants is not to be a hero. It's to be allowed to be one. Those are different problems."
Aizawa looked at the door, and past it, down the hall toward the room where a boy sat holding a burnt notebook.
"I'll tell him," he said.
"Would you like me to?"
"No." Aizawa stood. "I'm the one who said I'd believe him. I'll be the one who asks."