Chapter 1: Intro
Summary:
[...] And that’s how she discovered that she had been reborn into the world of My Hero Academia, and suddenly remembered reading three-hundred and four chapters of the manga, from the very beginning up to the war and Midoriya leaving school.
So. That was…. That was a thing, apparently.
Chapter Text
INTRO
She… She had lived before. It was a distant certainty, but a certainty nonetheless. She didn’t remember her name from Before, or her job, or if she liked some things and hated others, or even if she had a family. But she had lived. She had learned, and laughed, and cried, and then she had died. But it hadn’t been the end. She had drifted in the dark, and then, she had ended up… Here. It wasn’t hell, it certainly wasn’t heaven: but it wasn’t her world, either.
Her name was Toki. But she hadn’t always been Toki, had she? She had been… She didn’t remember. But someone. Someone else. Someone who didn’t belong here. It was weird, that strange feeling of dissociation. As if her soul was homesick for some better place she couldn’t even remember properly.
Tentatively, she would say she had been reincarnated. Why, thought? She wasn’t anyone special. She hadn’t done miracles deserving of a new chance at life, nor she had committed sins that needed atonement beyond death. She was just… a normal person. Well. She had been a normal person. She wasn’t one anymore so much, eh? Even in this world… having lived twice wasn’t common. Probably.
Toki wasn’t against the concept of reincarnation, mostly because if she hadn’t been reincarnated she would be dead and she liked being alive, thank you very much. But for such a used fanfiction trope, you would have thought the waking up part was pretty straightforward. New body, insert soul, and go. But it was more like… Being in that state of not-quite-awake, not-quite-asleep, where reality blurs with dreams. Oscillating between two states, without even understanding what those states were.
Obviously it was all very confusing. Babies don’t have any concept of time, object permanence, reality, or their own bodies. Their brains are brand new. It’s not like they’re empty, just waiting to be filled with knowledge. They’re not finished. The construction is still ongoing. So mixing that with an enormous bundle of disorganized memories spanning twenty-five years is bound to be messy. Sure, the brain develops faster. Neural circuits span into place easily, comprehension is more fluid, and synapses align themselves without the child needing to learn because they already remember. But it’s a long process. And… a very baffling one, for a young mind such as hers.
I mean, yeah, having a twenty-five head start on other children her age was great. She was smarter than kids her age, more confident, more mature and more curious. But she was still a child. A mature, confident and curious baby was still a baby: a pint-sized person with a tiny toddler brain and zero handle on her emotions. She was confused, uncoordinated and clumsy, cried a lot and… She probably was an exhausting baby. Hell, she was exhausted and she was the baby.
Also… Toki had apparently been reincarnated, not just in a parallel-universe, but in a fictional world. Which was another shock. People with surrealist mutations hadn’t been commonplaces in her original life. But here, there were lizard-men, seven-foot tall hairy dudes with bull horns and flaming eyes, people with feathers for hair. The vast majority was normal people, with two arms and two legs and whatever, but some had enormous eyes or ears, or really impossible hair color. And everyone has a superpower. Not only the superheroes on TV (which is also a thing apparently) but literary everyone. Extra-long limbs, durability, pyrotechnic, being able to spit rocks, becoming a puddle of degusting mucus in the middle of the kindergarten… It was insane. Great, awesome even, and wow she was so glad to be reborn in a world as cool as that… But it was still insane. What the hell?!
And that’s how she discovered that she had been reborn into the world of My Hero Academia, and suddenly remembered reading three-hundred and four chapters of the manga, from the very beginning up to the war and Midoriya leaving school.
So. That was…. That was a thing, apparently.
She had been reborn in a shōnen manga. With superheroes and an overpowered mastermind hellbent on society’s destruction. Cool cool cool.
Oh well. It could have been worse. Sure, it could have been better, too. It would have been great to be reincarnated in the Harry Potter universe! She would have been a Ravenclaw for sure. Or Narnia! Being a queen sure sounded nice. Of Middle Earth! She would have been a hobbit and traveled around the world! But well, that was reincarnation roulette for you. Beggars couldn’t be choosers. At least it wasn’t Game Of Thrones. Toki was going to roll with the punches. There wasn’t much else she could do, in any case. The simple fact of being reincarnated still left her a little shell-shocked.
Anyway.
She was reborn in what she dubbed the Boku-No-Hero-Academia-Universe, also called the BNHA-Verse for the sake of brevity. Long story short? Eighty percent of the population had a superpower, called a Quirk. It could be cool like super-strength, or lame like having glowing-in-the-dark skin, or terrifying like stopping someone’s heart with one touch. Nobody knew why Quirks appeared about two hundred years ago, but it changed the world. Technologies started to evolve differently, trying to compete with inhuman superpowers. Armies lost their meaning when people were born with the firepower of a tank. International power dynamics changed, each country scrambling for stability in this new word. And off course, when Quirks first appeared, criminality rose with the abundance of people using their power for evil… But society adapted and the profession of superheroes (or pro heroes) was created. They were people allowed to use their Quirk to maintain the law. And they were often in the spotlight. Sometime they were more like pop-stars than like civil servants, and the over-consumerism of the thing was absolutely unsustainable… But that’s a story for another day. Let’s take it one step at the time. Getting her bearings first, launching indignant tirades against the State later.
It took about four years for Toki to completely… wake up. Well, not really wake up. She was still the same person. It was just that the day her Quirk appeared, her past-knowledge finally settled in. And even then, she wasn’t an adult mind in a child body. She was still herself. Sure, she was smarter than everyone in her age group: but that wasn’t hard, they were toddlers. And Toki herself was still a child. Carefree. Careless, even. She knew about All For One and One For All, about death, about all the horrible things that were going to happen, but it Seemed… Distant. Like old dreams.
It was probably for the best. Her toddler brain couldn’t handle trauma and complex memories the way an adult brain could, after all. And she didn’t just remember the manga, but also snippet of her old life, too. Sometime she would see a TV commercial and had a flash about using a similar product. She instinctively knew how planes flew, or how babies were made, or what were taxes, or silly things like that that every adult knew, without even knowing where or when she had learned it. It was odd. Not bad, not good, just… very strange.
She worried a bit about it. She was afraid of All For One, and Tomura Shigaraki, and the League Of Villains, and the Nomu, and Gigantomachia tearing through her city. But that fear, too, was kind of abstract. She knew the memories, the danger, were real. She wanted to do something about it, but in a kind of detached, vaguely unconcerned way. It wasn’t really real, for her toddler-self. It felt too distant, like a movie she had watched in the past, not something she had experienced. Maybe because it was too huge. She couldn’t really wrap her mind about immortal villains devastating the country because of a century-old grudge between brothers. Nope. Too much.
But she was here. How, why, it didn’t matter. She… She hadn’t always been Toki, but she was Toki now. That life was hers. Maybe reincarnation was common, and most people forgot their past lives, and it was only by mistake that she remembered living Before, but… It wasn’t really important, was it? She was here now. She was Toki now. She had no other self to cling to. Even her past-knowledge was… distant, cold, like something behind a glass wall in her mind. It was there, but it wasn’t really hers.
She was… She was just Toki.
Sometimes she felt special. Sometimes, though, she mostly felt scared. It was like a tiny voice in her head, saying you’re not supposed to be here, you’re an imposter, they’ll know, they will hate you, you don’t belong. With time, it became easier to ignore it. After all, she was carving her place in this world. Her birth may have been a cosmic mistake, some weird unreal lag in the universe’s program, but what came after… Her actions, her choices, the memories she was making, the impact she had on people… It was real. She was real. For better or for worse, she existed in the world of Quirk, superheroes, and megalomaniac villains.
And she had… no idea of what to do with that information.
There was, deep inside her, the very human and normal desire to help others. There was also the absolute certitude she was completely over her head. She wasn’t some Chosen One guided by a prophecy. Little Toki had absolutely nothing to do with the Plot. The protagonist was already hand-picked by All Might… Or well, he would be soon.
Where was she on the timeline, anyway? She tried to collect clues, but it wasn’t easy. She still couldn’t read (because hello, she still remembered English, but she had never learned Japanese in her old life so she had to start from scratch like everyone else). She couldn’t exactly go looking for future events on Internet. She didn’t even have access to a computer. She could watch the news, but sometime the people on TV used big words and she didn’t understand all of it. All Might looked kind of young, thought. Like mid-twenties or something.
So Toki was more than ten years away from the canon. Maybe even twenty years away, actually. Ok, cool. Cool cool cool cool. Well at least she wouldn’t have to deal with villain’s attack at her school if she decided to attend Yuhei’s Heroic Course. Well, if she was even allowed to.
Ah. This was the second abnormal thing about Toki.
If that was a normal fanfiction, she would have been reincarnated fifteen years before the beginning of the Plot, so she could join class 1-A (hopefully taking Mineta Minoru’s spot) and save the world side by side with her friends. She would have been on the Good Guys’ side from birth, because everyone loved heroes and every child aspired to be one. Right? Well, someone in the Reincarnation’s Administration must have screwed up. Because not only was she born a good seven years in advance, but she had been reincarnated in a family with enough issues to put the Todoroki to shame. She wouldn’t find out right away, of course. Everything looked normal at first. But by age ten, Toki would have definitely cursed at the Reincarnation Administration more than once for saddling her with all this drama.
Yeepee.
Chapter 2: Welcome to the world
Summary:
First chapter ! Where Toki is born, is cute, get a super-power, has a revelation, start writing in notebooks Midoriya-style, and learn a harsh lesson.
Notes:
For those of you who already know my SI Castia, you'll notice how they both like poetry and space x) Althought Castia want to go to space as an escape, because she live in a hell-like universe, and Toki is just a dreamer x) But the poetry com from me, unfortunatly. I've been collecting prose in notebook myself for while, so... there.
Anyway. Hope you enjoy it !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
WELCOME TO THE WORLD
Let’s start at the beginning. Toki was born in Halloween’s Eve, which was already a bad omen. Well, the superstition was Anglo-American, but Japanese were superstitious, and Toki’s soul came from a heavily American-influenced culture, so… Anyway. Toki was born on October the 31st, she was a Scorpio, her blood type was B, and her mother gave her a unisex name (written with a needlessly complicated kanji meaning “Time”) because she had thought she was expecting a boy. Toki was a tiny baby with amber-colored eyes and a tuff of chestnut hair on her head, small for her age, but perfectly healthy. She bawled constantly at first, then started gabbling gibberish as soon as she realized her vocal cords could make sounds. Her first word was ‘why’. Her second was ‘book’.
At the beginning she thought she had a pretty average family. No sibling, a single mother… Small family, but normal all the same. Her mom was named Sayuri (but people called her Aratani-san, so that meant that Toki’s family was probably Aratani too). She was a beautiful, energic woman with long pale brown hair, and deep purple eyes. Toki had her hair, although a bit darker, but not her striking eyes. Too bad. It would have been so pretty. Toki was in awe of her mother, so beautiful, so kind, so funny, so loving, who read her stories every night and never raised her voice. For a baby without any other connection to the outside world… Her mother was her whole universe.
Sayuri raised Toki alone. There was no husband in the picture. But there were adults who came and went in their apartment. Colleagues? Friends? Sometimes they shut themselves with Sayuri in her study, sometimes they just whispered in the doorway. They never introduced themselves. The more Toki grew, the less she saw of them, however: as if they were wary of interacting with her. They were never mean, though. Toki didn’t really know what to do with that.
Sayuri… Mom… She didn’t seem to have a job, because sometimes she stayed home with Toki for days, and took her shopping for groceries or strolling in parks as if she had all the time in the world. Like an impromptu vacation. But she also had enough money to have a nice apartment, never lack anything, and buy pretty clothes whenever she wanted. Maybe she was divorced from Toki’s dad and had a wealthy pension? Or maybe she was a widow and had a big inheritance.
But Sayuri wasn’t completely idle, either. Every month or so, she left for two or three days straight, leaving her daughter to spend the night with a young woman that worked in the daycare where Toki spend most of her days. The babysitter never asked questions. When Toki did ask, Sayuri always laughed and told her it wasn’t anything interesting. Barely more than a toddler, Toki lost interest quickly. So maybe her mom had a part-time job, or something.
It wasn’t very important, in the grand scheme of things. Sayuri loved her daughter. Sometimes she was a bit at loss about what to do with a toddler, but she was kind and patient and she did her best. Sure, she spent more time with her work-friends than with Toki, but she always took several days off in a month to spend time with her, play silly games, watch TV, read her books, buy her toys, tell her fantastical stories of adventurers roaming the world. Sayuri was young, maybe twenty-five? It wasn’t easy to be a single mom without any family or close friends. But Sayuri loved Toki, she did her best to be a good mom, and that was enough.
When Toki childishly asked what her job was, Sayuri just patted her hair with a soft smile and told her she was a consultant. It was a big word and it sounded serious, so Toki nodded and dutifully bragged about it the next day in daycare. But afterward, her conscience from Before pointed out that it had been an extremely vague answer. Most adults told kids what they did to explain their jobs. A garage owner said they fixed cars. A doctor told they healed people. A cashier explained they sold stuff.
What did her mom do exactly?
Well, it wasn’t really important to Toki. As all kids were, she was pretty self-centered. She was happy, her mom doted on her, and that was enough. The Aratani family lived in a nice neighborhood, not rich but not poor either. Normal, even. Toki had a comfortable live. Home, daycare (then, later, kindergarten) friends, mom, games, adventures. Everything was fine. Her troubles were those of a normal child. She got her hair pulled at the daycare and cried, hoarded all the colored crayons and draw on the walls, befriended little kids and forgot about them when it was time to go home. She loved stories: fantastic stories about travel in distant lands, but also instructive stories, like those children’s books that explain things about dinosaurs or planes or storms. Toki didn’t play much with dolls, but she had plenty of animal figures. She liked paint, but wasn’t very interested with playing with make-up or hair-do. Actually, she hated people touching her hair, but she didn’t like having her falling in her eyes either, so her mother taught her to style it in two little macaron-like buns. It was cute, adorable, but most of all it was unique, and Toki kept the same hairstyle through, well, almost her whole life. She didn’t care very much about being the prettiest princess. Although she did have some childish vanity, she wasn’t very interested by her appearance. She loved learning new things: solving puzzle, digging into small mysteries. She wasn’t a very adventurous child, though. She was more contemplative, constantly dreaming about imaginary plots or fantastical questions.
And at age four, she got her Quirk, like everyone.
She had wondered what her Quirk would be since she had been old enough to know what they were. Some part of her was terrified of being Quirkless and to endure the discrimination that Midoriya had faced in canon (bullying, suicide-baiting, and of course no All-Might to give her his Quirk at the end!). For all of her energic and happy nature, Toki was soft-hearted and sensitive. But more than worried, she was eager. After all, she was an optimist! And what child wouldn’t be super-excited at the prospect of having a cool power? Toki could barely wait. Everyone around her was getting their Quirk, or already had them. There was her teacher at the kindergarten, who could make pretty lights during nap time… Or her friends that were already four and could change hair’s color or crack the floor or eat gravel or even bounce on the walls like a rubber ball. Or better, maybe she would have a power like her mom’s!
Sayuri’s Quirk was Swap-Space. She could swap places with any object of height and/or weight roughly equivalent to hers, as long as she knew where that object was. Done correctly, it was a bit like teleportation. In the appartement, there was always huge canister filled with water to weight exactly sixty-three kilos so Sayuri could swap places with it and come home from…. well, basically anywhere.
Sayuri was very proud of her Quirk, but she didn’t flaunt it. On the contrary, she almost hid it. It was utterly baffling to Toki.
Because, duh. Superpower of teleportation, anyone?! It was awesome! Toki would have bragged about it to everyone! She was a bubbly kid, easily joining in the ramblings of her little classmates in the kindergarten. But her mom very sternly said that the details of her Quirk were private and that Toki wasn’t allowed to tell her classmates, which was so… weird? When asked about it, Toki just said that her mom could swap places between stuff, but not that she teleported with it.
Keeping a secret made her feel all grow up and trustworthy, but she couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that there was something else going on. Odd.
In this world, people were defined by their Quirk. Or more specifically, children were. The first manifestation of their power could drastically change a life. A water Quirk? Immediately the kid was oriented toward a job like firefighting, or art, or even agriculture. Healing Quirk? You could have a scholarship for any medical school. The mindset of the adults was pretty much “how is that Quick going to benefit society?” and… From there, it wasn’t hard for a child to be modeled into thinking that their Quirk was the cornerstone of their future. Which was highly ironic, since only heroes were allowed to use their Quirk for their jobs! How frustrating could it be, to have a Quirk perfectly suited to make your work easier, and to be forbidden to use it?
Like removing gravity from object, but not being allowed to use it to help in the construction company your parents owned. Just as an example.
But anyway. Being a hero was of course being the best of the best, but even outside of this career, your power was a fundamental part of your future, of your perspectives. When people introduced themselves, they told their names, their age, their job, their Quirk, in that order. It was so significantly connected to their sense of identity. And as a result, being Quirkless was a shame.
In Japan, at least, it was the kind of thing that was discussed in hushed whispers, awkwardly or with a patronizing tone. A bit like normal people would talk about the mentally ill or the disabled. There was pity, but also a hint of smugness.
The human race had always been prone to discrimination. Race, gender, social standing, accent, physical appearance, disability… People never missed excuses to judge others as lesser. But in a world filled with superpowers, it was logical to see Quirks as a way to define the superiority or inferiority of an individual. Honestly, Toki thought it was unfair and mean. People should be judged on their merits, on what they worked to achieve, and not on what they were born with… Right?
But she was still a child and she didn’t really have the words to articulate that feeling of injustice. It was still distant, and besides, she wasn’t personally concerned. Because, fortunately for her, she had a badass Quirk.
Well she got it when she accidentally apparated in a tree while climbing it with her classmates, which was less badass. She panicked and didn’t know how to go back, so they had to call the firemen to get her back on the ground, but hey! It was still cool! And it made for a great story!
“Well, congratulation”, smiled the Quirk specialist they went to see afterward. “Considering what happened, I think it’s a teleportation Quirk!”
Toki clapped, delighted:
“Awesome! … What does that mean?”
Sayuri sniggered. Ever since being told what had happened by the teacher, Sayuri couldn’t seem to be able to stop smiling. Like Toki’s Quirk was such a good new that she was going to burst from pride and happiness. It made Toki feel very important, and she couldn’t help but smile in return.
“It means,” her mom laughed, “that you can disappear from a place and reappear somewhere else, Toki-chan.”
Toki opened her mouth to blurt out ‘like you!’ with excitation, then remembered it was a secret, paused, and said very seriously:
“Neat.”
The doctor chuckled, then grew serious: “Teleportation is very rare, and if often subjected to a certain set of rules unique to each Quirk. Some people can’t teleport too far, or other can only teleport a few times a day. Each Quirk has its drawback. Aratani-san, you can swap places with object of a certain height that you can see, isn’t it? Your daughter’s Quirk is probably limited by her field of vision, like yours. What is her father’s Quirk, if I may ask?”
Toki turned to her mom with curiosity, because hey, she was interested in the answer too. Also she had no idea why the nice doctor thought her mom’s Quirk was limited by the height of things, or by her field of vision. What a ridiculous notion! Her mom was so much stronger than that! If she hadn’t been obligated to keep the secret, Toki would have berated the doctor for his thoughtless words!
Sayuri didn’t even blink, and serenely answered: “Her father has Minor Telekinesis. Not limited by his field of vision, only by the weight of things he picked up.”
Telekinesis… He could move stuff with his mind? Wicked. Toki grinned, elated. That power was at least as cool as teleportation! She wouldn’t have minded having that kind of Quirk, either. Of course, her mom was the best, but her dad wasn’t far behind.
The doctor seemed impressed, too:
“Well with two Quirks as amazing as yours, it’s no wonder you had such a talented daughter. She could even be a pro hero one day!”
And at that, her mother’s smile took on a slightly fixed quality. Her hand, resting on Toki’s shoulder like a comforting presence, tightened.
“It’s a dangerous job, doctor,” she laughed softly. “I would be happier if she joined my business later.”
Ah, pro heroes. It was a thorny subject in the Aratani’s household.
In Toki’s kindergarten, it was a classic. They had toys, figures, cards, drawing about heroes. Children talked excitedly about the news and the fights their idols had been in. But it wasn’t just some passing interest, like their cartoons on Saturday, because… Well, they loved heroes, but big kids loved heroes too. It wasn’t just a kids’ thing, it was a grown-up thing too, and children knew it. They gravitated towards Pro Heroes not just because of the flashy colors, but also because it was something that adults loved, and kids always tried to emulate grown-ups.
Being a hero wasn’t just about cool powers and flashy costumes but also about goals, about strength, about doing things worthy of admiration. Everybody wanted to be a pro heroes in the way that in her old life, everybody wanted to be President or astronaut or actress.
But Sayuri wasn’t really a fan of heroes. She was reluctant to buy merch, even when Toki begged for it. It wasn’t just the merch, though. When watching the news, Sayuri didn’t fawn over the pictures of fights, while Toki’s classmates reported that all of their parents did it. Sayuri bought storybooks with magicians and adventurers like The Wizard of Oz or Harry Potter (or learning books about the sea, dinosaurs, or samurais, because Toki was a nerd even at four years old): she didn’t buy All Might’s or Endeavor’s comics. She liked old movies with romance and comedy, where nobody wore tights to fight crime. And, well, Toki did too, but she wondered if it was because she had liked that stuff Before, of because of her mother’s influence. Toki was aware that she wasn’t as hero-crazy as most kids her age. Teachers thought it made her mature and curious, but wasn’t it mostly a product of her education?
And… What did her mother have against heroes? It could be nothing, of course. Sometimes the hyper-mediatized guys in leotards weren’t your cup of tea. But still.
It was the first clue that something didn’t add up. Or maybe the first clue that Toki noticed.
Kids learned by osmosis, and so, imitating her mother, Toki wasn’t really interested by heroes. Well, she was, a little bit, because it was a big part of her classmates’ games and all, but… She didn’t have a favorite. She didn’t collect cards. She had some figures, but nothing more, while her classmates bragged about having a lot of merch. Toki didn’t really see the point. She would rather play with magicians, dragons, knight, hobbits and adventurers. So Toki hadn’t really paid attention to her mother’s dislike. Until now, that is. Because now, well. A doctor had said that Toki could be a hero, which was the best part to play in any game at her daycare, and even if Toki wasn’t really into heroes she would never turn down an invitation like that.
But her mother had said no. And that was… intriguing.
But anyway. Afterward, Toki had a few sessions with a Quirk counselor, like every kid who awakened their power. Those sessions were mandatory, once a year, from age four to twelve, for every Quirked child. It was more of a medical follow-up to make sure they didn’t hurt themselves (or hurt others) than a class about how to use their Quirk. After all, it was theirs, and the kids were the only ones who could learn how it worked. So during Toki’s sessions, the counselor stuck to basic questions. What did her Quirk do? Was it scary? What did she think about it? It was part of her and she needed to accept it completely in order to control it. How far could she go? Was it painful? No? Great! You’re good to go, see you next year.
(Really, you would have thought that in a world where children had superpowers, the child-safety measures would be a little more advanced. Seriously.)
At the kindergarten, Toki was showered with praises by her peers and the teachers. Having a superpower didn’t change much. Well, she was gently scowled when she used Teleportation to leave the classroom, but that was it. She wasn’t a disobedient child, anyway. Actually, that was a good thing for the teachers. She realized a few years later that if she had been as unruly as… say… Bakugou Katsuki…. It would have made her teachers’ lives miserable. A teleporting kid! They had really dodged a bullet here.
Anyway, Toki had others things on her mind. Learning about her dad had opened a barrage of questions. Before, well, even if she had been aware she had a genitor somewhere, it hadn’t really registered as having a father who was a real person, who had a telekinetic Quirk, who had existed. Now, though… Well, she was curious. What was his name? What did he look like? Was he nice? Where was he? How did he and Mom meet?
And patiently, a bit cautiously, Mom started answering. Toki was a grown-up now that she had her Quirk, and so her mom told her that she was allowed to know even bigger secrets that those that Mom had already shared with her. After all, she had done good, hadn’t she? She had never told anyone that her mother could teleport with her power. Nobody knew how strong Sayuri was, because it was a secret, and Toki had done such a good job at keeping it! So surely, she was ready to learn more. She wouldn’t tell anyone, would she? No, of course no!
So Mom made her swear to never tell a soul (which was the second clue that that there was something fishy)… And she started telling her about her dad.
Her father was named Ryūsei Taiyōme. His name was written with the kanji for “meteor”, and his surname was spelled like “sun-eyes”. Sayuri smiled wishfully when she talked about him. He was tall, and handsome, and brave. He had brown hair, darker than Toki’s, but with reddish accents like a sunset. He had almost the same coppery-colored eyes as Toki, but his were brighter, luminous, like embers. He was hard-working and intelligent. His Quirk wasn’t exactly Minor Telekinesis, but Psychokinesis: he could move things with his mind, but it was enhanced by his emotions. He was powerful, sure, but he also used his Quirk smartly. He didn’t try to move a whole building if taking away a beam was enough to make the thing collapse, for example.
But he could make a building collapse if he wanted, Sayuri said with a grin. Nobody was as strong as Ryūsei Taiyōme.
He and Sayuri had met at work. They had started at the same time, both teenage underlings doing odds jobs to make ends meet. Sayuri had been fourteen, then, and Ryūsei a little older, maybe seventeen. They had quickly become friends. But they had drifted in and out of touch for a few years. Ryūsei had started his own business, while Sayuri kept to herself, and occasionally did consultant work for various groups…
But they had stayed in touch, and after a while they had seriously reconnected: and then, they had started dating. Sayuri was barely nineteen, but she felt ready for a life-long commitment. They started their adventure… And they had such a wonderful time of it! They went where the wind carried them, with a band of loyal friends that helped them do the job right. The thrill of adventure! Risking their lives together! The rush of victory afterward!
(By that time, engrossed in her mother’s tale, Toki belatedly aligned the clues with a mounting feeling of dread. Not, surely not…)
Ryūsei and Sayuri decided to get married after a few months, and they never regretted it. For years, they roamed the country. Sometimes they stayed only a few weeks in the same place, but sometimes it was eight months, a year, more. They were thriving on success. Oh, sometimes there were close calls. Their job was risky. Sometimes the people they dealt with were aggressive or violent. Sometimes it was scary. Sometimes people got hurt. But Ryūsei and Sayuri always got away. When they were together, nothing could stop them.
Then Sayuri had gotten pregnant. She had been trying for a baby almost since the beginning, so it was a very good thing. But Sayuri couldn’t do her job while carrying a child (and her mother didn’t go into details, but Toki abruptly wondered what teleportation would have done to the fetus in her belly, especially if it had been a non-teleporting fetus: that mental image was not pretty). She couldn’t do her job while raising a child, either. So they bought a nice apartment, they made sure everything was ready, and they decided to go their separate ways for a while. Not long! Because each time Mom was gone, in fact she joined Dad at their secret meeting place. Often to work, but sometimes just to catch up.
(And Toki really hoped she was wrong, but… She knew what it looked like. In this world, ‘free-spirited adventurer’ wasn’t a job. At least not a legal one, which meant...)
“Can’t Dad come here instead?” she asked naively.
Sayuri ruffled her hair:
“No, sweetie. Dad has… Well, he has enemies, so he can’t attract attention to us or we could be in trouble. It’s simpler if I go to him. I can go there without being tracked.”
Yeah. That was what Toki had figured. She took a big breath.
“Mom… Is Dad a villain or something?”
Sayuri smiled softly:
“Or something, yes.”
“… Oh.”
Sayuri hesitated. She had let herself been carried away by her tale, apparently: and maybe she hadn’t planned on spilling the beans today. She looked a little anxious now. Toki didn’t know what to say.
Kids were taught at a very young age that villains were bad. Toki had a more nuanced understanding of the world and was trying really had to have all the data before judging, but still, her mother could probably see on her face that she wasn’t exactly thrilled with this answer. Sayuri wringed her hands, an unconscious gesture of nervousness, before crouching down to Toki’s eyes level and saying softly:
“Toki-chan, sweetie. Your Dad and I, we… When we were young, we didn’t have a good live. We had no family, no access to a better education. So we did bad jobs, because we didn’t have the option to do good ones. But once you start a job with bad people, then… You find out it’s not that bad, really. You can help your friends and have a reward at the end. And afterward, those bad people… Well, they continue to give you jobs and be nice to you, while the good people continue to ignore you. And it go on and on, and after a while you don’t have the option to work with good people anymore, because you’re in too deep. You understand?”
Toki nodded, reluctantly. She didn’t really have the vocabulary for it but yeah, she was aware of the socioeconomic context that surrounded most criminal activities. Well, she knew that from Before: she didn’t actually know if that world was the same, but she could extrapolate. Considering how violent was this world (superheroes needed to stop disasters daily, that was a huge red flag), and how strong was the discrimination (she hadn’t experienced any, but she remembered Midoriya’s backstory)…. Well, it wouldn’t be surprising if it was similar here.
“It’s just a job,” continued her mother, stroking her hair. “Everyone needs money to buy food and to have a house. Right?”
“… Right,” Toki said, hesitantly, when it became clear that her mother expected an answer.
“Right.” Sayuri looked pleased. “Some people can have nice, legal jobs where they make money counting numbers. But others have to start somewhere else and see where it leads them, and… They end up robbing banks. It’s risky, and we have to hide. But it’s not so bad.”
“Villains hurt people, though,” Toki said in a small voice.
She had trouble imagining her mother hurting anyone. Sayuri had never even raised her voice at her. Sometimes she was snappish or irritable, but it was because Toki was a little too rowdy, not because Sayuri was mean. Sayuri was so kind, so patient! Toki felt bad every time she annoyed her.
Her mother tilted her head:
“Well, not all villains, and not all the time. Your father and I are very careful to avoid it as much as we can. Don’t believe everything they say on the news. Heroes hurt people too.”
Well, yeah, but there was a difference between a police officer arresting a murderer by breaking his arm, and a robber breaking a victim’s arm to steal their money. Toki frowned, dissatisfied. Her mom took her by the shoulders, and shook her gently:
“It’s complicated, sweetie. But I’m still me, your Mom. And your Dad is still your Dad, and we both love you very much. So you’ll keep your promise, won’t you? You’ll keep my secret?”
She had tightened her grip. It almost hurt. Toki held back a wince, and nodded quickly:
“Yes, Mom. I promise.”
Because what else could she say? It was her mother.
Sayuri released her, looking relieved, and a little sad, and almost proud. She patted her head and offered to make her a hot chocolate to get over all those emotions, and Toki took the easy way out, hastily redirecting the conversation towards chocolate and the fact that they were almost out of candies.
So. Her parents were villains. Not terrible villains, not monsters like the League, or terrorists like the Army of Liberation: but villains. And even if they didn’t commit senseless violence, her mom had basically admitted that they had gotten people hurt… And that it didn’t keep her up at night at all. What was Toki supposed to do with that information?
She couldn’t tell people, obviously. She didn’t want her mother arrested. But was she going to do, talk to her and try to change her mind? Her, little Toki, at four years old? Yeah, right.
Damn it. Ignorance might not actually be bliss, but it certainly would have been less work.
oOoOoOo
Toki’s life didn’t really change afterward, but… more than getting her Quirk, that revelation was a good wake-up call. It was time to grow up and think about the future. She loved her mom, really, but being against the law scared her. Not because she felt particularly reverent of society’s order but because it was dangerous. Her mom could go to jail. She could get hurt. She could get killed. And where would Toki be, then? It was her mom, but it was also her life.
She wanted options. She wanted data. She wanted…. Possibilities, hypotheses, to have a clear view of the road in front of her. And for that, well, she had to take a little more proactive role. She needed to know everything. Not just about her parents, but about this country, its history, and the world at large. What was out there? What could the universe offer her? How could she use it?
And once she opened her eyes to all the possibilities, once she tried to look beyond the simple routine of kindergarten-home-play-sleep-repeat… Well. It was like a damn had been opened. Toki had always been a curious child after all, and once her intellect started aiming for higher pursuits, there was no stopping her. Toki wasn’t really sure she could stop herself. There was so much to learn!
Toki had always been one of the smartest kids in her class, but the cranked up the switch a notch. She had already learned to read hiragana and most katakana and some kanji, but she threw herself into more reading than ever. She started to peruse through books about heroes, to know what all of that stuff was about. It wasn’t bad, but her favorites stories stayed the ones with fantasy elements and without superheroes in leotard.
Her question in class started to be more pointed: why was it like that? Who paid for the damages made by heroes? Where did Quirks come from? How were they studied? Where? How did people become doctors? Where was the line between police work, military work, and hero work? Why had there been wars in the past? Why had wars stopped? Could there be another war in the future? Who owned the ocean between countries? Or the sky? Or the space? Did people go to space? There had been space exploration in the past, why had people abandoned that? Could people live on Mars or the Moon? Could people make Mars or the Moon livable?
The teachers had their hands full. Oh, they liked her, but sometimes her pointed questions needed complex answers that they couldn’t quite give to a child. They praised her cleverness, but once or twice Toki was well-aware that she left them a bit bewildered.
Like all kids, Toki had been obsessed with shiny toys, but with her eyes opened to the world her fascination shifted to weirder (or maybe, more complex) topics. The ocean. The sky. Dolphins. Stars. Storms. Lightning. Puzzles and riddles. History. Quirks. It wasn’t that weird, all kids had a nerdy phase during childhood: but Toki was a true nerd since birth, and so she was especially precocious.
“My smart little girl”, said Mom with fondness.
Sayuri didn’t discourage her newfound interest, far from it. She was delighted by it. She encouraged Toki to read, and even dragged her to museums. Toki hadn’t even thought about it, but it was fascinating. They didn’t have museums in the city of Hinohara, where they lived. Because why focus on the past when the present was much more interesting? So Sayuri and Toki always had to take the train and go to a bigger city. But it was so worth it! Museums were filled with treasures of knowledge. Pre-Quirk history wasn’t studied a lot, since the power dynamics and legacies of that time weren’t really relevant anymore, but still, it was good to know!
Apparently the BNHA-Verse was the same world that Toki remembered from Before, or at least the History was the same. It started to diverge toward… Well, Toki-from-before had died somewhere in the 2020’, probably, so she didn’t know what had happened next. Her memories from Before were still a bit fuzzy, incomplete. She remembered very well the BNHA manga, but the details of her own world had been blurred with time. In any case… Climate change had been the focus of the world for a few decades, starting from the 2000’, until the first Quirked person (a glowing baby born in China) appeared in the late 2060.
Then afterward Quirks had multiplied around the globe, armies had been disbanded, power dynamics had changed, economy had risen in some places and collapsed in others, and well, the very structure of society had been changed forever in less than thirty years. There had been a lot of Coup d’états. A lot. Seriously, in Asia there had been unrest or flat-out war for decades.
It also explained why manga characters had names that were so on the nose. Like Midoriya for a green-haired character. Or Taiyōme for someone with luminous eyes.
If you have had decades of war, then there’s no way you had any kind of census data happening. People lost a lot of their identity: for protection, but also because sometimes they just couldn’t keep track of it. It went to the point where, for several generations, people just had names that were identifying features, or were only able to keep their given name.
By the time orders was reestablished, and you could have government documentation with both a given name and a family name, what exactly would people use to identify themselves and their family? What would the government use? Quirks. It’s the equivalent of people having the last name Smith because they were a family of smiths, or having a last name that was the town/village that their family lived in generations ago. People with ‘regular’ last names from the pre-Quirk-era, like Sayuri Aratani, only made a little under half the population.
This world was very different from the one she had left.
Science had leaped forward in some domains (prosthetics and robotics, mostly) while regressing drastically in some other (artificial intelligence, space exploration…). Every country was a democracy now, with the last monarchies disintegrating in less than a decade after the Dawn of Quirks. The medias had an enormous influence. International relationships were both stronger and warier. States had lost power. Religious cults had risen and fallen every decade like clockwork. It was like several hundred years of historical events had tried to cram themselves in a single century.
Present time was the year 2212. It was so weird to think about that. About one hundred and ninety-two (ninety-one?) years had passed since what Toki remembered from Before. It was… It was the same lapse of time separating her death in 2020 from, fuck, the creation of Belgium in Europe, or the July Monarchy in France, or the election of the seventh president of the barely-created United States. It was wild.
The History museum was instructive, but wasn’t enough to soothe Toki’s thirst for knowledge. Besides, she felt a bit unsatisfied by what she learned. Even a century and half of research hadn’t managed to find out why Quirks had appeared. There were weird, gigantic and uncontrollable genetic mutations who gave people animal features or physically impossible superpowers (like freaking teleportation) and nobody had managed to find out why? It was maddening. Or maybe people were less interest in the why it happened and more of the how to deal with it?
Anyway. Toki still had questions about the world. For a few months, her new passion became the ocean. Had people explored the depth of the sea? What was down there? How did sharks breathe? Did dolphins really speak in regional languages? How smart were they?
So sue her, loving dolphins was a perfectly normal thing to do for a four years-old girl. Well, five now. Time had fled. For her birthday, her mom took her to a neighboring city where there was an aquarium. Holding captive cetaceans was forbidden now (there was a world-wide ban on the enslavement of intelligent species, and wasn’t that mind-blowing? People with empathy Quirk and other animal-communication skills had basically rioted to make it happen, but it had happened!), but it was still amazing. There were so many fish! And books about the sea! And they had a building where they healed rescued animals, and there were otters. So cute!
What? Toki was smart and curious, but she was also five. She was allowed to fawn in front of cute things.
Time passed, slowly.
Her mother continued to go for three days each month. But now, she told Toki about her dad when she came back. It wasn’t much, just “oh, he said hello” or “he bought this coloring book for you” or “I showed him that drawing you did and he said you’re very talented” but it made Ryūsei Taiyōme weirdly real. It was a person, out there, that had a life and a connection to her mom, and it was… strange.
It was a complicated situation. Toki knew that villainy was dangerous, and she didn’t want her parents (either of them) to be involved in it because they could be hurt. It was easier, safer, to be on the good side of the law. And, well, it was also morally better most of the time, but the problem wasn’t one of morality. It was just about feelings, and realism, and opportunities. Toki was safe, and she wanted her parents safe too. She wanted her mom safe especially. Her father was maybe, probably, the main thing tying her mom to her villain’s past. But he wasn’t a distant, immaterial figure. She hadn’t met him but she knew he was a real person, with likes and dislikes. She knew her mom loved him, and that he probably loved her mom. And Toki didn’t… She didn’t even really hate him? Or even dislike him? She didn’t know him. She didn’t like what he stood for, but as a person, he seemed nice. The discrepancy was jarring.
And how was she supposed to stop her parents from being villains, if she didn’t even know herself enough to sort her complicated mass of feelings on the subject?
Even at five years old and full of confidence, Toki felt small when she thought about how she was supposed to inspire that kind of change. She was… She was nothing out of the ordinary. She had a powerful Quirk but it didn’t make her exceptional. She had the potential to be a hero, sure, but she didn’t even know if she wanted to. She wasn’t a canon character destined to great things. Sure, she had been reincarnated, but that didn’t make her better. She had been given no higher purpose, no lady had come out of a lake to throw a big shiny sword at her, and she hadn’t found a flaming bush or some carved tablets. She was a child in a big, complicated world, and she had to carve her own path in it.
“You and Dad became villains because you had no choice,” she timidly asked one day. “But you could stop if you wanted, right?”
Her mom stayed silent a few seconds. Sayuri never tried to baby her or sugarcoat the truth. Sometimes she had to pick her worlds carefully, but she always treated her daughter like a tiny adult able to understand complex ideas. It was something that Toki could appreciate.
“We started down this path because it was easier than fighting to get out,” she answered slowly. “But no, I don’t think we could stop.”
Alright, Toki appreciated the honesty. But that was the only thing she appreciated in that answer. What the hell, mom?! News flash: crime was bad!
“W-what? But why?”
“Because… Toki-chan, sweetie, we don’t know anything else. And we are wanted by the law. If we stop, even if we hide our tracks, they will find us.”
Toki blinked, and pointed logically:
“Yeah, but you stopped. You live here, with me, and people know your name and your face but nobody has tried to arrest you.”
“My face isn’t known to the public,” admitted Sayuri. “But I’m using my maiden name, and I modified my data in the Quirk registry, and even with all that I’m constantly ready to grab you and run. Once you start a life of crime, it doesn’t matter if you change your ways later. They always want to catch you.”
Well, not if you waited long enough. There was a prescription for most crimes. Like, five, ten years? Something like that. Toki wasn’t really up to date on the subtilities of Japanese penal code.
Unaware of her daughter little mental freak-out, Sayuri sighed:
“And besides… You father’s name and face are known. If I stopped, I would have to leave him. And I can’t do that. But more importantly, I don’t want to.”
“Leave him?” Toki said hopefully.
“Stop,” her mother corrected. “I don’t want to stop. I like that life. I like the friendship, the danger, the reward, being good at what I do.”
Crap. Toki bit her lips. Yeah, she had suspected as much, but it still filled her with dread. If her mother had been tied to a life of crime by her husband, that would have been one thing. Everything could be blamed on the very bad man who had led an innocent woman on the path to perdition, yadda yadda. But if Sayuri had chosen it… If it had been her decision, taken with a full understanding of what it implied… Well. Let’s just say that thing had just gotten way more complicated.
“But it’s dangerous,” she whined. “I don’t want you to be in danger!”
Sayuri stoked her hair softly:
“It’s alright. I’m always careful.”
“But what if it isn’t enough? What can’t you choose another way?”
Her mom sighed, then playfully pinched her nose:
“Because, sweetie, it’s the way life is. Some people can afford to pay others to fight in their place, and so they have cops and heroes. Some others don’t, and they live by a separate set of rules. It’s a good life. We are so much more free than other people, you know? At least we know how the real world works, and we’re not chained by laws like others are.”
Yeah, Toki could get it: the good old argument that society was a prison and laws were shackles that the masses traded for the fake comfort of belonging to the pack. Of course, in that metaphor, the free spirits were villainized when they were in reality the only good guys. Classic.
But her mom wasn’t a bad person. She was kind, patient, loving, clever. She just happened to also be ruthless and have a flexible morale code. It didn’t necessarily make her a bad mother. It didn’t even make her a bad person.
Urgh, it was so complicated.
Anyway. Time passed. Sayuri didn’t change her ways. She continued to talk to Toki about her dad. They never met, though: apparently Sayuri’s teleportation was the only safe way to join him, and he couldn’t even pass a phone call. And since Toki had no idea where he was, she couldn’t teleport to him. One of the limits of her Quirk was that she had to know her destination to jump somewhere.
Toki’s Quirk was… Well, making it part of her had been surprisingly easy. It was just an extension of her will, after all. She thought about a place, and she clenched some invisible muscle somewhere in her chest, her skin tingled, and poof! She was there.
Sayuri was fascinated by her Quirk, and constantly encouraged her to use it. Even though it was technically illegal. Not that Sayuri cared about things like that, but still. She always gave Toki treats when she managed an especially long jump from one location to another. She made Toki perform little experiments about her range and her stamina, all the while wearing a watch that counted her heartbeats. Toki submitted happily to those tests (the results interested her, too!) but she couldn’t help but feel a little disquieted by her mother’s fascination. Sometimes it felt as if Sayuri was more interested in Toki’s Quirk than in Toki.
Which was, of course, ridiculous.
Anyway. Toki’s teleportation was great! She could go from home to her kindergarten in a blink. She could go from the park to the museum in a blink, too. She had managed to go to the aquarium and back one day, so she knew that she could easily cover forty kilometers. It had been tiring, though: she had weak knees and short breath as if she had run for hours after that stun. Sayuri had been very anxious about it. She hadn’t tried to make her do any more long-distance jumps afterward. But shorter teleportations were totally okay. For exemple, teleporting all day from upstairs to downstairs or from the couch to the carpet didn’t tire Toki at all.
Toki was also endlessly curious, so of course she experimented with her Quirk. Not too recklessly, though. It was teleportation, after all, and some morbid part of her mind always thought about what would happen if she got stuck in a jump, or if she left an arm or an organ behind. It was chilling. But hey, apparently, she had innate control over teleportation of her own body, so she never left any bloody part behind, or stuck between time and space. Success!
Basically, Toki could teleport herself anywhere as long as she could picture her destination in her mind. She still kept her clothes on when jumping, she realized: but as soon as she paid attention to that detail she started teleporting without her clothes, which wasn’t in her plans at all. It made her mother laugh, at least! But it took Toki a few days of tests to understand that she teleported everything she wanted to bring with herself. If she wanted to go with her clothes on, great. But if she wanted to jump home without her coat, she could do it too. It was a pretty fun experiment.
Toki could also teleport with thing she touched, like a book in her hand, or a trash bag to put outside. She didn’t manage to teleport with the couch when she tried the three first times, under Sayuri’s watchful eyes. But when she tried a fourth time a few days later after a frustrating day of trying to teleport parts of things (like only a slice of the whole apple she was holding), she succeeded. So maybe her teleportation’s powers were enhanced by frustration, or her emotion in general, like her dad’s psychokinesis? Or maybe it was just a matter of training?
She completely forgot to tell her mom about it. Later, when she remembered, she sheepishly decided that she didn’t want to tell Sayuri that she had forgotten, so… that particular experiment wasn’t repeated.
Besides, it felt very grown-up to keep a secret of her own!
Sayuri and Toki continued analyzing her Quirk. Some tests were boring. Some others interesting. Toki tried teleporting in quick succession, like a run around the room, jump-jump-jump one meter at the time. She tried to teleport while moving. She tried to teleport upside-down, or to appear facing away from the direction where she had disappeared. She tried to teleport carrying stuff. She tried to teleport with her eyes closed. She tried to teleport thing she touched with both hands, then one hand, then a few fingers, then one single finger tips. She tried to teleport with a thing that she touched and another thing that toucher that first thing (like two books stacked on top of each other, while she was only holding the bottom one).
Toki had… varying amount of success. Her main obstacle was her sense of equilibrium. Jumping in crazy position was doing interesting thing to her internal ears and she ended up dizzy if she tried to make too much teleporting-backflip in quick succession. She could teleport with anything she touched, but teleporting things she didn’t touch was hit-and-miss. She could teleport with two books, be she couldn’t teleport with the blanket and the mattress, somehow?
Experimenting on her Quirk never felt like training, somehow. Toki wasn’t trying to strengthen her skills. She was just exploring her abilities, like Mom said. Sayuri thought that Toki had all the time of the world to become stronger later. But for now, why not focus on creativity and versatility?
You could augment your power, but you always hit a limit. But if you were smart and adaptable… Then there were no real limits to what you could do, what you could become. The best example was Sayuri’s own Quirk: Swap-Space wasn’t powerful, but it was versatile. She could swap with anything. Not necessarily solid or inorganic objects! So Sayuri had learned to swap with people, so she could teleport other people where she wanted, for example. But she had also learned to swap with the water put in a canister. Not with the full canister itself, just the water. That way, she escaped and ended up standing upright in the open container… and the only thing left at the scene of the crime was sixty-three liters of tap water, that immediately splashed everywhere upon materializing without a container.
Talk about contaminating the evidence!
And yeah, Toki still thought that robbing banks and stuff was wrong, but wow, she had to applaud that stratagem. Sayuri didn’t swap with a solid thing, only with a certain mass of matter. It was incredibly clever. And… no wonder that she managed to escape the police for so long. People found water on the scene, so they probably thought the villain used a water Quirk, right?
(Toki had to reassess herself, and realize that maybe her cleverness didn’t come from her past-life, but from winning the genetic lottery. In addition to a teleportation Quirk, she had inherited her parent’s brains. Damn. It was humbling, in a way. And scary.)
Toki aligned that with the others clues and tried to look, on the news, for reports about villains using a water Quirk. Aaaand there it was, the Meteor Crew, led by the villain Meteor.
Really, he had picked the English translation of his first name as his villainous pseudonym? It wasn’t very imaginative! Still, Toki carefully noted the name in her head. The gang’s members were mostly unknow, but they often left a huge quantity of water in the safe of banks they robbed. Ten against one that it was her mom.
Maybe Toki should ask for some notebooks to write that down. Oh, and learn code to hide her notes. She had so many things she wanted to know; she was afraid to forget some of them.
Well, in any case, experimenting with her Quirk took her mind off things. And… it was pretty fun. Toki asked her mom for a notebook: she knew her mom made notes of her own during their little tests, buts he wanted to write down things, too!
Of course Sayuri, who never said no to her, indulgently bought whatever she wanted. Toki started to write down all of her observations. Writing her progress made her feel more confident, more grown-up. After all, the difference between science and messing around was just the act of taking notes.
A first notebook quickly became two, then three, because she didn’t want to mix topic and she also wanted to write about all her other questions. After the ocean, her new passion was the sky. How did clouds fly? Why was there rain? How high could people go before running out of air? Could we go to the moon? She started drawing planets with funky colors and asked her mom for glowing-in-the-dark stars to stick to her ceiling. She scared her caretakers half to death by teleporting herself ten meter in the airs to see if she could fly (and okay, maybe it wasn’t her smartest decision). She didn’t fly, but she managed to teleport herself to the ground before crashing like an idiot, so it was fine.
Space exploration had never really taken off in the BNHA-verse. Shame. It was one field of science that had been abandoned when Quirks had appeared. Mankind had to focus on the Earth, where power and danger both came from. It was a pity. If Quirks hadn’t apparated and reshaped people’s understanding of the world and their priorities, well… Today, humanity could have had space travel, and even started terraforming of distant planets!
She babbled excitingly about it to her mom, like always. And Sayuri smiled, nodded, and offered her stickers or new notebooks or even a trip to the museum. There was no planetarium in their town, but there was one in Tokyo, and a trip there would take a few days. It was a full vacation, not a simple week-end, but Sayuri was ready to make the trip.
“Really?!”
“Of course Toki-chan! You know, your father love astronomy too. I think you get that from him.”
It left Toki felt oddly off-balance. She had thought that this new passion was all hers, because nobody in this world really cared about space. But… Her father’s villain name was Meteor, wasn’t it?
It left her to wonder. What had she brought back from Before, actually? She had memories, but…. Her passions, the things that interested her, her feelings… None of them really came from Before, did they? All of it… All of her… It was a product of this world. It came from here, from her parents. It wasn’t necessarily bad, but… What did it mean, for her?
What did it mean, for a little girl who had so much questions about the world, and whose parents were villains? What kind of answers would she get?
oOoOoOo
At six years old, Toki started writing poetry.
It wasn’t original poetry. It was just prose from Before. Sometime, she had a flash of insight: a quote, a few words, a verse from a song, a rhyme from a poem, a scene from a movie. But it was just a fragment, adrift. Toki wrote them anyway. She didn’t want to forget. And… If felt nice, to put those words on paper, to make them more real than a single whisper in her mind.
Those words weren’t hers but at the same time, they were. The old world she remembered only existed in her mind, now. What she could bring back with her, even if it was her clumsy prose mixed with others’ poetry, was something only her could create. She was like a whole universe, trapped in a person, and fading a little bit every day. Was she going to forget her old life? Sometimes it seemed already so far away. She was Toki, now. She didn’t need any other name. She didn’t even remember her old one.
And so she wrote. Sometimes the words came easily, sometimes they didn’t. She didn’t let her mom read her notebooks, and Sayuri didn’t try to snoop (or if she did, Toki never caught her). Besides, if she had read her daughter’s writing, would she have understood?
We understand so much, but the sky
behind those lights,
mostly void, partially stars,
that sky reminds us
we don't understand even more.
Most of her little poems were astronomy-themed. Maybe that passion would go with time, like the others. Or maybe it would stay, and that would be something to share with the father she had never met. Maybe. But still, it was an endless source of questions, wasn’t it? What was out there? Mankind had barely scratched the surface of the ocean’s mysteries. The sky was so much bigger. There were stars, and comets, and black holes, and planets. It was so humbling and fascinating to think that the same rules governed the fall of an apple on earth and the symphony of celestial bodies’ movements.
Toki wrote. She had barely filled five pages: she still had plenty of space. It was a big notebook. She put stickers and drawn little stars next to the words, and wondered if she could make a scrapbook. Nah, too much work. The aesthetic of the page didn’t really matter. The point of writing wasn’t to put the words somewhere specific, just to get them out. Or they would stick in her chest, filling it with too many emotions she couldn’t name.
One day you will be face to face
with whatever saw fit to let you exist in the universe,
and you will have to justify the space
you have filled.
At six years old, she also left kindergarten to join an elementary school. Sayuri told her that she was a big girl now, so she would leave more often for work. Toki wasn’t stupid, she had seen that her mom was getting restless. She was a wild spirit, after all. A bank robber, a villain, a fugitive from the law. Settling down for six years, even with the frequent reunions with her gang and subsequent heists… That was a lot. Sayuri was still young (twenty-eight, maybe?). She still wanted to enjoy her life. And even if she loved Toki, her true happiness came from the life she had with the Meteor Crew.
Did… Did that made Toki a bad daughter, because she couldn’t convince her mom to made her the priority in her life? Of did that made Sayuri a bad mother, who didn’t love her daughter enough?
Anyway. Elementary school. It was… Well, it was fine. In Japan, it was pretty normal for children to walk alone to their school even if it was half an hour away, so Toki started going to school by herself. It was a thirty minutes walk…. Or a split-second of teleportation. But it was that much time that she didn’t spend with her mom, who used to walk with her to the kindergarten each day. It was strange. A bit lonely, too.
Actually, it was at the time that Toki’s life started to get a bit lonely.
Before, it hadn’t really registered. She had been too little to need anyone besides her mom and her classmates in kindergarten. Then she had been distracted by her Quirk, and then by her sudden opening to the real world and all the questions that came with it. But the frenzy of questions-answers-discoveries-experiments had slowed down after two years, and it left Toki with more time to think… And more time that she had no one to share with.
She did try to make friend in school, but it wasn’t easy. Sure, they eat together, and played together, and told each other stories, but… In class, the teacher constantly praised Toki (her grade, her intellect, her Quirk, as if it mattered in her academic performance somehow), and it set her a little apart. She was bit uncomfortable with that open admiration, actually. And the teacher did her best to answer her questions, but most of the time it was too complicated, and she sidestepped neatly, telling her ‘it’s something you’ll learn later’ or something like that.
And alright, wondering if an anti-gravity Quirk could launch stuff in space or how fast was the Earth rotating…. It probably wasn’t the best conversation-starter in a class of six years-old kids whose eyes were firmly rived on the ground instead of toward the sky. But Toki just couldn’t turn off her mind like that. She was always asking why, how, where, when? Every little game of make-believe needed to have a huge backstory, just as every little drawing devolved into what could be giant fresco if Toki had more paper (and crayons, and talent… and attention-span).
There were also times where she was bored to tears. Toki already knew almost all her kanji, while her classmates were just beginning. She hadn’t had math lessons before, and but simple addition or subtractions were so simple she could do them with her eyes closed.
And mostly… There wasn’t anyone she could share with what she really thought. Things like ‘what to do to protect my mother?”, or ‘I’m not sure what I will do with my life’, or even ‘Is that weird that looking at the sky make me hopeful, and does that mean that I’ve already given up on what’s on Earth?’. She was an odd child, she knew. It wasn’t her fault.
Her teachers started to give her more complicated work, but it still wasn’t really challenging. Only when they hit middle-school level physics (what was mass, and gravity, and what was a wavelength) Toki started learning new thing and became invested in her work. She also joined two club, the English one (she didn’t know if she was learning or relearning, but speaking English came to her easier than to most students), and the gymnastic one. Both were middle-school clubs, so she hung around older kids. It was harder to bond with them, so Toki didn’t really make friends there. Not that she was here to make friends. Especially with children. There was a large gap of cultural difference and she didn’t know how to cross it, or even if she wanted to. For so long it had just been her and her Mom. It felt weird to think about opening to other people. Besides, she wasn’t exactly isolated: she had her Mom, and that was the most important thing!
But sport was good: it forced her to stop thinking, to stretch her muscles and focus, and went home feeling a good kind of tired. But it wasn’t enough. She was still bored in class, and lonely, and distracted, and people noticed. After a few weeks, her teachers started talking about moving her up a grade or maybe two. Sayuri was so proud she looked like she was walking on cloud nine.
“My little prodigy,” she giggled. “Smarted than both your father and me put together.”
“Moooom!”
“It’s true, sweetie! You’re so smart. You could do anything you set your mind to!”
And… Toki considered it. Sure, she had almost perfect grades. The only class where she didn’t have a huge advantage was Japanese, and even then she had a good level, whether it was hiragana, katanaka, or even kanji. As for the rest… She didn’t remember math from Before, but she probably had something left in her head, because multiplication and addiction slid easily in place in her mind. She could do in her head any elementary-school-level mathematic operation. They didn’t teach much science, but learning about the cycle of water or the food chain was old news for her. The physics homework that the teachers gave to her was two or three years ahead of her peers: and even if she had to make an actual effort to solve it, she found it engaging, instead of insurmountable. So yeah, she was pretty advanced. She didn’t know if her advance would last (maybe she wouldn’t feel so smart by the time she joined high school or even middle school!), but for now… Yeah. She could do pretty much anything.
And wasn’t that another problem? Toki didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life. She hadn’t even thought about it until now, but since her mother had told her about being a villain, Toki couldn’t help but turn the thought over and over in her head. What if her parents pressured her into joining their gang? For Toki, it had never been in question that she would not become a villain. It had been a complete certitude from day one. But… She didn’t know if her parents knew that, she realized with a jolt.
What if, for them, it was the opposite? What if the thought… What if mom thought that of course Toki would join them?! Hell, she was already involved, she was keeping their secrets. Then would come the next step, meeting them… Then sharing the loot… Then learning more about who they were… Then do something small, like providing food for an attack, or filling up the tank of their car… And then it would turn into carrying message or things for them… Playing lookout… And finally, actively joining in and attack.
But Toki didn’t want to rob banks. She didn’t want to run from the police. She didn’t want to be against the whole world. It had never been in her plans. She just wanted to ask questions and find answers. Was it too much to ask?
“I want to go to college,” she impulsively said.
Her mom froze, and blinked at her. Toki squared her shoulders. In for a penny, in for a pound, right?
“I want to become… an astrophysicist.”
She had just decided that. It was a toss between astrophysicist or astronaut, and considering that this world wasn’t really interested into sending people to space, well, studying the stars it was. Also, the word sounded pretty cool. Toki nodded to herself. Yeah, astrophysicist was a good career path. She raised her voice, feeling a little more confident:
“I want to study science and stuff. So I want to go to college.”
I don’t want to join you, was the implied message, but Toki knew her mom heard it loud and clear. I don’t want to join your life, with you and Dad. I won’t become a villain.
“You… You’re young,” Sayuri smiled weakly. “It’s okay to not be sure.”
“But I’m sure!”
“Toki… It’s…”. She sighed, then shook her head: “I hear you, Toki-chan, but it’s still years away. A lot of things can happen.”
The young girl stubbornly crossed her arms. Yeah, a lot could happen, but that wouldn’t change her mind. She didn’t want to live on the run, she didn’t want to be a villain. End of the story.
Shit. She had been right, she realized with a sinking feeling. For Toki, becoming a villain had never been an option. But her mom… All that time, when she had encouraged to learn about her interest… When she had helped her experiment with her Quirk… Her mom had always thought that there was no option for Toki besides villainy. They both had had two very different conversations, each time, for the very start.
And now… It looked like they were both realizing it, right now, out of the blue. Toki barely dared to breathe. She felt petrified, incredulous. Like, it couldn’t really be happening, right? Her mom was going to tell her that her choice was fine, right? But no. Sayuri didn’t say anything for a long time. Then, she tried to smile:
“I would be hard to keep in touch if you become a famous doctorate in star-stuff, you know.”
Don’t go where I can’t follow. But Toki balled her little fists, and when she answered, her voice barely shook at all:
“It wouldn’t be, if you changed your job.”
It’s you who is leaving, not me. You could stay if you chose. It wouldn’t be hard. You could stay by my side if you decided.
But you’ve already made your choice, didn’t you?
Neither Toki nor Sayuri managed to reach a compromise this evening, nor the following day. The atmosphere was oddly tense and subdued. After a while, Sayuri left ‘for work’ and didn’t came back for a whole week. There was food in the fridge like every time Sayuri had to leave, and by now Toki knew how to use the microwave and even the stove safely, so it wasn’t bad, but… She had never left so long before.
When Toki had been younger, Sayuri had arranged for a worker at her daycare to take her home for the night so she wouldn’t be alone. Now, for a two or three days absence, her mother didn’t bother anymore because she knew that Toki could handle herself. But for a whole week? It was so long.
Also, Toki didn’t know if it was normal for parents to leave their children unattended for several days like this. She didn’t really have a frame of reference, though. Maybe two days alone was normal? Or maybe a week wasn’t so bad, because Toki was unusually capable for a kid. She was six years old but she had the maturity of a child twice her age. Actually, mentally speaking, she was probably closer to teenagerhood than childhood. After all, she had even started her teenage rebellion!
After the third day home alone, Toki started to worry, afraid that her mom wouldn’t come back. Maybe she had run in trouble? Maybe she had been hurt or arrested? Or maybe she was disappointed in Toki and had decided to abandon her?
Or maybe it was some elaborate kind of emotional blackmail, some sort of punishment for Toki’s rebellion? If that was the case, it was working wonderfully. The guilt and self-recrimination were eating her up. Why couldn’t she have been kinder to her mom? Sure, she was a villain, but she was her mom. She loved her, she took care of her. She was the most important person in her life. Didn’t Toki owe her a little gratitude? Or even more than that? Sayuri was the only person who really knew her, the only person Toki could really talk to, the only person Toki could trust. So of course Sayuri was angry, because Toki had told her she didn’t trust her back, and it had hurt her feelings! It was all Toki’s fault. Even if she didn’t want to be a villain, she shouldn’t have told her that, or at least not that way. She should have waited. Why did she had to ruin their peaceful life?
But after the self-blame came anger. She was six years old. Alright, she was strong and clever for her age, but she was a child! It wasn’t her job to coddle her mom. Especially about that! It was her life. She wanted to have a safe life, and it was wrong of Sayuri to be mad at her for that. Her mom was… Her mom was a bank-robbing villain, a criminal who had absolutely no intention to leave her criminal life. It was bad, but it was her choice. Her choice! Sayuri had picked this life willingly and now at the gall to be pissed about her daughter wanting to do the same for herself? Especially if the path Toki wanted to follow was a better one?! What the hell?! It wasn’t wrong for Toki to have her own dream! It wasn’t wrong for her to be smart and to want to pursue an academic career. It wasn’t selfish of her! It was selfish of her mom to make her feel like she was the selfish one!
Then the circle of worry and guilt began again, eating her anger. Sayuri shouldn’t have left like that but what if something had happened to her? What if Toki’s last conversation with her mother was an argument? It was a terrifying thought. Toki was smart but she was still a child, with no other support system than her mother who had just abandoned her. The loneliness was getting to her. Children were not made for prolonged period of solitude. Toki teleported to class every day, sure, but... she didn’t have friends there. She didn’t know these people, she didn’t trust them. It made her feel claustrophobic.
The secrecy felt like a physical weight squeezing her chest. She wanted to scream at people “Mom isn’t home, I don’t know if she’s coming back, I’m scared, help me!” but she couldn’t. The unarticulated fear of betraying Sayuri’s trust (and to really making her leave) was stronger. If Toki had had others friends… Or even another authority figure she could trust… It would have been easier. She would have opened up to then and, well, even if that person couldn’t solve her problem, the simple fact of sharing her burden, or not being alone, would have helped tremendously.
But she had no one else. No one else could be trusted. No one could help her, and Toki was on her own.
She walked around the house, pacing frantically like a worried housewife. She picked things up and put them down, she compulsively checked at the door or the windows (even knowing her mom would come back by switching with the water in the big container hidden in the hallway behind a curtain). She wanted to go out and do something, but she was scared that if she left, her mother would come back during her absence. Besides, even if she went out, where would she go? Toki had never been outside the house without her mother. She didn’t even know her own neighborhood. She never had a sleepover with friends and didn’t know anyone or anything outside the school. She had no one to call for help.
In what could either be a fit of paranoia or a flash of lucidity, Toki wondered if her isolation had been voluntary or not. There wasn’t even a computer in the house: Mom had taken her laptop with her, and in any case Toki had never been allowed to touch it… so Toki had zero contact with the outside world outside her school. She had been to museums and parks, she had taken the train and ridden the buss… But always with her mother to hold her hand. She had zero autonomy. And of course, at six years old, she had no money. Did parents usually give their children an allowance? Well, probably not at such a young age. What would Toki have done with a few coins? She had never even been alone at the store.
She was only allowed out of the house with her mom. Sayuri always hammered that Toki had to stay home when her mother couldn’t watch her (so: when she was gone, or shut in her office with her friends). Otherwise, Sayuri never let her out of her sight. Toki had been happy to be the center of her mother’s attention, but… Well, had she become dependent of it? When she had teleported alone to the park, once, Toki had been consumed by guilt as if she had done something horrible. Even though if Sayuri had never found out!
And after all, Toki was six! In Japan, it was an important milestone. Children that age started to do stuff on their own, like going to school, ride the bus, even buy ice-cream on their own. Toki’s classmates did that all the time. Toki…. Never.
She hadn’t really cared, because she hadn’t seen the point, but what hadn’t her mom cared? Toki knew that she could be a tiring child, with her restless energy and her unceasing questions. Why hadn’t her mom let her leave the house to spend her energy elsewhere?
Maybe Sayuri was just worried. Maybe she didn’t want Toki to get any idea about how great heroes were (after all, their face and exploits were plastered everywhere). But… It was already damning, right? Because it would mean that Sayuri had always intended for Toki to join Meteor’s Crew. In a distant way, Toki had been aware that it was a possibility. But… But it was her mom. Only bad people raised children to made them fight in their war, and her mom wasn’t a bad person. She loved Toki. She wanted what was best for her, right?
Right?
(But Toki, who always had questions and always looked for answers, knew that her mother didn’t. Her mother wanted her to be happy, but not at the cost of her own happiness. The plan had always been to bring Toki in the family business. Cutting her from the outside world and stopping her from having other options may not have been deliberately planned, but it had been voluntary.)
Sayuri came home after a week.
By that time, Toki had yelled, cried, shut down, then got up again, calmed down, and… more or less accepted the facts. Her mom looked briefly surprised by her calm… then immediately started begging forgiveness for a long absence. She was so genuinely sorry, too! She pleaded that the job had gotten longer than she had though, that she was sorry, that it wouldn’t happen again, that she had worried so much… She regretted it and she was sincere. There were tears in her eyes. Seeing her mother so sad made Toki cry, and in less than five minutes they were both sobbing in each other’s arms.
Of course, Toki forgave her mom. She was angry but more than that, she was scared and felt guilty. And in exchange, their argument was forgotten. Tacitly, they never spoke of going to college or becoming astrophysicist. Sayuri never left her so long alone again.
It was as if nothing had happened. Toki was moved up a grade, according to her teachers’ recommendation. Her mother gushed about her cleverness and told her she would get far. Neither villainy nor astrophysics were discussed in relation to Toki’s future, though. In fact, her future wasn’t discussed at all. It was only the present that mattered: her good grades, how challenging she found her homework, how smartly she used her Quirk, how well-behaved she was. Her mother was proud of how smart Toki was, and no other argument occurred about what her daughter would do with that clever mind of hers.
But Toki would never forget the lesson.
Notes:
Poor Toki.
Anyway, don't hesitate to check-out the fanarts in "Snapshots of Wisdom" to see little Toki learning about space exploration =)
EDIT 12/08/2022
Spelling mistakes were corrected. I also put emphasis on why involved Sayuri is in Toki's life, how she help her experiment with her Quirk, and how interested she's in Toki's teleportation.
Also added that small paragraph about "why do the anime chacracter have names so on the nose" xD Someone gifted me that headcanon in a comment, sorry, i don't rememeber your name. But as you see, i made good on my promise and put it in the story!
Chapter 3: Blood is thicker than water
Summary:
Toki turns seven and has a nasty surprise. But hey, she really should have seen it coming.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
BLOOD IS THICKER THAN WATER
Weeks passed, then months. Toki was getting ready. Ready to what, she had no idea, but she wouldn’t be taken by surprise by the unpleasant reality ever again.
(Oh, how naïve she was!)
Her mom and her never spoke of their quarrel again, but it didn’t make thing better. Something had been irreparably shattered. Would a normal child forget and move on? Toki didn’t know. She wasn’t a normal child anyway. She was the daughter of Ryūsei and Sayuri Taiyōme, a little prodigy who loved math and stars, a fan of fantasy books, small and smart and fucking pissed off. She still loved her mom, of course she did, but there was a wound that would never heal. Now Toki watched her every word. She didn’t dare to ask for things like outings to the museums. Their trip to the planetarium in Tokyo was forgotten (real oversight from her mom, or a punishment?). Sayuri didn’t talk anymore about the gang or their activity. She didn’t spoke about Dad, either. She still told Toki when she had to go and see him, but she never brought back a kind word from him like before. It felt stupid, but Toki missed it. It was like a subtle indication that her father was mad at her. But Toki wasn’t allowed to apologize or even explain herself, just to live with it.
Sayuri never left more than three days straight, but she was gone more and more often. Their little tests on Toki’s Quirk slowed down, as if Sayuri had lost interest. More than anything, the loss of this little mother-daughter bonding activity hurt. It was one of the few thing that made Sayuri genuinely interested, that made Toki felt like she gave something important to her mom. It made her feel smart, it made her feel grown-up, like they were partner on a project. And now it was just… gone.
Like Sayuri had found something better to do.
Toki managed. She did her homework, she read her books, she played with her figures. She cried sometimes, because she was sad, of course she was sad, her mom was mad at her and she didn’t know how to fix it. But was there even something to fix? It was the most terrifying thought of all. There was no going back. Her mom was a villain and Toki wouldn’t be one. The fact that they both avoided the subject didn’t change reality. And one day, it would come back to bite them in the ass. The only question was when.
At school, Toki managed to get her hands on a computer. Usually, the access was restricted to the older kids, but Toki still tried her luck. After all, she was her teachers’ favorites! So she used her best puppy-eyes and asked nicely if she could read about orcas. What? Dolphins were still one of her favorite animals, and in class the teacher had made them watch a movie about orcas to keep them quiet during a rainy afternoon, so everyone at school was fascinated by those animals. Nothing was suspicious about her request… and Toki was granted access to a computer for the afternoon. Success. Using old memories from Before and a good deal of intuitively, she managed to find the navigator… and she googled a few things. Like a city map showing the police station. A few articles about children’s emotional needs (turn out leaving your six years old for a week alone was child neglect). Some dietary recommendation. A training regimen for young gymnasts. What happened to villains’ children if their parents were arrested. What was foster care. How to leave foster care.
And what was the Meteor Crew.
She hadn’t had much information about them before. The news had given her a name and some clues, so, not much. But like most villains, Meteor had a Wikipedia page. It was mostly conjecture but there was also a lot of relevant information. Meteor’s real name wasn’t here… But there was a blurry picture of him. A tall man with dark hair and vivid ember-like eyes. He had split pupils, Toki noted with a slight shock. It gave him a somewhat feral look, like a starving wolf.
Meteor’s power was Psychokinesis. The angrier he got, the more powerful his Quirk. He was feared for his strength and ruthlessness. With his Quirk, he picked up heavy objects and made them rain on heroes and civilians alike, in what he called a “Meteor Shower” (oh, that’s what his name came from!). He was classified as A-ranked threat, meaning that only heroes of a certain level were allowed to engage him. Because he was so strong, but also smart. His plans were clever and flawless, with several escape routes perfectly planned from the start. He had always evaded capture. Not a single one of his accomplices had been caught, either. The whole gang counted four people, maybe five or six, the police wasn’t sure. Toki didn’t recognize any of the three names listed.
Her mom wasn’t there. A little note indicated that one of Meteor’s accomplices surely had a water-based Quirk, but the picture above the note was a grey icon with a white inscription: Unknown.
Their first bank robbery had happened a little over eight years ago, which checked out with what Toki knew. Even before, Meteor and several of his presumed accomplices had had arrest warrants for assault and theft. They were relentless. Since their debut eight years ago, they had robbed twenty-seven banks. Toki didn’t need to check the date to know that most of those attacks coincided with the days her mother had been ‘absent for work’. Shit.
Even after birthing Toki and settling down to raise her, Sayuri had never stopped being a villain.
And the Crew’s member were real villains. About a fourth of these attacks had been non-violent, in the night, with limited collateral damage. But the rest… They had also severely injured seventy-five persons and killed about twenty. Meteor was credited with most of the charges.
Shit.
Toki didn’t bother erasing her navigation history when she left the computer room. Some small and vindictive part of her wanted to be found out, wanted to get her mom in trouble. This unresolved argument… This uncertainty about the future… This stalemate they were both locked in… It needed to stop, one way of another. It terrified her. It broke her heart. But Toki couldn’t live like this, with that sword of Damocles hanging above her head. She couldn’t.
She ran away from home, once. She waited until night, when her mom had put her to bed, then she got dressed, took a backpack with her clothes, and teleported to the park. She wandered aimlessly for maybe an hour. But she was too cold and too scared, so she went home. She appeared in her bedroom, changed back in her pajamas, hid under her covers to cry, and fell asleep.
Her mother never noticed. If Toki hadn’t caught a cold afterward, it would have been as if it had never happened.
Did she even want to run away from home? Maybe. Probably not. She would miss her mom something terrible, but at the same time, she would be relieved. The problem was… Where would she go? She knew no one else. If she tried to seek refuge with the police and told them everything, they would arrest her mom, and she didn’t want that. Same thing if she tried to appeal to a pro hero. And if she didn’t tell them her mom was a villain, well, they would think she was missing and try to find her parents. Mom would come and collect her (probably), and it would all have been for nothing. Not, it was useless. Running only worked if you knew where you were going.
Oscar Wilde, serval centuries ago, had written: “we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars”. Some days Toki felt this quote like something alive in her chest. She had her eyes wide open and looked for beauty in the future, but all around her were darkness and danger. She couldn’t stop seeing what was happening, in all of its terrible clarity. The world, the danger, the beautiful possibilities and the dark reality. And oh, how she wanted to reach for something else, something more, and it was like her mother and everybody else was blind to not see it!
She knew her time was counted. How long would Meteor allow her mother to stay away? How long would Sayuri herself accept to stay on the sidelines, raising her daughter alone when her dearest wish was to be reunited with her husband? One day, this life (it was cage, Toki had finally understood, but it was comforting and familiar nevertheless) would end. Sayuri would bring her to the Meteor Crew. She would stop hiding behind the Aratani name, and take back the Taiyōme one. The criminal one. And Toki didn’t want that, but what could she do? What could she do?!
She waited. She prepared. She had no idea where all of this would lead.
She asked for a fourth notebook, to practice drawing. She doodled in the margins of her notebooks but she was running out of space. Also, it left her less space to fill with words and that was completely unacceptable.
Her notebooks were her most precious possessions. She had a dark blue one with little glimmering stars, where she wrote poetry; a purple and pink one with pale seashells, filled with questions and idea about random subjects, from dolphins’ intelligence to headcanons about her favorite cartoon; and a white one with gold and silver geometrical pattern, that she reserved for her Quirk’s analysis. She continued to experiment with Teleportation, but it was going slower without her mom’s careful supervision.
She wondered if it was paranoid to assume that Meteor was interested in her Quirk. Probably not. A lot of his robberies had gone without a hitch because there seemed to be an invisible accomplice (obviously Sayuri) opening doors from the inside. Since Teleportation was more reliable than Swap-Space… And that Toki could bring stuff with her when she jumped from one place to another… How wouldn’t that interest Meteor?
(In her head, she had switched from calling him ‘Dad’ to ‘Meteor’. It was easier to compartmentalize that way. Her mother was still ‘Mom’, though. Toki knew she couldn’t trust her to have her best interest at heart, but she loved her. How could things be so complicated?)
But Teleportation was hers, not Meteor. So Toki tested, experimented, took notes, and only talked with her mother about inconsequential things like her goods grades or her classmates. Her results were for her eyes only.
Sayuri didn’t even care about Teleportation anyway. Not anymore. She sometimes told Toki to be careful or not strain herself, but it was like she had lost all interest into finding Toki’s limits, into helping her grow.
It doesn’t matter, Toki thought furiously, blinking back tears. It’s my Quirk. It’s my life.
Toki continued experimenting. She was tired if she jumped several kilometers, but not if she made several smaller jumps in quick succession. She could appear in the same position she had disappeared, but she could also change position (disappear standing up, reappear sitting down). She usually appeared one centimeter above the ground, as if it was really a jump and she had to complete some sort of landing. If she jumped with an object in her hand, she could reappear with that object elsewhere (like, in her other hand, or perched on her head). She couldn’t teleport things from a distance. It was easier to teleport somewhere in her line of sight. She wondered if she could teleport with another person. She had never tried. And now… Well, who would she ask? Certainly not her mom. She didn’t want her involved in her Quirk training. A classmate? No, they would babble. Same thing for the teachers. Sadly, Toki had… absolutely zero friends.
She was nearly seven years old.
That last year (well, the last four months at least: since her big non-argument with Sayuri) had been tiring. Not physically, although Toki always give her all in her gym club or when Quirk training, to sleep like the dead in the night. But emotionally. Toki hadn’t lost her Mom, Sayuri was still there, and she still loved her, but… Toki had lost her confident. Her best friend. That person she could trust to have her back wasn’t there anymore. Sometimes Toki wondered if she had even existed. Sayuri hadn’t changed, hadn’t suddenly betrayed her. She had always been the same. It was Toki who had deluded herself into thinking they had similar goals and hopes: it was Toki who had pushed her mother away. Still, it didn’t make it hurt any less.
She loved her Mom and it hurts to think that after what happened… After what had been said… Sayuri might love her less.
But it wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t her responsibility! Toki tried to whisper to herself, every night: I did the right thing. I’m honest about what I want, and I don’t want to be a villain. It wasn’t her fault if Sayuri had a problem with that. Toki shouldn’t have to renounce her moral code to earn her mother’s love. It wasn’t… People couldn’t deserve a person’s love. She would drive herself crazy thinking like that. Her mom, Meteor, everybody… People either loved her, or they didn’t. Simple as that. It didn’t mean Toki wasn’t good enough for them to love her, because love wasn’t something you earned by being good enough. Love wasn’t something that could be quantified or doled out. She shouldn’t blame herself for not being loved how she need to. She just had to look for love elsewhere.
The problem was… She had no one else.
Gods. Fuck you, Reincarnation Administration. Couldn’t she have landed in a nice, problem-free family? Hell, she would even have taken the Todoroki over this. At least with power-hungry Endeavor, you knew where you stood. The fact that he was a douche helped, too. I mean, yeah, he would start on the road to redemption later in life (much, much later in life, and with incredible awkwardness): but for most of his live he had been a completely unlikable father. Toki would have felt no remorse in telling him to fuck off. But she couldn’t do that to her mom, because her mom wasn’t a violent, abusive asshole. She was a normal person who loved her daughter very much, but who also happened to be a criminal and refused to entertain the idea that Toki wouldn’t want to join her later.
What a mess.
Sayuri made efforts, though. She didn’t speak of it. She was waiting for Toki to forget the argument before trying to convince her, but she did try to regain their lost closeness. She never confronted the problem head-on, or whine that her daughter was too distant, which was… a good thing, because Toki was completely helpless in the face of emotional blackmail. But maybe Sayuri was as afraid as her to reopen that wound, knowing that neither of them had changed their mind about it. So she tried to be nice, to be helpful, to start anew.
“We could go to the planetarium for your birthday, what do you think?” she offered an evening.
Toki raised her head, startled. Her birthday was still a week away. They hadn’t talked about it, but…
“Really?” she said hopefully. “In Tokyo?”
“Yes. We would have to take the train early in the morning to get there, but we can both teleport to come back, so the trip back shouldn’t be a problem. Would you like that?”
“Yeah! Of course!”
Toki didn’t know if it was a peace offering or simply her mother doing her best, but she would gladly accept it. She had never been to a planetarium in this life, and damn it if she didn’t want to make it count§
For the remainder of the week, she felt like she had wings, and she could barely stay in one place. She bragged about the upcoming trip to her classmates, who were suitably impressed. Since moving up a grade, Toki had become even more of a loner: she hadn’t really had friends in her old class, but she had known these children for years, so she had no problem teaming up in sport or finding a group to eat lunch with. It was a bit harder in her new class. Toki managed to find people to chat with her or work with her, but she felt more like an awkward tagalong than an equal. Which was ironical, considering she was smarter than these kids! Well, better at math at least!
But oh, she liked her classmates well enough, all things considered. People were nice. Her classmates didn’t like her showing them up in class but Toki wasn’t really interested in hoarding the glory, so she refrained from raising her hand in lessons, and eagerly shared her work during groups projects. She was the baby of the class (smaller, younger, lonelier) so the others kids were in turn protective and condescending, but never mean. Some of them even were appreciative of her good grades.
Toki was friendly with a few of them, but they weren’t really friends. Or maybe those kids thought that she was their friends, but… Toki couldn't honestly call them hers. After all, a friend was someone you could trust, someone you could talk to and share your problem with. Toki… Toki couldn’t inflict her burden on her classmates. They weren’t close enough. Or rather: they were too young. Toki wasn’t an adult or even a teenager, but she wasn’t quite a normal child, or maybe she didn’t have quite normal problems. She would have needed an adult friend to help her.
Well, good luck with that. The only adults that Toki knew besides her mom were her teachers, and they all loved Sayuri. Obviously, Toki couldn’t tell them the truth. What if they decided that her mother (who would deny everything) was the more trustworthy one? Toki would have played her hand for nothing.
But back to the point. Toki eagerly awaited their trip. Her mom was very busy this week, making a lot of phones calls and packing her bags for her next trip with Meteor in a few days, but Toki didn’t pay much attention. She was too excited about her incoming birthday present. If her mom took her to a planetarium, Toki could absolutely forgive her for going to Meteor afterward!
The big day came. In the morning of her seventh birthday, Toki felt on the top of the world. Well, not a six in the morning when she had to get dressed half-asleep, or when she drank a brick of apple juice as breakfast in the bus on the way to the station, and definitively not when she had to enter the train station and found herself in the most crowded place she had ever been to. She clutched her mother’s hand like a lifeline. But man, she was going to Tokyo to see a planetarium! She had put on her favorite shoes, little orange sneakers with white soles, and had tied her buns with her prettiest elastics. She had packed her backpack herself, with all of her notebooks, her crayons and pens, a few snacks, a sweater, a book to read on the train, and a map of Tokyo’s subway that made her feel like a real grown-up.
As a first travel experience, it wasn’t great. Toki had never been around so much people in the same time. She lived in a quiet little town, but here… They had to change stations twice, and each train was more crowded than the first. Internally, Toki knew nothing could happen to her (she could teleport!), but it was still intimidating. And very long. The whole train ride took about two hours. For a child, it was a small eternity.
But they finally arrived and wow, it was huge. Tokyo was a gigantic city. It wasn’t Japan’s capital anymore (it was now Kyoto, as it had been before the Edo period: the change had happened after the last emperor died and his government collapsed, about twenty years after Quirks appeared), but it was still a massive metropole. The Planetarium was in the cultural district, filled with museums, guided tours, souvenir shops, and various expos: it was bursting with activity, and Toki was torn between running from one thing to the next, or sticking to her mother like glue. In that crowd, if she let go of her hand, she would be lost for sure!
They started, of course, with the planetarium. There were actually two planetariums in Tokyo (in the past, there had been at least five: mankind had really turned away from the stars…), one in Shibuya and one in Nakano. They were barely ten minutes away from one another using the train, so Toki and her mom started by the one in Shibuya, the biggest one.
Toki went from one exhibit to the other, entranced by the holograms of asteroids or the solar system. There were little nooks with seats where an audio-guide talked about one galaxy or another, with pictures projected on a large screen with vivid colors. There was a long showcase with fragment of meteorites. There was a room where a movie about the Big Bang was on a loop, and another room where an interactive movie summarized how artificial satellites were made, what they did, and how they were launched. You could get star-themed snacks from the cafeteria. There was a small library with numeric books and podcasts about space exploration in the pre-Quirk era. A children’s cartoon explained what astronomy was to the younger visitors.
But the main even was the dome. The cosmos was projected onto a gigantic domed screen, above reclining and individually rotating seats, with earphones to listen to an explicative podcast. Surrounded by stars and nebulas, Toki could almost believe she was in space.
Alright, Toki was in love.
When they got out, it was mid-afternoon and she was exhausted, but also beaming. Her little feet were aching. She had bought a new pin to put on her backpack, and a bunch of stars-themed stickers for her notebooks. Her mom had quickly been bored and had spent most of her time on her phone, texting or calling, but never very far away, always keeping an eye on her daughter.
Sayuri offered to go home, but Toki insisted on seeing the second planetarium and her mother obliged good-naturally.
This one had a dome too, but smaller. Most of the space was taken by a long exhibit about the history of space exploration. It began with Spoutnik in 1947 and ended up with the launch of a rocket whose crew was tasked with repairing and inspecting several satellites, in the year 2199. It was fascinating. No satellites had been sent in deep space since the year 2040, though: no rover send on Mars or the Moon, no space telescope, nothing. It was such a shame. If Quirks hadn’t appeared and shifted mankind’s focus, well, people would be terraforming Jupiter right now! And there would even be light-speed space travel! Like in Star Wars!
(Star Wars now had seven trilogies and eighteen spinoff movies, by the way. Why. And meanwhile, not a single Harry Potter remake!)
When they got out of this planetarium, it was nearly evening. Toki had brought a t-shirt that said ‘Astronaut In Training’ and another pin for her backpack. She felt ecstatic and completely exhausted. When her mom dragged her to a fast-food to eat something, Toki nearly nodded off in her seat while they waited for their order. The smell of fries and grilled chicken was enough to remind her she was famished, and she wolfed down her food in a matter of minutes… But then, the exhaustion came back tenfold. When she yawned, she could almost hear her jaw crack.
“Can we go home now?” she whined to her mom.
Sayuri looked to her phone. Then she breathed deeply, put it in her pocket, and reached above the table to take both Toki’s hands in her own.
“Not yet, sweetie. Mom had something to do first. Do you want to come with me? You can sleep on the train.”
Toki squinted. She was tired, but even then, the sudden change of plan rang alarm bells in her head. It wasn’t her mother’s style.
“Is it about him?”
There was only one him she could refer to. Sayuri didn’t look happy with the wariness in her daughter’s tone.
“It’s about your father, yes,” she said, stressing the word. “It shouldn’t be long. Are you coming?”
And what stupid question was that? It wasn’t as if Toki was going to run off on her own. She could have teleported home alone, true, but she still remembered vividly the week-long absence of her mom after their argument. What if Toki went home, but Sayuri didn’t? If Toki left, and her mother walked away from here… Toki would never find her again. She teleported to places, not to people. If she didn’t want to be abandoned, she had to follow.
So Toki didn’t answer, but when her mother got up, she followed grumpily. She didn’t dare to lag too far behind. She even gripped her mother’s hand when it was time to enter the train station. In the dark, and without the promise of a planetarium at the end of the journey, riding the train was suddenly much scarier.
The train went. Toki nodded off. She didn’t remember the exact length of travel, or even how many stations they had passed. It could have been thirty minutes or three hours. She only woke up with a jolt when Sayuri shook her softly, whispering they were here. Rubbing her eyes blearily, Toki mechanically took her mother’s hand and followed her outside. They were outside Tokyo, probably, or in a poorer part of the city: it was all tall, dingy buildings, more like HLM than like shiny skyscrapers. Sayuri looked like she knew the place, though, walking fast and at a determined pace. Toki, still holding her hand, was dragged behind with great reticence.
She yawned again. It was way past her bedtime and she was really starting to be sleepy. The unarticulated fear of leaving her mother was starting to look more and more inconsequential compared to her real need to lay down in her own bed. But it wasn’t very long until Sayuri murmured ‘we’re here’, and softly pushed her daughter with her in the backdoor of a convenience store. Distantly, Toki wondered why Sayuri hadn’t brought her back home, then teleported here by herself. It would have cut a lot of travel time. Unless they had nothing there for her to switch place with? It would be weird. Sayuri had always used her switch-teleportation to go to Meteor and back, so why change now?
It was only when Sayuri opened a door and entered in a brightly lit room filled with people, that Toki realized why. The sudden clarity was like a bucket of cold water. Sayuri hadn’t teleported here like always… Because until now, Sayuri had never brought her daughter with her.
There were three people in the room, sitting on wooden chairs around a wobbly table where they were apparently playing cards. When Sayuri entered, they all straightened slightly: but only one got up, smiling. He walked to where Toki stood frozen, and kneeled to her height. He was so tall. He wasn’t massive, built like a runner more than like a body-builder… But in the room’s harsh lighting, sitting to close, he towered above her, intimidating. His hair was dark with blood-red accents, and he had exactly the same eyes’ color as hers: something between gold and orange, like frozen amber, with a touch of fire. He had slit pupils and his gaze was intense, burning like smoldering embers.
“Hello Toki-chan,” smiled her father. “I’m so happy to finally met you.”
oOoOoOo
The convenience store was the front of Meteor’s hideout and money-laundering business. There was an apartment upstairs that his Crew used as headquarters. Toki had her own room, which was little more than a cupboard with a futon. They would stay here only a few days, Meteor had explained with a kind smile. Just a little family reunion. It was long overdue, wasn’t it?
Fuck no, it wasn’t. Absolutely not. She wanted to go home and be done with it.
But there was no home to run to. While Toki had been wandering around in Tokyo, a moving company had packed all their belongings and brought them to their new home, somewhere downtown. Sayuri would take Toki there later, after their vacation was over.
It was Meteor who told her that too: and when Toki turned to her mom, betrayed, Sayuri was looking at her phone and pretending to not notice. She had planned to give her up to Meteor from the start. Her own mother had cut off her exit, and led her right into the lion’s den! It was like being stabbed in the heart. Toki had known where her mom’s loyalties lied, but she had thought… She had thought… She had believed that her mom would just avoid choosing, avoid confrontation like she always did. She hadn’t realized that her mother had already made her choice, that there wasn’t even a choice to make. Sayuri had always been on Meteor’s side, on their Crew’s side. Toki’s rebellion had been seen as cute and a bit awkward, but ultimately inconsequential. Sayuri wouldn’t take Toki’s side because Toki didn’t have a side to defend, she wasn’t even a player in that game, her opinion didn’t matter.
The feeling of betrayal was so strong Toki almost felt numb. Part shock, part defiance, she refused to say a word. Her father didn’t really need her to: he talked enough for two, cheerfully detailing how their meeting had been planned, introducing his friends (all wanted criminals), and earnestly telling her how they were destined to be one big happy family. Toki’s muteness drew a reproachful pinch from her mother. Then one of Meteor’s associate pointed that it was a bit late for a kid, and Toki was sent to bed without further ado.
She hated it. She hated their paternalistic voices, and how they smugly talked about how they had manipulated her without ever drawing suspicion. She hated how totally in control they were, while she was powerless and alone. She hated how those criminals were friendly with her mom, how her mom was friendly with them, as if they were all one big family and Toki was the outsider, excluded from their private jokes and their community while being utterly at their mercy. And she hated how unaggressive they were: she hated how they pretended to be glad she was here, she hated how they smiled earnestly and tried to tell her she was one of them. She wasn’t. She was Sayuri’s and Meteor’s daughter and they thought that she owed them because of that. Well, screw them. She was Toki the Teleporter, she was her own person, she wasn’t going to join their second-rate villains’ club, and she hated them.
The room where she slept (she refused to call it ‘her bedroom’) was so small it looked more like a cell. It was entirely filled by a futon and a colorful sleeping bag probably bought just for her. There was no pillow: Toki used her backpack, that she had clutched in her arms during the whole ordeal. They closed the door behind her, but didn’t lock it. Why would they bother? She had nowhere to run to.
I want to go home, she wanted to plead. But home had been her mother, and she couldn’t trust her anymore. Home was gone. She huddled under the covers, feeling the sadness and despair clamp her throat like something physical. There it was, the belayed realization of what was happening, of what she had lost, of what her mother had done.
On an impulse, she squeezed her eyes shut and teleported in her real bedroom.
The landing was rough. It had been a long distance: she felt the aftermath immediately, her knees bucking with sudden weakness, as if she had run a marathon. Her chest hurt, as if her heart had a spasm or something like that. She fell on her ass on the parquet, because the push carpet was gone. In fact, when she opened her eyes and took in her surroundings, she realized with horror that Meteor hadn’t lied: there was nothing left. The whole room was clean and bare. Even the glow-in-the-dark stars stickers on her ceiling had been removed. It was chilly: the heating wasn’t turned on. It was dark, too, and pressing the switch didn’t do anything. The power had been cut… Heart in her throat, Toki got up and ran in every room of the apartment, frantically looking of a sign that all of it had been a joke. But the living room was empty, as was the kitchen, and her mother’s bedroom. There was nothing in the cupboards. It was just an empty house.
This time there was no shock to dull the pain, no numb incredulity to shield her from the truth. Her home was gone. Toki’s lip wobbled, and then, she burst into tears. She was all alone and her mother was here but she had also abandoned her, betrayed her, and the apartment was empty and it hurt, it hurt! Toki couldn’t breathe with the pain of it, like all of her emotions were bursting from her body at once, like she was too small to contain them.
She wailed and cried until she had no tears anymore. It was just huge, racking sobs that shook her whole body, making her gasp for breath. It was her first taste of real pain in this life. She fest so crushed by it, so lonely and sad and helpless, like a child weathering the full awfulness of the real world all at one.
She cried until she was spent, feeling oddly dazed and empty, drained by the tears. Between the tiring day, the emotional roller-coaster, the long-distance jump, and the waterworks, she was knackered. Her head felt like it was stuffed full of cotton. She almost considered sleeping here, on the cold hard floor, away from her mother. But she had left her backpack there, with her notebook full of poetry and the one with her Quirk-analysis and the other filled with math equations and scientific questions. It was her most prized possessions. So she gathered her remaining energy, and jumped back to her flimsy bedroom.
She was out like a light as soon as her body hit the futon.
She slept like the dead and woke up a full turn of the clock later, near midday. Waking up in her tiny, cell-like bedroom was disorienting at first. But when she got up, she felt… well. Not ready, but rested. As if all of her negative emotions had been drained by that good cry. She felt a bit numb, empty, but it was a good emptiness, the kind that was just waiting to be replaced with anger or determination, not the kind that left you weary at the simple idea of getting out of bed.
Toki rolled out of her futon, and went to find the kitchen to face the music. Well, first to the toilet (and gods, clearly it was only men that lived here, had nobody ever heard of lowering the toilet lit?!). Then, the kitchen.
As expected, there were… people. Sayuri wasn’t here (and Toki’s heart gave a little panicked jump at that). Meteor was, though. Him, one of the guys from last night, and another woman. When they saw her, they all beamed, and Toki nearly took a step back. They were criminals and they all acted like counselors in a summer camp: it creeped her out.
“Hello, Munchkin!” smiled her father, and Toki instantly hated the nickname. “Yesterday was tiring, wasn’t it? You slept all morning! Want some breakfast?”
Toki tilted her head and considered her answer. But she was hungry and telling him to fuck off right away seemed like a spectacularly bad plan. She had no real idea of what she was going to do in the short-term future. Talk with them? Run away? Run away where? To who? Resist, then? Resist how, and resist what? She knew what she wasn’t going to do (go along with their criminal scheme and get arrested), but you can’t plan stuff around negative space. She needed more data.
And first of all, she needed a full stomach. So in end, she nodded slowly.
“Yes. Please,” she added reluctantly.
“Aw, she speaks!” laughed the other man in the kitchen.
Toki shoot him a poisonous glare, and he raised his hands in feigned fright: “Oooh, and she scowls just like her daddy, too.”
Meteor sniggered, and Toki reflexively scowled harder before forcing herself to smooth her features. Breakfast was surprisingly nice: toast, an egg sunny-side up, a glass of apple juice, and a small mug of hot cocoa. Sayuri had probably told them what she ate every morning. One more little betrayal. Still, Toki rationalized, it was food. She wasn’t going to complain because they had made her good food that she liked. She begrudgingly thanked her father for the meal and ate. Having three gangsters stare at her while she chewed her food was kind of unsettling, though.
“Do I have something on my face?” she finally snarled.
The woman snorted, and turned to Meteor: “She had some spunk. I thought you said she was kind of meek?”
Toki bared her teeth. Her father laughed (Toki couldn’t help but tense), and interceded smoothly:
“She was exhausted yesterday, I didn’t even get to hear her voice. But she is my and Sayuri’s daughter, of course she has some spine! Oh, by the way, Toki-chan, this is Nono. You already met Homura yesterday.”
The woman, Nono, had mousy grey hair with bright blue streaks, black eyes behind rectangular glasses, and skin so pale she looked like a corpse. The man, Homura, was a giant with massive shoulders. He had neon-green hair, and wore a Hawaii shirt that seemed almost incongruitous. Both of them seemed sincere enough when they smiled to Toki, but whatever. She didn’t trust them. She couldn’t trust any of them.
“Where is my mom?” she asked suddenly.
It shouldn’t matter. Her mother had clearly shown where her priorities lied, where her loyalty lied. Still, she was the only person here that Toki knew. The only person she loved, that she could talk to… No, she couldn’t even talk to her mom anymore, could she? When she had tried, it had backfired pretty spectacular. The week-long absence had been bad enough, but this… pseudo-kidnapping… it had probably been prompted by their arguments too, as a way to fix Toki’s rebellious attitude by forcibly involving her in the family business.
“She’s working,” calmly said her father, is molten gaze never leaving her.
Toki’s heart rate picked up. Working. Doing what, scouting a bank? Robbing people? Laundering money? Doing illegal things, in any case. Dangerous things, things that hurt people and could get her arrested… Toki shouldn’t be surprised (after all, her mom had been ‘working’ each time she joined Meteor) but she still felt her stomach drop out. She squeezed her little fists, and didn’t say anything.
Shit. She couldn’t even count on her mother, could she? It was a dead-end. Toki felt her heart twist painfully at the reminder, and for a second the betrayal was as raw and horrible as yesterday. Her mom was as well as gone, too, like their home. She wasn’t an ally anymore.
What was she going to do? She couldn’t stay here. There was no future here. The longer she stayed the riskier it became. But could she just leave? Just… abandon her mother, just like that? And to go where? Even if she went to the police, Meteor wouldn’t take it lying down. He had killed people before. What if he killed her too?
What if he killed her mom, to hurt her even more?
“Whatever,” she muttered, avoiding his eyes. But her heart was beating rabbit-fast against her ribs.
Her father hummed pensively, then leaned towards her. Toki stiffened reflexively.
“So,” Meteor smiled. “Sayuri says you’re very smart for your age.”
She tensed her jaw, but meet his eyes without backing off: “Yeah, I am.”
He laughed, softly, looking delighted with her aplomb: “Of course! She also said you wanted to go to college, with that big brain of your.”
Oh boy, that was his aim from the beginning. Toki didn’t know if she felt petrified about confronting Meteor so fast about their opposing ambitions, or if she was just pissed off in general and wanted to yell at him for putting her in that situation to begin with. A bit of both, probably.
“I am,” she reiterated tersely.
“What unwavering confidence!” Meteor said admiringly. “But you know, college is expensive. Where is the money going to come from?”
Toki narrowed her eyes.
“Well, if I can’t count on my parents to support my education, I figured I would just get a part-time job.”
Meteor blinked, apparently not expecting her to be insolent. Homura let out a whistle:
“Wow, shots fired!”
Meteor looked briefly annoyed, then rolled his eyes: “Fine, you’ll get a job. Will it be enough? Most jobs offered to youngsters are cheap.”
“A lot of students do it with no problem.”
“I will take your word for it,” her father said patronizingly.
“Oh, don’t,” she snipped back. “There are really useful statistics online. Want me to show you how to Google them?”
Homura laughed. Nono didn’t. She was watching Toki unblinkingly, like a snake. Creepy. Meteor sighed deeply, as if his daughter was being irrational… Then he asked in a reasonable voice:
“You are scared of villains, aren’t you?”
Toki inhaled. Careful, she had to be careful, she didn’t know this man, she couldn’t piss him off too much…
“Some of them. I’m more scared of prison.”
“Why?” her father wondered. “You could teleport away in a blink.”
“Modern prisons are too secure and tailored to their prisoners’ Quirks,” Toki refuted. “Besides, I could think of three ways to stop me from teleporting.”
“Oh? Like what?”
Toki sneered, and it came from the heart: “As if I would tell you.”
Putting her into a medically-induced coma. Drugging her too much for her to remember places where she could teleport. Injuring her and putting her in some kind of life-support, so she couldn’t get out of the room without sustaining deadly injuries. And all of that would be, of course, state-sanctioned. Japan didn’t have much in the way of human rights for prisoners.
“You don’t trust me,” her father sighed. “But you know, I only have your best interests at heart. I’m your father.”
“That doesn’t mean much.”
Homura wasn’t laughing anymore. Both him and Nono looked a bit uncomfortable, although fascinated. Meteor narrowed his eyes thoughtfully:
“Because I’m a villain.”
“Among other things.”
“You mother is a villain too, and you trust her,” he pointed out (and Toki repressed a twitch, but judging by the glint of satisfaction in her father’s eyes, he knew he had touched a nerve). “Villains aren’t inherently bad people, you know. You shouldn’t believe all the lies society feeds you. Being labelled villain doesn’t change you and turn you into an immoral brute.”
“But you hurt people.”
“I steal money,” he corrected her. “Sometimes people get hurt defending the cash of billionaires who don’t need it, and sometimes people get hurt when they try to hurt me: but inflicting harm on other people had never been the goal.”
And his voice was sincere, his arguments logical. Meteor was a charismatic man. His eyes almost seemed to glow like embers, Toki realized: when the hell had they started doing that?! His irises were more gold than brown now, with a subtle luminescence. It was both hypnotic and scary. Ah, Meteor didn’t have a visible mutation that could have ostracized him, but with eyes like that and a penchant for violence, Toki could totally get why he had embraced a villain’s path. Toki’s eyes were the same color as Meteor, but at least she had normal pupils and they didn’t glow like that. Those eyes, with those slit pupils and their reddish glint… They gave the heebie-jeebies. He looked like a dragon straight out of Middle Earth.
Considering his greed, that was a pretty apt comparison. Hello, Smaug.
“But you do hurt people,” she finally muttered.
“It happens,” he conceded reluctantly. “But only enemies or strangers, and they get hurt because I protect my own. Being a villain doesn’t make people monsters. Your mother, myself… We have friends, we have family, and we care about them. I care about you.”
He was leaning toward her again, almost crowding her, voice low, eyes never leaving her. Toki’s heart was beating loudly. She was angry, but she was afraid, too. Like a bunny face to face with a wolf. He was too fucking close. She bit back:
“Right until I manifest an independent thought, you mean?”
“Of course not. Munchkin, I’m not against you going to college, you know.”
It threw her for a loop, and she blinked owlishly:
“What, really?”
“I love astronomy too,” her father smiled wistfully. “So of course, I encourage you to chase your dream. My only problem with you going to college is the financial cost. It’s a lot of money, you know. And I’m not rich. Sure, we cash millions when a heist goes smoothly, but the spoils are distributed evenly between us, and then there are supplies to buy, guards to bribe, bills to pay, brokers to reward.”
Toki wondered what he was after with that argument. Then she squinted. Wait, he had said that the loot was distributed. He didn’t mean… he couldn’t want to…
“So if you want a part of the haul, you need to do part of the work,” concluded her father.
She was so taken aback that she almost forgot to be scared for a second.
“You’re… blackmailing me with college money?” Toki blurted out.
“Not really. Think of it as working in the family business to fund your schooling.”
Well, you couldn’t say that Meteor wasn’t logical. Guess that Ravenclaw side of hers really came from him, uh. Toki frowned, annoyed with how he had outmaneuvered her.
“What if I say no?”
“Why would you say no?” countered her father. “It’s financially safer than being a cashier: at least you know you won’t be fired. It’s faster, too: a good heist, and you can get enough to fund eight years of doctorate. There are some tussles, sure… But as you’re aware, we protect our own and no one in our family has ever been hurt or arrested. Sayuri and Nono aren’t even identified by the police. If you stay behind the scenes, people would be none the wiser about your involvement, and you can reap the benefits without any of the risks.”
Shit. He was really selling it, wasn’t it? And the worse was that Toki was tempted. Very much so. It was an easy way out of this conversation. A very primitive part of her brain told her to bend, to submit, to show her belly to the larger predator. It was a compromise, wasn’t it? In the short term, it would mean that Meteor would back off. In the long term, well… Her participation could be rationalized. She helped them out, and they helped her chase her dream. She would end up an astrophysicist, not a villain. She would just have some skeletons in her closet, but who didn’t? It would just be some youthful error, buried behind her veneer of respectability and the weight of her personal achievements…
But Toki had lived before, and wisdom lingered. Deals with the devil were never without strings attached. If you showed your belly to the larger predator once, it was one thing, but if you handed him your leash… Once you were in with bad people, you could never get out: or at least, not without paying a terrible price. A price that most people weren’t willing to pay. It was easier to stay settled in your ways. Wasn’t it how her mom had justified her involvement with Meteor’s Crew, almost a year earlier? Once you did something bad and got a reward, you did it again, then again, then you realized it had become your life and that the other paths were closed to you.
“Stealing is bad,” Toki tried lamely.
What a flimsy excuse. That last counter-argument that didn’t even count as a denial. Meteor saw it, and his cat-like eyes glinted ominously.
“You can’t have such a strong moral objection, or you would have raised that argument earlier. Your main problem with our line of work, if I remember correctly, was the danger of being arrested, not the inherent evil of stealing.”
Toki flushed. He wasn’t wrong, and it pissed her off. Or maybe what pissed her off was the fact that she didn’t have any more logical arguments to oppose him, besides not trusting him and being scared to fall in too deep: and she couldn’t say that, could she? It would be an admittance of weakness, as good as saying that joining them for good was ineluctable because she would feel like she owed them. She was stuck. She had lost and she wasn’t used to losing. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.
And he was still so close, looming over her, with his glowing eyes: how could she think rationally when his fucking face activated her fight-or-flight response?!
“People often like to say that villains are evil,” her father said gently. “But you know, people… heroes… they are only good because they compare themselves to us. They were born luckier, on the right side of justice, but the only reason that right side exist is because we’re here to make it real. You can’t define this society without villainy, just as you can’t define good without evil. The key is to find the right balance.”
Toki stayed silent: but somewhere in her heart, she clutched this answer like a lifeline. This, she disagreed with. It was such a fatalistic outlook on life, at the opposite of what her infinite thirst of knowledge stood for. She rejected it. Toki had never given this trope of ‘balance between good and evil’ any credit. Good and evil weren’t concepts that could balance each other out. Light and darkness were often used as metaphors for each, but while that was some fairly potent symbolic imagery, it wasn’t the reality of the situation. Light and darkness weren’t opposites: they were presence and absence. Darkness was the absence of light, just as the cold was the absence of heat, or loneliness the absence of companionship. One wasn’t necessary for the other to exist. Balance? What a joke.
To Toki, the more accurate comparison would be that evil was a disease that warped people’s nature. It infects them, poisoning what should be simple parts of human nature into something horrible. Unless you treated the body, the disease ate away at you, corrupting everything until there was nothing worth saving. You started by killing some people by accident, then you argued it was justified, then it became inevitable collateral damage, then… What next? You couldn’t compromise with something that would either destroy or consume you.
You couldn’t live in balance with evil. You could only fight or submit.
And Toki was still a fighter at heart.
oOoOoOo
Toki stayed in the hideout for ten days. She counted them. Afterward, her mother kept her word and took her to their new home, a bigger apartment in a totally different part of the city. Too close to Meteor’s Crew, still. But it wasn’t as if Toki had a choice in it…
Anyway. During ten days, Toki stayed at the hideout. She met the gang, that Meteor (who insisted she called him Dad, which Toki still refused to do) called his Crew or, when he was in a sentimental mood, our family. There was Meteor, of course, their leader, strategist, and main firepower. Then there was Homura, who had a fire Quirk and was their muscle for the heists. Nono had a mediocre electronic Quirk, but she was talented hacker as well as an incredible driver. Then there was the guy Toki had saw at her arrival, named Fujio: a lanky man with white hair and a sharp grin, who was a professional conman as well as ruthless fighter. He was Meteor’s second in command.
Toki didn’t really want to get to know them, but both logic and curiosity dictated that she learned as much as she could about them. So she did. At the beginning, she held herself back, tense and nervous. She didn’t dare to ask questions. She was snappish and defensive. Laughing, Homura even called her ‘a little bit feral’. But everybody was so nice and so open. It gave her whiplash. Even if she knew they were the bad guys, it made her feel like a rude and inconsiderate asshole. They were all trying so hard to make friends with her…
Homura told great jokes and was always thrilled to demonstrate fire tricks, like twirling a candle’s flame or turning sparks into dancing silhouettes. His flames were green, too, like will-o'-the-wisp! It was so pretty, almost magical. He earnestly told her about his family, too. He had two children, both a little older than Toki, but he was divorced and his ex-wife had custody. He only saw his kids during holidays. Nobody in his family knew he was the villain codenamed “Blaze” that fought alongside Meteor, because his villain persona was fully masked and wore a coat that hid how muscular he was. Homura liked the freedom of not having his face plastered on wanted posters (yes, apparently it was a thing), but he was also sad to not be able to be wholly who he was with his children. The only people who knew him for real was Meteor’s crew. And now, Toki!
Homura had known Meteor the longest: they were childhood friends, apparently. He had even been best man at his and Sayuri’s wedding. Homura also offhandedly mentioned gifting Sayuri a stuffed animal when Toki had been born, a big pink and purple dolphin, and Toki suddenly realized that she still owned that damn thing.
Nono wasn’t as energic and chatty as Homura, but she had a dry sense of humor, and she was soft and patient, once you got used to her creepily unblinking eyes. She had a sad childhood: orphan at a young age, she had spent years in foster care because no one wanted to adopt a kid that looked like a reanimated corpse. Nono had learned how to steal, hack, and fight all alone. She had often gone hungry. It was with Meteor’s crew that she finally had some financial stability. She used her part of the spoils to pay for evening classes to learn more advanced coding. Nono wasn’t very effusive but she was undoubtedly proud of the path travelled, and considered herself a self-made woman.
Fujio was the less friendly, but he was welcoming all the same. He was a bit rough and didn’t soften his words. He openly talked about shooting people, taking hostages, and all the stuff that Meteor had apparently glossed over. Still, he grunted approvingly when Toki was well-behaved, and obligingly explained to her what he was doing when she asked. Well, usually Toki regretted asking shortly after, because even when she saw him on Instagram, it turned out he was stalking bank’s staff members thought their social media!
Fujio didn’t have a sad backstory like Homura and Nono: he had been born in a reputable family, but had started scamming people to make some easy money in high school, and had slid into crime one step at the time. First scams, then thefts, then armed robberies, then murders… It had come to him easily, like second-nature. He had met Meteor a few years before his grand debut, and they had quickly become friends. They also had a weird rivalry going on, often playing very intense strategy games, and butting heads when a debate turned heated.
Also they were all persuaded that Meteor was the best thing since sliced bread or something. He was strong, he was smart, he farted flowers and shat gold. And apparently, he was unbelievably lucky. Seriously, was he the protagonist of a shōnen manga or something? Meteor could pickpocket someone in a second: he had seeped up more security passes and credit cards that he could count. He had escaped heroes and cops by the skin of his teeth twice, and had even outmaneuvered All Might in an unrelated car chase. Oh, and he had once jumped from a roof and survived by cushioning his fall with his Quirk and a well-placed advertising banner.
“Meteor doesn’t cheat death,” Nono nodded very seriously. “He wins fair and square.”
“Yep,” Homura grinned. “I heard he once played Russian roulette with a fully-loaded sniper rifle and won.”
Fujio just snorted in amusement. Toki threw her hands up in exasperation and stormed out of the kitchen. There was too much hero worship in here for her tastes.
Meteor was the friendliest of the bunch, of course. He was smart, too. His grins were unsettling, and Toki never knew when his over-friendliness would turn into cold, evaluating looks… And long story short, he was unpredictable and she stayed on her guard with him.
But when you live with someone 24/24H for days, you end up getting used to them. Meteor wasn’t even that bad. He encouraged Toki to ask questions, he gifted her as many pens and notebooks she wanted, and he even let her access his computer. Toki was sure he checked her search history afterward, though, so she didn’t dare to google the address or phone number of the closest police station. She did read a lot of Wikipedia articles, however. What? It was free knowledge. She wasn’t going to pass the opportunity. She could ask her question directly to Meteor, he would have gladly answered her, but he had a way to give leading answers to push Toki’s reasoning into the direction he wanted. At least the Internet offered different point of views.
Time passed.
Without realizing it, Toki started being less tense the more she became familiar with that place and its inhabitants. Children adapted quickly, after all. It made her feel both guilty, angry, and worried. Yes, she remembered they were villains and they were trying to manipulate her into joining them, but… It was hard to constantly keep it in mind, alright? When she learned stuff, when she listened to their stories or their explanations, when she gave them her whole attention… She cared. She opened herself to them and it made her vulnerable. Before she knew it, she was giggling at a stupid joke or saying thank you when they passed the salt, and she clamped up again, terrified of starting to care, to slip up. She couldn’t let her brain being tricked into considering those people hers, into thinking she was one of them. That was Stockholm syndrome. She needed to keep things clearly compartmented in her brain, or she would be lost. Feelings were messy and complicated, and Meteor’s goal was to use her emotions to tie her to his crew for life. She couldn’t let him do it.
It was really hard, though. Toki had no friends, no support outside of this gang, and it was difficult to hate them when everyone welcomed her with open harms. If Toki hadn’t been reborn… If she hadn’t had this past-knowledge from Before, about how easily isolated children are manipulated into joining gangs or cults that gave them a sense of belonging… She would have fallen for it hook, line and sinker. Hell, even now, knowing what she did, she was beginning to fall for it. She was opening up. Her mom, Meteor, Homura, Nono, even Fujio… They were there, they were friendly, they were familiar, and some primitive part of her brain that was desperately seeking some sense of safety and belonging was happy with it. Humans were not meant to be alone.
And Toki, in a way, was so, so alone.
She wrote in her notebooks. At first, she only did in her tiny room, but after a while, she ended up sitting in the hallway, where the light was better and she could hear what was going on. Nobody tried to take her stuff or paged through it, which she could appreciate. Once, Homura asked to read what she was writing about his Quirk, and corrected a mistake in her kanjis, but then he only congratulated her on her penmanship. He didn’t even touch the paper. Begrudgingly, Toki gave him point for the effort. He respected her stuff.
Maybe it was paranoid of her, but she was a bit protective of her notebooks. The poetry one, with her soul spilled on the pages. Her Teleportation-analysis one, with all of her skills and talents (she had stopped experimenting at the hideout, not wanting to share her Quirk with the Crew). The one filled with questions, notes and theories, and all the ramblings she didn’t dare to utter out loud. The one with analysis of others peoples’ Quirk, too: what had been simple curiosity had become almost obsessive. Sayuri’s Quirk, Homura’s Meteor’s… They were all so powerful. Toki didn’t just study them because they were interesting, but because she wanted to dissect them and find their weaknesses. Because she was preparing to run, or to fight, or to do something.
And for now, she wrote. She didn’t have any other weapons but ink, paper, and her mind.
For a star to be born
A gaseous nebula must collapse
So collapse
Crumble
This is not your destruction
This is your birth
It was liberating to write. Sometimes she wished she could send her words to someone, in a letter or maybe just by email, to know that it would be read and understood. But she had no one to send this stuff to. She didn’t know anyone but the people that she needed to escape.
So yeah. She guarded her notebooks quite ferociously.
Ironically, while Toki was making friend with the whole Crew… She and her mom hadn’t patched up. It wasn’t really feasible, anyway. Sayuri wasn’t sorry. She was glad that things had turned out okay and that Toki had found common ground with her father, but she didn’t feel any regret for betraying her daughter’s trust and locking her in this situation where she had no choice but befriend Meteor, even though Toki had already said that she didn’t want to. Sayuri didn’t even knew where the problem was, because in the end, Toki had done what was expected of her, right? She had met her dad. But the problem was she shouldn’t have been forced to do it!
Sayuri had knowingly manipulated her and trapped her in that situation, and she didn’t even see that it was wrong, because her daughter was a child and obviously her mom knew better. That kind of reasoning left a bitter taste in Toki’s mouth. So what, Sayuri praised her intelligence and maturity, right until that intelligence and maturity went against what Sayuri wanted? Urgh. When Toki had accused her father of only caring as long as his daughter didn’t manifest an independent thought, maybe she should have aimed that claim to her mother instead.
But hey. Their family vacation ended. Toki discovered her new home. And of course, she went there with her mom, and it was once again only the two of them.
Awkward.
The thing was: if one of them had tried to confront it, the issues would have been solved. It would have burst open like an abscess and the poison would have been drained. But Toki refused to broach the subject first, since she wasn’t the one in the wrong. And well… She quickly realized her mother wasn’t just non-confrontational. She had selective blindness. Or maybe she… she had never cared about her bond with Toki in the first place, hadn’t valued her trust and her admiration, and so she hadn’t even noticed those things were gone? It hurt. It actually hurt even more than the betrayal in the first place, because it was a complete admission that what Toki had felt from the very beginning didn’t matter. Or maybe it was some kind of elaborated plot to make her closer to her father?
Because, since they were only a few kilometers away from the hideout and that Toki knew the place, now Sayuri never hesitated to ask the crew to do some babysitting.
“You know, I never needed babysitting in the first place,”, Toki flatly said to Nono.
The woman patted her head with affection:
“I know, you’re a smart cookie. But your mom is back to working fulltime, now, so of course she’s going to have less time for you.”
“So? She once left me to fend for myself a week. I managed just fine. I even made noodles, and I was even younger than I was now.”
Nono narrowed her eyes: “Really? When was that?”
“I dunno, I was maybe six?”
Nono hummed pensively, but her eyes were cold. Toki secretly hoped that Sayuri got her ass whopped. If she could sow some discord in the Crew, even better.
She never saw the Crew members argue (except Meteor and Fujio, but it was play-fighting more than anything). Not in the hideout, anyway. But hey, they were all allowed to go outside. Toki, of course, wasn’t allowed to go out unsupervised. Not yet, had said her dad, which was radically different from the not ever that her mom used to say. But Sayuri didn’t care anymore.
“Want to learn how to sew?” Nono offered to distract her.
Toki shrugged: “Sure, why not.”
So Nono taught her how to sew a button, how to fix a hole in a coat, how to repair a rip in jeans. A few days later she taught her how to put patches on a leather jacket. Then how to remove blood stains from a shirt (it was fine, it was from a mishap with a knife while cooking dinner). Then she told her how to keep her feet dry in her shoes were getting wet. Then before Toki knew it, she had learned a bunch of useful hacks like the fact that pairing several layers of silk with a leather jacket acted like armor and protected from most knife wounds, or the fact that if you trained enough you could run in heels faster than a cop, or how to make bandages with old shirts, or how to tie a tourniquet…
And from there it devolved into first aid training.
It didn’t happen all at once. Weeks, then months passed. But learning funny anecdotes and everyday tricks from a hardened criminal tended to be, well… kind of leaning in a certain direction. Nono never had to made embroidery but she taught Toki the exact kind of needle point used to sew back people as well as clothes, for example. After six months, she would be freely talking about underground doctors and the danger of drug overdose, and Toki would stay unfazed because, well, it had been so gradual that she wasn’t shocked.
But it didn’t happen all at once.
Toki and Sayuri settled in their new home. There was a new school. It was poorer than her old one, with barren walls, older desks, teachers who were more tired. The lessons were boring. This time, the teachers had no time to waste printing specials physics lessons for one advanced student. They still praised her good grades and her great Quirk, but they brushed off her in-depth questions. When she insisted, they scowled and told her not to be disruptive. Toki quickly learned that if she wanted to do something productive during class, she had better bring a book to read. Problem: she didn’t own much books. She settled for printing page after page of Wikipedia articles or online quizzes, and doing that instead.
During recess, she missed her old friends. Even if having a good Quirk automatically put her in people’s good graces (in the grade above hers, there was a Quirkless boy who was treated like a pariah or something), it wasn’t enough to stop being an outsider. She was picked last in tag-games. When Toki brought some toys from home to play with the others kids, a few boys tried to steal them. She did keep the toy, but she had to hit the boys to make them go. It wasn’t a serious scuffle, and teleporting gave Toki and edge, but still. She took a punch to the chin and bawled like a baby. Her mother was called to pick her up. And afterward, of course, Sayuri told Meteor’s Crew all about it.
“So much crying for such a little punch!” cooed Homura.
Toki tried to set him ablaze by the force of her glare, to no avail. Her mother, that traitor, had the gall to laugh:
“It was a bad moment, that was for sure. But you’re alright now, right, sweetie?”
That didn’t even warrant an answer. Meteor snorted:
“At least you won you first real fight.”
Fujio raised his brow: “It was her first fight?”
“Yes, and she won against three! I’m so proud.”
“Hopefully she won’t cry the next time,” said Nono, cynical.
“There won’t be a next time!” Toki blurted out. “I don’t want to fight people!”
“You would rather let them steal your toys?” smiled Meteor.
Toki rounded on him, and fired back:
“What, you want me to believe you’re not on the thieves’ side?”
Her father looked indignant:
“Of course not! Thieves, not-thieves, heroes, villains, they’re just labels. I care about individual people. Those kids, I don’t give a crap about them. I care about you, so I want you to win, no matter the circumstances or the context of the fight.”
Toki didn’t like the direction this conversation was taking. She crossed her arms defensively.
“I’m faster.”
“It doesn’t really matter, though,” Sayuri said gently. “Running away doesn’t work if you have to come back to class every day. You should be ready to make a stand and defend yourself.”
That was why the teachers were here. But Toki didn’t say it. She had seen the teachers turn a blind eye when the bullies pushed around the younger kids, or when someone got their lunch stolen, or even when Toki and the boys had fought. It wasn’t like her old school, where she was the favored child, protected and listened to. She was on her own.
“You have to prove you’re not afraid of them and they will leave you alone,” Nono said wisely.
Meteor nodded approvingly:
“Yes. Fear is the weakling’s power.”
“More like power is the weakling’s ambition,” Toki muttered.
Her father laid an appraising look on her, and she turned away, uncomfortable. No matter how nice he was, how familiar she became with him, or how similar they were sometimes… Toki couldn’t quite shake the unease his amber gaze awoke in her.
There was a short silence. It was Fujio who broke it, saying gruffy:
“Well, you better learn how to throw a punch.”
Sayuri offered to teach her, but just to spit her, Toki turned toward Meteor. She didn’t really want to learn hand-to-hand combat from him of all people. Sometimes it slipped her mind, because he was her father (and also a guy she had seen absentmindedly put salt in his coffee instead of sugar and then nearly choke to death): but he was a murderer, he had killed dozens of people. But hey, at least she could trust that he knew what he was doing… And she would have no qualms about fighting back.
But Meteor wasn’t brutal in his teaching. On the contrary, he was patient, and calm. He didn’t push. He didn’t mock. He teased her when she didn’t get it right, but never meanly. Toki wanted him to be an asshole: it would have been simpler to hate him if he had been a total dickhead, Endeavor-style! But no. He didn’t swear at her, he didn’t hit her, he didn’t even disdain her. He loved her, he treated her like she was something precious.
He loved her. It was so unfair. Why couldn’t he hate her? Then Toki would have been able to hate him back. Instead… instead…
But Meteor loved her, he loved all his Crew. He loved Sayuri, especially. When they were in the same room, their faces softened, and the way they looked at each other with such tenderness… You could never doubt of their respect and their devotion toward each other. Sure, their Quirks had mixed up to make a Teleporter, and they were proud of that… But Toki was certainly not the product of a Quirk-marriage. She was the inconvenient baggage that came in the middle of a true love story, Bonnie-and-Clyde-style, and they had generously made her a place in their world. They had given her a good life because they loved her, and it just happened that this life was outside the law: if she refused their gift, she was the ungrateful one! It was infuriating.
Anyway. Meteor taught her how to brace for a punch, how to roll to cushion a fall. Later, after a few more scuffles with different boys (older ones, and after her lunch rather than her toys: but still too cocky, and still defeated by her speed) he would teach her how to hit back. Toki learned how to close her fist to make a good punch, how to kick high to aim for a guy’s balls, how to go for the face or behind the knees.
When she got a punch right or learned a new trick, Meteor always praised her, his eyes warm and proud. Good job, he said, and I knew you could do it. And Toki basked in the praise like a flower growing towards the sun.
He was a killer but he was kind to her. He was her dad, and he cared. He cared about her, with no conditions, and Toki was… Toki started loving him, too. It would have been impossible not to. Meteor was always so intense and honest in everything he did, even opening his heart to his estranged daughter.
Toki didn’t want to learn to fight. But she had never been able to say no to knowledge, especially useful knowledge. So, just as she had learned how to give first aid and wash the blood from clothes with Nono, just as she had learned how to lie and misdirect from her mom, she learned how to defend herself with her father. She lived with villains, ate their food, and accepted their teachings. What the hell did that made her? She had sworn to never follow them, but the more time passed, the harder it was to keep her distance. Her life was so intertwined with theirs that she couldn’t even isolate a part of her world that was fully hers, and not influenced one way or another by Meteor’s Crew.
Well, there was her poetry, maybe. But these days, everything in her notebook carried the gang’s taint. She had started analyzing Nono’s Quirk, then Meteor’s. Her notes were filled with theories about how to get around them, what weakness to exploit. How to kill them, of necessary. Toki felt awful just thinking about it. She wouldn’t kill anyone, though. She wasn’t a bad person. Not yet, anyway.
You don't get to die
and be reborn the same
You come back
but you come back wrong.
This is the price you pay
for resurrection.
(Who had she been, in the Before? She couldn’t remember. Her memories from the BNHA-Verse were as crisp and complete as the day she had woken up at age four, but for the rest… Her knowledge of literature had faded. She could barely remember how to do equations: that was why physics were so engaging, she was relearning. She had completely lost her level in English, and her intuitive understanding of the syntax didn’t help much with her lack of vocabulary. Who she had been was gone, like an old CD overwritten with Toki’s personality, memories, dreams, ambitions, and desires. She didn’t miss it. How could you miss something you don’t remember? But she wondered if she had a softer life, before. If she had more options. If she had been happier.)
(She wasn’t happy here. Well, sometimes she laughed and relaxed and was carefree for a day or two, but it wasn’t happiness. It was habit. It was her animal brain feeling safe and loosening up her stress. Then reality caught up with her, and Toki felt guilty about it. It ate her inside like a parasite. She didn’t want to be here. She felt trapped. Did circus animals learn to love their cage? Or did they just learn to fear what was outside, what was unknown?)
Toki knew she wasn’t a villain. She lived with them and liked them and all of that stuff, sure, but… She hadn’t changed that much. It wasn’t too late. But weeks and then months were passing, and… She liked those people. Even Meteor who unsettled her, even Fujio who barely talked. They were familiar: she had no one else. And… They liked her. They trusted her, and in some twisted way she trusted them, because she had no one else to trust. But she also knew, in a very fundamental way, that they were going to do evil and destroy people’s lives, and she didn’t want to be part of that. It made her want to sob just like that day, in the empty apartment, when her mother had brought her to Meteor. It wasn’t who she wanted to be.
And she was scared of what she would become, if things continued like this.
Notes:
Hope you liked it !
Here are some pictures of the characters, if you want a quick look...
A picture of Ryūsei and Sayuri before Toki’s birth (i love how grumpy Meteor looks!)
A picture of Meteor’s Crew (from right to left: Homura, Nono, and Fujio).
A picture of Meteor looking sinister. The original artist is BayBay on Tumblr!I'm rather desesperatly looking for a Beta, if anyone is interested ! =D
EDIT 12/08/2022
Some spelling mistakes corrected. I added some details about the Crew (Homura's fire is green, Fujio and Meteor have a weirdly intense rivalry about startegy games). Emphasis put on how Sayuri distance herself from Toki, and at the same time how Toki starts to like the Crew and especially Meteor.
Chapter 4: Expect the unexpected
Summary:
Things acceletare, and the irreparable happens. No matter how smart you think you are, you can't control anything in life when you're eight... and all alone.
Notes:
You can all thanks my Beta for fixing all of my grammatical mistakes, this chapter is way better since the correction =)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED
Weeks passed. Toki started experimenting with her teleportation again, quietly, when she was sure no one from the Crew watched her. It wasn’t something she shared with her mom anymore, but it was still hers. Her teleportation-analysis notebook was slowly filling up.
She could teleport as much as she wanted if the distance covered was in her field of vision or less than ten meters away from her. More, and she needed a little effort. And if she tried to cover several kilometers in one jump, it was a big effort. The jump from here to her old home was reaching her limits. If she tried to do it thrice in a single day, she would drop from exhaustion.
Toki could teleport with objects if she touched them. She could use her hands, her feet, her belly, her forehead, even her hair. As soon as it was in contact with her body, it could teleport with her. The lighter they were, the easier it was, especially if she had a lot of skin contact with it. Toki didn’t even have to think about teleporting with her clothes, for example. She could also teleport several object touching each other, like a pile of books, even if she was only touching one. She couldn’t teleport an object she wasn’t touching, even if she was technically touching the air that was also in contact with that object. She didn’t know yet if it was a limit to her power or simply a blockage in her mind that was consequently limiting her use of her Quirk. Maybe once she managed to study physics a little more, she could persuade her brain that air was just a bunch of atoms, just like a physical object, and therefore her hand was indirectly in contact with the book… Well. She would see.
Toki couldn’t teleport part of one thing. She could teleport with a cushion from the couch, but she couldn’t teleport with the cushion split in half. Again, she didn’t know if it was a limit of her power or just the way her brain worked, considering the couch an object but having trouble conceptualizing a half-cushion as one whole object she was trying to jump with while leaving the rest in place.
She could move while teleporting: disappearing upright and appearing sitting down, for example. But she could also disappear while holding something (she tested it with a stuffed bear) and reappear without it, letting the toy fall to her feet from… Well, sometimes in front of her, sometimes behind, sometimes to her left, something straight above her. It was tricky to control both her place of apparition and the object’s. Still, it always materialized in a range of three meters around her. She should test if she could reappear after throwing it, to add some velocity and direction to the plushie’s fall. Huh. That was something to consider.
And finally: adrenaline enhanced her abilities. That one had been tricky to figure out. Sometimes her test results were wildly different: her range changed, her strength differed along with the effort she had to do… But after eliminating a bunch of variables (the time, the food she’d eaten, the weather, even the phase of the moon!), Toki realized that she was the variable. Her father’s Quirk was strengthened by his emotions, so what if it was the same for her? Toki tested it and even if she didn’t notice a real difference when she was sad of happy, she did find out that adrenaline, whether provoked by long training, stress, or a fit of anger against bullies, always got her better results. In normal conditions, Toki could teleport things that didn’t weight much more than herself. When she was pissed, she could teleport the fucking couch in the living room.
Oh gods she had a berserker power, didn’t she?
Well at least she didn’t lose her mind. Fortunately, adrenaline didn’t make her go crazy, she was just… highly emotional. But still! In that state, people threw plates and yelled hurtful things. Having the potential to hurl heavy projectiles when angry was not a good thing. And sometimes it was highly tempting to use it against the boys at school, or against her mother, or against her father, and… she couldn’t do that.
No matter how much she gritted her teeth, Toki swore to herself: she would never let her parents find out that facet of her power. She didn’t even dare to write about it in her notebook, in case they read it. Teleportation could easily be used as a weapon, and they all knew that. Toki was already sitting on a time-bomb, waiting tensely for the day her parents would want to use her Quirk for a robbery. There was no need to add to how dangerous she was!
Anyway. Toki was opening up more and more to Meteor’s crew, but she never told them about the details of her Quirk. It was her only little defiance, in a way, the only thing where she had some power against the crew.
Once, at the end of winter, Meteor sat her down and asked her about her Quirk, and Toki had felt her stomach drop out. But she had stuck to the facts, incomplete facts but real nonetheless, and it had… probably worked.
“So you need to know your destination. You can carry small objects with you, like a pile of books. And your range is…?” He trailed off, staring at her.
“I dunno. The further it is, the harder it’s for me. I once tried to teleport forty kilometers away and I nearly passed out. But if I jump somewhere close, it barely takes any effort at all, I don’t even notice.”
“So, a less than ten kilometers away should be fine?”
She considered it, then nodded: “Yes. It would be tiring but okay.” She hesitated, then asked: “Why do you want to know?”
“Can’t a father be invested in his daughter’s growth?” Meteor said with a wry smile.
Toki looked unimpressed. Her father snorted:
“I am interested in your growth, believe it or not. I want to know if your Quirk is going to evolve like mine, or like your mother.”
Alright, that was interesting. Toki frowned, her interest immediately perking up.
“Like, in terms of limits? Like mom has a limited range?”
“A hundred kilometers isn’t very limited,” laughed Meteor.
“Yeah, but mom had to know exactly where’s the thing she’s switching with, and she can’t switch place with only part of something… Like me, actually.”
“Tue,” hummed her father. “But I was thinking more in terms of what you could bring with you. Your mother, for example, can only switch places with things that are roughly her height and weight. The bigger the difference, the greater the effort she had to expend.”
Toki nodded. That was why Sayuri had a container of water at home so she could switch places with le liquid as needed. Each day, she weighed herself, and adjusted the quantity of water in the container in consequence. Sayuri couldn’t swap with things too heavy, or too light, or too tall, or too small.
“She could probably switch places with Nono-san or Fujio-san,” Toki thought out loud. “But not with you or Homura-san. Not without a big effort.”
“How many times have they told you to drop the ‘-san’? But you’re correct. That’s why before any of our operations, we all follow a strict diet to have the perfect weight. It’s in case we are arrested and Sayuri has to bail us out.”
Shit. Toki’s eyes widened but tried she to not react further. Sayuri was their escape route!
She should have seen it coming. That meant that even if the Crew was arrested, they wouldn’t stay in jail very long. Sayuri only had to find out in what police station they were held, and… she would swap places with them, and then swap with water. Of course, it’d be more difficult to pull off if the crew was in a huge prison (where they frequently moved from their cells to the cafeteria and so on, and when it was difficult to know where each room was without obtaining the plans beforehand), but criminals weren’t sent to prisons immediately upon their arrest. They first would be held in a police station, then transferred by car, and… it left a window of opportunity of almost a day for Sayuri to strike. That was more than enough.
Toki had always considered Meteor the most dangerous of the Crew. But now… she found herself mentally revaluating her mother, so calm and unassuming. Sayuri was a key element of the Crew. She was the uncatchable member, the untouchable partner. If Toki wanted out, one day, Sayuri had to become her priority.
And that… that complicated things, didn’t it? Because even if their relationship was tense… Sayuri was still her mom. Her caretaker. Toki’s first real parental figure. Even knowing Sayuri was a criminal who hurt people and had no qualms about sentencing her daughter to the same life, Toki couldn’t just get rid of her feelings for her own mother. Emotions didn’t work that way.
So Toki had to protect her mother, but also protect herself. That wasn’t going to be easy. But both goals were important. Toki wasn’t the kind of person to make sacrifices. She planned, she calculated, she contemplated, she plotted. Sometimes it felt stifling to stay here and do nothing about her situation, but Toki wasn’t doing nothing: she was preparing. Even now, this new information was being added to her existing data, and her plans were shifting in response.
“So how did your Quirk evolve?” she asked quickly in order to change the subject. “Mom has height, weight and range limitations. What about you?”
Meteor grinned, looking pleased by her interest:
“Well, I can pick up an entire boat, so I don’t really have a weight limit. There is a limit to my range, though. I actually need to see something to hold it in my Psychokinesis, but once that’s done, I can turn away without dropping it. The better my vision, the better my grip.”
Toki briefly struggled with herself, then gave up and quickly opened her Quirk-analysis notebook. Notes filled the pages, but it was full of doodles too, taking a lot of spaces between her scrawls. Those doodles were actually concealing the place where Toki had written compromising information with invisible ink, like how to subdue Meteor from a distance (sleeping gas, sniper with sedating darts, drugged food… and now she could add flashbangs to that, to reduce his vision…), or what were Homura’s weaknesses (his family, the name of his wife and kids, where they lived…). Honestly, even without the invisible notes, her notebook was very compromising. She had analyzed in depth everyone’s Quirk, but also their strength and weakness. If anyone managed to read that, they would be impressed… and slightly suspicious.
But the invisible notes made this book switch from ‘slightly suspicious’ to ‘incredibly incriminating’. If Meteor found out Toki was writing about the way to take down his crew, he would kill her.
But Toki had his trust, and she knew that was her best weapon. Her father liked her, he wanted her to like him too. He’d noticed that the fastest way to his daughter’s heart was knowledge. So he let her take notes about everything, respected her boundaries and didn’t touch her stuff, and… honestly, it had earned him some good point, from her perspective.
But for all his positive traits, he was still a Villain and a murderer, so. She still took invisible notes and pried apart his weaknesses. No hard feelings, dad.
Still, she felt a pinch of something like guilt when she saw his delighted smile. Meteor was so kind with her, so charming and funny and interesting. He loved her. And she loved him, as stupid and as unreasonable as it was. She loved him maybe even ore than her mom, because not once Meteor had ever lied to her about who he was and what he wanted.
“How much can you move away from an object before it slip from your grip?”
“Depends,” he grinned. “If it’s still in my field of vision, as far as I can go. If I turn behind a building or something else limit my view… My range spans about two kilometers. And when I go in psycho-mode, it gets bigger.”
“Psycho-mode?!” she repeated incredulously.
He shrugged: “It’s not called Psychokinesis for nothing. I don’t just use my mind, I use my emotions. Anger, fear, joy, delight. Most of the time, there are side-effects. My grip became stronger and less controlled. Sometimes I don’t even grip things and my Quick smash them.”
“Wait, what? It changes the effects of your powers? I thought anger only made you stronger.”
“It can be seen that way,” he admitted. “But Psychokinesis is not the act of griping an object with invisible hands: it’s the power of the mind over matter. The angrier I get the more powerful I am, yes, but my Quirk also become more versatile and volatile. I can crush a garbage container like an empty soda can without gripping it with my Quirk, provoke tremors in the ground around me…”
Oh gods that sounded terrifying. It was like a natural disaster that could be unleashed in a matter of seconds in the middle of a crowded city. Toki pretended to be absorbed in her writing to hide the way her eyes had widened.
“I’m actually not quite sure of my limits,” Meteor confessed. “When I go into psycho-mode, I have less control. I don’t think I will ever learn the full scope of my Quirk, because it would mean understanding and controlling the full scope of my emotions, which is impossible. The human mind is too vast and complex. I would need to study psychology and neuroscience and, well, no offense to your scientific mind, but reading articles all day would bore me to tears.”
“Maybe because they aren’t good enough,” Toki protested halfheartedly. “Science isn’t boring, it’s great, the key is just to get the right balance between something you understand and something you discover to keep you engaged.”
“Hm. Well, I was a terrible student at school, so maybe I never managed to find that balance.”
Toki frowned: “Why? You’re smart.”
Her father looked flattered. “Oh? You think so?”
Toki shrugged. Obviously Meteor was intelligent. He was a master criminal who robbed highly secured banks for a living and he had never been arrested. He had managed to outsmart the police and tons of heroes for years. No dumbass could pull that off.
“I was a brat,” her father smiled ruefully. “The teachers bored me. I liked math and physics because it was loosely connected to astronomy, and… well, when I was child I always hung out near the Planetarium in Fukuoka.”
“You’re from Fukuoka?! Where is that?”
It was news to Toki. She had never imagined her father as a child coming from somewhere. For her, he had always been here, and since his hideout was in Tokyo, it seemed logical that his roots were here. But Meteor grimaced:
“Yes, it’s in the South. It’s a very lively city. Maybe I’ll take you there someday.”
No you won’t, Toki thought sadly, but she stayed silent. Without prompting, her father went back to his story:
“In middle school teachers briefly talked about the solar system and that kind of thing, but by the time high school came nobody cared about astronomy at all, so I lost interest. I didn’t like learning very much to begin with. Also, my math teacher was an asshole… oh, sorry.”
Toki blinked, then realized he was apologizing for swearing, and couldn’t help but laugh. She had been here for months. If Meteor thought his men refined their language in her honor, he was in for a big surprise. She had learned so many curses from Homura she could probably scandalize even the most vulgar bullies at school. They had nothing on Meteor’s Crew.
“I’ve heard worse, you know.”
Her father let out his own chuckle: “Well, as long as I don’t catch you saying those things, I don’t want to know. Anyway, I dropped out during high school. I educated myself in other ways. Museums, the internet…. Sayuri told me you liked going on exhibitions too.”
“Yeah, but…” Toki frowned, “we haven’t been to one in a while.”
Sayuri hadn’t been very available. Or maybe Toki had stopped asking for mother-daughter outings at the nearest museum after their spat. Or both, probably.
“That’s a shame,” her father frowned. “You need to nurture your mind, it’s your greatest tool. I’ll speak to Sayuri about it.”
“There’s no need! Besides, I can go by myself now. I’m grown up, I don’t need her to hold my hand! I’m going to be allowed to go outside anyway, right?”
There was a hint of challenge in that declaration. Meteor raised an eyebrow:
“Right, I forgot. You’re better than the best and the smartest girl in the world and good at everything.”
Toki crossed her arms.
“I am,” she said, without even a tinge of defensiveness, “all of those things, yes.”
Meteor laughed and tried to ruffle her hair. Toki playfully batted his hand away, and for a moment it was nice, it was normal: they were just a father and a daughter goofing around and bonding over playful banter. Then Fujio called Meteor to speak about something, and reality came crashing back. Toki schooled her features in a neutral mask, and turned away. Her father went to speak with his second in command, closing the door behind him. Toki tried to turn back to her notes, but she had lost her motivation.
She was getting too comfortable here. She spent most of her free time in the hideout, because it was better than being home alone and she still wasn’t allowed outside unsupervised: but it was a den of criminals, not a daycare filled with friendly faces. No matter how friendly said criminals were!
(The very next day, her mother offered to take her to a big aquarium in Tokyo, with hundreds of fish and even an exposition about the evolution of cetaceans. Meteor had kept his word.)
Toki wrote, wrote, and kept writing. Her notebooks were her only confidantes. No matter how much the crew wanted to be her friends, she couldn’t let them. She repeated it to herself again and again at night, as if it could make it real. But the truth was: wasn’t it with them that she spent most of her time? Wasn’t it with them that she spoke the most? Wasn’t it with them that she opened up, asked her questions, pondered her answers, laughed, shared food, relaxed?
She had none of that outside. Sayuri had made her join a gym club and an English club, to keep her busy, but both were filled with older kids and Toki didn’t socialize much. They didn’t want to hang out with ‘the baby’. Well, too bad for them. Toki was still in the middle ranking of her gym group, but she was one of the best in the English club. School wasn’t so different. She had jumped a grade in her old school so now she was in a class where she already knew most of the material: but teachers didn’t really care if she was bored, as long as she wasn’t disruptive, so Toki mostly kept to herself and read stuff to pass the time. As for the other kids… They left her alone. Sure, Toki had acquaintances at school, kids who hung up with her without being mean. But there were also kids who constantly picked fights with her to try and prove who was the top dog.
At the beginning, it had freaked her out. It had made her angry and afraid. She had always been such a well-behaved child, she had never been in a fight! But this neighborhood was rougher than her previous one. Kids pushed and pulled, the tested each other. They weren’t coddled or even comforted by the teachers, so they had learned that most social interactions were about establishing dominance rather than offering help. Kids absorbed and reflected what adults showed them, after all. And Toki was softer than those children, so of course she had made for a very tempting target…
But Toki wasn’t a delicate baby. She was smart as hell and she knew words hurt. Physical fights had scared her, and even after her father’s lessons she was still clumsy and reluctant to hit: but she had never been hesitant. Toki had always been quick to analyze, to change plans and adapt, so that she would always land on her feet no matter how many times they tried to knock her down.
After school, it was either gym or English, and then home. Sometimes Sayuri was here, working on spreadsheets, examining buildings’ blueprints, or making phone calls. But most of the time, she was out (either at the hideout, or somewhere else, Toki didn’t know). Toki could stay here all alone, or leave. She was forbidden to go alone to the park or in the streets, because it was ‘too dangerous’ apparently: but since her conversation with Meteor Toki now had permission to go to any museum she liked. As long as she either paid her own ticket or sneaked in and didn’t get caught by security, Meteor thought it was fine.
Wow, really A+ parenting here. But well, what could you expect from criminals?
Anyway. Toki spent most of her evenings in the hideout. She did her homework on the kitchen’s table. She asked Nono to print some articles to read the next day. Sometimes Fujio dropped next to her some middle-school textbooks and left without a word, and Toki read them avidly. Middle-school level stuff wasn’t impossible, but it was engaging and often slightly difficult to understand, so she loved the challenge. Math, especially. Equations with unknown numbers made her head spins. What? She was only seven (and half), she was allowed to be a bit confused by ‘x’ and ‘y’ mixing in with good old solid numbers!
The Crew’s members weren’t often all here at the same time. They were all part of Meteor’s Crew but they all led different lives. Nono was a taxi-driver. She also sometimes played lookout for small-time crimes (robbing convenience and grocery stores, that kind of thing) in exchange for a share of the loot. Homura was a thug, and sold his services to the highest bidder. Sometimes he played bodyguard, sometimes he committed arson, sometimes he roughed up guys who had pissed off the wrong person. Fujio was a conman, and he mostly went gambling, but he also set up elaborate scams. Sometimes assurance fraud, sometimes a fake mugging. It… It went fine, for the most part. But it could also turn violent. And when it did, Fujio usually had no qualm burying evidence of his involvement… typically with the body of the victim.
(Toki wasn’t supposed to know that. But in March she saw him make a fake police file, with a guy’s picture and name and all that kind of stuff, and he asked her to fetch some paper because the printer was empty. That guy was his mark. Fujio didn’t talk much about his scams, but sometimes at dinner he said ‘it’s going well’ or ‘he’s getting suspicious’. At the end of April, Fujio came back with a bullet wound in his leg and blood on his hands, Nono fussed over him, and Toki was sent home. Nobody told her what happened, of course, beside the fact that Fujio was fine and that the crew wasn’t in any danger, but…. but… During the following weeks, on the news, there was a report about a guy’s disappearance. Toki recognized his face. It didn’t take much to put two and two together.)
(It should have shocked and horrified her to realize that Fujio had killed someone, but it didn’t. She was surprised and there was a sick weight in her stomach, but she wasn’t… shattered by that revelation. Probably because it wasn’t a revelation. She had known that Fujio was a killer from the very beginning. And it scared her, how rational she was about it. Was she becoming numb to what was happening? Was she becoming like them?)
Meteor sometimes helped out Fujio, but mostly he did ‘boss’ things’ like running around in the underground, cultivating contacts, buying supplies, and listening to rumors. He was an information broker in his spare time. He enjoyed it, apparently: the challenge, the little mysteries, the thrill of casting a net and see what would get caught. He was the one who made this operation run smoothly, Toki realized: without him, the crew wouldn’t be able to stay organized. Meteor gave them plans, motives, weapons, equipment, and information.
Sayuri was the only one who didn’t explain her role to Toki, but she found out anyway. Apparently her mom was a spy. She scouted possible targets’ locations. She was an expert at disguising herself with make-up, wigs, baggy clothes or designer’s suits, changing her behavior, her gait, her posture, even her voice. Her Quirk was the Crew’s most treasured tool, their secret weapons, the ace hidden up their sleeves: but they only had to use it twice in their whole career (which spanned now nine years!) because they hadn’t had any need to. When they attacked, Sayuri was usually miles away, with a perfect alibi, because she had already given them all the relevant intel. Where were the exits, how many guards, what safe was filled with diamonds, everything.
… No wonder Toki had never realized how good of her liar her mother was, right until the moment she had been brought to the hideout. Sayuri was a born-chameleon, able to blend in any situation to be the most overlooked person around. She was, essentially, the perfect spy.
Great. Now Toki had a good idea of how strong they all were, which was a lot. But as for their weakness? Well, she could find some. But to go from observing the Crew to a plan to escape villainy… Well. That was a whole other story…
oOoOoO
Time passed and Toki celebrated her eighth birthday. She was almost surprised. The date had sneaked up on her. Time flew, right? It seemed that it had only been yesterday that she had been to Tokyo’s planetarium… and that her mother had used that distraction to uproot her from her old life, trap her with criminals, and cut off her escape route so she would have no choice but accept her fate.
Yes, Toki was still salty about that. Even if she had gotten used to her poorer and rougher school, even if she didn’t hate Meteor’s crew, even if it wasn’t that bad: yes, she was pissed about being tricked and used and lied to, and she was right to be. And really, why her mother was so surprised when Toki reacted with bitterness at the thought of another trip to the planetarium?
“You’re mad at me?” Sayuri stuttered.
“Had been for the past year, thank you for noticing.”
“Be nice to your mom, Munchkins,” her father said absent-mindedly from where he was typing on his laptop.
Toki crossed her arms. Sayuri looked at a loss for words:
“Why are you mad at me? I love you, sweetie. I was just trying to make you see reason. All I was doing was helping.”
Toki gritted her teeth. She felt like she was talking to a wall. But yelling wouldn’t help, would it? She paused. She held her breath and tried to make the bubbling mix of emotions in her belly calm again, so she could find the right words, the simpler ones, blunt and to the point, without any detours.
“I didn’t want that from you,” she finally said. “I know why you did it, Mom. I know you love me. But you need to think about my loves, too, my wants. You did it because you love me, but that was still about you.”
Sayuri bit her lip and looked to Meteor for help. He raised his hands defensively, as if to say ‘hey, don’t look at me, I’m not in the wrong here’. Which was pretty rich coming from the only person in the room who was a wanted criminal, but well, not completely false either. So finally, she turned back to Toki, and said hesitantly:
“Well, I will… take in consideration your wants from now on. I’m your mother so sometimes I know best, but I will always talk to you in advance about important things, alright? I should have told you about meeting your father. Hum… Sorry,” she said, after an awkward pause.
Toki pinched her lips. “I accept your apology.”
She had gotten into the habit of saying that instead of “it's okay” at school, when teachers made kids apologize for fighting, because she had noticed that she often wanted to accept apologies for things that were not really okay. For instance, when one of the kids had stolen her Teleportation-analysis notebook from her bag and ripped five pages of it. Granted, Toki had fixed it with tape so now it looked fine, but she had been pissed.
“So…” her mom smiled tentatively. “What do you want to do for your birthday?”
Asking for enrollment at university would be a little premature, so Toki wisely didn’t suggest that. Instead, she thought about it.
“Books.”
“Books?” Sayuri echoed.
“Lot of books. Also changing schools, or moving up a grade, because I hate it.”
Meteor and Sayuri looked at each other, and the man winced: “Changing school is expensive. And it stands out. Not recommended if we want to say below the radar.”
Toki inhaled, indignation bubbling up, and Sayuri pleaded quickly:
“More books? And online classes if you want?”
Toki held her breath a second, then deflated: “Alright.”
“Perfect! To the library it is!”
So Toki had… a lot of books for her anniversary. Like, a lot. Middle-school or even high-school-level textbooks, stories about wizards and stuff, a few novels, illustrated books about space and stars, a huge volume about the evolution of Quirks thought time, some educational comics about the ocean, a book about cats… Her purchases weighted a ton. She was very proud of it.
Well, before that, she also had gifts from the whole Crew. She stammered it wasn’t necessary, really, but even Fujio had brought something! Homura delightedly informed her that they had eight birthdays to make up for. After all, she was part of the family, wasn’t she?
Faced with the truth so boldly stated, Toki froze and was forced to concede. It was bittersweet. All this time she had refused to become one of them, but she had only focused on the fast that she didn’t want to be part of their criminal activities. It scared her. It blocked her from achieving her dream.
But… They weren’t just criminals.
Oh, it was the primary purpose of their group. It was visible at first glance. The whole Crew was a perfectly oiled machine, each of them perfectly covering the others’ weaknesses. Sayuri and Nono were discreet when the others were too flashy, Meteor was calculating when the others were lost, Homura brought fire and unpredictability to the group, Fujio was their precision hitter… They were the perfect hit force. But more than that, they were all friends. Family, Meteor had called them. He had been right. Toki had been there for months and she would have had to be blind to miss how much they loved and trusted each other. Her heart arched because she wanted friends like that, too. And they had all opened their heart to her…. Toki had tried to be cold and aloof, but she was just a lonely kid, and the people she spend time loved her: how could she not love them in return?
You can disapprove of what someone is doing without closing your heart to them. You couldn’t control your love. It grew on its own accord, like a tree putting roots into your whole being. So yeah. Toki loved them and hated them and was scared of them and pitied them, all at one. What a mess.
Anyway. She got a funny beanie with two holes for her macaron-like buns, a nightlight that projected the starry sky on her ceiling, a stuffed otter in her favorite color (orange), and pens with glittery ink that came with pretty stickers. She loved all of it, thanked the guys profusely, and almost teared up. They laughed it off, saying it was emotion, but Toki knew better.
It was guilt. Because those people loved her, cared for her, but all she wanted was to be free of them, even if it meant getting them arrested. How horribly selfish was she? What kind of monster could love people and still le to them, plot against them, plan to betray them? What kind of person do that to their family? What kind of person do that to themselves, turning against their own, knowingly breaking their own heart?
(Yeah, that birthday didn’t start great.)
In any case, once Toki dried her tears, her mother and her set off to the library. They bought a tremendous number of books, as promised. But her beginning-of-reconciliation, her guilty tears, and her fifteen new books… None of that was the most striking event of Toki’s eighth birthday. After shopping, her mother bought her ice-cream, then they sat down on a bench and Sayuri took a big breath. She seemed unusually nervous. Toki nibbled on her ice-cream, looking blankly straight at her. She swore that if her mom announced they were moving again, Toki was going to throw a fit. This past year spent with criminals had made her a lot more belligerent. If her mom wanted a nice, well-behaved daughter, she should have let her in her old school with posh teachers and soft-hearted kids, instead of exposing her to the rougher reality of the world.
“I said I would tell you about important stuff, didn’t I?” Sayuri smiled self-depreciatingly. “Well, I should start now, I think.”
Toki continued eating. Her mother took a big breath:
“You’re going to be a big sister, sweetie.”
Toki would have liked to say that she took the news with stoicism, but well… She let out an incredulous squeak, and she dropped her ice-cream right in her lap. It could have gone better.
“W-w-what?!”
What the actual fuck?!
Her mother breather in deeply, and put joined hands on the tables. Her hands were trembling, suddenly saw Toki. Her jointures were white with how tight she was pressing her hands, and her eyes were shiny with tears. She abruptly realized that her mother was scared, and it terrified her. She had never saw her mother afraid of anything.
“I found out yesterday,” the words tumbled out in a rush, as if Sayuri had barely held them back. “I’m already nine weeks along. I couldn’t believe it. After you were born, my doctor had told me I couldn’t get pregnant again, and that my health would never be as strong as before, and your birth was already difficult enough, so I… I didn’t think it was possible… Oh, Toki, I’m happy, I want you to have a baby brother or sister. Your Quirk is amazing, so your sibling’s will, too. But it’s so complicated! I haven’t even told Ryūsei yet…”
Sayuri took a hiccupping breath. She looked on the verge of crying. Toki jolted out of her daze, and tentatively reached out to pat her mother’s hands:
“Well, er, congratulations? And you should tell him. If he’s not supportive of your decision, tell me and I will beat him up.”
Sayuri hid her face in her hands and let out a wet little giggle, discreetly wiping her eyes. Toki stood there, awkward. She had a hard time wrapping her head around this. She already had enough on her plate trying to know her place here and plan for an escape route (even if, in all logic, she wouldn’t be able to really leave until her majority)… And now, she was going to have a little brother or sister? That was huge.
“So…” she hesitated, before blurting out: “You want to keep it, right?”
“Where did you learn about…? Never mind. Yes, Toki-chan, I want very much to keep it. He. Or she, if it’s a she.”
“You don’t know yet?”
Her mother laughed. It was a steadier sound, without tears, and Toki only realized how tense she had been when she relaxed her shoulder at hearing it.
“Not yet. I will know in about two weeks.”
“Oh.” Toki mulled that over for a few second, then she looked back up, frowning: “You said your health was bad? Is having a baby dangerous for you?”
“I should have expected you to ask the hard questions right away,” her mother sighed. “I… It’s more dangerous for me than for most mothers. For now, it’s mostly risky for the baby. When I had you, it had been difficult, there were complications. Long story short, there’s some scarring inside of me that could make my pregnancy difficult in the last months. The baby could get sick, get hurt, or… die. And if that happen, it could hurt me too.”
Her birth had been difficult? Toki had no idea. And it had left scarring? Scarring that put her mother’s health in danger?
“I’m sorry,” Toki said, aghast.
“Oh, sweetie, no, it’s absolutely not your fault. And it’s not that bad! If I’m careful, it will all go smoothly.”
“Careful how? Do you have to eat certain food? Or do some sport? Or not to do any sport at all? Ah! We walked so long to get here! Are you alright?”
Toki started fretting, hovering around her mother protectively, hands fluttering everywhere without daring to touch anything, especially her belly. Oh gods there was a baby in there. Fuck, did that meant that her parents had sex?! Gross! She would never be able to look Meteor in the eyes now. He had fucked her mom! Twice, at the very least! Ugh! Quick, she needed bleach for her brain.
“Calm down, calm down!” her mother sniggered. “For now, everything is fine. But in a few months, yes, maybe I will need to lay down a lot and be watched by doctors every day. And of that happen…” She hesitated, then soldiered on: “If that happened, Toki, I will go a hospital, to live here until the baby is born. It will be the best hospital in Japan and I will be totally safe, but that meant you will have to live with your dad for a little while.”
Toki had not anticipated that. She frowned reflexively and got ready to protest… then she shut her mouth.
What were her options? Even if she said no, it would happen. Nobody else could watch over her. And no matter how good Toki was, there was no way her mom would let her live alone for months. Besides, it wouldn’t change much from what she was used to, would it? Toki would go to school, then go the hideout. The only difference would be that she would sleep here instead of going back to her bedroom at home. Ugh. She hated the tiny, cell-like bedroom that was hers in the hideout. But oh well, worse came to worse, she could always teleport in her own bed and go back there in the morning. She could get pretty sneaky when she wanted to. Especially because she could fucking teleport.
It would also allow her to go visit her mom to the hospital pretty often. That last thought placated her a lot. So she shrugged:
“He’ll do. When are you going to tell him?”
“Next week,” Sayuri promised. “I have… I have an appointment to the doctor Saturday. I want to make sure everything is okay before I tell him.”
Toki nodded, and that was the end of conversation.
But holy shit, a baby! A whole other human being, dragged into this mess. Well, that mess wasn’t that bad. Toki was well aware she could have had worse. She could have been poor and go hungry for days. She could have had abusive parents that belittled her and hurt her. She could have had a bad Quirk that made her hated by her peers and bullied at school. So yeah, she had lucked out compared to others. She thought about canon characters like Shouto Todoroki or Tenko Shimura or even Izuku Midoriya, and yikes. Talk about a tragic backstory.
But it could have been so much better. She thought about Katsuki Bakugou, who had it so good and so easy from the beginning, showered with praised, rich, beloved by all, even by his scapegoat at school. She thought about Ochako Uraraka, whose parents had financial troubles but who never put their daughter in harm’s way, who loved and supported her whatever path she chose. She thought about Momo Yaoyorozu who was filthy rich, or Mirio Togata who struggled to control his Quirk but had the support of his whole family and had been hand-picked to succeed All-Might. Yes, it could have gone so much better.
Toki didn’t hate Meteor’s Crew. Sure, she hated that they hurt people and saw nothing wrong with it: but she hadn’t seen them hurt or kill anyone with her own two eyes, so it was only a clinical and impersonal knowledge. She was afraid of it, she hated it, she didn’t want it to continue, and she hated that they choose to keep at it… But she didn’t hate the Crew.
She loved them, actually.
What she hated… What she rejected… was the idea that it was inevitable. That they lived on the fringe of society and it was normal, that it allowed them to do whatever they wanted, and that it would be Toki’s life too because she owed them that much. No she didn’t! She didn’t owe them shit. Toki had her own dreams and desires! She didn’t want to spend her life feeling the guilt of having hurt or killed another human being. She didn’t want to be afraid of being arrested and thrown in jail. She didn’t want a life built on shifting sands, that could destroy her very existence in a blink without anybody caring. Toki wanted to build things. Rockets. Spaceships. Submarines. Maps. Theories. She wanted to reach out to something greater and beautiful, something that called her, and they all told her to look at the ground instead. They all believed that hunt and being hunted was the only path that awaited her, and they were fine with it.
Toki wasn’t fine with it. She wasn’t a prey or even a predator: she was a human being, a sentient creature that understood how vast and terrible life was, and how fucking fruitless it was to be a criminal when you could have other, better options.
Yes, she wanted to be safe from heroes, but that was like, the very base of the pyramid of needs. Toki wasn’t a coward, she could live with danger if it was useful or if she chose it. There was no reward without a little risk: space exploration had come with its own cost, and she was very much aware of it. It didn’t scare her. Well, it did, but in good, exciting way. The question had never been ‘how to live a life safe from harm’, it was ‘how to live a life worth the harm’, and the life of a villain wasn’t worth much. Villains were barred from joining society and contributing to it, and… Toki wanted that, she craved it like hunger. To build things, learn things, teach things, in the open, with lots of people to talk to and exchange information and knowledge. She couldn’t bear a life on the fringe of society, in the shadows.
So yeah. She loved her family. She had to accept it. But she hated what they did, she hated how they refused to change, and she hated what they wished her to become. And those two things were sometimes difficult to reconcile, but it didn’t make them less true.
Toki loved them but she had to leave. And to leave she had to break their heart. Either but escaping so totally they could never find her (and that would only happen when she reached eighteen)… Or by making them unable to catch up to her. Which would mean getting them arrested.
But that was a problem for another day. Right now it was still her birthday, and she was allowed to have a little fun at dinner. For example, wait for a lull in conversation and say…
“Where do babies come from?”
Nailed it. Everyone froze. It was hilarious. Suddenly, there wasn’t even the click of wooden sticks and bowls, or even a single noise of mastication. Everyone was exchanging wide-eyed, horrified looks. Toki blinked with candor, the picture of innocence. Meteor looked at Sayuri, but her mother had hidden her face in her hands and was sniggering helplessly.
“W-well,” her father stammered. “You see… Well…”
“It’s fine,” Toki snorted, taking pity on him. “I already know about how mammal reproduce.”
Sayuri made a little choked-up noise, her shoulders shaking with laughter. The rest of the table looked split between relief and alarm.
“Where did you learn that?” cautiously asked Meteor.
He looked like he was dreading the answer. Toki took another mouthful of rice and chewed thoroughly, pondering her answer. On one hand, she could say it was taught at school, and that would be it. On the other… Their faces! Oh gods, who knew such an innocent question could have this effect? That idea had been great. She had to milk it for all its worth.
“In books laying around.”
There was a new level of alarm in the adults’ faces, now. The ‘oh gods, have I let porn laying around in the house where an overly curious child wanders daily’ kind of alarm. Toki wanted to take a picture of this moment and frame it.
“Science books,” she finally smiled. “Relax.” She waited a beat, then added: “What did you think I meant?”
Yeah, she though while watching the adults flounder and try to change the subject. She could hate some things here, even most things. But she didn’t hate those people. In a sad, twisted way, they were really her family. It made things harder, didn’t it? It was a good thing she didn’t really have a plan to have them arrested, since she had never found a weakness in their organization.
But… That night, however, as she was drifting off to sleep, she suddenly realized that she had this weakness. The ace in Meteor’s sleeve was Sayuri and her Quirk, the perfect escape plan, the joker that made them impossible to catch. But Sayuri had told Toki, years ago, just after she had manifested her teleportation, that her own Quirk had a weakness.
She couldn’t use it when she was pregnant.
And so, she had handed Toki the key to put every single member of their family behind bars… If, of course, she could live with the guilt afterward.
Happy birthday.
(Toki hadn’t realized she had made her decision until she had to rush to the toilet to throw up.)
oOoOoOo
Sayuri fretted after Toki had been sick, but the girl smiled weakly and pretended to have eaten too much cake. She went back to bed and hid under the covers, shaking, feeling angry, guilty, elated, and terrified out of her wits. Sayuri was sidelined for months. If someone wanted to take out Meteor’s Crew, it was now or never. It could be quick and painless. Mom wouldn’t even know about until too late. And since there was no way for them to escape, maybe they would surrender. Especially if the difference of power was overwhelming, and that the police used their weakness against them. Using Homura’s family… Attacking Fujio from a distance… Using sleeping gas against Meteor… Subduing Nono before she jammed communications… It could be done. The police only needed to know. The police only needed Toki’s notebook.
The notebook she had specifically filled with information to take out the Crew, and now looked like a weapon.
It was some kind of cosmic joke. For a year now (well, more than that, since the first entry was her analysis of Sayuri’s Quirk), Toki had dutifully written everything needed to capture the Crew. How their Quirks worked. Their strengths. Their weaknesses. How to take them by surprise. How good they were at hand-to-hand combat, how agile, how physically fit, how quick… She had analyzed them as enemies, even as she had grown close to them. She had dissected Homura’s power and his psychologic profile even as she had begun to love his jokes, his carefulness, the way his voice went soft when he talked about his children. She had pondered over Fujio’s experience and how to best disable him, while she had delighted in the textbooks he brought her. She loved those people, but taking them apart in her little notebook had never registered as something wrong, because it hadn’t been real, you know? She was only protecting herself. It was just planning. She hadn’t decided to act, not yet.
But Toki had decided to act. All this time… she was just deluding herself into thinking she was only waiting for the right opportunity. And now the perfect opportunity had landed on her lap… So what was she going to do?
It wasn’t a question of right of wrong, because that was too easy. Toki was very cartesian in her approach to morality. She could figure out what the right thing to do was through logic and reason. Without having read much philosophical books (which she mentally added to her to-do-list, before scolding herself because hey! Priorities! Moral dilemma now, shopping list later!), Toki was fond of ethical thought experiments.
The logical thing to do was to weight her two options and pick the ethical one. Saving the few or the many. Helping the heroes or helping the villains. Protecting the Crew’s future victims or protecting the Crew’s members. She knew what was the right option, what was the morally acceptable answer, what she was expected to pick as a dutiful member of society.
It was right. But oh, how could it be right and be so painful? So frightening? She would have to live with it. No amount of ‘it was for the greater good’ would make disappear the fact that she was selling out her family. But how could she live with herself, if she didn’t do anything? Because if she kept quiet… Every single person that the Crew would kill or hurt later on would be on her conscience. She would have their blood on her hand, as someone who could have saved them and choose not to. Wasn’t that a heavier burden to carry?
So Toki took her notebook. She always left a few blank pages after her analysis of each people’s Quirk, so she could add notes later on. She had written so much about Sayuri’s Swap-Space that she only had one sheet left. One page to give away her greatest weakness. One page to reveal how Meteor’s Crew could be caught helpless. She smoother the paper, then carefully stated writing.
The countdown had begun.
She thought that her decision would change something in her life, but it didn’t. Everybody continued to live unaware. After a week, Sayuri told Meteor about her pregnancy. Understandably, he freaked out. But he was also happy. He told every single member of his crew with a huge smile on his face, and Toki suddenly wondered if he loved this baby already. If he had loved her like that too. Had he been thrilled to become a father? She always had thought no, it can’t be, because Sayuri had pretty much been sent away to raise her, but… When she saw how delighted he was, how proud, how doting…
She wondered. That was all.
Of course it wasn’t all happiness and rainbows. Sayuri’s doctor was categoric: her pregnancy was going to be complicated. There was a fifty-percent chance that either the mother or the baby wouldn’t make it. It would be for the best if, in one month or maybe two, she went to the hospital and stayed here. Something about the baby not being hung up right inside? Toki wasn’t obstetrician, but if someone told her mom to lay down for five months because there were malfunctioning fixations in her uterus, she was going to take his word for it. Anyway, Sayuri (and Meteor) immediately started looking for the best hospital the country has to offer. Obviously it wasn’t the closest, since they lived in the poorer neighborhood of Tokyo. They finally decided on the Central Hospital in Musutafu. They had a lot of health-specialized heroes in the city, like Recovery Girl.
(And wasn’t that another example of how heroism was twisted? Those people were doctors and nurses, and they had healing powers. But in order to use them, they had to be pro heroes. They had to have a military instruction, and they were only granted a license after a combat-centered exam. What a ridiculous idea! That meant that the others healers, the one who didn’t know how to fight, were forbidden to use their powers to saves lives? When she would be done with her astrophysics doctorate and had launched one or two spaceships, Toki would roll up her sleeves and fix that stupid excuse for a society. Really, people were so illogical.)
But back to the point. For most of her parents’ conversations about Musutafu, Toki was politely sent home, or distracted by another member of the crew. At the beginning, she felt a bit miffed. Sure, she was a kid, but she wasn’t immature. She could handle talk about illness and hospital. Yes it was scary to think about the danger to her mother’s health, but Toki could be rational about it. Ignorance didn’t make the problem go away! Then, after a few weeks and finally one big tantrum, Toki was sat down by her mother how calmly explained her that hospitals were expensive and that the Crew was also planning on robbing one bank before Sayuri was hospitalized. The two topics were overlapping because they wanted to rob a bank in the same city as the hospital, because in some twisted way, it would increase the security there and make Sayuri safer.
Oh.
So the crew wanted to rob a bank in Musutafu. Right next to Yūei. Where plenty of others heroes lived. Cool cool cool. Toki wasn’t freaked out about this at all. Ok, maybe she was, but just a tiny bit. Because hello?! Danger?! She also had a moment of blind panic: should she move up her timeline and give the notebook to the police now? She didn’t know when the robbery was going to happen! If she wanted to stop it, she should act now. But suddenly, even after accumulating so much knowledge, Toki felt like she was flying blind… Or more exactly, she was frozen in indecision.
Where to begin? Who should she give the notebook to? The Tokyo police? The Musutafu one? A hero? But how to approach them? She couldn’t be seen. It would be a catastrophe. But she couldn’t exactly teleport in the police station. She had never been there, and she needed to know her destination to jump somewhere.
And the time flew, days then weeks slipping between her fingers like water.
Her mother was rarely home. She had gone to Musutafu by train to check out the place. Officially she was preparing her arrival at the hospital, but unofficially… Well, she was probably doing her job as a spy, scouting out the bank, spotting the guards patrols’ routes, analyzing the patterns. The rest of the Crew was preparing. Nono was talking all day long about cars, trucks, false trails and hidden outposts to switch vehicles. Homura was tinkering with flamethrowers and pondering over buildings’ blueprints. Fujio was more taciturn than usual, and some cupboards started sporting child-proof locks.
When Toki glimpsed what was inside one day where Fujio was rummaging around, she saw dark metal that looked like the barrel of an automatic weapon. She didn’t say a word, and tiptoed back out of the room, biting her tongue so hard she tasted blood. Her heart was pounding. Those weapons were real. They made the whole thing very tangible, suddenly: those were real guns that fired real bullets and were going to be used on real people. She had a hard time reconciling that with the people she knew, the one who made her laugh and brought her books, even if she had already been aware they all had blood on their hands. She had known, for fuck’s sake, so why was it so heart-wrenching?!
Meteor was often gone, but when he was home, he seemed much more animated than usual. Toki had never thought her father subdued or peaceful before, but now that the imminent assault filled him with nervous energy, he was almost manic. His smiles were toothy grins that reminded Toki of a tiger spotting a gazelle. He talked more loudly, laughed more often. His amber eyes flashed gold or orange at the oddest time, like some kind of ominous mood-stones.
Toki was now too familiar with him to be actually freaked out, but she found the change unsettling.
Her notebook was filled to the brim with sensitive information. Everybody’s Quirk, everybody’s weaknesses. Homura and Meteor were the only ones using their Quirks during their robberies (which was why they had villains’ names), while Nono and Fujio fought mostly Quirkless. Still, they were powerful. Fujio had a low radar Quirk and could pinpoint the position of people around him (very handy when he had a sniper gun…. Toki tried not to think about it), and Nono’s Quirk allowed her to jam low-frequency radio signals, which she used in addition to the Crew’s high-tech jammers. They were all individually dangerous, but together, they were unstoppable. That was why they had to be stopped. That was why Toki needed to get her shit together and act.
Especially, she realized, since she was soon going to be forced to work with the Crew.
It wasn’t obvious. But… Her father started asking more and more pointed questions about her Quirk. Then questions weren’t enough and he started testing her. Jumping to her old house, jumping in the planetarium in Tokyo, jumping alone, jumping with a bag filled with heavy books… Just like Sayuri used to do, once upon a time.
But Toki felt petrified, her adrenaline spiked, and even if she tried to downplay her power, she knew that it wasn’t enough. Even with half her strength, she would be an invaluable asset to a band of bank-robbers. For example, Toki pretended not being able to carry more than ten kilos, although her max was probably around twenty (her own weight). And even if she fumbled around in her anxiety, she hadn’t been able to dodge all of his tests… She had jumped twenty kilometers (the distance between here, and the planetarium) and she had overplayed her exhaustion afterward, but the damage was done. Her father knew how big her range was.
Besides, Toki’s power had never stopped getting stronger. She was less supervised since the adults were all busy, so she tried to put her newfound freedom to good use. She roamed the neighborhood, sometimes walking but more often than not jumping from streets to streets… Then, after accidentally finding out how great the view was, from rooftop to rooftop. She probably gave a heart attack to a few residents but hey, she was allowed to have some fun, wasn’t she?
(Technically she had never gotten a formal authorization to go outside, but she was pretty sure that Meteor knew what she was doing anyway.)
And so she started getting quicker, more reactive, Sometimes trying to jump in the air then jump again before gravity reasserted itself and she went into freefall. It was exhilarating. It was like flying.
If she wanted to be a criminal, she would be virtually unstoppable. Same thing if she wanted to be a hero, actually, but Toki had never really considered the idea.
The countdown was getting shorter. It was now December. Toki still hadn’t given her notebook to the police. She wanted to wait until her mother was safe in the hospital, where nurses and doctors would watch over her. This self-assigned deadline reassured her a little bit, but it couldn’t stop her bad feeling about the incoming robbery… And what her father planned for her.
“I don’t want to rob banks,” she abruptly said one day to her mother. “You know that hadn’t changed, right?”
She had waited evening, when she and her mom were home alone, away from the hideout. It would have sent a stronger message to have this conversation with her father, but Toki had never claimed to be brave. Theses day, Meteor was… unpredictable.
“Oh, sweetie,” Sayuri smiled softly. “You’re only eight. Nobody is going to ask you to break into a safe and shoot people.”
It was a chilling reminder that Meteor and his crew would do that. Toki stiffened.
“But I don’t want to do anything,” she argued. “I don’t want to help them hurt or kill people in any way, or be their mule… And yes, I guessed what Dad intend to do with my Quirk, it wasn’t hard, please give me some credit.”
Her mom didn’t even deny it. It was infuriating.
“Your father’s plan keeps your involvement to a minimum and it’s only if they don’t manage it all on their own,” Sayuri said in a reasonable tone that made Toki want to scream. “You won’t be in any danger. You will just go somewhere, pick something up, and come home. It will be over in a blink. It’s all for your little brother or sister. Don’t you want to help me take care of my health?”
“Are you emotionally blackmailing me?”
Her mother shrugged: “Is it working?”
“No! Yes! Maybe!”
Her mom snorted, then went back to being serious.
“It’s our livehood, Toki. Even if you don’t like it.”
“But you don’t need me for it!”
“Maybe not. But even as strong as your father is… He can’t reach his success without help. It takes a village.”
Oh, gods, after the emotional blackmail, there was the altruistic wisdom. Toki grit her teeth, fuming. Her mother saw it wasn’t working, and changed her angle:
“I know you don’t like the idea of breaking the law, but it’s going to happen anyway. Wouldn’t you prefer that all of what’s going to happen have a purpose? Otherwise, it will all be for nothing.”
Well, logic was better than trying to guilt her into helping, but still.
“It shouldn’t happen at all!”
“But it’s going to. You can either turn it into something useful, like help for my hospital bills, or you can let all those efforts go to waste.”
Toki waved her arms, sputtering helplessly: “Don’t speak of that like it’s inevitable! It’s not some sort of natural disaster, it’s a crime, it’s done by rational human beings who decided to execute a specific action. It’s completely preventable, and it shouldn’t happen!”
Her mother smiled, softly: “Ah. But it’s not up to you, is it?”
And she was right. Only Meteor’s Crew could decide to not act. Toki had no control over them. Toki only had control over her own actions, and even then, that was relative. Because if she decided to do a sitting and not participate, what would she change? The robbery would still happen. The only difference would be that the money may be lost and the risks would have been taken for nothing. Toki would probably receive a good trashing (none of the adults had ever been violent towards her, but she had never made them angry, either…). They would have to prepare a new robbery, because Sayuri would still be pregnant and would still need the hospital.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck. There was no way out of this mess, was it?
The countdown was still ticking. Nobody told Toki the date of the assault. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to know. It would probably happen after her mother was in the hospital, so she would have the perfect alibi. But days passed and nothing happened.
Then came the day of her mother’s check-in at the hospital, on Christmas’ eve, the 24th of December. Sayuri went back to Musutafu… And this time, she bought Toki with her. They stopped in a few stations to walk a little. Toki didn’t miss the fact that every stop was between ten and forty kilometers from each other. She didn’t even feel betrayed. Simply scared, and resigned. It was going to happen anyway. Once her mother was in the hospital, Toki would give her notebook to the police. Maybe it would be read and used fast enough to prevent the attack. Maybe not. But in any case… Toki could do nothing more.
Once in Musutafu, Sayuri wandered a little in the subway, changing stations twice and getting lost in the financial district although Toki had seen the map and knew they were going the wrong way. She didn’t say anything, though. She obediently followed her mother and, on her instructions, memorized discreet places to teleport. Even when they snuck in a corridor for ‘authorized personal only’, walked in a maze of hallways until they found a bathroom, and Sayuri showed Toki how to open the water tank of the second toilet to the right. It was there that money would be stored.
It felt a little surreal, as if it was really happening to someone else. For fuck’s sake, it was Christmas. She wasn’t actually doing that, right? Toki was a smart girl. She was in control of her life. She had big dreams. She wasn’t actually rummaging around men’s toilets to prepare to transport a lot of cash, right? Right?
She followed her mother out in a daze. They went to the hospital. Sayuri was put in a big, comfortable room, and Toki was allowed to go with her. Sayuri chatted with the nurse, telling her (highly-edited) life-story to pass the time. Apparently Sayuri was a modest widow, she had no family, nobody could watch her daughter until tonight when a professional sitter would come and take her home (yeah, fat chance of that), and her job was in journalism. The nurse was easily drawn into conversation, while Toki nervously played with her pens and didn’t dare to open her notebooks. Her stomach was tying itself into knots, she wouldn’t be able to write anything.
Then, two hours after their arrival, there was an alarm. Because she was watching for it, Toki was the only one to see the flash of relief on her mother’s face.
Toki felt her heart sink.
They wouldn’t have dared… Would they? Not so soon. Sayuri hadn’t even been here for a day.
But it was perfect, Toki realized with horror. Not only because it was Christmas, and the city was busting with activity… But also because both Sayuri and Toki were safe. The hospital was well protected. And in the chaos… Nobody would check on one, lonely kid. One kid who could teleport, and who was conveniently sitting at jumping distance from the place where Meteor’s Crew was going to hide their spoils.
They had all planned it out. Toki had been stupid to believe their plan was going to revolve around her mother. Toki herself was a key-player. It was Toki’s arrival in Mustafu that set the plan in motion, not her mother’s!
And what could she do?! Nothing! She sat frozen for the whole hour the alarm rang. Apparently the robbery was done in less than five minutes, but the whole area was frantically searched for the criminals. Every hero was on the streets, cursing the villains who had given them the slip.
Toki felt like her tongue was stuck in her mouth.
If she spoke, if she said ‘they are using the subway tunnels’, she could end it. But she didn’t. Like a coward, she stayed silent. She waited. She felt numb. Cold and distant and fuzzy, as if breathing was happening into someone else body. She had to hid in the bathroom to wipe her tears of fear and anger. Her anxiety was like a ball of lead in her stomach. A nurse offered her something to eat, but she had to shake her head, her throat too closed up to even speak. If she ate, she would be sick.
It took an eternity for things to calm down. Then, Sayuri patted her head and told her: “You know what you have to do.”
Toki nodded, and went. She still felt numb. The so-called professional sitter was a teenager that had come only to reassure the adults (in case they wouldn’t let a kid leave the hospital alone) and who ditched her as soon as they crossed the road. Toki realized her hands were shaking. She wanted to throw up.
She teleported in the subway. The bathroom was deserted. Feeling like a puppet whose strings were pulled by someone else’s hand, Toki mechanically opened the water tank in the second toilet to the right. There was a backpack wrapped in a plastic bag to protect it from the water. Toki took it. It weighted exactly ten kilograms, she could tell. Meteor had done his job well. Toki closed her eyes, and even if she felt sick, she jumped. First the dingy corner outside the train station, then the dustbin near Mishima’s station, then the shadowed nook in the streets of Oyama… and so on. Until she teleported right in the hideout’s kitchen.
There was no one. Of course. They were all busy planting false trails and running away. None of them could teleport, so it would be while before they came back here. A day, maybe two. Most likely three.
Toki was shaking like a leaf. She let the bag on the table, dripping wet and cold like a dead body, then she had to run away to the bathroom and heave. She only vomited bile but she sobbed uncontrollably, trembling all over, tears and snot running on her face.
Gods, she was so scared. She was disgusted and guilty and scared and she wanted it to stop. She wanted it to never have happened. She wanted someone to hold her and tell her that everything would be alright, but there was no one, was it?! Her family was all in it. And none of them were here. Her mom was in the hospital, her father and his friends were running around somewhere. They had all left her. They had used her and pressured her and now they had left her to deal with the aftermath, not even having the human decency to pat her head or just to be there, and she was so scared, she didn’t want to be alone, please, don’t leave me alone!
She was supposed to go home and sleep. Her mom had told her there would be leftovers in the fridge, and Toki was expected to take care of herself until the Crew came back. But well, her mother had expected her to be exhausted after her teleportation. Toki was tired, true, but she hadn’t exhausted all of her energy. And the idea of going home, in an empty apartment, in the dark, to go to sleep all alone… It felt horrible.
Toki didn’t want to be alone. She couldn’t bear to be alone. She wanted someone to cry with, someone to comfort her, someone to help… Someone, anyone. But every single person who loved her was gone, busy doing the very thing that was breaking her heart, so Toki sneaked in her old cell-like bedroom, and cried herself to sleep while hugging the orange stuffed otter that her father had bought her for her birthday.
The next morning, when she would turn on the news, she would learn that the robbery had been a success and that her family was safe. The three criminals and their driver were on the run. Nobody knew where they were headed. Toki hated that she felt a wave of relief. A little part of her had been worried for them. Nono who taught her to sew, Homura and his little fire tricks, Fujio and his gruff acknowledgments. Even her dad. Especially her dad: kind and clever and ruthless and so charismatic.
Then the news anchor continued speaking, and Toki’s relief was chased by crushing dread.
Their assault had made three dead and six wounded.
The very next day, she put a few more info in her notebook. On the cover, she wrote METEOR’S CREW. Then, to hide her tracks, she went to the one of the stations she had stopped on the road to Musutafu. She walked to the post office from there, and send her notebook to All Might’s agency. She addressed it to Sir Nighteye, who as a canon character was known for his efficiency, but who in real life was also relatively unknow, which ensured her letter wouldn’t be lost in a pile of fanmail.
There. It was done. It wouldn’t fix anything, true, but every action, even futile, was better than passive acceptance.
(If she didn’t tell someone, then all the blood Meteor spilled would be on her hands.)
Notes:
Aaaaaaand now the fun part is going to begin ! Toki has taken the first step towards her freedom...
EDIT 12/08/2022
Fixed some spelling mistakes. Slight edits done to Toki and Meteor's conversation where he mention his limitations and the fact that he comes from Fukuoka. Mention made of Meteor being an information broker in his spare time. When Meteor tests Toki's range with her Quirk, the atmosphere between them is less antagonistic than in the first draft.
Chapter 5: Not all those who wander are lost
Summary:
Toki is eight years old and has sold out her parents to All Might. Now is time to paid the price.
Also, funny thing: she hadn't thought at all of what was going to happen to her afterward. Really, you would expect her to be better at this "planning ahead of disaster" thing, right?
Notes:
Sooooo there it is ! Toki has sent her notebook to the police... and now, the consequences!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
NOT ALL THOSE WHO WANDER ARE LOST
Toki didn’t speak much the following days. She was digesting what had happened. Her part in the theft. Her anonymous letter. She was also bracing for impact. Nobody knew it was coming, but Toki did. She had sold them out. It would all be over soon.
Was it bad? Was it good? Right or wrong was so difficult to determine… Morality was always so personal, and Toki’s feelings were definitively compromised here. She could only comfort herself by knowing she had taken the logical decision. Humans were fallible. Logic was not. And logic dictated that she saves Meteor’s future victims.
She tried to pour her feelings in her poetry notebook, because it had helped in the past. But it suddenly seemed futile. There was no turn of phrase, no clear assemblage of words that could translate how she felt. The choking guilt. The determination. The rage, the hatred, the sadness. The love. The pain. The feeling of betrayal. She wrote and erased and wrote again. The words built up, but they didn’t come out right. Toki may have been smart but she was no real poet: the little quotes and verses that littered her notebooks were memories of books and songs from another time. There was no poem that could capture the heartbreak of pulling out corrupted roots, or the impotent anger that burned your chest, or the crushing feeling of sobs and wails that stayed stuck in your throat. There were no words to tell how stupid she felt, because she had known, she had fucking know from the start, and yet… ! So Toki wrote, frantically, furiously, until her fingers cramped up and her jaw wasn’t clenched so tight. And yet it wasn’t enough.
This is the house that built me
and I'm going to burn it down
This is the river I crawled from
and I refuse to drown here
You've got to bite the hand that starve you
What is a home if not the first place
you learn to run from?
She wrote verses and songs’ lyrics and furious flood of nonsensical prose, and maybe something in her chest unclenched a little, but it wasn’t nearly enough. What Toki felt couldn’t be fixed by writing or talking about it. Some situations cannot be resolved by understanding but only by action. Toki needed to do something to fix it. And maybe the action felt bad, because who wouldn’t hurt at cutting ties with their loved ones? But the alternative was to do nothing, and it was killing her inside.
So yeah. Toki had posted her letter, and now, she wrote. Wasn’t it all she could do? She was only a child. Even if she was a little prodigy, a teleporter, and a future astrophysicist, Toki was only just Toki.
Nono was the first to come home, two days later. Then Fujio, the day after. Then, two days after that, Homura and Meteor, congratulating each other on a job well-done. Just in time for the New Year. They all rejoined and laughed in delight when sharing their part of the loot. Now that the heist was done, they had no problem bragging about their plans. They had taken the bank hostage, entered the safe, and stolen several billions, but their real genius came during their escape plan. Escaping was always the tricky part: heroes weren’t often fast enough to stop the crime, but they all loved chasing criminals once their bad deeds was committed and justice had to be given. Heroes had the advantage: they knew the city. Hence the false trails. The real money and jewels had been hidden in the subway, but Homura and Meteor had each taken big duffel bags (similar to what the hostage had seen them leave the bank with) filled with newspaper clippings. From a distance it looked as if they were each carrying half their loot. And so, when they accidentally lost their bags… Heroes, police and avid onlookers alike chased the bag rather than the criminal, creating chaos and confusion. Nobody has expected it, because Meteor’s Crew was famed for their violence and their disappearing acts, but they had never used decoys before.
They shared the money. It was one billion each (the equivalent of ten million dollars). And each, it meant there was a part for Toki. Her part was actually a bit smaller (apparently Sayuri was taking a cut) but it was still hers, and it made her stomach twist unpleasantly.
“It’s for your university’s enrolment!” laughed Homura. “You can get as many doctorates as you like now!”
“Happy New Year,” Fujio added dryly, tossing notes in the air like confetti.
She wanted to punch them. Or maybe break down and cry. Or maybe just scream. She wasn’t sure. She settled for a glare. How could they joke about that? People had died for that money. Toki didn’t want it.
“I will keep it safe for you,” promised Meteor. “You’ll use it when you feel ready.”
Toki wanted to toss the bag of cash to his face. Or maybe yell at him that he should send that money to the victims. But it wouldn’t make her hands any cleaner. The thought finally untied her tongue, and she snapped angrily:
“People are dead. I saw it on TV.”
Meteor’s face darkened slightly, but he didn’t seems otherwise bothered. None of them were. It only incensed Toki further, especially when her father shrugged:
“We always give them the option to run away. Those guys tried to play heroes. It’s a job that come with a risk.”
“Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” snorted Nono.
Toki threw her a horrified glance, disgusted by her carelessness. Nono had always been so kind and patient: it was jarring to see her so indifferent to other people’s pain and grief. But the woman only raised an eyebrow, unrepentant. She wouldn’t lose any sleep over it, Toki realized. None of them would.
She left, slamming the door behind her. She heard her father sigh, and Homura said in a comforting tone:
“She’ll come around, you’ll see.”
No, she wouldn’t come around. And no, he wouldn’t see, either. Toki took a some vindictive pleasure at that. It was going to stop, and she would be the one responsible. They would all go to jail…
Well, maybe Sayuri wouldn’t. Japanese people were very protective of children, even unborn ones. So the most hardened criminal could have the best medical treatment if she turned out to be pregnant, because gods forbid the baby was harmed. Japan didn’t have a high birth-rate and children were a precious resource after all. Especially pure-blooded Japanese. Especially pureblooded Japanese whose parents had powerful Quirk. Yep, Japan was a little bit eugenicist. Nothing new. Toki vaguely remembered it had been like this even Before, in the twenty-first century.
As for Toki… Well.
What would be her fate, once the police arrested everyone? She was an accomplice. But also a child… and a little bit of a coward. She didn’t want to get imprisoned. Ironical, considering she was the party responsible for everybody else’s arrests. But if she was caught, her role in the robbery would come to light. Of course the law would want her punished… and she would also have to testify to the Crew’s trial. No way.
She would have to run away. Where? She wasn’t sure yet. But hey, if everybody was arrested, there would be no one left to claim her if she turned up one day at the police station with a fake name. No one would know who she was. Nobody knew Meteor had a daughter, after all. She just had to disappear some weeks and then reappear somewhere else. Easy, right?
Well. All she had to do was wait. She had no idea if the police were going to arrest the Crew right here at the hideout (she had noted its address, though, because Meteor had once mentioned this place had been theirs for almost ten years and they had no intention to move anywhere else). Or maybe they would pick them off one by one. Or maybe they would ignore her notebook entirely… It made Toki felt both sickly relieved and churning with powerless anger. She wanted to make things right.
She continued to go out more and more. The adults weren’t so busy anymore, and they paid more attention to her disappearances, but when Toki tersely told them she was practicing her Quirk, they backed off. They didn’t quite tell her it was good training for the future, but she could see their approval. Urgh. Her father fussed a little, telling her she should have adult supervision and try not been seen in the neighborhood, but even he let her run away when she wanted. Toki had already proven how independent she was, after all. If she had managed just fine during the weeks while they were planning their robbery, why change things now?
So Toki was allowed the kind of freedom that was usually associated with Pokemon trainers. At eight years old, she wandered the city alone, going from street to street and (more often than not) from roof to roof. It was the dead of winter but she had warm clothes, so it didn’t bother her. She explored as much as she could, using the most of daylight. She didn’t have to have visited a place to teleport here: if she could see it, she could jump here, so she just had to land eyes on a window ledge five stories-high and hop, she was there. And alright, it was very high, and she had a couple of freak-out: but she was getting used to heights. And besides… if she started falling, she just teleported to the ground, and stopped her fall before she gained any momentum.
Momentum. Another funny thing to play with. She had the idea one day, and played around the whole week, until she had a hang of it. Momentum was simply movement: if she could direct it, well…. It could be like flying. Well, Toki already know how to fly, in theory: she just had to teleport a few meters high in the sky, then higher, then higher, then chose her direction and continue to teleport up in the air… But the problem was the landing. Because jumping in the sky meant falling. And once you’re falling, well, stopping was hard.
Once when she had been a kid… or well, a younger kid… Toki had tried to teleport ten meters high to see if she could fly. Obviously it hadn’t worked. She had freaked out and teleported right back on the ground. But now she was more confident, and she tried it again. Teleporting high, falling, then teleporting up again, fall, teleport again… And each time, she kept her momentum, falling faster and faster. It was like a very long free-fall… But Toki could shift position during her jumps. So to stop that momentum…. Instead of teleporting falling toward the earth, she teleported upside-down, the speed from her fall propelling her up instead. Her momentum versus gravity. Inevitably, gravity won, and Toki’s speed crawled to a stop. And when she was immobile, suspended in midair just before she started falling down again, bam! She teleported on the ground again.
Her legs were a little unsteady but at least she didn’t go splat. Success.
So. A week passed, and Toki learned how to fly. Well, how to use her controlled falls to cross long distances. Which was kind of a useless move, since she could teleport anywhere, but hey. It helped her get a bird’s view from the city and find new places to teleport. From ground-level, she could only see so much. With her jumps, she had managed to see kilometers away. She had even seen a McDonald! She hadn’t been aware they had them in Japan. Or well, that this brand had survived the centuries.
She stopped a purse-snatcher, too. It was such a small and easy thing, it should have been anectodical. She saw the guy running and heard the woman yelling at him, teleported just in front of the thief, grasped the bag and teleported away in a blink just as the man tripped on her and started falling down. Toki reappeared in front of the screaming woman (who was so surprised she shut up), gave her the purse with a grin, then disappeared. It all happened in less than three seconds. Really, it was nothing: but Toki couldn’t help but feel a thrill of elation all day long. She had fun, but more than that, she had felt strong and useful.
If that astrophysicist thing didn’t work out, she could always be a hero.
But well. Days crawled by. Two weeks, then three passed. Toki was offered to go and see her mother, but she said no. She didn’t want to see Sayuri again so soon. She couldn’t forget how casually dismissive her mother had been of her feelings, how her last words to her had been ‘you know what to do’. She was angry, and she was allowed to be. Meteor probably thought it was just a childish tantrum, or maybe jealousy towards her unborn baby brother… but at least he didn’t force her to go.
Yes, it was going to be a brother. Sayuri was apparently in contact with the Crew via email. Was it surer than the phone? Who knew. In any case, she sent coded messages with regularity. Most of her emails had a kind word for Toki, but they were all obviously for Meteor, because it was about her health, the baby, her stay at the hospital. Private stuff, not Crew stuff. Meteor always stared longingly at his screen when he received her mails. He was a ruthless murderer, but no one could deny he was also a loving husband. It made Toki feel weird. Why couldn’t Meteor feel towards others people the same empathy and compassion he held for his family?
Anyway. In her latest email, Sayuri had sent ultrasound pictures as well as a bunch of baby names. Apparently she liked the name Hikari. What was that with Sayuri and giving her kids unisex names that somehow would have fit the opposite gender better? Toki would have been better as a boy name, and Hikari was better for a girl! Really, mom…
Days passed.
Four weeks after the robbery, the police raided the hideout.
It was midday. It was the week-end, so they were all here. They were eating in the kitchen. Toki was munching on a part of lemon pie while reading a book on her lap (living with criminals made for poor table manners) and the adults were chatting, making plans about summer, arguing half-heartedly about which car was the best. Nono was talking about quitting her taxi job, because while Sayuri was gone, it was Nono who played the role of the responsible adult in Toki’s life for her teachers and so she had to pick her up at school. Fujio was discreetly stealing the pie part in Homura’s plate, and he hadn’t noticed, engulfed into a heated recounting of a car chase during his teenage years. Meteor was quietly laughing at him while scrolling on his phone. It was calm, it was normal.
“Can you pass me the water, Munchkin?” her father asked, not looking up from his phone.
“What about the magic word?” Toki grumbled.
“Give it, or else?”
Toki rolled her eyes, and passed him the bottle: “Screw you.”
“Sayuri is going to murder us when she finds out what kind of things we taught her baby,” laughed Homura.
“Fujio is the one who taught her swear words!” protested Nono.
Fujio only smirked: “It’s educational.”
“Fuck,” deadpanned Toki.
Nono raised her arms to the sky as if asking it to witness how much she was surrounded by idiots. Meteor and Homura both laughed. Even Fujio cracked a smile. Toki snorted, trying to stay distant but still finding it funny.
Then something smashed through the window and landed on the table. Toki looked at it in a split-second of wide-eyed shock, saw it was a smoking canister, thought ‘oh shit’, and then the thing exploded.
It was probably only a flashbang grenade, but Toki still teleported shrieking in pain.
She landed blindly on a roof she knew well about half a kilometer away, the first place that had popped in her mind when thinking of an escape. The landing was rough, and she fell on her knees. Her eyes, her eyes! She was blind! Toki desperately clutched at her head, her eyes burning, her ears ringing so strongly it drowned everything around her. She blinked hopelessly, feeling something hot running on her face. Tears? Blood? Her whole head hurt, she had no idea if she had been hit by shrapnel. She frantically wiped her face, blinking and blinking until, to her great relief, she started seeing light again. Everything was blurry, but she wasn’t blind anymore. She staggered to her feet. Her ears were still ringing, but not so loudly anymore, and she could hear… Gunfire? Screaming?
No, those were explosions… And roars of rage. A familiar voice. Toki’s stomach sank. Meteor. Dad.
She crawled to the edge of the roof. Her vision was still fuzzy but she could see that the hideout’s building was smoking, partially blown up, and that the place was crawling with heroes. Several pieces of rubbles floated in the air before violently raining down on the heroes. Then there was a roar of green fire and a hero who was climbing the building fell down screaming. Gunfire thundered. Frozen in place, Toki could only watch how everything descended into hell. Explosion, pieces of wreckage flying like guided missiles, fire spreading on the upper floor, screaming, gunfire, people calling for help, yelling…
Then All Might appeared. Toki recognized him by his ridiculous hair and by his billowing cape. He smashed into the building like a wrecking ball, and the gunfire stopped. Seconds later, so did the fire. All Might jumped back in the streets, deftly avoiding the projectiles controlled by Meteor, and tossed the two people under his arms (Fujio and Homura, Toki guessed with a shiver) to the police, before going back to the half-destroyed floor in one powerful jump. Toki gripped the edge of the roof, frantically trying to see what was happening. Fujio had been responsible for the gunfire, and Homura for the fire, and they had been caught: but what about the others? Had Nono escaped? Toki hoped she had, then suddenly felt awfully guilty about it.
And what about Meteor? Rubble was still raining down on the streets, pieces of the building exploding outward to harpoon everyone in sight…. Then, with an end-of-world groan of tortured metal and breaking concrete, the structure started leaning toward the right. It was fucking collapsing, the torn apart building unable to support its own weight.
Toki opened her mouth on a soundless, horrified cry. The fifty-five meters of concrete were falling, the whole thing rumbling and groaning so loudly that she could hear it from her roof. It was leaning out of balance, like a slowed-down scene in a horror movie, slowly collapsing on the side like a massive cut tree. The fall seemed to never end. There were people screaming in terror. One hero dressed in bright yellow darted in and out of any open windows, using what looked like a speed Quirk to get people out as fast as he could: but then, a flying block of cement and twisted pipes hit him like a cannonball, snatching him from the air and slamming him against a wall that from gray became red. There was more yelling. The yellow hero didn’t get up. Toki realized she had raised her hands to her face and was biting her fist hard enough to draw blood. Her head was pounding, and she didn’t know if it was the flash-grenade from earlier or the sheer horror of what was happening. She hadn’t wanted this. She hadn’t wanted any of this!
The huge building fell.
The impact shook the whole neighborhood: Toki could feel the tremor in the roof she was standing on. An enormous cloud of dust rose, drowning the whole place, rushing through the streets like a shockwave. From her perch, Toki could still see rubble flying in all directions.
There was a lone silhouette levitating above the chaos, raining devastation on his enemies, and Toki’s belly twisted. From here, covered in dust and blood, surrounded by flying rubble like a meteor shower, her father looked like a vengeful god. She had never witnessed the full extent of his power. It was fucking terrifying. Huge block of concrete, cars, furniture, pipes, everything flew around him as if he was the sun of his own solar system made of deadly wreckage, surrounded by devastation. The whole building had collapsed, torn into pieces just like that. The whole building…! And now it was a field of broken ruins and her father was floating, screaming like a demon and pushing waves after wave of projectiles towards heroes like it was nothing. He looked untouchable and monstrous. His long dark hair was like a wild mane floating behind him, and Toki could imagine his ember-like eyes flashing wildly in feral anger.
Toki had never been scared of her father, not really. He had always been nice to her. She had been scared of what he could do, what he had done, but not of him as a person. But now, she saw him, wreaking havoc on this post-apocalyptic scene, she felt petrified.
The fight was absolutely one-sided. Could it even be called a fight? It was a massacre. Toki couldn’t see well with the smoke and the dust but the screams…! The way the heroes tried to rise above the dust cloud to attack and were ruthlessly crushed with rubble, speared with pipes, tossed around like ragdolls…! Toki couldn’t close her eyes, couldn’t breathe. It was like in a nightmare when you can’t move, when you can only watch as the monster is closing up on you, teeth bared. It looked like war. It looked like hell. How could a single man wreck so much destruction? How could human beings be so easily torn to bloody shreds, and bleed and scream so much, and how come nobody could stop it?!
Then All Might emerged from the rubble where he had been buried, and launched himself at Meteor, roaring. The villain roared back, directing a giant mass of rubble toward him… and the two titans collided in a deafening explosion of dust and flying pieces of wreckage. One little chunk of metal whizzed past Toki’s head, so chose she felt the wind sting her cheeks. She jerked away, abruptly released from her petrified trance. All Might and Meteor were still fighting.
Toki closed her eyes as strongly as she could, and teleported away.
oOoOoOo
She hid in a cupboard in her school for a while. Some animal part of her brain needed the tiny space and the comforting darkness of a small place to process what had happened. But Toki didn’t feel like she was processing anything. She just sat there, hugging herself, her brain filled with white noise. There was a big blank space where her thought process should be. She was just… sitting there. Breathing. Breathing was fine.
When she finally unfolded herself from her hiding place, she felt as if a small eternity had passed. Her legs had cramped up. Her eyes didn’t hurt anymore, though. She didn’t know where to go, so she teleported home. The address had been in her notebook, but since it was Sayuri’s place and she was at the hospital, the police shouldn’t have invaded the place. And just as she thought, the apartment was deserted.
She wandered around, aimless. Then she shook herself out of her daze and went to pack a bag of essentials. She didn’t know when the police would come to ransack Sayuri’s apartment, after all, and she should be prepared to make herself scarce when it happened.
Toki didn’t own a bag (beside her cute backpack for school) so she went to her mother’s room to borrow a big duffel bag. She put in a bunch of clothes, and some toiletries. She wasn’t sure of what was important. Urgh, if only she had had the foresight to look online ‘what to pack when you’re about to be homeless’ on her father’s computer! But nooo, she had looked up stars’ names and how deep could cachalots hunt and what was highest an human could go without needing an oxygen tank (about eight kilometers high, although you only left the troposphere at ten kilometers high, which was the altitude planes flew by)…. But not if she should pack shampoo and pajamas. Oh well. She intended to sleep at school so she didn’t know how warm it would be at night. It was January, after all. Winter clothes would do as sleepwear. And, well, better to have shampoo than to be missing it, right?
Toki also remembered where her mother hid her cash (there were nine hiding places in the apartment, each containing one or two envelopes filled with bank notes), so she took that too. All on one, there were maybe a billion yens in here. She should find some place to hide part of that ill-earned treasure… It wasn’t wise to carry that much cash on her person. But well, she would see about it tomorrow. For now Toki finished packing her bag.
Then she turned on the TV, and switched channels until she found what she was looking for. It wasn’t hard: after all, a villain’s fight of that scope would be all over the news, especially the local ones.
“… The rescues efforts are still ongoing,” a dog-eared presenter was saying gravely. “There are still nearly thirty people missing. The number of victims hadn’t been confirmed. Still, everyone is on agreement that without All Might to stop the main villain, the death count would have been higher…”
The screen shifted, showing the mugshots of the Crew’s members. Toki’s heart jerked, and she leaned toward the TV, eyes wide. They were… They were all there… Nono’s mugshot was all fresh, she had the same shirt and lipstick that this morning. Homura’s mugshot was older, and showed him with his villain’s mask. Fujio’s and Meteor’s looked to be a few years old. Sayuri’s wasn’t really a mugshot, but a cropped photograph that showed her in a wide-brimmed hat that shadowed part of her face. To protect her anonymity, maybe?
Under each mugshot was their villains’ names. Neither Fujio, Nono or Sayuri had any prior to this day, and Toki blinked when she realized that the police had used her codenames, the ones she had noted in the margins of her little notebook. It was not even related to their Quirks, it was just stupid pseudonyms she had thought would fit the whole ‘Meteor’ theme. Sayuri was Eclipse, Nono was Smoke, and Fujio was Skyshooter.
The presenter reappeared on one half of the screen, continuing his story:
“Their leader, Meteor, is singlehandedly responsible for the destruction of the residential building this afternoon, as well as the death of pro heroes Stinger, Narrow-spin, and sidekick Opal. The hero Moonlight and the sidekicks Tempo and Collider are still in critical conditions, as are several police officers and victims. Meteor will be held in Tartarus awaiting his trial.”
So they had captured him. Toki breathed more freely. Somehow, she hadn’t really thought it possible. Her father was so strong. Even now, watching the news, she had trouble believing it was real. Meteor was arrested. Should she feel guilty? All she felt was tired. Maybe a little relieved, but if wasn’t the righteous relief of the hero who had accomplished their task. It was the kind of relief you felt when you put down a heavy burden, when you left the room after an exam you had been dreading for weeks, when you confessed some awful lie that had been eating you. It’s done. It’s done, finally, I can breathe a little easier.
“His accomplices have all been caught,” the presenter continued. “The villains Blaze, Smoke and Skyshooter all incur a life-sentence in prison. Police had reported that Eclipse was currently suffering from severe health problems and leniency could be granted as a result.”
Severe health problems. Ah. Yeah, pregnancy could be categorized like that. Especially a risky one. What a convenient way to explain that Sayuri was stuck in a hospital for months and powerless to escape.
Toki turned off the news. She was hungry and it was getting late, so she went in search of something to eat. Thankfully there were some instant noodles in the cupboard, and Toki ate ramens while watching children’s cartons, as if she was a normal child having a normal evening.
When she went to sleep, she hid under the covers and hugged her stuffed otter with all her strength, but it didn’t make her feel less lonely.
The next day was a Monday. Toki woke up groggily and was halfway to dressing up when she realized she didn’t have to go at school anymore. But staying in the house made her feel claustrophobic. So she took her coat, and decided to go for a teleporting-augmented walk to clear her head. She tried to stay as clear from yesterday’s battlefield as she could, though. She felt squeamish about what happened, about the people who had died there.
Toki wandered the city. She walked, at first, but being all alone among adults made her nervous, especially because a lot of people threw her side-looks. After all, it was a school day: a lonely child attracted attention. She picked a quiet street then teleported from window ledges to higher window ledges until she could see the top of the building and then just appear there. Then she walked through rooftops. It was pretty fun. In the weeks preceding Meteor’s robbery, Toki had wandered there so much that it was second nature now. She wasn’t afraid to fall. She was actually kind of desensitized to height. She teleported mid-step from one building to the over, she climbed fences because it was funnier that way, she played games by trying to sneak up on pigeons and making cartwheels on narrow edges…
Later, she found a corner sheltered from the wind and took out her notebooks for a while.
It had been a while since Toki had completed her Teleportation-analysis notebook because she had wanted to keep her true strength a secret from her father, but now it was in need of a serious update. Who much she could carry, how far she could jump, how adrenaline augmented her abilities… She could probably have a more accurate analysis if she could get her hands on some medical equipment to measure her heart rate and the adrenaline in her blood, but well, practical observations would do.
(She didn’t want to think about the Crew. She didn’t want to think about her dad, or her mom. She didn’t know what she was feeling anymore.)
Afterward, she perused through her other notebooks. She went back to some of her sciences questions and happily wrote answers next to them, scribed some more ramblings about the city’s buildings or the outdated parabolas she saw on the roofs. She wondered if she could teleport with something that didn’t have a shape, the way her mom could switch place with water.
Turned out Toki could teleport with water cupped in her hands, but not with the content of a puddle if she just touched its surface. Weird. Maybe it was because she couldn’t properly visualize what she was teleporting that way?
Her Quirk wasn’t vision-based, but it heavily relied on it. She had to visualize a place to be able to appear there. She could of course teleport with her eyes closed, but it was easier not to. Same thing for long distance jumps. It was easier to teleport in her visual range than outside of it, even if that outside point was actually closer. It didn’t tire her, of course, not for short distances, but teleporting in a place she couldn’t see required a split-second of thinking, reflecting, deciding… while teleporting where she could see was as instinctive as breathing.
“No,” she suddenly muttered, erasing her last sentence. “It’s a too hasty conclusion, my sample of experiments is too small…”
The sound of her own voice, alone on the roof, sounded almost strange. Toki suspended her gesture, pen immobile a few centimeters above the page.
When she had been younger… Well, younger than she was now… She was used to speaking out loud when she thought about her Quirk or noted her observations. She didn’t quite mumble, Deku-style, but she hadn’t been a silent child. It had only changed when… When she had started living with the Crew? No, later, because it had been her mumbling that had attracted Homura’s attention the day he had corrected her Quirk-analysis… Toki frowned. She couldn’t quite pinpoint the moment when she had started to keep her ramblings to herself, but it had probably been when she had started hiding her true skills. She hadn’t yet decided to send her notebook to the police, at that time, but… Unconsciously, she had already picked her side, hadn’t she?
With a sight, she closed this notebook and opened another one. The poetry one. It was starting to be pretty well-filled. Almost half the pages were scribbled on, with sometimes a few colorful stickers around her poems. Toki leafed through the pages, then picked up her pen and started writing. Poetry didn’t clear the mind, not really, but it was always easier to thing when you had gotten the words out.
You deserve to celebrate who you've become
But also who you could've become
and fought not to.
She wondered if, one day, someone else would read this page and find those words resonating with them the same way they had resonated within Toki. She didn’t really like the idea of someone reading those lines, in her childish chicken scrawl: it was too raw, too honest. But maybe one day she could quote them. Or maybe try to put into song. Hey, that was an idea. Some of these lines were song lyrics after all. Of course, Toki didn’t intent to sing herself (she was tone-deaf and couldn’t even whistle a tune), but it was still worth considering.
Anyway. Back to the point. Or rather, the reason why Toki had needed to go out and clear her head in the first place…
What the fuck was she going to do, now?
It would have been nice to think about that before sending your parents and main providers to jail, a little voice in her head said snidely. Toki mentally flipped it the bird.
Well, alright, the mean voice was kind right. But Toki had been so stuck on the fact that she had to act and then that her family was going to be arrested, that… it hadn’t really left any space in her brain to think about after. And now she was here. The cops hadn’t raided her apartment yet, which was nice, but they would. The address was on Sayuri’s papers and they had her. Besides, even if they overlooked the place for some mysterious reason… Toki was eventually going to run low on food, and then what would she do? Rob a store? Yeah, right. She could probably survive on food banks and shelters for a while, but a homeless kid attracted attention. Good attention, like social workers and concerned citizens, and bad attention, like pedophiles, human traffickers and the like.
And of course, if word of her Quirk got around, some villains would want to use it like Meteor’s Crew had. Although Toki hadn’t seen any other villains around, besides some lowly purse-snatchers. Well, probably because it had been Meteor’s territory. Now that the big fish was gone, other predators were going to try their luck. Although none of them would be as… strong… as…
Fuck.
No. That wasn’t right. HOLY MOTHERFUCKING SHIT.
She had forgotten about All for One.
“Motherfucker!” she swore.
Then she jumped to her feet and paced down the length of the roof, unable to stay in one place. Several pigeons, scarred by her brusque gesture, flew away a few feet: Toki ignored them. Gods, how could she have been so stupid?! All For One hadn’t been defeated yet!! He was beaten six years before the start of canon, and Toki was waaaaaay before that. Holy shit, All Might and Sir Nighteye separated because of that fight, and it hadn’t happened yet, and Toki should have realized that immediately when she had seen Sir Nighteye still worked for All Might! Merlin, Gandalf, Naruto and all gods above, she had sent her notebook to that damn sidekick and she hadn’t even thought about the fact that he was still a sidekick!
Her canon-knowledge was relatively extensive (well, she couldn’t remember everyone’s Quirk and their specifics, but she mostly remembered the names and pasts of the main characters, as well as most of the Plot). But in the canon-timeline, AFO had been defeated and it was a given, nobody even questioned it. The main threat was the League of Villains and it hadn’t been formed yet. Japan was at peace. And it hadn’t looked different from Toki’s usual so yeah, she… she just hadn’t thought about it. At all. It hadn’t even been a blip on her radar. All Might was here, people called him the Symbol of Peace, so yeah, cool, no danger until the league appeared, right? Right?! AH AH AH.
She was so screwed. She was a teleporter, like Kurogiri but faster. Kurogiri, one of AFO’s favored plaything, a Nomu made with the dead body of Aizawa’s childhood friend if Toki remembered correctly: and wasn’t that fucked up?! AFO had wanted a teleporting buddy so badly. Oh shit, was Shirakumo (the dead body in question) dead already? Or was Toki at risk to literally replace him if she was caught by that psychopath?!
Fuck, fuck, fuck! As long as she had been under Meteor’s protection, of course it had been safe: who would dare challenge a villain like him for some kid that most people didn’t even know existed? But now, that was different. Because Meteor was gone. Toki was homeless. Her only advantage to survive in this world was… well, her brain… but unfortunately, you can’t beat up people or run from your problem with brainpower only. So she was going to use her Quirk. She had to. Hell, she had already used it in plain view of people. Of course people were going to know there was a teleporter up for grabs in Meteor’s former territory, if they didn’t already. And first arrived first served, right?
It hadn’t worried Toki, before, or rather she hadn’t thought about it because she had mistakenly believed that this neighborhood was safe, and that her Quirk would allow her to run away from her problems. But right now, she could already think of eight nightmare-scenarios, seven of them ending up with her death. What if she ran out of hideouts? What if she was attacked in her sleep? Her brain was running a mile a minute in a sort of horrified clarity. Oh gods she was going to die.
“I’m so dumb,” she moaned. “I’m an insult to the chain of evolution. I’m surprised I can walk straight with a brain so small. Somewhere there is a tree, tirelessly producing oxygen so I can breathe, and I think I owe it an apology. I should toss myself off that roof.”
The sarcasm helped to ease the weight on her chest. A pigeon let out an interrogative coo, and Toki rolled her eyes:
“Of course I’m not serious. Chill.”
The pigeon tilted its head. Toki rubbed her forehead, wincing. She was talking to a pigeon. Come on. Alright morbid jokes apart, what was she going to do?!
Well. Step one: leave this place as if she had AFO on her heels. Maybe she didn’t (he probably hadn’t heard about her yet), but she really didn’t want to find out. So: leaving. Right the fuck now.
Toki teleported back to her apartment to make one last check of the place. Still empty. She took some granola bars and a bottle of water, and left her stuffed otter on the couch. She was too big for toys anyway. She cut electricity, turned off the hot water, closed off the shutters, and put her dirty bowl from yesterday’s ramen in the sink. She stood in the living room for a second, trying to summon some grave thought for this solemn moment, but her head was empty. How were you supposed to feel when you ran away from home, if it wasn’t even a real home anymore?
Then she thought she heard a key turning in the door, and teleported without waiting. Too late, now. There would be no tearful goodbye for the apartment.
Toki teleported to the first place that crossed her mind… the park near her old school, where she and her mom had lived before moving to Tokyo. She had to take a breather afterward, her heart beating almost painfully in her chest, and her legs a little weak. But she sat down, breather, drank water, and after five minutes she was fine. Maybe her long-distance jumps were getting better. Last time, that jump had exhausted her. How far away from Tokyo was she, anyway? It was way more than forty kilometer. Fifty? Sixty? She needed a map. And she needed to know where she was! Ironically, Toki didn’t even remember the name of the park: she was even fuzzy on the name of the city. It only came back to her after walking a while and seeing the city name on bus stops. It was Hinohara. She wandered around until she found a station where you could have some maps, took a few (one for all of Japan, and one for each prefecture between Tokyo and Musutafu where her mom was hospitalized), then found a quiet place to ponder about the distance. Hinohana was exactly seventy-eight kilometer from her neighborhood in Tokyo.
Holy. Shit. That was almost eighty kilometers, double her previous forty-kilometers limit! Well that made her seriously reevaluate her range. If she could jump almost eighty kilometers, it would help greatly her escape plan. In case, you know, she had to escape.
Well. Step one of her plan, get away from Tokyo, was complete. Now, it was time for step two… Figure out where to go. Because running was all fine and good, but in only worked if you had a destination in mind. Flying aimlessly was the best way to get corralled and trapped. Or, most likely, to get lost and then trapped.
“So,”, Toki muttered, trying to get used again to the sound of her own voice. “Where to, o fearless astrophysicist?”
She could go South, or North, or just… as far away as she could. Then she would wander into a police station, open wide fawn-like eyes and say something about being lost and not remembering her name, until she managed to sneak anonymously into foster care.
But there were two flaws with that plans… One, she didn’t trust the system very much. Hadn’t AFO’s doctor, the one responsible for the Nomu, also been a pediatrist to keep an eye on interesting Quirks? You could never know who worked for AFO and who didn’t. Second flaw: how to travel there. Toki didn’t know many places in those directions and so she wouldn’t be able to teleport too much. She could use her flight to see far away and travel partly by air, but cold wind, constant vigilance and frequent jumps were bound to be tiring. Toki would also most likely get a cold, at best, because her clothes were warm but seriously not made for high-altitude.
So no for North or South. She had to stick with places she knew.
Second plan: stay here. She was already kinda familiar with the area. There were mountains and a forest not far, so she could go and explore, and it would made for a great hiding place in case of pursuit… As well as a good training ground. People were nice and didn’t ask many questions. They also already knew about her, or well, about the cover version her mom had given them for the seven years they had lived here. Toki could say that her mom was back in town, stay vague, and since people had actually known her mom and her busy schedule, they wouldn’t think she was lying. Those were some solid pros.
Cons: people knew her. They knew she was a teleporter, and it was even in this very town that Toki had awakened her Quirk. If AFO started digging for intel about a teleporter, his research would lead him here, inevitably. Another cons: Sayuri had been a mother-hen and people here knew that, so they would immediately sniff out the lie when Sayuri failed to shadow her daughter everywhere. Actually, they would sniff it even earlier, when they realized Toki wasn’t at school. It wasn’t a big city, there were only two primary school after all.
So, no staying at Hinohana.
Third plan: go somewhere else that she knew, like Musutafu. And then… and then, well, it opened other options.
(Also, apparently All Might’s agency wasn’t in Musutafu, which was a coastal city between Shizuoka and Fuji. There was an office there, where Toki had sent her notebook. But the main building, Might Tower, was in fucking Tokyo. Meteor had been living right under his nose! But All Might wasn’t often here. He had local offices in the whole country, including one in Musutafu where Toki had sent her notebook. Apparently the Number One Hero liked to travel and to have anchor points in the whole country. Well. At least there was nowhere truly out of his reach? Toki almost considered staying to the city of his real agency, then shrugged it off. Musutafu was big, it had Nedzu and Yūei and a lot of kind-hearted canon-charactesr. Also, if there was a fight, well… Endeavor was based here, he was nothing to scoff at. Besides… It was where her mother was hospitalized. If she was still there, then… then… maybe Toki could try to see her, and…)
So. Musutafu. What were her options?
Toki could live homeless for a bit before turning to the foster system, but that plan wasn’t actually safer in Musutafu that it would have been away from here. Doctor Sociopath had been, after all, based in Musutafu. So Toki could also go to the police, admit her connection to Ryūsei Taiyōme and Sayuri Aratani, codenames Meteor and Eclipse, and hope for the best. She would end up in the foster system, in a good family and with the law enforcement watching over her, but her anonymity would be shot to hell. If AFO (or any villain!) came looking, she may as well be gift-wrapped for him. Last option: go to All Might himself and ask for his protection. He knew about AFO (unlike the police) and the danger he represented. Even if Toki pretended to not know about the Quirk-stealing business, All Might would know. He would realize how precious a teleporting Quirk was. Maybe he would help Toki disappear…
Or maybe he wouldn’t, Toki thought with a scowl. All Might wasn’t the sharpest spoon in the drawler. Especially when it came to children.
Let’s be real: All Might was pretty irresponsible in canon. Of course, it was expected because the Plot had to jumpstart somehow, but. Well. He promised one of the most powerful Quirks in the world to an emotionally unstable fourteen years-old the day he met him after seeing him charge into danger with no regard for his well-being, then gave it to him without his guardian's knowledge or consent. Plus it was only hours prior to the entrance exam, which didn’t give him enough time to test it out beforehand, and All Might's ‘warning’ about the repercussions it would have on his body was minimal. Yes All Might didn’t know how badly Midoriya was going to be hurt, but still! When handling such a powerful thing, you should be just a tiny bit cautious, you know? All Might even said that had an idea that this kid would break his goddamn bones using OFA, but didn’t do anything about it, because he… hadn’t thought about it? Sure his heart was in the right place, he was an incredible fighter and a devoted person, but really, he was either an airhead or wildly irresponsible. Or both.
And it wasn’t the only time All Might had proved himself to be reckless with other people’s wellbeing! Later in canon, during combat training, he didn’t stop Midoriya and Bakugou from wrecking each other, even though he knew that he should have. Then during the Sports Festival, Endeavor basically said to his face that Shouto was only a tool to him. Then there was the entirety of the practical exam which had Midoriya and Bakugou fight All Might... yeah that was super fucked up. None of the other exams got that violent.
ANYWAY. All Might had done a ton of bad stuff, not because he had bad intentions, but because he was just incredibly oblivious or negligent at times. His scale of ‘thing that are too violent’ was probably a bit screwed. He did try his best, but sometimes it was okay, good even, to take a step back and admit you can’t help, you’re untrained or unsuited to help, and that the situation would be better handled by someone else.
Also, to get back to the real problem… Did All Might have any connection to help get a child to safety? The only canon-comparison Toki had was Eri’s situation, and All Might had been utterly uninvolved in that. If Toki came knocking, All Might would probably foster off the problem on the only children’s expert he knew: Nedzu, the headmaster of Yūei. Except that Nedzu probably didn’t know about AFO yet! Toki wasn’t sure about it, but she thought that in canon All Might had only told him because he had been looking for a successor. Which he didn’t yet. Back to square one.
Well at least she had options in Musutafu. Worse came to worse she would sneak into Yūei and see how long she could live into the fake ceilings undetected. Yeah, that idea was pretty tempting. So, Musutafu it was!
And so, the adventure began.
oOoOoOo
Adventure was a bit less glamorous that what she had pictured. It was tiring and cold and lonely. But Toki managed. Homelessness wasn’t pleasant, but teleporting was really useful to teleport inside of locked building and flying overly curious eyes.
The first days were the worst, because she was constantly second-guessing herself. How to go to Musutafu? Could she afford to dawdle during the trip? Should she hurry, or locate more anchor-points to teleport to? Where to eat? Was this guy watching her too closely? Where to sleep? Where to shower?
Fuck, she would never take a home from granted ever again. Not having a safe haven was hell.
Anyway. Toki’s road trip. She still remembered the way by trains, so she decided to jump from station to station and explore the surrounding cities as much as she could. It would give her more ‘anchor points’ to jump to. So she teleported to the first station, took her duffel bag, and wandered all day long, trying to go as far as possible. She sneaked on a bus once, then teleported to rooftops later. Toki also draw little dots and cross on her maps to know where exactly her new anchors points were. She found some restaurants, a supermarket, a hotel, a park, a library, a school… And of course, she found a few secluded roofs that would make for great escape points.
She walked and walked and walked some more. At midday, she brought some food with her mother’s cash, then continued her journey. She brought a map and, on an impulse, a compass. What? It helped her to orient herself. Also, it was a pretty brass compass with a Quirk-enhanced needle that wasn’t disturbed by all the magnetic Quirks out there. It could come in handy.
Toki wandered all day long. Then she tried to find a place to rest, and finally decided on the library she had passed. She liked libraries: they had internet access, heating, and most importantly, books and comfortable places to read. Also, if she scouted the place during the day, she could teleport herself there to sleep the night if needed. So, after an early dinner, she went back to said library, waited around until it was closed, then teleported inside. The place was scarier in the dark, and the air was a little chilly, but it wasn’t bad.
Toki slept on a little couch, wrapped in her blanket. She jerked awake several times during the night, terrified at the idea of finding a dark figure looming over her. In the morning, she took off an hour before opening time, which was dreadfully early and left her tired and cranky. She brought breakfast at a nearby bakery, then went back to the library (which was now open) to nod off a little. She only left when she felt a little more rested and when the librarian’s concerned look started to turn really suspicious.
Then she jumped to the next station, in the next city. Then the next, the day after that. Rinse, then repeat.
She avoided stealing. She brought her own food. She couldn’t exactly pay for a place to sleep, but she tried to find a place where she wouldn’t bother people. A library was best, of course, but there were also furniture’s retailers (their beds were the comfiest). Toki had to be crafty sometime. She had to keep an eye out for people who paid too much attention, who could have bad intentions or simply wanted to report a homeless child to the police. She had to be careful with her clothes, as she didn’t know where to wash them, and didn’t have the means to mend them. When she was tired during the day, she had to find a safe place to rest, but keep an eye open. She showered at night, in the showers’ room of deserted gyms or swimming pools. She had to be careful to dry off and stay warm, because if she caught a cold, there would be no mom or dad to bring her medicine… and it was one thing for a kid to buy food or clothes, but medicine? That was the adults’ job. The pharmacist would immediately be suspicious.
So Toki was careful, and stayed under the radar. She avoided cops. Heroes, too, were to be watched out for.
Not that they were particularly noisy, but there were always two or three patrolling the area and unlike most people, they didn’t just stick to ground level. Once Toki jumped on a roof and ended up eyes-to-eyes with a big, hairy gorilla-dude in a black and red jumpsuit and it nearly took out ten years of her life. Toki had managed to teleport away before the gorilla-dude could even open his mouth (although in the split-second before her jump, she had saw him flail around enough to guess he had been as taken aback as her!). But that surprise wasn’t an experience she was eager to repeat.
Rooftops, telephonic poles, secluded ledges and all those places that Toki had unconsciously categorized as hers, because no one was there normally, were actually on most heroes’ patrol routes. In her old neighborhood, she had never seen heroes there, but… The area where Meteor’s Crew had lived had been avoided by both the heroes and the police. So yeah, it had been the idea playground for a young teleporter. But now, she had to scramble to change strategies, and get used to the fact that she didn’t have the monopole of high-perched hiding places anymore.
She still used the rooftops, of course. The air, too, jumping in the void and teleporting higher or further away, like some kind of disjointed flight. It was her turf, there was no way she was going to give it up. Besides, she loved the thrill of being able to jump impossible distances between building, or the feeling of defying gravity. She was just a little more careful about her surroundings, that was all.
So that was Toki’s new routine. Jump, explore, find a place to sleep, a place to wash, a place to eat, some places to hide. Make small talk with cashiers if they initiated, but never volunteer any relevant information. Look happy and innocent. Make up lies about a dad at the hardware store, a mom busy with a baby brother, a cousin at school who had forgot his lunch, a train to catch, whatever. Stay alert. If someone followed her, turn into an empty street and teleport on the closest roof.
Nine time out of ten, it was a false alarm, but once Toki leaned over the edge of the roof and saw the guy who had been following her look in the empty alley, swear, look behind the trashcans, and leave looking really displeased.
Maybe it was just a nice passerby who was concerned about a kid alone on a school day. Or a police officer who took his duty very seriously and intended to give her a serous dressing down for skipping classes. But there were others, worse options… And the whole scene had given her chills.
Toki reached Mustafu in a week. Eight day, eight jumps, eight stations and their neighborhoods thoughtfully explored. Then it was time to settle in Musutafu, and… map the area.
There were a lot more heroes than in the cities she had crossed. She had to be extra-careful in her exploration of the rooftops. Fortunately, most heroes stuck to ground level to greet fans, talk with patrolling policemen, or just keep a closer eye on what happened in the streets. After all, most crimes didn’t happen on roofs, but on the ground! On her first day in Mustafu, Toki witnessed two villain chases! Nobody was hurt and there wasn’t even propriety damage, so Toki wondered if most of it wasn’t for show. The heroes needed the publicity, and the villains didn’t face big sanctions if nobody was hurt. They also had their moment of glory, with their pictures taken and even a journalist recognizing them and screaming their pseudonym with excitement.
Musutafu was an exciting city to live into, but Toki started her adventure carefully. She looked around. She found libraries to sleep in, and parks to hang around, and fast-food to eat, and gyms to sneak in to shower. She stayed on her guard. The first night, she picked the wrong library: she triggered an alarm during the night, and had to flee in catastrophe to avoid heroes. It wasn’t her only close brush with them. She ran at least four times into an acrobat dressed like a ballerina, who used the roofs as much as she did.
She mostly ate on-the-go food from streets vendors, but sometimes it was better to eat sitting down in a warm place and Toki hung out in cafés or fast-food for a while, and there were always sidekicks or heroes taking a break nearby. Seriously, the first days were nerve-wracking. Then… Well, after a week, Toki got used to it. She adapted. She didn’t tense so much when she saw a bright uniform from the corner of her eye. She learned which heroes frequented which parts of the city.
Once or twice, she was even bold enough to approach one of them, playing the wide-eyed child and asking as many questions as she dared.
It had been a while since she had analyzed Quirks, after all! Well, it wasn’t hard to find a nice roof and watch heroes and villains, and to guess what their powers were. The ballerina hero had either surreal ninja-training or had a Quirk related to her weight, allowing her to jump high and land either very softly or with all the force of a pneumatic hammer. Two heroes had a water Quirk and worked with another one who had an earth-bending ability. Then there was a guy with super-speed… A girl who controlled projectiles (although it didn’t seems to be quite telekinesis, more like the ability to control the trajectory of any object already in movement)…
Some heroes didn’t have time for a child. But most sidekicks were very pleased with her interest. They all talked feely about their Quirk, bragging almost.
“Yeah, I can affect the vectors. Augment the velocity of stuff, change its direction… It only works with object of a certain weight, though. That’s why I use kunai and shurikens! It’s light enough…”
“And it also makes you look like a cool ninja?” Toki guessed, her pen hovering above the page.
Sharpeyes, a heroine with long flowing silver hair and a black outfit that vaguely resembled both a ninja costume and a swimsuit, laughed:
“That too! We all like ninjas in the family. I have a cousin that just graduated, and his hero costume is ninja and samurai themed. He like a walking advertisement for Japan’s medieval history.”
Toki snorted. The other sidekick sitting at the table leaned forward, interested:
“He joined Accuracy’s agency in Yokohama, didn’t he? Think one day you’ll join forces and make a ninja-themed agency?”
Toki nodded enthusiastically. What? Ninjas were cool. They had shurikens and swords. Toki was a calm, collected, mature kid but Sometimesshe saw heroes fight and she wanted a sword more than she had ever wanted anything in her life.
Sharpeyes made a face: “Ugh, no, I’m perfectly happy staying in Musha-san agency. But Shinya… I mean, Edgeshot will probably fund his own agency one day. He wants to make it into the top ten heroes!”
Toki carefully didn’t choke on her saliva, although she was absolutely sure that Edgeshot had been a canon character. And since his aesthetic was ninja-and-samurai… Yeah, she could see which hero it was. One of those who fought in the Kamino arc? Wow. Well, it looked like in a decade or so, Sharpeyes’ cousin would have his wish. Because Edgeshot had been one of the top ten heroes if Toki remembered correctly! Wow, what were the odd of running in his cousin? Although, Sharpeyes wasn’t a canon character so maybe she would be retired by the time the canon-storyline would begin…
Anyway. Toki’s main interlocuters began to be sidekicks. It was a good thing. Social interactions were important to the human brain’s development, or so Toki had read. She loved her notebooks, but really, they weren’t a substitute for real company. She wrote less poetry these days. Maybe she had used it as a coping mechanism, to live with her loneliness. Ah! It would be ironical to be less lonely now, homeless in a strange city filled with potential enemies, that she had been home surrounded by her family! But well, it was apparently the case. Toki still wrote in her poetry notebook, but not as often. Her prose was also shorter, somehow both hopeful and strangely bitter.
What part of yourself did you have to destroy
in order to survive in the world this year?
But most importantly:
what have you found to be unkillable?
And so, it was her life. Going from hero fights to cafés, from libraries to parks. Toki looked for parks after schools’ hours and tried to mingle with others children, because it felt good to play tag or join crazy contests of climbing the highest tree, but she didn’t really make friends there. She also stalked library and frantically read everything she could get her hands on. She started with sciences books because… well… astrophysicist. But it was really too easy to be sidetracked and to read about the cold war, or the rainforest, or anything really. Toki only realized how far she had been sidetracked when she found herself reading an introduction to the Enlightening’s philosophies and ideals. Because pre-French revolution doctrine had little to do with what she had been looking for in the first place, which was the history of space and teleportation-related Quirk.
But most of her meaningful conversations happened in fast-foods or cafés with hopeful sidekicks that liked the attention. Toki couldn’t help but feel like it was a little overconfident of them (what if she was a villain’s spy?), but hey, she wasn’t going to complain.
Besides… Living like this, homeless, even with the relative comfort of knowing she had money to eat, and could always find a place to sleep… It was lonely. Toki liked talking with people. She liked asking questions and receiving answers, share her excitement about something, get laughs to her jokes, receive warm smiles and sincere interest in her thought process. She liked being heard, and sometimes she almost slipped and told them about her own Quirk, or about the fact that she didn’t exactly have a place to live, or how she avoided getting too deep in thought because the loneliness and lack of permanent safety scared her.
Back to the point. After a week in Musutafu, Toki accidentally watched the news in a coffee shop… And felt a jolt of horror when there was a short advertisement for a missing child… with her picture in it.
Shit.
The picture was one taken at school six months ago (neither her mom or her dad had been fan of photographs…), where she had her hair down, but she was clearly recognizable. Also, her name was apparently Toki Taiyōme. She had a moment of wild perplexity before remembering it was her father’s name, and probably her legal name. She was so used to Toki Aratani that it had skipped her mind. Still, that report was bad news. Toki was listed as being missing in Tokyo, and her Quirk wasn’t mentioned, but… Well. It was bad news nonetheless.
The good thing was that absolutely nobody had recognized her so far. Probably because Toki stood tall and with a confidence better suited to a pre-teen than to a child, or maybe because of her twin buns (people tended to focus on such a distinctive hairstyle), or because it was winter and Toki hid most of her face with a beanie and a scarf… Or maybe just because people weren’t very observant. None of the sidekicks Toki spend time with (and there was nearly twenty of them!) had never remarqued she was homeless!
Toki didn’t know if she should be appalled at their lack of observational skills or proud of her own talent. After all, she went to great pains to hide her… predicament.
She was clean and casually dressed. She ate a (moderately) balanced diet. She washed her clothes once a week in a laundromat that didn’t ask questions (especially since she went early in the morning, when there was nobody else). She had acquired a workbook and two middle-school level manuals (one for math, the other for general science) and made a show of working on them when she stayed in cafés, to look like she was busy. Also, her hairstyle with twin buns was kind of recognizable, but it also hid what her disaster her hair was. It had been a year since she had her hair cut. When she didn’t braid and pin it in buns, it was a wild mane that would have well-suited a feral child raised by lions. Badly groomed lions.
But back to the point. Toki was extra-careful, but she was confident in her strengths. She had mapped the place. She had hideouts. She was blending in.
So, thirteen days after her arrival in Musutafu, she tried to sneak in the hospital where she had last seen her mother.
“It’s a bad idea,” she told a friendly pigeon on her favorite roof. “I know it’s a bad idea. Even if the police hadn’t guessed that it was me who send them the notebook… Well, the moment the words notebook and Quirk-analysis were pronounced, Mom has probably guessed it. She is going to be spitting mad. She loved Dad more than anything.”
More than Toki, at least. And yeah, it hurt a little bit. But the fact that her mother had loved her less than Meteor didn’t mean that she hadn’t loved her at all. Just like the fact that Toki had valued Meteor’s victims didn’t mean that she hadn’t valued her family. It was just that… She had prioritized. They all had.
“But I should try, shouldn’t I?” she asked the pigeon. “I mean, she’s just here. I should at least try to make sure she’s alright.”
The pigeon cooed, and went on to peck at the roof, trying to eat the last crumbles of Toki’s sandwich. The young girl raised her eyebrows:
“Thank you for the vote of confidence.”
She would have liked a real person to bounce off ideas. But well, she could hardly talk to the sidekicks about it. Most of them didn’t even know her name (and to those who asked, Toki had introduced herself as ‘Toki Hinohara’ because she didn’t dare use her real surname). They all thought she was an overly curious, above-average intelligent child, but not much more. Which was good, because the least thing Toki needed was to attract their attention. Being noticed by the sidekicks would mean being noticed by the heroes, then the police, then the foster system, then All For One. Yeah, nope, not happening.
“Still, I need to stop talking to pigeons,” Toki sighed. “It’s not really an indicator of great mental health. No offense to you, pal.”
The pigeon flapped away, looking offended. Pfff. Some birds really had sensitive egos!
So. Toki started elaborating a plan to sneak into the hospital. Good thing she had already been here before. She waited for the evening, a few minutes before the end of visiting’s hours. She changed her clothes, changed her hairstyle (a high ponytail), put a cloth mask (very common, and also useful to hide your identity), then teleported on the floor where she had last seen her mother. The hallway was deserted. Good. Toki mentally congratulated herself on her timing… Then she started to explore.
She didn’t remember exactly which room was her mother’s, because her memories of that day were kind of… faded. Yes, she should have been paying more attention, she knew! But hey, she had been shaken. That kind of thing happened, right? And she still remembered enough to get inside the hospital, so there was that. Now, she only had to find the right room… She was sure it had been left… Three, maybe four doors after the stairs? Hummmm…
She knocked on one door, then stuck her head in the opening, trying to look innocent: “Mom?”
Empty room. Crap. She closed the door, then tried another. This time there was a middle-aged woman, who gently told her she had the wrong room. Toki meekly apologized, then continued her search. Another door… Another…
When she opened the seventh, she froze. It was the right one, she recognized the windows and everything. But her mom wasn’t here. Instead, there was a young police officer, sitting on a chair and holding her black notebook in his hands.
“Wait!” he exclaimed in a rush when he saw her. “Please don’t go, I know where your mother is!”
If he knew where Sayuri was, then he also knew who she was, and who Toki was. The young girl narrowed her eyes without answering, but she didn’t leave. She stayed unmoving in the doorway.
“You’re Toki Taiyōme, aren’t you?” the man said in an encouraging tone. “I’m Naomasa Tsukauchi. I know you’re the one who send the notebook to All Might so he could save you.”
Toki was immediately pissed off. By his presence or his phrasing, she didn’t know, but it ranked. Saver her?! Nobody had saved her. Who did that man think he was, smiling at her condescendingly like that, like she was a victim to be pitied?!
“What,” Toki sneered, “you expect me to fall to my knees in gratitude because some himbo who look like America vomited on him used my intel to boost his reputation and still managed to make a building collapse in the process?”
Yeah she knew she was a bit hypocritical about it, All Might hadn’t acted for fame and he certainly hadn’t wanted all those victims. The casualties were Meteor’s fault, not his. Still, everyone thought that All Might was perfect but what had happened wasn’t perfect, and Toki needed to be pissed with something, so there. She was a homeless, lonely child and she wanted her mom and she wanted things to not have ended up here, so yeah, she was bitter about it. And if Tsukauchi wasn’t happy about it he could go suck a dick.
“All Might didn’t save me,” she added defiantly, while the policeman was gaping like a fish. “I saved myself. I don’t owe him shit.”
Tsukauchi raised his hands in a placating gesture: “All right. Ok. You don’t owe him. But people are still worried about you.”
Toki shrugged. Her heart was beating wildly. It was scary to face down a police officer, but not that scary since she could always escape. And it was also freeing, in a way. With the kids in parks, the sidekicks in cafés, the cashiers or the people in the laundromat, Toki always presented a front. Now she could drop the mask and talk about what had happened to her, and it felt both frightening and exhilarating at the same time. Because she was angry, and lost, and grieving, and furious, and she could say it now. She was allowed to.
“Who? My mom?”
“For starters, yes.”
“Even though I sold her out? She has to know it was me. Where is she?”
“In a different hospital,” Tsukauchi answered levelly. “She was very upset after what happened, and it made her a little unwell. Her pregnancy is difficult, but you already know that. The best doctors are taking care of her. She should recover in no time.”
It was a relief. Or it could be a total lie. Toki ruminated it a few second, and Tsukauchi used this opportunity to continue, in a softer voice:
“She still cares about you. But there’s also others people. Me, for example. Children aren’t meant to fend for themselves. Where are you living?”
“Here and here.”
“You’re homeless? Since the arrests, three weeks ago?”
Gods, had it been three weeks already? It couldn’t be right. But Toki mentally did the math and yes, it had been a Sunday when Meteor had been caught, and she had been exploring the last train station before Musutafu on the following Sunday, so that was one week, and after that she had arrived Musutafu, then wandered in the city, and spent the following Sunday in the library, so that was two weeks, and there had been another Saturday two days ago, so yeah, it was three weeks. Wow.
“I managed.”
“It isn’t safe,” Tsukauchi tried. “There are institutions that exist to help children like you who can’t stay with their parents. Foster families that will take care of you while you grow up. You will have you own place to stay, you could go back to school, live a normal life. I know you’re very clever. Don’t you want to cultivate this intelligence, go to college, instead of having to fight for survival?”
Toki hesitated. He was right. But… it still didn’t feel safe. It was too soon. The wound was too raw, her paranoia too high. There was All For One. The danger. And the fact that Toki didn’t feel confident letting her fate rest in the hands of strangers. That guy probably wasn’t working for the bad guys, and he only wanted to help her, but… he didn’t have all the information.
“I’m not ready,” she said truthfully. “If you have a card or something, I’ll come back to you when I am. Or well, when I’ve got a phone.”
“I can get you one,” offered Tsukauchi.
“Yeah, with a GPS in it? No thanks. I’ll get my own.”
Tsukauchi sighed, and held out to her a small printed card: “You’re really distrustful, aren’t you?”
Toki eyed him warily, then walked slowly in the room, before stopping a reasonable distance away. The police officer waited a few second, then put the card on the bed, as far away from him as he could, before stepping back. Quickly, Toki grabbed the piece of paper, then retreated a few steps. She probably looked ridiculous, trying her hardest to stay out of his reach when she could literally teleport away, but hey. Better to be overly cautious then to be caught.
“Your mother would probably love to see you,” Tsukauchi tried.
“Did she say that verbatim?”
He hesitated: “Not really. But she loves you.”
She did. Just as Toki loved her. But love didn’t negate anger, and both Sayuri and Toki had plenty of reasons to resent the other. Maybe they would be reunited again later, but for now they were… drifting away. And the rift between them would not be so easily bridged.
Love doesn’t make your hands clean. It just makes them warm.
“I know,” Toki said softly. “But she can’t keep me safe, and you can’t either.”
But when Tsukauchi tried to open his mouth to speak, she didn’t wait to listen. He had nothing to say that she didn’t already know. She teleported away, and didn’t look back.
(She kept the card. But she knew she wouldn’t call him for help. Toki was too used to rely on herself.)
Notes:
So ! I really enjoyed writing this chapter. Meteor's last fight was great to write. Also Toki being on her own!
To anwser some questions...
Was Meteor really strong enough to stand against AFO and keep him out of his territory?
Oh no ! He was one of the strongest around, true, but more importantly: he didn't start gang wars. Nobody had beef with Meteor. Not even AFO. Meteor is extremely smart but not ambitious, which is one of the main reasons he stayed out of AFO's machinations. He never tried to encroach on his empire. Meteor fucked up some heroes and showered the underground with money, so AFO approved and never tried to interfere.
Like most big names villains, Meteor knew AFO existed. But they mostly dealt into separate business, so their paths never crossed.
Which is a good thing, because I don't think Meteor would have survived the encounter.There was a police officier whose job was to sit in Sayuri's hospital room to try and catch her runaway daughter? And is that who I think it is?
Yes and yes! Toki is a runaway who can to teleport (and so, can't get caught unwillingly) but who also happen to be a key-witness in Meteor's case. They don't know for sure she is the source that allowed All Might to catch that villain, but considering they ransacked Sayuri's appartement and found writing samples that matched the black notebook, they strongly suspect. Also Sayuri's breakdown upon hearing it was an anonymously delivered notebook that allowed them to catch her must have clued them in a little.
So Tsukauchi as been tasked with waiting for a kid to sneak in the hospital looking for her arrested mother. Fun.Anyway. In canon i think Tsukauchi is around twenty-five here, he's just starting as a detective, and he doesn't know All Might yet. He isn't a key-player. He just got the lowly job of trying to catch the teleporting kid because at this time, he's a convenient underling and using him mean that I don't have to make an OC! xD
Also : Toki absolutely didn't reconize him (or his name) so she doesn't know he's a canon-character of some importance... which has some comedic potential if she met him again later.
I hope you enjoyed this chapter ! The next one should be here in two or three weeks ! =)
EDIT 12/08/2022
Lots of spelling mistakes were corrected. A few weird sentences were untangled. Correction about how All Might's headquarters aren't in Musutafu (that's just Yūei). Toki sneak in the hospital thirteen days after her arrival in Musutafu instead of eleven (detail, i know).
Chapter 6: A stroke of luck
Summary:
Toki's fate takes a sharp turn right. Or wrong, depending how you see it.
Notes:
Well, this is it. Everyone who guessed it from the tags or just the fact that Toki is actually a small child with a powerful Quirk... Congrat! Toki is getting off the streets!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
A STROKE OF LUCK
Days passed. Toki had now been on the run for five weeks. It was March. The whole adventure was starting to really be draining.
No physically, not really. Toki never slept in the cold, since she broke in various places as needed. She never went hungry either. But to always be on the move, to constantly watch her surrounding, to never really be able to talk to people… it was exhausting. Sometimes she cried herself to sleep without knowing how to make it stop.
She missed her mom. She missed her dad. She had no right to miss them, and yet… and yet… They were hers, and she missed them.
She tried not to think about it.
Anyway. Maybe it was so hard because being on the run seemed so pointless. She had seen neither hide or hair from All For One and his minions.
Maybe because it was she stuck to the good parts of Musutafu and not the poor areas. The poor areas weren’t really dingy either (no area in Japan really was, since misery had been all but eradicated in this part of the world), but… it was the kind of place where there were actual homeless people huddling in the corners and no cops on patrol: the kind of place where villains were more likely to plan a kidnapping. At least by sticking to the popular areas and taking the risk of being seen by heroes, Toki was afforded said heroes’ protection.
But maybe it had nothing to do with her smart choices. Maybe she had been jumping at shadows when she had decided to run? But again, maybe not. And she wouldn’t have been safe in Tokyo either, as the daughter of a notorious murderer. Actually, Toki wasn’t sure she could be safe anywhere outside of witness protection. Did Japan give new identities to children of villains? She couldn’t recall.
Then Toki got caught in an accident.
It happened while she was wandering thought the city, walking along a bridge. A car honked, there was a scream of metal and then Toki flung herself backward acting on pure instinct, narrowing avoiding the two cars that fell into the river below. One vehicle passed so close to her that Toki could see the horror on the face of the woman behind the wheel. It was over in a blink: the two cars fell into the river with an exploding splash of water, and started sinking. Toki hadn’t even had time to yelp.
In the bridge, there was a second of shocked silence, then people started screaming.
“Shit, have you seen that?!”
“There were people in those cars!”
“Where are the heroes? Call for help!”
Toki stayed petrified, her eyes glued to the river. She could see the trunk of the second car (the blue one, with the woman behind the wheel) completely fading from view. The river was deep, but the car was heavy, and it wouldn’t be long until it touched the bottom. The cabin would fill with water, and if the passenger couldn’t get out, they would drown, and Toki’s brain really didn’t want to get there but that woman had looked so scared…
“Where are the heroes?!” screamed someone right next to her. “Someone do something!”
Toki’s mind was blank. No one was doing anything. She realized she was gripping her duffel bag too tightly. She turned away, and saw a young woman right next to her, with cat’s ears and a tortoise-shell colored hair (orange, black, and white, like a cat), who had her eyes closed as if she was praying. Without thinking, Toki trusted her duffel bag in the woman’s arms, making her stumble back and opening her eyes in surprise. Green eyes, Toki absentmindedly noted. Jade eyes.
“Can you keep an eye on that for me? Thanks.”
Without waiting for a reply, Toki focused on the image of the car (the inside of it, where the wide-eyed woman was), and teleported.
She had no idea if it was going to work. She hadn’t thought about it, she wasn’t actually thinking, she had just wanted, or maybe reacted, and then, in a blink, she appeared in the car. She immediately bumped her head and fell backward against the door: the woman, who was half-out of her seat, scrambled back with a shocked cry. Water splashed and fuck it was cold, and it was dark, and she was inside the car.
“Wow, it worked,” Toki’s mouth said without any input from her brain.
“What?” the woman said weakly.
Toki actually tried to get some thought process online, came up empty-handed, and improvised:
“Er, hi? I’m here to help.”
And that’s when water splashed some more, there was a shrill cry, and Toki realized there was a baby.
It was actually an infant, maybe six month old or something. Small, kind of squishy, a puff of dark hair that stood almost upright on its head, in a blue onesie, safely strapped in a car seat. It was dark underwater so Toki couldn’t see clearly, but there was a baby here, and that suddenly explained why the woman was half-out of her seat instead of being half-out of her car. Shit, there was a baby in there. Toki froze, looking at the kid in something akin to horror, and the mom begged her:
“Take him, please take him. I can’t get the seatbelt off, I’m trapped, please take him…”
The car was almost vertical and there was water nearly to the edge of the backseat. It reached higher than to the woman’s waist, so half the car, it wasn’t touching the baby yet but it was dripping from the car’s doors’ grooves, and it was filling the cabin quickly, and Toki had never tried to teleport with someone before. Her brain felt like it was spinning out of control, too many thoughts at the same time but nothing coherent, nothing useful. There was math to calculate the volume of water that would fill the car, and how long did she have, and how long could humans hold their breath, and when would hypothermia set in, and could she teleport out with the kid? Could she teleport out with the mom? She didn’t know if she could do it, but she wasn’t actually thinking straight, she was soaked and cold and her heart was pounding harder than any time before. She gripped the baby by its armpits, closed her eyes, jumped…!
She reappeared right next to the calico-cat-lady, who startled at her arrival. Toki blinked down at the toddler in her arms (holy shit, she had done it), and absurdly realized he was quite heavy. She hadn’t thought he would weight anything. But it was a real person, screaming and kicking, the feet of his little onesie soaking wet. His hair was purple in daylight. He was heavy, and loud, and alive.
Toki took a big breath, then blindly trusted the toddler in calico-lady’s arms.
“Please hold him. His mom is still there.”
She had left the mom here, and it was unacceptable.
When Toki reappeared in the car, the woman was yanking at her seatbelt. The outside air had kicked Toki’s brain back online, and her memory helpfully coughed up some half-remembered advice about how to get out of rubble after an earthquake, how to stay safe during a flood, how to survive a plane crash, and… how to exit a car sinking.
Step one, get seatbelt off. Step two, not panic. Step three: wait until the water filled the cabin so the water pressure inside was equivalent to the pressure outside the car’s door. Step four: open the door and swim up.
“Stop yanking!” Toki stammered. “Hold still so the seatbelt isn’t tense, and then just click it open!”
She shoved the woman’s shoulders down, and (maybe because she was in shock) the mom let her do it. The water was now reaching past her waist. It was so fucking cold. The woman and Toki both fumbled for the seatbelt buckle in the water and it took several long, agonizing seconds until one finger managed to press the button at the right angle. The belt loosened. The water was now reaching to the woman’s chest.
“Alright,” Toki faltered. “The water is pushing the doors closed so we need the car to be full to open the doors. And we need to not panic.”
The woman looked at her. She wasn’t crying, but her eyes (purple, bright purple, so much like Sayuri’s that Toki’s stomach dropped) were wide and shiny. Her voice trembled:
“I can’t swim. Please, you should… You got Hicchan out, didn’t you? My son?”
Toki nodded dumbly. The tears started running down the woman’s face. The freezing water was now reaching past her chest, and lapping at Toki’s tights on the backseat. It was so dark. How deep was that damn river?!
“Can you get me out the same way?!”
“I don’t know,” Toki said, feeling like her whole body was numb. “I don’t know, my limit is around twenty kilos but adrenaline may help, I don’t know…”
She was going to cry, she realized. She must have looked terrified, because the woman took her by the shoulders, gently, and shook her.
“Please save yourself,” the woman whispered. “You can teleport, but… I can’t swim. I can’t swim, I can’t swim.”
But she looked so scared, and all Toki could hear was I don’t want to die. The water was now up to her neck, up to Toki’s waist. There wasn’t much air left in the car.
Too many thoughts were spinning wildly in Toki’s head. How much air, how much time, what had possessed her to go teleport inside a sinking car, she needed to run, she couldn’t leave that woman here, she was going to die, she didn’t want to die, she didn’t want to watch anyone die…
And then, in the middle of her panic, there was a spark of fire, something that snarled no. She thought about the way her mom had avoided her eyes after bringing her to Meteor, the way the evening news had flashed with the number of casualties after the robbery, how Nono had sneered ‘play stupid games, win stupid prizes’, how the stun grenade had exploded on their kitchen’s table, how Homura’s fire had caught a hero climbing up to their apartment, how Fujio’s gunfire had cut out, how Meteor had roared as the building came crashing down, and the spark became a roaring fire. NO.
She didn’t ever want to feel this small and scared and powerless again, and she wanted to cry, she wanted to scream, no, NO, she rejected it!
“Your eyes…!” started the woman, jerking back.
Toki gritted her teeth, grabbed the woman with both arms like the world’s most ferocious hug, and jumped.
The woman and her fell in a tangle of limbs on the sidewalk, right in front of calico-lady.
“Ow.”
“Hicchan!” gasped the woman, scrambling upright to take back her son.
Toki got back up a little bit slower. The jump hadn’t been as tiring as a seventy-kilometers one. More physical, but not as exhausting. Maybe the distance and the weight used different ‘muscles’ of her Quirk?
She looked back at the river. There were… people getting out of the water. The second car’s occupants had managed to escape. A few second later, an amphibian-looking hero in a blue costume dived in the river. A bit further away sounded the sirens of an ambulance. Toki breathed deeply, relieved. It was over. Help was here.
Everything would be fine.
The passersby were starting to notice the soaking and crying woman, though, and quickly a crowd formed, full of worried (and curious) people. One of them gave a blanket to the woman. Another did the same with Toki, who suddenly realized she was drenched in cold water too, and was shivering pretty violently. She hesitated, but accepted the blanket. She really didn’t want to catch a cold… Although, she had been in a freezing river for several minutes, so unless she took a warm bath right now, she wouldn’t be spared. Gods, she hadn’t had a warm bath in weeks.
“Here,” the calico-woman said softly, giving her back her duffel bag, before turning to the onlooker. “Please, give her some space, you can see she’s overwhelmed!”
Toki almost retorted that she wasn’t overwhelmed but… Well, she didn’t really like being the center of attention. Also, now that the adrenaline rush had passed, she felt a bit weak. She had teleported in an unknow space, then had teleported out with a passenger. It was a miracle that any of that had worked. A little part of her was scolding herself, because that had been reckless and dangerous, but the other part of her brain was like… What else could she have done? She couldn’t just walk away and pretend she hadn’t seen that woman fall.
Paramedics started arriving. Toki reluctantly got up. But before she could leave, the woman she had saved rushed to her, and bowed almost formally:
“I can’t thank you enough! Without you… We would have both died.”
Toki smiled awkwardly. She couldn’t imagine that it was right. Saving someone life seemed so surreal. She had just… acted without thinking.
“It’s nothing. I’m glad you’re both okay.”
“It’s not nothing!” the woman insisted. “Please, is there anything I can do to thank you? At least let me pay to have your clothes dry-cleaned.”
God, she was right. Toki was going to have to wash those or they would small like pond for weeks and contaminate the rest of her duffel bag! Urgh. Toki tried to think of an excuse, but her mind came up blank.
“Hum… Alright. I don’t live here, so I need to find a place to change, but I’m swinging by the laundromat nearby that afternoon…”
“Nonsense! I live three streets away. Wait, let me give you my address.”
The woman reached to her hip, then apparently realized she didn’t have her purse. They both laughed, as if the absurdity of the situation was just hitting them. Toki reached in her duffel bag side-pocket, where she kept her notebooks. She took one of them, flipped to the last page and gave it with to the woman with the first pen she found. It was a bright pink and glittery, very girly. The woman giggled, then started writing. It was a bit awkward, since she still held her son in her arms. When she gave back the notebook, Toki saw that she had written her name, address, but also her phone number and an email.
“I’m Mihoko Shinsō,” she introduced herself. “And this is Hitoshi.” She gestured to her son.
Hitoshi had bright purple hair that stuck upright, unlike his mother’s long and wavy lavender hair. But he had her eyes, big and purple. Curiously, he didn’t have black pupils but white ones, reflecting the light like a cat’s. Toki blinked. Wait. The kid had purple hair and eyes. His full name was Hitoshi Shinsō. No way… It couldn’t be that Shinsō, right?
“I’m… Toki Hinohara.”
Mihoko-san smiled so brightly it hurt, her eyes shining: “I’m very pleased to meet you, Toki-chan. You’re a miracle!”
It was the first time Toki had been called anything like that. She couldn’t help but feel oddly touched.
Then the paramedics showed up and Toki was ushered to an ambulance. She didn’t teleport away because duh, where else was she going to get medical care anyway? So she let them pat her down for injuries, offer her a better blanket, and give her a warm drink. She said she had clothes in her bag, and they were all too happy to give some privacy to change. Her shoes were a lost cause, though, too wet and cold to be put on again. Toki had back-up shoes in her bag, but they were flat slippers. She was going to be so cold… Well, it would only be until her shoes dried off. She but on the slippers. At least she wasn’t in danger of getting hypothermia anymore.
Gods, she suddenly felt exhausted. She wasn’t used to so much stress! Alright, she lived a stressful life, but in general her anxiety stayed at a manageable level. She was familiar with her life and its risks. What had just happened was definitely not part of her routine and she really hadn’t been prepared to handle that. She had teleported in a river! In a freezing cold river, in a sinking car that was filling with water! Thank gods she wasn’t claustrophobic, because it was the stuff of nightmares. And she had really though she was going to watch someone die! That was way different from watching a building crumble from half a kilometer away. It was closer, more personal. More awful.
And she had saved someone. Wow. It was hard to digest it. It seemed so unbelievably ridiculous that her, Toki, could have such power. She had saved a human life. Well, actually, two human lives.
It felt… surreal. But good, too. A bit like the satisfaction of stopping a purse-snatcher and seeing the relief on their victim’s face when their bag was given back to them, but deeper. More reverential. Toki had never saved anyone but herself, sometimes at the detriment of others. And now… She had helped. She had done something that mattered. Two unique, irreplaceable human beings were alive today because of Toki. She had done that.
Wow.
When the paramedics were done, they offered her a ride (which Toki declined). Mihoko insisted on bringing her home to thank her, and Toki decided to go along with it. Honestly, she was exhausted. If she could sit down in a warm place to drink tea an hour, that would be really great. No library would let her in if she looked like she had just crawled from a swamp, and she couldn’t take a shower until gyms closed.
But just as the woman started showing her the way, the calico-lady appeared next to them. She looked a bit hesitant, but her eyes were shining with curiosity:
“I’m sorry to bother you. May I walk with you a few moments? I would like to talk with Toki-san.”
Toki wasn’t used to being called ‘-san’, so she blinked incredulously. On second thought, that cat-woman was really young. Eighteen, nineteen max. She looked like she was barely out of high-school and used a lot of eyeshadow to seems older.
Oh, why the hell not. The cat-lady (cat-girl?) had kept her duffel bag safe after all. So Toki nodded: “Sure.”
“Thank you,” smiled the cat-lady. “I’m Kameko Sabira. Nice to meet you.”
She really looked like a cat, with rounded triangular ears, big eyes that closed when she smiled, and even pointy canines. She wore a crisp white shirt and a dark pencil skirt, like a normal office worker, but she also had a few necklaces: two delicate silver chains, a gold one, and a neckerchief of sort with a fake bell as a pendant. Like a cat. Also, she was really cute.
Toki and Mihiko-san automatically introduced themselves, and they started walking. The accident was over but the place was crawling with curious people, drawn to the noise and the idea of a good story. They only needed to turn in the next street to be free of the crowd, though.
“What did you want to ask, Sabira-san?” Toki asked after a few seconds of silence.
The young woman smiled: “Your Quirk is astonishing. Have you ever thought of becoming a hero?”
Mihiko gasped: “It’s true. You would be a fantastic hero, Toki-chan!”
The young girl laughed a little nervously. Becoming a hero? Toki’s mind was drawing a blank. She hadn’t thought about it since… Gods, since that day in the doctor’s office when he had told her how amazing her power was. Then immediately Toki had been focused on finding the reasons behind Sayuri’s refusal, and then… Well, with villains has parents, the idea of becoming a hero had simply never crossed her mind again.
“I want to become an astrophysicist,” she finally said.
“The two aren’t mutually exclusive,” the calico-girl pointed out. “Heroes are also doctors and inventors, after all.”
Were they? Well, Recovery Girl was a healer but also a doctor, so it made sense. Toki considered it, then shrugged: “Then I suppose I’m not opposed to the idea.”
Sabira’s smile made her eyes spark, like a kitten seeing Christmas’ lights for the first time. She gave Toki a calling card, and the young girl took it, curious.
Kameko Sabira, Junior Assistant H. R.
Hero Public Safety Commission
It was like a jolt of lightning down her spine. Toki jerked her head up, searching Sabira’s face for a sign, a clue, something: and when the young woman smiled meaningfully, Toki realized that she knew. She had probably known from the moment Toki had used her Quirk in front of her.
“The Commission sometimes sponsors gifted children,” said Sabira softly. “It’s in no way an obligation. But the program can offer may things. Tuition, guardianship, a new identity, protection. And of course, a better future.”
And Toki stood frozen, while the full weight of this plan’s perfection fell in her mind.
The Commission. Of course. She hadn’t thought of them at all, but they were there. They had power. And they had formed Hawks, hadn’t they? Hawks, trained from a young age. Hawks, whose father was a criminal, just like Meteor, and who had used this program to hide his true name. Hawks, recruited because he had a powerful Quirk. Of course the Hero Commission would be interested in a teleporter. But unlike the guys Toki was running from… They were on the side of good guys.
Well, mostly. Shadowy organization were never good, and they had sent Hawks to spy on the Leagues of Villains even if it meant getting his hands dirty and maybe getting killed, but that was a topic for another time… The point was: they wouldn’t sell Toki to All For One, in any case. They were against him. And unlike the foster care system, they could protect her. The HPSC didn’t know who or what Toki was running from, but anyone with half a brain could guess that she was running from something. Maybe villains, maybe enemies of her father, maybe the weight of his name. But… The HPSC offered her what the administration couldn’t: a fresh start. And they knew it. Sabira knew who Toki was and that was precisely why she was making that offer, because she knew the offer could interest her, because that offer was no more and no less than a way out.
For a price, of course. No favor came free. Especially from shadowy organization.
Toki breathed in. Breathed out. She smoothed the paper with her thumb, then put the card in jeans’ pocket. She didn’t look away from Sabira. The young woman looked like an eager cat, with big round eyes shining with enthusiasm, and yes she was adorable, but Toki was also understandably wary.
“Can I get back to you in a few days with my answer?”
“Sure!” Sabira chirped happily. “Where do you want to meet? There’s a cat café a few blocks away, Cats’ Cappuccino, that’s pretty nice.”
Toki knew the place, although she had never entered it. She had actually never been in a cat café, since unaccompanied kids weren’t really welcome there. But she loved cats. Just for that, the idea appealed to her. She nodded, trying to think quickly.
“Alright, so… Friday, at midday, if you agree to buy me lunch.”
“Alright, Toki-san! See you on Friday, then.”
Sabira cheerfully said her goodbyes to Mihoko, then bowed to Toki, before turning back and walking away, a skip in her steps. Toki couldn’t help but let her thumb brush the paper in her pocket.
Gods, what was she getting herself into?
oOoOoOo
The last half-hour had been so surreal that when Mihoko wondered if Toki shouldn’t be in school, the young girl barely took time to weigh her options before throwing caution to the wind and telling her she had ran away from home weeks ago. After all, she would have a hard time explaining her duffel bag filled with clothes, money, and books. But Mihoko didn’t fret like Toki would have expected her to fret, which meant calling the police to inform them about the whereabouts of a runaway child. No, Mihoko started fretting about Toki. Apparently she was ‘skin and bones’ and ‘could catch her death’ and ‘wasn’t taking care of her health’. And she didn’t brush her teeth right. Ok, Toki admitted skipping the teeth-brushing sometimes, but she didn’t eat much candy, so that canceled each other out, right?
Well, wrong, and Toki was strong-armed into brushing her teeth before and after eating. It made her a little nostalgic. Nobody had cared about that since… Since Mom, actually, before she started becoming distracted by her pregnancy, the robbery, and all the rest.
Anyway. Mihoko gave her tea, and biscuits, and asked how she keep up with her education while on the run, and if she needed help, and that was all. She didn’t pry, and more importantly, she didn’t lecture her. Maybe she just wanted to avoid spooking her. But it was till a relief.
Toki hated adults lecturing her, and she would have hated it even more if it had been about her homelessness. She felt relieved by Mihoko’s tacit avoidance of the subject. Well, part of her wanted to talk about it, but it would also mean talking about Meteor and the robbery, and Toki couldn’t bring herself to admit out loud all of that to a woman who wasn’t aware of that awfulness in the first place.
Mihoko was nice. She was chatty and always smiling, filling the whole room with her cheerful presence. She was an artist: she drew, painted, danced. She was also a part-time nurse working in the elderly care, but she had stopped after having her son. As a college student, her passion had been street art and graffiti, and she shared a lot of funny anecdotes about climbing building to tag their roofs and find the best place to paint a fresco. Now she tried to have a calmer and more orderly life, but she still enjoyed art expos, and had recently taken to rollerblading. She was a very active mom.
The apartment didn’t bear much signs of a partner, though. Sure, there were pictures of Mihoko-san with a man, but no coat was thrown over the back of a chair, no pairs of slippers waited near the door. Toki enquired as delicately as possible… But Mihoko answered easily. No, she wasn’t a single mom. She was happily married to her husband Hajime, who was a surgeon in Musutafu Central Hospital, but he basically lived here. His Quirk was “No Sleep” and, as he didn’t tire or require breaks, he pulled hundred-hours shifts without any problem. He loved his work, and he wasn’t often home. Maybe once a week, at most. That was why his shoes and slippers were out of the way, and why there was none of his stuff scattered around. But he and Mihoko loved each other very much, and apparently Hajime doted on their son.
Ah, Hitoshi… He was apparently nine months old: he had been born on the first of July. He mostly ate and sleep and crawled around, but he was cute, didn’t cry much, and burbled happily when Toki held him. He didn’t really speak yet, but he blabbed in incomprehensible baby-language as if wanting to participate in conversation.
Unwillingly, Toki felt herself soften. He was a cute baby. And he smiled at her with a big, gummy smile that light up his whole face, his big purple eyes shining with pure delight. How could someone look at this adorable expression and not felt their heart melt?
Well, if he was the canon Hitoshi Shinsō, it was a shame to know that he would grow up to have a grumpy face and terrible eyebags. But hey, if he was the canon Hitoshi Shinsō, that meant that Toki now knew where she was on the timeline! She was eight years old (and half). Since Hitoshi was roughly a year old, that meant Toki was going to be about seven years older than the protagonists-to-be, the class 1-A of Midoriya and Bakugou and Todoroki and all their gang. When the canon would begin, the students of class 1-A would be fifteen years old so Toki would be twenty-two.
It was enough time to obtain a Bachelor’s degree at least. Or enough time be an established hero, if she took Sabira’s offer. She hadn’t decided yet.
Mihoko didn’t try to speak about it, but she did mention that whatever path Toki ended up following, she would always be welcome here. Actually, the Shinsō apartment was big enough to have a spare room, that was currently used as a study. But Mihoko started talking about how easy it would be to put a bed there, and that she had always wanted to furnish a guest’s room…
“I wouldn’t want to impose,” Toki stammered. “I can handle myself!”
“I don’t doubt it,” Mihoko replied very seriously. “You are more level-headed, competent and mature than a lot of adults. But there are burdens you shouldn’t have to bear, and I would like to ease them a little. It’s the least I can do for the person who saved both mine and my son’s lives. Besides, it would… it would make me happy to know you’re safe.”
Well, Toki couldn’t exactly argue with that. She tried to change the subject, and finally settled on:
“I will think about jumping by some time.”
Mihoko snorted: “Yes, that is a convenient Quirk you have. But please, ring the doorbell first? I may have a heart attack if I walk in a room and you’re already here.”
“Of course!” Toki said indignantly. “I have manners!” a pause, then she amended: “Well, most of the time.”
They shared a smile. A comfortable silence fell on the room. Toki drank some more tea, liking how the drink warmed her to her core. After a while, she impulsively asked:
“What is your Quirk, Mihoko-san?”
Judging by the way the woman stiffened slightly, it hadn’t been a good choice of topic. Toki wavered. “Besides, hum, making very good tea and being exceedingly nice to strange children…”
“It’s Brainwashing,” Mihoko smiled bitterly. “I can take control of a person by touching them. I had a lot of trouble controlling it when I was young, but I don’t, anymore. I haven’t used it in years.”
Well, that definitely confirmed it: her son Hitoshi would be the Brainwashing Hitoshi Shinsō from the canon. Toki mentally digested that. Mihoko threw a furtive look in her direction, then relaxed. Maybe she had expected scorn or mistrust (like Hitoshi would later on). Toki smiled awkwardly:
“Well, no Quirk is inherently bad or good. What matter is what we do with them.”
“Well said,” ginned Mihoko. “What about your Quirk? You can teleport?”
Toki hesitated, but she had already revealed a lot when she had jumped with Mihoko during her rescue. In for a pound…
“Yeah. I can carry stuff with me, but I have a weight limit. Adrenaline change those limits, though. That’s why I was able to carry you.”
“Yes, you said so,” Mihoko said thoughtfully. “Is that an evolution or maybe a second level of your Quirk? Just before teleporting with me, your eyes flashed gold.”
“My eyes did what?!”
“Not gold-gold,” Mihoko corrected herself pensively. “More orange-gold, and luminous, like fire. You have very pretty eyes, like amber… And for a second if was like they were light up from the inside.”
Toki didn’t move, but her stomach twisted unpleasantly. She couldn’t help but remember how Meteor’s eyes had glowed like embers in the dark. She already had the adrenaline thing from him… Apparently, it wasn’t the only aspect of her power that came from her father. Damn him.
But wasn’t it unfair to blame him, was it? Like Toki had just said… No Quirk was inherently good or bad. It was only a tool. The morality of its use rested in the hand of the person it had been gifted to. Toki’s Quirk came more from her mom (jumping from one space to another), but its power came from her father, and it wasn’t good or bad, it simply was. Besides, Meteor hadn’t done anything to Toki. He had been a brute, a thief, a murderer, but he’d only hurt other people. Not his own. Toki… Sayuri, and the other members of his Crew… He had never been anything but kind with them. Toki’s grievances were in the name of the countless people Meteor had hurt, against the general fact that he had thought acceptable to inflict pain on other human beings, but Toki hadn’t been the one wronged. So why would she blame her Quirk for resembling her father’s? It was like blaming herself for being related to him. It was just plain illogical.
“I wonder if that means my Quirk is evolving,” she wondered.
“Oh, you still have plenty of time for that, Toki-chan. Quirk start evolving during teenagerhood, and you’re… eleven?”
“Eight.”
Mihoko did a double-take: “Eight?!”
Toki shrugged sheepishly. She was tall for a child her age (she had been the tallest girl in her class) so she was probably on the short side for a pre-teen, but it didn’t seem impossible. The way she talked and carried herself also helped her to pass for older that she was. Mihoko did not dwell on the subject, but when Toki left a few hours later (when her clothes were done being washed then dried), she did insist even more vehemently about the fact that Toki would always be welcome here. Toki nodded, smiled, but didn’t make any promise.
She jumped on a roof, and considered that episode of her life over and done with.
Now what?
Now, she had forty-eight hours until her meeting with Sabira in the cat café, and she needed to cross-examine her options. Well, for starters… What did she know about the HPSC? Not much. It was the Hero Public Safety Commission and, as it was written on the tin, their goal was to make sure the heroes kept people safe. Safe from villains but also from bad heroes, too. Toki suddenly realized that stumbling upon a few Wikipedia articles a year ago while researching Quirks’ evolution wasn’t going to cut it, so she teleported a few blocks away to go to a library she knew. Then she took a computer and started digging.
The Hero Public Safety Commission was a law enforcement agency responsible for managing the interactions between heroes and society as a whole and for investigating the most dangerous cases of criminality. Basically they regulated the rules pro-heroes had to follow, a bit like the Chamber of Pharmacist or the Department of Archeological Studies regulated what happened in the professional orders they headed. But the HPSC had a bigger role because in Japan, heroes were public servants, privateers, cops, and military.
Japan didn’t have a formal military beside the Self-Defense Forces: their army had been disbanded after World War Two and had never been reformed. In others countries, the military had slowly lost power and had become more of a National Guard than anything, while in Japan there had not been a military to start with, so the heroes hadn’t had any concurrence in the ‘big guns that people cheered on’ department. Which actually was very tied to the hero-mania there was in Japan aaaaaand Toki had already verged off topic, so she grumpily abandoned this subject.
Back to the point. The HPSC was staffed by pro-heroes, retired pro-heroes, but mostly non-heroes. The goal was to improve the balance between heroes and regular member of society. Fair enough. The HPSC also had its fingers in a lot of pies. Just looking at the organization chart made Toki’s head hurt. There was an ethic committee, a committee controlling merchandizing and fair competition, liaisons with insurances compagnies… The Commission was responsible for many hero-related matters, including the Hero License Exam. The HPSC also closely with the Police Force to coordinate hero teams, and also had the authority as a criminal investigative organization. Toki hadn’t known that. But apparently it was kind of like the FBI, maybe? In any case, it allowed the HPSC to handle missions to heroes individually, to investigate and solve dangerous cases.
Like how Hawks had been ordered to infiltrate the League of Villains… Hum.
Toki’s memories from that part of canon were fuzzy. Which was normal, after all it had been what, one page in a manga she had read in another life years ago? Well, Toki had mostly thought that this mission had been given somehow coercively, because the HPSC shouldn’t have the authority to issue those orders. But apparently it wasn’t? Or, well, it wouldn’t. It was the Commission’s job to give missions and instructions to heroes. They did have the authority. Heroes could comply but also reject those assignments. Few would turn down that kind of mission, to be honest, and Toki didn’t need a Wikipedia article to see it. Bringing down a criminal organization would save lives, and what heroes would turn away from this task, even if the cost was their own soul?
So Toki read, and read, and read. Two and half hours later, her eyes hurt and she had learned a lot about the HPSC, but she had seen no mention anywhere of children’s sponsorship. Oh, the organization itself had goals that completely aligned with it. The Commission was, broadly, the part of the government that merged with the pro-heroes and controlled them. It would make sense for them to scout for children with powerful Quirks to nudge them in the right direction. Especially children living in poverty, or abused, or from villains’ families: children who were at risk of turning to villainy. The nice and moral option would of course be to give these kids to the foster system so they could heal, and later on freely pick a path, but hey. Toki was avoiding the foster care system because it wasn’t safe enough to protect her from villains, so maybe she shouldn’t be judgmental here.
Well… Anyway. When Toki left, she had learned a lot. She still had questions, of course. But she realized that, in a sense, her decision had already been made.
Because, the important thing was: she was tired of running. She was tired of not having a place to call home, of only owning what she could carry in a bag, of being alone all the time. It was exhausting. And this sponsorship program was a way out. It was the only real plan towards a long-term future Toki had. If she stayed on the streets, then what? She couldn’t go to school. She would eventually run out of her ill-acquired money. What would happen then? Running away had been a short-term plan. It had been a little over five weeks now, and that was already too long. Toki couldn’t live like this forever. Sure, she could decide that enough time had passed and turn herself to the police and then foster care, hoping that her trail had gone cold… But if Toki ended up in the foster system, she would always look above her shoulder in fear of being tracked down by All For One’s minions, or her father’s enemies, or whatever.
The Commission was giving her a way out. A new identity, protection, tuition. And of course, Toki could always ditch them once she reached her majority. But their offer was really tempting. Even without knowing the price.
So yeah. Toki’s decision had been made. She only had to ask Sabira a couple of questions to soothe her last reservations, and then… Well, she would embark on her new adventure.
oOoOoOo
Friday came. Toki packed her bag. It was lighter now. She had bought camouflaged little plastic containers and put money in then, before hiding them all across the city. In holes on the top of brick walls, on roofs, taped to the inside of fake ceiling in some libraries… If Toki ended up going to the HPSC, she didn’t want to have all her money confiscated. Yes it was her mother’s money, her mother’s stolen money, but still. She was well aware how worse her life on the streets could have been if she hadn’t had the meant to pay for her food, but also to wash her clothes, buy library cards, and stuff like that.
Anyway. When Toki walked in the café, she saw that Sabira was sitting next an unknown guy in a suit, and narrowed her eyes suspiciously. But the young cat-woman light up at her arrival and literally waved at her, so it was too late to turn back. Toki joined them.
“Nice to meet you,” smiled the man in a suit. “I’m Yokumiru Mera, from the Hero Public Safety Commission.”
He was tall but lanky, with dark eyes, an angular face, and messy blondish hair. Toki nodded without saying anything. Her eyes flickered to Sabira, and the cat-girl smiled apologetically:
“I’m only a junior assistant who’s been working at the Commission for less than a year. I had to bring up my superior, because… Toki-san, you’re kind of too important for me to handle.”
Toki couldn’t help but snigger at the dramatic way Sabira had say it. Mera playfully rolled his eyes, then turned to Toki and smiled gently:
“Toki Taiyōme. What did Sabira-kun tell you, to begin with?”
Toki side-eyed the cat-girl, and answered slowly: “That the Commission sponsor gifted children and it’s not dissimilar to witness protection. For that and from a quick google search about the Hero Public Safety Commission, I inferred that you’re on the lookout for villains’ children or otherwise kids with powerful Quirks that could easily turn to villainy, and you recruit them. It deprives the villains of their potential and turn them to the good side. I suppose training and tuition and the new identity are part of a deal, and the counterpart to it is that the kids become heroes, otherwise you take back what you’ve given.”
Mera and Sabira both took a few second to get over their shock, and Toki mentally attributed herself a mental point. It had been a while since she had completely taken aback people.
“No!” the cat-girl protested. “You say that like we target kids and if they’re not enough we just toss them away, and… No!”
“That’s a very dark outlook on our institution,” slowly said Mera. “Do you think you’ve been spotted by Sabira-kun here because she recognized you?”
Was that a trick question? Toki nodded mutely, and Sabira leaned forward, her big cat’s eyes shining with fervor:
“No! It wasn’t like that! I didn’t realize who you were until afterward. I didn’t approach you because you’re Toki Taiyōme, or because you can teleport. I approached you because you were heroic. Because you saw people hurting, people in danger, and you jumped to save them even though you were scarred, and you succeeded in saving them! And not by with sheer dumb luck! Yes, you used your Quirk, but what made me notice you wasn’t just its power. It was your skills, your determination, your compassion, your cleverness. I approached you because you acted like a hero would, and if I hadn’t recognized you I would still have given you that card, because a child with so much potential has to become a hero!”
She cut herself off, panting slightly after her impassioned speech. Her cheeks colored a little, and she quickly lowered herself back in her seat after realizing she had risen up to lean toward Toki. Mera looked amused by her outburst. And Toki… Well Toki felt a little stupid, now. There was such a thing as being too paranoid.
“Well,” she said after an awkward pause. “I’m sorry for making assumptions. But in my defense, I don’t know either of you, and you’re the one trying to recruit me for some shadowy program that would make me disappear.”
“Fair,” Mera admitted. “Do you want to know a little more about us, then?”
Why not. Toki nodded. Mera weighted his words for a moment, then started:
“Very well. My name is Yokumiru Mera, as I said. I’m twenty-five and the youngest director in the Commission’s Human Resources Department. My Quirk is Weather Prediction: I can predict the weather up to a week. I’m also Sabira’s mentor.”
Sabira almost bounced in her seat: “I’m Kameko Sabira! I’m nineteen, I’ve been working with the Commission since I graduated high school. My Quirk is Lucky Cat, it allows me to create a stroke of luck in a short radius around me. I used it when we met!”
Toki suddenly remembered the way Sabira had looked when she had first laid her eyes on her: eyes closed, face scrunched in concentration, as if focusing on a fervent prayer.
“So that’s what you were doing!” she realized.
“You noticed?” Sabira looked flattered. “I can only use it once a day, and it doesn’t affect me, only the people around me. It’s not a very useful Quirk for combat, since it targets everyone equally. But on that bridge… Even if the cars were too far away to be touched by my lucks, the witnesses wouldn’t be, and so they would have the luck to not witness a deadly accident that day.”
“Wait,” Toki blinked, disturbed. “Your Quirk made me jump in that car?”
But Sabira shook her head.
“No. Sadly, my Quirk can’t make people act a certain way, or change a pattern of behavior. Maybe my Quirk made you notice your own ability to act. But the decision to go and save that family was entirely your own.”
It was reassuring, in a way. Mind you, Toki was still aware that Sabira could be lying, but hey, trust had to start somewhere. Besides, the thing that had made Toki’s body move that day hadn’t been Sabira, or the passerby’s screams. It had been how wide and scared Mihoko’s eyes had been.
Purple eyes, just like her own mother’s.
There was a pause. Around then, the café was filled with chatter, cats’ noises, and cutlery clicking. It was peaceful, although the cats had probably noticed the tension around them, and no feline had tried to join them. Too bad. Toki liked cats. Well, probably. She had never even petted one, but she thought they were cute.
Then Sabira’s stomach rumbled. She turned crimson. Toki couldn’t help but snigger. Mera’s lips twitched, and he offered:
“Let’s begin with lunch. My treat.”
It was a café, not a restaurant, so they mostly had snacks. No matter. Toki chose the most gigantic waffle on the menu, with syrup, ice cream, caramel, nuts, and diced strawberries. Sabira took a milkshake and Mera a gourmet coffee with macarons. Then, while they were all eating (or rather, while Toki was wolfing down her waffle at a truly impressive speed), Mera explained:
“The HPSC has neither the means or the time to scout the whole country for potential heroes. But all of our agents have strict instructions to encourage gifted children to pursue that path. Some are receptive, some aren’t. We don’t push. Not everyone wants to walk down that road, and an unmotivated hero is not what we’re looking for. When we find someone interested, we usually don’t do much more than point them in the right direction. Sponsorship is extremely rare, it happens maybe one time out of ten.”
“How rare?” Toki asked. “Give me numbers. Names, if you can.”
Mera raised his eyebrow but obeyed: “We sponsor about one child every year. When that child has parents, our support come in the form of a scholarship to attend a hero course in high-school, and a recommendation afterward when they’re looking for an agency. It happens in eighty percent of our cases. When that child doesn’t have a legal guardian fit to care for him, the HPSC takes custody and provide training.”
“Can the Commission do that? Have custody?”
“Of course. We have administrative forms and everything. A judge gives the Commission temporary custody just as if it was a foster parent. That meant we have the same obligations of care, protection, and education. But we can keep your identity under wraps better than your usual foster family, since your training with us fall under the Heroic Identity Protection Act.”
This, Toki knew about. It was the bill that had allowed Heroes to completely separate their heroic personas from their private names. It allowed them to keep their surnames a secret, and to protect their family. Some heroes didn’t care very much for it, but others kept the two completely distinct (like All Might). Toki took a mouthful of ice-cream, considering. It did seem attractive…
“Is it like, contractual?” she suddenly asked. “If I agree, what do I owe you?”
“You’re a child,” Mera replied calmly. “You don’t owe us anything, and besides, your signature isn’t legally binding.”
“I’m not talking about the paper trail, but about what you expect of me to repay your help. Like… Do I have to follow your training and them become a hero at eighteen and then work until I die? What if I decide to go into medicine or engineering, or, I don’t know, even baking? Can you legally stop me from going to the high-school I want? Do I get tossed on the streets at eighteen with nothing but the clothes on my back?”
Sabira looked offended and horrified at the same time. Mera narrowed his eyes, staring at Toki for a few seconds before saying softly:
“You’re very cautious.”
“I’ve been planning to make Meteor stop killing since I was six,” the girl retorted flatly. “I started becoming paranoid very early on.”
“But you do want to become a hero, don’t you?” Sabira asked hopefully.
And that was a good question. Toki didn’t not want to become a hero, more like. It wasn’t a vocation, a dream. She had never wanted to have a livehood of fighting and bureaucracy. It just didn’t seem intellectually challenging enough. Also, it was fucking dangerous. Most heroes retired at age thirty, forty max, and chose a more lucrative career afterward, using their hero license to use their Quirk in their new job. Fighting villains all the damn time was exhausting. There wasn’t a lot of old heroes. At least it wasn’t because they all died young anymore (thank you All Might and the area of peace he had brought Japan), but it was still a risky job.
Besides, heroism also had a lot of serious problems that Toki really didn’t feel like tackling right now: like the over-publicized fights, the encouragement of reckless behavior, the wrongs of famous heroes swept under the rug… So yeah. It was far from being the dream-job.
But even with all of that, heroes had an appeal. It meant being strong, having the backing of powerful allies, the implicit protection of the same society that Toki had been so scared of when she had realized her parents were criminals. It meant freedom, because then she would be allowed to use her Quirk (and Toki loved her Quirk), and nothing felt more liberating than jumping from place to place. It meant power: money, publicity, alliances. But more than all of that it meant helping people. It meant seeing victims like Mihoko-san, scared and helpless, and having the means to do something about it. It meant changing the world. And wasn’t it mind-blowing to think that she could saves people? Her father had killed and destroyed, but she could protect, preserve, help. Even one life saved, it was enormous. It meant one life that would continue its course and change others, thanks to her.
It was bit like changing the whole world. One step at the time… It was a bit like touching the stars, making the whole universe a little brighter with one word, one action, one step at the time.
So yeah. Toki wasn’t blinded by the hero-mania but even then, she was attracted to the concept. Who wouldn’t? Even with the hyper-capitalization of it, heroism was still, at its core, the act of Doing Good.
“I do,” Toki answered hesitantly.
“Sure?” Mera-san insisted. “I want you to think about it seriously. It’s a big decision.”
“Worried about my happiness?” she snorted.
“Happiness is fleeting,” he said seriously “I’m worried about you being content.”
It was surprisingly solemn. Toki blinked, considering. She would have thought that a shady organization would pressure her more. But Mera-san encouraged her to reflect on her choices: mentally, Toki reevaluated him.
She heeded his advice, though. She paused, she thought. Then, finally, she nodded.
“I am. I would like it, I think. But I also have other dreams. I don’t want to have my hopes crushed because you closed all doors but one.”
Toki didn’t really know what she wanted to do with her life, besides learning things and eventually launching satellites into space. She wanted to be an astrophysicist, but that wasn’t incompatible with doing others things she liked, like traveling, fighting, exploring… Being a hero was a true option, sure, but she didn’t want it to be all of her life. What about her other passions? Would she have to give them up to do a job that, no matter how fulfilling, she would grow to resent because she had been coerced into it?
It was Mera who finally answered, slowly:
“You don’t have to worry. If you accept… The training we offer won’t create any legal, contractual or financial debt to the Commission. We will provide you with housing, education, training, a new identity. In exchange you have to obtain your heroic license and swear to never turn to villainy, but that’s the extend of it. At age eighteen, once you have your license… It will be your choice to either continue to work with us, as a fully-fledged hero, or to break ties and follow another path. It’s rare but it happens. The education and training provided will be heroic in nature, of course, but it can come in many shapes and forms. The oldest active hero trained by the Commission is Recovery Girl…”
Toki boggled. Recovery Girl! She was a canon-character, and she was ancient. How old was this program?
“… And she went to medical school for seven years on a full scholarship, and only decided to become a hero at twenty-five years old. The point of this program is not to make heroes but to push gifted children towards heroism or support of heroism… But more importantly, away from villainy. Especially if they find themselves in a vulnerable position. Recovery Girl came from a very poor family. Her parents had started making money on the black market by offering her services to people who didn’t want to risk going to a hospital. You can guess what kind of injuries those people had.”
Injuries from fight with heroes, gangs’ conflict, less than legal stuff. Yes, she could imagine. Toki frowned, a bit hesitant. Did Recovery Girl know that Mera discussed her past with strangers? Well… Maybe it wasn’t a secret. After all, Recovery Girl didn’t hide her civilian identity, and she even had a Wikipedia page. Maybe her past was in there. Toki hadn’t read it recently, though, so she couldn’t be sure.
But well, surely the HPSC wouldn’t discuss confidential information with random strangers. They were all about secrecy…
“Can you give me the names of heroes you sponsored?” she suddenly asked.
“You don’t trust us?” asked Sabira, looking almost hurt.
Mera touched her arm lightly: “No, it’s a valid question. For all she knows, we could be making that stuff up.” He turned back to Toki: “There are currently four active pro-heroes who’ve been fully sponsored by the Commission, including having custody when their guardians were unsuitable. Recovery Girl, Snatch, Lady Nagant, and Shirayuki who had just made her debut last year. The pro heroes Takeshita and Crust have been sponsored too, but only via scholarship and letters of recommendation, as their family supported them. A few sidekicks, too, around ten… although I don’t know their hero names. There are also around thirty persons who have been sponsored by the Commission, but who quitted being heroes after a few years to pursue more attractive career.”
Toki knew a few of the heroes mentioned. Again, maybe Mera was lying. But at least now she had data she could check. She doubted that kind of info would be on their Wikipedia page, but at least she knows who could answer her questions.
The tension at their table was gone, and so a few cats approached, interested in their melting ice-cream. A calico cat jumped on Sabira’s knees, and Toki inwardly grinned at how similar their colorings were. Orange, black and white, just like a tricolored maneki-neko…. a lucky cat. Ah. Sabira’s Quirk really had been aptly named!
Then Toki turned back to the subject of their conversation, thought for a few seconds, than asked: “Are you sponsoring anyone right now?”
“Two children. The first one is attending his last year at Shiketsu on a scholarship. The second one is younger, and fully sponsored.”
Toki mulled it over. She liked the idea of being able to walk away if she didn’t want to be a hero after all. Sure, she didn’t want to rely on anyone, but she was also aware that she was eight years old, and living alone was hard. She needed an adult, and the Commission was willing to step in… and would be more pragmatic about it than the normal foster care system. Besides, they were willing to go above and beyond in terms of education, if they had paid for Recovery Girl’s medical school. That was certainly a point in their favor.
“Do you have any more questions?” asked Mera.
A few. Like where was she going to be staying. Would she be home-schooled or go to class with others children? Would the police be notified that they could stop looking for her? Would her mother? Toki hesitated briefly. Sabira sniggered:
“Come on, you can ask. I’m starting to think it would be for the best.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
The young woman grinned: “You are smart, you have a tendency to question things, and it’s physically impossible to stop you from walking away if you don’t like something. So it’s going to be a very short cohabitation if you enter this deal without having the full picture.”
Well, she wasn’t wrong. Toki held back a smile. Kameko Sabira was so young and eager, especially next to cool-and-collected Mera, that it was easy to forget she was actually sharp and clever.
“Alright, I have questions,” Toki admitted. “But I also made my decision, and most of what I want to ask may be skirting the edge of confidentiality. So if you want, we can talk on the way to your super-secret lair.”
Sabira’s eyes lit up and she mouthed the words ‘super-secret lair’ with delight, before quickly turning to her boss. Mera didn’t even look at her.
“No, we’re not renaming it that.”
“Killjoy,” muttered Sabira so quietly that Toki barely head her.
Mera ignored her, and turned to Toki with a smile: “Then… Welcome aboard. Do you want a dessert before we leave?”
Well, if people she sold her soul to were always that nice, Toki would have no problem get used to it.
Toki got dessert. She petted a few cats. Then they left. Mera and Sabira had come with a car, and Toki realized with a slight shock that she had never been in a car before. Why the hell would she have? She had always lived within walking (or teleporting) distance of school and shops. When they couldn’t walk somewhere, there was public transportation. But a car, or maybe specifically that car, was wayyyyy fancier than a train. The cushions were soft leather, the cabin was wide and comfortable, and there were heated seats. Mera was driving, but Sabira sat in the back with Toki, and both adults continued answering her questions (and providing her unprompted with more information). Sabira for example talked a lot about her family, her friends, her favorite food, how she had tried to get in the hero course at Yūei but failed the entrance test and ended up in the business course of another heroic high-school. She was kind of funny.
The rational and paranoid part of Toki’s mind knew that Sabira was trying to make her feel comfortable to integrate herself, but… Well, it was working. Sabira was nice to talk to. After a while, she even insisted Toki call her by her first name, Kameko.
Anyway. Mera warned them they had a long road to their destination. They drove… And they talked about what was going to happen.
The HPSC would make the police close Toki’s case, and keep all the rest secret. Unless she wished to keep contact with her parents (which Toki emphatically didn’t), then it would look like the case was closed because she was presumed dead. Morbid, but efficient.
The place where Toki would live was where all the fully-sponsored kids lived until they reached eighteen (or left the program, because it was still an option). Officially it was a small factory, with big labs for supports items, and residential apartments for their staff. Unofficially, behind the labs, there was also a training ground, and the residential area housed their potential students. It was located on Shikoku, the second smallest island of the five that made Japan, and it was five hours away from Mustafu. More exactly, it was on the easter side of Shikoku, at the edge of a city called Naruto. Toki absolutely loved the idea. What? She was a nerd.
The children who got full sponsorship (and who were in the Commission’s custody because their parents were unsuitable) usually had villains on their heels. And even if they didn’t… As a rule, their presence in the Naruto labs was to be hidden. The Commission had the right to take in children but it wasn’t a fact the HPSC wanted to be publicized. So the kids were usually homeschooled until high-school, and more importantly, they had to give up their surname. When they mingled with the outside world on holidays, or received their homework from their online classes, they usually used a fake name. Inside the labs, between themselves or with the staff, the students used their hero names.
So Toki would have to pick a hero name because that would become her open identity, while Toki Taiyōme would be her secret identity. Ugh. She was left scrambling for a good idea. Something related to jumping? Or light? Since her parents were codenamed Meteor and Eclipse respectively, there was no way Toki could take a name like Shooting Star or Comet or even Satellite. Damn it!
Anyway. Toki had all the time she needed to pick a name, right? They were still hours away from Naruto…
Absented-mindedly, she thought that she had never been that far away from her parents. Actually, she had never been so South of Japan. It was both exciting and oppressing. To pass the time, Toki reported her attention on Sabira… On Kameko’s chatter.
Sabira worked in Musutafu, as did Mera. However, to help Toki settle in, they would both drive her there and introduce her to the staff. It made sense. They were the only ones who knew her and had established a rapport of trust. Considering that the HPSC couldn’t physically stop Toki if she decided to leave, it was in their best interest to make her want to stay… and for that, she needed to have a friendly bond with her new tutors.
Sabira… no, Kameko hoped to be transferred in a nearby city. Her parents lived nearer from Naruto than from Musutafu anyway, and it would be nice to see them more often. Besides, Kameko was hoping to be promoted soon. She had only worked in the Commission for a year, but if Toki turned out to be a good pupil, then Kameko (as the one to bring her in) would be rewarded. In some way, Toki’s work would be reflected on her. And later, maybe, when Kameko would be a mature an experimented official, and when Toki would be a hero… Then maybe Kameko would work with her agency. Most heroes had a specific contact at the HPSC, because each hero was unique and so it was easier to have a handler assigned to a particular agency to know the specifics of their mission.
Endeavor’s agency, for example, worked with one specific guy who knew by heart how which fire codes could and could not apply in certain situation, or how to decode Endeavor’s blunt statements to the press as something a little softer. One of the most sought-after posting was in All Might’s agency, but the guy holding the post for the last ten years had no intention of going anywhere. Besides, even if he left, he would leave big shoes to fill. Kameko sure didn’t feel like taking his job. She would rather work with young and dynamics people like her!
Bemusedly, Toki wondered what Kameko had done in canon. She hoped she had found her perfect dream job. She was so enthusiastic, she would be wasted in a boring hero agency!
But wasn’t that a funny idea to imagine? Her, Toki, having her own agency. Being a hero. Bossing around sidekicks, and having Kameko read her reports and make jokes. It was a surprisingly idyllic vision. Maybe because Toki had always imagined her future as some sort of ongoing battle, but this picture… It was a picture of having reached success. And it was kind of nice to think about.
Anyway. Between Kameko’s chatter, Toki’s questions, and all the thoughts that rolled around her head… Well, the five hours of road passed quicker than Toki had expected. The sun was already touching the horizon.
“We’re almost here,” said Mera.
Naruto was small city, but very active, with touristic spots, traditional houses, but also modern buildings and several high-tech structure that ranged from high-school to factories to theater. They drove across, and Mero took a smaller road that ran through woods. Barely ten minutes later, they crossed an open gate with two men in black suits, and Toki saw a big sign saying “NARUTO LABORATORIES – PRIVATE PROPRIETY”.
From the road, it did look like a laboratory. A tall administrative building, then lower and longer structures, like hangars, and then, behind it, a dense forest to surround the place and keep away prying eyes. Mera stopped the car in front of the administrative building. Toki couldn’t help but feel herself tense a little.
“Well this is it,” Kameko smiled encouragingly. “Have you decided on a hero name?”
Because that what she was signing up to. Become a hero. She could become something else, to, but right now, to take her future in her hands, she needed to become a hero. She couldn’t stay in Meteor’s shadow forever. Toki exhaled, slowly, then squared her shoulders.
“Yes. I think my name will be… Quantum.”
She needed to start somewhere. So why not here?
Notes:
Wow the Commission seems nice, doesn't it ? Here is the plot-twist : they really are. Yep, I read a ton of fanfic where the HSPC was manipulative and downright abusive to Hawks, for exemple, but i like turning tropes upsides down so there we go. Also making the Commission some sort of puppetmaster removes Hawks' agency in all the shit he's done, and it makes his character too shallow. The Commission can have both Hawks and Lady Nagant (manga spoilers!), and have no overlap into their characters/missions/objectives.
The Commission is not all good, obviously. They deal in black ops and stuff like that. But they try to be good and do good. For example : saving children without blackmailing them afterward. Anyway. This is a "moraly grey HPSC" story, but leaning on the lighter side with a few dark spots, instead of being all dark and evil.Also : Mera is canon-character, but Toki didn't reconize him. Kameko Sabira is an OC. Here is what she look like :
Click for a bigger pic! Or go check out Snapshots of Wisdom (the next fic in this series) to see the full picture =)I like to imagine that in canon, she's the one liaising the HSC with Miruko, the Rabbit Hero (notorious for refusing to have an agency or a team). You can't get more dynamic than that !
Anyway, small addendum about the Shinso family :
A popular idea in the fandom is that Hitoshi Shinso lives in foster care and is either an orphan or abandonned by his parents. So... I imagine that in canon, the car accident did happen, and his mother Mihoko did die in it. The amphibian-hero that Toki saw managed to open a window and get baby-Hitoshi out, and he nearly drowned but survived. His mother didn't. Hitoshi's custody fell to his dad, who was super-busy and neglecting him, and also grieving his wife and coping pretty badly. Hitoshi awakening Brainwashing was the last straw. His father put in in the foster care system a few years later because he was too overwhelmed, and several of his coworkers had threatened to have him charged for child neglect. So that's how canon!Hitoshi ended up in foster care.
But in the Wisdom-verse, Mihoko didn't die. A butterfly flapped its wings and everything changed. What? I just want Hitoshi to have a better childhood, okay?
Stay tuned for the next chapter !
EDIT 12/08/2022
Spelling mistakes corrected. Mention was made of Toki missing her parents, instead of being in constant denial about it. Slight edits were also made to the conversation between Toki, Mera and Kameko: Toki trusts Mera a little more, because he didn't push her.
Chapter 7: Choosing a different path
Summary:
Toki joins the Commission's sponsorship program. She makes a friend, then destiny decides to screw her up some more. Not that Toki wasn't expecting it, but still.
Notes:
Hello people ! Here is the new chapter !
Congrats everyone who looked at the timeline and immediatly realized who Toki was going to meet xD Althought i bet the tags helped a little!
Also, quick question: who is up to date with the manga? 'cause i am ! And i have an annoncement to make !
Soooo i've decided that this fic would be canon-compliant until chapter 315. For those who don't remember exactly, it's the one where Hawks call himself Lady Nagant's "successor". Well, i won't do that, because i've already written Nagant's successor and it's not Hawks. It's an OC and... well, imagine the love-child of Bakugo and cold-blooded alligator, add a few pouds of trauma to that, and voila! The funny thing is, he wasn't supposed to exist, but i accidentally introduced him as the romantic partner of another sponsored hero, and it snowballed from there.
Anyway. Just to say: i'm still reading the manga, and i will maybe collect little bit and pieces of canon to expand the Wisdom-verse, but... from chapter 315 and on, i won't try to make Wisdom stick close to canon.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
CHOOSING A DIFFERENT PATH
There was a tiny detail Toki had overlooked in her plans. She should have paid better attention when Mera had talked about that sponsorship. Because then, she would have remembered him saying that there was another kid here, in the same situation as hers.
And if she had paid better attention to the timeline, she would even have guessed who it was exactly…
But let’s start at the beginning. Upon arrival, she was introduced to a bunch of people, who all smiled and bowed politely when Mera said: “this is Quantum”, as if she was already a hero on a tour. It was both a bit surreal and very flattering. She didn’t want to let it go to her head, but hey, she was only human. She was given a bedroom, bigger than the one she had in her mother’s apartment in Tokyo, with a bathroom and even a tiny dressing room. There was a bed, a chair, a desk with a few middle-school manuals already set up, and some manga on shelves. The door had a lock, and Toki was given the key. It was a show of trust. Sure, the staff probably had another key, but the gesture was appreciated. She could have privacy.
The caretaker, a short man with a frazzled air, took her clothing size and said he would give her a new outfit tomorrow, but Toki was allowed to keep her duffel bag and all of her stuff. Then it was dinner, in a large cafeteria where everyone ate together. Toki was introduced to some more people, she ate two serving of food; then she was escorted back to her room, took a shower, put on her pajamas, and slept like the dead.
On the second day, she woke up early. She had a brief moment of disorientation, then remembered the previous day. She dressed with her normal clothes, brushed her teeth, hesitated a moment, then opened her door to try and find her way to the cafeteria. If she got lost, well, she could always teleport there.
She had barely made two steps in the hallway when there was an exited cry from a few meters away. Toki turned… and then she was nearly bowled over by a flurry of crimson feathers. She went down with an undignified squawk then reflectively teleported back upright: her forehead collided with her would-be assailant’s, and they both jerked back with a muffled ‘ouch!’… Then Toki raised her eyes enough to see a short blond boy, looking mortified, frantically moving his arms:
“I’m sorry! I heard there was another kid and I wanted to meet you but I didn’t mean to scare you and I’m sorry! Did you hurt your head? How did you do that, did you teleport?”
But Toki’s eyes were glued to what was behind the blond kid, which was a pair of red wings. Child-sized, but still very large, probably able to support his weight and fly. Wings! Oh, by Gandalf, Merlin, Madara, and all nerdy deities. Her brain suddenly connected the missing dots. A child sponsored by the Commission… Red wings… Around fifteen years before the canon started… Oh for fuck’s sake, she was so dumb! Mera had basically told her to her face, and she should have guessed who it was. Because it was… It was…
“I’m Hawks!” the boy smiled brightly, his golden eyes shining.
I know, Toki nearly said. She barely held back a hysterical laugh. This time it wasn’t like Hitoshi Shinsō, where she hadn’t been sure, and it had been a baby, and it some way his canon-self hadn’t seemed so present. But Hawks? Oh, Hawks looked just like Hawks. He had adorable round cheeks, his eyes were wide with childish enthusiasm, but it was him, with his unruly blond hair, the tiny markings that looked like eyeliner, his wings…! Shit, it almost gave her vertigo. It was a real person but he looked so much like his future, canon-self that it was disorienting, like seeing double.
She couldn’t help but grin, feeling giddy and in shock and elated all at once. Holy shit, it was baby-Hawks. She was in a manga world, with canon-characters, and she was going to be a hero. Holy freaking shit, she was in! It was really sinking in, all at once. And weirdly, it managed to be more exhilarating than panic-inducing. Probably because she was facing an adorable version of what had been one of her favorite characters, instead of a crushed building, a scared woman, or a guy in police uniform. It was a kid, like her, just like her, in the same place and on the same path and suddenly she wasn’t alone. She was in a fucked-up and wonderful and terrifying world, but she wasn’t alone.
“I’m Quantum!” she beamed. “But you can call me Toki when no one’s around.”
Hawks’ eyes widened. “Then you can call me Keigo when no one’s around, too!”
Oh gods he was adorable. So round, so soft! Toki wanted to squish his little cheeks. And he was so small! He was like, half a hand shorter than her! Sure Toki was tall for her age, but he looked tiny!
“How old are you?” she blurted out just as Hawks avidly asked: “So you can teleport?!”
Then they both tried to answer at the same time, cut themselves, and there was an awkward pause until they both snorted. Toki gestured at him to start. Immediately, there was a barrage of questions:
“What’s your Quirk? Where are you from? How old are you? Are you gonna stay? Are you training to be a hero? What does Quantum mean? Did you pick it yourself? Where is your training uniform? Are you going to train with me?”
Toki blinked, taken a bit aback by the rapid-fire onslaught of questions, but the she answered eagerly. Her Quirk was teleportation, she was from Hinohara but she had lived in Tokyo then Mustafu afterward, Quantum was a name she had picked herself because her Quirk fucked with quantum mechanics (Hawks looked elated at hearing her swear and Toki was absurdly reminded of how young he was, and made a split-second decision to tone down the swearing), she didn’t have a training uniform yet, and she had no idea if they were going to train together but gods she hoped so, she hadn’t been around kids her own age she could talk to in ages. Well, her whole life, actually.
Then it was her turn to ask questions, and of course the first one was: where was the cafeteria?
While Hawks lead her there, they chatted excitingly, taking turn asking questions and sharing enthusiastic rambles. Apparently Hawks was eight years old, too! He was born in December, so Toki was older by a few months. Hawks had been here for a year and half. The Commission had offered him a spot after he rescued several people from a car accident (the parallels with Toki’s circumstances were amusing). His Quirk was Red Wings! He could fly but also move his feathers telepathically, to throw them at targets or carry stuff around. He liked it here a lot! At first he hadn’t lived here but in the city, to socialize or something, but he had moved to Naruto Labs six months ago and it had been great so far! The food was awesome, and the training was really fun. There were rules to follow, though, and a training uniform to wear. It was a tight black shirt and wide khaki pants: Toki couldn’t help but think it looked a lot like what would be Hawks’ hero costume. They could wear casual clothes if they wanted, but the training clothes were made to be dirty. And training could get rough! But at least it was exciting. And it would be even better with a partner! Hawks was barely holding still, almost vibrating with excitement, his wings fluttering behind him. He was training to be a hero and one day, he would stand on the same podium as the best of the best!
When they arrived at the cafeteria, a few people were already here, including Mera and Kameko. A stocky woman in a designer suit was talking with them. When she saw the two children, she beckoned them forward. Toki hesitated, but Hawks was sauntering toward the woman without fear, so she followed.
“Hello, Mrs. Vice-President!” chirped Hawks.
“Hello Hawks,” the woman smiled benevolently, before turning to Toki. “And hello, Quantum. We haven’t been introduced yet. I am Asahi Genmei, the Commission’s Vice-President. I’m glad you joined our program.”
Toki nodded, eying her warily. Her silence didn’t seem to bother Genmei, who made a little speech about the high hopes she had for Toki, and how much this program could offer her. In the end, it just a way for the big boss to make herself known to their newest recruit. The Vice-President then enquired about Hawks, asking if he had any trouble, how his training was going, that sort of thing. Afterward, they had breakfast, then Kameko and Mera said their goodbyes to Toki. It was a short affair. Kameko gave Toki her phone number, and promised to be in touch, but they each had to follow their own path.
Anyway. Toki finished her breakfast with Hawks, and although the adults’ intervention then departure had left her a little unsettled, she slowly relaxed. Hawks wasn’t stressed at all, and his confidence helped her to feel more at ease.
Besides, he was a real chatterbox. He was smarter than the average kid, too: quick-thinking, curious, smart. Toki was more knowledgeable in most areas (because she had devoured more books and articles that she could count) but Hawks was easily able to keep up with her, and it was great, it was fantastic, Toki couldn’t help but feel both excited and riled up, because that was a challenge and she loved it. They actually chatter and bickered for nearly an hour in the cafeteria before a teacher came to fetch them for lessons.
And that’s how Toki’s new life started.
She settled in quicker than she would have thought. She had gotten used to never sleep more than a few days in the same place, to be always moving, to pay attention to her clothes, to keep an eye out for heroes or cops or just curious people. Being allowed to relax left her feeling off-balance and paranoid for a few days, as if being complacent was the beginning of the end. But she had a lot of things to direct her newly feed attention to. Lessons. Training. Hawks.
She was given training clothes: a black shirt, loose brown pants that stopped at her calves, black socks, and black sneakers. She was also given new casual clothes if she asked for them, because her pants were starting to be a little short. An appointment with the local doctor was made, to poke and prod at her until he declared her a little underweight but otherwise healthy.
Then she was given schoolbooks (and she had never been so happy to have homework again!) and her level was assessed by a few tests. No surprise, she was good in Japanese, very good in math, pretty advanced in physics, average in chemistry, excellent in English, abyssal in literature, bad in geography, and unconventional in both History and sciences, which meant that she had high-school level comprehension on some subjects while being also wildly ignorant of others. The teacher didn’t quite scratch his head when looking at her results, but it was a near thing.
Anyway. Toki was back to school, and she loved it. Granted, they only had one small classroom, but it was good enough for only two students. The curriculum was tailored to their progress, based on online classes and standardized tests, and they had a rotating set of three teachers to supplement those classes.
Those teachers were actually researchers working in Naruto Labs, and they only taught part-time. At least they were all dedicated to their task. They never brushed away Toki when she asked a weird question. They actually quickly realized how she latched on some topics and investigated them, and used it at their advantage by integrating those topics into their lessons. Quirk analysis became a regular feature in their History lessons, math problems using astronauts and quantity of fuel needed for a rocket became more and more frequent, and fantasy books started appearing in their Japanese or English lessons.
They also had “Strategy Lessons”, which was basically a class where they played with riddles and creative problem-solving. Sometimes the teacher gave them an imaginary scenario with a villain, a set of obstacles, and a hero, and they had to figure how the civilians could escape. Or they were given logic puzzles to solve with mental arithmetic and general culture. It was Hawks’ favorite class, and soon it started to become Toki’s too. They weren’t asked to memorize things but rather to go wild with their imagination, and the Ravenclaw in her was rubbing its hands in delight. That was the good stuff!
The teachers also let her read whatever she wanted. The lessons ended pretty early in the afternoon, and after that Hawks and Toki were free to roam around. They had some video games, but also access to their classroom’s computer, and they sometimes played football with the off-duty researchers. But Toki also read, read and read. The Naruto Labs’ library didn’t have as much fantasy as the libraries in Musutafu, but the researchers certainly thought they were smart, and so there was a ton of books on different subjects. And most of them had educational purposes! Toki found He, She And They: An Exploration of Gender Through The Ages, which was not the kind of book she had imagined to find in a lab for support items. There were others titles that held her attention, like Mankind and Mutantism that talked about how mutant Quirk had evolved and the discrimination they faced, or The Powers That Shapes Our Minds, which was a compendium of several decades of debate about how much a person’s Quirk shaped them compared to socialization.
(Toki’s opinion was that it depended from people to people, and conducting a global study was a bit pointless considering how unique each Quirk was. Yes, sometimes a person’s Quirk shaped them, she was the perfect example: she was well aware that her reckless streak came from the fact that she could always disengage from any situation. But it had shaped the way she interacted with the world rather than shaping herself, so you could say that her Quirk had impacted how she was socialized, and then socialization had shaped Toki. Hawks’ personality hadn’t been affected by his wings: but his future, his perspective, the way people saw him… That was what his Quirk had changed.)
(It was fake causality. In canon, Bakugou’s teachers had thought his Quirk made him explosively violent, for example, but were willing to ignore it because he had such a promising future. In fact, his Quirk had no impact on his personality whatsoever. Bakugou was violent because people let him be violent, even encouraged him. A Quirk didn’t change you: but it changed how people perceived you and how they treated you. And even then, that changed from person to person, with how much the Quirk was visible, how much of it was passive or needed intent to active, what kind of social class the subject lived in…)
But anyway…
Lessons were four days a week: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. Wednesday was for Quirk training. On Saturday they had extra-curricular activities, which meant that Hawks was learning sword-fighting. Toki signed up for boxing, because punching people was cool. Then she also signed up for judo, because the instructor begged her to take a martial art where the goal was to restrain the opponent. It was true that Toki’s Quirk easily allowed her to slither out of any grasp and run. Boxing would help her be more offensive, but a hero also needed to learn how to capture bad guys without knocking them out cold…. Although, Toki could probably knock out people by teleporting with them ten-meters high and then dropping them… Oh well.
But back to the point. They had one hour of conditioning every day to keep in shape, but Wednesdays were always the most intense. They did push-ups, sit-ups, but mostly a fuck-ton of stretches. Apparently, strength training was a bad idea for kids because having too much muscles could stun their skeletons’ grow (Toki hadn’t known that!). But that didn’t mean their instructor was going to let them stay idle. They had to work on their flexibility, their dexterity, their speed… And most of all, their Quirk.
Some part of Toki was still waiting for a proof that the Commission was abusing their power. Because, morally, training eight years old to fight was wrong. So really, Toki would only need a reason to fly of the handle, to yell vindictively ‘Gotcha, this is child abuse!’ and then run away. But the Commission didn’t train them like, said, Endeavor had trained his son (or would, because Shouto was less than two years old right now). There was no beating, no disparaging, no military-like rigidity. It was tough, sure, but it wasn’t very different from what Toki remembered from Aizawa’s classes in the manga.
Hawks flew, jumped through hoops, chased flying drones or was chased by flying drones. He multitasked, doing one thing while several feathers did something else, like trying to catch a multitude of soft toys thrown in all directions. So far his record was using ten different feathers for different tasks. Toki couldn’t help but think about the canon-Plot, where Hawks had been able to find and evacuate several dozens of civilians in a crumbling building in less than a minute with his feathers, while in free-fall, watching a Nomu fight Endeavor, and… yeah. Hawks no doubt had the potential to be this efficient, but right now he was still a kid, and he had a long way ahead of him.
Toki trained with him. Sometimes they had the same exercises, like searching and collecting a bunch of hidden objects (usually brightly colored balloons) as fast as possible. They also were together in some lessons like first-aid training, sparing, or team tag.
Their instructor was a speedster, called Hayasa-sensei. He was about thirty, strict but fair, and never held back when there was a race to be won. Between him, Hawks, and Toki, it made for crazy games of tag.
Toki’s Quirk training was tailored to her. She was made to jump higher, further, at several points in succession. She had to teleport at one point, spot several targets in a split second, then manage to teleport to them one after the others with her eyes closed. She was made to jump through the same flying hoops as Hawks, but since she didn’t fly, she had to teleport high and then use her momentum. She learned to teleport while sparring without losing track of her adversary’s movements. She played hide-and-seek with drones and surveillance cameras. She learned parkour and free-running, with and without teleportation. It was hard, sometime. But it was also challenging and entertaining. They had brightly-colored targets, rewards for their success, quiz-tests in the middle of their races, breaks as often as needed. It was… It was kind of the same type of training the protagonists had at Yūei in the manga, with crazy scenarios, risks, and fights, but in a controlled setting, and with lot of care afterward.
They had a reward system with candies. Toki was even allowed to take double her part of lemons candies, since they were her favorites.
Anyway, the whole training thing was calqued on Yūei… But it was child-sized, made for eight years-old instead of fifteen years old. Most of it looked like games. Intense and challenging, but still fun and interesting to do. Yes, they hit each other, and sometimes they broke bones, and they were sometimes put in stressful situation. But at no point they were in real danger… And at no point Toki thought ‘oh this is pushing it too far’. Which was saying a lot, considering that she was still waiting for the other shoe to drop!
I mean, in some way training children for a future of violence was wrong no matter how good your intentions were. But Toki and Keigo weren’t trained to mindlessly follow orders, or to become stronger no matter the cost. They were trained in how to best use the tools they had at their disposal. Yes, those tools would be used in a violent ways, but it was inescapable because they were destined to live in a very violent world. Did that make sense?
Toki wanted to be indignant, but her teachers and trainer were awfully reasonable. She had to begrudgingly admit that maybe the guys policing ultra-dangerous super-powered people who beat up bad guys for a living… knew what they were doing. Go figures.
So… A week passed, then another, then a month. Spring came and settled down. Toki started getting used to this place quicker that she had expected, and she started to appreciate it sooner than she would have thought.
She liked not having to worry about her next meal or about where to sleep, or if she could find a place to shower. She liked that the adults were friendly, but gave her space. She liked being able to read as much as she wanted. She liked having a place to put her stuff, and being able to own more than a duffel bag of clothes. Toki especially liked having classes, being able to asks questions and get answers, to be seen, pushed and encouraged in her curiosity. She liked having teachers to give her directions and guidance. She liked that they were nice, too. They clearly cared about her, respected her boundaries, applauded her intellect, and Toki basked in it like a flower under the sun.
But the best thing in Naruto Labs? It was Hawks.
Toki had never really had a friend before. She had had her mom, then her dad and his gang. Yeah, she had loved them, they had been family, but she hadn’t trusted them… And besides, they had never been equals. She was all too aware of the fact that they were adults in control of her life. In school, in her gym club, or in the parks she passed during her weeks of homelessness, Toki had met a few kids, but she had never made friends with them either. Same problem: she couldn’t trust them, and they weren’t equal. Toki was almost always stronger and smarter, and it bred either admiration or resentment. Toki had always found peers that wanted to have lunch with her, or join her in class for group projects, but she had never had friends. Neither of her own age, neither among adults. She had been aware of how lonely it was, but she hadn’t really minded. She didn’t know anything else.
But now there was Hawks. He wasn’t as well-read as her and he didn’t have twenty-five years of memories crammed in a corner of his head, sure. But for the rest? He got her. They were both thrill-seekers, curious and reckless and bright-eyes with wonder. Hawks loved logic puzzles and riddles, like her. Although he didn’t have Toki’s thirst for knowledge and books, he loved to learn, and each time Toki showed him up with some obscure knowledge, he met the challenge head on. He was as smart as her, but often quicker on his feet, unlike Toki who constantly overthought things. Hawks was delighted by challenges and enigmas, and he wasn’t a sore looser or a bratty winner. It was the game that mattered, not who won or lost.
Hawks was also unafraid of heights, like her, and he loved using his Quirk to climb, jump, or soar through the sky. They stood on equal footing: in class, in autonomy, in the social hierarchy, in term of strength and cleverness and age and experience, and wasn’t that a novel experience? For the both of them! Toki had been lonely her whole life, but Hawks too. But now, they had found each other, and they weren’t alone anymore. They liked each other, they trusted each other, they fought and trained and learned together, and it was even better than not having to worry about being homeless. Toki had never raced on the rooftops with someone but there was something exhilarating about sharing something you loved with someone you trusted, and realizing that person loved it as much as you did.
Toki didn’t write as much as before in her notebooks, anymore. When she had questions, she could ask them to real people. Sometimes she still wrote the answers down, but it didn’t seem as important now. Her poetry notebook was still regularly opened, but she wrote less and less. Before, it had been like a valve to let out her bottled-up feelings, but now it was less necessary. Ironic, wasn’t it? She felt less pressure than she had when living at home with her family.
When you’re born in a burning house
You think the whole world is on fire
But it’s not
It’s not.
Was it a betrayal, to think so quickly of this place as home? She felt more at ease here than she had felt since… Well, since Meteor. Or maybe earlier. Since that first argument with her mom, when Sayuri had left her alone a whole week. How old had Toki been? Five? No, probably six, because it had been on her following birthday that her mom had betrayed her trust and moved to Tokyo. Gods, she was eight now. Eight and half. That event was basically a quarter of her life away. That was twenty-five percent of her whole existence spent being jumpy and refusing to trust anyone. No wonder she was paranoid.
But here… There wasn’t a threat constantly hanging above her head. There was freedom, opportunities, protection, and friendship. And yes, for the first time in a very long time, Toki felt safe. Toki felt home.
It was good. Because a few days later, the last remnant of what had been her home crumbled forever.
oOoOoOo
Toki had been in Naruto Labs for a little over a month when the news came. A worried-looking man in a suit sat down Toki after her class, and told her that her mother’s pregnancy had suffered complications. Toki felt her stomach drop out. She had honestly forgotten about it. Well, she hadn’t forgotten about her mom, her hospitalization, the baby, but she hadn’t realized so much time had passed. Sayuri had been three months along in October to now, it was time for the birth, wasn’t it?
“No quite,” the man coughed nervously. “Your brother is two weeks early. But the doctor saw a problem, and both the baby and your mother would suffer if we wait longer. They have decided to trigger the birth this morning. It… It isn’t going well. You may already know it, but it was a very risky pregnancy. There is… The doctors are doing what they can, but there is a big risk that the baby won’t make it. And your mother… She is at risk too.”
Toki felt like throwing up. The man awkwardly patted her hand and told her he would tell her if there was any change, but nothing more. The hospital Sayuri was in was highly secure and they couldn’t allow visitors. They didn’t even tell Toki where it was, probably worried that she would sneak there. They were worried for nothing: Toki wouldn’t have. She remembered too vividly the way her mother had patted her head and told her ‘you know what to do’ with a smile, she remembered the weight of the back notebook in her hands as she sent it in the mail to the heroes, she remembered Meteor’s roar of rage as the building came down, and how bright the TV screen had been that evening, showing the names and faces of all the criminals arrested. It had been her fault. She had ruined her parents’ lives, and she was terrified to face them again.
Toki was excused from physical training that afternoon, and since Hawks was restless and distracted, he was quickly excused too. They both hid on Toki’s room, and waited. And waited some more.
“Is it bad that I’m relieved that they forbid I go see her?” Toki whispered. “She could die, and I still don’t want to see her. Is it selfish?”
Hawks considered.
“Yeah, a little? But it’s not a bad thing. I don’t want to see my mother either.”
Toki side-eyed him, because Hawks never talked about his family. Just as Toki never talked about hers, come to think of it. She shouldn’t use double-standard here.
“But she could die,” she gulped. “Maybe she is scared and hurt and in pain. I’m prioritizing my fear of being rightly accused of ruining her live, over her fear of dying. It’s wrong. I know it’s wrong. If I was braver, I would have sneaked out to go and look for here, because maybe she needs me here.”
“Did you really ruin her life?” Hawks asked.
Toki threw him a dark look. Here she was, opening her heart, and that dumb pigeon had to put his foot in his mouth. He raised in hands in a placating gesture:
“I’m just saying, maybe she doesn’t blame you.”
“Non, no, she does,” Toki muttered. “I’m the one that send the police the info they needed to arrest her, my dad, and all their gang. She had hidden her identity from the cops for ten years. And she couldn’t even run, since I waited until she was in the hospital.”
“… Okay, that’s… yeah that’s pretty bad.”
Toki’s shoulders sagged. She knew that, of course, but it still stung to heard it. Hawks didn’t say anything for a few seconds, then leaned sideway to knock his shoulder against her.
“Hey. You did your best. It shouldn’t… Parents shouldn’t ask bad things from their children. You looked out for yourself because no one else would, right?”
Toki smiled weakly: “Yeah, in a way.”
“Then you did good,” Hawks insisted with ferocity. “And there’s nothing wrong with being selfish sometimes. If you give and give and give, then at the end you will end up all empty and dried up.”
There was a quote like that, in one of Toki’s fantasy book. A story about a witch who raised a princess without telling her she wasn’t her real daughter, and Toki didn’t really remember the morale of the story, but she did remember the quote. It is alright to be selfish. Bleeding for others is a gift. It is valued, but it is up to you to give it.
“I should be braver,” she still said in a small voice. I should have more to give, she thought, but she didn’t dare voice it.
In Japan, there was this whole culture devoted to self-sacrifice. You gave yourself to your job, to your duty, to the point where it became a cornerstone of your identity. It played on the hero-mania, too. Heroes were expected to be infallible, to be more than mere mortal, because if they didn’t give everything to their job (even their lives) then they had betrayed the trust people had given them. But even without being a hero, you felt the pressure, the internalized social expectation that you had to give all of you. That keeping something for yourself was selfish.
It was normal to be selfish, it was human. But Toki feel ashamed and small, and still she couldn’t make herself change her mind. Confronting her mother scared her. She was afraid that it would turn ugly. She was afraid, so afraid, that the ugliness would consume everything good she still kept of Sayuri in her heart.
So she waited. Hawks leaned on her side, warm and comforting, and waited with her. The man in a suit had said that the birth had been triggered this morning, but when he had pulled Toki out of her class, it had been mid-afternoon. Now it was night. How long did it take for a mother to birth a child? How long did it take for a person to pass out from exhaustion and pain? How long for a baby to suffocate, to hurt, to die? How long for a mother to bleed out? Toki didn’t know, and it ate her up inside, but she didn’t dare voice her questions out loud. She was terrified of the answers.
She had tried to never think of her mother… or of her whole past and her whole family, actually… but Toki still had a lot of complicated feelings about them. She had loved them and feared them and despaired of them. She had wanted to stop them, but talking and reasoning with Meteor or his crew was like yelling at a wall. So she had taken a page of her mother’s book and simply acted as she felt right, to trap them with stronger people that would solve the problem for her. Just as her mother had brought her to Meteor when Toki had started rebelling. It was logical, it was the Right Things To Do, it was an action born out of love and despair at their miscommunication.
But it had been cruel. It had been a betrayal. Toki had felt betrayed when it had happened to her, and she hadn’t been sent to jail. Of course her family hated her, now. They must feel dismayed, horrified, furious. They were right. Toki felt awful for causing them pain… But for the life of her she couldn’t regret sending that notebook to the heroes. She couldn’t have lived with herself if she had stayed their accomplice in thief and violence and murder.
But Sayuri… Mom… She hadn’t actually killed anyone, and yet she was the one who suffered the worst, wasn’t she? She had been weak and helpless when she had been arrested. She must have felt so afraid: for her friends she couldn’t protect, for her baby who was so fragile, and for herself, too. And she had been alone, so alone, away from her husband and friends, abandoned by her daughter. Sayuri had devoted years of her life to Toki, she had restructured her life of crime to raise her child in the most normal life she could, she had protected her and spoiled her, and even if Toki and her mom hadn’t always seen eye-to-eye, they had loved each other. They had loved each other but that hadn’t stopped them from hurting and betraying one another, hadn’t it? Just as Sayuri had once betrayed Toki’s trust by bringing her in the Crew’s life and cutting off any escape, Toki had betrayed her mom by selling her to the police.
But Toki had forgiven her mother, she realized. Maybe not fully, and of course she would never forget, but the pain had healed. Toki had bounced back from what happened to her (because after all, there were worse things that being dropped in a friendly family that sincerely cared about her, even if they were criminals). But Sayuri… Sayuri would maybe never forgive Toki for this. There was a difference between being forced in a family of criminals that tried their best to be nice, and being held prisoner by law-enforcement while helpless and pregnant with a baby who could die any day. No, Sayuri would maybe never forgive Toki for this. And… It would be unfair to ask it of her.
I just wanted to stop Dad from killing more people, Toki wanted to say. I didn’t mean to hurt you, but to stop him I had to stop you. I’m a teleporter just like you, I know how dangerous we are. But Mom, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.
She would never say those words to her mother, now. A little after midnight, another worried-looking man in a suit came. His face was grave and drawn, and Toki knew what he was going to tell her before he even opened his mouth.
Sayuri was dead.
She had been brave, she had done her best, but the pregnancy had been too dangerous from the start. She should never had risked it. Her body had been too weak, and carrying a child had weakened it further. The birth had been bloody and messy. Some muscles didn’t stretch right, others tore open, and the baby had been too big, dead weight ripping her apart from the inside. It had taken nearly sixteen hours to deliver. After that Sayuri had been rushed in intensive care and they had tried for two more hours to save her… But she had died.
The baby was dead too. Sayuri hadn’t even had time to name him. Toki remembered, vaguely, that her mom had wanted to call him Hikari. A gender-neutral name, but more suited to a girl, just as Toki was a gender-neutral name but more suited to a boy. It was so absurd. All of it seemed so pointless, so surreal. Toki felt empty and numb. Not like hollow box, but like a fruit whose flesh would have been scrapped off.
If Toki hadn’t warned the heroes, would Sayuri still be alive? She wouldn’t have been imprisoned. She would have stayed in Musutafu hospital, were she could have the best care and where Recovery Girl was only a half-hour away or so. But Toki had warned the heroes, and Sayuri had been arrested. She had been moved to a more secure hospital, and the doctors had probably been less talented, less patient, less attentive, less concerned. They had done their best, the man said, but maybe they hadn’t, because Sayuri had only been a prisoner, and not a rich patient who paid well. Or maybe they had done their best, but it hadn’t been enough. What difference did it make? Sayuri was dead. She had been Toki’s mother… and they had hurt each other so much, and never apologized… and now she was dead.
The man said he was sorry for her loss, but the words were meaningless. Sorry wouldn’t fix it. Toki would have liked to say that it seemed impossible, that she couldn’t believe it, but she didn’t have the luxury of denial. Not when living in this world. Her mom was dead. She had trouble wrapping her brain around it, but she could feel the truth of it in her bones. Sayuri was gone. Her mom would never hold her in her arms again. She would never have the chance to yell at Toki or to forgive her.
“Do you want to go to the funeral?” the man asked gently.
And Toki nodded, because she felt sick to her stomach with shock and grief and guilt, and she owed her mother at least that much.
“Can Hawks come with me?”
Hawks, who had been small and silent the all time, briefly tightened his hold on her hand. The man looked at him, surprised, but he agreed readily.
The following week was kind of fuzzy.
The next day, there was a funeral, short and to the point, in a cemetery near Mustafu. Toki and Hawks went there by car, and the five-hour trip seemed to last twice as long. They didn’t talk, they just held hands. Or well, Toki was holding Hawks’ hand like a lifeline. Everything was so solemn, and depressing, not at all like Sayuri had been. But well, Sayuri wasn’t there, was she? And funerals were for the living, not the dead. Besides… The ceremony didn’t attract a lot of people. Maybe Sayuri still had friends in Tokyo or Hinohara, but nobody knew who they were so nobody could contact them. Meteor’s Crew was in prison, and they had been the closest thing Sayuri had to a family. Apparently, she had been an only child, and an orphan. Toki was her only relative present.
There were two coffins, because there would be a tombstone for Hikari Taiyōme too. Toki hadn’t realized it until that very moment, and it felt like a punch to the stomach. She had lost a brother, too. The coffins were lowered in the ground in solemn silence, but Toki didn’t feel closure or relief. Just that gaping wound in her chest that hadn’t began to heal.
Kameko had come to support her. Hawks hadn’t left her side. It helped, not to be alone, but it didn’t help enough. Sayuri was dead. What was Toki supposed to do? What was she supposed to feel? She was sad, and grieving, but she also felt guilt and anger and rage and fear, a confusing whirlwind of emotions she couldn’t made sense of. She felt numb and empty, and raw like an exposed nerve. She didn’t cry at the funeral, but on the road home, huddled on the backseat with Hawks asleep next to her, Toki sniffed and sobbed quietly until exhaustion.
Once back in Naruto’ Labs, her teachers tried to give her space… But they were all a bit awkward, not knowing how to tiptoes around the subject.
Still, life went on. Toki had a full week without classes, but then she had to go back to training.
She went back to class and, the first day, she missed about half of what the teachers said. During training, she was either too distracted or too ferocious, trying to drown the universe in the pounding of blood in her ears, taking risks and jumping always higher and higher, until Hayasa-sensei yelled at her for her recklessness. She felt angry, and sad, and desperate, and empty. Her mom was gone, there would never be closure, and she didn’t know how she was supposed to deal with that.
But she didn’t collapse. It hurt like a knife wound, so violent that it cut off her breath with the shock: but Toki continued living. She went on, one day after another. She ate, she slept, she studied, she trained, she talked. She smiled less and didn’t laugh as often, but she was still here, whole and alive. Her mother was dead but Toki wasn’t, and she was bouncing back from the tragedy. She almost felt guilty about it. Sayuri had been the pillar of her existence for so long: shouldn’t losing her wreck her life? Did that mean that her love hadn’t been so strong after all? Because Toki had had complicated feelings about her mom, but she had loved her. She still did. Betraying her then losing her was terrible, and it broke her heart… but life went on.
Days passed and, little by little, the pain faded.
Some days Sayuri’s death didn’t seem real. She had been alive the last time Toki had seen her. Pale, tired, but also calm and focused. Sometimes Toki just plain forgot that her mother was dead. She hadn’t been with her for weeks now, so Toki was used to her absence. Sayuri had been a distant idea, out of reach, but that nothing really bad could touch. And now… She was gone for good, wasn’t she.
Parts of me died
in the house I grew up in
and I visit them in my dreams.
Toki had always been a dreamer, easily lost in her own head, so she threw herself in training and studying and other distractions. She had books, she had computers, she had challenges and ideas and games, and she had Hawks.
It was clear that he had no idea how to deal with her grief, no idea how to help her untangle the complicated feelings she had towards her mother, but he always tried earnestly. He asked her if she wanted to talk about it (sometimes she did, but most of the time she didn’t). He never made fun of her when she snapped or teared up, even in the awkward way that ill-at-ease children used defensively. Hawks was eight, but just like her, he had mostly grown up isolated and surrounded by adults who expected maturity from him. He could be childish, but when it came to the important stuff, he was always sensitive. Toki felt a little pathetic with her tears next to a kid who was technically her age, but so much more emotionally intelligent.
They were both lonely kids, though, and maybe Toki’s pain was distressing to Hawks too, because he clung to her as much as she clung to him. At night, they often snuck in each other’s rooms to make pillow-forts and whisper until late. Toki told him the full story about how she had turned Meteor’s Crew to the police. Hawks told her about his own family, too. His father the thief and murderer, who had been arrested by Endeavor for stealing a stupid car, and who was rotting his jail. His apathic mother who only cared about money and safety, and who had given her son to the HPSC without a second of hesitation as soon as the men in suit mentioned money. Hawks hadn’t been luckier than Toki in the family’s department.
They shared secrets. They shared dreams. Somewhere in the middle of that, they started making up names for their future agency, then designing their costumes. It was easier to talk about the future than to dwell on the past.
It was somewhere during that time that in Toki’s mind, her friend shifted from Hawks to Keigo. He was still Hawks, but Keigo was something more personal. She was the only one who called him that, just like Keigo was the only one to call her Toki. After all, there was no one else now who would remember who she was before taking the name of Quantum. Her mother was dead, her father in prison, her family scattered. Disappearing had been the goal, had been safe, but it hurt to leave the past behind. So it was comforting, in a way, to know that before being Quantum and Hawks, they were Toki and Keigo.
Here, now, in her new home, grieving her mom and grieving all the possible futures where they could have made up and forgiven each other, Toki felt both very alone and, maybe for the first time in her life, not alone at all. Having a friend, a best friend, really changed everything.
Without Keigo… It would have been so much worse. Sure, it was rough patch, but company made it bearable. Toki had never had someone to share her crazy ideas with. Someone to sneak off in the kitchen with, to eat the last part of cake at midnight. Someone that worried she didn’t have a favorite plushy, and offered to loan her his Endeavor doll if she had nightmares. There was something so simple and stupid and pure in it, that some nights, dumbly, Toki had tears burning in her eyes.
“Are you crying?!” Keigo whispered in a horrified tone.
“No, I’m not!”
They were both in his room, in a makeshift fort made of pillows, chairs and both their duvets. There was a storm outside and they both had trouble sleeping, for different reasons. Keigo had nightmares. Toki remembered how loud the storms were when she slept in library, and how worried she always was about the roof being torn off.
“Come on, take Endeavor,” Keigo insisted, and Toki took it.
The plushy was worn and well-loved. It made her feel nostalgic. She confessed in a whisper: “I had an otter plushy at home, before. My dad gave it to me.”
“Not a hero?” Keigo blinked.
Toki shrugged: “Nah. My parents didn’t like heroes, so I never paid much attention to them.”
“That’s too bad. Who’s your favorite hero, then?”
Toki pouted, considering. She didn’t like All Might. No matter how good he was, she remembered his numerous flaws from canon… And he would forever be associated, for her, with the roar of the building collapsing, her father screaming in rage as he made rubble rain on the heroes. She didn’t like Endeavor much either, no matter how cool Hawks though he was. In canon, he had been a dickhead and an abuser, and even if he was going to redeem himself later, it hadn’t happened yet. Then… which other heroes did she know? Not much. She was mostly aware of their sidekicks, since she had talked to several of them in Musutafu. But none of them warmed her heart, none of them made her feel protected.
Well, Toki thought, her eyes stopping on Hawks who was still waiting for her answer. That wasn’t really true, was it?
“You,” she finally said. “The hero you’re going to be.”
Keigo flushed, his little wings puffing up in pride and embarrassment. But Toki was being truthful.
“You’ll be a great hero, too, Toki. Shining as brightly as Endeavor!”
Toki mechanically hugged the plushy. Damn, she missed her stupid otter.
“I dunno. It feels so far away. Besides, I don’t think I want to be like Endeavor or All Might or anything like that.”
“Really?” Keigo blinked. “That make sense, I think. You will be a hero like you. Not as bright as Endeavor, not as strong as All Might, but someone…”
He struggled, trying to find the right words. Toki looked at the window, to the storm who was still raging.
“Someone smart,” she decided. “But someone kind, too.”
She wasn’t sure about what kind of hero she wanted to be, and she wasn’t sure it was the right answer. But that was why she was here, wasn’t she? To learn. She still had time.
oOoOoOo
The terrible thing with life is that it doesn’t slow down for you when you need it. You have to keep moving. Losing her mom, especially this way, without any chance of reconciliation or closure, and with the nagging certitude that her death could have been avoided if Toki hadn’t got her arrested… Well. It was a hard blow.
But children bounce back. They were resilient creatures, with sharp mind and lifelong supply of determination. So Toki bounced back.
It was spring. Their lessons switched from third-grade level to fourth-grade level. Toki asked for more books about Quirk studies, and the library was quietly supplied with a dozen of heavy volumes. In History class, they started focusing on world history, instead of only learning about Japan. In science, their teacher offered to build a miniature volcano to study how tectonic plaques produced volcano chains, and a dozen of adult researchers joined their project with childish excitement. Toki got a hair-cut. She tried a bunch of different hairstyles for the day, but nothing felt right aside from her usual macaron-buns. Then Keigo wanted to get a hair-cut, too, and Toki gleefully played hairdresser. The result was kind of shorter on one side than on the other but at least she had fun.
The days were longer, so their lessons were a little shorter, and they used the free time to train. Well, it wasn’t really training: their physical conditioning was extended half an hour, and they spent that time playing various games. Toki was only now noticing how good all those stretches had been for her. She had always been flexible thanks to her gymnastics club, but this was a whole other level. She was learning to do backflips. Her reaction time had become better, too, as did her reflexes. Playing ferocious games of tag with Hayasa-sensei had paid off. When faced with a threat, Toki’s instinct had always been to flee… but now she felt more confident, and she could reflexively attack instead of retreating. Of course, when she spared with Hawks, she still lost two times out of three. He didn’t know how to throw a punch but he was quick on his feet and he used his feathers, the cheat.
Still. Hayasa-sensei, their trainer, was very proud of their progress. He had spreadsheets about how they were supposed to evolve and what level of skills they should reach, it was all very impressive. Hayasa-sensei was also really fucking lucky that Keigo and Toki were both very energic children, because he had high expectations for them. They did an hour and half of physical training each day, then five hours of Quirk training every Wednesday, then three hours of various sports on Saturday. That kind of schedule wasn’t crazy (especially in Japan where gifted kids had great expectations trust upon them) but it was still very ambitious.
“Now you have reached a solid level of combat reflexes and self-awareness of your bodies,” Hayasa-sensei said, nodding approvingly. “But what you must now focus on is speed. You’ll be both quick fighters, not heavy-hitters. You need to learn how to dodge and run circles around your enemy. So if you agree, I would like you to quit boxing and sword fighting for something that will teach you gracefulness, control, accuracy, and speed. You will have to practice this discipline until you’re at least eleven. Three years should be enough for the movements to be second nature to you. Afterward, you can drop it if you want.”
Keigo and Toki looked at each other. The boy shrugged:
“I don’t mind.”
“Me neither,” Toki added. “But I like boxing. Can I drop judo instead? We’re going to learn a martial art anyway. Right?”
There was a fleeing smile on Hayasa-sensei’s face:
“You can drop both if you want. You have reached an acceptable level: the goal wasn’t to make you an expert, just to teach you about your limits and your potential. And… No, it’s not a martial art. I was talking about ballet.”
“WHAT?!” the kids both schrieked.
“What?” repeated Hayasa-sensei, blinking. “Have you never considered it?”
“No!”
“It’s a girl’s thing!” Keigo added indignantly.
Toki rounded on him, menacing: “Oh yeah? Can you elaborate on that?”
“Er…”
Hayasa-sensei sniggered. “Don’t pretend you don’t stereotype ballet dancers either, Quantum. Come on, let’s talk about how wonderful and difficult dancing is…”
Turned out ballet helped with coordination, balance, and agility. It made them use as much flexibility as their usual gymnastics, but it was also a lot more physical. Toki and Keigo were both a little dubious, so Hayasa-sensei had made them practice a few exercises. Some jumps, some twirls and chassé and battement and arabesque. They were spared the pointe shoes, but even then Toki felt about as graceful as a drunk donkey, and even Keigo (who used his wings to balance himself) didn’t fare much better.
So… Yeah. Ballet it was.
Ballet meant going to town, because Hayasa-sensei was not a qualified teacher for this. There was a dance studio in Naruto, and a club taught by a quiet middle-aged woman. Both Toki and Keigo were signed up. Two hours a day, every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday evening. They would have lessons with a bunch of other children, which was a daunting prospect… But, as Hayasa-sensei wisely put it, they needed to socialize. Homeschooling was all fine and good, but they would end up too sheltered if they continued like that. Besides, learning with more experienced children would help them catch up faster. They would have a range of different partners to work with.
(They were signed up under the names of Toki and Keigo Hayasa, and instructed to say that Hayasa-sensei was their cousin, and to keep quiet about the rest. In any case, the teacher’s absolute lack of curiosity about them clearly showed that she had been somewhat briefed. Hey, maybe Toki and Keigo weren’t her first students to come from the Naruto Labs…)
So. Life went on.
And Toki made peace with her mother’s death.
It still hurt. It hurt, but less than before, the pain fading in the background. Toki healed. It wasn’t a story: the world didn’t stop because she had lost a loved one. Actually, the proof it wasn’t a story was right here, because if it had been a manga, Toki would have been allowed to have closure. She and her mother would have had one last argument, or maybe a tearful reconciliation. But now, Toki would never know how her mother had lived her betrayal, what she had thought of her, if she had been angry or devastated, if she had hated her, if she had wanted to forgive her.
There had been questions Toki had wanted to ask her, and now she never would. Why did you have me? Why did you choose Meteor over me? What did you plan if I ran away and refused to be a villain? Would you have still loved me, if I stopped supporting you? If I stopped being potentially useful?
Toki knew she hadn’t been born from a Quirk marriage, like Shouto Todoroki. Her parents had loved each other. But still, she wondered if they would have wanted a baby, if that baby didn’t have the potential for an awesome Quirk. There were little clues pointing in that direction… Like how Sayuri had let it slip that she wanted Hikari because Toki’s Quirk had been strong. It was only a single phrase, told in a rush when Sayuri had revealed her pregnancy, but Toki couldn’t get it out of her head.
There were other things, too. Meteor had been incredibly uninvolved in her live until it became necessary. Toki’s future as a part of their Crew had always been made very clear to her. It was difficult to explain, but there had been an element of… duty, in the way Sayuri had raised her with the expectation that she would join the Crew.
Maybe Toki was paranoid. But still, it nagged at her.
(And if her parents had decided to keep the baby, keep her, because they thought about her Quirk… Maybe Sayuri had decided to keep the other baby, Hikari, because Toki’s mulishness about villainy had been disappointing. Hikari would have been the better version, raised with villains from the beginning. Wasn’t that a chilling thought?)
Anyway. Sayuri was dead. Toki was not. She would never have her answers now, but that was fine: life was full of others questions. And it was her life, hers alone. Sometimes Toki randomly thought about Sayuri (and this whole mess, and how any chance of making peace or amends had vanished with her death, because the whole Crew had loved Sayuri and if they didn’t already hate Toki for babbling… they were now certainly hating her for robbing Sayuri of the medical care that could have saved her life). Some days Toki had to hold back tears. But most of the time she just forgot and worked, studied, talked, laughed, trained, played.
For a while, she hadn’t touched her notebooks. But now she wrote in it almost frenetically. Mostly the poetry one, which was slowly filling up. Words were bubbling in her brain but died on her lips: words of love, loss, resentment, grief, fear, guilt, shame, despair, anger, and she needed to put them on paper. Some days she didn’t even touch her pen, and her head was empty. Those days, Keigo needled her to do their homework together, or said dumb puns to make her laugh. It worked, most of the time. But still, writing felt liberating in the way spoken words couldn’t be.
Cruel mothers are still mothers
They make us war
They make us revolution
They teach us the truth, early
Mothers are humans
who sometimes give birth to their pain
instead of children.
Sayuri hadn’t been violent, abusive or neglectful. But she had been a bad mother. She had hurt and betrayed Toki. She had punished her by faking abandon. She had ignored her wants and her fears. She had seen her as something she owned, something she could give and share with others. She had loved Toki, she had cherished her and protected her, but sometimes you can hurt people even if you love them dearly, even if you think you’re doing what’s best.
Sayuri hadn’t been a good mother. She had tried. But she had other dreams, other priorities… And no matter how softly she tried to push her daughter in what she thought was the right direction, what she had wanted to do with her life had been frightening and harmful. So yeah. Sayuri had been a bad mother.
It was ironic that Toki had asked herself that question for the first time years ago, when she had just learned that her mom was a villain, and that she hadn’t dared to find an answer. And now that she had found it, it was too late to fix it. Sayuri would never have the chance to be good mother. But Toki would never have the chance to be a good daughter, either. She wouldn’t have the chance to ear forgiveness, to obey, to understand, to ask the right questions and accept her parent’s way of life. She could never amend. Even if Sayuri had lived, Toki wasn’t sure she would have been able to. There were screw-ups you couldn’t come back from.
She could never go back to being Toki Aratani. She could never go back to being Toki Taiyōme, either. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.
But maybe it wasn’t a bad thing. She didn’t know who she was now, not yet, but it wasn’t bad. She had teachers, and books, and well-meaning adults. She had a future, a promise tailored to the name of Quantum. She had the sky, and science, and astrophysics. She had Keigo, most of all. Her first friend, her best friend, a future hero named Hawks. And, worse came to worse, she still had poetry.
Thought my soul may set in darkness,
it will rise in perfect light:
I have loved the stars too fondly
to be fearful of the night.
Sayuri… the villain Eclipse… She hadn’t deserved to die. But she had chosen to carry a pregnancy with a fifty percent chance of fatality. She had chosen to help her husband rob banks. She had chosen to blackmail, threaten and manipulate her own daughter. She had made her how choices, just like Toki had.
And just like neither Meteor nor Sayuri were responsible for Toki’s choices, well, their daughter wasn’t responsible for their bad decisions.
So days passed, then weeks. Toki learned to dance, and slowly, the raw wound caused by her mother’s death became a scar. There would still be guilt, and shame, and grief. But broken hearts always mended in the end.
Spring ended slowly, and summer began. The weather was hot and heavy, with frequent rain storms. In June the Vice-President (Genmei-san) came down to Naruto Labs, officially to inspect the researchers’ new projects, and unofficially to have an update on Toki’s and Keigo’s progress. The researchers worked on real stuff, Toki had seen them: Naruto Labs wasn’t a front for a secret training facility, it was a real lab that happened to be large and active enough to hide a secret training facility.
Anyway, the Vice-President came. She talked to Toki’s and Keigo’s teachers and trainers, and apparently they had glowing reports from everyone. Well Toki would have hardly expected otherwise. Not only were they talented and adorable, but they also worked hard! Training together pushed them to do better. It wasn’t exactly competitive (the goal wasn’t to leave the other in the dust) but they wanted to impress each other more than they wanted to impress their teachers.
Talking with Genmei-san felt weirdly like a parent-teacher meeting. Sayuri had always been here for parent-teachers interviews when Toki and her lived in Hinohara, but she had been less present after they had moved in Tokyo. Of course: she was busy running recon and missions for Meteor. Still, it did bring back memories, and Toki wasn’t sure about how she was feeling about it. The Vice-President smiled, all nice and motherly, and it gave her the creeps. She preferred when adults where honest, even if it meant being rude and condescending, thank you very much. Hawks apparently picked up her reluctance because he was cold to her, too.
It was still a very informative conversation. Toki hadn’t been here for a full year, so she had no idea if the Commission’s training program followed the same timeline as a standard curriculum, with holidays and all that. The answer was: more or less. There would be holidays, but Toki and Keigo would still have to be supervised. They were offered to go to a summer camp in July or in August, for example.
Genmei-san also talked about their options for their school-work. Unsurprisingly, Keigo was better at multitasking and strategy, so he was offered to join an online chess club. He said no, but at least he had the possibility. Toki was better in math, science, and English, so she was offered to join an online class for once of these subjects. She picked English, because why not. Also, if that class made her watch no subtitled English movies, she would invite Keigo and it would be like going to the cinema. Toki had never been to a cinema before, and she was pretty sure that Keigo hadn’t either.
Most school offered their students little trips, to museums or games or hero agencies. In the past, Toki had never done that. Hinohara’s school had once made a trip to the only hero agency in town, but Sayuri hadn’t signed Toki’s permission slip that day, and so Toki had spent the afternoon at home reading books and playing with her mom, without feeling bumped out about it in the least. In Tokyo, the school had sent them to an History museum once, and Toki had been allowed to go… but her class had been unruly and loud so she hadn’t really enjoyed it. Anyway, the point was: going outside and learning through cultural and educational outings was part of the usual curriculum, so Keigo and Toki would go somewhere. The where, though, was still undecided, and the Vice-President wanted to have their opinion. Privately, Toki wondered why she was bringing it up herself: wasn’t it the role of their teachers? Unless Genmei-san just wanted a safe topic of conversation. Or maybe she wanted to give them the implicit understanding that any semblance of freedom would come from her. Or maybe she wanted to endear herself to them by offering this outing as a treat. Or all of the above.
(It didn’t occur to Toki that maybe the Commission wanted to play nice because they feared that their prized teleporting student would run away. After all, Toki was quite the rebellious child, and to make her a hero, the Commission had first to tame her like a skittish feral stray. But no, the thought didn’t occur to Toki… Because leaving would mean leaving Keigo, and that hadn’t crossed her mind either.)
Genmei-san asked them what museum or hero agencies they wanted to see. Keigo eagerly asked if they could go to Endeavor’s agency, but the woman sadly declined. The Flame Hero didn’t open his agency to the public. So Toki asked if they could visit a hero sponsored by the Commission. Recovery Girl was working at Yūei but there were still Snatch, Lady Nagant, and the new heroine Shirayuki. The Vice-President looked evaluative for a moment, then agreed. As for the museums, well… Keigo wanted to see a museum about planes, but Toki wanted to see a planetarium. It had been nearly two years. She didn’t want her memories of looking at stars and listening to a recounting of space exploration to be forever spoiled with the memories of her mom’s betrayal.
Feeling a little bold, Toki also asked if they could visit an observatory. Not a planetarium, made to be toured and seen by visitors, but a real observatory where researchers looked at stars, received reports from satellites, watched out for asteroid, and pondered over supernovas and black holes that were hundreds of light-years away.
“Ah, yes,” smiled the Vice-president. “You wanted to study stars, didn’t you, Quantum?”
Toki frowned:
“I haven’t given up. I will be an astrophysicist. Maybe I won’t go beyond a master degree, or maybe I will pursue a doctorate. But I’m not going to give it up just because I also study to punch villains in the face.”
Genmei-san blinked, then nodded: “It’s a worthy goal. It’s always smart to have a back-up job to help pay the bills.”
Astrophysicists didn’t pay well, actually, or at least Toki didn’t think so. In her memories of Before, internships had been filled with starving students and most of them had worked part-times jobs to support their studies. Still, she blinked, because it was an interesting point:
“Pay the bills?”
“Heroes don’t get paid?” exclaimed Keigo, looking faintly horrified.
The Vice-president laughed:
“They do, don’t worry. But… Well. I don’t suppose you had economic classes yet, especially about how heroic economic works?”
They both shook their head. The woman took a moment to think, then exposed slowly:
“The state can’t afford to pay heroes that much. The typical hero’s base salary is actually lower than a police officer’s. Of course, that salary varies. Heroes have a certain number of service hours they have to account for, and a quota of incidents they have to resolve each year, and they have bonuses if they exceed those numbers. They also have better wages after years of service, usually a two percent increase every year… And of course when a villain has a bounty on their head, the heroes who arrest them can collect it.”
It made sense so far, so Toki nodded. Although that ‘bounty’ thing seemed a bit barbaric. She knew that some villain had a price on their head, but who fixed it? The HPSC? The prosecution?
“But heroics is expensive,” Genmei continued. “If you have your own agency, you have rent, funding your sidekicks, and paying for your own costume repairs and redesigns. Supports costs are enormous, since you need weapons, armor, restrains, vehicles, and communications devices. And that’s not even talking about what can happen if you’re found to be negligent at an incident. Of course, heroes have to be insured. But if you or your team are found to be at fault for damage beyond what was necessary to resolve the situation, you’ll end up having to foot the bill.”
Uh. Toki hadn’t considered that. Unbiddenly, the image of a building collapsing on screaming civilians popped in her head, and she nearly shivered. Who had footed the bill for that, she wondered. Was it All Might agency? Or had Meteor been deemed the only responsible, and sentenced to compensate the victims’ families?
“So: where to get the money?” the Vice-President carried on. “The government doesn’t have infinite resources, and the HPSC neither. So the heroes found other alternatives. About seventy percent of the active heroes are only part-time, and have another job. Some are doctors, some nurses, some lawyers, some painters, some drivers, some work in businesses, in sports, or in engineering. I never met an astrophysicist hero, but there’s a first for everything.”
Keigo avidly leaned forward: “But what about full-time heroes? Those who don’t have a side-job, like Endeavor?”
There was a short, fleeting smile on Genmei’s lips, and she bowed her head approvingly:
“Yes. Those are the stronger and more efficient heroes, and as such, they are the more popular. That’s how they make money, too, with their popularity.”
Toki and Keigo looked at each other, a bit confused. Genmei smiled:
“When the Golden Age of Heroes began, with the heroic profession really taking off the ground, and heroes realizing their salary wasn’t sustainable, they looked for another source of income. And they discovered an incredible ally: the media.”
Toki opened her eyes in sudden realization. Of my freaking gods, of course. The popularity pools, the ranking, all of that had been capitalized on…
“People loved watching their fights, and by extension loved them,” Genmei explained. “It started with selling signed photographs and maybe t-shirts, and it snowballed from there until advertising and merch became a legitimate source of income and the Commission started to regulate it. Heroes are now allowed to spend some of their required duty hours doing advertising. Merchandise has a specific tax on it that goes to the State Heroic Assurance Funds, while a portion of the sales goes directly to the hero or heroes featured on the products. So when you’ll be heroes, you will be expected to smile prettily for the cameras, too.”
They both pondered that for a while. Toki honestly didn’t imagine herself doing that kind of thing… Or even having merch about her. It seemed ridiculous. Keigo on the other hand, well, she could see it. Hawks, the Winged Hero! Featuring in adds, magazines, and photoshoots! Yes, she could totally see it.
He was an adorable child, but give him fifteen years and he would be unbearably awesome.
The Vice-President chatted a bit more with them, then left. She still had given them a lot to think about. All the hero-mania was more easily explained if it was supported by capitalism. Everyone wanted to make money out of it, and so they spoon-fed the public with tales of how great the heroes were, of how they could do no wrong, until the average consumer wanted nothing more than an All Might keychain to proudly affirm how much of a good person he was, because they supported the Symbol of Peace. Urgh. Thinking about it made Toki a little cynical. But well, who wouldn’t be cynical when contemplating capitalism? It was a cruel system. It worked, but Toki was of the opinion that people could do better.
Maybe she was too hopeful. But when you look too long at the sky, mankind’s squabbles seemed so unimportant. Astronauts always reported that seeing the planet from afar, a small blue marble in the pitch-black sky of the empty universe, gripped their heart with raw emotion. Tenderness, protectiveness, awe, love. All those human beings were worth protecting, all of them were unique and so alone in the universe, so how could Toki not love them? Want something better for them?
Granted, she had no idea what that ‘something better’ was, but… She wanted to make that word a little kinder, maybe. She didn’t want to be a hero for the fame, the money, or the power… Although she was a pragmatic and she wanted those things too, let’s get real… But her motivation wasn’t…
“I don’t want to be a hero for the money,” suddenly said Keigo, looking by the window.
He had probably followed the same path of thought. Well, probably not exactly the same (Keigo was unfortunately completely uninterested by space exploration), but close. Toki put her elbows on the table and her chin in her hands:
“I know. You want to help people, right?”
“Yeah,” he muttered. “I want to save them and give them hope, just as I’ve been saved. I don’t… It kind of doesn’t matter if famous heroes famous are also rich, but it feels weird to think about that.”
There was a short silence. Then Keigo turned towards her:
“For you either, heroism isn’t about money.”
It wasn’t a question. Still, Toki considered her answer carefully. Because… What was heroism, for her? Why that path? It took her a few second to find the right words.
“No, it’s not, but it’s not some calling I have, either. I think… For the perfect hero, it’s supposed to be an instinct thing. They just can’t help themselves from helping others, they see injustice in the world, and they react before their brains tell them all the ways it can go wrong. I like to think of it more as a choice. I choose to do heroics because it needs doing, and because doing it feels right. I wouldn’t be lesser for not doing it, but it would be a choice. Whether heroics or academia, or both, at the end I’m choosing my own path.”
Because neither Meteor or Sayuri had been interested in giving her choice, hadn’t they? But Toki had. The Commission had given her option, but they also had to convince her to join them. They hadn’t forced her (probably because they hadn’t been able to). But Toki had picked their side, and… It was her life now, as Quantum, and she was allowed to choose. It was a luxury that neither Toki Aratani or Toki Taiyōme had had.
So Toki chose. Now she had committed to something, and she had to follow through.
Notes:
Hope you liked it !
I'm going to update "Snapshots of Wisdom" to add some more art with Toki and Hawks. Or rather, Toki and Keigo. Calling him Keigo also help me distance Keigo-the-young-child-who's-basically-an-OC-at-that-point from, well, Hawks-the-canon-character.
Are we getting close to the canon-timeline?
We still have a few years, jeez, calm down x) I'm not going to skip all of Toki's formative years with the HPSC ! I also have several plot-twists planned...
Anyway, this chapter was both a transition and a strating point. The " childhood arc" is over, and we're now strating the "training arc". I'm going to spend more time on worldbuilding, for example, and monitor Toki's progress along the chapters.
The headcanon about heroes' salaries and the importance of merch isn't from me. Like a magpie, i built my nest of headcanons and ideas from shiny posts and meta found in various place. So this whole idea of heroic paying less that police work, and the ramification? i basically stole it from another fic who explored this in detail. I don't remember the title, unfortunatly. I will get back to you once i remember it x)Is the HPSC going to stay nice?
What a loaded question x) Because well, Lady Nagant exists, hellooooo ! But the sponsorship program is going to stay good, yeah.Yes the Commission trains children, no they do not make child-soldiers. According to Horikoshi's publisher, Hawks' story was canonically inspired by Lionel Messi's (a football player recruited as a child by a club because he was incredibly talented). So I'm basing myself on this, too. The Commission is looking out for its interests, but it's also in its interest to care for their proteges' well-being. So they train kids young, but more in a Eraserhead kind of way than in an Endeavour kind of way. They are shady, because goverments always are. But they are not evil. This is a grey-area.
Also, in the Wisdom-verse, the Commission may be a tiny bit nicer than in the canon-verse... Because they have Toki. Unlike Hawks who is, right now, shy and obediant, Toki is willful, mouthy, and independant. She knows how to live homeless, she's smart, and most of all she can't be locked up in a training facility. They can't just give her orders and expect her to obey: they have to win her to their cause. So they play nice. And by extension, they play nice with Hawks too (because of course allowing her to have a buddy is part of their plan to convince her to stay).
So, long story short: the Commission's goals and mentality are the same than in canon (and please take in account the fact that in my canon, the HSC isn't evil, only callous), but they actively try to be more gentle with kids because they have a flight-risk in their program. Mera knows that and acts accordingly. Kameko a little less so, because she whole-heartedly believe that being super-kind and helpful is the Commission's default mode. But they all want Toki to stay and be a hero, because as they rightfully said : teleportation is rare and incredibly sought-after.
It's better if the Commision has it, than if the Villains have it. Ressources have to be jealously guarded.Are Meteor and his gang canon and what would have happened to them in the canon-timeline?
Nope, Meteor and his gang aren't canon. But they could be! I imagine that in the canon-verse, Toki was never born. But a few years later Meteor and Sayuri did have a child, and just like what happened here, the pregnancy was very difficult and the birth went badly, so Sayuri died. Meteor spiraled into self-destruction and was eventually killed in a raid gone wrong. As for the child, well, maybe he died too, or maybe he lived and was adopted by a kind family who gave him plenty of love and a very average life. You decide =)
Anyway. Next chapter will be in three weeks, not two. Because in two weeks i'm going LARPing, so i will be in the middle of the forest with no reception, hitting people with fake swords and screaming incantations. French people of AO3, do you know Kandorya ? Because if you don't, i recommand it!See you later !
EDIT 12/08/2022
Spelling mistakes corrected (again). Slight edit made to Hawks' timeline: he was recruited at six and half, that doesn't change... but for the first year or so he didn't live at Naruto Labs but "in the city" at an undisclosed location. Sligth edit to Toki's training too (i forgot she was in a gymnatics club for two years before strating training). Correction done about villains having 'bounties' on their head (instead of 'private bounties' in the first draft) because those bounties are actually placed by the State.
Chapter 8: The future isn't so far
Summary:
Time passes. Toki grieves, then heals. After so many years living on the edge, isn't refreshing to stop, breath, and think about your own future, your own wishes for once ?
Notes:
It's been a while since i updated. I was LARPing, then on holidays, and my schedule had been a little... weird. But don't worry, the story is still going strong !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
THE FUTURE ISN'T SO FAR
Summer camp was an experience. Toki and Keigo were sent to different ones for three weeks in July, because their teachers wanted them to socialize with different persons. As if they didn’t have already plenty of contact with children their age at the dance studio! Tch’. Anyway, it wasn’t bad, but Toki missed her best friend terribly. At least her summer camp was entertaining. It was a sort of Girls Scout club for teen and pre-teen. Toki was the youngest, but her papers had been tampered with to age her a little. She was now Tsuki Nagareboshi (at least she appreciated how thoughtful was the guy who had picked the name, because “shooting star” was very good fake name), ten years old, with a minor teleportation Quirk that only allowed her to jump a few meters. She played her part well, didn’t show-off, and even befriended a few others girls. She learned how to make a fire, how to build a shelter, how to apply first aid in the middle of nowhere, what berries to eat and what mushrooms to avoid, how to catch a rabbit, how to skin and cook it…
(It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that even the summer camps selected by the HPSC were educational and taught useful skills for heroes.)
Anyway. Then it was back at Naruto Labs for a few days, with no class, but full freedom to roam around in the neighborhood. Of course Toki and Keigo took the definition of neighborhood a bit loosely, and they started tracing the river. The town of Naruto was built where the Yoshino stream met the sea, but the spring was in the mountains, nearly fifty kilometers away. In any case, they had loads of fun. The mostly traveled in the sky, Keigo flying and Toki jumping, only getting back to the ground when they wanted to explore a forest or stop for lunch. It took them days. At the beginning it was easy, the river clearly visible even from the sky, but the last ten kilometers were deep into the forest and they had to walk. At least it was an adventure! They usually went home in the evening, after placing a marker so Toki could teleport them back there the next day, but they could have camped there no problem. Keigo had been in Boy Scouts camp too, so both children now boasted incredible survival skills in the uncivilized wild!
In August, they were sent together to another summer camp, on a beach. They were to learn how to swim, sail a boat, use naval code, and plays with kids their age. It was less interesting that the survival skills taught in the Girl Scout camps, but Keigo’s presence easily made up for that. In Naruto Labs, Toki and Keigo already got up to all sort of mischief, but they stayed reasonable. They were always limited by their time, their homework, the setting. Now, let wild with a bunch of others ultra-energetic kids, many of them could be considered bad examples? They went wild.
They learned how to make Cola bottles explode with mentos, which was innocent enough, but then they got their hands on gasoline and one kid taught them how to make a Molotov cocktail, and Toki showed them how to make a fire with dry foam and a few sticks, and they nearly started a wildfire. A few days later Toki learned how to attract seagulls with chips to play pranks on teachers, and lured about ten murderous birds in a guy’s room before locking the window. It was pandemonium. The seagulls tried to return for days, hungry for more chips and destruction. Then Keigo learned how to shot birds with only a rubber band and a bottle of nail polish, which considerable raised his social status among the kids. There was a short prank war that escalated to the point where they used all the duct tape in the camp to stick furniture to the ceiling. A fussy teacher always went to the bathroom to pee late because he drank all day, so Toki sneaked in the teachers’ bathroom so she could let out a blood-curling scream in the middle of the night (it was very entertaining). For totally unrelated reasons, several kids were banned from taking a swim the next day and had to clean the beach on the other side of the small creek, which devolved into a trash-battle. An unfortunate jellyfish was used as a throwing weapon. It was awesome.
Toki and Keigo came back from summer camp three weeks later with a tan, bright grins, loads of fun ideas, and a propensity for sneaking out of the Labs’ perimeter. Now they had tasted freedom, and the forest wasn’t big enough for them!
The first time they went ‘missing’, their teachers pitched a fit. Especially Hayasa-sensei. But he couldn’t actually stop them, could they? Toki could teleport and Keigo could fly. And sure, the yelling about villains, and the berating about worrying the adults, and the disappointed speech in general… It did make them scared and ashamed for maybe half an hour.
But the very next day they were at it again.
So after three day, one of the researchers gave them wristwatches with GPS, and told them to be back in time for dinner. Otherwise, they were free to do as they wanted. It was a victory in appearance, but about ten hours later Toki grasped she had just passively accepted a tracking device on her person at all times.
And the truth was, even after realizing that, she didn’t take it off, because she understood why she had to carry it, and she thought the Commission was right. She didn’t like it, but she accepted it… So, really, whose victory was it?
Anyway. Days passed, then weeks. Summer came to an end. The weather turned cold, and classes resumed. The highlight of the month was a short visit of a hero who had his leg amputated, and who needed a prosthetic that could withstand his Quirk (he changed his mass to get as light as a feather or as heavy as a truck). So the hero hung out here while the researchers studied him, studied his Quirk, and tinkered with prosthetics and technological gadgets. Toki and Keigo were instructed to not bother the guy, but they did have a cover-story ready if they were seen, which was that they were children of the staff and homeschooled here. They sadly didn’t have the chance to crowd the hero and pester him with question, but tailing him around the place made for an entertaining game. For a guy with a fake leg, he was surprisingly quick!
Then it was October. Toki breezed through her English tests to the point where she switched to more advanced online classes, which was a bit flattering. Sure, she really lacked vocabulary, but it wasn’t hard to learn. The syntax came to her almost naturally, with the subject-verb-complement order that didn’t make sense in Japanese but was necessary in English. Her accent was awful, but her writing was pretty good. Still, she didn’t want to leave Keigo behind. He was smart, he would have effortlessly been at the top of a normal class, but he didn’t have Toki’s passion for academia. He got bored faster. Endless equations, English movies without subtitles, little drawing of how a soundwave broke on a soundproof barrier… It didn’t fascinate him. He really made an effort to share Toki’s enthusiasm, but he would rather read something good or play outside. Unlike Toki, Keigo wasn’t a nerd!
But it was how the world worked. Toki was better with long, complicated written stuff. Keigo could juggle more tasks and do faster mental calculations. There was nothing to be jealous of: they played their respective strengths and covered each other weaknesses, and that was all. They were still thick as thieves. They were a team, why would they compete?
At the end of October, Toki celebrated her ninth birthday. At dinner, there was a huge cake and the whole staff of Naruto Labs sang ‘Happy Birthday to you’, before showering her with small gifts. It was mostly candy, chocolates, hair ties, glittery pens (Toki loved glittery pens!), little toys. Keigo gave her a notebook, secretly bought during one of their outing along the Yoshino river. It was kind of plain but there were stars and nebulas on the cover, a swirling galaxy that moved if the light it the paper just at the right angle. Toki was losing track of how many notebooks she had (at least six, but maybe eight or nine) and what they were for. She should invest in labels.
She got new clothes, too, although it was less of a birthday gift and more of an automated process each time a child aged a year. Her measurements were taken and although most of her clothes were some kind of standard uniform, she was allowed to pick some motifs and colors from the online store the Labs used to buy kids’ clothes. Toki picked everything she could in orange and yellow. It was going to be smashing.
What? She liked bright colors!
So. October, then November, then December. Christmas, Keigo’s birthday on the 28th, then New Year. Kameko Sabira dropped by to give them some late birthday/Christmas/new year gift, and cheerfully informed them she had been promoted. She was barely twenty. Really, either Kameko was wildly successful, or Toki’s grades reflected well on her resume. Probably a bit of both.
Time flew by.
Toki didn’t think much about Sayuri. Maybe it made her a bad daughter, but she thought about her mother less and less. Broken hearts mend, wounds heal: even the bad ones. She missed her mother, but she missed what could have been rather than the real thing. Just like, on the streets, she had missed home without really missing anyone at all. The pain faded in the background, until it became almost unnoticeable. Toki Taiyōme was gone, just as was her past, and her history with her parents. There was now only Quantum, the Commission’s protégée.
It was cold as fuck outside so Toki and Keigo didn’t sneak out as much. Instead, they started exploring hidden places in the building. There weren’t much, and Keigo knew almost all of them (he had been here longer than Toki, and he had explored plenty) but they were still small enough to slither in the vents or climb in the fake ceilings. But in their free time, they would rather buddle in a sweater or two, put on a warm coat, and go crazy outside. It even snowed, which led to a good old snowball fight with a few bored researchers.
Winter passed, slowly. Toki was bored in math class, so the teachers upped her level. Her lessons were still with Keigo, always, but now they had different manuals and different exercises to complete. They also had separate English homework, since Keigo learned better by hearing it and Toki by reading it. They still trained together, but they had more join exercises now, working on coordination and teamwork.
And as time passed, and Toki quietly settled in her new life, she started thinking about the future.
Once upon a time, in the twentieth century, there had been a guy named Abraham Harold Maslow, an American psychologist who theorized that human needs were ordered in a prepotent hierarchy. A pressing need would have to be mostly satisfied before someone would give their attention to the next highest need. His theory had been popularized and called pyramid of needs, the lowest levels of the pyramid being made up of the most basic needs, while the most complex needs were at the top of the pyramid. So at the bottom of the pyramid would be the basic physical requirements: the need for food, water, sleep, and warmth. Then there was the next level, safety and security. Then came the social needs: friendship, love, family. The fourth level was the need to be competent and recognized, the need for esteem, for status and levels of success. Then there was the need of cognitive challenges: discovery, learning, intellectual stimulation. After that were the need for harmony and beauty, and lastly, on the very top of the pyramid, the need for self-actualization: the realization of one’s full potential.
According to Maslow’s theory, one individual could not focus on one need until a more pressing, basic need was left neglected. And it made sense, of course. How could someone focus on creating bonds and friendship when they were constantly hungry, or felt unsafe? Their focus was on meeting their more basic needs, the more necessary for survival, before moving up the pyramid. Not matter how important socialization was, not starving to death was more urgent. Same thing for the social needs. You couldn’t really focus on status or aesthetic appreciation if you felt lost and adrift, surrounded by indifferent strangers, because your focus was on seeking a place to belong.
Toki had never gone hungry or slept in the cold. In that, she supposed she was lucky. Not every child who ended up on the streets was blessed with the ability to break into warm places at night, or had a frankly disturbing amount of cash money to pay for meals. But… ever since she had been six and her mother had briefly abandoner her to teach her a lesson… or maybe even before that, when Sayuri had told her about Meteor’s Crew… Toki had been worried. She had felt… not unsafe, but isolated. So no matter how good her grades were, no matter how interesting her analysis and her books were, how praised she was by her teachers, how pretty she became (she was a plain-looking kid, but her big doe-like eyes could be considered cute), Toki was still missing a step in the pyramid. It had felt like a gaping pit in her stomach, that unarticulated lack of something… An aching loneliness that she couldn’t put in words, especially considering that she was constantly surrounded by the very people who made her feel both loved and isolated.
But now she was here and… it was different. She wasn’t cold or hungry, she was provided for, she felt safe, she had a friend and a sense of belonging, she was intellectually simulated, she was praised and recognized for her talent: and so she could relax. It didn’t feel like there was anything missing from her life. She could stop focus on how to make it through the present, or the very short-term future, and think about… Well. The long-term future. Intellectual challenge, harmony, self-actualization…
And what was her place in the canon-Verse.
Because, let’s be honest: just because she was born, it wasn’t the canon-verse anymore. Well, it could be. Maybe in canon there had been a villain named Meteor who had been arrested, and a teleporting girl named Toki who had been friend with Hawks, but sincerely? Toki doubted it. Maybe that canon-Toki had existed, but had been killed before the beginning of the Plot. But the way things were progressing in this universe… Toki was going to be a hero, and Keigo and her were going to be glued at the hip. Of course, Toki could still chicken out and decide to protect canon, and leave everything to go live as a hermit in Norway, but… She didn’t want to.
Because being a hero would be cool, and came with free tuition to be an astrophysicist. Did Toki want the world to follow the safest course, to be saved from the big bad All For One? Sure. But would she thrown the sacrosanct-canon-verse by the window, if it allowed her to get her hands on a chance to study stars and launch satellites? You bet.
So. The situation was as followed: Toki knew things about the future. She didn’t have the power to something about it, for now. But one day, she would. The question was: should she act? Or should she stand back and watch how things unfolded? Because if Izuku Midoriya was destined to meet All Might and inherit his power, it would happen wherever Toki stepped in to stop his bullying or not. Such was the power of the shōnen protagonist. But! What if there was no such thing as fate? What if everything was just luck and circumstances, what if the butterfly effect could stop the canon even before it gained any momentum? Then stopping the bullying could be disastrous. What if it meant that Midoriya changed schools, or just left school a little earlier on that fateful day, and so wasn’t attacked by the Sludge Villain that made him met All Might?
Not everything happened in a vacuum. Even if Toki didn’t stop the bullying, what if others things changed? She would be a hero. What if she stopped the Sludge Villain before he attacked Midoriya? Or, if she came across him, should she just let him go, and risk him kill people just so canon could proceed? And… even if Toki didn’t do anything, what if the simple fact that she was born, that she lived and existed in the same space as canon-characters, had already destroyed anything she thought fixed?
The canon-verse had been unchanging and unmoving. It had been linear and clear. But even without touching the main character, things could change… if their circumstances were altered.
It could be as simple as losing a job, or having a different favorite movie and choosing to go to the cinema a certain day. Things were constantly moving. What if… What if somebody meet Nono in prison, and upon being released a few years later decided to become a taxi driver like her, while in canon they would have tried for a job in a fast-food? And what if that person was supposed to save, let’s say, Eraserhead while he choked on a chicken nugget, because that lowly fast-food employee was the only one to know the Heimlich maneuver? What if, by putting Nono in prison, Toki had already doomed Eraserhead?! Then he wouldn’t be a teacher at Yūei, and he couldn’t protect students when they were attacked by the League, and he wouldn’t try and teach Hitoshi Shinsō to transfer in the hero course, and oh my gods she had killed Eraserhead!
Then she realized, with a shock not unlike an electricity jolt, that no, she hadn’t killed Eraserhead, but she had already changed a main characters’ lives. And not just Keigo.
She had changed Hitoshi Shinsō’s life, because she had saved his mother.
Maybe, in the canon-verse, a hero would have been quick enough to reach the car. But Toki remembered… The amphibian-looking hero on scene had only dived in the river after Toki had saved both Hitoshi and Mihoko. By that time, the car had been two-third filled. And Mihoko had been struggling with her safety belt. Hitoshi had obviously been saved, in canon, but he’d been at the back of the car, where there was more air… And of course, the hero would have prioritized the baby… And… Fuck. The more she thought about it…
Well, in any case, it hadn’t happened. So there was no use thinking about it.
Back to her starting point, then. Should she change canon? Or rather: should she actively try to interfere, instead of living her life and considering it interference enough?
The thing was: Toki didn’t really have an end goal. Sure, making the world better would be great, but Toki wasn’t an ambitious Slytherin or a righteous Gryffindor. She didn’t have a vision of what a better world would look like. There were things that were cooler than Before, like better healthcare, no war, no army. There were things that sucked, like the hero-mania and All For One. It was just life. It was a world, her world, with all its beauty and its imperfections.
So… should Toki just… do what a hero does, and try and act where she could? But that would mean acting on her memories from Before, and soon that would wreck the Plot. Knowledge prompted change, yet change negated knowledge. Toki liked knowing things. It would be like erasing data! Losing intel! For someone as knowledge-hungry as her, it was a crime!
“Aaaaarghh,” she moaned, hiding her head in her hands.
Keigo sniggered:
“What are you doing?”
“Having a moral crisis.”
“That late in the evening? You couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”
They were in Toki’s room, doing their homework. Or well, Keigo was done and playing Nintendo, while Toki was supposed to write about tectonics plaques and had let her thoughts wander. She sighed, letting her pencil fall on her desk. Her friend raised his gaze from his game, and asked curiously:
“Why are you having a moral crisis?”
“Because I’m wondering what would be my duty of care in a very vague and specific situation that may happen but could also not happen.”
“Like what?”
Toki considered.
“Well. Let’s say I learn there’s a kid bullied in Tokyo. That’s super-far away, I have no connection to that kid, but I know he exists and considering nobody give a rat’s ass about him, I’m the only one who would be willing to do something. But first question: do I have to power to act? Second question: do I have legitimacy to act? Third question: do I have opportunity? And finally, and that’s the hardest one, fourth question: what if by acting I deprive him of better opportunities? Like, for example, in a few years he will meet a hero who will notice him because he’s bullied, and that kid will save the hero’s life in a very specific event, because it turns out his useless Quirk was perfectly suited to saving this specific hero in that specific catastrophe?”
Keigo blinked: “That’s a lot of specifics.”
Toki shrugged. Maybe, but hey, the canon-story was specific too. Several people were saved because Izuku Midoriya had been here, had been powerful, had befriended the right people and made the right choice. Would Tenya Iida be saved if Midoriya wasn’t in Hosu when Iida would go to look for Stain? Would Eri be saved if Midoriya wasn’t here to fight Overhaul? Would Koda be saved if Midoriya hadn’t noticed the kid was missing in the middle of a villain’s attack? Maybe, but maybe not. There were a lot of situations where it was specifically Midoriya’s skillet and self-sacrifice that had allowed the good guys to win.
There was also the matter of One For All, All Might’s power. Because… Apparently All Might’s Quirk was too strong to be passed on a normal person. An individual wasn’t meant to have several Quirks. So a Quirkless person could live forty or fifty years with One For All, while the past holders had slowly been killed inside. Wasn’t there a past older who received the power at twenty then died of old age at forty? Anyway, One For All, the legendary Quirk, should only be passed on to a Quirkless person, and the Quirkless were fewer with each generation. They made up about twenty percent of the general population but it wasn’t a worldwide statistic (there was more Quirkless people in Europe than in Asia for example)… Or a generational one. Most Quirkless people were old. In Toki’s generation, or Midoriya’s, the Quirkless represented maybe 3% of births, not 20%.
So if All Might didn’t pass on his power to Izuku, who was both heroic and Quirkless, good luck finding another like him. And if he passed on his power to someone who already had a Quirk, like Mirio, well… All Might didn’t know, nobody knew but Toki (and eventually, the poor sap who would have seven ghosts in his head), but it was a death sentence. It wouldn’t be immediate, but Mirio’s body would start deteriorating, and he would die before hitting forty.
So yeah. What was Toki’s duty of care in that situation? Make sure Midoriya got the Quirk? Make sure the bullying stopped? What was the logical thing, the one where the cost-benefit analysis was the more positive?
“I think my problem is really more one of personal responsibility,” Toki thought out loud. “If I take action to stop one small problem that could ultimately play a role into a larger event, is it my responsibility to step in to make sure I don’t disturb that large chain of event?”
Keigo closed his game, looking thoughtful.
“Isn’t that kind of self-centered? Like, that chain of event doesn’t exist in a vacuum. If you stop a car accident and that car accident could have made people realize that an intersection was dangerous, it’s not your job to go and plant warning signs, or to assemble the mayor and stuff so the signalization change, right?”
“Yeah, but…” Toki struggled with her words. “What if I know what’s going to happen for sure, and I change things. For a small good thing, I could do start a chain reaction of bad things.”
Like getting Bakugou blacklisted from heroic schools because he was an ass, and making him even more furious than in canon, which turned him into a villain, which of course ended up changing the kidnapping arc and making the League of Villains kidnap little Shouto who was way more vulnerable psychologically… and wow that was a scary scenario now that she thought about it, wasn’t it?
“We’re going to be heroes, Toki,” Keigo said very seriously. “We can’t be scared to act because we could make thing worse, because then we will never be able to make things better.”
That was… a very good point. But Toki frowned:
“It’s not about being scared. It’s about… corrupting data and fucking up experiments by adding extra-variables.”
“Then you need to adapt on the fly. Deal with the consequences!”
Toki made a face. Keigo snorted, then flopped on the bed, letting his Nintendo fall somewhere on the floor.
“Honestly, you’re making a too big deal of it. Letting something bad happen today for an uncertain better tomorrow still meant that you let something bad happen today, and for what? Even if it all play out perfectly, I know you, you will never be fine with what went wrong. So just…Don’t let the bad thing happen today.”
“You said it like it’s so simple…”
“It is. Even if you think you know how a situation is going to play out, there’s to many factors you don’t control, it’s always a gamble. You solve the more urgent problem, then the next, then the next, and you collect data and you anticipate the next on, just like in Hayasa-sensei’s treasure hunts. If you change the circumstances then maybe the one scenario you had predicted won’t happen: so what, can’t you predict another and adapt to it? Everyone does it all the time. You already do it all the time!”
Toki blinked. Good point, too. If she changed canon… Well, more than what she had already… She would still have huge amount of data to extrapolate from, because she knew the characters’ personalities and motivations. And… Seriously, did she even need that canon-knowledge information to make her way in this universe?
She had already changed canon. She hadn’t even hesitated before arresting Meteor’s Crew or befriending Hawks, because… it had been her life, not a story. Later on, would she calibrate how to live her existence in a way that would leave undisturbed All Might and Co? No, absolutely not. Why the fuck would she do that? It was her life. She was the main character of the story.
It was an eye-opener. As if she had struggled to reconcile two points of view, and only now finally merged them. Sure, the canon-story was important, but it wasn’t fixed. Changing it a little wouldn’t bring the end of the world. It wasn’t the beginning and ending of all! The canon had had battles and drama, but good guys had won because they had done their best. Would they stop trying, thinking, fighting, helping, if some tiny circumstances changed? No. And even if they did, it wasn’t Toki’s job to hold their hand, to make the main characters into functional people. All Might mattered, Midoriya mattered, but Toki mattered too. She didn’t have to get out of her way to protect them, especially if it put her at risk. She would help if she could, but she was also allowed to focus on herself first.
Yeah, they were important. Yeah, Toki knew more about them than most. So what? There were future-seeing Quirks out there. It didn’t give their owners a god-like responsibility to preserve the future. It only gave them an edge into navigating their own life.
And Keigo was right. Normal people lived with a constant changing world, they didn’t have a picture of ‘what the future is going to look like for a certain person in a certain universe if no variable deviate from its trajectory’. And even if they had, they certainly wouldn’t mold their existence to follow this picture… Especially if said picture was full of fuck-ups. Like, Toki didn’t know Ingenium personally but being paralyzed from the waist down by a violent lunatic sounded pretty traumatic. Sure it was a good plot point. Was it inevitable? No. Could she avoid it? Maybe. Would she lose sleep if she changed it? No. She would fret a bit about what could go wrong and all, but you couldn’t always control everything, all the time. Sometimes people got hurt. And sometimes you had to power to stop them from getting hurt, and you had to make a choice to act or to stay a passive observer.
“You’re right,”, she said slowly. “I mean… I’m training to be a hero and I want to go to space. Mediocrity is not an option. I will act. I could fuck up things that could have been, but I also could not.”
“That’s the spirit!” her friend cheered. “So, moral crisis solved?”
Toki grinned.
“Yeah, for now. I will let you know if I have a melt-down about great power meaning great responsibility and the fact that being super-smart meant that I have decided to be god.”
(And she was only half-joking.)
oOoOoOo
Every single person in Naruto Labs knew that Toki was a space nerd. When bored researchers made trivia games and a space question came up, they all looked at her with expectant smiles. What were the names of Jupiter’s moons? Was Pluton a planet? What was the closest galaxy? What was a nebula? A black hole? A supernova?
It wasn’t like it was hard. There had been no new major discovery since the twenty-first century, which was a crying shame. Space exploration had been shut down and abandoned in favor of Quirks, despite the leaps and changes in technology in the last two hundred years. Toki loved ranting about it. They had discovered so much! Advanced fabrication, creative and exoteric materials, better fuel and environmental studies and solutions: all of which were steps towards sustainable space flight... But none of it was hooked together, pushed to the conclusion. It itched at Toki, like she was suffering from OCD and seeing all those loose threads made her twitch with the suppressed need to tie them together neatly.
So. When Toki started outpacing her lessons plans in math again, this time her teachers stopped giving more advanced homework and switched to a different idea altogether. Her math lessons were reduced by half and the rest was reserved for a new module: engineering.
Toki was a little ashamed to admit she had never thought about it, like, at all.
Engineering was cool, but it was… kind of in the background? Real scientists were writing equations of paper and playing with cool schematics, but they didn’t actually put their hands in sludge. Ah! Terrible mistake. And an arrogant one, at that. Powerful minds could gargle themselves all they wanted with their knowledge, they would create nothing if they only spat on the people who did the actual work. So Toki was introduced to the workshop of Naruto Labs, and she started painstakingly learning what was a wrench and how electrical boards worked. It was both engaging and terribly frustrating, because she was used to be good at stuff right of the bat, and here she just… wasn’t.
She was a normal kid learning how to tinker with mechanics. But hey, as a researcher sternly said to her: ‘if you want to make a spaceship, you’re going to have to do more than daydream about math’, so here Toki was, learning how to make the laws of physics her bitch.
If she wanted to go to space, she was going to need a spaceship. Something that could hold, with insulators, conductors, reinforcements, aesthetic plating… And a power source. Technology had progressed by leaps and bounds in the last century, so it was possible (and probably even easy). There were a few cities power plants in Europe that used something called an Ion Drive, an electromagnetic field generator, but just how that thing worked was still a bit too complicated for Toki. Still, one researcher had mentioned in an off-end manner that it could be used as an actual propulsion drive engine since it didn’t need any other fuel that electrons from the environment, and Toki had latched on that single-mindedly.
But she still had a few years ahead of her before getting her hands on the equivalent of a nuclear warhead power generator with an infinite source of energy, so there was no rush.
Anyway. Toki started learning engineering. She was good at it, her teacher said so, but for someone used to prodigy-level of success in basically anything mathematical she touched, it was sometimes difficult to accept struggles and failed experiments. It was also startling to do something alone, without Keigo. They were usually together almost all the time. Even when they had lessons of different difficulty levels, they were still in the same room, sharing some exercises, talking to the same teachers. It was strange.
Unsettling, but not bad. Toki was aware that even if both her and Keigo were very intelligent and independent children, they tended to rely a lot on each other. They were rarely apart. Intellectually, she knew it was a good thing that they each had their own interest and skillset, completely separate from the other. Emotionally, well, that was another story.
But at least, they still had all their other training together. The ballet lessons, for example. Or their training with Hayasa-sensei. He made them spar together more often these days. At the beginning they were still the same level, but Keigo was slowly starting to win more matches than not. Most of Toki’s take-downs relied on her being able to surprise her adversary by appearing behind or above them, but Keigo was very hard to take by surprise.
“It’s my feathers,” Keigo explained with a bit of wonder. “They’re getting more sensitive. Like, I feel when you appear somewhere.”
“Like a cat’s whiskers?” Toki wondered with curiosity, poking a few feathers with her index finger.
“More than that,” her friend said, scrunching his face in thought. “Maybe like a bat’s radar?”
“Fascinating,” muttered Hayasa-sensei, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Is it some kind of psychic awareness, some passive telepathy? Or are they picking up vibrations?”
“Hum. I think vibrations?”
“Well. Let’s test it.”
They played hide-and-seek for a while, then Hayasa-sensei brought Keigo to the doctor, then to their Quirk counselor. Bemusedly, Toki wondered if that was that big of deal. In canon, Hawks had been able to do much more. He could locate civilians in a crumbling building and spy on conversations behind closed doors thanks to the air vibrations his feathers picked up.
She had naively thought that he always had had this ability. But of course, he didn’t… It would have been overwhelming, to be so sensitive, so constantly exposed right of the bat to so much stimulus since age four.
Which begged an interesting question. How much could a Quirk develop during childhood? In the canon-verse, the story had followed Izuku Midoriya who had received his Quirk at fifteen. So it was hard to guess how Quirks evolved during childhood. There had been Dabi’s back-story flashback, still… Apparently Touya Todoroki’s hair had slowly turned from red to white while his body changed with his Quirk, but it was impossible to say when it had started, and when it had stopped. Was it related to age? To power?
Turned it was both, and neither. Quirks evolved constantly with their user’s body. From age four (when the Quirk appeared) to fourteen, Quirk strengthened and grew. They started stabilizing when the user was about fifteen, and stopped changing completely during early adulthood. After that, they very rarely evolved. The rare cases recorded were called Awakening. The right catalyst could cause the Quirk to evolve on the spot, gaining a new level of strength and/or new aspects to its nature that were previously not possible.
Toki and Keigo were still kids, so their Quirks were still gaining strength. Keigo could flight higher, carry heavier burdens. Toki could teleport quicker, and carry heavier things too. It was normal. But Keigo’s feathers becoming more sensitive in addition to becoming stronger was unexpected, so of course their teachers were all very interested. Toki felt almost jealous. No, scratch that, she was jealous. What? She liked being the best. She almost always did better than Keigo, academically! She was faster! And she was better at close-combat!
Still, Toki knew better than to voice her childish tantrum aloud. She growled at her homework more than usual and even rambled a bit about having a bad day to one of her teachers in the workshop, but she didn’t want to direct her negative feelings towards her best friend. He was better than her, so what?! In canon, he was the Number Three… No, the Number Two hero. She had known it, and she had also known that she had no hope to top that. She wasn’t as dedicated, as good at multitasking, or as physically strong. She was good, but not that good. And it was fine!
Still, not being the best annoyed her a bit. For so long, Keigo had been her equal. Toki had even surpassed him in the classroom. But now, Keigo’s Quirk was becoming more refined, more polyvalent than hers, and ultimately it would made him a more powerful hero than her.
Toki’s Quirk was evolving too. But she had already explored all its versatility (how to teleport with things, inside clothes, carrying things in her arms, while throwing or dropping things, while changing position to attack from low or high…), and now it was only strengthening things that existed before. So yeah, there was no big surprise in store for her. Shame.
Well, there was one, but it wasn’t in the manifestation of her power. Only in its definition.
“Rename my Quirk?” Toki parroted dumbly. “For what?”
“Hawks is going to do it, and it would be convenient to edit both your entries at the same time, that’s all,” answered the guy in a suit.
Keigo was almost vibrating with excitement:
“I’m renaming it Fierce Wings!”
Yes, it was more logical than Red Wings. Still, Toki frowned:
“I’m still just a teleporter…”
“Not exactly,” argued the man. “You have discovered that you can do more with your Quirk than merely teleporting yourself, right?”
Toki nodded. She could teleport stuff, she knew. The guy in suit looked satisfied.
“It’s the President’s opinion that your Quirk isn’t simply teleportation, but warping.”
“What, really?”
The President had never come down to Naruto Labs. From his Wikipedia page, Toki knew it was an old man, with an Intelligence-type Quirk, and that he hated publicity. Toki had no idea he had analyzed her Quirk… But yeah, it made sense. She had only seen the Vice-President, but the woman must have given their files to her boss, right?
“Really,” the man acquiesced. “The difference between a warper and a teleporter is that a warper creates a portal. The portal either push whatever is in the way or allow the warper to at least feel the obstacle. A teleporter doesn’t have this luxury. If they teleport to a space that is already occupied by something solid, their molecules fuse.”
Ouch. Sounded kind of deadly. Hey, wait a minute…
“So that meant…” Toki realized with a horrified look. “… That if I had been a teleporter, and that I had tried to teleport in my coat…”
“Indeed,” the guy said dryly. “You would have fused with said coat, instead of slipping it on. Our theory is that you are generating a portal around yourself. In practice, it is no different from teleportation.”
But it made sense, Toki thought, frenetically re-evaluating her past analysis of her Quirk. How she managed to transport objects… She pulled them through a portal, or rather she widened an existing portal to make them go through. And how she could reappear without holding those objects, too! She didn’t teleport her and the object to two different locations, she just widened her portal to include herself and the object’s location! Which explained why she couldn’t teleport stuff very far away from her. The size of her portal had to be limited by the size of her body…
“Oh, I need to run some more experiments right now,” she grinned.
“Can you at least pick a new name for your Quirk before that?” the man asked with amusement.
Toki considered it. Self-Warp didn’t quite fit, since she warped stuff too. Transport seemed a bit lame. Portal was misleading. Then the perfect name came to mind. As a knee-jerking reaction, she thought about rejecting it. It sounded too much like her mother. But, on second thought, wasn’t it what made it perfect? Maybe her raw power came from her father, but the ability to tear through space came from Sayuri’s Quirk. She didn’t have the limitation of Swap-Space but she had its core. It was her mother who had been the first teleporter in the family.
“Warp-Space.”
“Nice!” Keigo chimed in.
And that’s how Toki became a warper instead of a teleporter.
She also learned, later on, that changing her Quirk’s name had a hidden advantage. It made her harder to find in the national database. Admittedly, only the police could search people by their Quirk, but a truly determined criminal could always have contacts willing to do a quick search for them. If, one day, someone looked for a Quirk named “Teleportation”… They wouldn’t find it. And so, they wouldn’t find Toki. After all, she had already given up her birth name, so why not the name of her power?
Anyway. Time passed. Toki and Keigo kept training. Learning about the warping didn’t change Toki’s power, but it did change her outlook on it. A lot of her analysis had to be reexamined and reworded. Like, if she teleported holding a teddy bear in her arms, and reappeared in one place and the teddy bear away from her, she had a limited range, right? Well, that range wasn’t random, it was the maximum size of her self-generated portal. The epicenter was her body, but… the portal was like a thin film covering her whole body and she could stretch it to englobe more, and change shape to extend in one direction (to make the teddy bear reappear two meters left, for example). It did clarify a lot of her experiments. For example, adrenaline thickened that film and so her warping was more powerful, could expand further, stretch longer, carry heavier stuff. It also had the weird side-effect of making her eyes glow a little, but that wasn’t important. Anyway, warping instead of teleporting didn’t bring her more strength or more versatility, so yeah, Keigo still had the superior Quirk. Damn it.
But back to the point. In spring, Toki and Keigo joined a group of children who were invited to visit Shirayuki’s agency. It was the first time they had left Shikoku’s island since summer camps.
Being part of a group helped them blend him (only two kids visiting would have raised questions), but of course the Commission couldn’t merge Keigo and Toki with a visiting class from a random school. So their group was kind of an exclusive group having received invitations on behalf of Shirayuki herself… who had probably done so on the advice of the Commission.
Almost of the children were ‘legacy kids’ one way or another. Legacy kids came from heroes’ families, or were connected to the industry via support or business. The more they were involved in this world, the more they were sought after when being selected for hero course in high-school. So no one was surprised to have a bunch of privileged kids were selected to tour a hero agency.
In this group, a few children were sponsored by the Commission from a distance, still living with their parents but having a scholarship in exchange for the promise they would join a hero course later on. Some others were children of sidekicks who had received an invitation. There were nine kids in total, and Keigo and Toki were (once again) the youngest.
Shirayuki was one of the younger heroes: she was barely twenty-two. She had been a freelancer from age eighteen to twenty-one, which meant she hadn’t had an agency or even a real base of operations. She had wandered from city to city to run after criminals, like some sort of bounty hunter. After all, starting an agency cost money (and not everyone could afford a loan that large), needed a good administration (with qualified staff and experimented secretaries), and several heroes (at least four sidekicks were needed so the agency could have one active operative at all time). So most licensed heroes didn’t start right off the bat with a full agency. They either worked as freelancer or preferably as sidekick for a few years, to gain some experience, before making their own debut.
The agency was in Fukuoka. It was a few hours drive away from Naruto Labs. In the future… Well, in the canon-verse… Toki was pretty sure that Hawks’ hero agency would be in that city. It was also Meteor’s birthplace, although Toki would rather forget that. Still, she looked around with curiosity. It was, well, a city. Not as big and busy as Musutafu, but still huge and bustling with people of all shapes and forms, heroes running around in brightly colored spangled outfit, and all the usual fanfare of a Japanese metropole.
Shirayuki herself was a young woman, tall and cool, with long white hair and crystal-clear blue eyes. Her hero costume was a traditional long-style kimono, specially tailored so she could run and fight in it, but that also gave her an air or regal dignity. She had a powerful ice Quirk and could create animated ice construct (usually in the shape of various animals) and had a telepathic connection with them. It made her able to use those constructs to stand guard, attack, or accomplish multiple tasks. She surveilled the streets thanks to ice-made birds, for example. It was a fascinating Quirk. As a person, Shirayuki was kind of cold (pun intended) but she did make a valiant effort to briefly introduce herself, then answers the kids’ questions. What was the purpose of an agency? How did it work? Who made their support items? How many people worked here?
But Toki’s questions were a bit more personal, so she had to wait impatiently until the group was led away by a sidekick, while Shirayuki went away for patrol. She teleported to the heroine’s side in a blink (and promptly dodged a reflexive punch for her trouble) before asking cheerfully:
“So, I’ve been told you’ve been sponsored by the Commission, is that true?”
Shirayuki narrowed her eyes: “Who told you that?”
“The Commission. I’m Quantum, by the way.”
“Ah,” the woman understood, frowning. “You are a sponsored child, too. And why, exactly, are you bothering me?”
“Because I have questions!” Toki exclaimed, waving her arms. “I haven’t met any other sponsored heroes. And, according to the guys who recruited me, there are only four of them who are currently active. Which actually beg the question of inactive heroes, either retired or dead…”
“Fascinating,” the heroine deadpanned. “Now, I have a very busy schedule…”
She sidestepped Toki very neatly. Without missing a beat, the young girl teleported herself right in her path again. One of Shirayuki’s eyes twitched in annoyance. Ah ah, too bad for her. Faced with a potential source of knowledge, Toki was like a dog with a bone.
“Can you answer my questions first?” she chirped eagerly. “It won’t take long. Also, us sponsored kid have to stick together, right?”
Shirayuki briefly closed her eyes. “Fine. You have three minutes.”
“Perfect! So, how old were you when you’ve been scouted by the Commission, what event made them notice you, and why were your guardians deemed unsuitable?”
Shirayuki looked thunderous. Yeah, maybe Toki shouldn’t have started with the hard questions right from the start. Still, the woman gritted her teeth and answered tersely:
“I was ten. I had been placed in foster care a year ago, after the death of my father, as my mother had been gone for years and was impossible to find. I iced over my school in a fight. And you only have two minutes and ten seconds left.”
Lies and slander! Toki resolved to buy a chronometer. She knew she still had at least thirty seconds more. Shirayuki was so uncooperative! But hey, better to make the most of it. Undeterred by the heroine’s glare, Toki continued:
“Do you have a special relationship with them because they sponsored you, or are you allowed the same freedom as normal hero?”
“There is no special allowance made because they happened to place me on that path,” Shirayuki gritted. “I have the same level of autonomy as any other hero. The Commission is more liable to turn to me for confidential or high-risk missions, but it’s because of my competence, not because I hold a preferential status.”
Yeah, keep telling yourself that. In the canon-verse, the Commission had ordered Hawks to infiltrate the League of Villain, and yes it may have been because he was popular and a good liar… But maybe they had picked him because they knew he was least likely to refuse.
“Did they help you set up your agency?”
“No.”
Toki stayed unruffled: “Did they offer?”
“Yes,” Shirayuki admitted reluctantly. “But if the Commission gives financial help to open an agency, they also have a say in how it’s run and where it is set. Using them as a springboard has its cost… And my goal was to prove myself, not to climb ranks as fast as possible. I opted for starting as a hero on my own merits.”
Toki could respect that. For some people the end justified the means, but for some other the way you attained your goal was as important as the goal itself.
“Are you proud of having been a sponsored child? Or do you feel like you owe them something?”
“Proud?” Shirayuki looked, for the first time, a little taken aback. Then her expression became scornful: “There’s no need for pride. My worth is my own. As for owing them… I am thankful for the opportunity they have given me, but our relationship was one of mutually beneficial business. I am no more indebted to them that they are to me, for my services as a hero who protect this city.”
“Do you have regrets?”
“None.”
Toki blinked. Well, that was fast. But then, Shirayuki had a second of hesitation, watching Toki was if mentally measuring her, and she added reluctantly: “It was a lonely childhood. But no, I don’t regret taking that path. Without it, I wouldn’t have been able to realize my full potential.”
Lonely. Toki wondered, suddenly, how lucky she had been to be Keigo’s age. How lucky she was to have him. Because who else was there for her, and for him?
The Commission taught them, guided them and helped them, but they didn’t parent them. There was a difference between being a teacher and raising a child. Well, Keigo and Toki pretty much raised themselves, but… If Toki hadn’t had Keigo… Or if Keigo hadn’t had Toki, as it should have been in the canon-verse… Life at Naruto Labs would have been wildly different. The hallways would be serious and silent instead of being filled with laughter and games. Their free time would have been spent training, because there wouldn’t have been another child to play with. Maybe Keigo (or Toki) would have tried harder to please the adults, seeking some substitute for friendship or family.
Yeah. Toki had thought that life at Naruto Labs was pretty good. But if she had been alone there… It would have been so much depressing, especially in the long run. It made her heart squeeze almost painfully, because… Had it been Keigo’s fate, in canon? What a sad childhood it would have been.
“I see,” Toki said after a beat of silence. “Any advice for someone in the sponsorship program?”
Shirayuki gave her a long, hard look.
“You are an investment,” she finally said. “Heroes all are. All we can hope, is being worth to be gambled on.”
Well. That didn’t sound ominous at all.
Then there was a distant call in the hallways, and Toki realized that Keigo was probably looking for her. She tossed a quick look above her shoulder, trying to spot the rest of the group. When she turned back toward Shirayuki to thank her for her patience, the young woman had already pivoted on her heels to go back to her work.
“Best of luck to you, Quantum.”
Toki hesitated a small second to return the words, because Shirayuki didn’t look like the kind of person who needed luck. But she was also a character who didn’t appear in canon. While it didn’t necessarily mean anything… It could also be a bad sign.
Too late. Shirayuki had already turned the corner and disappeared from view. Toki sighed, and her shoulder dropped. Well, at least she hoped that when Keigo and her would be a grown-up hero, they wouldn’t be as cold as her!
oOoOoOo
Their visit to Shirayuki’s agency was informative. Toki hadn’t learned anything new concerning the HPSC, but she had now confirmation that neither Mera or Kameko had lied about sponsored children being a regular (if rather sporadic) occurrence. Good to know. But heroic kids with powerful Quirks were pretty rare, so it made sense that the Commission didn’t have a boarding school, only a bedroom and a few part-time teachers grafted on one of its facilities.
But back to the point. The goal of their visit of Shirayuki’s agency was to learn how a real heroic agency was run, and they did just that. What were the eployees’ jobs, what did secretaries do, how the sidekicks organized their scheduels, how the agency coordinated with others heroes, how they decided patrols routes, how they looked for villains… But also how their administration worked. Who paid for damages, where the money came from, how to manage merch and advertising, what permit they had to obtain, how sidekicks were selected… It all sounded very complicated. That was why most heroes started as sidekicks, to learn the ropes before starting their own agency.
It gave Keigo and Toki a lot to talk about, in any case. They hadn’t made a formal plan or anything: but since the beginning, when they talked about the future, they absentmindedly spoke about how they would work together. It had never been in question. They were a duo, a package deal.
Ah! So much for canon-Hawks who was a known loner, too fast to be followed, and who only deigned to slow down for Endeavor.
Keigo absolutely loved Endeavor. Toki didn’t share his enthusiasm, but well, she guessed she understood his feelings. Okay, Endeavor had a garbage personality, but he was the most brutally honest example of what being a hero was about. Not victory, but struggle. Heroes were usually perfectly happy with All Might’s legend, and so they never bothered to try and surpass him, easy in the knowledge that they would never become more than what was set for them to be… But not Endeavor. He had pushed upwards, fought bitterly, and worked harder than all of them put together. Yeah, he was a dickhead and Toki didn’t like him, and she would continue not liking him until he put his head out of his ass and started his redemption arc, but there was something that inspired respect in how ferocious and driven Endeavor was.
Keigo also admired Endeavor because he had saved him from his piece of shit of a father, and once, he had wondered if Toki felt the same thing toward All Might, who had arrested Meteor. But Toki didn’t have any particular feelings towards the Number One. He hadn’t saved her. Toki had saved herself. All Might had just been there. He hadn’t helped. In fact, some spiteful part of Toki thought he had actively made things worse.
Everyone expected All Might to magically fix everything but… He hadn’t. He didn’t. When he had arrested Meteor and granted an interview afterward claiming ‘everything is fine now because I am here’: it had felt grating. Like a lie. All Might was all smiles and sweetness, reassurance and false hope. He was a good hero, but he wasn’t a Messiah, only a placebo that promised no one would go unsaved, some kind of security blanket for the wide-eyed public that didn’t realized the all-powerful savior was just a guy in a jumpsuit doing his job.
Was Toki bitter? Probably. She was also rational enough to know that the root of her disillusionment was the fact that All Might had been the one to arrest Meteor. To arrest him so brutally, to wreck their home, to sent Toki’s lifre crashing down. If it had been Endeavor or Best Jeanist instead… Toki would have felt the same ressentiment toward them. Because stopping Meteor was supposed to make her feel safe, and all she felt about it was wariness and a deep, sick feeling of guilt.
She didn’t think about it. She didn’t want to think about any of it: the crumbling building, Meteor screaming, the barren stone of Sayuri’s grave. It wasn’t my fault, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t want to¾
It wasn’t my fault ¾
Anyway. She should think about the future, not the past.
Keigo and Toki started talking again about their future agency, and it offered Toki a new insight on how canon-Hawks had ended up so tight with the Commission. Because Keigo wanted to climb ranks as fast as possible, to stand on the same podium as Endeavor as soon as he could. He did’nt care about the cost.
By age twenty-one, Endeavor had been the Number Two, and had never been dethroned. Keigo burned to break his record, to stand as his hero’s side and be able to talk to him like an equal. So the idea of starting his own agency at eighteen was very appealing to him, even though the Commission would have a foot in the door. Actually, Keigo didn’t mind inviting the Commission even more in his work, basically giving them a lot of control over his business, if that meant they gave him the meant to fly closer to his goal.
“You don’t get it,” Keigo explained excitingly, waving his arms. “Who care if the money came from a Commission’s loan or from merch? At least the loan is quicker. And it’s safer to have the Commission as a direct backer, instead of relying on sales and advertising and stuff. That way, even if our rankings aren’t the best in the beginning, we’ll still have massive amount of money! That meant a super-big agency, billboard with our faces plastered on them, good support gear, and enough to pay a lot of sidekicks to do the boring parts of the jobs!”
Yeah, that explained so much about canon-Hawks. Alarmingly so.
“Yeah but,” Toki floundered a little, “they don’t give money for free! They’re already training us so we become heroes, if we continue leeching off them afterward, then we give them a say in what kind of hero we’re going to be, and what if it’s something we don’t like?”
Keigo made a face:
“You’re having a moral crisis again, aren’t you.”
“I’m not, I’m just asking!”
“You are. You so are. Come on, lay it on me, what’s the deal?”
Toki couldn’t very well ask him how he would feel if he was ordered to infiltrated a super-villain gang and ended up killing one and being maimed by another. So she waved her arms:
“Well, imagine! What if they try to make you have a specific kind of brand? Like, pretending to be edgy and dark? Or pretending you hate chocolate and only eat hard-boiled eggs with asparagus? Or push you to make commercials with their friends’ compagnies, even if those compagnies use child labor?”
Keigo didn’t brush her worries aside. He did consider them for at least three seconds. But, as Toki expected… He shrugged.
“It comes with the job, doesn’t it? Besides, come on! I told you I would be ready to pay the price to end up Number Three hero!”
Toki briefly thought about Keigo-who-would-be-Hawks, about Dabi, about Twice, about blue fire eating red wings until there wasn’t even a stub left. Would Keigo still think that price worth it?
Then again… It wasn’t the Commission who had asked Keigo… no, Hawks… to kill Twice or to fight Dabi. Hawks’ job had been to spy, and to try and stop them. He had gone above and beyond, but it had been his choice. To try and blame the Commission for it would be removing Hawks’ agency in what had happened. He had fought and killed and bled, yes: but he hadn’t done it because some sick need to please the Commission, or because he had been brainwashed to do so. He had done it because he had believed it would save people, and that was his duty.
So yeah, how could Toki even begin to stand in the way of that? She didn’t even disagree with him. If it had been her, if it had been her place, she would probably have done the same thing. Keigo and her were sometimes so similar it hurt. Except for a few key-differences of course. Like how they viewed Endeavor. Or…
“I don’t like people telling me what to do,” she said instead, mulishly.
Keigo’s eyes softened. He didn’t mind when people gave him orders. It would continue in canon. Hawks, despite his namesake, acted much like a domesticated parrot, gladly accepting to be feed by hand and repeating what its owner wanted him to learn. He didn’t see the point of fighting it, and considered it a small price to pay for comfort and success.
Oh, Keigo wasn’t a mindless sycophant, far from it. He disliked formalities, often acting in an unpredictable way, while being cocky and taunting. But he was good at following orders. There was a reason he would be a better hero than her, after all. Keigo sometimes replied with sarcasm or subliminal cynicism, but he listened and strategized… Meanwhile, Toki bristled and overthought things, like a feral stray that hadn’t been properly tamed.
“I guess we’ll have to find a way around that,” he smiled.
And that was why Keigo was such a fucking treasure. He was already planning how to find a way around the problem, already ready to compromise, already starting to strategize, because Toki’s feelings mattered as much as his dream to equal Endeavor.
“Well I guess I could be your sidekick,” Toki grinned. “That would leave me some time to work in an astrophysics lab…”
“But you’ll be part of the agency, doesn’t that count?”
“Crap, you’re right. Hum. Maybe I should start in another agency as a sidekick, you know, for one or two years, until you’re high-ranked? Or better, work as a freelancer so I’m not officially affiliated with you, except I would use your agency as unofficial headquarters so we wouldn’t really be separated…”
“Oooh! I like that one!”
“Do you think we can pull it off, though?”
“No idea. But hey, if we don’t and you have to be a sidekick somewhere, can you pick Endeavor Agency and bring me a signed picture?”
“… I will see what I can do.”
The chances of actually becoming Endeavor’s sidekick were pretty low, so Toki wouldn’t hold her breath for it. Besides, Endeavor favored fire Quirks. His agency was famous for it. But hey, warp Quirks were rare and coveted, so maybe Toki would have a chance. She was kind of curious, too. Being a sidekick was the best way to learn how to be a hero in the field, according to studies online, but what kind of boss would Endeavor be?
Well, one thing at the time. Toki wasn’t even ten years old yet. She still almost had a decade to go before applying for a job at Endeavor’s agency!
Still, this conversation had given Toki a really illuminating view of canon-Hawks. At the beginning she would have thought that the Commission was a shady hooker and Hawks had been (would be?) the idiot who fell in love with her. But turned out that actually the Commission was more like a vat of nitromethane and Hawks had been trying to balance it on his head, on one foot, on top of a unicycle, on top of a moving, burning cart. Funny image, that.
Also Toki had no idea how much her influence would change how Keigo saw the Commission or decided to deal with it. Sure, maybe the ‘would readily sell his soul to the devil’ was part of Keigo’s nature, but Toki was a firm believer in the inherent superiority of education and self-enlightenment, in that Nature VS Nurture deal. So maybe Hawks wouldn’t be as self-destructive as in canon. Who knew. In any case, Toki would be here to keep an eye on him, that was for sure. No way she was going to let this self-sacrificing chicken nugget all alone in the real world.
But anyway… They went back to their normal lives. Learning, playing, eating, training, sleeping, training again. They were getting better in their ballet lessons. Toki especially. Keigo was plenty graceful, especially considering his wingspan, but it was Toki who twirled and bounced in all directions. While Keigo could use his feathers to attack from a distance, Toki had to touch people to teleport with them, and so her fighting style relied on getting close and personal. She didn’t punch and kick like a boxer, though: as Hayasa-sensei liked to said, she was too tiny and too low on the food chain to try to win a fight with brute force. Besides, taking a blow from an adversary was no joke. So Toki mixed ballet with gymnastic and hand-to-hand combat to avoid her opponents’ strikes. She sidestepped and jumped and twirled, bouncing like a facetious ping-pong ball and dancing circles around her enemy without taking any hit, until a window of opportunity opened and she could strike.
The spars between Toki and Keigo were always very entertaining to watch. Of course Keigo had the advantage at long-range with his feathers, but Toki could disappear and reappear right in his personal space. It made for a quick-fire game of cat-and-mouse. They both advanced then sidestepped, striking and avoiding, absolutely no hit connecting because they both evaded their opponents at the very last second. They each had their own advantages and handicaps. Keigo had hollow bones, fragile and easily broken, that made him unable to fight brutally. But his feathers made him hyperaware of anything that happened around him, and taking him by surprise was virtually impossible, as if he had eyes behind his skull. Toki wasn’t fragile and she didn’t hesitate to be vicious, but she was limited to close-range combat, and she was also kind of short. Well, she was tall for a kid, but Keigo was slowly starting to be of even height… And his feathers were damn strong. If one of them caught Toki’s collar and tried to drag her away, the young girl could dig her heels in all she wanted, it wouldn’t make a difference. Those feathers could drag an adult man as if he weighted nothing more than a couple of grapes. So unfair.
It was funnier when they fought together against someone else. Their teamwork was seamless. They had spent nearly two years training everyday together, with and without Quirk, discovering new techniques and exploring new idea. They understood each other perfectly. Hayasa-sensei sometimes said with a tingle of pride that it was almost as if they could read each other’s mind.
Their opponent was usually Hayasa-sensei himself. As a speedster, he could keep up with both Toki’s teleportation and Keigo’s multiple attacks. Hayasa-sensei was a patient teacher, nice and a bit rigid, but when it was fighting-time it was like a switch had been flipped. He was direct and brutal. He punched hard, and he didn’t hesitate to barks orders and criticisms, while he never raised his voice when he was on the sidelines. Toki wondered if he had been a hero before, and if fighting (even with them!) activated some reflexive veteran instincts.
But they also fought (sometimes) other people. There were a few researchers in Naruto Labs who had hero training. Other just practiced combat sports. They weren’t trained instructors, but once in a while Hayasa-sensei dragged one or two of them in the training ground to play tag, or hide-and-seek, or dodgeball. More often than not, Toki and Keigo won, because they were slippery little things and trained in evasion to boot, while the adults were a bit out of their depth, which made them slow and clumsy. Some adults tried to be exceedingly careful, but after one training session with the kids (who threw themselves into the exercise like there was no tomorrow) they didn’t make that mistake twice. The play-fighting became real combat. There was something a bit scary at fighting grown men that weren’’ playing around. It never became violent enough to send either of them to the infirmary, but Toki was pushed to her limits more than once.
She was getting stronger. Faster, more agile. She never froze when an opponent came at her, now. She planned, and acted, and won. When she had joined the program, being a hero had seemed so far away, almost unreachable. It had been a good idea, a good excuse to find protection with the HPSC, but it hadn’t seemed real. Now, however… Now Toki could see it. How she would jump and catch people in free-falling, how she would run circles around villains or teleport civilians away from danger.
She hadn’t given up her dream of being an astrophysicist, of course not. But well… Now, being a hero was also something that could make her dream, too.
Toki was a science nerd and a hero in training. She was a dreamer and a realist, an optimist and a poet, occasionally. She had almost fully filled her poetry notebook. She still had plenty of blank ones to use, but she had a particular attachment to that one. It held her first pieces of prose, her childish scrawling. It had supported her in so many key-moments in her life. Discovering Meteor, living with Sayuri’s betrayal, loving and hating the Crew, going on the run, meeting the HPSC, meeting Keigo. She could turn the pages and guess who she was, who she had been, just by looking at her poetry.
It felt weird. These words were hers, but they also were not. And… Still, without being able to put them on paper, Toki didn’t know how she would have gone through all the emotions that seemed to choke her from time to time.
Some days I am afraid to write
Because sometimes the honestly kills me.
There were pages and pages of prose, half-forgotten songs’ lyrics and small verses and authorless quotes. It feels more disjoined but more intimate than a diary. It was her soul, barred to the world. Her questions, her emotions, all the stuff she couldn’t quite said out loud. She never let anyone read it. Well, she would have let Keigo read it, if he asked. But he never did. He was curious, she knew he was, because sometimes she saw him watch her write, but he never asked.
That was alright. She didn’t mind if it was Keigo. She trusted him. There were days where he felt more like family than Sayuri or Meteor ever did. Keigo was her age, but even if Toki had about twenty-five years of mental experience locked somewhere in her brain, she wasn’t really more mature than him. She was smart, but she wasn’t a prodigy. Keigo and her… They were equal. They were close. Toki hadn’t realized how much she had needed a friend until he appeared in her life. It was sad, somehow, that she had taken what she had with her parents for the norm. Toki had liked them, loved them, but she hadn’t trusted them. They hadn’t made her feel safe. Or valued. Or maybe they had made her feel valued, but as a prize, as a mascot maybe, not as a person with her wills and desires.
Maybe some part of Toki had believed that they would stop loving her sooner of later, and that she should cut her loss first. She wondered, sometimes. It felt so alien, to try and divine what had crossed her mind in that moment. Like it was somebody else’s action, somebody else’s decisions.
But the truth was: she hadn’t thought, at all, at that moment. She had just wanted it to stop. If she had had a weapon, she would have pointed it at them to make them listen, make them stop; but Toki hadn’t had a gun, all she had were her notebook, so she had used that instead, and…
And she had sold them out.
She still had complicated feelings about what had happened as a result. Guilt and horror and regret and vindictiveness and defensiveness and shame and pride and fury and sadness, so intertangled that she couldn’te ven begin to make sense of it.
People had died in the arrest. And now… Her father was in prison, and her mother was dead. It wasn’t Toki’s fault, she hadn’t been the one making them murderers or deciding they had to keep the baby who endangered Sayuri’s health! It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t.
Was it? If Toki had stayed quiet and obedient, it would have never come to this. And she had to ask herself sometimes… Had she acted for the better? Or for the worse? Had her action saved more people than Meteor had killed that day? Were those people’s lives more important than Sayuri’s? Was the trade worth it?
It was an unanswerable question. Toki didn’t know the future. Or, ironically, she did: but not the right kind of future. The only thing she could knew for sure was… She had loved her parents, but she had still destroyed them. And now she had to live with that.
Tell me father
Which to ask forgiveness for:
What I am, or what I'm not?
Tell me mother,
Which should I regret:
What I became, or what I didn't?
It would get easier with time. It was already getting better. The wound wasn’t so raw and painful anymore. Like a scratch already starting to scar over. It itched and burned when Toki pocked at it, but it didn’t paralyze her anymore. All she could do was run forward now.
Toki had chosen, but there had been no good option. It was like the trolley problem in the philosophy books. A runaway trolley was barreling down the railway tracks, there were five people tied up and unable to move in its path; but if you pulled a lever the trolley would switch to a different set of tracks, where there was only one person tied up. Choosing nothing was to accept the greater number of victims, but acting meant becoming an active participant in a single person’s demise. There was no ethical option, no right path, but still Toki had made her choice, and she stood by it.
She had to stand by it, or else… or else it would mean admitting she had been wrong. It would mean that it shouldn’t have happened, that it had all been for nothing, and she couldn’t… she could’nt live like that; it had to be worth it. It had to.
She wasn’t Toki Aratani or Toki Taiyōme anymore. She was only Quantum, and she was going to be a hero. She had sold her freedom to the Commission for a fresh start, protection, and friendship… And Toki couldn’t bring herself to regret. If she regretted it, then she was lost.
Yep, she had given up her freedom: but ironically, she felt freer than she had ever been with her blood-family. The oppressive anxiety that plaged her days was gone. She felt safer, too. Besides, with how things had turned up, with her learning progresses, meeting Keigo, finally being able to think of her future… She honestly had gotten a good deal. It could be so much worse.
Here, she had a future. Safety, trust, love. She had Keigo. It was home, now.
“Want to sneak out to the river?”
She turned her head toward Keigo, who was beaming, upside down by her window. Toki knew better than how to ask how he had gotten here. Instead, she slapped her notebook shut with a grin, and grabbed her shoes.
“Meet you on the roof in five?”
“Fiiine. How can you be so slow when you’re the one who can teleport?”
Toki opened her mouth to respond indignantly, but Keigo didn’t let her time to do it. Laughing, he kicked off the windowsill and shoot upward, his crimson wings spread wide. Toki huffed, and put on her shoes with a smile.
Yeah. The world was still hard and complicated, but… She was okay. It had taken sometimes, but she was here. She was okay.
And she was allowed to be hopeful.
Notes:
Hope you liked it !
So Shirayuki is an OC, and yes, because I'm a nerd I modeled her after Sode No Shirayuki in the manga Bleach. I also gave her ice powers and a missing mother because I had the idea of her while thinking about Geten. You remember Geten from the Meta-Liberation Army arc ? Yes, that guy.
So Shirayuki's mother left when her daughter was a child, leaving her father to raise her. Then the father died and Shirayuki was poached by the Commission (not because she saved people, but because such a power shouldn't be left uncheked: it was better to direct Shirayuki towards heroism than to let her risk become a villain).Meanwhile, after running away, the mother joined a cult. Yep, the Meta Liberation Army, you guessed right ! And a few years later, she had another kid, Geten. We do not have a canon-age for Geten but I imagine him being younger than Dabi and older than a high-schooler, so i'm going to said that Geten has been born and is actually about four years old.
Of course, neither Shirayuki nor Geten are aware of their relation and i don't think I will make them meet. But it's nice to give an origin story for that massively over-powered villain. And the irony of having a heroic sister is just too nice to pass up !
EDIT 21/08/2022
Some mistakes were corrected. One or two sentences added on the fact that Toki, despites missing her parents, has now fully embraced her new life.
Chapter 9: The President's masterpiece
Summary:
Toki and Keigo go to Musutafu, stumble upon a new mystery, and think about what it mean for them. Also, they met the HSPC's current President.
(Yes, the one who, in canon, gave kill-orders to Lady Nagant.)
Notes:
Soooooo i'm back ! Here is the next chapter ! Toki and Keigo are now ten years old. They grow up so fast...
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
THE PRESIDENT'S MASTERPIECE
In the winter after Toki’s tenth birthday, Japan suffered a terrible snowstorm.
The sea iced over, then rose and flooded the coast. Telephonic poles were torn away. Whole cities lost power. Houses were destroyed, streets flooded, roofs torn apart. That storm was the lovechild of a cyclone and an ice age. There were several conspiracy theories online saying it was probably the result of several ice-Quirks banding together to attack Japan (which was obviously bullshit) but it didn’t change the facts: it was strong, it was cold, and small coastal towns had to be ready to be severely fucked.
Even if the city of Naruto wasn’t on the storm’s direct path, it was close enough that the Commission cautiously decided to evacuate as much as possible. In the days before the storm hit, all non-essential projects were shut down. The labs were closed, the windows reinforced, and a steady line of staff members and researchers tricked down to board the train and wait the storm in inland, either with family or in shelters.
Toki and Keigo cheerfully helped to barricade the place, carrying furniture and hopping to the rooftops to help dismantle fragile parabolic antennas. They had a blast. But hey, since the whole place was being locked down and bracing for impact, they had to leave too. The storm was expected to last at least a week: they had to settle down somewhere else.
How exciting!
It was far from the first time they had left Naruto Labs on an organized trip. Each summer, now, they went to various camps. They hadn’t gone back to the one where they had terrified their teachers with seagulls and late-night screaming, which was too bad. But that summer, Toki had been to another Girl Scout Camp and then one in the mountains, while Keigo had been in a birdwatching one for four whole weeks. So, they did get out. But it was the first time they were forced to evacuate the building, and it felt a little thrilling, like some risky adventure.
They would have liked to follow Hayasa-sensei, who was the adult they were closest to. But it wasn’t to be. Instead, they went to the President’s home. After all, since the Commission had custody of them, their guardianship in time of need fell to the man who was leading this institution, right? So they went.
And that’s how they met the Commission’s current President, Genryusai-sama, who was seventy years old, relatively unknown from the public, and probably one of the most powerful men in Japan.
The house was big and traditional: a bit like Toki imagined the Todoroki estate being in canon. It was often full of people because the President had a wife, two adult daughters, and a middle-aged son. There was also a staff who helped cleaning and cooking… but somehow, everyone tried to be invisible. Everyone made sure to stay out of everyone’s way. It was virtually impossible to make small talk with them: they just waited politely to see if you wanted something, then politely excused themselves. It was creepy. Neither Toki or Keigo were used to that… or to the silence. In Naruto Labs, it was always busy: people talking, machines wiring in the lower levels, computers beeping in the offices, researcher arguing in the breakroom. But in the President’s home; it was so quiet. Voices were muffled. People moved silently. There was no music or no noises from the TV.
It was only upon meeting Genryusai that Toki understood why.
The President wasn’t a very imposing man. Medium-heigh, lanky, sagging eyelids, big glasses. He moved without making noise, so everyone in the house had to watch out for when he returned. No one wanted to notice him when it was too late, because he only looked like a grey and unassuming man until he didn’t. There was something cold and scary in his eyes, something sharp that reminded Toki that this man had guessed the true nature of her Quirk before everyone else, before herself, and he hadn’t even needed to meet her for that. He was short, old, and myopic, but he stood straight and there was something inherently threatening in the way he watched you, as if already mentally vivisecting you. So yeah, the house was silent, and Toki didn’t need much time to realize why. It was like the whole place was holding its breath when he was here.
“It’s a pleasure to have you here,” the President said unsmilingly, eyes cold and evaluating. “It is only until the storm pass and Naruto Labs reopen, but in the meantime, I will ask you to continue studying quietly, as to not disturb those of us who will be working from home.”
His eyes were grey, not red, but suddenly Toki remember how cold Fujio’s eyes had been when he had prepared the rifles before the bank robbery. She didn’t shudder, but it was a near thing.
“Of course.” Keigo smiled like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “We will be perfectly behaved.”
And they were. For about twelve hours. Just the time to run a quick recon of this place. After all, they needed to know where they stood. Where everyone worked (every single adult had their office), what they could hear, if their doors were closed, if they left Toki and Keigo work alone (they did), if someone was going to check on them (they didn’t)… Then, once that was done, Toki and Keigo got bored. So they both dressed in their warmest clothes, and decided to take a quick walk outside.
(Honestly, they had no problem running away from the Labs, where they had felt safe: how had their caretakers not thought that they wouldn’t pull it off here, in a place that creeped them out? Because there was a little snow?! Ah! As if!)
Alright there was a shit ton of snow. And wind. Toki had never been in a real storm like that, even when she had been homeless. She usually waited out the bad weather in a library. But hey, staying under the President’s roof was even chillier than the howling wind, so… Storm it was. At least the visibility wasn’t that bad yet. You could still see most of the street. Even if there were no car (the roads were quickly turning white with snow), most shops had stayed open, and there was a lot of pedestrians. Musutafu wasn’t close enough to the storm to be in a state of emergency.
Toki teleported them in the inner city, because fuck if she was letting Keigo fly in that weather: and then they were free.
They were in Musutafu, and wow. Being here now, nearly two years after joining the program, gave Toki a strange feeling of almost-dissociation. As if she was Toki Taiyōme once again. It was odd. Odd, but not bad. She quickly recovered and started showing Keigo around with excitement, leading her wide-eyed friend in her favorite streets. Usually she travelled by rooftops but considering the wind, well, she would pass this time.
Keigo had never been in Musutafu, so Toki really enjoyed being a tour guide. She showed him her favorites places to break in and sleep, retrieved some money from one of her old caches (nobody had found the plastic container filled with bank notes and hidden in the shop’s fake ceiling), bought them food from a street vendor who was closing up, and they wandered around until they were tired. Considering how energetic they were, it took a long time. Afterward, they went to an internet café and looked online where they could see some heroes at work… And, lo and behold, a lot of heroes had gone where the storm would hit the hardest so they could help with rescues effort. After all, a hero’s work wasn’t just to punch villains in the face, it was to protect civilians. All Might, Best Jeanist, Crust, Shishido, Endeavor, Gang Orca… Hundreds of heroes had coordinated. Toki could admit it: it was impressive. And a little humbling. She couldn’t fantom being part of an operation of this scale.
Anyway. Heroes or not, Keigo and Toki still had plenty of ways to entertain themselves. They stayed as long as they could in the internet café, then went right back to exploring. Walking and chatting kept them warm, even with the snow and the biting wind. They had plenty of things to talk about. How were the other staff members doing, the storm, how the heroes were preparing, if they could sneak in the headquarters…
Toki wondered if Kameko Sabira was in the city. Maybe. Or Mera, or the Vice-President. Honestly, they would all have been a better option than Genryusai. No matter how smart and powerful he was, there was something in him that put Toki ill-at-ease. He wasn’t exactly frightening, but his presence was… threatening. Like being watched by a snake, or a crocodile. There was a small, animal part of Toki’s brain that identified him as a larger predator, a cold-blooded one, and she didn’t like it. The last person she had found that intimidating had been Meteor. And he had been towering tall, with ember-like eyes and a smile full of teeth. It was unnerving to think that short, soft-spoken Genryusai could project the same level of threat.
Besides, Meteor had been dangerous, but he had not been a danger to Toki. He had never hit her, or demeaned her, or even raised his voice at her. He had loved her. He had loved all of their small and dysfunctional family.
Not all toxic people were cruel and uncaring. Some of them loved dearly. Many of them had good intentions, like Sayuri did. But those people were still toxic, because their needs and way of existing in the world forced others to compromise themselves and their happiness. Toki wondered if Genryusai was that kind of person. His wife, his children, his staff… They weren’t cowering in front of him but they all held themselves so straight and tense, as if afraid to draw breath. Was he kind to them, even a little bit? He seemed so cold and controlled, but was he violent, abusive? The house’s atmosphere creeped her out. There was something going on, that was sure.
“Had you met the President before?” she asked Keigo out of the blue.
“No”, he frowned. “I would have told you. I only met the Vice-President.”
“Can’t imagine why,” Toki muttered.
But Keigo heard her, and he winced: “I know, right? He doesn’t seem super-friendly. If he had been the one to offer the sponsorship to my mom, I think she would have bailed, money or not.”
“Nobody in their right mind would want to give their children to that guy. He looks like he would eat them for breakfast.”
“You think we should worry?” Keigo joked.
“I don’t know,” Toki replied with a grin. “He does look like a snake, and you do have pigeon’s wings…”
“Said the girl who froze like a mouse.”
“I didn’t freeze!”
“Yes you did! And even right now, you have you worried face on!”
“I don’t have a worried face,” Toki protested with as much dignity as she could manage, “because I don’t worry.”
“Bullshit,” Keigo snorted.
“I strategize,” Toki said. “I make contingency plans. Occasionally I indulge the tiniest amount of tactical… fretting.”
Oh gods that was so lame, why had she said that. Keigo waited until Toki has winced before he repeated, agonizingly slowly: “Tactical fretting.”
“It’s a technical term,” Toki said haughtily. She sniffed for good measure. “It has a dignified military history.”
“Like goddamn hell it does,” Keigo said, but his eyes were sparking in delight. “So what are you tactically fretting about?”
Toki opened her mouth. Closed it. She actually wasn’t sure. So she shrugged and said:
“I don’t like the guy. He gives me the heebie-jeebies… but he also makes people afraid in his house, and that’s never a good sign.”
Something cold and bitter passed in Keigo’s eyes. He knew what that meant. His parents had made him afraid in their home, too. It made Toki feel sick inside, because no one should have to live with that. She hadn’t felt safe at home either, but it had been a different fear, less immediate, less consuming. Nobody in her family had wanted to harm her just because they could. That, had least, she had been spared.
“You think…” Keigo didn’t finish his phrase. Toki shrugged helplessly.
“I don’t know. I can’t know. What do you think?”
Because the President’s family still lived with him, but if he was abusive, they would leave, right? Maybe Toki was imagining things. Besides, even if Genryusai was violent, or abusive, or something worse than just cold and threatening (which was a very big if, considering the only clue Toki had was a gut-feeling!), there wasn’t much that Toki or Keigo could do. He was the President, while they were only kids. Worse, they were kids sponsored by the Commission. The very institution that gave Genryusai his power owned them… And it also owned the heroes, so trying to turn to them for help would be fruitless.
Technically the President was on the Good Guys’ side. But you could be on the side of justice and law, and still be inherently frightening. Or an asshole. Case in point: Endeavor.
It would have been simpler is good guys were always nice and bad guys always hateful. But Meteor had been kind to her, cared for her, and still he had killed innocent people. Genryusai frightened her but he stood in the way of villains like AFO… Well, maybe. He looked like the kind of person who would rather hang out with AFO and his evil potato face than with All Might and his sunny smiles.
“Well since we’re in his home, we could investigate!” Keigo suddenly grinned.
Toki stared.
“Hum, isn’t that risky?”
“Oh, are you scared? And here I thought I was the bird guy, you chicken.”
“I’m not scared!”
Then Toki realized she had backed herself in a corner, and groaned. Keigo grinned triumphantly. Well now she had to hope that the President wasn’t secretly evil…
They went back to his house. Of course, nobody tried to draw attention to their absence. Genryusai’s wife severely asked where they had been when she had checked on them: but Keigo replied, all wide-eyed innocence, that they had been in the garden. Said garden was maybe half the size of the house and would have been a pretty lawn with flowers if it wasn’t covered in snow. There were no way two children could have hidden there for four hours without being noticed. Keigo kept smiling, and the wife dropped it.
Of course being stuck in a snow storm with several other people, including the one you’re investigating, didn’t really help to search the house secretly. But Toki and Keigo took the task of detectives with the same relentless enthusiasm they did with any aspect of their training. Maybe even more. That game had a thrilling ‘secret agents’ vibe. And well, what else could they do? After all, their schoolwork didn’t take much time… And nobody bothered to check on them, as long as they didn’t disturb the house’s quiet.
So, between Toki’s teleportation and Keigo’s feathers, they managed to thoughtfully map the house (no secret passages, what a disappointment!), discover everybody’s schedule, and from there they tried to spy on the President. Which was not as interesting as Toki would have thought. He mostly made long phone calls, and studied reports and budgets on his computer. The phone calls came from various heroes’ agencies, so it allowed Keigo and Toki to know what was going on with the storm and the heroes’ work, but it was nothing really compromising.
Endeavor was handling the villains in Tokyo while all the others heroes more suited to rescue were running around evacuating people from collapsed buildings, searching for victims dragged by floods, or helped fix damaged dams. All Might was in the South, rescuing ships and planes willy-nilly. Shirayuki’s ice constructs were helping clear her city of snow to allow ambulances and police cars to continue circulating. The President didn’t usually talk much in those calls, but he sometimes gave a clipped order, and in the next hour, it would be done. He didn’t coordinate all the heroes but he played a role in the direction they were all taking… and in the way they would appear in various media.
On the evening news (that the whole family watched in utter silence each evening, which was disturbing), Toki and Keigo sometimes recognized a turn of phrase or a statistic that Genryusai had said in his daily phone calls. That man sure had a lot of clout.
The President was so busy that he rarely spoke to his family. He actually barely interacted with them. They were all looking for him from the corner of their eyes, as if anxiously expecting judgement, but he barely saw them. He was always completely focused on his work. And, well, Toki could guess how his family would feel, living with a man who seemed to stare straight into your soul, then turned away, finding you too insignificant. That kind of thing would have made her feel small, too.
But at least Genryusai wasn’t violent or cruel. Cold, maybe. Not that it was an excuse. Coldness could hurt as much as blows: it just hurt differently, more insidiously.
After two days, as the storm was still raging, Toki and Keigo got bored of their on-site investigation, and left the house again to explore the city. They went to an internet café and googled everything they could about the president. Still, they were easily derailed and Toki ended up looking up Quirk-theories while Keigo watched with rapt attention video footage of fight between a jumping hero and a flying villain last week. When they reluctantly went back to their search, they didn’t find much, beside the fact that the President had headed the Commission for now forty years, which was a fucking long time. He was apparently an All Might fan because there were pictures of him with the Symbol of Peace, while he usually never met others heroes in a public setting. But the Commission wasn’t really a close ally to All Might (they worked together, but minded their own business), so maybe it was personal relationship? I mean, All Might seemed like the type to befriend anyone… And Genryusai was cold as fuck but he surely saw the usefulness of having the Symbol of Peace in his corner…
Anyway. Toki and Keigo spent a few hours at that. Then, to pass time, they had the brilliant idea to go the mall. They didn’t need to buy anything! But it was funny to hide in the crowd, to gaggle at pretty storefronts, to ostensibly criticize the shops that didn’t account for customer with mutantism like wings, or to try on stupid hats. There was photo booth, and Keigo had the bright idea to takes a few pictures. It would make for a nice souvenir! They never took photos in Naruto Labs. So they took a bunch of pictures together, then shared them.
On a whim, Toki also bought a cute envelope and some pens in a nearby shop. Later on, while they took refuge in a cat café (the staff had been reluctant at letting two unsupervised kids enter, but they had sworn they were going to behave, and Toki flashing them a fistful of cash had certainly helped), she ripped a page from a notebook, and started writing. Keigo took a few minutes to notice, entranced by the cat purring on his knees and the three kittens chasing his feathers around. Apparently he had never snuggled with a cat before, which was a crying shame.
“Whacha doing? A top-secret spy’s report?”
“Nah. It’s a letter.”
“A letter?” Keigo blinked. “To who?”
Because, as far as he knew, Toki didn’t have anyone who cared for her outside of the Commission. Which wasn’t exactly false but… Unlike Keigo, who had been basically sold by his mom, Toki had run from home. She was registered as missing. She was plenty strong, but still, there had been people out there who had been concerned. People who had been worried for her. There was that detective, Tsuki-something. But there had also been…
“Being in Musutafu remined me,” she said softly. “I wandered in this city for weeks without anyone really seeing me. The shopkeepers, the librarians, the sidekicks I grilled about their Quirks… They liked me but they didn’t see me. I was hiding, after all. But there was one person I didn’t hide from, because I was tired and vulnerable. And that person was worried for me, but they still respected my choices. They cared, and they didn’t care because I was a Taiyōme or a teleporter, but just because it was me. Because I needed some warm tea, and they were a decent human being.”
She stopped writing for a few seconds. In the very last picture Keigo and her had taken at the photo booth, Keigo had moved, and you could only see his fluffy hair, while Toki was grinning like a lunatic front and center. Toki had considered throwing that picture away (she had no interest in keeping it) but hey, it could make for a good proof of her identity.
“Mind if I take that photo?”
“Go ahead. Want me to cut it apart from the others?”
“You can do that? Thanks!”
Keigo gleefully took two feathers like scissors and started snipping, before asking lightly:
“So! Who’s your mysterious pen-pal?”
“Not really a pen-pal,” Toki frowned. “You know how the Commission recruited me because I saved someone in a car accident, right? Well the person I saved was a woman, Mihoko-san. She said… She said it would make her happy to know I was safe. I considered going back to her afterward. But two days later I took the Commission’s deal, so I never kept my promise. And I realized… What if I worried for a kid one day, a kid living on the streets, who promised to come back, and who never did?”
Keigo stayed silent a few second. Then he said softly: “You want to reassure her?”
“I dunno. It would make me feel better if I was sure that she wasn’t worrying.”
Or maybe Toki just wanted to reassure myself that she still had a place in the world outside the Commission A way to prove to herself that if Quantum disappeared, there would still be people who would remember Toki. But she couldn’t say that out loud. It would be cruel to Keigo: he would mourn if she was gone. She had him. But Keigo only had her. If Hawks disappeared, then no one outside of the Commission would notice. Maybe not even his own mother.
Toki signed the letter, then folded the paper and put it with the picture in the envelope. On the front, she wrote Mihoko Shinsō, and briefly regretted leaving her notebooks in Naruto Labs. She had only taken one normal notebook and her poetry one, but she had left the one with Mihoko’s name and address back there. Oh, well. It didn’t matter very much. She remembered the location: she only had to drop it in the letterbox.
“Want to drop it off with me?” she offered impulsively.
Keigo looked at her a second, something soft in his eyes, before shaking his head:
“No, you go ahead. It’s your origin story. Just come back quick, alright?”
Toki hadn’t considered doing otherwise. She grinned, then teleported away. One jump in another street, then near the infamous bridge where everything had begun, then right in the hallway of Mihoko’s building. There were several letterboxes on the wall, and Toki carefully looked at each name until she recognized the right one. There! Shinsō, with the kanji for “heart, mind” and the kanji for “manipulating, operating”. For a wild moment, she thought about climbing the stairs, ringing the doorbell…
But Keigo was waiting, and he would always be her priority. So Toki stuffed the letter in the letterbox, then teleported away.
She didn’t look back.
oOoOoOo
Dear Mihoko-san,
Hello! I don’t know if you remember me. It has been two years already. I hope you’re doing well, and little Hitoshi too!
I know I promised to swing by sometimes, and I hope this letter is enough. I just wanted to let you know that I haven’t forgotten about you. I hadn’t been able to come because I live away from Musutafu, now. I got off the streets! Everything is going a lot better than the last time you saw me. I’m training to be a hero. It’s a difficult sometimes, but I love what I’m doing. I also made a friend!
Thank you for being kind to me that one time. It meant more than you think. It’s a bit thanks to you that I decided to stop running.
Sincerely,
Toki the Teleporter.
oOoOoOo
The storm lasted three more days. In the meantime, Toki and Keigo continued snooping around Genryusai’s house. They didn’t find anything incriminating. The President was only a very, very powerful man, who worked with heroes and also happened to be very cold and scary. Nothing more. He didn’t beat his wife or kids, he simply ignored them. Yes, that was mean, but honestly he didn’t even notice. They were so far beneath him they didn’t warrant interest, good or bad. Nothing more. Toki thought it made him an asshole, but not an abusive bastard. Keigo thought it made him way more bearable that his own father had been. And there wasn’t much to argue with that.
Anyway. They looked around, they sneaked out, they entertained themselves. Then the storm abated. They were told that they would be sent back to Naruto Labs shortly. Toki and Keigo were very proud to have played at being spies for a week without getting caught, so of course, the evening before their departure, Genryusai flatly said at dinner:
“Have you found what you were snooping around for, Hawks, Quantum?”
Toki froze. Keigo froze. Every single person at the table stopped breathing. In retrospect, it was probably very funny, from an outside point of view.
“W-What do you mean?” Toki tried to play dumb.
“Don’t waste my time, child. I mean your little… espionage. Your recreative outings will stay unmentioned.”
Keigo and Toki exchanged a wide-eyed look. The jig was up. The President didn’t blink. His cold gaze was still resting on them both, unmoving. He wasn’t angry, or amused, or impatient. Only emotionless. Waiting for their reply, as if the thought of not having his questions answered was unfathomable, as if rebellion or insolence were so far from possible that it didn’t even register as an eventuality. And, Toki thought with an uncomfortable swallow, he wasn’t even wrong.
“We found it,” said Keigo with a blank smile. “You’re not secretly evil. All is good.”
The joke fell flat. Keigo’s smile wavered. Finally, the President lowered his head a fraction. Not a quite nod, but something that could almost be considered one, if you felt wildly imaginative and optimistic.
“I see. How… childish. I do hope that in the future, you will refrain from such pointless endeavors.”
Toki and Keigo both squeaked out something like ‘yes sir!’, but the President still continued staring at them, as if he was mentally measuring them to some invisible blueprint and finding them lacking. It was unnerving.
“You have the potential to one day replace my masterpiece. So far, no young hero had been up to the task. I hope that you won’t disappoint me.”
Toki and Keigo didn’t share a glance this time, but there was like a lightning-quick communication between them. Masterpiece? Was it a clue? What did it mean? And of course Keigo couldn’t know, but Toki’s mind flashed back to canon-Endeavor and all his talk of Shouto as his masterpiece, and what if the President meant it in the same sense, what if he was talking about a person, not a project…
“Who is your masterpiece?” she dared to ask.
The president looked at her. There was not smugness or disdain in his voice, only a cold, matter-of-fact tone.
“The Symbol of Peace, obviously.”
Keigo and Toki both boggled at him, completely floored, and Keigo sputtered:
“All Might was sponsored?”
The President only raised an eyebrow, and simply said:
“No, he wasn’t.”
And he went right back to eating, signaling the conversation was closed. The rest of his family subtly relaxed. Keigo and Toki exchanged a bewildered glance, but neither of them had the guts to insist.
Well, at least they had learned something new… And that cleared up exactly nothing.
Still, it was a new mystery, and Toki eagerly started to write about it in her notebook. Keigo, too, was intrigued. Alright, the last night they spend at the house, they didn’t dare speak about it… But once they were back in Naruto Labs, they excitingly held a top-secret meeting to talk about it. And to recount with thrilled horror how freaking terrifying it had been when the President had casually revealed he knew absolutely everything. That had been a stomach-dropping moment, that was for sure.
But then, what Genryusai had revealed…. it was surely important. All Might had something to do with the President after all! Or maybe not All Might as person, but maybe his growing myth, what he had become? Because (as Keigo rightfully pointed out) the President wasn’t one to twist his words or boast about his successes, but he had said the Symbol of Peace instead of using All Might’s name. It was kind of contradicting what they had observed of him so far. Had the President been the one to coin the term? Or maybe the fact that All Might had become the Symbol in the first place had something to do with the President, like, maybe he had helped him become Number One by running his agency’s PR departement? That warranted more investigation!
But even with that new mystery, Keigo and Toki were both relieved to be far away from the President. He was scary. In canon, he hadn’t headed the Commission, right? So maybe he was going to retire. Or drop dead, considering how old he was. Toki could only hope!
Anyway, their normal lives resumed. Classes, training, going to the dance studio, spending their free time chasing each other around the forest, playing video games (for Keigo) or reading (for Toki).
They had to be more discreet than usual. The Labs had sustained some damages in the storm, with torn antennas, broken window, and a flooded basement, so repairs needed to be made. Of course the Commission’s contractors weren’t the kind to go babble around about what they saw in a secret lab, but better safe than sorry. This time, Toki and Keigo obeyed. It wasn’t hard to stay away from the repairing crew if they sneaked outside to play in the forest or went to eat fried food in the nearby town, right?
The weather was still cold, but the storm was over. Toki and Keigo played snowball fights almost every day, preying on unsuspecting staff members or, more often than not, on Hayasa-sensei. Their trainer was hard to take by surprise, and he gave as good as he got. Training kicked up a notch, though, and often left them too tired to play cat-and-mouse with their teacher. Not that he would refuse if offered… Hayasa-sensei wasn’t exactly the kind of person you would call playful (he was kind of a stick in the mud sometimes, and there were days where he reminded Toki of the canon-character of Tenya Iida), but he did have a sense of humor. And he was fair-play. Any game that could also double as a training exercise was good in his book. He never said no to hide-and-seek or tag, which was more than could be said of their others teachers. Besides, he was the adult with whom Toki and Keigo spent the most time, so of course they had a bond.
Their other teachers were nice enough, but they didn’t spend almost three day a week with them, exclusively focusing on them. Their others teachers were, first and foremost, researchers of Naruto Labs. They had a degree in other field (like literature, for example) and they had a teaching license. They did good work and planned their lessons with care. But they also had a career and researches to lead. Keigo and Toki’s education was a part-time job, not something they were wholly dedicated to.
Not that Toki had any right to complain. She wasn’t wholly dedicated to them, either. She had her priorities.
Like reading. And playing. And training. And fucking up things in the workshop.
So, after a lot of small experiments and big explosions, Toki learned to fix a watch, to disassemble a computer (but not to put it back together), and to use a blowtorch without immediately having to use the extinctor afterward. But one thing was sure, Toki would not be the next Tony Stark, creating technological miracles from nothing. Computer code was frustratingly difficult, and nanotechnologies completely flew over her head.
But Toki did have one thing in common with Tony Stark… She liked robots. Not how to program them, or how to teach them, or how to calculate how they were going to stand staring without falling and all the boring details like that. Just the building part. Making a sketch and then making a three-dimensional replica. Like, cutting pieces of metal, bending them under intense heat, weld the edges together, polish them… It had a sort of beauty to it. Bland and boring pieces of metal or wood, slowly turning in something other. Like a miniature plane (Toki first attempt at making a model). Then, later on, several ideas of futuristic spaceship, whose form were inspired by various movies ranging from Star Wars to Doctor Who.
Toki could see that several of her teachers were a bit disappointed. They had expected her to take to code or mechanics like a duck to water, with the same ease she manipulated numbers in class. But even if math was the root of all science… Well, most science anyway… Being good with numbers didn’t automatically made you a prodigy in others fields! It gave Toki a good understanding of the basics, but she didn’t have a gift for all that super-advanced stuff. She was ten. It wasn’t her fault if coding left her a bit floored. It was like a different language; one she had no basis for. And mechanics were hard! Sure, it all made sense on paper when she did physics exercises, but in reality, there were variables and failed tests and… It was just too advanced for her!
But making models, that, she learned quickly. Metalwork wasn’t that hard, when you had 3D-printers and computers and huge machines at your disposal. So Toki didn’t create new gadgets, but she did learn how to use most of the machineries in the workshop. If she helped out the engineers with their work, she was allowed to go and play around with the equipment, and she used that time to make models of imaginary spaceship, or abstract sculptures of twisted metal and brightly-colored glass.
It wasn’t intellectual. But she liked it. Besides, she was still learning. How to operate a workshop, how the machines worked, what were the safety measures, what were the requirement for such and such piece of equipment, and so on. She also could make small, useful things. Like miniature claws for a glove that one of the researchers worked on, and so th researcher could focus on making the hidden mechanism in said gloves. But Toki didn’t stay here because she wanted to make herself useful: she stayed because she liked it. So what if she sucked at code or at creating pieces of complex machineries? Her models were pretty. Metalwork took focus and patience, and she liked being absorbed in her creations, to see a new thing be shaped from nothing in her hands. It was… a bit like pottery, or carving, or painting.
Maybe Toki was a little bit of an artist, too.
Anyway. Time passed but neither Toki or Keigo had forgotten about the President, and all the mysteries around him. Somehow, even if they were far away and had no others interest, learning the truth about the Commission’s boss was even more alluring than before. It was still a game but it was with real people, real stakes! That made it even more thrilling.
They looked for info online, not about the President but about All Might and the Symbol of Peace. The wording was important. Where did the hero end and the Messiah begin?
Retracing All Might’s history was a great big mess, because a lot of articles were heavily biased. The earliest ones constantly contradicted each other. Besides, All Might had made his debut in America, so the articles and the video footages were in English. Toki was good, alright, but she wasn’t bilingual. And some journalists’ accents were so thick it didn’t sound like English at all!
But little by little, as weeks passed and they dug deeper and deeper, some things started coming to light. All Might had started his heroic work at eighteen, as a freelancer in the USA. He had stayed here for five years before coming back to Japan. There, he had started to make a name for himself as a good hero, but not as an incredible one. He was good, very good, but not legendary. The thing that had blown up his career sky-high was a famous video of him rescuing thirty people from an exploded building (the same video that tiny-Midoriya would watch over and over in canon). All Might had been, like, twenty-six? He had reached the Number One spot in the Billboard Chart the same year. And suddenly he had shot up in popularity. It wasn’t connected to his ranking: at this time, rankings were important but not as much as they were now. It was All Might that had made the rankings significant, not the other way around.
So All Might had suddenly started ascending to Godhood in the year following his nomination as the Number One, and had never been dethroned. If Toki had been cynical she would have said that he had gotten a very good publicist, but… It was more than that.
It wasn’t just show. Well, there was a part of it that was show, but it wasn’t artificial. What All Might did was real, it just garnered a lot more of attention that before, as if everybody was watching! And the attention it attracted was overwhelmingly positive, as if nobody could find anything to dislike in the hero. Which, alright, fair, some people were that likeable. But usually the public liked to nitpick. This sudden approval spoke of a coordinated effort in the medias, not of the miraculous job of a very good publicist.
Which was a clue that the President had intervened, by the way. All Might was beloved by the masses but he had no people-managing talents. The canon-story had at least taught Toki that much. So Genryusai had, probably, used his considerable clout to direct the journalists’ attention toward the Number One, and advise them to show him in a positive light.
Neopotiiiiiiiism!
But whatever. The adoration directed toward All Might wasn’t unwarranted. Toki read article after article and she could feel a sudden respect bloom in her chest, because… Before Toki was born, there had been villains of Meteor’s caliber in every city. Monsters, killers, serial robbers, murderers, unbeatable mob bosses… It was’nt rare to have a small death toll every day. There were dozens of villains so powerful that heroes were unable to take them down. But All Might did. He was too strong to be stopped. He took one, then another, then the next, and suddenly it was like a tidal wave sweeping the whole country. All Might was in the path of all the famous and dangerous villains, one after the other. All those people whose names were only uttered with fear… He had sought them out and defeated them, breaking their hold over Japan, breaking the fear the citizens lived in.
All Might had taken on all the fig fishes in Japan as if he was on the warpath. But he hadn’t acted like a mindless brute. He had also comforted victims, he had given hopeful speech on TV, he had been awkward but always polite with journalists who harassed him, he had dived headfirst into every single disaster site so he could help with recues… And soon, he was called perfect, unbeatable, a beacon of strength and hope. The perfect hero. He was lauded online and praised at every apparition. The crime rate of Japan declined steadily. Even if part of it was probably the job of the police and others heroes, most of it was due to All Might tearing apart the big gangs. No villain really wanted to replaced their boss when said boss had been a gigantic invulnerable shark-man and that a guy in spandex had just punted him into space like it was nothing, before loudly announcing that was barely a warm-up.
Fuck. All Might really was that strong, wasn’t he? No wonder the President considered him his greatest success, if he had participated into All Might’s ascension to godhood.
Which actually made Toki wonder if Keigo and her were expected to replace All Might one day. Sure, he was still at his peak but he wasn’t getting any younger. It would be hard to replace him once he retired (or… died), because no one was quite that strong But if it was about making a new Symbol, then it was different. The public needed someone likeable. Someone strong, impressive, how could make them dream and home and feel safe. Someone impressive.
Which explained why the Commission was so intent on scouting promising children… They had to have young heroes in the wings for when their champion would falter. Or else, the country would descend into panic. Like it had happened in canon.
Well, if that happen, it’s still years away, Toki reasoned. I’m not going to drive myself crazy predicting the future. Any certainties have already been shot to hell when I started fucking up the timeline.
She still had time. They still had time. Time to learn, to prepare… To train.
Because training hadn’t stopped. Keigo and Toki were now both quite good at ballet. Their spars noticeably looked like dances, if dances had punches and flying feathers soaring in all directions. Hayasa-sensei had filmed them and showed them the footage later to analyze it, and Toki always felt a flicker of incredulity at watching herself move. She was fast, her steps were quick and sure… She moved so confidently. Was it possible to feel jealous of yourself? Because Toki didn’t feel half as in control as the girl on screen, that was for sure!
But hey, she did the job done and it was the most important part. She was betting better. Stronger, too. Her Quirk was evolving, and Keigo’s too. His feathers could reach further, and the edges were sharper. When he had been eight, one of his exercises had been to shoot a few feathers while blindfolded, to become more aware of them. He had hated it. Now he could do it with half of his wingspan, flying upside-down, and laughing all the while. He could attack and restrain multiple villains while fighting another bad guy, swinging his primaries like swords and bouncing around too fast to be hit.
He was going to be such a fantastic fighter. He already was!
Toki wasn’t quite there yet. Sure, she was great in close combat, and she felt confident in her abilities. But she didn’t have an ultimate move like multiple-bladed-feathers-with-incredible-precision. Her Quirk was evolving, sure, but it would never be as versatile as Keigo’s.
Still, Warp-Space was pretty neat. Since she had figured out that her teleportation was a constant portal around her body, she had practiced stretching it to its limits. She could now disappear with an object in her hands and reappear with that object in a three to four meters radius around her, which could be awesome to cuff unsuspecting villains without even having to touch them. She had also worked out that she could teleport stuff from one point of her body to another. Like, and apple in her right and could teleport in her left and without Toki herself teleporting. Well, actually she did teleport, since she activated Warp-Space and all, but she didn’t move her body, she just… flexed that invisible muscle only in her hands. Oh, on paper, that didn’t mean much. But in hand-to-hand combat, it did make for a nasty surprise when her opponent was gripped in her left hand then suddenly found himself in the air, being slammed in the ground by her right hand.
On a completely unrelated subject, Hayasa-sensei made her practice judo throws a lot. Since Keigo was considered fragile (and had better things to do with his time than getting smashed against a tatami all day), their unlucky guinea pig was usually whatever researcher was lazing around.
“How can a midget like you pack such a punch?” wheezed miserably her latest victim.
“I eat all my vegetables.”
“Thank you for your help Sato-san,” Hayasa-sensei said politely, scribing on a notepad. “Any remarks?”
“Your tatami lack padding.”
“Any other remarks?”
The poor scientist sighed, but shook his head. On the side, sitting on a bench, Keigo sniggered. The scientist gave him the stink eye, and started raising a hand to flip him the bird, but then he crossed Hayasa-sensei’s eyes and slowly lowered his hand to the ground.
Smart choice. Hayasa-sensei looked like a paper-pushed and he was stick in the mud but he was a sticker for good manners, and he really didn’t like when people were mean to his kids. He would eat any nerdy researcher for dinner. Sato-san got up, grumbling unhappily, and hobbled toward the exit, muttering something about the cafeteria better having donuts to make up for this shit.
“I thought you could only teleport with weight close to your own weight?” Keigo asked curiously, swingling his legs back and forth.
Toki thought about it, flexing that invisible muscle somewhere near her heart. The muscle analogy was pretty accurate, actually. When she used it wrong, or too long, or with too much strength, she could feel it ache, a sharp pain like a twisted ankle. For now, it was fine, but they were days where she pushed herself too much and she had to take a moment to breathe afterward, because it was like a particularly vicious side stich.
“I think it’s only when I teleport myself with someone else? When I don’t move, it takes more control but less strength. My weight limit is probably double what I can usually carry.”
“Closer to triple,” Hayasa-sensei corrected her, checking his numbers. “Your weight is thirty-one kilograms, and you can teleport with charges up to ninety kilos on a good day. But when you stay put, you can teleport charges weighting up to two hundred kilos.”
“It still feels weird,” Toki frowned.
“But you’re getting the hang of it very quickly. And since you’re good in close-combat, I think it will be easily integrated in your style.”
Toki didn’t really consider she had a style. Keigo had one: he flew, send feathers, all that jazz. Toki was just a normal person, fighting basically Quirkless, but she also happened to travel super-fast and to be able to slip from anyone’s grip. She would never be able to take on super-powered opponent (fire-users, dinosaur-like giants, slime villains, etc.) and she wouldn’t quite reach Keigo’s strength either, but she was fast, she hit hard, and she could make an enemy’s world turn upside-down with a touch. Quite literally. It was hard to hit someone when you were suddenly twenty meters high and didn’t know which way was up, right?
Ah ah, Toki could already imagine it. Quantum, the untouchable hero!
“Actually, do you have a name for that new move?” Hayasa-sensei asked, bursting her bubble. “It’s shaping up to be a real technique.”
There was only was name that would be fitting, but even if that move was way too similar to Sayuri’s power, there was no way Toki was naming her attacks something like Swap-Space. So she considered it several seconds, before biting out:
“Switch.”
Keigo send her a sharp look but didn’t say anything. Hayasa-sensei simply nodded, taking note without looking up at her:
“That works. Well now! What if we did some dodgeball to finish this session? Then we can cool down and stretch, and it will just be time for dinner!”
Toki and Keigo looked at each other, looked at Hayasa-sensei, then shared an evil grin. Peltering their teacher with balls was their favorite sport. Of course, he usually won, but if they teamed up, they had a chance. So… Game on!
oOoOoOo
Because real life was distracting, it wasn’t until nearly summer that Toki and Keigo finally uncovered what the President had meant when he had said that the Symbol of Peace was his greatest success.
What? They had plenty of other things to do! Like learn, train, play, learn again. Toki joined an online math club and won two online competitions. Since Keigo and her were already learning middle-school level math (it wasn’t that big of a deal, they had simply learned fast enough to now have about a year of advance on others kids their age), their teachers decided to introduce them to trigonometry. Toki loved it. Keigo hated it. For him, shapes were just supposed to make senses. Geometry was something natural, simple, and splitting hairs about it was just nonsensical. But Toki liked how numbers could fit with how space was occupied: the geometry, the predictability of it.
So yeah. Trigonometry. Sine, cosine, tangent, cosecant, secant, and cotangent. Fun times!
Keigo and Toki were now ten and half, and (even if they weren’t supposed to know) there was talk about signing them up to a normal middle school. When Toki had been recruited, Mera had told her that sponsored children were usually home-schooled until high-school… But apparently almost all sponsored children had been of middle-school age when they had been scouted. So they didn’t spend more than three years hidden in Naruto Labs. Toki had already been here two years, and Keigo three. The Commission didn’t want them to be under-socialized or too codependent… But they also absolutely refused to slow down their training, too.
In the end, they decided to keep them home-schooled until high-school, but to enroll them in another club outside the Labs. Maybe two clubs, if they dropped ballet (which Toki and Keigo fully intended to do). They also talked about specialized tutors instead of part-time teachers to help with their online classes… But by that point Keigo didn’t manage to listen to the rest of the conversation. Bah, whatever. Toki was fine with it. The online classes were good. If she had to go back to normal classes, she was pretty sure that the others kids would just slow her down.
Arrogant? Yes. But not inaccurate. Toki was an average student in most subjects (like Japanese, History, Geography, all that useless stuff), but she was good at math. Really good at math. If she had to follow the rhythm of unenthusiastic preteens, she would explode. It was bad enough that Keigo whined and struggled in trigonometry!
But back to the point.
They remembered the President and his mystery a little randomly, because the Vice-President visited. She never spoke about the President, but she did mention All Might latest feat right before complaining that the man was ‘unmanageable’. Apparently he gladly took any mission thrown his way but he wasn’t one for strategy. Or rather, he disliked strategies that didn’t involve him charging headfirst into danger at one point of an another. He was willing to way for the right moment to strike, as long as he got to fight. But he refused to stay on the sidelines, even if the others heroes had it handled and were actually more efficient (and more subtle). The President complained, but she also praised how invested All Might was, to the point where staying idle during a fight was unfathomable to him, and… Well.
Toki wondered if that was the reason that the task-force who had arrested Meteor had been filled with heroes, and not with snipers and sleeping-gas grenades, like she had written in her notebook. It would have been less brutal that way. And maybe… maybe it wouldn’t have ended the same way. Maybe it would have gone better, and wouldn’t have left her feeling so torn about it.
Anyway.
The Vice-President went, chatted a little with them, and in doing so she accidentally reminded them of their big, unsolved mystery. So the very next day, by unspoken agreement, Toki and Keigo resumed their search.
All Might. Started in America. Went back to Japan. Was strong, but not legendary. Until he made it to the Number One spot in his twenties. Then, suddenly, a spotlight was constantly directed at him, and he didn’t disappoint, fueling public admiration that only enhanced the media coverage, like an ouroboros of popularity and successes. By extraordinary luck, all the scary bad guys ended up in his path. Sometimes it was with team-up with others heroes, others times it was All Might’s decision to go hunt down the villain who was terrorizing some little town showed in the evening news. But he always won. There wasn’t a single failure to criticize, not a single misstep to complain about, and it went on and on for months, then years, always stroking the flames of public’s adoration… Until All Might was considered to be more than mere mortal.
So when All Might was about thirty, the term Symbol of Peace was coined. When Toki looked up the origin of the word, to see who had this brilliant idea, well, thing got confusing. All Might himself had said in several interview that he wanted to be a symbol and give hope to people, so a non-official title of his had been ‘Symbol of hope’. But when he had been thirty, at the height if glory, with a national crime rate about 7% (while most of the other countries had between 10% or 20%), there was an online newspaper who had called him Symbol of Peace. The term had then been swiftly popularized, because the heroes had seemed to like it and had started using it too.
The Commission was involved in that online newspaper. Almost every single staff member here had a subscription, and when Keigo thought to google the owners of said newspaper, it turned out that it was one of the guys Genryusai had sometimes spoken to on the phone. He recognized the name.
The Symbol of Peace wasn’t an imposture, that was for sure (even if they were conspiracy theories about it, which Toki read with great amusement). But media coverage had played a big part in creating his legend. And so… the President certainly had a hand into making All Might the Symbol of Peace.
And wasn’t that clever? In many ways, the Commission’s hands were tied. They had a good reputation but people were wary, and rightly so, of governmental organizations having super-powered individuals at their beck and call. That was why armies were pretty much inexistant, and that was why pro-heroes were public servants with a lot of agency. Sure, they earned a salary from the State but they didn’t receive orders from above. They were beholden to the public, not some shadowy leader. They had their licenses from the Commission but they didn’t obey to it. If they did, then the Commission had to create a debt to justify it… Like all that stuff Toki and Keigo had talked about, about having a loan in exchange for handling the Commission control over their agency.
What it meant was that the Commission couldn’t take direct action against villains. They could only support heroes who did so. But they had too wildly benefited from All Might’s success to not have invested in it! So when you looked for it, and when you knew there was something to look for… You could find the little pushes the President had given All Might. Keeping him at arm’s length, but slowing paving his road to success.
“It does make sense thought!” Toki said excitingly. “Most heroes use informants or the police to search for villains. If All Might had the Commission’s network working for him, dropping anonymous tips or asking other heroes to request back up…”
“… He had no trouble always being in the right place at the right time to fight the biggest and baddest villain of the week, with cameras at the ready to flood the evening news,” Keigo completed. “Yeah, it makes sense. And the Symbol of Peace stuff… It’s really more in-brand for the Commission than Symbol of Hope, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, peace implies finality, yanno? The fight is over, we won. While hope would imply that the fight is still ongoing, that we’re hoping to achieve victory, not that it has been done.”
“Mmmmh. Do you think he knows?”
Keigo blinked: “That who know what?”
“All Might.” Toki paused, thoughtful. She didn’t really know why, but it bothered her. “Do you think he know that it’s the Commission that made him the Symbol of Peace? He’s always saying that he’s self-made and all that jazz. Of course he could be lying, but… That doesn’t seem in-character.”
They lapsed into silence, thinking about it. Toki was also trying to fit what she knew from canon in what she had learned. In the story, All Might had been… pretty uninvolved with the HPSC. His only contact with the authorities was a lowly cop whose name Toki didn’t remember, the guy with a truth-Quirk. All Might was basically never seen interacting with the Commission, even after retiring. When the kids passed the Provisional License, All Might sat with Endeavor away from the others, and there had been at least one Commission’s guy… Actually that Commission guy in canon had been Mera, holy shit, Mera was a canon-character and Toki hadn’t realized before, wow. No, bad Toki, back to the point! She was supposed to analyze All Might, not Mera!
“He could,” Keigo frowned. “But that doesn’t seem likely. He is kind of a loner. He only has one sidekick and he almost never work with the police. Making the Commission build some PR brand to boost his image… That’s not his style.”
Interesting how Keigo’s main argument was that All Might didn’t want help, rather than the fact he didn’t want the publicity. But… Toki agreed.
“I think so too,” she said slowly. “He doesn’t do anything fake, you know? He just does his hero job, but the results are framed just in the right way to make his victories go from impressive to spectacular. I’m not sure it makes sense but he probably didn’t even notice he was put up on a fabricated pedestal…”
“Well, that pedestal isn’t totally fake. Also, are you kidding? He must at least suspect he got handled resources that others heroes don’t have. He can’t be that dense.”
You would be surprised, Toki thought with a fleeting smile, remembering how clueless Toshinori Yagi could be in the canon-story.
“It isn’t very noticeable,” she pointed out. “Speedsters are not given the same missions or the same resources as tanks. So yeah, the Commission gave All Might all the super-difficult missions, instead of giving a little to several heros. So what? All Might could have fucked up, and died because he had bitten more than he could chew. But he did the job quicker than the others would have, and with better press. It was high risk, high reward.”
“But he must have at least noticed!”
“Well, maybe, but would he have cared, or thought they had secondary motives?” Toki reasoned. “He’s a pretty straightforward guy. He saw a random string of good luck shoving villains at him, he took it. We are the ones who looked for a conspiracy under it, and we only found one because the President told us what to look for exactly.”
“Mmmh. It doesn’t feel right.”
Toki blinked:
“Why? He did his best. He just happened to be watched by people who threw big enemies at him and then attracted attention to his victories to boost his image, because having a Symbol also served their interests, and said interests happen to be a peaceful country. I say it was a masterful move on the President’s part.”
It was still kind of far-fetched and Toki wondered if she was reading too much in what she had found. But hey, everything fit perfectly! The President had seen how All Might was wrecking Japan’s criminal underground, and had probably thought ‘hum, I can use this’ and then had subtly pointed the unbeatable superman towards enemies of the state. All Might was already shaping up to be extremely powerful. It didn’t take much effort to turn him into a weaponized Messiah aimed right at Japan’s criminals.
The President didn’t even have to do it directly! Anonymous tips dropped at his agency, a word of advice given to a trustworthy hero who then passed the message along, some push to make a villain appear more and more in the evening news… All of that created a distance between All Might and the HPSC. And it was smart! Because so much was gambled on All Might that if he failed (when he would fail) it would be disastrous to be sucked in his fall. Also, if people learned that one pro-hero, especially as powerful as this one, took orders from a shadowy organization… The Commission could kiss its good reputation goodbye. They were trusted because they were a neutral watcher of heroes. If they were revealed to favor some heroes over others, and to pull strings to manipulate said heroes… the blow would cripple them.
So yeah, the way the President had handled it was a good move. All Might was perfect for that job. Also, if there was one person besides All Might who knew about AFO (super-big-bad-villain dominating the criminal network), it had to be the President. Maybe he didn’t know AFO’s Quirk or his history with All Might, but… He certainly was aware that the big bad existed, and that it was a threat. A threat that the President wanted gone like the rest of the criminals riddling Japan. If All Might had managed to find and defeat AFO in canon (had it happened yet? Probably not, considering how active All Might was… He didn’t have a time limit yet…), it was very likely that the resources put at his disposal by the Commission had played a part in that.
“It’s unfair to the other heroes,” Keigo insisted.
“Well it’s not like Endeavor could have done it,” Toki reasonably pointed out.
Keigo tossed a pen at her. Yeah, he was an Endeavor fanboy, and proud of it. He sighed dramatically, collapsing on his desk.
“I guess you’re right. Unfair doesn’t meant it’s wrong.”
Toki smirked: “The end justifies the means, is that it?”
“Pretty much. I have no problem with, like, the President being a manipulative dickhead for the greater good. I’m just sad for Endeavor. The deck was stacked against him from the beginning.”
“That’s his own fault for not being as strong as Mister America-Vomited-On-Me.”
“Don’t disparage my idol! I can accept shadowy organization puppeteering All Might, but I refuse to accept criticism against my hero! Come on, there are limits.”
“I feel like you’re having a hard time knowing the difference between right and wrong.”
Keigo stuck his tongue at her:
“I discovered at a very early age that if I talk long enough, I can make anything right or wrong. So either I'm a god or truth is relative. And in either case, boo-ya.”
“… The average person has a much harder time saying 'boo-ya' to moral relativism.”
“Suck for them.”
They exchanged a shit-eating grin. Then their teacher voice could be heard in the hallway, and they both rushed to the computer to erase their search history and anything that could betray their snooping. When the man entered, Toki and Keigo were both at their seat, the picture of innocence.
Life as usual.
And so, the mystery of the connection between All Might and the President was solved. Boo-ya, indeed.
Which, coincidentally, reminded Toki that the canon-story was approaching, that All Might played a big part in it, and that in a few years he would get janked up by an immortal, evil potato-face with megalomanic tendencies, and that, hummmmm, maybe she should do something about that.
Not that she planned to drop into the fight to support All Might, gods, no! If Toki had her say in it she would never approach AFO at all! But like, maybe she could anticipate the shit-show to try and protect herself at the best of her abilities? And try to predict how the Commission was going to react, so she could prepare herself if they suddenly became tyrannical and power-hungry when faced with the weakening of their Symbol? Like, if they tried to coerce Keigo into a suicide mission? Because if that happened, Toki would have to grab Keigo and run to become astrophysicist far away from all that madness. She was okay with being a hero: but she didn’t like the idea of being a cog in the machine, or letting Keigo become one. And with his stupidly self-sacrificing tendencies, he could easily become one. Oh, he would walk in the trap fully aware of what it meant, but that was Keigo for you. He was the essence of what a hero should be. Brave, selfless, but also smart, ruthless, willing to do the dirty work and walk to his death with his eyes wide open. One who had the wisdom to know what had to be done, and the courage to do it.
You have the potential to one day replace my masterpiece, had said the President. And maybe he had meant both of them, but Toki knew who was the real candidate between her and Keigo.
He was strong, stronger than her, but he was also clever and likeable. He would rise fast in the rankings, but without being consumed by ambition like Endeavor, or being obsessed by the idea of being an infallible icon, like All Might. Keigo didn’t care about glory or his image, he only cared about getting the job done. About saving people, reassuring them, thinking two steps ahead. He dreamed of a world without villains because he dreamed of success and safety, and he was willing to burn out his wings to achieve it.
It wasn’t a coincidence if, in canon, the Commission had asked him to be their spy in the League. Keigo was perfect for it. He had the heart of a hero, but he was far from a naïve idiot. He knew sometimes sacrifices had to be made. Hell, he knew that since the day his mother had sold him out, and he had given up his name to become Hawks.
So yeah, canon was approaching. AFO and the League were going to be a threat. No just in the abstract sense, at large, but a threat to her personally, because they would be a threat to Keigo. And… Toki wasn’t anything special, in the Plot. She was only a teleporter. She would be squashed like a pancake if she faced tanks like Shigaraki or Dabi or Twice or (Gandalf and Merlin, she hoped it would never come to that), All For One. But could she run away and leave Keigo behind? Nope.
Fuck.
So, for starter, Toki had to know where she was on the timeline. She was the same age as Keigo, and she was seven years older than Hitoshi Shinsō, so she could use their age in canon to estimate her position. So… Hitoshi had been fifteen when canon started, and Keigo had been famous for being super-young for a Number Two hero, so he had ben twenty-two or twenty-three… So yeah, basically Toki had twelve years until canon began. Well, twelve years until Izuku Midoriya entered Yūei, at least. Canon started a little earlier, when Midoriya met All Might, but whatever. Let’s say twelve years.
All Might’s fight with AFO had happened six years before that. So Toki would be sixteen. Yeah, so, there was absolutely no way that she meddled with that kind of fight, at sixteen years old. She wouldn’t even have completed her hero training!
But still, canon was going to happen. Evil potato-face was going to go down in six years, then make his comeback six years later, and Toki had to be ready. She didn’t feel some divine calling to save the world, but shit, she lived there too; if Japan turned into some post-apocalyptic dystopia it would sucks.
Also, the government would certainly use that to push space travel at the bottom of their priority.
So, plan for the future: chill for the next six years, then keep an eye out for AFO and the League. Stomp them if she could, maybe buy a gun just in case she found Shigaraki in shooting range: and for the love of all that was sacred, not get caught in All Might’s drama. Also keep an eye on Keigo so he didn’t try to go too fast and burn himself out, or find himself trapped in awful infiltration missions. And if he did, well, Toki would have to fucking microchip him so she could swoop in and punch Dabi’s ugly mug before he tried to transform her best friend into a rotisserie chicken.
Yeah, that was a solid strategy. Toki was very proud of her strategizing skills.
The funny things was: she had no real plan to deal with the canon. She didn’t have a vision to make come true (except for the space travel stuff). If the Reincarnation Administration had done its job right, well, surely it would have been an altruistic and driven person who would have been reincarnated in this world, right? Someone who could plan for the future, who had clear and defined objectives, like How-To-Stop-The-League-In-Forty-Seven-Steps. But nooo, this world had Toki, and Toki’s priority was very much to save her own skin. She couldn’t stay idle if people were getting hurt, that was why she was becoming a hero after all, but she also knew she was way over her head with the Plot. She wasn’t special. She could only try her best.
To be a hero. To become an astrophysicist and make space travel come true again. To protect Keigo. To protect herself… And to see what the future had in store for her.
Notes:
I shoved a lot of my headcanons in this chapter. Because yeah, there is no way the HPSC isn't dealing with back ops, especially since they were around BEFORE All Might, when AFO was basically king of Japan's villains. But i still want to write a morally grey HPSC, not a corrupt one! So I headcanon that until the canon-President (the woman who is, in this fic, Vice-President), the HPSC was headed by someone who... had the necessarily ruthlessness to deal with it.
Enter Genryusai, the President. I gave him a personnality halfay between Nedzu and Lucius Malefoy, and from there it escalated. Yeah, he's on the side of the Good Guys, but his moral compass is basically a russian roulette. And from there, i wondered: wait, what would be this cold-hearted bastard's opinion of All Might, who's radiating optimist and farting sunshine? Then it hit me. Genryusai sees heroes as tools. So of course he would have a good opinion of All Might, because the man is an excellent weapon. His only fault is that he doesn't deal well with direct orders. But it's easily solved, especially if Genryusai doesn't need All Might to be part of precise operations. All Might is a nuclear warhead. You aim it to things (ennemies, gangs, cities) you want destroyed: nothing less and nothing more. You use him as a detterent for villainy, as a symbol of what the villains have to fear if they dare disturb the peace.
And considering it was All Might's own goal, it was even easier.It played out perfectly. It would never have worked with anyone else, because nobody had the raw power, the conviction, but also the pure motivation of All Might. He was perfect. He made heroism great again.
And now the HPSC expects Toki and Keigo to follow in his footsteps, which is... less fun.
EDIT : Chapter edited because Ryukyu couldn't possibly be a pro-hero yet ! So her name has been replaced by Gang Orca ^^
Chapter 10: Having a blast
Summary:
Toki from age ten to thirteen and some. Shit happens: some good, some bad, and some surprising.
Notes:
Here i come again ! It's been nearly a month, but i didn't forget you =)
I'm not very happy with this chapter because it goes in every direction. We met a new Oc, we talk about Toki's Quirk, and we talk about friendship, romance, and activism. Every single of there things would have deserved its own chapter. But hey... that's life.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
HAVING A BLAST
Days, weeks, months and then years passed. Toki had been a child when she had joined this training program. Slowly, she was becoming a teenager. How strange, to think she had been here longer than she had lived with her father and his crew.
Growing up in a secret training facility wasn’t a normal childhood. The Commission tried its best to not traumatize their kids, but they still made they train a lot and heavily restricted their contact with the outside world. At least Keigo and Toki had each other, and with their respective Quirk, it wasn’t hard to sneak out to play in the forest, explore the island, or laze around in the nearby towns. But in canon, Keigo had been alone, and… Toki did her best to not think about it.
She liked Naruto Labs, the staff and the researchers, Hayasa-sensei, her training… She even liked the Commission. They were fair and helpful. But they weren’t kind. They weren’t gentle. Toki was tough: but she was only a child. There were emotional needs that teachers and trainers couldn’t fulfill. Sometimes the adults worried that her and Keigo were too close, that they would be too codependent later, but they should worry about what they would have become if they had never met. How miserable they would have been. How they would have thrown themselves into training to try and fill that gaping emptiness in their heart, how they would have tried so very hard to feel useful without realizing that what they really needed was to feel loved.
Toki didn’t doubt that the people at Naruto Labs loved them, but it was in the distant way absent-minded teachers loved good-working students. They liked them, but they moved on easily. Some staff members left, others came, but no relationship of value was lost because nobody bothered to really befriend the kids. Even Hayasa-sensei, who had the closest bond with them, was careful to maintain a professional distance. They were all just doing their job, after all. But it was hard to live like this for a kid, who didn’t need a job but a family. Toki pitied Shirayuki and the other sponsored children who had to stay here without friends their age.
But Toki wasn’t alone. She had Keigo.
They were apart for some lessons but they were usually glued to each other’s side. It was habit by now. They trained and talked and played together, but they also shared long, comfortable silences. They were always aware of where the other was in the room, without even exchanging a glance. They didn’t bat an eyelash when the other invaded their personal space. They were the same size so they also shared clothes, and it wasn’t rare for them to fall asleep in the same bed after whispering stories way past midnight. Toki had gotten used to waking up with a mouthful of feathers because that dumb bird flapped his wings in his sleep, and Keigo had gotten used to have a spare duvet because Toki was a vicious blanket thief. They talked about their dreams, about silly ramblings, about everything. They liked to compete right until the pressure become unfriendly, and then they both gave up at the same time, because no competition could ever matter more than their friend’s feelings.
They didn’t argue much. Almost never, actually. They poked, prodded, mocked, bantered, but it was never mean. When they argued for real, it always came as a surprise. Once, when they were nine, they had an argument about some stupid thing, a ball thrown too hard or something, and voices rose until Keigo spat out something about Toki being a backstabbing traitor, and then there had been a shocked silence before Toki had burst into tears, then Keigo had burst into tears too, and well, it had been an emotional evening… but the very next day it was over. A few months later, after summer camps, they had a spat about where they wanted to go next year, and they didn’t speak for three days before making up. Toki didn’t even remember how the argument had started out. Still, they bickered a lot, but real arguments were so rare Toki could probably count them on one hand. At twelve, they had an argument about how Endeavor was a good or a bad hero, and at thirteen they had a gigantic row about heroes’ costumes, of all things, but hey, that was life.
It was healthy to fight. Or rather, it was healthy to have conflict, like a safety valve releasing pressure in an otherwise harmonious relationship.
What exactly was her relationship with Keigo, Toki had no clue. He was her best friend but he was also more. He was her confident and her hero and her protégé, all in one. He was Keigo but he was also Hawks, and a million things in between. No definition really fit. They lived in each other’s pockets and most of their personal boundaries merged. For now, they were kids, so Toki had trouble putting a label other than family on their bond, but… She was reincarnated, so she knew what was in the near future, and she wondered with a vague sense of dread how it was gonna change when teenagerhood would be added to the mix. She wasn’t a jealous person: but how would she feel if Keigo started dating someone in their dance club, for example? Or started to talk to her about girls? Or boys, actually. Maybe Keigo was gay. Or bi. Hell, maybe Toki was bi. She had no idea: she had never thought about it, but she had the same feelings for boys and girls. Said feelings being usually indifference but yeah, it counted. She didn’t frequent many kids her age besides Keigo, anyway.
Oh shit, would she want to date Keigo? When hormones would start rearing up their ugly heads, maybe he would turn out to be her type. If she even had a type. She had trouble wrapping her head around the idea… It would be a little strange, but at the same time, she couldn’t really imagine being close to anyone else. Was it weird?
So. Teenagerhood.
It didn’t happen all at once. Months passed. They went to summer camp. Once again they were the youngest in the bunch. Preteens tried very hard to act like actual teens, so Toki was left feeling faintly befuddled by the giggling girls wearing make-up to laze around the pool, and horrified by the ones who said they were already dieting. Keigo wasn’t quite as perplexed by his peers, because twelve years old boys weren’t as weird as twelve years old girls apparently, but he did tell Toki in an honestly bewildered tone that the others kids really spend way too much time talking about girls instead of heroes.
Anyway. After Toki and Keigo’s eleventh birthday, their schedule changed. As Keigo and Toki had overheard, the Commission had decided to make them socialize more, without making them join a normal middle-school.
They still had Quirk training on Wednesday, two hours of physical conditioning each day, and ballet on Saturday. Good, because it was already a demanding schedule! Toki had noticed that none of their peers in the ballet club were as physically fit as her and Hawks. And they were only eleven! Anyway, they still had their online classes, but only three days a week now (Monday, Tuesday, Thursday). But their three part-time teachers had gone back to their respective researches in the labs. Keigo and Toki were expected to work on their own for now on.
Instead of their extra-projects or their Strategy Lessons that had previously filled their weekdays, they now had a full Friday dedicated to Heroic Class with a special tutor, a short and somber man named Okamoto. He didn’t exactly have a curriculum. His role was to teach them the behind-the-scene of heroics. They already had learned bits here and here, like when they had visited Shirayuki’s agency, but Okamoto was going to teach them the real stuff. How to make a balanced hero team. What were the rescue protocols. How to run an agency. How to negotiate contracts. How to deal with journalists. How to deal with hostage situations. Heroes school taught these skills (well, some of them) in high-school. But Okamoto said that if they started learning now, it would leave them more time to train their Quirks. Toki couldn’t argue with that logic.
“What is your actual job?” asked Keigo with interest.
“I work for the Commission.”
“We figured,” Toki drawled, chin in her hands. “But what do you actually do? Marketing? Legal counsel? Ninja-training?”
Okamoto stayed stoically silent. Keigo leaned forward, his eyes gleaming mischievously.
“If you don’t tell us we’re just going to assume you’re a janitor.”
“Not that being a janitor is wrong!” Toki piped up.
“Of course! Just, washing up windows, picking up trash cans…”
“It’s not that dissimilar to legal counsel when you think about it, Hawks!”
“Really?”
“Yeah. In both case you’re dealing with lot of bullshit!”
They both grinned at the pun. Okamoto let out a great sigh, pinching his nose in exasperation, before growling:
“Fine. I’m a public relation advisor, working with the Commission and various hero agencies. What I do is a mix of marketing, legal counsel, but also… lessons in acting, stealth, recon.”
“Really?!”
“Of course. It’s good to tell the public that you will keep them safe, but it’s better to have the skills to back it up.”
“So you’re a ninja?” Toki said dubiously.
Okamoto was short, with a big belly and a double-chin. He was maybe in his fifties, with a receding hairline and a severe face, and his skin had a purplish tint to it. He looked like a cranky banker who liked donuts too much, not a ninja.
“I refer people to… ninja-trainers,” corrected Okamoto as if the word ninja physically pained him. “In my job, I make a lot of contacts. It will be very useful in your career.”
Toki and Keigo looked at each other, then shrugged:
“Sure. Let’s become ninja!”
Okamoto looked exasperated, but let it slide. It would soon become a trend in their relationship…
Anyway.
Okamoto was never given the honorific of sensei, although Keigo always take care to use -san (either because he was polite or because he was sarcastic: honestly, sometimes the lines blurred). Okamoto wasn’t invested in them like Hayasa-sensei was. He was professional, and clever, and good at his job, but he was also prissy, rigid, easy to rile up, and sometimes straight-up mean. That made him a perfect target for Keigo and Toki’s early teenage rebellion. So, no honorific.
What he taught was interesting, though. He brought books about heroic History. He taught them technical terms. He explained how to control their tells when bluffing. He made them go around the Labs and try to learn five things about each researcher they passed by. He encouraged them to use their Quirk in every situation. For example, one day Toki wasn’t allowed to make more than three consecutive steps before teleporting, and Keigo wasn’t allowed to put his feet on the floor at all.
But Okamoto mostly focused on their people skills. He gave them memorization exercises. He brought back their strategies lessons, but instead of a make-believe scenario, he gave them real fight between heroes and villains, and made them analyze that. There were lessons about ethics, with moral dilemmas to solve, like: do you let the villain take a hostage, knowing he’s going to hurt them, if it allows you to get reinforcement to attack his main base? Or do you take your chances with an immediate fight?
During winter, Okamoto made them go to an improv group in a city two hours away, every Friday for three months, so they could get better at inventing stories on the fly. He wanted them to be able to jump in a conversation seamlessly, to never freeze when asked a compromising question, to reassess and adapt even in front of a crowd. Some heroes had stage fright, but Keigo and Toki weren’t allowed to be one of them. They had to be perfect.
Lucky for Okamoto, both children were both fairly confident (and sassy). So they managed to find their footing quickly enough. Keigo, especially, since he was a real chatterbox. Toki was more easily caught by surprise, so she learned to deflect with unbelievable excuses. Better to muddy the water than to let her interlocutor get the upper hand. Like when she was late, instead of telling she had been sneaking out, she started an improbable tale of crossing paths with a black cat and then having to take the long way around a propped-up ladder. Yes, Kakashi-style. It was fitting, for someone living in Naruto Labs, right?
Then came spring. Okamoto made them see a speech specialist to get rid of their regional accent (Toki hadn’t even noticed she had one!) and learn how to disguise their voice. It took nearly six months. Then, unexpectedly, Okamoto told them they were done with it, and taught them to play a bunch of cards games. Poker, blackjack, Sixty-Three, Go-Fish, Red Dog. And, okay, that part was fun. For about a month, they saw Okamoto fleece every single researcher dumb enough to play against him in the cafeteria. It was the first time their chubby and grumpy tutor looked cool.
After a month, Okamoto was done with the cards games, though. Instead, he made them go a ninja-trainer (or rather, a stealth specialist) for four months. It was a two-hour drive to the city where that guy worked, and they had to get up at six, and go back home only at eight, after a day filled with exhausting exercises.
They learned how to walk without a sound, how to attack someone from the back quickly enough to incapacitate them, how to pickpocket bystanders, how to use your environment to escape, how to tie various knots to restrain people… The stealth-teacher was polite, but Okamoto was there, and cranky enough for two. Asshole! And after that, boom, no time to relax: he made learn how to tail someone with another stealth expert, this one specializing into disguises and evasion. It lasted four other months, every single Friday.
During the long train ride or car rides, Okamoto stayed with them and quizzed them relentlessly about heroes, their agencies, their Quirk. He pretended to be a journalist grilling them about their last mission. He could be in turn cool and collected, or downright dismissive and insulting. It wasn’t pleasant like Quirk training, but it was its own kind of challenge. It was training, too. How to lie, how to look confident, how to lead a conversation, how to avoid questions, how to project empathy. He made them read a lot of self-help books.
You have to be in control, he hammered. Not only in control of your Quirk and of your fights, but also in control of your emotions, of your facial expressions, of your reactions. The media is the heroes’ judge and jury. Do not, under any circumstance, let them smell any weakness, or they will also be your executionner.
Chilling.
Every week was the same except it was never the same at all. Sure, their online lessons changed, but it was still classwork. Quirk training varied but it mostly stayed predictable. It was Okamoto who was the wild card. Every Friday, Keigo and Toki went to meet him without knowing what he had in store. Would they get in a car for two or three hours filled with questions and tests, or with a podcast to listen because they would be quizzed about it upon arrival? Or would they be let loose in the gym to talk about strategy? Or maybe they would start a role-play to see who lied the best? Would they go to the same club they had been going for weeks, or would Okamoto suddenly change his mind and bring them to a totally different city, for a completely different activity?
It wasn’t bad. Not knowing things in advance was sometimes annoying and stressing, but it never felt unsafe, you know? Toki remembered how tension had knotted her stomach when her mother left and she wasn’t sure Sayuri would come back. It wasn’t that kind of stress she felt when Okamoto dangled incertitude in front of them. It was different. Okamoto wasn’t a friend, fuck no, but he was an ally. He was… He was giving them missions. Unknow missions. And it was a little scary, but in a good way, in a challenging way.
Toki still didn’t like his fat purple face, though. The improv club, the stealth training, it was all good and fine. But gods Toki hated those long car rides. Even in a limousine, with Okamoto sitting face to them and quizzing them, criticizing their posture and poking holes in their composures, the whole car felt claustrophobic. Keigo took it with better grace than Toki. He had a way to smile with a hint of mockery, pretending to be self-depreciating with a knowing look in his eyes, as if criticism only made him laugh. But Toki didn’t have his lay-back attitude. She could fake-smile for a while, but at the end she snapped and she brooded. Okamoto wasn’t cruel… but he was strict and snappish. He sneered at their failures, and his wry comments rubbed her the wrong way. It pissed her off.
Maybe Okamoto was too haughty, or Toki too wild: but they always clashed. He didn’t like her because she was rude, because she snapped and sneered like a wild cat, because she was immature. And she didn’t like him because he was too cold, too bossy, too dismissive. He was an ass, plain and simple.
Later that year, Okamoto was also the one who picked their summer camp. It went badly. He chose theater groups, then Scout’s training, then beach camp… And Keigo and Toki were always sent to different camps. So they spent eight consecutive weeks apart, and as a result they were especially pissed at Okamoto when they came back. They constantly bitched at him, talked back, stole his keys when he wasn’t looking, all that kind of stuff. Toki had been a sassy student, but she cranked it up until she was downright insolent. Keigo was barely better. Things didn’t calm down until Okamoto (probably prompted by Hayasa-sensei, who was the kids’ unofficial wrangler) stiffly promised to not separate them again. Especially during their holidays.
“You won’t be able to always be together,” he warned them. “If you can’t handle working separately, you will never be proper, functional heroes. If you’re too compromised, maybe you should be sent to separate facilities…”
Keigo didn’t quite snarl, but it was close, his wings flaring up like a bird of prey trying to make himself look bigger. Toki gritted her teeth, and she didn’t need a mirror to know her eyes were suddenly glowing like Meteor’s when he was pissed.
“We can work separately,” she growled. “We do that every single time we have separate classes, or separate Quirk training, or separate summer camps!”
“We’re not invalids,” growled Keigo.
“Yeah. So while I’m sure you had good intentions, it was unnecessary. Fucking up our free time is a dick move, and the only thing it has accomplished was to make us pissed at you.”
“Language, Quantum!”
“I will shove up my foot up your…”
“Fine!” Okamoto exploded. “You won’t be sent to separate camps all summer long, fine. But in the real world, you will be away from each other longer than four weeks.”
“Yeah, if we decide to,” Keigo pointed out with a vindictive glare. “And we haven’t decided that, so shove it.”
“You should be ready for it,” the man scowled. “Your bond is… touching, but in the real world, a hero is always alone. Connections, alliances, friendship will only take you so far. When push comes to shove… We are all born alone, and die alone. It’s a sad reality, but I don’t want it to break you when you will have to face it.”
Toki reared back, indignant. Oh gods, not that dramatic bullshit again! What was with people and being dark and edgy about how the universe was out to make them miserable?!
“That’s rubbish!” she snapped at him. “We were born alone and we die alone, are you freaking serious?! You delivered yourself during birth? Built all the roofs that have ever given you shelter? Sown the wheat in your bread?? Weaved the clothes on your back? Wrote all the books you've ever read and the music you’ve ever listened to? Who made the literal bed you’re going to die in, you, all alone?!”
Okamoto looked honestly taken aback, which was very satisfying. Toki turned on her heels and marched out, dragging Keigo behind her, feeling still pissed but also kind of proud at having the last word. Behind her, she slammed the door as hard as she could.
Neither Okamoto or her mentioned that conversation again next Friday. Toki counted it as a win. She so rarely had an occasion to shut up an adult these times!
But seriously, why did adults have to be this dramatic? Life is unfair… We’re all doomed to be lonely and miserable… Existence is a prison… The universe is dark and terrible… So what? Yes, the universe didn’t care about people, the Sun didn’t care, the Stars didn’t care, but people did! There was light in the universe, and it was them! Thousands of thousands of human beings, with hopes and dreams and the innate instinct to help each other, to work together to achieve their goals. How many persons had it taken to send the first rocket to the moon? How many researchers had worked tirelessly to build one single satellite? How many people had watched, heart in their throat and tears in their eyes, the moon landing footage? Didn’t that fill you with hope?! Or maybe it was just Toki. Maybe she had internalized too much Lord Of The Rings as a kid, to actually believed there was good in the world. Or maybe too much Discworld, to believe there was good in people.
Being smart in a universe filled with idiots was really exhausting, sometimes. It was a good thing Toki was an optimist.
But anyway, back to the point. Life continued. Normal classes weren’t harder as usual, but since Toki and Keigo had the equivalent of five schooldays crammed into three, it managed to keep them busy. It was a good thing they didn’t have a lot of homework. Quirk training was still kicking their asses, but it was the kind of challenge they loved. Always being faster, stronger, better. They were now past eleven, so they both dropped their ballet classes to take up others sports. Keigo took up swimming, to strengthen his back and work on his breathing. Toki took Thai boxing for a few months, didn’t like it, then switched to Krav Maga. It was the most violent self-defense sport that existed: and since Toki was going to be a close-combat hero, well, she needed all the tools she could get. She also started training with various weapons: mostly batons, but also short throwing knifes. It led to crazy games of accuracy with Keigo and his feathers, and it was a small miracle they didn’t accidentally stab someone in the hallways.
But hey, most of the staff was used to their antics by now. Sometimes a researcher passed them perched on a cart propelled by a makeshift flamethrower, and the poor guy only took a step back to let them pass in the hallway, his face not even twitching in surprise.
Quirk training started being mixed with various sports. Hayasa-sensei brought them to deserted places in the nearby city to learn parkour and free running, mixing it up with good old games of tag to spice up the exercises. Keigo and Toki were both comfortable with flying, but less so with jumping from rooftops from rooftops, swinging from telephones poles to balconies, landing and rolling. Keigo had to shred most of his feathers so his wingspan didn’t hinder him, making his wings ridiculously tiny. Still, it was fun. Toki realized that even without using her Quirk, she had become pretty athletic. She could do impressive acrobatics at very dangerous heights without breaking a sweat! Wow, she felt like Spiderman!
And then the month passed, then the next, and suddenly Toki was twelve. And that year, she made online friends.
oOoOoOo
Winter had come and go, with birthdays and presents and parties and snowballs fight, as usual. It was now the year 2220. Canon would start in exactly ten years. Hurray.
At twelve, Toki was hit full force by a dreaded enemy: puberty. She grew up taller than Keigo, who had been (until then) more or less of height with her. She started having hairs. Having boobs. Having her period. Having to receive The Talk from the labs’ resident doctor, which was awkward and horrifying, because even if Toki argued that she already knew that stuff, they wanted to be sure she didn’t skip an important lesson. Good for them, but really, the talk about safe sex (especially with Keigo as an example of a male partner, holy shit she was going to die of mortification) was so embarrassing! Really, she had to live through that once Before, it was just plain mean to have a do-over. Well, at least, in this universe, the pain medications for period-cramps were pretty amazing.
But well. Besides puberty, Toki had others adventures. Okamoto started to teach them how to negotiate with villains or civilians or journalist, how to empathize with your interlocutor to create a personal connection, how to redirect the conversation smoothly, and all the bullshit that made a person popular with the medias. He also allowed them to have an email (which they hadn’t until that day) and a social media account. They weren’t allowed to post anything compromising, of course. No selfies, nothing about the HPSC or their training, no political opinions… basically: nothing but cat pictures. But they were allowed to subscribe to various heroes’ social media to observe how they managed that aspect of their relationship with the public. Endeavor’s twitter account was maned by his sidekicks, and only gave brisk announcement in the third-person. All Might typed in all caps. Shirayuki used her social media to promote her merch. Death Arms rarely posted any texts, but he always sent picture of him or his sidekicks.
Of course, this new lesson required Toki and Keigo to have their own phones. They had managed twelve years without smartphone, so at the beginning, they didn’t use it much. Then Keigo discovered Youtube and the analysis channels, and Toki, wandering from forums to forums, discovered people who contested the system.
Alright, some of them were nutcases. There was Stain’s rhetoric thrown around (although it wasn’t Stain’s rhetoric yet), about heroes being fame-hungry assholes instead of being devoted civils servants. There were people hating on Endeavor because he was rude, people hating on Present Mic because he was loud, people hating on The Wild Wild Pussycat because one of them was trans, people hating on heroes in general because they were rich…
But there were also people who had good points. Like those who protested because heroes were the only ones allowed to use their Quirk freely. Of course, it made sense for there to be some oversight and control over Quirks. Especially when they had started appearing and threw the world in chaos. But by now everyone had a Quirk. And people weren’t allowed to use them unless it was to beat up bad guys? It was unfair. Wouldn’t it make sense for you to be able to apply for a license, similarly to a hero license, and then be able to use your quirk in a mundane job, like construction?
Which led to Toki creating an account on that website (with the username ShootForTheStars) and posting a reply. She argued that to deliver such license, there would need to be an infrastructure like the Hero Commission (a ‘Quirk Commission’ maybe?) which would require a huge amount of capital. And money didn’t grow on trees, so to fund it, it would be the easiest to charge a fee for the license itself… Aaaaaand that would create an undesirable wealth gap between those who can use quirks and those who can. Toki was completely in favor of that ‘license to use a Quirk for something else than hero work’, though. If Uraraka could use her Quirk to help her parent’s company… If Toki could freely use her Quirk to avoid taking the train… Damn, if he didn’t have his hero license, Keigo wouldn’t even be allowed to fly! How unfair was that?
Soon the conversation was blowing up. Because having it so that all people who wanted to use their quirk needed to be combat-ready and trained was, not only unfair, but bad. As a nice user named PinkIsPunkRock pointed out, that basically made the only portion of the quirk-capable populace a militia. Which… Good point.
Well. Space-travel was still Toki’s priorities. But maybe that idea of more freedom to use Quirk was a worthy hill to die on. Of course, Toki didn’t want to go as extreme as the Meta-Liberation Army or whatever their names was, because they were eugenicist pieces of crap who valued individuals by their powers instead of their own merits (a Quirkless astrophysicist was worth way more than a psychokinesist bank robber, for example!), and they had a cult-like mentally to boot. But restricting Quirk-use to the hero was… kind of unfair. And sad. And unpractical. And it bothered her. So Toki was going to look into it, and well, if she could fix it, she was sure it would help her space-travels projects in the long run. And her hero career, too! If people could use their Quirk to find jobs, that meant they were less likely to turn to villainy because of poverty. And that meant that the Meta-Liberation of whatever was going to lose credibility and be weaker than in canon, so: all the better.
So, ShootForTheStars started to wander online looking for constructive criticism of the hero society, for how it was done in others countries, and how reform usually happened in Japan. It kept her busy for a while. Turned out that legislation could pass very quickly if famous heroes advocated for it. All Might avoided supporting any politician, but he had argued once in favor of clemency for vigilantes, it had blown up online, and the law had been amended in the following years, after months of online petitions and campaigns. Pretty cool.
Toki continued digging. Internet was such a fascinating place. Soon she joined Tumblr, then a Discord server, then another. She found a Youtube channel about Quirk analysis, then she dug deeper and found blogs about pre-Quirk history, and… Well. Once you were in, it was hard to get out. Besides, for someone as isolated from the real world as her, it was a goldmine! Keigo loved to read tweets and move from one hero’s account to another, but Toki dug herself a tiny place on some Quirk-Analysis Discord server, and she made friends. Well, they would never be as close to her as Keigo, but still. She talked to real people, argued, shared her opinion, was introduced to silly memes, and so… friends. Online friends. She tried to bring Keigo in her things but that wasn’t his cup of tea. He did join the server, but their animated debates weren’t his scene. Toki was the one with a wild enough imagination to picture hundreds of imaginary scenarios. Keigo was more down-to-Earth.
Still. Meeting new people online was refreshing. They all had their worries, their ambitions, their problems, their joys, their lives and their jobs. They didn’t get Toki like Keigo did, but they still caught her puns, made her laugh, and talked excitingly about stuff that Toki couldn’t tell anyone else. Some of them recommended comics and manga to her, and Toki started avidly reading those series when she sneaked out in the city’s library.
She downloaded the Discord application on her phone. She spent more and more time on it. Not a lot, compared to the others members, because she wanted to keep her involvement a secret from Hayasa-sensei and Okamoto, but still, it was enough that Keigo noticed. He wasn’t exactly annoyed, but he was… definitively pouting.
________________
< ShootForTheStars: I think my best friend is feeling neglected
> PinkIsPunkRock: why
< ShootForTheStars: I’ve been hanging out here a lot lately
> NotOnFire: what kind of shut-in are you irl, we barely see you one hour in the evening?!
< ShootForTheStars: Well i didn’t have a phone before…
> EndeavorSucks: YOU DidN’T HAvE A PhONE?!?!
> PikaPika: Who doesn’t have a phone?! INFANTS?!
> NotOnFire: or old grandmas
> ThisIsFluffy: Stars. STARS. How old are you?!
< ShootForTheStars: chill guys, i’m twelve!
< ShootForTheStars: my caretakers (and me) are just super-focused on my studies
> PinkIsPunkRock: ? you don’t live with your parents
< ShootForTheStars: Nope. Foster care.
> ThisIsFluffy: oh
> ThisIsFluffy: well not having a phone at 12 is still sad
> PikaPika: invite your friend in the chat!
< ShootForTheStars: Already done, he is *ChickenNuggets. He doesn’t come often, tho.
> EndeavorSucks: THAT BASTARD
> EndeavorSucks: HE SPAMMED ME WITH ENDEAVOR PICTURES FOR A WEEK!
> ThisIsFluffy: ah ahaha lol
> ThisIsFluffy: but your username is begging for pain *EndeavorSucks
> EndeavorSucks: fuck off
> PinkIsPunkRock: Hey have you seen the new All Might interview?
> PikaPika: did he say something
> PikaPika: something interesting I mean
> PikaPika: if this is just his usual pep-talk i’m going back to bed
> PinkIsPunkRock: He said he’s doesn’t intend to retire ‘until the job is done’, but he’s getting old, right?
> ThisIsFluffy: isn’t he only 46?
< ShootForTheStars: he has a few years before kicking the bucket
> NotOnFire: Wow
> NotOnFire: Stars is BRUTAL today
> ThisIsFluffy: Maybe AllMigh will retire to knit or some shit yanno
< ShootForTheStars: Or maybe he will refuse to retire because he has no life outside of work, and continue his hero work until he’s too weak and get killed on national tv, leading to a national panic and the rise of organized crime
> EndeavorSucks: …
> PinkIsPunkRock: …
> PikaPika: holy shit
> ThisIsFluffy: you would think with her username Stars would be nice
> ThisIsFluffy: in my days 12 yo weren’t savage like that
< ShootForTheStars: what does my username has to do with my level of cynicism
> ThisIsFluffy: Because the saying? ‘shoot for the moon, if you miss you’ll land in the stars’ or something
< ShootForTheStars: well that’s a stupid saying. if you miss the moon, the vacuum of space will sucks out your eyeballs so…
> PikaPika: Alright Stars, this past your bedtime, go watch a fluffy cartoon or something
________________
Joke was on him. Toki didn’t watch fluffy cartoons. All she had was science books and existential dread. Ah ah. She sent a bunch of emojis instead, then disconnected and went to ask Keigo if he wanted to try and go with her to see if they could steal some pie before the staff locked up the kitchen. Peace was restored.
(Still, the next day she spent a good half-hour arguing with PinkIsPunkRock and NotOnFire about All Might’s eventual retirement. Toki happened to find the whole Symbol of Peace business far overrated. It was dangerous to shoulder a single person with something like the well-being of society. Besides, All Might hadn’t managed such a good job of it anyway! Oh, on the surface it had been a golden age, but he had left behind himself a warped idea what Goodness and Heroism meant. It had exacerbated violence in the name of heroism (just look at Bakugou and his twisted view of what a hero was!), but also discrimination. Not to mention situations like what happened in the Todoroki family… Abuse was swept under the rug to keep up a perfect picture of Heroism. So yeah. Things weren’t as perfect as the advertising would want to make you believe. There was no such thing as a perfect society. Even in a utopia, there would always be people falling through the cracks, Toki was well aware of it. It was time for things to change. All Might couldn’t keep the status quo eternally.)
Anyway… Toki really liked to vent her ideas and contestations on the Discord server. It felt liberating to talk about it, to bounce ideas back and forth with likewise-minded people. She talked about it with Keigo sometimes too, but it wasn’t the same. He wasn’t as involved as her.
Keigo had his own interests online. He mostly watched YouTube videos. He sometimes got new ideas for aerial maneuvers, or appreciated a good critic of a tense hero fight, and of course he watched avidly anything to do with Endeavor. But he didn’t try and look for society’s contesters. Keigo… he had his dreams and ambitions. He wanted a safe world, without villains. That was as simple as that. Oh, Toki and him sometimes debated about stuff she had found online, and they had similar point of views on most things. How Quirks’ use should be freer, how All Might couldn’t carry the weight of society on his own shoulder eternally, how heroes were growing more and more violent. But even if Keigo agreed with those things, they didn’t light a fire in him. It was a problem and he wanted it to be solved, but he didn’t feel like it was his to solve. He had others priorities.
Toki wasn’t fascinated by the idea of being a hero like him, so maybe that was why could more easily take a step back and imagine herself in the shoes of those who weren’t heroes, who would never be heroes, and were just powerless bystanders while supermen threw buildings at each other, while the normal people risked heavy fines if they dared to use their own Quirk to make their lives a little easier.
Toki wondered if the Commission knew what she was doing. Probably not. They had others things to do than monito a twelve years old Discord account. Still, just to be sure, she looked online how to tinker with a phone, and learned how to look for bugs and other stuff. She still wouldn’t make a half-decent hacker, but she was really getting the hang of the cryptic coding jargon.
She was writing less and less in her poetry notebook, these days. She was too busy. She never had so many people to talk to, about so many different things. There was Keigo, there was Hayasa-sensei, but now there was also Okamoto who insisted on constantly making conversation during their lessons, the various teachers Okamoto drove them too (the stealth-expert, the theater groups), the friends in her Discord server, but also some online blog that answered her comments: one about her grad students complaining about her studies in astrophysics and who was amused by Toki’s enthusiasm, one who posted poetry and encouraged Toki to post her own poems, another who posted hero fight analysis and liked to debate…
But Toki was still attached to her notebook. There were barely fifteen pages left to fill now. It was crazy. She had that thing for year. She had poured her soul in from age five to now. Those poems had given her strength and hope when she had needed it the most.
We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins,
Carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains,
93 percent stardust, with souls made of flames
We are all just stars
that have people names
Maybe, when she will be done with this notebook, she would close it shut and never open it again, closing that chapter of her life forever. Or maybe she would keep it somewhere in a corner of her bedroom, like a dairy she didn’t dare show others. She hadn’t even let Keigo read those lines, and he was the only person Toki could consider bare her soul to.
Why was she even thinking about that? She always thought about a thousand things at once but now she was being emotional about it. What bullshit. Urgh, being a teenager sucked!
It was now the end of spring. Okamoto signed them up to work in a journal, as lowly coffee-fetchers and printed-copies carriers. Their goal was to learn a maximum of information about everyone in the office, how their worked, what angle they looked for in their articles, and so on. So every Friday, they went there and played the role of middle-school students trying to be useful. Okamoto hadn’t presented that as a test, only as a lesson just like the one they had with the improv group or the stealth specialist: but Toki and Keigo weren’t stupid. It was a test. It was a way to put everything they had learned in practice. It was a spying game!
And even thought a small, logical part of Toki brain protested it was immoral to train kids to spy on people, well… It was a fun test, and she was good at it, so: game on. Keigo and her started investigating the shit out of the office, with the kind of exuberant energy they couldn’t let out when doing the same at Genryusai’s house. They chatted with all the employees, got into their good graces by bringing them coffee and remembering their kids’ birthdays, discretely memorized passwords, and sneaked into locked rooms to look at records. They worked great as a team, but they also did very well on their own. Keigo better than Toki, even, because he could use his feathers to listen to conversations behind closed doors, or to steal papers while standing in another room talking loudly to make diversion.
Long story short, it was a success, but they didn’t discover anything more compromising than the fact that several employees were cheating on their respective spouses and that the secretary was stealing candies from the vending machine. Oh well. They had fun, that was the important part.
Hayasa-sensei told them they were now old enough to start with some strength training. They would start slow, but he fully intended for them to be able to bench-press each other by next year. He made them join each another sport club, so Keigo selected a music club (probably just to be provocative) and Toki went with a breakdancing club. She knew ballet, gymnastics, parkour, and a few martial arts, so she already had some solid basis. But it was also lots of fun. And it helped her with her balance and agility, so… Hayasa-sensei couldn’t complain.
Besides, Hayasa-sensei cared for their extra-curricular activities, but his main interest was their Quirk training. On a day-to-day basis, Toki didn’t really feel an amelioration, but when she looked back a few years, she had to admit she had progressed by leaps and bounds. Her reaction-time was lightning-fast compared to those first games of tag she had played with Keigo. She could teleport quicker, further, with more complicated landings, while enchaining successive tasks. She could integrate teleportation in a fight or a chase. Keigo was the better fight, more polyvalent and better at long-range, but Toki was the uncontested queen of the swift take-down. It made her feel all powerful!
Well, she was still kind of a normal, baseline human, so she was limited. She had a bit of choc and pressure-resistance, as if the warp-portal on her skin acted like a shield (Hayasa-sensei had theorized that maybe teleporting created a vacuum, so Toki was actually vacuum-resistant, and wasn’t that a thrilling thought?!)… But she was still soft and squishy, so getting a building dropped on her was a big no-no.
She learned that the hard way at the end of spring, when a particularly violent spar had seen her tossed by a window. She had teleported before falling the two-stories of the empty building they were in, but her foot had caught on the balcony’s railing and it had hurt like a bitch. Turned out she had broken her ankle. Keigo was horrified, and he wasn’t even the one who had tossed her by the window.
Hayasa-sensei was stiff as a board, but even with his total professionalism, he seemed a little apologetic.
“It’s better to deal with your first broken bone in a controlled setting,” he tried to offer.
Toki groaned. She had her foot in a cast for six weeks, and had been given enough painkillers to feel faintly floaty.
“Geez, sensei, you’re really trying to see a ray of light in that shitshow?”
“Language, Quantum,” her teacher coughed, looking uncomfortable. “But… Yes, I suppose I am. I will adjust your training so you won’t have to use your ankle at all for the next six weeks, and of course, after that, we will have to take in account your loss of muscles.”
“Sweet. Can I have the day off?”
There was a fleeting smile on her teacher’s face, maybe because of her slightly slurred voice.
“Yes. I’ll warn Okamoto. Afterwards… You’ll still have your online classes, but no Quirk training. You can think about what you will do with your Quirk when training resume. I expect you to have at least one idea for a new special move.”
“Aw man,” she whined. “Do I have to?”
“Yes, Quantum. Now, I’m sending Hawks back in. So, be good.”
So Hayasa-sensei left, Keigo was let in her room, and he spend the rest of the day hovering worryingly next to her. Toki couldn’t blame him. When Keigo had broken bones in the past, she had done the same. Although Keigo had a somewhat accelerated healing: he was more fragile than a normal human because he had hollow bones, like a bird, but he also healed a lot faster (about three weeks). But when he healed a broken bone, his plucked-out feathers didn’t grow back, so it wasn’t an accelerated healing as much as his body redirecting resources…
“I should have at least one long-ranged attack,” she groaned. “It hurts like a bitch.”
“Yeah,” winced her friend. “What about using a long weapon, like a staff? Or, you know, going to the rational route and taking a tranq rifle.”
That made Toki laugh: “So what, you think I should be a sniper?”
“Well, that would take you of the line of fire, at least. Besides, your Quirk require contact. You can’t exactly start blasting people with nothing but air.”
It was meant as a joke, but Toki narrowed her eyes in thought.
“You… You may have something here.”
Because, well. Air is something which was easy to forget that it even exists. But it was here. Sure, air practically weighed nothing… But in the end, air had mass… And after a quick google search, Toki learned that air had an approximate mass of 1, 2 grams per liter of air at sea level.
So if air had a mass, it was something. Atmosphere was an object, everywhere, and it was in contact with Toki’s skin. At a rate of 1.2 grams per liter, the density of air was so low that teleporting small amounts of air wouldn’t even register into Toki’s Quirk, who could teleport grow ass men like it was nothing. And if she managed to use Switch with air, to teleport a mass of hair from one hand to another… Not only could she create an air blast, but also a vacuum…
Yeah. Those six weeks could be productive, after all.
oOoOoOo
Teleporting air turned out to be a great idea in theory, but a bitch in practice.
Until then, Toki had only been able to Switch objects from one hand to another. But air wasn’t a full object. It was a bunch of particles floating freely. To rationalize it, Toki needed to see it as part of the atmosphere. And of course she didn’t want to teleport the entirety of Earth’s atmosphere, she wasn’t an idiot, but… If she could scope out some of that atmosphere, then it would make perfect air-blast coupled with vacuum. Shit, she could probably Switch air by sourcing it at the top of her head, so she would be aspired upward! Or better yet, teleport small pockets of air around her to manipulate air pressure… Damn, she needed a book about air currents and atmospheric phenomena, right now.
Toki started small. She asked for a big cub of jelly, about thirty centimeters tall (it was a testament to the cook’s mental fortitude that he didn’t ask any questions) and then tried to teleport a small ball of it from one hand to the other. She knew she could do it. She had teleported bigger and heavier things, there no reason why her Quirk couldn’t do that. In the past, she had tried to teleport half a cushion and failed: but she knew it wasn’t a problem with her strength, it was just that her brain hadn’t been able to correctly direct her Quirk, to correctly visualize the limit she wanted to give to that half-cushion. So now, that block of jelly was going down. Because… It had to be a conceptual limitation, not a real one. To bypass it, Toki could trick her brain into not seeing the whole block, only the part she wanted to Switch!
Game on.
Things were made of atoms, and every atom was a tiny separate thing. Atoms were held together by a quantum mist of shared electrons, or sometimes just magnetism at close range. If it came down to that, the protons and neutrons inside the nuclei were tiny separate things. The quarks inside the protons and neutrons were tiny separate things! There simply wasn't anything in reality, the world-out-there, that corresponded to people's conceit of solid objects. It was all just little dots. Toki had to make her brain stop seeing the big block of dots that was the plate of jelly, and make it carve out a smaller block of dots that was just a spoonful of jelly.
Her activation of Warp-Space was all in the mind to begin with. She hadn’t been able to teleport parts of things, could only touch what her mind perceived as wholes, because she hadn’t known in her bones that it was all just atoms deep down. But she knew that now, and so… Toki focused on that knowledge as hard as she could, the true fact that the jelly was just a collection of atoms, everything was just collections of atoms, and the atoms of the little patch she was trying to teleport formed just as valid a collection as any other collection she cared to think about.
And it didn’t work. She read more books, tried some optical illusions, even tried to self-hypnotize, to no avail. She tried for weeks and it didn’t work.
This. Was. Ridiculous.
Her ankle healed. Training resumed. She told of her idea to Hayasa-sensei and he was enthusiastic, but his eagerness was quickly quenched by Toki’s repeated failures. The block of jelly didn’t move. And if she failed with the jelly, how could she manage to teleport air? Still, the idea had potential, and he told her to keep it. Maybe, later they could try with support items. Likes googles that could display shapes to help her visualize what she wanted to teleport from a whole. But it was expensive technology, and the Commission’s resources weren’t’ unlimited. Especially for a pet project like the idea of a special move that Toki couldn’t quite conceptualize yet.
Anyway. Summer came. Toki and Keigo were sent to different summer camps in July (a dance group for her, a music group for him), and then they were both sent to the same bleach summer camp in August. It was as awesome as ever. A little more awkward sometimes, because there were boys looking at Toki now, and girls looking at Keigo. Oh, they were both trained to brush off uncomfortable questions and deflect people’s interest, but it still made them flounder a little. It wasn’t bad, exactly. Toki felt a little flattered. But she felt also… at loss. What was she supposed to do? She didn’t even know what she wanted to do. She could appreciate the boys’ interest but it also made her feel uncomfortably, on display and self-conscious. She was only twelve! Well, nearly thirteen, but still. There was fine line between what made her feel pretty and what made her feel objectified. One of the older boys once commented out loud on her boobs and Toki was so taken aback that she didn’t say anything, just blushed with mortification.
(Keigo offered to push that guy from the balcony. Toki thanked him, but she could handle it. She had regained her composure by then, and so, at the following meal, she calmly poured burning coffee on his lap. It wasn’t hot enough to seriously injure him, but it hurt, and afterward that boy gave Toki a wide berth. Good.)
At the end of summer, Keigo hit a growth spurt and shoot five centimeters in a month. His back hurt and all his shoes were too small. He was also unusually clumsy, lanky limbs flailing like he wasn’t quite sure where his legs and arms ended anymore. It was very funny to watch. Keigo never hesitated to clown around during training, but now it was a whole new level. He even got stuck in a tree once. Toki was laughing too hard to help him, so Hayasa-sensei had to fetch a ladder. It. Was. Hilarious.
“I have to take vitamins now,” Keigo said in an extremely offended tone that night. “I’m fine! I don’t have an iron deficiency or an equilibrium problem!”
“You smacked in a window last week. I think the tree was the last straw.”
“It’s all those things!” Keigo wailed, flailing his wings and arms around. “How tall am I going to be? It’s going to hinder my maneuverability!”
That was a serious concern. Toki raised her eyebrows:
“If it’s that’s serious, then the new diet should help, right?”
“They want to take the meat out of my lunch!” he screeched. “My chicken, Toki! MY CHICKEN!”
“Hey, veganism is a total legit diet…”
“Then eat spinach if you want! Because in my humble but obviously extremely correct opinion, humans are the top of the food chain, and Nature isn’t vegan. You gonna tell a hyena that zebras have a right to life? You gonna look a hyena in the eye and tell it to drink a fucking kale smoothie? No! So I have a right to my chicken!”
Toki started giggling hysterically, a dangerous glint in the eyes:
“Hey, remember the farm a few kilometers up the river? What if went there and kidnapped the chicken to release them in the kitchen? As an incentive?”
“You just want to create chaos,” Keigo accused her with a large grin. “You don’t care about my diet at all!”
“… So you don’t want to?”
“Are you kidding, I’m in. Let’s go steal some chicks! Oooh, and some eggs, too, I have a brilliant idea…”
Toki had no idea what kind of childhood she and Keigo would have had if they had never met each other. But it would surely had been way calmer for the poor staff of Naruto Labs.
And if someone egged Okamoto’s car, well, nobody has any proof it was them.
Anyway. Life went on. Keigo’s growth spurt stopped, or at least slowed down. The doctor said that he would probably be of medium height once adult, but he should expect to shoot up a few centimeters in the following years. In Toki’s memories of canon, Hawks had been on the short side, though… But hey, that was because she mostly remembered him standing next to Endeavor who was a mountain of a man. Whatever. Keigo spent more time in the air than standing on his feet anyway.
He was plenty athletic, but most of his fighting style relied on his telekinetic control over his feathers. His hand-to-hand was passable, and his sword-fighting with his primaries was pretty good, but he would never be a heavy hitter. With his skillet, it wasn’t suited to him anyway. He could be a sneaky fighter, be a spy, be an informant, run surveillance, attack plenty of small fry at the same time, even stop a low-powered Nomu… But to face the kind of monster that needed All Might’s strength to be brought down, well, Keigo would not be the best choice.
And that was where Toki appeared on the scene. Because she didn’t have the raw power of All Might, nor the versatility of Hawks. But if she managed to pull off her air manipulation slash vacuum slash teleporting part of stuff… Shit, she could be deadly. Her thing was swift take-down. But was if instead of teleporting the bad guy in handcuffs in a prison cell, she touched his hair and teleported with only his head?! Bam, no more bad guy. That would be so fucking useful to deal with the Nomu. No, really, Toki needed that new move. And she would get it right, gods fucking damnit.
She continued practicing. She still went online to chat with her friends, but after nearly a year, the novelty had worn of. Sure, she still got fired up over their debates about hero society: but she couldn’t really talk about personal stuff to her online friends, and it built a barrier. She told them she was in foster care, homeschooled, with only one friend, but she couldn’t tell more. She always deflected, and well, it was just easier to talk with Keigo. She didn’t feel as if she had to hide, with him.
In the fall, after Toki’s birthday (she was thirteen! It was so strange to think she had been with the Commission for nearly five years now!), Okamoto brought them to visit another training facility. It was where the Provisional Heroes License Exam was held, and also the License Renewal Exam for the heroes who had stopped their activities for more than a year, leading to their License being temporary suspended.
The Provisional Hero Exam was held in August, usually, but it was hard to justify letting two kids watch it. But there was a do-over November, and that other exam allowed observers to come and watch. As long as Toki and Keigo were discreet, they could sneak in the bleachers and watch the processing.
The exam was a mock-fight, with a handful of pro-heroes playing the roles of the villains. Dismayed, Toki realized that most of the competitors weren’t that good. They didn’t work together, they were either too reckless or too timid… One guy even injured himself with his own porcupine Quirk. Sure, the top twenty gave a good showing, but the rest? Gods, two guys slammed into each other while chasing the same guy, like morons! In a real battle, with real enemies, they could get killed like that!
So, when Okamoto came back to fetch them (after rubbing elbows with the bosses and the pro-heroes, probably), and asked their opinions… Toki and Keigo looked at each other in askance, then looked back at him, and Keigo declared with a hint of a mocking smile:
“They aren’t that good, are they?”
“Well, this is the do-over exam,” Toki reasoned. “Maybe in the real exam, they were better, and now we’re only watching the losers.”
Keigo sniggered. Okamoto frowned:
“Crudely and immaturely said, but not incorrect. The ones who passed the exam in their first try were better… But only marginally better. This,” and he swept out his arm, as if to encompass the wreckage that was the arena where the last contestants were strutting, apparently very proud of their barely-acceptable performance, “is the state of heroics today. Make no mistake: we have some exceptional heroes. But the overwhelming majority of them are average. They just aren’t good enough. So we’re relying on quantity over quality.”
Subtle message here: you are quality. So you better raise the level that these poor saps have brought us to.
No pressure.
Still. For the next months, Okamoto started making them studies economics, or more accurately heroic economics. How insurance worked, how much money went into repairing damages made during fights, what was merchandizing, what qualified or not as a support item, who owned what in the support item business, and all that jazz. It was mostly reading articles and being quizzed on numbers. At least they didn’t have to travel two hours each morning and each evening anymore (which was good, because the weather was beginning to be super-cold, and Toki liked to stay in her warm, toasty classroom, thank you very much). But it was so dense. Some of it was interesting, sure, but it was all so tightly packed that it became boring!
But it was kind of a necessary step to become a hero, wasn’t it? Not just jumping and punching things, but also knowing the structure inside out. It was that stuff that people learned as sidekicks or as freelancers, and it took time. It took dedication, patience, luck, having the right teachers. Now that Keigo and Toki had seen the level of those newbie heroes, well, they couldn’t slack off. Those people couldn’t do the job right. Toki and Keigo couldn’t let themselves slide to those poor contestants’ level. That would just be too sad, too insulting.
Toki continued trying to get her new move right.
Just focusing was useless, she needed to know what she was focusing on. She read a lot about atoms, molecules, neutrons and electrons. Molecular science was complicated, but that was alright. She didn’t need to learn by heart the chemical composition of something, just to have a good grasp on the theory. Then she tried to read on psychology and cognitive science, because maybe what blocked her was in her brain. How did people perceive things? What were their unconscious bias? What part of the brain dealt with understanding what space was, what shapes were?
In December, the kitchen stopped making her blocks of jelly for her tests. She had been working on that for six months without any breakthrough, and every time, the jelly came back intact, so they had to eat it or throw it away. No matter. Toki decided to try it directly with air. After all, jelly was easier to see, but since air was invisible, she shouldn’t start training with a visual aid as a crutch. So, air it was. And, each day, after classes, she started training her brain to visualize what she was going to do.
She hadn’t succeeded when she had thought about small little dots making up collections. Maybe the fact that some part of her mind was still thinking in terms of objects was stopping the teleportation from going through. She had thought of a collection of atoms that was a block of jelly. She had thought of a collection that was a little patch of jelly.
Time to kick it up a notch.
So Toki changed her angle. She tried to see through the illusion that nonscientists thought was reality, the world of desks and chairs, air and jelly and people.
It was a bit of a mindfuck but, picture this… When you walked through a park, the immersive world that surrounded you was something that existed inside your own brain as a pattern of neurons firing. The trees weren’t things in front of you, they were something in your visual cortex, and your visual cortex was in the back of your brain. All the sensations of that bright world were really happening in your skull, the place where you lived and never, ever left. And the picture of the park that you thought you were walking through was something that was visualized inside your brain as it processed the signals sent down from your eyes and retina. The thing you were watching, the things you were touching, they weren’t things for you outside of what your neurons relayed. Nothing was real for your brain besides the information it processed.
It wasn’t like the world was a lie, like the Buddhists thought. What lay beyond the illusion of the park was just the actual park, but it was all still illusion, because the way the park appeared was the only facet of reality your brain could interact with…
Yeah, Toki had to take a break approximately at this moment.
Just trying to wrap her mind around that was giving her a massive headache. She tried to explain what she was doing to Keigo and Hayasa-sensei but they both looked at her as if she was nuts. And I mean, OKAY, it sounded batshit crazy, because she was actually trying to rewrite the reality as her brain was processing it in order to teleport Earth’s atmosphere around her own body. Oh, Keigo absolutely thought she could do it. His unwavering faith was kind of touching. But he still thought she was crazy and that her brain was going to be as twisted as a pretzel. He actually told her in a very impressed tone that she just had to think about that when a telepath tried to attack her, and that the villain would just be left babbling like a lunatic and ripple for a mental asylum. Hayasa-sensei made a face, but didn’t contradict him. He was convinced she was biting more than she could chew, and seemed to wait for her failure to gently guide her towards another idea of technique.
When Okamoto asked what she was working, Toki just told him it was too complicated for him in the exact same condescending tone Okamoto would use to say that to her. Seeing him grit his teeth brought her disproportionate joy. What? She was a brat. She was allowed.
Anyway. Whole things didn’t exist. Things didn’t exist. Air, atmosphere, it didn’t exist. Toki wasn’t sitting at her desk looking at the nothing that was filled with air molecules. She was inside her own skull, and experiencing a processed picture her brain had decoded from the signals sent down by her retina.
The real air was somewhere else, somewhere that wasn’t the picture.
And the real air wasn't like the picture Toki’s brain had of it. The idea of the air as a non-solid object was something that existed only inside her own brain, inside the parietal cortex that processed his sense of shape and space. The real air was a collection of atoms held together by electromagnetic forces and shared covalent electrons, dust and oxygen and dihydrogen and plenty of other atoms… It was a full whole, it was a thing, but what she saw or didn’t see was just an illusion…. There was a ball of air in her hand, it was there, it was real, but her own brain was projecting an illusion of nothingness…
The real air was far away, and Toki, inside her own skull, could never quite touch it, could only imagine ideas about it. But she had her Quirk, and her Quirk had the power to touch it. It was only Toki’s preconceptions that were limiting it. The concept of Swap-Space could touch the concept of a ball or a book, so was absolutely no reason why it couldn't change the other collection of atoms too...
It was there. IT. WAS. THERE.
AND SHE WANTED TO TELEPORT IT.
So Toki closed her eyes, grabbing in her mind this concept of the ball of air, full and whole because mental pictures didn’t matter, only concepts did, because concepts and power were how she could interact with reality: she grabbed this ball of air in her Quirk and yanked.
BANG!
With a noise like an explosion, Toki was thrown forward. The desk split in two where her hands were resting, and collapsed under her weight. The lamp just above her shattered as if someone had shot it, glass and pieces of lampshade flying everywhere: the resulting shockwave of pressurized hair exploded in the whole room, making papers fly everywhere. With a startled cry, Toki instinctively dodged, teleporting in the nearest hallway. She could hear doors open, and curious or exasperated voices asking what was going on: but she just stood frozen in a half-crouch, blood pounding in her heard. She was pretty sure a shrapnel from the lamp had struck her, because her scalp was tingling painfully. But she couldn’t move, because holy shit. She had done it. She had teleported air! She had created a vacuum-generated air-blast.
Her head was pounding with how much she had concentrated, and she slid down in a sitting position. Ouch. Also, her chest was kind of painful, like your legs burned when you ran a sprint without properly warming up. If that was going to become a combat-ready move, she had her work cut for her. It worked, but it was still way too uncontrolled! Because… Holy shit. Air. Vacuum. She had created the emptiness of space in her hands. Wow, it was a good thing she was sitting down.
“What did you do this time?” cheerfully asked Keigo, appearing seemingly from nowhere.
“… I think I just became God.”
Her friend looked spectacularly unimpressed:
“Congratulation. Was the lamp an unavoidable casualty in your ascension to godhood?”
“To be completely honest, I’m not sure exactly what happened. But I think… It worked?”
“Your air-blast things? Cool! I knew you could do it!”
Toki smiled weakly. It felt good to hear it. She had never struggled so much with an aspect of her Quirk before. She should have been overjoyed by her success, but she mostly felt stunned… and a bit exhausted.
“Thanks. It was ridiculously complicated.”
“Your thing to trick your own brain was crazy,” Keigo acquiesced, snorting. “But don’t feel too bad about it. The first time I used by Quirk I flew straight into a ceiling fan.”
Taken aback, Toki couldn’t help but guffaw: “No! Is that true?!”
“You will never know,” he winked, before holding out a hand to her. “Come on, let’s go and see the damage… Toki, you’re bleeding!”
With a wince, Toki palped her skull. Sure thing, there was blood in her hair, running down her ear and neck, and… and that was a piece of glass stuck vertically in her scalp. Fuck, it hurt. It was probably big. And rammed in her skull…!
“Did I get trepanned by a lamp?” Toki started freaking out. “Is there a lot of blood? I have to see. No, actually, I retract that statement, I absolutely don’t want to see, shit, let’s go to the infirmary.”
“Good call. Wait! Don’t teleport with a headwound! I will carry you!”
“Don’t you dare bridal-carry me!”
Too late. He scooped her up with a shit-eating grin, and started flying at high speed while Toki was gripping his shoulders for balance, screeching like a banshee.
So. Long story short, the shard of glass wasn’t that big. Barely the size of her pinky finger. It had maybe touched the bone but not transpierced it, so it didn’t count as trepanation, even if that small scratch was deep and bleed a lot. Toki was healed, bandaged, and then thoughtfully chewed out by like five different people because she had wrecked the classroom.
Apparently, her new move was quite destructive. Nature hated vacuum. A vacuum created just above the desk’s surface meant that the desk had been aspired toward this vacuum, undergoing a violent torsion that had broken it almost in half. Toki slamming into it had been the last straw and now the piece of furniture was good for firewood and nothing else. But it was the other part of Switch that had fucked up the place. Because when you materialized air from nowhere, it took space, a space that was previously occupied by other air molecules, so… Highly pressurized air-blast ensued. It was what had taken out the lamp. And then broke against the ceiling full force, creating a shockwave. The room wasn’t too damaged but papers were ripped, the lightbulb had exploded, that kind of thing.
As a punishment, Toki was ordered to clean up the room all by herself. Considering there was chalk dust everywhere because nobody had bothered to put away the blackboard their old teachers had used, it was going to be a long task.
On the plus-side… Well. Now, she had a long-ranged attack. Okay, it was wild, but she knew she could teleport air, now. She had the ability to use it. She just had to master this new move… And then, well. Canon could come.
Toki would be ready.
Notes:
The ideas of seing "part of something" a a whole something because "things are an illusion" if a concept taken from "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality". Great fic. Gave me a sprained brain, but great fic.
Okamoto is an OC. I actually modelled him after most "evil HPSC handlers" in some fanfics !
He doesn't hate kids but he doesn't like them either. He treats them like adults, expect adultness, and is exasperated when they fall short of his expectations, which should be expected because they are children. He isn't allowed to punish them harshly, wich is the only reason he doesn't but he would totally slap them around if he was allowed to. He isn't a kind teacher. He has incredible self-control and restrain, though, so he never even raise his voice.
Still, he's extremely good at his job of being... well, some sort of bureaucratic black ops. So Keigo and Toki respect his skills. But they feel his disdain and it get their hackles up. Especially Toki who overcompensate her unease with agressiveness instead of de-escalating.Here is what he looks like ! There's a bigger picture in "Snapshots of wisdom", too ^^
Chapter 11: How to fight dirty
Summary:
In wich training goes well until it doesn't, and Toki learn how to take a hit. Or several. Good thing she's a feral little shit and can hit back.
(THIS IS A RE-WORKED CHAPTER, NOT AN UPDATE)
Notes:
WARNING !
This chapter is the first part of the chapter that was previously titled "the accident". There were too many things in that chapter, and none of them were expanded enough.
Hobo-san wasn't introduced correctly. He should have a whole chapter to explain why Toki felt such a strange mix of respect and sheer dislike for him. For the same reason, it wasn't clearly shonw why it's so creepy to imagine it's... a certain canon-character. And it didn't illustrate enough how fucked-up that character was in the past.Besides, cutting "The accident" in two and then expanding each half allows me to write more about things that Okamoto taught the kids. ABout the heroes ranking, for exemple. Also, i headcanon that Endeavor has several times the workload of All Might and you can't change my mind. A warrior may decimate more ennemy soldiers but a general gets more done.
Also, All Might sucks at paperwork, it's the whole reason why he meet Tsukauchi in the first place xD
So, besides worldbuilding, other additions to that chapter include: more poems, and another Discord conversation that i cackled like crazy when i wrote it. I hope you'll enjoy it !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
HOW TO FIGHT DIRTY
Toki’s new attack (her brand new Ultimate Move!) was named Warp-Blast. Not very imaginative, maybe, but accurate, and it sounded more mysterious and Quirk-specific than “air blast”. But it would still be a long time before she would be allowed to use in combat… or even during friendly sparing!
Vacuum was powerful. Pressurized air too. It could fracture walls, transpierce targets like a bullet… and it was invisible! It made it even harder to defend against. Hayasa-sensei was suitably impressed by Toki’s success, but he was also extremely strict in his admonitions. Toki was playing with forces she didn’t fully control. She could injure someone. She could kill someone. It was good that she had figured out how to make this attack work, but now she had to break it down to its simplest components so she could use it at manageable level.
So Toki was handled precisions exercises, like peeling or cutting an apple by teleporting only part of it. She needed to learn to feel her Quirk better, to know exactly what mass of air she was teleporting, instead of just yanking like a barbarian. So, precisions exercises. It wasn’t a great success. Sure, Toki knew how to teleport part of things now, but it required a lot of focus. She had to do all the steps of her reasoning, one by one, like writing an equation manually inside her brain. First to only see the concept, then only wrap her Quirk around what she wanted to teleport and not the rest, and warp it. She usually lacked precision.
Her half-apple was a bit wonky, for example. Hayasa-sensei told her she only needed some practice, but… In the meantime, the cafeteria started to make compote a recurrent dessert.
So what? She didn’t have anything to be ashamed of. She had found her ultimate attack at age thirteen! Sure, it needed polishing, but she still had five whole years before having to take her Hero License Exam. She had time. Besides, considering the other contestants’ level, Toki could probably pass the exam without using any special moves, and with one hand tied in her back. Keigo could pass the exam without special moves, too, and with both hands in his back, and blindfolded. Or maybe even in his sleep. That was how good they were.
But well, if for the next three months Hayasa-sensei wanted to make her peel fruits and cut various object with her Quirk, she wasn’t going to complain too much. It was good practice. It could make for a different special move, too. Something she could call Scalpel. She could probably cut a person in half if she used it right. Not that she intended to cut a person in half, but well, she liked to contemplate all the possibilities, just in case.
Okamoto was ecstatic about her new idea, and that was what annoyed her the most. He was praising her intellect, and criticizing her lack of control at the same time. She wanted to bask in the praise but also tell him to stuff his unwanted commentary where the sun didn’t shine, so that was a dilemma. Keigo found it endlessly funny, but then, Keigo managed to find humor in pretty much everything.
Her breakthrough didn’t change much in their training, in any case. Oh, it did enthuse the Vice-President at her next visit, and she even brought Kameko Sabira with her. The young cat-woman was still as bouncy and energetic as ever. Even if Toki hadn’t seen her in at least two years, Kameko was still surprisingly easy to talk to. She had brought gifts and chocolate, but also a lot of pictures of her neighbor’s cat, whose antics ranged from sneaking in her kitchen to steal her omelet, to get stuck in a window and scare the crap out of a neighbor. Toki had to admit, it was hilarious. And Kameko was such an exuberant story-teller! The young woman was now, what, twenty-two? Twenty-three? But even with a suit, a pretty wristwatch, and a good job, she still radiated the same playful energy, like she would never quite grow past her youthful exuberance.
Toki felt vaguely envious of her evident self-confidence, of how happy and comfortable in her own skin she was.
Not that Toki felt uncomfortable in her own skin. She was just, you know. Short, and young, and awkward. Filled with mood-swings and existential moodiness like all middle-schoolers contemplating their own existence. Wondering about her future and her feelings. And also… She was kind of plain. Kameko was so radiant, so bright and bouncy and pretty! Toki was energetic too, but she felt more like a tomboy than like a sophisticated and yet cute woman, like Kameko was.
But anyway. Teenage drama apart… Things were good.
The new year started quietly. Okamoto was still teaching boring stuff. Hayasa-sensei still made them run ragged. Online classes were fine. Toki was starting to have fun in her breakdancing club. The students were putting together a whole show, and Toki was one of the four main dancers. She felt a little hurt when she realized that she wouldn’t be able to brag about it, though. All of her peers were inviting friends and family, and Toki… couldn’t. Keigo had his club at the same time, and there was no way he would be allowed to ditch it. And besides him, Toki had no real family. Sure, Hayasa-sensei was important, but he was a mentor, and… He didn’t care like Toki wanted him to care. He liked her and was proud of her because she was Toki the Teleporter, but there was no value in Toki the dancer.
Well at least she had her online friends to commiserate with. They always brightened her day. She wasn’t constantly online with them, but… it was nice, every evening, to log in and read their hilarious stories, or to share some ramblings about hero society, or just to laugh about their favorite shows.
Toki and her Discord friends… They were all leading different lives, but it was crazy how they had managed to stick together on that Discord server for more than a year. You would think that teenage girls, art college students, small time journalists, electricians, and bartenders would have nothing in common: and yet.
________________
> EndeavorSucks: So. Guess who has been fucked over by karma today.
> ThisIsFluffy: You?
> PikaPika: If that’s you, you probably had it coming.
< ShootForTheStars: I bet it was youuuuu
> EndeavorSucks: you fuckers
> EndeavorSucks: you have no compassion
> EndeavorSucks: Something terrible has happened
> EndeavorSucks: y’all know how i live in Yokohama?
> PikaPika: i didn’t but my inner stalker thank you for this private information
< ShootForTheStars: shut up Pika i want the story!
> PinkIsPunkRock: yeah so?
> EndeavorSucks: so there was a villain attacks in the business district and I was there
> PikaPika: ?!?!
> NotOnFire: shit man are you okay?!
< ShootForTheStars: What happened?!
> PinkIsPunkRock: are you okay?!
> EndeavorSucks: yeah
> EndeavorSucks: some douche attacked the place right next to me and the building nearly collapsed on me but, well
> EndeavorSucks: a hero got there in time and rescued me before trashing the bad guy
> EndeavorSucks: so i’m okay
< ShootForTheStars: that’s a relief
> ThisIsFluffy: if you need anything, we’re here!
> PinkIsPunkRock: holy shit, talk about karma
> EndeavorSucks: oh the villain’s attack wasn’t the karma-thing
> PikaPika: ??
< ShootForTheStars: what do you mean
> EndeavorSucks: WELL
> EndeavorSucks: guess which hero rescued me.
> NotOnFire: …
> ThisIsFluff: … no…
< ShootForTheStars: OMG AHAHAHAHAHA
> PikaPika: you’ve been saved by ENDEAVOR?!
> EndeavorSucks : YES
> EndeavorSucks: and he was like, competent and stuff
> EndeavorSucks: very hero-like. Tall and scary and IMPRESSIVE as hell, and he carried me like i weighted nothing, like, bridal-style, with flames everywhere
> EndeavorSucks: it was hot
> ThisIsFluffy: … omg
< ShootForThe Stars: well he’s on fire, right? so of course it was warm
> PikaPika: oh sweet summer child
> NotOnFire: lol lol lol i am literally on the floor, endeavor rescued you and IN ADDITION TO THAT he was your gay awakening
< ShootForTheStars: WHAT
< ShootForTheStars: … oh that’s what you meant by hot
> EndeavorSucks: Hey I’ve been gay before that! Or at least bi
> ThisIsFluffy: XD XD XD XD
> PinkIsPunkRock: this is the best day of my life
- PikaPika has changed EndeavorSucks’s username to HotForEndeavor
> HotForEndeavor: PIKA NO
> NotOnFire: PIKA YES
- HotForEndeavor has changed their username to EndeavorSucks
- PikaPika has changed EndeavorSucks’s username to SucksEndeavor
> ThisIsFluffy: uuuuuh not to be that guy but there are minors here
> ThisIsFluffy: Stars and Pinky are definitely underage
> PinkIsPunkRock: aw come on
> ShootForTheStars: i believe that *SucksEndeavor should be free to sucks whoever he wants
> NotOnFire: xD
> PikaPika: nah that’s fair, the chat rules are not to be horny on main so… please take a username not referencing to fellatio
> SucksEndeavor: I hate all of you, and Endeavor’s flaming tits most of all
- SucksEndeavor has changed their username to GayCrisis
> NotOnFire: omg AH AHAHA
> PikaPika: i will allow it
> GayCrisis: karma hate me
< ShootForTheStars: i’m screenshotting this conversation for posterity y’all
________________
She sometimes told Keigo what was going on in the chatroom, but well, it was different when you weren’t there to read it happen in real time. Besides, it felt a little weird to talk about leering jokes and dirty talk to her best friend.
Not that Keigo was a pure cinnamon roll. He was a thirteen years old boy. He and Toki were hormonal and nervous teenagers stuck in a building full of frigid grown-up, so there wasn’t really anyone else to talk about this stuff. So they spoke about girls, boys, hairs, periods, and morning wood. Keigo’s voice was starting to break, too, and that was another hilarious thing that Toki eagerly recorded on her phone. But anyway, they talked a lot about stuff (Toki would be hesitant to call it ‘sexy stuff’: it didn’t feel sexy… just weird and awkward and yet fascinating… but not sexy). Some personal, some not. But they never talked about feelings, or at least not about attraction in general.
Toki wasn’t attracted to anything besides books. Well, that was what she would tell, if someone asked her about it. But the truth was that maybe… maybe she was attracted to Keigo.
She wasn’t even surprised about it.
What? He was, objectively, handsome. She liked to look at him. When she tried to imagine kissing someone, it was intriguing and awkward, but she could imagine it being pleasant when she pictured him. No other boy or girl from her dance club or her martial art club had caught her eyes, no matter how intently she stared at them. Maybe blond and carefree was her type? Keigo was getting taller and prettier, after all… And Toki could confess that she had written a few poems while thinking about his honey-bright eyes, or his disheveled blond hair, or his smile that seemed to light up the room.
But she wasn’t sure if it was teenage physical attraction or if it was just that they had always been so emotionally close that the lines were blurring. Maybe the feelings had always been there and were simply evolving with hormones and general teenage anxiety.
Besides, it wasn’t like she would tell him. She didn’t know if it would make him uncomfortable. In some way, Toki’s feelings felt both inconsequential (because she had accepted them, liked them, even) and terrible (because what if saying it out loud changed things, made things awkward, damaged their closeness?).
So yeah, she wasn’t telling him. Maybe it would pass. Keigo didn’t speak to her about being attracted to anyone, but he had been fawning over Endeavor for so long that Toki was half-sure that the man would be his gay awakening. Which, to get back to her earlier point, made it awkward to tell him about what was going on with her Discord server. Keigo and Toki talked without complex about sex but, like, from a scientific point of view. Joking about being turned on by someone was, well, different. More personal. They were mature, alright, but they were still awkward and inexperienced teenagers, alright?
Damn, puberty sucked.
But still. Weeks passed quietly, filled with training and thinking and learning. They were settling in a comfortable rhythmic, demanding but manageable, with challenges and progress and a satisfying kind of exhaustion each day. They worked on their Quirks, on their lessons, on their physical condition.
On the week-end, they didn’t sneak out as often as before. For starters, the weather was awful (spring was coming late). And it felt good to laze around all day sometimes. They played Nintendo, or they watched movies, or they laid on their beds like starfish, remaking the worlds with impassioned speeches. They talked about traveling to far-away places and building chocolate factories, or about cracking down on child-labor and completely changing the educational system to promote art and creativity. Toki waved her hands around with enthusiasm, and Keigo’s wings fluffed up, his golden eyes bright excitement.
The future seemed still very far away, but they were already making grand, deliriously optimistic plans. Their agency would be a skyscraper! It would have six balconies with French doors! They would have a toboggan inside to go from the top level to the bottom one. And they would teach take sidekicks as students to make them as strong and kind and confident as they could! And they would turn on corrupt heroes and make sure nobody abused their power! And they would speak in favor of marginalized groups, unlike the mainstream heroes who were so scared of dirtying their squeaky-clean image! Like… Quirk discrimination. Or even Quirklessness!
Because let’s be honest, they had it rough. Most Quirkless people lived in rural areas, far from all the villains and heroes agglutinated in big cities, hiding from this world that didn’t want to acknowledge their existence. And when they didn’t have this luxury, well… They lived in bad neighborhoods. Areas populated with, well, not villains, but people with villainous Quirks, mutant-Quirks, family ties to villains… Poor people. Unemployed people. Society’s rejects. Long story short: it was considered the perfect place for villains to recruit, because it carried a stigma. It was the kind of place where heroes didn’t patrol much. They would rather wander in pretty neighborhood where journalist had a camera at the ready! So when things went south in those places, which happened more often than in a non-super-powered society… Well, collateral damage was just a fact of life, and that only reinforced the vicious circle of poverty: leading to villainy, leading to discrimination, leading to even more poverty
Society often liked to forgot those inconveniencing truths. Like they would like to forget Quirkless people, if they could. Technically, twenty percent of the population was Quirkless, but it was a world-wide statistic. In some parts of the world, like Northern Europe, Central America, and parts of Africa, the majority of people were Quirkless. In fact, in Sweden, the most Quirkless country, only twenty percent of the population had powers! In Asia, where Quirks first developed, it was the opposite. Only about five percent of the population was Quirkless. And in Japan, this number shrank to three percent. Most of them were also old. Toki had looked it up. Those people were basically treated like they were disabled and they had to work twice as hard to prove themselves. A Quirkless child was regarded as an oddity, a congenital defect. Fucking bullshit. No wonder Midoriya’s self-esteem was shot…
Well. They lived in a strange word, wonderful and surreal and almost manic, but people were still people, always finding reason to hate each other. Beauty, money, family, religion, race, power… Quirks.
So much was revolving around Quirks.
“What would you be, if you couldn’t be a hero?” Toki one day wondered while they were cooling down after sparing.
Keigo blinked, and let himself fall ungraciously on the bench next to her. Feathers fluttered everywhere.
“I dunno. Why do you ask?”
Toki shrugged. “I was just wondering. I talk a lot about how I’m going to study astrophysics, but you never said what you wanted to do instead of this.”
She emphasized the last word with a sweep of her arm encompassing the gym, its fancy equipment, the park with its run track, and Hayasa-sensei who was comparing spreadsheets near the locker room.
“I never thought about it,” Keigo said slowly, considering. “I never had a chance to be anything else.”
That was just sad. Her friend bumped his shoulder against her, smiling:
“Aw, come on, don’t make that face. I don’t regret it. I think I would have ended there anyway, Commission or not.”
I wish you would have a safer passion, Toki thought. Something that make you happy without putting you in danger. But it would be selfish of her. Not everyone was a dreamer like she was.
She didn’t say anything. But she thought of how brightly Keigo shone, how hopeful and enthusiastic and optimistic he was, how great he could be, how great he was already. She thought about lies and poison and corruption and betrayal, about burned wings and shattered dreams, about blood on the ground and a sky without stars.
She would change the course of the story, of course. This wasn’t the canon-universe. Nothing was set in stone, especially not Keigo’s future. And yet, she worried. She knew what were the risks that he would face, personally. She couldn’t even tell anyone. She could only put her melancholy and her fear to paper, late at night, in her poetry notebook: and hope it was enough.
I think you will set yourself aflame
before you realize
that even you
cannot conquer the sun.
Rebellion sits well on you;
like a red coat
or the gilt gold of youth.
Oh, my love,
I do not believe we shall ever see
how old age look on you.
Wasn’t she allowed to be afraid? She had never ignored that the path they walked was a dangerous one. But she had chosen this. She had made her decision with her eyes wide open, but it had been a choice, she had had options. Keigo… Keigo had never been given the possibility to pick another road.
But he was happy, there. He belonged. And Toki had no right to wish that he would walk a different path. Keigo wasn’t someone meant to be stuck on the ground. Forbidding him to spread his wings just because flying was dangerous would be cruel. Staying safely put, away from the fight… It wasn’t who Keigo was. It wasn’t who Hawks was. He yearned for a wilder fate, for the thrill of danger or maybe the abandon of free-fall.
A ship in the harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.
oOoOoOo
Spring came early. In March, Hayasa-sensei decided that, now that Keigo and Toki were nearly fourteen, they weren’t as fragile as before: and he shifted the focus of their training from flexibility and speed to strength and endurance.
They would never be massive beefcakes like All Might and Endeavor, of course! The goal wasn’t to make them into bodybuilders. They both relied on speed more than on brute strength. But even short and lithe heroes like them had to be as physically fit as possible, and that meant doing push-ups, sit-ups, weight-lifting, cardio, skipping rope, and a bunch of things that Toki quickly grew to hate.
At least gym was fun. It was tiring, it made her sore and sweaty, but she felt strong and capable afterward. Weight-lifting and all that strength-training bullshit just made her feel gross and exhausted.
Keigo didn’t hate it as much as she did, but maybe it was because Hayasa-sensei was more careful in his training. Strength training couldn’t be done with young kids because kids’ bones needed to grow long rather than thick. Having heavy muscles could damage their skeleton. Now that Toki was taller, she didn’t have to worry about stunning her growth with her muscles. But Keigo had hollow bones: it limited how much his skeleton could endure. Hayasa-sensei was tailoring his training in consequence. For example, while he shared all of Toki’s sit-ups, push-ups and cardio exercises, he was exempted from weight-lifting. So unfair! It was the most boring and harsh exercise of the whole list!
Of course, they still had Quirk training. And their extra-curricular sports clubs. That was the good stuff.
Unfortunately, they also had bad stuff. Hayasa-sensei freed them earlier on Friday, and Okamoto brought them to another trainer. Someone to teach them real life. Someone to teach them how to really fight dirty, how to fight someone stronger. Someone who, in Okamoto’s terms, wouldn’t coddle them. Hayasa-sensei wasn’t the only one who believed that fourteen years old was the right age to remove the kid gloves.
And so begin one of the miserable times of Toki’s life.
“This will be your new teacher,” Okamoto introduced them stiffly. “Pay attention to what he says.”
The man in question didn’t offer a name. He was tall, scruffy, dressed in dirty baggy clothes that made him look like a scarecrow dressed in garbage bags. His hair was unevenly cut at the shoulders, and he wore a medical cloth mask. The only things visible were his eyebrows, his blood-shot eyes, and his massive eyebags. His hair, his eyes, his mask, his clothes, even his shoes: it was all black, tired, and dirty. And it smelled like roadkill. Gross.
Toki was polite, but she still had had hold back an incredulous grimace. That hobo was going to be their teacher?
“I’ll be back in two hours,” Okamoto said to the homeless guy. “Don’t damage them irreparably. And don’t hit them in the face.”
“Cash first,” the guy rasped.
He sounded like he had been chewing gravel. Okamoto’s jaw twitched, like a repressed grimace of disgust, but he still slid a hand in a pocket to retrieve a few bank notes. Keigo and Toki exchanged a wide-eyed look.
“Half now, half when you’re done.” He gave the money to the hobo, carefully to avoid touching him. “And remember, I want them to learn how to fight, not just get hit. Use your words. This is a lesson for you too.”
“Yes,” snapped the hobo, snatching the money and counting it. “And I’m so very grateful.”
His tone was straight-up venomous. Oh, boy, he really didn’t like Okamoto. Or their deal. It didn’t seem to bother Okamoto, though. He shrugged, gave Keigo and Toki a last disdainful look, then turned back and disappeared from the alley.
Yes, because this introduction had happened in a dirty alley behind an abandoned supermarket. It like the background of a post-apocalyptic movie: dark, muddy and deserted. Absolutely everything about this was giving Toki the heebie-jeebies.
“So!” Keigo cheerfully asked, once Okamoto was gone. “I’m Hawks. This is Quantum. What’s your name?”
“I don’t care, I don’t care, and not your business,” the man answered tersely.
His black eyes were bloodshot and mistrustful as he watched them coldly. Hands in his pockets, slouched against the wall, he looked like a drug addict trying to decide if he was going to mug them. How old was he? The height and built pointed towards someone young, maybe early twenties, but his general tiredness made him seems much older.
“Well we can’t call you ‘that guy’ forever,” Toki grinned to hide her unease. “No name means a nickname!”
“Like Hobo-san,” helpfully added Keigo.
Hobo-san sighed.
“Whatever.”
He took his hands out of his pockets. Then, without warning, his exhausted slouch turned into a lightning-quick attack, his fist crashing into Toki’s solar plexus at full strength.
It was like being hit by a fucking truck.
She flew back and opened her eyes on the ground, huddled around her stomach that radiated pain, retching. Her ears were ringing, she couldn’t breathe. Out of pure, animal instinct, she warped herself five meters away before raising her head, still heaving, desperately looking for Keigo… He was on the ground, too, cradling his arm, teeth bared in a cry of pain and defiance both: all of his feathers were raining down on the hobo, and for a second Toki was one hundred percent sure he was going to pin him down. But their opponent somehow somersaulted and avoided all the feathers in a crazy feat of agility, retreating a few meters away, before returning to his casual slouch. As if they weren’t hurt, angry, frightened, in pain.
Behind his mask, he looked like he was sneering.
“Pathetic.”
“What the fuck?!” yelled Keigo, furious.
Toki would have yelled, too, if she could get her breath back. She threw up bile and heaved again, acid burning her throat. Oh, gods, it was disgusting. Swaying, she got back on her feet, because staying down face to an enemy was stupid, then warped next to Keigo.
If they had to run, she needed to be close enough to grab him: and if it devolved into a fight, well, she certainly wasn’t going to let him face that dickhead alone.
“You didn’t evade, you didn’t block,” the hobo said, his tone cold and cutting. “And you immediately fell back on your Quirks to run away. Clearly you’re worthless as fighters.”
“We didn’t know you were going to attack!” spat Toki.
The hobo snorted, derisive. The sound made Toki’s blood boil in anger.
“So? You thought that we were just going to talk? Maybe braid each other’s hair? What a joke. Go somewhere else if you want to play at being friends. You’re supposed to train to be heroes. Life won’t pull any punches.”
“Geez, thank you for the philosophy lesson,” snarked Keigo. “Is that what you’re supposed to teach us?”
The hobo didn’t blink. “Among other things.”
“Like what?”
His dark eyes glinted dangerously.
“How to survive someone stronger than you.”
And that’s how Toki and Keigo were introduced to Hobo-san’s brutal brand of teaching. This man had issues, clearly. Each lesson was closer to a cage match than to an actual class.
The ground rules were simple. Hobo-san wouldn’t use his Quirk (Toki didn’t even know what it was). Keigo would remove all his feathers, except two that he was allowed to use as knifes or swords. Toki wasn’t allowed to teleport more than once every five minutes. That was it. The match started when Hobo-san attacked; it ended when he had enough.
In Hobo-san’s language, it usually meant ‘when everything hurts and you have hurled at least once’.
And then they did it again, and again, and again. It was only after a small eternity that Hobo-san arbitrarily decided on a break. A break, for him, meant dissecting their performance and tearing it apart, pointing all the flaws, all the times they hadn’t been strong enough, all the times they had attacked left instead of right, how they should have gone after a vulnerable joint rather than try to strike his face, and so on. He wasn’t insulting about it, only clinical and cold, and somehow it made it worse. Okamoto hated them, they knew it, they knew how to deal with that. Hobo-san just… didn’t care. He didn’t care about their flaws, about their progress, if they were in pain. He was apathic, always tethering between total indifference and cynical disdain. It was chilling.
He had two hours to kill and for those two hours, he just wanted to see how many hits they were able to take without crying uncle.
Not that he would have stopped. Toki was pretty sure he wouldn’t have. It was a gut-feeling. Hobo-san looked like the type of person to go on full-attack mode and to not back out until the other guy had stopped moving. He moved fast, he was ruthless and didn’t hesitate to punch kids like they were enemy. Shit, Toki had never felt as small as she did when a tall adult man wrestled her on the ground and half-strangled her. That had been a terrifying experience.
She knew, now, why Hayasa-sensei had been so insistent on sparring with them when they were young, until the reflex to freeze upon danger completely left their system. When you were afraid, that reflex came back. And freezing, when facing Hobo-san, was a terrible idea.
He never pulled his punches.
The first fight barely lasted two minutes. Then, when Toki and Keigo were both on the ground, aching all over and panting in exhaustion, Hobo-san shrugged, when back to his place near the wall, and cocked his head.
“Again. Do better.”
The next fight lasted a little longer, and the next, too: but it always ended the same way. That evening, Keigo and Toki went home limping. Their whole body felt like a giant bruise. Okamoto ushered them in the doctor’s office, and they go ice, bandages, and even a brace for Keigo’s wrist: but the next day, they were purple and blue and black all over.
Hayasa-sensei didn’t say anything. But when he saw them, his eyes went wide, then narrowed in the most terrifying expression of fury Toki had seen on his face. He coldly told them that training was suspended today, and left. Apparently he called Okamoto and yelled at him so loudly that the researchers all fled the building.
Not that it made a great difference. The next week, Toki and Keigo met Hobo-san again.
And again, and again, every Friday.
Hobo-san became a fixature of their week. Most of the time, he looked annoyed. Toki privately thought that he had to channel part of his frustration in their lessons. Maybe he just really disliked children? He didn’t like Okamoto (and Okamoto hated him right back), but Hobo-san showed him more courtesy than he had shown to Toki or Keigo.
Toki had a knot of anxiety like barbed wire in her stomach before climbing in Okamoto’s car to go to those lessons, but they still went. They had to.
They progressed. They were good at what they did, after all. Yeah, Hobo-san was taller and stronger and meaner and just plain better, but Toki and Keigo were fast and scrappy too. Keigo learned not to flinch at a hit, and to slash at vulnerable tendons. Toki learned how to roll and fall without getting hurt, and to get up even when she was shaking and heaving after a violent kick to the belly. They learned how to keep their face neutral even when everything hurt. They learned not to panic when they were strangled. They learned how to move despites the bruises and the pain, as if it was real fight and their lives depended on it.
They started landing a few hits on their opponent, too. A few kicks there, a punch or two, some scratches. Once, during their fourth lesson, Keigo slashed their enemy’s forehead to viciously that Hobo-san was blinded by the blood, allowing them to pummel him. At this point they were both snarling like two feral cats: Toki almost gouged out an eye. It was the first match they won.
It would stay the only one.
After that fourth lesson, Hobo-san slowed down. They still fought, vicious and harsh: like Hobo-san needed a punching-balls and they had just volunteered. But before or after the fights, and sometimes even in the middle, Hobo-san paused and started explaining things to them. Most of the time it was to criticize their performance. But he also gave them brief instructions, and very often demonstrations, on how to fight dirty. How real thugs fought, and how Quantum and Hawks would have to fight to defeat them.
They knew how to fight, all right. They both had martial art training, some boxing knowledge, and their spars with Hayasa-sensei had taught them how to think fast and strike without hesitation against a bigger opponent. But, as Hobo-san quickly demonstrated… they were no match for someone how fought dirty.
Meteor had taught Toki some tricks, like how to aim for the throat. But it was so long ago. She had mostly forgotten. It wasn’t instinctive. Hobo-san made it instinctive.
He knew what he was talking about, at least. He taught them how to gouge out eyes, how to grip the enemy’s hair, how to use their elbows and their knees, how to not hesitate before hurting the other. Villains didn’t fight fair. Yes, it was good to have a clean win, but sometimes you just had to settle for a win, period. Especially if you were short and fast instead of being big and strong, because you would almost never triumph in a pure contest of strength. You had to go not with the intent to gracefully subdue, but to hurt, to make the other go down and stay down, because if he got back up, you would die or at the very last suffer.
So they learned how to fight dirty. All the nifty tricks and sneaky attacks that were straight-up banned in sports were to be learned by heart. Like how to strangle someone with their tie. How to impede someone’s moves by pulling his clothes, like handcuffing them with their own jacket, or how to pants them to make them fall flat on their face. How to garrote someone with their own belt. How to pull hair until it came out bloody. How to slap ears so hard you damaged the eardrum. How to kick someone in the balls. Or worse, gripping their balls and twisting. It was the ultimate attack, apparently. Yes, it was gross to grab someone’s junk, but it was also a guaranteed win.
See, there was a thing in sports. Even in violent combats, guys always politely pretended that balls just… weren’t there. Because it was pretty much an instant kill-switch. They punched teeth out, they bit, they broke bones, they plummeted each other until they had internal bleeding. But a kick in the balls? It was a big no. They knew a simple hit here was game-over. Even a bulky man built like a weightlifter would turn the color of wet cement and pass out if you punched his junk. In self-defense, it was perfect for an immediate take-down.
“Don’t use it in front of cameras,” reluctantly said Hobo-san. “It’s bad press. But if you’re trapped and your life depend on it, you better be able to remember that. If you die because fighting dirty is beyond you, well, that doesn’t make you noble, it only made you a cretin. A dead one.”
“Jeez, you’re so inspirational, sensei.”
“Don’t call me sensei.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” childishly protested Toki.
Hobo-san raised an eyebrow, and it still managed to be intimidating enough that Toki shut her mouth. Her heartbeat picked up. Trying to provoke him usually led to a fighting lesson. You know, as a demonstration, since they clearly had enough energy to spare.
“What kind of hero are you to know that stuff?” Keigo interjected with feinted annoyance.
Hobo-san’s glare left Toki, and she breathed a little easier. That, too, was part of the lesson, although it was probably an unintended side-effect. How to use diversion, protect each other from their teacher’s focus.
“I don’t have a license,” Hobo-san retorted.
It may be an impression, but Toki had a feeling he was grinning nastily behind his mask. Like it was a joke of some kind.
“You don’t have a heroic license?!” sputtered Keigo. “Are you even qualified to be a teacher?”
“I don’t have a teaching license either.”
Keigo made an outraged noise. It seemed to amuse Hobo-san greatly. Then he shook his head, and added in a bored tone:
“Why, do you have criticisms about my class?”
“So many,” muttered Toki.
“Too bad. Take it or leave it. I’m supposed to teach you how to not die, not to implant some survival instincts in your defective brains.”
“Will do!” Keigo chirped, bouncing on the ball of his feet. “We’re smarter than you think, yanno!”
“Whatever. I hope I haven’t wasted my time.”
“You had something better to do?” Keigo asked with a grin.
Hobo-san ostensibly checked the time on his phone. It was an old bulky model, with a cracked screen and a chipped case that depicted either a cat or a garbage bag: hard to see with how scratched it was.
“Look at that,” he said flatly, putting his phone back in his pocket. “Lesson is over. See you next week. And do better.”
“See you next week, Hobo-san!” the kids chorused.
Okamoto was approaching to give Hobo-san his cash, and he rolled his eyes, but he didn’t protest the nickname. Considering that Okamoto was a real stick in the mud, always criticizing Keigo’s table manners or Toki’s foul language, it spoke volume of how he disliked their instructor. Still, he had picked him, and Hobo-san was extremely competent.
Maybe Okamoto disliked Hobo-san because he had a criminal background. That would explain why their mysterious instructor knew how to fight like that… And also why he accepted to teach brats how to gouge eyes out, no questions asked.
Honestly Toki would have expected a lecture from the guy on the first day. Something like ‘it’s a dangerous move, so only use it on villains’ or ‘never try that attack unless you really need to hurt the other’. Most of their instructors had done so. But well, most of their instructors had seen two rambunctious children and had expected them to use their new moves recklessly, like any untrained child would. But Toki and Keigo didn’t live normal lives, and so they knew how to restrain themselves. Civilians were fragile. They could be hurt. They had to be protected. It was a lesson that had been drilled in their skull by Hayasa-sensei since day one.
Anyway. Hobo-san never lectured them on how they had to restrain themselves and not use those dirty-tricks willy-nilly. Maybe he knew that they trained to be heroes and could be reasonable. Or maybe he didn’t care if they hurt someone. It was hard to tell.
Hayasa-sensei hated it. He never said it, but when he saw the dark purpling bruises all over their arms and legs, his jaw clenched and his eyes narrowed in fury. He was livid. Once, Toki had overheard him and Okamoto yelling at each other. The words ‘gratuitous violence’ and ‘child abuse’ were pronounced. Toki tried to not examine that thought too closely.
It was… very violent, true. But Hobo-san didn’t damage them. Not too much, anyway. No lesson had been as brutal as the first one: but then it was maybe because, for the first lesson, they hadn’t expected it. Nobody had ever come to Toki with the sole intent to hurt her as violently as possible.
Before meeting Hobo-san, Toki’s worst injury had been a broken ankle and she had immediately been healed and pampered. Hobo-san didn’t believe in pampering. Hobo-san hit them hard and fast again and again, and it wasn’t rare for them to leave the lesson black and blue from neck to toes. The only place he sparred was their face. It would have attracted too much attention.
Toki guessed that she had lived a sheltered life, when you thought about it.
That was why Hobo-san’s lesson were so necessary. Because all her life, Toki had had it easy. Her parent hadn’t beat her, her teachers had been loving, the physical violence she had encountered had always been tightly contained in warm dojo and short lessons where a teacher would coddle her afterward. She had been pushed, she had even been hurt, sometimes, like when Hayasa-sensei had accidentally broken her ankle. But she had never been pushed past her limits, past her comfort zone or her learning zone, straight into the too-much zone. That’s when you knew your limits were: their beginning, and their end.
And Hobo-san was… unfortunately, very good at that.
I mean, any adult man deciding to beat the shit out of a fourteen years old girl would be good at it, obviously. But said fourteen years old girl was also a little bit feral, and had training in various martial arts. It took a delicate balance between hurting and not damaging. For example, Hobo-san was careful to never break any bones.
Well. Almost never. Because he did snap Toki’s fingers, once.
It was mostly accidental: he had grabbed her hand, she had jerked away, he had twisted and… Crack. It hurt like a motherfucker. But Hobo-san didn’t even flinch. Like he heard fingers break like twigs every day. He didn’t even bat an eyelash when faced with a screaming girl and a boy hissing like an overprotective mother-hawk. He looked at the injury without a word, showed her how to bandage it with ice to keep the swelling down, and made her continue training until the end of their lesson.
Toki cried the rest of the lesson, of pain and fright and just plain old exhaustion, but Hobo-san didn’t stop. Didn’t even slow down. He just told her to keep up, or he would give her a real reason to cry: and Toki was too scared to disobey.
That was a lesson, too.
oOoOoOo
Lessons with Hobo-san lasted several months. During this time, the rest of their physical training was slowed down as much as possible, or even completely halted. Hayasa-sensei was visibly simmering in rage each time he saw evidence on their body of Hobo-san’s teaching. Hell, Toki couldn’t go to her usual sports club. If she took her shirt of, someone was going to call social services. Some weeks, there were bruises that were too clearly in the shape of a boot’s sole to pretend she had fallen down the stairs.
It was mostly bruising, but there was also a few scratches and road burns, too. They didn’t train on tatami, but in deserted alleys or empty parking lots. When they fell, they fell on the concrete. Jeans and jackets helped to protect them, but only to a certain point. Toki’s right knee had been scrapped raw after a bad fall, and she had limped for days. Even afterwards, there was still a faint but large discoloration there, where it had healed but left a scar.
They had to continue Quirk-training, still, but Hayasa-sensei took great pains to make it as soft as possible. Their strength training turned mostly to lifting weights and boring stuff like that, instead of interesting chases across the park. Toki was forbidden to do any gymnastics, but encouraged to practice her stretches as much as possible.
(They grumbled a little, of course. They didn’t want to be coddled. Okamoto’s cutting remarks, each time he picked them up, clearly showed his opinions: Hayasa-sensei was too soft, Keigo and Toki were just too weak to take it, it was a waste of time. But thinking back… Thinking back on it, years later, Toki would wonder if she could have kept going. Because it had never been question to stop. The training hadn’t stopped. Hayasa-sensei had slowed it down to a normal middle-school level, instead of pushing them like athletes training for the Olympic games: and considering how much their bodies were pushed and abused every Friday, it had been perfectly reasonable. Hayasa-sensei had to keep training them, or else he would probably be fired: but he also knew where to draw the line before breaking them.)
(Yes, when Toki would look back on this time, years later, she would feel very grateful to Hayasa-sensei indeed.)
Anyway. Okamoto also kept training them into… various Okamoto-stuff, actually. He taught them about team observational skills, about what to look in for a sidekick, who to pick a partner when several heroes were working together on an incident, how to communicate with others so you didn’t step on each other’s toes during a fight. He talked about Quirk analysis, public interaction, healthcare, resource management.
Shame that he was such a bastard. Sometimes he had very interesting stuff to say.
“Heroes rankings are a sham,” he explained with a sneer. “Can you tell me why?”
“It’s a popularity contest more than a grade of their efficiency,” Toki tried.
“Poorly worded. Hawks?”
“The criteria are bad and the evaluation method is unbalanced.”
“Not good enough. But it will do. There are three pieces of data used to rank heroes. The first one is their social contribution. It’s a fancy word to say number of people saved: and that number is very unreliable, because most bystanders go forwards and tell they were saved just to share a bit of their favorites hero’s spotlight. But it can also cover a hero’s involvement in current events. Appearances to charities, or taking a stance on a social issue that the public approve of, give you a bonus in this category. Brutality complaints and lawsuits, even hidden from the public, give you a malus in this category.”
He paused, giving them a second to absorb all that. Toki inwardly wondered how the bonus and malus worked, and how you could mix that with the number of people saved. She liked math, but there was math and there was just messing around with numbers.
“The second piece of data,” continued Okamoto, “is the number of cases solved. How many villains they arrested, how much help they gave to the police, how critical were they to ongoing investigations, how many people they protected with their own hands… That data only exists to favor combat heroes in the ranking. As rescue heroes prioritize saving people instead of chasing the glam of the fight, they usually get a zero in that category.”
“Endeavor is in the lead in that category, isn’t it?” Keigo piped up.
Okamoto frowned, annoyed by the interruption, but agreed: “He is.”
Toki blinked:
“He is? Not All Might?”
“That’s a common misconception. But no, All Might may be the strongest hero, but Endeavor gets between three and five times his workload depending on the time of the year…”
“Three to five times?” Toki gaped. “How is it even possible, physically?!”
Okamoto glared at her, not appreciating the constant interruptions. Toki raised her hands placatingly and mimed zipping her lips. Okamoto looked at her for a second, then condescended to answer:
“Endeavor works every day, all day, and get a considerable amount of work done. All Might has inconstant hours. He works all day but doesn’t close most of his cases. About half of the villains he arrests get back on the streets within the day, because the proper paperwork hasn’t be filled. He doesn’t participate in any investigations. The majority of the villains he arrests are usually already involved in a fight with other heroes: All Might end the fight, but since he didn’t do anything but swop in at the very end, the credit is shared and he’s not the one getting most of it… well, on his paperwork at least. The media,” and there, Okamoto’s lip curled in annoyance, “usually spin another kind of story.”
Toki raised a hand. Okamoto sighed: “What?”
“So the Number One is one big joke, is that what you’re telling us?”
“Are you stupid?”
Toki clenched her jaw. She hated when he took that condescending tone. The implicit insult, the sneer, gods, there were days where she wanted to strangle him. She saw Keigo glare at Okamoto, indignant on her behalf, but at least he had to good sense to keep quiet. Okamoto didn’t allow himself to be distracted by one kid mouthing off like Hobo-san did: their usual diversion tactics wouldn’t work here.
“No,” she forced herself to said evenly.
“You sure pretend to be,” Okamoto sniffed. “No, All Might isn’t a joke. He’s on another level. He’s an unstoppable force. He doesn’t fit in this category because he doesn’t play by the rules, and because it’s been at least ten years since there was enough super-villains around for him to be entertained. Car thieves and arsonists and drug smugglers are small fry to him. He will give a hand, eagerly, if he sees something like that happening: but he won’t look for it. All Might’s focus is on people like Toxic Chainsaw, who makes whole cities tremble. And yet, it’s only one villain. One fight. One point, while people like Endeavor arrest fifty more, and get the investigations done, and ties up loose ends, and in the end collect about one hundred points in the same amount of time. Is it clear enough, now?”
“Yes,” said Toki through gritted teeth. “It is.”
Asshole.
But well, you couldn’t deny it was instructive. Toki had no idea that the gulf between All Might’s statistics and Endeavor’s statistics was so wide. And All Might hadn’t even fought All For One yet! He didn’t even limit his time!
“Where was I?” mused Okamoto. “Ah, yes. And finally, the biggest criteria of all: popularity. How much merch did you sold, how high does the public rank you in term of likeability, how much do you uphold the values of a heroes, how often are you solicited by journalists, how many followers do you have on your social media? It sounds shallow. It is not. It’s how much people trust you. And it’s the role of heroes to be trusted. Not to arrest villains, but to keep the peace by assuring people that they are protected.”
So far it made sense, and Toki and Keigo both found themselves nodding along. That’s why limelight heroics existed in the first place: so heroes could be seen, so people knew that there were individuals looking out for them. After all, the main purpose of heroes was to make the public feel safe. It didn’t actually matter if they saved people, as long as the population as a whole felt reassured by their presence, and the villains didn’t get too cocky.
It was the difference between having a police officer in full uniform standing watch near a parking meter, and having a detective in civies looking for people who tried to park without paying. The detective may catch someone. But the police officer acted as a deterrent.
“Popularity is evaluated by more criteria than the two other variables combined,” Okamoto scowled. “It’s ridiculously complicated. Breaking the law or otherwise dishonoring the image of heroism automatically give you a malus. Being very visible, with publicity stunts and TV commercials, automatically give you a bonus… But the weight of popularity in the rankings is just plain ridiculous. It’s almost two third of the note. And of course, people who are already popular have an easier time having visibility and promoting their work, while the others are left struggling at the bottom.”
Logical.
Then Toki frowned, thinking about All Might’s unbroken streak as the Number One. If popularity weighted more in the ranking than the two other criteria, and that being already at the top gave you an advantage, then someone who was topping the charts wouldn’t be easily dislodged, even if his overall work wasn’t as good as other heroes…
“So,” Okamoto continued. “These three variables give each hero a number of points, with a max of a hundred, and that’s how the heroes are ranked. Look online the Top Ten Heroes from last year, with all their statistics. Their overall grade is at the bottom of each column, in red. You’ll notice that All Might has the perfect score, one hundred. He’s the only one is all heroic history. The others heroes never went past eighty-seven points.”
He paused.
“But if you compare each individual grade, you will notice something. Endeavor had the most powerful villains arrested, and the most people saved. Crust had the most involvement with the police, right after Endeavor… Best Jeanist had the most patrol time… Gang Orca had done the most community work… And so on. All Might worked less, fought less, and saved less people than any of the other Top Ten heroes. Either in number of cases solved or in number of people saved, his stats drop him from the top ten to the top twenty. Now that you know that: do you know why he’s still Number One?”
Keigo and Toki looked at each other, then Toki took a guess:
“Popularity.”
“Yes. See, you can do an acceptable job it if you think for a second.”
She ground her teeth. He couldn’t even give a compliment without being an ass, apparently. Ignoring her death glare, Okamoto continued:
“He scores a perfect popularity note, one hundred percent, thanks to a twenty-points bonus because he had kept that score for twenty years. Wild, isn’t it? No other hero goes past the thirty percent. They just aren’t universal enough, there’s always a local hero people feel closer to. But All Might is a national icon, so he doesn’t even have to appear on TV to be beloved by all. Look at the detail of his popularity score! He didn’t go on any TV show this year. He did two commercials, that’s it. He didn’t involve himself in any charity event, or visit children’s hospitals, or even put on the slightest of work to make himself marketable. The public opinion has built him a pedestal and he can’t physically step down from it.”
It was kind of sad, when you thought about it. None of All Might’s exploits were valued anymore, because it was always old news. Exploits were expected. All Might was an icon, a public good instead of a hero doing his job, and… it almost dehumanized him.
Toki wondered if he took pleasure in doing his job anyway. Or if he was too obsessed in finding and killing All For One. It shouldn’t be too far away. A year, two? Three, maybe, if Toki’s calculations were off.
She wondered if All Might liked what he did. But then she remembered a crushed building, and her father screaming, and something she couldn’t name twisted her stomach. Some days, she didn’t know if she liked All Might because he represented heroism and because he had stopped Meteor: or of she hated him for those exact reasons. Besides, didn’t make her a hypocrite? She had been the one to sell out Meteor in the first place.
She had known that her parents were going to stop loving her at one point, that they were going to crash and implode. It had seemed… simpler, to burn her bridges first. To do it now, to protect as many people as possible. To save the people her parents would kill, but also to save herself from the inevitable fallout.
It had been years, now. Why couldn’t she forget and move on?
Then Okamoto glared at her, and she focused on the lesson. The past should stay in the past. She already had her hands full with the present.
________________
< ShootForTheStars : did you know that Endeavor does FOUR TIMES more stuff than All Might (investigations, arrests, rescues, everything)? And he’s still stuck as Number Two?
< ShootForTheStars: just learned it and I am in shock. I had no idea that he did THAT MUCH.
< ShootForTheStars: now I feel a little bad for him
< ShootForTheStars: I mean I get that popularity is important, and that All Might is more popular because people feel safer with him and his big smile than with Endeavor’s perpetual scowl, and trust is important!
< ShootForTheStars: but at that point it’s just ridiculous.
> EndeavorSucks: yeah tell me about it
> EndeavorSucks: All Might is a goof, too. Having good intentions is great but come on people LOOK AT THE FACTS! The numbers!!!
> PinkIsPunkRock: oh are we dishing on All Might today?
> PikaPika: looks like it
> PikaPika: I approve the goof part, too
> PikaPika: he always seems a little surprised by other heroes’ standoffish attitude, like he doesn’t get that maybe people don’t enjoy when he shows up and steal their thunder?
> PikaPika: All Might doesn’t act arrogant but sometimes he looks like he’s taken aback by the lack of praise
> NotOnFire: I would rather say that he’s like a big dog that just can’t understand why not everyone wants him to jump up on them all the time
> PikaPika: xD
> ThisIsFluffy: I’m persuaded that part of the reason All Might is Number One is the costume
> EndeavorSucks: I know, right?!
> EndeavorSucks: it’s so TIGHT
< ShootForTheStars: they both have skintight costumes? what’s the difference?
> NotOnFire: ??????? seriously?!?!
> PinkIsPunkRock: STARS
> PinkIsPunkRock: even I see it!
> EndeavorSucks: are you joking Stars?!?
> ThisIsFluffy: [mentally make a tally in the column ‘Stars is ace’]
> PikaPika: [mentally make a tally in the column ‘everyone on this server is a pervert’]
> PinkIsPunkRock: 🤣
> EndeavorSucks: so
> EndeavorSucks: Endeavor’s costume is tight, alright (gods, it’s SO TIGHT), but it’s an outfit. It has texture, different materials, there are folds and creases, there’s still some things left to the imagination
> EndeavorSucks: but ALL MIGHT’s
> EndeavorSucks: that thing is painted on!!!
> EndeavorSucks: I mean, we would see if he had a third nipple! It’s that bad!
< ShootForTheStars: I never noticed
> NotOnFire: you never noticed?! Stars. You can see his ass crack.
< ShootForTheStars: 😳
> ThisIsFluffy: hence the popularity
> PinkIsPunkRock: you’re so right
> PinkIsPunkRock: you know what it means? To beat All Might… to finally become Number One… there is only solution for Endeavor…
> EndeavorSucks: … omg
> PikaPika: of course!
> PikaPika: the obvious solution is for him to dress like a pinup!
< ShootForTheStars: AFHJAKAKAG
> ThisIsFluffy: I would pay good money to see that
> EndeavorSucks: oh, me too
< ShootForTheStars: I’m traumatized.
________________
The days passed.
Each time their bruises yellowed and started healing, they got a new collection. Hayasa-sensei refused to amp the difficulty of their Quirk training, despites Okamoto’s snippy comments. Tension were high at Naruto Labs. Hayasa-sensei and Okamoto were at each other’s throat, constantly, and everyone knew it. Keigo and Toki were well-aware that they were the source of this argument, or rather: Hobo-san was.
Most of the researchers sided with Hayasa-sensei. They were civilians, violence made them uncomfortable. And even if they didn’t see the training, didn’t see the progress, didn’t see how hard Toki and Keigo fought back and how much better they were than at the beginning… They saw the marks left on them, and it made them squeamish. Violence against children always made people ill-at-ease.
Toki didn’t have the right words to explain that they weren’t exactly children anymore, and that they weren’t victims, either. It wasn’t child abuse. It was training. Brutal training, with a grown man repeatedly hitting them until they threw up and sometimes even cried (mostly Toki: she had never seen Keigo cry, not even once): but training all the same.
And they learned, and that was the main thing, right? How to roll with the punches, how to keep standing even when they were wrung out, how to resist mentally to pain and exhaustion. As a side-effect, and maybe not an unintended one, they learned how to stay cocky and confident even when the most pressing thing on their mind was the fear of incoming pain.
It didn’t help that their teacher understood psychological warfare on an intuitive level. (Which was a nice way of saying that he was scary as hell.)
But still. The researchers didn’t like it. They glared at Okamoto, and it was pretty obvious that he was on his own in this. But Okamoto wouldn’t be Okamoto if he bowed in front of adversity. He continued to bring Keigo and Toki to training every Friday.
Toki had overheard some researchers make bets on how long Hayasa-sensei would help until he snapped and did something rash to put an end to this farce. It made her a little morbidly curious to see what Hayasa-sensei would consider something rash.
“I can’t wait for Hobo-san to get ran over by a car,” groaned Keigo.
It was so out of character that Toki, laying on her back on his bed, twisted her neck to look at him with a raised eyebrow:
“Woah, homicidal much?”
“Maybe a little,” he confessed. “I hate this, you know? He’s always harder on you.”
It was true, Toki realized. They both got hit, but Keigo… Keigo had hollow bones. Bird’s bones. Hobo-san grappled him, threw him away, gripped him, rather than punch and kick. Keigo always went home with just as many bruises as Toki, but from an external point of view, Toki took more damage, because she took more direct hits.
“And we can’t do anything,” Keigo continued mulishly. We can only wait until Okamoto decide we’re done with this lesson. It’s been four months! Maybe he will make us do it for the whole year.”
Toki sighed, and crossed her arms: “Counterargument. We could wait until Okamoto get tired of that game, or we could act. The fact is, we have two options. One of them is safe, legal, and healthy, and will have lasting long-term benefits. The other one is fun.”
“… Tell me about the fun one.”
“Simple.” Toki smiled, wide a slightly feral. “I’m gonna need a knife.”
So, in July, instead of just cowering at taking it, Toki and Keigo escalated.
Once again, thinking back on that moment, Toki wondered how they had survived that long. It clearly hadn’t been a good plan, from start to finish. They had learned about knife-fighting from Hobo-san already. His advice had pretty much boiled down to: ‘A knife fight is like chess. Chess with pain. So think three moves ahead and stab them in the stomach.’
Great advice. Would 100% not recommend.
The fights started as usual. One round, two rounds, three. Each time, Toki and Keigo were flung away like ragdolls, slammed against the ground or against a wall, kicked and punched. They gave as good as they got, but it was infuriating, to unleash all of their fury on someone and see that guy just brush it off. They were strong! They knew they were strong, and agile, and fast, and dangerous! And yet Hobo-san was physically stronger, faster, had a longer reach.
But this time, Toki had brought a knife.
It wasn’t exactly allowed. It had just- never been specified in the rules. So she hid a knife in her sleeve, and during the fourth round, without having to coordinate, Keigo and her attacked from two sides. Keigo slashed, Hobo-san kicked, Toki went high… there was a split second where she had a shot, and she slashed at his face like she wanted the knife to sink a foot in his skull and rip half his face.
He wore some kind of protective gear around his throat: the neck of his jacket was cut but the blade ripped on the protective clothes wrapped there, and deviated enough that Hobo-san didn’t lose an eye. The blade still cut through his cloth mask, his cheek, his eyebrow. Blood splattered on Toki: and yet Hobo-san had already gripped her wrist and twisted, and when she brought her other hand to scratch at his face, rip and claw and hurt, his other hand closed around her neck and slammed her against the wall with bruising strength.
For a single second, they stayed immobile, gaze locked. The cloth mask, cut in two but vaguely held in place by Hobo-san’s high collar, fell enough to reveal the unamused twist of his mouth. The cut on his cheek was bleeding abundantly. His eyes were as dark and cold as the first day. Unimpressed.
“Do better,” said Hobo-san.
For an instant, between one breath and the next, Toki hated him from the deepest part of her soul.
Then Keigo attacked, gold eyes murderous, and Hobo-san had to dodge. His hand on her neck released his grip, and Toki’s feet feel back on the ground. She wheezed, then bared her teeth. Blood was splattered all over her face like crimson freckles, and her ember-like eyes blazed with anger. If she had any breath left, she would have told him to go fuck himself.
If I had been the kind of child my parent wanted, you would be dead, she thought wildly.
They didn’t win that match. Maybe it was for the best. It was becoming increasingly brutal, and now that Toki had introduced weapons to the game, it was only a question of time before Hobo-san brought his own. He already did enough damage like that.
When they went back to Naruto Labs that evening, Toki had a purpling necklace of bruise all around her throat, in the shape of Hobo-san’s fingers. She looked like someone had tried to strangle her. For days afterwards, her voice was the croak of an asthmatic frog.
It wasn’t her face, as per Okamoto’s instruction, but it was close enough. Maybe Okamoto decided it was time to call it quit before irreparable damage was done. Or maybe Hayasa-sensei reached his breaking point and went above Okamoto’s head, making the President intervene. Or maybe someone had enough, and ran over Hobo-san with their car. Toki didn’t know.
But it was their last lesson with Hobo-san.
(And Toki breathed a little more easily.)
Notes:
And this is the end for our acquaintance of Hobo-san! For now, at least.
But yeah, you can see more clearly why Toki does not like him. And you can ask yourself, "hum, i wonder what was happening in canon around the same time?"
The next chapter has also been reworked and expanded, so you should go and check it out =)
Chapter 12: The accident
Summary:
Toki, aged fourteen, discover puberty. Teenage drama. Having a crush. Having dreams. And also : what it mean to massively fuck up.
Notes:
I'm back ! With a new chapter. Ending with a cliffhanger even !
EDIT 15/08/2022
So, too many things happened in this chapter. Hobo-san; the tension between Okamoto and Hayasa-sensei; the lessons with Okamoto at various places to make Toki understand the importance of the civilians behind the scene; her compassion and feeling of inadequacy when confronted with the people in the homeless shelter... I wanted to develop too many things, and as a result, i didn't develop them enough !
So. This chapter is still called "The accident" but it's actually the second half of the chapter that was previously "The accident". It's more complete, there are additionnal dialogues, additionnal scenes... Even additionnal poems, too =)The first half is in the previous chapter, that had been reworked too, and reposted under the name "How to fight dirty". It's the part about Hobo-san, mostly. So read that chapter first!
Anyway. Good reading =)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
THE ACCIDENT
Their lessons with Hobo-san had lasted a little over four months, and yet, it felt like a small eternity. It was July when they saw him for the last time. As soon as they were done with him, it was like a weight had been lifted from everyone’s shoulders at Naruto Labs. The researchers were more cheerful and Hayasa-sensei even had a spring in his step.
He left them some time to recover, but soon enough, he upped their strength training. He made them run and jump and fly all day long. Toki didn’t suffer much chest pains anymore, but in the rare occasions where it happened, it felt even more stabbing and painful than before. It was always unpredictable, seemingly randomly.
Toki tried to find a common denominator but she couldn’t quite manage. Maybe it was the total distance she jumped in one day? The days where she used her Quirk the longest usually ended up with a feeling like a cramp near her heart… But there were evenings where it got worse, so much worse it felt like have a knife trust between her ribs. It never lasted more than five minutes, but gods, it fucking hurt. Should she… talk about the doctor about it? But to say what? It hurt sometimes, but not right now? It didn’t stop her from functioning. Toki would feel a little ridiculous, complaining about that. Maybe it was just some of the bruises left by Hobo-san that took longer to fade.
She would live with it. She didn’t want to be a baby about it. You had to sacrifice some comfort to reach the top.
You had to sacrifice things constantly to reach the top.
Toki tried not to think about it too often, of the things she had lost. The people she had lost. It had been her fault. She had no right to complain. She had lost her parents, but she had lost also part of herself, that day. The knowledge she was a good daughter, that she was worthy of her family’s love. Her safety. And later, she had lost her freedom, too. The possibility to create strong, meaningful bonds with strangers. Oh, she didn’t regret it. It had been a fair trade. She had gotten strength and power, in exchange. She had gotten Keigo.
And yet. Sometimes, she thought about it. That was all.
we’re all killers.
we’ve all killed parts of ourselves
to survive; we’ve all got blood on our hands.
something somewhere had to die
so we could stay alive.
Anyway. Life went on. Soon after, they were off to summer camps.
That year, Toki went to a traditional Japanese temple for two weeks in July. She couldn’t even begin to guess why Okamoto had thought it was a good idea. Sure, it was interesting. But seriously, learning about traditional kimono, flower-pressing, and tea ceremony?! What use would it be for her as a hero? Geta were impractical to walk in, kimonos were stiff and restricting, and Toki hissed like a feral animal if anybody tried to touch her hair. Really, the Girls Scouts had been so much better!
Was it some sort of infiltration training? If that was the case, Toki clearly didn’t have the temper for it!
At least, in August, she was with Keigo. In July, while Toki had been playing dress-up in traditional clothes, Keigo had been sent to volunteer at a rehabilitation center for young villains. Honestly Okamoto should have switched their assignment! Keigo was so much better than Toki had playing pretend. And Toki was interested in social issues!
Anyway, what was done was done, too late to worry about it. At least their other summer camp, in August, was better. They didn’t go to a beach camp this time (too bad!) but camping in the forest. It was fun. They couldn’t play at being arsonists, though. But hey, they made a few friends, they explored, they grilled marshmallow, they hiked up a mountain, they swam in streams, and all in one, they had a pretty good time.
Summer camp with fourteen years-old of both genders was still a wild experience. Most of the time, they were normal people. They hiked, complained, had wildly bad ideas to climb high rocks, played in the mud, laughed loudly, talked about favorites movies. But there were moments where they were just so… high-strung? Maybe they were horny, or emotionally tense, but sometimes things just snapped.
Honestly, it gave Toki whiplash.
And all that tension between boys and girls or, occasionally, girls and girls or boys and boys! Seriously. It was mind-blowing. There were less swimsuits than on the beach, so you would have expected less giggling, but still, boys teased girls and girls snickered at boys.
Even if Toki and Keigo weren’t as baffled by those behaviors as before, they still couldn’t quite get into it. Toki was starting to wonder if maybe she was asexual. She liked Keigo, but most of her attraction was platonic… Probably. She was a hormonal teenager, so yeah, she knew what it meant to be horny. By there was a difference between attraction (when your body said ‘I want that one!’) and libido (when your body said ‘I want it right now!’). Toki looked at all those pretty strangers her age and yes, even if they were pleasant to look at, even if she could imagine kissing or cuddling… There was nobody that turned her on.
Maybe it was because she just was a late bloomer. She was more developed intellectually than physically. And besides, fourteen was a little young to have the irresistible urge to climb someone like a tree!
She didn’t dare to ask Keigo if he was in the same place, but she did notice he didn’t state any preference when questioned about his taste in girls by his peers. Oh, Keigo wasn’t a prude. He joined in the laughter and the jokes easily. Toki did, took. But a lot of girls picked a boy to fawn over, and boys seemed to unanimously declare one girl to be the prettiest one… and neither Keigo nor Toki could really see the point.
Why was it so important to know people found you attractive? Why was it so important to have a crush and have it be a cornerstone of your identity? Why was it so important to vocalize it, to advertise it? Especially if being emotionally exposed made you feel terrified, inadequate, as if everybody around you was going to point and laugh? As if social disproval was the end of the world, crushing you by the throat, making you feel cornered and worthless?
It was a weird mix of self-esteem issues and identity issues, mixed with existential angst and a lot of social anxiety. Toki felt a lot of kindship with those teenagers, because she felt like that, too… But it was safely locked up behind her self-control, and made less scary because of a practiced self-awareness. She was more aware of what was going on in her head… And more confident in her own worth, independently from the others’ gazes. But normal preteens who hadn’t grow up as fast as Toki and Keigo, and they probably didn’t have those coping mechanism. Toki and Keigo always felt a bit apart. More grounded than their peers, who were so easily swept away by a flurry of emotions.
That didn’t mean they were always mature. They were just mature in different ways.
“I’m pretty sure that girl was flirting with you,” Toki grinned at Keigo while they were assembling a tent.
He made a face:
“I wasn’t sure. She just asked questions about birds with a very weird intensity, sitting so close that I could smell miso soup on her breath. It was awkward more than anything.”
Toki swallowed back laughter. Keigo had a great poker-face, effortlessly relaxed and charming, but when his gaze had caught hers, his expression had briefly shifted into a wide-eyed cry for help. That was Toki had pretexted she needed his help assembling her tent, actually.
“I could tell. What did you tell her about birds anyway? We’re in the mountains. If she wants an ornithology lesson, she should ask one of the camps counselors.”
“Hey, we were talking about city birds!”
“Like pigeons? Gods, she must really like you to listen to you talk about it for fifteen minutes.”
“Hey, don’t badmouth pigeons. They’re actually nice. People are always mean to pigeons and call them flying rats, but it’s not their fault that humans domesticated them and they lost their use for them, you know?
“I know,” Toki admitted. “The pigeon was once a dove, and then we built our filthy empire up around it, came to hate it for simply thriving in the midst our decay, came to hate it for not dying.”
Keigo blinked once, owlishly. Toki turned crimson. She hadn’t meant to go all poetic on him. But he didn’t laugh. Instead, he cocked his head, a small smile on his lips.
“Yeah,” he said softly. “Pretty much.”
Toki turned away, her cheeks warm, and cleared her throat. She desperately looked for a way to change the subject, and settled on:
“I used to talk to pigeons when I was a kid.”
Keigo snorted. “For real?”
“Yeah. What, do I seem weird to you?”
“Since the day I met you.”
“Rude! And to say that I was happy to have found another pigeon to talk to.” She gestured at him.
“I resent that,” Keigo said cheerfully in a tone that was anything but resentful. “But to get back to our earlier point, no, we weren’t talking about pigeons. I’ll have you know that there are plenty of birds in the city. Even hawks!”
“That’s because humans encroach on their territories. Everyone knows that birds would rather live in mountain habitats or in forests, where it’s calm and remote. Where else can a murder of birds—”
“That’s a crow-exclusive term,” Keigo sniffed with disdain.
“Fine, fine: where else can a large flock of flying pillows filled with hatred gather together and hone their hunting skills? In the city they might get hit by a police helicopter or strung up in an electric line at any moment.”
“Only if they’re bad at flying,” retorted Keigo.
“You’re right. Birds bad at flying can also get stuck in trees like you.”
“That happened once, how dare you.”
Toki cracked up, laughing so hard she barely managed to correctly tie to last cord in place. The tent was up, and she took a step back to admire her work. Keigo huffed, and they wordlessly went to install the second tent (his) next to hers. After a few seconds of silence, Keigo seamlessly resumed their conversation:
“Smart birds can spot a trap. It’s not hard to see an obstacle from a distance, and the great thing about the urban habitat is that if one option doesn’t work out, just nest in another chimney! To say nothing of the convenience. I mean, the calories saved on commuting. Much-needed nutrients that the baby birds could use, instead of fueling flights to and from the nest.”
“It’s called migration, with animals. Not commuting.”
Keigo waved a hand, engrossed in his passionate defense of the city habitat:
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. Consider the urban jungle! The unexplored heights, just begging to be lived in! A diversity of prey, exciting hunting grounds, soaring above the heads of all the mindless drones confined to the ground below!”
“So you’re a city bird,” she said mildly.
“And you’re not?” he challenged her.
Toki took a moment to consider it. Yeah, she liked their escape during summer camp. The beach, the mountains, the forest, the remote monasteries, the open space, the calm. But it was in the city she felt the most at home.
Tall buildings, high rooftops, busy streets, a dense crowd, the sheer concentration of shops and hobbies gathered close together. The proximity meant nothing to someone who could warp at will, but there was something nice in having it all clustered together: in not just being close to what you wanted, but also having the things you wanted all close together, influencing one another.
“Yeah, I suppose I am.”
“Damn straight.” He paused, and blinked, looking down at his half-installed tent. “Wait, why am I missing a sardine?”
“Because city birds suck at foraging in the mountains?”
“Hey!”
They both turned to see one of the guys from the camp wave at them from a curve in the path, leading from their campsite to the nearby stream.
“We’re going bathing! You’re coming or what, lovebirds?”
Keigo and Keigo exchanged a lightning-quick glance. It wasn’t the first time they were teased about dating, and they had quickly found out that refuting the accusation only made people more eager snigger and laugh about it.
It was another thing that didn’t really talk about, either.
“Yeah, we’re coming!” Toki yelled back. “Keep your hair on!”
It hadn’t escaped Toki’s notice that they had a harder time mingling with their peers. They always stayed together, even when they were in a group. They just didn’t have as much to say to strangers, while together they never ran out of conversation. Lovebirds indeed.
She knew she loved Keigo. She just wasn’t sure if she was in love with him. He was her best friend, her family, her home. She adored him. She wanted to spend her life with him, and the idea of losing him made her want to burst into tears.
But that didn’t mean she was in love. She didn’t know if her feelings were romantic in nature. They didn’t have to be.
What was romantic love, even? Maybe Toki was aromantic. Her only reference for romance was her parents’ relationship, and… they had been happy together, true, but that was also the problem. They had been so happy together that they had been callous and selfish. If romance turned Toki into them, she wasn’t sure she wanted it.
Whatever. It was a problem for later. She wasn’t even fourteen. She had all the time in the world to figure that out.
So.
Summer camp was nice. They had fun. But they didn’t made friends like they used to, the previous years. Not that they had ever kept the phone numbers or the postal address that their summer acquaintances gave them: it was nice to have such a good relationship with the other kids that they gave them a way to keep contact, but neither Keigo or Toki were allowed to actually keep contact with these civilians. Would they even want to? They lived in too different worlds.
Those civilians had never had to train until their legs trembled and their breath wheezed. They never had to endure Okamoto’s insults or Hobo-san’s beatings. They didn’t study situational recon and tactical awareness, they didn’t immediately calculate the dangers and catalogue all the exit when they entered a building. Maybe some of those civilian kids dreamed of being heroes: but they didn’t know what it meant, not really. The training, the hardships, the secrecy, the loneliness, the struggle. Limelight heroics, even the most glamourous parts of it, were always anchored in a grittier reality.
Toki didn’t use to think so much about it. But as a side-effect of seeing her peers grow up, giggle and enjoy their teenagerhood, she couldn’t help but think about her own maturity.
Anyway. Both heroes-in-training came back from their summer camps thoughtful and solemn. They had fun, yeah, but they felt more like grown-ups now, and it seemed that they couldn’t quite grasp their childhood’s carelessness anymore.
Even when they enjoyed their vacation, they noticed problems, they asked themselves questions… The part of their brain used to be pessimistic didn’t turn off anymore.
Gods above, being an adult was like that, all the time? It probably sucked ass. Toki wanted a refund! She didn’t remember that from the Before. Granted, she didn’t remember anything concrete from Before, but still! Adulthood was a scam and she should have been fucking warned!
Well at the very last one good thing came from that summer: she finished her poetry notebook. It was now filled to the very last page. She almost felt something like melancholy when she wrote the final word of her last poem.
“what is grief if not love persevering”
But what about when the grief and love
are happening at the same time?
how do you grieve
something that’s still alive?
how do you love
something that has always been dead?
and the answer is just:
intensely.
She was thinking about Meteor when she wrote it. She usually thought about her parents, when she wrote about grief. Her mom, who was dead: and her dad, who wasn’t but may as well be, and the fact that he wasn’t made it so more painful. There would be no closure, here.
How strange… Almost six years had passed. So much had happened, Toki herself had become a completely different person: but it was still that man that haunted her wayward thoughts, as if he was still just a room away.
She had only known him for a little over a year. But still, she couldn’t forget him. She had spent so much time with him at the hideout, hopelessly pulled in his gravity, orbiting around him like every member of the Crew. His big feral smiles, his tall frame, his glowing eyes. How he filled the room with his presence. How he stood so strong, so solid and reassuring, sometimes; and how he laughed, a crazed glint in his eyes, at the prospect of violence. How he softened for the people he loved, always. How he made himself quieter, still sharp, but sharp like a razor blade instead of like a knife, not as good at killing but just as capable of wounding.
He had scared her, he had made her angry, but he also made her feel safe and loved. It was so unfair that he could have such an important place in her life when Toki wanted nothing to do with him. She wasn’t Toki Taiyōme anymore. Why was she still haunted by her father?
She shut the notebook. She put it away in her bookcase, near her astronomy illustrated book and her Harry Potter saga (which had stayed untouched for the past four years, but that she couldn’t resolve to give away). She took a spare, blank notebook she was keeping in store just for that, a blue and sliver one with tiny wisps of color treading on the cover, and started with another poem.
The terrible things that happened to you
didn’t make you you.
You always were.
It isn’t the storm
that makes the ocean dangerous.
It was only a notebook. She had plenty of others. Maybe this one would take ten years to be filled, like the first. Maybe it would take longer, because Toki would have less emotions to put on paper. Or maybe it would be faster, because she would have lots to write. Who knew? Who cared? In the end, it was only a notebook, and her poetry didn’t concern anyone but Toki herself.
oOoOoOo
In the winter of the year 2222, after Toki’s birthday but before Keigo’s, there was a terrible villain attack on Fukuoka. It was a villain with a flame Quirk, and the media nicknamed him Hellmaker. Fire rained down and flames devoured whole buildings like a scene straight from a nightmare. Endeavor was called in as soon as it began, while All Might kept away, raging about not being fire-resistant. Dozens of people were burned alive, dozen more suffocated in the smoke or crushed by damaged building, and hundreds were wounded.
Shirayuki, the strongest hero in Fukuoka, fought valiantly. But in the end, she was killed.
It was a gigantic blow to the public’s morale. Shirayuki had been cold but beloved, with her powerful Quirk and angelic face. And now, she was gone, just like that. All Might hadn’t come and saved them, and one of the most adored heroines out there had been murdered. Endeavor’s public approval skyrocketed following his swift response and how he had been the one managing to subdue the villain in the end (five heroes and seven sidekicks had been injured before his arrival), but it was the only positive thing coming out of this mess.
Toki and Keigo read about it online, grave and silent. So many people dead. The pictures of the city on fire looked like they had been taken from a post-apocalyptic movie. The sky had been blood-red, smoke reducing visibility, flames twisting as if having a life of their own. Where Endeavor had managed to corner and defeat Hellmaker, the road had melted, and there was only a charred crater left.
This disaster meant that Okamoto suddenly left their side for two full months, because he was busy doing damage control in Fukuoka. Toki wasn’t going to complain. Without Okamoto’s lessons, they could catch up on their homework, train, or just hang out on the rooftop.
They talked about the future, about heroes, about villains, about death and dreams and hopes and pointless questions. Endeavor’s popularity was on the rise, but he had no hope of surpassing All Might. It looked like he did, right now, but Toki knew better. All Might was too idolized. No mere mortal could compare. It was a hard pill to swallow for some, but it didn’t make it less true… Nor less dangerous.
Toki talked about it with Keigo, and with her online friends more often than not, but All Might wasn’t eternal. One day he would be just a little too slow, or too tired, and it would be then end. Maybe he would die, maybe he would be forced to retire, but the end-result would be the same… The Symbol of Peace would be gone, just as Shirayuki was. The public wouldn’t have the comfort of this idealized security blanket anymore. The criminals would feel emboldened, and the people more scared. It was the inherent danger of putting faith in the system with the rise and fall of a single person. Besides, in a general sense… It was dangerous to put the well-being of people on the shoulders of those desiring fame, and that was why heroes as a whole had to be watched carefully.
Toki tried to not think about Shirayuki.
She had met the heroine barely five years ago. They had talked, they had understood each other. And now Shirayuki was dead. Just like Sayuri. Alive one moment, gone the next, while Toki was miles away.
In the grand scheme of things, maybe it didn’t matter, maybe Shirayuki hadn’t been a relevant character… But she had been a real person. Someone with hopes and dreams. She hadn’t been kind, but she had been honest with Toki. She had told her ‘best of luck to you’ before walking away. She had seemed so strong and confident. It was hard to believe she was dead.
Hard, and scary, too, because Shirayuki had been so grown-up and capable. She had refused a loan from the Commission and fought tooth and nail to earn her place as a hero, to fund her agency with her own merits, and now… Barely a few years later, it was all turned to ashes.
Dead. Gone, forever. It was so unfair. Shirayuki didn’t deserve that. Toki had seen herself in her, just a little. A child sponsored by the Commission, orphaned (or close enough) at a young age, a bristling demeanor, a powerful Quirk, the way she refused to owe anything to anyone. Yes, Shirayuki had been what Toki could become. And she had been killed. She had been so strong, but still, she had found her match. It was a chilling thought. No matter how good you were, as a hero, there was always the risk of not coming home one day. Of fighting the wrong villain, facing the wrong Quirk, being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then you died. Just like that.
(Maybe Toki could have befriended Shirayuki later in life, if they had more time. They had had a lot in common when you thought about it. But Toki would never know, now. Shirayuki was gone. And inexplicably, Toki felt almost guilty about it. About now having known her better, about not having enough to remember. About not trying to learn more. About not trying to make her life easier. It was ridiculous, wasn’t it?)
Grieving for her mother had been hard. Grieving for Shirayuki felt different. Odd. Maybe it was part of growing up. It was like a weird, belated understanding that everything was fragile. Toki felt like she had touched the end of the world with her hands but then realized there was no true end: forever caged in an endless wishy-washy of emotions and events that affected her deeply, but ultimately have no acknowledgment of her, nor of her being. Thinking of herself as the main character now felt pretentious, self-centered at most. The world just was. Nothing lasted. Not even people. Toki, Keigo, Hayasa-sensei, the Commission, they could live and fight and try as hard as they could, but they were just existing in the same storm, powerless to do anything but steer their boat in the same direction, against the raging waves. The Sun, the Stars, the Moon, the vast emptiness of the universe… It didn’t care. It never had.
Life went on.
Christmas passed, then Keigo’s birthday, then the New Year. Kameko Sabira dropped by to say hello, and give them some updates on how things were going on in the outside world. Okamoto was still away. The anguish around Shirayuki’s death and Fukuoka’s attack was starting to calm down. But it had been a rough blow for the Commission. Shirayuki had been one of their best, and Fukuoka was notably difficult to manage. It had had a history of housing big gangs and once every three years or so, a big villain tried his luck a becoming the new face of Fukuoka’s organized crime.
(Another thing that Toki liked about Kameko-san: she always provided context, and in doing so she talked openly about the hidden stakes and secret agendas. Compared to Okamoto’s usual brand of secrecy, it was refreshing.)
“After you get your license, one of you will probably be stationed in Fukuoka,” Kameko told them bluntly while slipping her drink. “This city is a nightmare! There are plenty of heroes, but none of them are strong enough to be the unofficial protector of the city.”
“Is having an unofficial protector so important?” Toki frowned.
“Of course! It’s the face of heroism in a specific place. Japan as a whole has All Might, for example. Most city have a prominent hero to represent them, too. Endeavor in Shizuoka, Wash in Sendai, Yoroi Musha in Fukushima… It gives heroes a presence, a feeling of being more real, of being closer to the public. It’s how people are reassured. It’s what discourage the villains from acting out in the first place!”
Toki pouted, unconvinced, but Keigo was nodding approvingly:
“Yeah, that’s why popular approval is the most important metric for measuring a pro hero’s rank! Because it’s a hero’s task is to put citizens at ease!”
Kameko nodded very seriously, before finishing her cup and putting it on the table. She used a coffee mug, but Toki had seen her fill it to the brim with milk. This woman was really a cat.
“Yeah, but there is a shortage of strong heroes willing to move here. All Might is probably going to hang out in the city for a few months, to reassure people…”
Oh boy, Endeavor was not going to like that. Fukuoka was his triumph… But he had to go back to his agency, to control his territory. And as soon as he was forced to leave, All Might was going to swoop in and win’s people’s hearts immediately? That had to burn. Pun intended.
“… but it’s not a long-term solution,” Kameko continued, nodding. “All the strong heroes already have an agency, so if they moved to Fukoda, they would leave a vacuum, and if something happened, it would mean bad press for them. So, lower public approval…”
“… which mean lower ranking, lower pay, and lower price for their merch,” Toki completed.
Kameko-san raised her mug as if silently toasting her, grinning from ear to ear:
“Exactly! A few unattached heroes or glory-seeking sidekicks will probably try their luck in Fukuoka, but the Commission isn’t willing to bet on them.”
“And they are willing to bet on us,” guessed Keigo.
“Yup! You’re cool like that.”
Toki grimaced: “Doesn’t seem like much of a gift if super-powered villains show up regularly…”
“Don’t be a killjoy,” Keigo playfully nudged her. “Someone has to do the job, so why not us, since we will be good at it? Besides, high risk meant high reward! Pretty pictures, good public approval, climbing the rankings, and so on!”
Toki pretended to think about it: “Does Fukuoka has a planetarium?”
She immediately regretted her question, because she suddenly remembered her father telling her in a conspiring tone how he had grown up in Fukuoka, hanging out at the planetarium when he skipped school.
Her father had been born in that damn city. She had forgotten that.
“It has!” Kameko said delightedly. “I checked!”
She had? Aw, that was sweet. Toki sighed, feigning reluctance:
“Then I guess we can go there.”
In canon, hadn’t Hawks been based in that very city? It was basically fate. Toki didn’t know how she felt about making hers the city where her father had been born, but hey, it would be a fresh start. She didn’t associate Fukuoka with Meteor the same way she did with Tokyo or even Musutafu.
And just like that, their future affectation had been decided. It felt a bit bitter. But hey, it wasn’t as if Toki had any better ideas.
Anyway. Kameko left the following day, and a week later, Okamoto was back. He had eyebags bigger than his suitcase and his purplish skin now had a grey tint, and Keigo even told him he looked tired, which was nice-person talk for how many hours did you spend studying the inside of a toilet bowl. Keigo was an angel. Toki just pointed out that he looked like shit.
Nobody had ever accused her of being polite.
Still, she hadn’t expected Okamoto to glare at her and reply with a scathing comment about how difficult it was to manage the brutal murder of a young heroine he had known personally, whose death had been so horrific that there wasn’t even much left to identify her, and whose funeral had been turned into a media circus so other heroes could pat themselves on the back.
Toki was left frozen in horror, red with shame. She stuttered something like ‘sorry’, but Okamoto had already turned away, and she didn’t dare to speak up. In that instant, he seemed much taller and scarier than in reality. Even Keigo was rendered mute with shock.
Afterward, Okamoto didn’t mention it, and neither kid dared to bring it up again. But there was a stiff coldness in their conversations that lasted for weeks.
It wasn’t often that Toki put her foot in her mouth that badly.
Life went on. Toki was asked to ditch one of her clubs to play a team sport. Apparently, she didn’t pay enough attention to people who weren’t Keigo or Hayasa-sensei. Which, firstly, rude. Also, not true! She paid attention, she just did the job better with teammates she was familiar with! But whatever. Hayasa-sensei was the boss. So Toki gave up Krav Maga (she was violent enough) and took up baseball. It didn’t passion her, sure. But it wasn’t bad. Her teammates let her have her space.
And she got to have a baseball bat, so that was super-cool.
Not that she intended to hit people with it, but… She had learned how to use blunt weapons. Baton, staff, and a bunch of other stuff. She could easily twirl the bat in her hands to posture like a threatening delinquent. It was a thrill.
She was better with knives, actually. Not that she was allowed to use actually knives, but Hayasa-sensei taught her to use blunted ones. It was pretty cool. Hobo-san’s lesson about knives fight had been pretty blunt and boiled down at ‘if you’re in a knife fight, knife them first and then run the fuck away’, but it was nice to have some technique.
Not that there was much technique to be had. It was a knife fight. You would not have fine motor control. It was big movements and holy fuck and that’s it. But yeah, practicing dodging was a good skill to have at least.
Hayasa-sensei still followed his usual lessons’ plan, but Shirayuki’s death had apparently shifted Okamoto’s focus to heroic care. So during the following months, he taught them safety protocols again. He made them re-take first aids classes, then made them volunteer to animal shelters so they could see firsthand some blood and injuries (nobody in their right mind would allow kids to treat adult’s wounds, but animal shelters weren’t so strict). Once assured that they wouldn’t froze when faced with a mangled paw, a bloodied cat attacked by dog, or even a horse giving birth… And that had been an experience, honestly Toki had never expected to face that in her hero training… Okamoto made them visit a private clinic, then a police station, then a fire station, then a hospital. He made them memorize how they worked, how fast they could respond, how hero agencies optimized communication with them.
He made them volunteers almost every week in a different place. The first place was a morgue. Keigo and Toki weren’t volunteer there, but interns, working under the relative care of a disabused legist. It wasn’t awful, but it was… it was depressing. They saw dead bodies. The legist made them get out when he had to do autopsies, so at least they were sparred that: but they still had to move the corpses, fill out impersonal paperwork about the age and cause of death, clean up the scalpels that would be used to cut up these people.
The first day, Toki had to hide in the bathroom for a little while to just focus on calming her breathing and stop her hands from shaking.
But she could understand Okamoto’s reasoning. It was better for them to be confronted to death in that kind of setting, when it was over and done, instead of… an accident later on. A failure of their hero work. At least, now, they knew what a dead body looked like. How heavy it was, how it smelled. How it could be carved up in car accident, or ripped apart by gunfire, or badly burned by a fire Quirk.
How, sometimes, they looked like they were just sleeping, too. In Toki’s opinion, that was the worst time. The line between saved and not-saved was so much thinner here.
They spent less than a week at the morgue, cleaning and helping quietly after the legist two hours every evening until they silently climbed back in Okamoto’s car. Then Okamoto decided that the lesson had been learned, and they moved on.
The volunteered to other place, places filled with living, breathing people. A library that needed someone to do community service and clean the place: Okamoto used that time to make them run recon on all the visitors. Then there was a soup kitchen who needed help. Then a beach that needed cleaning. A supermarket that needed interns to do unpaid labor (a way to know who it felt to work in retail). Later, it was a triage center for donations related to Fukuoka.
And once it was a homeless shelter.
It wasn’t like the morgue, not at all, but it was one of the few times that Toki felt viscerally uncomfortable there. Keigo felt the same, she knew. They were… out of place, in their nice clothes, with their cushy lives, helping people who had reached rock bottom: because their help didn’t feel like enough. It was homework, and they would leave the next week. Oh, Toki and Keigo didn’t complain, but they didn’t like it.
She could see it in her friend’s eyes, how he burned to do more. Maybe she had the same look. In the homeless shelter especially, she had her heart in her throat and her hands were clenching sporadically, burning with the need to do something. She felt so useless. Unlike the work done in the triage center or at the beach or even at the library, it felt like she wasn’t helping at all. She carried stuff, gave supplies, but it felt so inadequate, like a drop of water in the ocean.
Several people in the shelter were fleeing domestic abuse, and Toki had wanted to go near them, talk to them, help them especially… But some part of her animal brain had slammed on the brakes and made her avoid them instead. Toki didn’t even know why. What she had lived couldn’t be called domestic abuse. It wasn’t even abuse. Just an unhappy homelife.
It was in those shelters that you saw the impact of discrimination the more clearly. People there had bad Quirks, villainous Quirks, dangerous Quirks. Some of them were also Quirkless. Older people, mostly. Often unemployed, often bitter.
Everyone knew that Quirkless people didn’t amount to much in society: but people didn’t ask themselves why. The answer was right there, staring them in the face. Of course they gave less to the economy in taxes: because employers were allowed to blatantly discriminate against them.
Worth was measured by what you can give back to society. Those with an inconsequential Quirk or no Quirk at all could only give back less, since what they could do, anyone else could too. A Quirkless individual in a career with a high earning potential could even be regarded as stealing the job from someone who is more able to specialize in that profession.
Toki had known it was bad. But there was something especially disheartening in seeing it up close, because… Most of the times, the evil that those people faced (Quirkless people, but also most of the other Quirked people in the shelter) wasn’t something Toki could fight. It was just the public looking elsewhere. Toki could fistfight a ninja, but she couldn’t halt the progression of a rot that ate at society like a cancer.
She felt at loss. She rarely dared speaking to the victims beyond what was necessary: she felt awkward, a stranger butting in their business, unable to help. A hero could only meddle because he could help. Someone who butted in just to gawk at strangers’ miseries was no hero.
Was it the lesson that Okamoto wanted them to learn? That no matter how hard they worked, they wouldn’t be able to help everyone? That even if they put criminals in prison, there would always be people slipping through the cracks? That they wouldn’t be enough?
That villains sometimes came from those very same shelters, and that what had pushed them on that path was the fact that nobody had reached out to them?
“You hate it too, don’t you?” she said to Keigo one evening, after getting back to the Labs.
He didn’t have to ask what she was talking about.
“Yeah,” he confessed. “I guess that I never thought about this facet of heroism, you know? How sometimes being a shining light isn’t enough. There are people deep underground that you can’t reach.”
“It’s not the fact that they are underground that’s the problem,” Toki countered hotly. “I knew those people existed before. My problem is that someone put them here, many someone, and it’s an evil I can’t punch in the face.”
Keigo made a pensive noise.
“You know, not every villain shows up on the street firing a homemade laser gun into the air. Most of them have normal faces and normal lives. You wouldn’t know them on the street if you passed by them. The worst of them think they’re just doing their job. They think that if someone, or even a lot of people, get hurt… it’s not really their problem.”
“Then what can we do?” Toki said, a little helplessly.
He shrugged. Keigo was the same height as her, but his massive wings shrugged him with too, making him seem bigger. Massive. Looming. Toki had always found it reassuring, the place that those large wings took: but right now they seemed more dejected than anything.
“Help those we can help. Give to others the means to reach those we can’t reach. Work until rankings and competition because meaningless, and people focus on being kind to each other instead of tearing each other down.”
A world where heroes would have time to relax, Toki thought. That was a definition she could get behind, actually.
“It seems hopeless, sometimes,” she confessed.
She hated it. She hated feeling so useless and inadequate. She hated that this shelter had to exist in the first place.
She thought about Meteor and the trail of bodies he had left behind him, about Sayuri and the way she had patted her head before sending her to play mule for the stolen money, about Homura and the way fire had rained on the heroes, about Fujio and the sound of his guns, about Nono and her mocking tone when talking about casualties, about All Might and a building crumbling, about Shirayuki and the way Okamoto’s face had twisted in rage and grief, and why, why did people have to do such horrible things to each other?!
“I know,” said Keigo. His golden eyes were warm and soft, reflecting the setting sun, and Toki thought of molten gold and shiny amber. “But I’ll be right beside you, every step of the way.”
Toki took his hand. Wordlessly, their fingers intertwined. Her heart was beating too loudly, and she had a lump in her throat.
“Promise?” she whispered.
Keigo squeezed her hand back.
“Promise.”
oOoOoOo
Spring passed slowly.
In a few months, they would be fifteen. It meant that it was their last year of homeschooling. The Commission needed them to be adequately socialized. They should be capable of hanging out with their peers all day, of being subjected to teachers who didn’t tailor their lessons to them but expected them to adapt instead. Of course, Toki and Keigo would have reduced classwork, to keep up with their training outside of school; but they would be expected to join a normal high school and blend in.
It would be a reputable high-school in Okayama: Koraku High School. The teachers were excellent, the students were all subjected to background check. It wasn’t a heroic school, but it catered to children of the elite. The education was top notch. It was on Japan’s mainland, almost two hours away from Naruto Labs. Koraku High School was a boarding school, so they would stay here all week, and go back to Naruto Labs for the week-end to train. They were expected to join at least one extra-curricular club. Toki had already decided to take up boxing. She would miss breakdancing, but hitting people in the face could be fun. Keigo was already going to attract way too much attention with his crimson wings, so taking a combat sport was pretty much out. He decided to take up chess or something like that, to be challenged intellectually.
Toki was, objectively, smarter than Keigo, if you looked to their grades and what they read. But funnily, in most strategy games, Keigo won. He was a sneaky bastard like that. Toki usually got lost pondering theoretical ramifications of such or such move instead of moving her damn pawn.
Maybe Toki should join the chess club, too. She would need to strategize more when she would be a hero.
Both of them were more intelligent than average, in any case. Hayasa-sensei once told them that they probably both had more neural connections than most people: it was a very common secondary mutation for people with telekinesis Quirk. Telekinesis was like a fifth limb that wasn’t controlled by your muscles but directly by your mind, after all. Those kinds of Quirks required a secondary adaptation that increased the number of neural connections in the user’s brain, so it could handle the added stress. Keigo had it for sure, to use his feathers… But Toki probably had it. After all, it was a mutation, not part of the telekinesis Quirk. Which meant that it could be passed down to children separately from the telekinesis Quirk. There had been study about it, showing that children of telekinesists usually had higher cognitive functions.
Toki hadn’t inherited Meteor’s Psychokinesis: but it was thanks to him that she had additional brain power.
She looked like Sayuri, physically, but when Toki looked at her reflection in the mirror, she couldn’t forget that she was Meteor’s daughter, too. Sayuri’s face, Meteor’s eyes. Sayuri’s Quirk, with Meteor’s power. Sayuri’s laugh; Meteor’s feral grin, Meteor’s thirst for the thrill of battle, Meteor’s all-compassing loyalty.
She was her parents’ daughter.
Then she squared her shoulders, always, and turned from the mirror, because what did it matter? What looked back at her wasn’t a patchwork of her parents’ identity, it was her. Her own person. The one who had saved Mihoko Shinsō, so long ago, by diving headfirst in a freezing cold river. The one who had fought Hobo-san, snarked at Okamoto, got beaten but got back up again and again. The one who had become Hayasa-sensei’s student, training and learning. The one who walked besides Keigo, the one who would become a hero by his side.
What if sometimes, when she wrote poems about her family, she made herself sad? There was so much more waiting for her.
So you didn't have the love you needed.
Big deal.
Let me tell you
about all the love you will have.
It will be bigger than the anger
and it will grow around the sadness.
It will drown you.
You will become it.
Her mother was dead. Her father, locked up in prison, had long stopped loved her. Toki was more than the memory of them. She was her own person, and she knew her own worth. She had paid dearly for every ounce of it.
Weeks then months passed. Okamoto dragged them to one emergency center to the next, teaching them what was going behind the heroic scene, what happened to victims after the heroes were done with them, how many people had to work together to make this society turn round. With time, with meeting different people and contributing to different things, Toki learned to accept that she couldn’t solve every issue. Sometimes her help was inconsequential, but it was helping all the same. It was humbling.
It was comforting, also, in a sense. Well, maybe comforting wasn’t the right word. Horrible things still happened. But people went on. They helped each other. They cared. They always extended their hand to offer help to those who needed it.
And in the end we are only atoms
drifting alone
desperate for something
to cling to.
It felt awful, to acknowledge how terrible the world could be. To realize that people kept hurting each other, again and again, as if they delighted in cruelty. But it was reassuring to see that it wasn’t the end. Mankind was also capable of kindness. People were empathic and good at heart. When they saw someone down, their first instinct was to reach with a helpful hand. And they worked together, they organized, they built things to be better at helping each other… Wasn’t that mind-blowing?
Toki found it humbling, to be part of something bigger than herself. Like the realization that everything they had, everything they saw has been made by other people for them, and in turn, they got to give back something. She may be Meteor’s daughter, but she was more than that. She helped, and the good she could do in the world compensated part of the bad he had done in the past.
But it wasn’t just about balancing scales.
It was about feeling small and grateful. It wasn’t something that Meteor or Sayuri would have understood. It wasn’t something that Toki would have known how to explain to them, either. Those nurses, social workers, firemen, they weren’t the only one whose lives interconnected with Toki’s. They were the realization, but they weren’t the whole thing. Someone had designed the logo of her favorite tea bags and someone had decided which paintings should go in the calendar hanging on her wall. Someone had built the roof above her head and someone had paved the street outside her dance club. Someone made this pair of shoes for her, someone picked the pear she ate with her lunch, and someone designed her favorite sweater. Every book she read, every song she listened to, every movie she watched… Tens, if not hundreds of people had to be there to make it happen. Even if she was alone, she was always surrounded by other human beings. It’s a fact that made her heart squeeze in on itself every time she remembered it.
(Was it how astronauts felt, looking at their small blue planet, so beautiful and fragile, suspended in the vast emptiness of space? Nine billions individuals, all interconnected. All one people.)
Time passed.
Toki spend more time with her Discord friends. EndeavorSucks posted pictures of the stray cat that came every morning on his balcony to meow at full volume until EndeavorSucks caved in and gave him food. PinkIsPunkRock was stressing about her exams, and that’s how Toki learned that her friend was a general education student at Yūei! PikaPika had had a raise at his job. NotOnFire was thinking about signing up for online dating. ThisIfFluffy had a boyfriend and was slowly drifting away from their Discord, having found others friends and interests. Everything was going well in their lives.
All Might established a small office in Fukuoka, proudly claiming he was going to defend this city until a worthy protector came along. But no matter his proclamations, All Might couldn’t focus on a single place. He was all over the country, chasing the more dangerous criminals. Toki knew he was probably tracking All For One. The general public didn’t know that, though: they only saw him doing his job in addition to what should have been Shirayuki’s job, and they applauded him for it. It was a little disheartening to read the online comments. The amount of adoration that rained on All Might was borderline creepy, because… Sure, those people loved him, but they loved the image he projected. The man behind the legend was probably running ragged.
There were comment saying excitingly ‘wow, five villains in four days, three rescues, one interview, and two inaugurations? The productivity! Life’s goals!’ but never once people wondered ‘geez, when does he sleeps?’. Or if he did the proper paperwork, instead of letting the job half done! Honestly, Toki was a little pissed at All Might for pretending to be strong and perfect when he wasn’t… but mostly, she felt uncomfortable. Or maybe something like pity. Or fear. Or all the above.
That pace wasn’t sustainable. Working like that, without any support… Was that what was expected of a hero? It would kill her. It would kill Keigo. Fuck, it was probably killing All Might.
No matter how much Toki saw his beefy silhouette and his smiling face on TV, she couldn’t forget his true form from canon. Soon, that man would be a skeleton spitting blood. How could she not worry about it? At least Endeavor relied on sidekicks, and was very firm about respecting his limits, instead of burning himself out to please the crowd. Not All Might. The path he followed… The path people were encouraged to idolize and try to walk, too… It wasn’t healthy.
All Might claimed that he would always be there, protecting them, that he was ready to give his life to protect people. But he was already doing it. That… self-sacrificing outlook on life… was All Might even aware of it? No wonder that Izuku Midoriya had been so reckless, no wonder he wrecked his body to the point of nearly losing his arms at age fifteen, if he thought that you had to destroy yourself in order to have value as a hero. If you mixed that with how people had told him over and over that he had no value as a human being because he was Quirkless, well, it made for a very unhealthy mentality.
This society had so many issues. Oh, this world was, in many ways, better than the one Toki had known Before. No wars, no pandemics, and poverty was almost inextant. But… Shit. There were still so many fucked up things with people. Starting with how they had turned away from space exploration (yes, Toki was NEVER letting that go), they also had twisted values about human life. What a mess.
Toki had no idea how to even begun to untangle it. She wasn’t even sure if she wanted to. Just because some people had been fucked over by the system or fallen through the cracks didn’t mean the whole system was useless. You can’t fix what isn’t broken…
But yeah. Some things could get better. At least, no matter how Okamoto was unpleasant, he had taught a lot to Keigo and Toki about how the world worked. About where to start to make things more efficient. Being an astrophysicist was still high on Toki’s list of priorities, but… She didn’t regret taking the path of heroism.
She wanted to help. She wanted to feel useful.
She had to start somewhere. Here was as good as a place as any.
So. Weeks and months passed. This spring was heavy in training and classwork. Toki and Keigo barely had anytime to themselves. Not that they minded: as long as the lessons were engaging, they were no slackers. They worked hard. In a few months now they would leave this place to go to high school, and there was some pressure to leave on a good note. They couldn’t just be average, they had to be impressive. So they worked, they trained…
And in May, Hayasa-sensei decided to up their Quirk training to find their limits.
That’s when things went wrong.
They went oh so terribly wrong.
The first day, they tested their weight limit. Keigo flew while carrying bags filled with sand, then carrying people, then carrying struggling people, until his arms were trembling and his whole back was aching. His wings didn’t exactly tire (they moved using his telekinetic connection to his feathers, not with bones and muscles), but he had a splitting headache and looked like death warmed over. Toki had the same task, trying to find how much she could carry, how far, how long. She jumped from one extremity of Naruto Labs to the other with a block of lead the size of a small car: then two, then three. She jumped on the rooftops, in specific locations in the gym or in the park, all the while carrying a mass of metal that weighted roughly five tons. At the end of the day, she was covered in sweat, taking big gulping breaths, blood pounding in her ears, hands trembling. The pain in her chest had started near the end of the exercise but she had refused to take a break, because there was only five minutes left, and… Gods, teleporting while her chest was burning in pain was horrible. The first time, she nearly let out a gasp of pain.
When the exercises ended, she didn’t even see straight anymore: she collapsed to her knees, and it took her five whole minutes to get back up.
It had never been so bad. For the very first time, Toki felt a stab of fear. Something was wrong. Her chest wasn’t supposed to hurt like that. Hurt mean injury, and if she had some internal wound… It was probably Quirk-related, and her Quirk played around with vacuum and portals. To have that near her heart… It was bad.
Something bad was happening, and she should tell someone, right?
Toki went to the Labs’ doctor the very next day, hesitantly explaining what had happened. But the pain was completely gone by that time. The doctor was concerned, listened to her heartbeat and took her blood pressure, but in the end, he found nothing. Her blood pressure was even a little low. It made her feel dizzy, tired. She was pretty sure she was going to flunk Hayasa-sensei’s next test.
Reluctantly, the doctor prescribed her a very low dose of midodrine, a drug used to raise standing blood pressure levels in people with chronic hypotension. It worked by restricting the ability of your blood vessels to expand, which raised blood pressure. The doctor gave her enough for a week, but ordered her to come back in a seven days exactly to see if anything had changed. Toki thanked him and went back to class, feeling a little relieved.
She didn’t tell Keigo. She didn’t tell Hayasa-sensei either.
She told herself it was to avoid worrying them, but it was more complicated than that. Keigo was so flawless in heroic training. He was better than her. Toki wasn’t jealous, but she did feel a little overshadowed. It made her reluctant to attract attention to her weakness. The gap of abilities between her and Keigo wasn’t that large yet, but it was here. He was faster, stronger, more adaptable, more likable. The only edge Toki had over him was that she was more physically resistant. She could take more damage. If she revealed that she was fragile, if she lost that… Well, it would be a harsh blow.
Toki was good. She knew that. Hell, she was a warper: obviously she was good. That was, like, prime Mary-Sue material here. But power was nothing without control, technique, experience and intelligence. Toki and Keigo were pretty much evenly matched in all that… But he had more control and more technique. It came with his Quirk. Keigo could telepathically control almost a hundred feathers so they could each carry out separate task, like lifting up heavy objects, putting away rubble to rescue a fragile training dummy, or even spy on someone’s conversation by picking up vibrations that Keigo would later convert into words. It was just mind-blowing, and there was no way that warping could compete with that. Toki could move fast from one location to another, but Keigo could simultaneously act in all those different location at once.
So yeah, Toki didn’t tell Keigo, and she didn’t tell Hayasa-sensei. She didn’t want them to worry. She didn’t want to pass for weak. She didn’t want to be left behind, simply put.
Days passed. And of course, the day before Toki’s appointment with the doctor was Quirk training day. This time, Hayasa-sensei didn’t want to test how much they could carry, but how far they could go.
They took a car and crossed the whole island, making regular stops so Toki could go out, get her bearings and memorize the landscape. She felt anxiety like a knot in her belly, but she kept her mouth shut. Shikoku island was two hundred and fifty kilometer long. Toki wasn’t sure how much her limit was, now. When she had been eight, it had been seventy kilometers, and it had only made her chest hurt a little. But now… She was taller and stronger, and all the other limitations of her Quirk had been pushed back.
But the chest pains had also been worse and worse. Last week, it had been so bad that Toki had literally been incapacitated for five minutes! It had never been so awful before. And she had only done weight training, which didn’t trigger the worst spasms. It was always distance training that made her chest clench in pain in the evening.
So… If she tried to find her limit, she feared the stabbing agony that would come with it.
Fuck. She wouldn’t know until she tried it, right?
So they went to the very end of the island, to the city of Tosashimizu. Then, they had lunch (bantering with Keigo and stealing the shrimps in his bowl made Toki feel a little better), and Haya-sensei explained the rules.
“Right, so we’re testing your range and speed today. Hawks, you will try to fly in a straight line from here to Kure’s train station, you remember? It’s about seventy-four kilometer in a straight line. I want you to go as fast as you can. You’ll be wearing that wristwatch to measure your altitude at all time, and here is your earpiece so we keep in contact.”
Keigo gave him a lazy military salute after taking both objects, and Toki sniggered. Then Hayasa-sensei turned towards her, and she straightened reflexively.
“Quantum, you will jump several distances to find when you’re blocked. First you will jump to Kure’s train station. Seventy kilometers was your limit when you were eight, so you should be able to do it no problem. You will come back here, then, and I will have you make successive jumps to further and further points. From here to Suzaki, so eighty kilometers, then from here to Tōsa, so ninety kilometers, and so on. Considering the way your Quirk as improved over time, I expect your limit to be between around two hundred kilometers. Do you have your phone? Good. Each time you jump, I want you to send me a pin of your location on the map’s app, so I can run the calculation about the exact distance you can cover.”
Toki nodded. There was a sick feeling in her stomach. She tried to blame it on the shrimps. Hayasa-sensei gave the signal, and Keigo took off in a great whoosh of displaced air and fluttering red feathers, ascending straight up in the sky before rocketing towards his goal.
Toki took a big breath, focused on her goal, and jumped.
She got to her first destination, Kure’s train station, with no problem. She waited a full second but there was no real pain, only apprehension, and an unpleasant twinge near her heart. Nothing serious yet. She fished her phone out of her pocket and sent a pin to Hayasa-sensei using the map’s app.
Then she jumped back to her starting point. Still no pain, but the twinge was slowly becoming more pronounced, like a burn. She refrained from gripping her aching chest. Come on, it was only the beginning! She couldn’t start weakening now! Thankfully, Hayasa-sensei hadn’t seen her hesitation: he was watching his phone, having apparently received her notification. He nodded approvingly, then said out loud:
“Seventy-three kilometers. Good. Now, to Suzaki. Aim for that place where we stopped, with the convenience store.”
“Aye aye,” she muttered.
She jumped again. When she landed in front of the convenience store, she cringed. Ah, there was the pain. It wasn’t quite like a stitch, but almost. Gods, and it was only eighty kilometers?! Her eight-years old self would be ashamed. Toki took a deep breath, sent her location to Hayasa-sensei, then jumped back. This time, she had to smooth her features to hide the stab of agony that flashed in her entire chest. Her teacher didn’t notice, and simply ordered her to jump to the next point.
Toki obeyed. Ninety kilometers, it really became a stitch that hurt at each heartbeat. Ninety kilometers, back to Hayasa-sensei. Fuck, it burned. She gritted her teeth and didn’t say anything. She wasn’t a weakling. She was going to be hero, for gods’ sake! She couldn’t… She couldn’t give up now.
It was the last day of test. After that, they would go to high school, and things would calm down. She just had to get thought this last test. It wasn’t so hard.
Giving up never crossed her mind.
Giving up as a concept didn’t come naturally to her. Maybe it was because of her upbringing with the HPSC, the constant training, but she doubted it. It probably came from her old homelife. Of knowing that if she slipped up, she would be consumed by Meteor’s crew, she would become one of them. Or maybe it came from even earlier. From her mom. Toki hadn’t felt like she had to fight, back then, but… Her whole life had been a sort of tug-war for her mother’s love and attention. Sayuri was kind, and loving, and tender. But if Toki stepped out of line, she would be abandoned like garbage. It had never been said, but it was one of these things that Toki had known for sure, like the fact that the sky was blue. It was one thing to know that love shouldn’t have to be earned. It was another to feel like she had to prove herself to her mother, day after day.
Toki was good at bargaining. Bargaining with her mom to be loved, with her dad to be left alone, with the Crew to be safe, with school’s teachers to be taught interesting things. Bargaining with fate to escape her family, bargaining with her skills to live in the streets, bargaining with the Commission for a future. It was the first time that she had to bargain with her own traitorous stitch, though. Her own body had never let her down before, and it was a frightening thought.
She pushed on.
Ninety-five kilometers. The blood was rushing in her ears. She took short and carefully measured breaths, as if afraid of jostling the invisible knife lodged between her ribs. When she sent her location to Hayasa-sensei, her hands were clumsy and uncoordinated. Her fingers were trembling. She felt almost sick. No nausea, but an overwhelming sense of something is wrong with my body, it’s not right, I don’t feel well.
Toki’s resolve wavered. The pain felt like that one time Hobo-san had snapped her fingers, but spread out to her whole torso.
She mentally scowled herself. Come one, just a little more… She jumped. One hundred kilometers back to Hayasa-sensei. This time, her teacher frowned, looking her over, but he didn’t say anything. Toki wiped sweat on her brow, then realized her hands were trembling, and hid her fists in her pockets. Next jump… One hundred kilometers.
This time, she could almost hear something in her muscles pop, as if some invisible security valve had snapped. She fell on her knees, then laboriously sat down. It wasn’t even voluntary. Her head was spinning and she couldn’t hear anything beside the blood pounding in her veins. Fuck. Without realizing it, she had gripped her sweater so hard the fabric was straining. She felt like there was a hot iron shoved between her ribs, she couldn’t breathe. It hurt like a motherfucker.
Okay, no matter how much she wanted to be able to walk by Keigo’s side, it was time to admit she had hit her limit. She needed a break. With trembling hands, she sent her location to Hayasa-sensei.
She realized that her fingers were numb. The pain in her chest was dragging out in her arm and in her clenched jaw.
Oh.
Fuck.
That was… That wasn’t a stitch, was it.
Her hands were unsteady and shaking, but she still managed to call Hayasa-sensei. He picked up at the first ring. She didn’t let him talk. She said flatly, her voice only faintly trembling:
“Sensei, I’m… I’m having a heart attack.”
To his credit, Hayasa-sensei didn’t hesitate. He didn’t ask if she was sure, if she was exaggerating, if she just needed a breather. He exhaled, once, and said in a steady tone:
“Alright. Tell someone, several people if you can. Then you have to cough as strongly as possible, to send up blood from your chest up to your brain. Listen, Quantum. Stay where you are, get help from bystanders, then cough, alright? I’m sending a helicopter to you. I’m coming, Quantum.”
Toki blinked. Her head felt fuzzy. Was Hayasa-sensei still speaking? The phone was falling from her numb fingers. Everything hurt. She couldn’t think clearly. Were there people here? She tried to look around wildly, but her vision was darkening. Her mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton.
“Help!” she yelled. “HELP! Help me, I’m… I’m having a heart attack!”
There were people rushing toward her. Toki belatedly remembered to cough, and she did it as forcefully as she could, but everything hurt. She couldn’t think, everything was too dark, no, too bright and confusing, like the world was spinning, random thoughts didn’t connect to one another. Were people speaking to her?
Someone was touching her, helping her turn on the side. When had she fallen down?! She didn’t remember. Where was she, where was Keigo?
Toki felt like she was drowning, grasping as strongly as she could at the strands of consciousness but feeling it slipping from her fingers, the current trying to drag her away, drag her under. Her vision was blurry. She was… There was… It was too fast, too fast, her brain couldn’t follow what was happening. She felt her eyes roll in her head, her hands spamming where they gripped her sweater, and gods her chest hurt so much…! Everything was dizzying and confusing.
What was happening?! She couldn’t speak, her mouth wasn’t working… People were trying to speak to her but she couldn’t hear anything beside a growl like a waterfall, and she was alone, so alone, and she didn’t want to die, she didn’t want to-
She didn’t want to—
Notes:
.... ah ah ah. Don't kill me ?
Next chapter in october =)
EDIT 15/08/22
The part where Toki and Keigo speak about birds living in the city comes from a fic i can't find again, where Shouto stalks Dabi because he immediatly guessed that he was Touya. But nobody else know that. And Hawks is baffled and vaguely horrified at having to play buffer betwwen the villain who pretend to be civilian, and the Yūei student who obviously doesn't know who's talking too. I cried of laughter reading this, and i thought that this chapter deserved a little levity xD
Chapter 13: And the world shattered
Summary:
Toki doesn't die. But her Quirk does.
Of course, the HPSC can fix anything. They are reliable like that. But they always ask a price. Now Toki has to decide if she's willing to pay it...
Notes:
Hello ! Here i am again. Still buried into work, but since i've decided to join another mass-larp next summer (and started creating my character, my costume, organizing parties with my fellow adventurers...), i feel way less stressed.
Which is good, because i've got my Big Exam coming at the begining of november.
Also i've a tendency to skip meals when stressed, and i once... nearly passed out at work and proceeded to freak out the entire office, so, not fun x)ANYWAY ! I left you with quite the cliffhanger last chapter. Let's remedy that !
Enjoy !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
AND THE WORLD SHATTERED
Consciousness came and went. There were flashes of light, bubbles of noises, then blessed silence. Pain, awful pain, them numbness, as if she was floating away from her own body. Time flew strangely. Sometimes it was so fast her brain felt sluggish and too slow to understand what was going on, and sometimes the seconds were crawling. A breath took a small eternity. A heartbeat dragged on like a seizure. Toki didn’t know what was going on, she didn’t remember what had happened, she just knew she was. She existed. Not quite awake, not quite asleep. She was drifting in and out of consciousness.
She was alive. Somehow, she remembered… It was important. She was alive.
She couldn’t quite hear her heartbeat anymore, though. The thud-thud of her pulse didn’t pound in her head anymore, and some distant part of her mind remembered it was a good thing, but… It was so quiet. She should at least feel it pulsing in her chest, right? But… It didn’t hurt. She actually didn’t feel anything at all, not even a twinge of pain. Not anything. It felt… empty.
That thought was so disturbing it woke her up.
It was a gradual process. Toki felt like she had been steamrolled and turned into a pancake: her thoughts were mushy, disjoined. Her mouth felt dry, as if stuffed with cotton, and her whole body was floating on a cloud somewhere. Urgh. She was probably drugged to the gills. At least the floaty feeling was nice. Kind of nauseating when you focused on it, but pretty nice. Comfy. There was no worry here, just pretty cloud. And a dry mouth. And uuuh, hadn’t she been thinking about something else, just a second before?
Oh yeah. Waking up.
It took a few minutes to open her eyes. She had to squint for the blinding white around her to turn to something resembling real surroundings, and finally make sense of what she was seeing. White ceiling. A bed. Big screen with blinking lights. An IV drip. Right: she was in a hospital. She had… She had been…
She had been training and then… her heart… Oh. Yeah. She remembered now. The agony, the fear… the feeling of powerlessness… She had had a heart attack. She had called for help and then— she couldn’t remember. But Hayasa-sensei had gotten there in time, apparently. She was safe and sound.
She lowered her eyes, paused a second, then amended that statement. Alright, mostly sound, because there was a lot of tubes and wiring connected to her chest. Her hospital scrubs were open in the front, hiding her breasts but revealing her sternum, and yikes. Some tubes and wires were attached to patches stuck to her skin, but some seemed to fuse with her sternum. Toki squeezed her eyes shut. That was such a disturbing visual.
A nurse entered the room and let out a small gasp at seeing her awake. Toki wanted to raise a hand and wave sarcastically, but her limbs were too heavy. She settled for croaking:
“Did I get run over by a bus?”
The joke didn’t make the nurse laugh. Too bad.
Instead, there was a flurry of activity as other nurses and a doctor rushed here, taking Toki’s vitals, asking her how she felt, what she remembered. It turned out she had been in a coma for nearly a week. That explained why she felt as weak as a newborn kitten. She was in Tokushima’s hospital, the best of the island. All the tubes and things in her chest were here to keep her heart beating, so, no touchie.
She wasn’t going to die but it had been… a close call.
She had been incredibly lucky to have time to call for help. She had also been incredibly lucky that some of the bystanders attracted by her cry had been a baseball team. The nine guys had relayed to give her CPR for fifteen minutes, keeping her heart beating until the ambulance reached them. By all right, she should be dead. She had given everyone quite a scare. Hayasa-sensei had rushed to get to her so fast he had apparently injured his legs.
She asked if she could see him, and Keigo. The nurse gently told her that they would pass along the message. But the doctor hemmed and hummed and said that maybe they should wait until things settled, whatever that meant. In other circumstances, Toki would have been indignant and boldly reclaimed answers, but— She felt so tired.
She would get angry later.
She went back to sleep. Sleep was nice. You weren’t dead but you weren’t awake either. Win-win situation. Yeaaaaaah.
The next day was easier. Her mind felt clearer. With the help of the nurses, she managed to sit up in the bed, careful to not jostle any of the things stuffed in her chest. She still didn’t feel anything. Her heart was beating, she knew that, otherwise she would be dead… But when she tried to take her pulse, it was barely there. It freaked her out a little. Apparently the muscle couldn’t contract properly anymore. So instead of pumping blood in her veins with rhythmic contractions, her heart (and the wiring attached to it) made it flow continuously, like a stream. The heart was still beating, but it was more from force of habit than anything, and without the machines’ support, it wouldn’t be enough to keep her brain oxygenated.
Toki was silently freaked out, and couldn’t help but think that it wasn’t a viable solution long-term. The doctors didn’t tell her much. Apparently, they were waiting for her legal guardian.
Considering Toki’s legal guardian was the Commission, she had to wonder who was supposed to show up. Not the President, right? It would send her right into another stroke if he passed that door. Then, who? Maybe Hayasa-sensei… No, he was hurt. They wouldn’t sent him. Okamoto? Oh, it better not be, she would punch his teeth in. Not that she had any reason to blame him, but he was so grating, he would find a way to piss her off in ten seconds flat with his off-handed criticism. Maybe Kameko-san…? Ah, no way. She was too young.
She got her answer quickly enough. The door opened, and three familiar people walked in. The Vice-President, the Naruto Labs doctor (Soko-sensei or something like that?), and… Toki jerked upright, just in time to get and harmful of wailing teenager.
“Toki!”
“Keigo?!”
The Vice-President coughed, Toki realized her mistake, and quickly backpedaled: “I mean, Hawks! Are you alright?”
Keigo straightened, indignant: “Am I alright?! Am I?! You’re the one who had a heart attack! You could have died!”
Toki laughed nervously, scratching her head: “Ah ah, sorry about this…”
Keigo smacked her upside the head: “You fucking better!”
“Hawks,” scowled the doctor. “Language.” Then he turned towards Toki, and readjusted his glasses, the gesture strangely nervous. “Quantum… We need to talk.”
Toki looked at the Vice-President, then at Keigo and his distressed face (Keigo, who had no place in an official meeting except for moral support or emotional blackmail), and she felt her heart sink.
“Yeah,” she said slowly. “I figured.”
They sat around her bed, the plastic hospital chairs squeaking on the tile floor. Keigo was fidgeting with his feathers, but when he realized what he was doing, he straightened and blanked out his expression. There was a short silence. The doctor spoke first:
“Your heart attack was very serious. It turns out that your Quirk relies heavily on your heartbeat. That’s why your stats are better with adrenaline spikes. In your earliest health assessment, you reported feeling like you were using an invisible muscle in your chest when you activated your Quirk, which led me to believe Warp-Space is activated by your heartbeat. Your mother’s medical records confirmed it. As you already guessed… using your Quirk too much… put a strain on your heart.”
He paused, and readjusted his glasses again. He looked almost worried. Then Keigo interjected aggressively:
“Hayasa-sensei’s Quirk-assessment pushed you too far, because that guy had given you medicine to make your heart beat faster!”
What? Toki turned swiftly toward the doctor, who hunched back in his chair, wincing, before straightening resolutely.
“In essence, yes. Your heart was already tired from the previous week’s exercise. And I gave you a vasoconstrictor, not accounting for the fact that you would be passing another taxing test while taking that drug. Separately, those events may not have triggered the heart attack, but together… the worst happened. For this, I am deeply sorry and intend to submit my resignation from Naruto Labs.”
He paused. Toki didn’t say anything, feeling a little shell-shocked. Keigo was pretending to fidget nonchalantly with a feather, but anyone who knew him could read the tension in his shoulders and the hostility in his gaze. The only reason he wasn’t glaring daggers at the doctor was because he had better self-control than that.
“But you probably felt some chest pain before that!” blurted out the doctor. “Your heart presented signs of damage; it must have been aching for a while after Quirk training! I wouldn’t have given you midodrine if I had more information about it, and…”
“Enough,” calmly said the Vice-President. “Our cardiologist expert informed us that those pains probably registered as a simple stitch. Nothing that a hero in training would have bothered you about. Quantum’s pain tolerance is no excuse for your criminal forgetfulness.” She paused. “Now that’s out of the way, you may leave.”
The doctor cowered, trying to make himself as small as possible. The Vice-President looked at him coldly for a few seconds, unmoved. So he got up from his chair, dragging himself to the door and leaving without a word, looking like a kicked puppy.
Genmei-san waited until the door was closed again. Then, she turned to Toki.
“Nevertheless… Those lesions on your heart are a problem. The muscle has been weakened, its resistance stretched to its limit. This attack had damaged it irreparably. Your heart is now only beating because of support equipment.”
She waved toward the wire and tubes stuck in Toki’s chest, and the girl winced:
“Yeah, I’ve been told. My heart can’t beat strongly enough anymore.”
“Yes. The artificial current created in your circulatory system is keeping your blood flowing. But it’s a temporary solution. You can’t stay hooked to machines forever… So, you have two options.”
Toki had a feeling she wasn’t going to like it. She gulped, bracing for impact. It wasn’t hard to guess where this was going. Nobody had ever heard of a hero with a heart condition.
“The first option is to live with a pacemaker,” the Vice-President started. “The implant is small, the surgery minimal. It will keep your heart beating and you will live a normal life…”
“… But I will never be able to be a hero,” Toki concluded, her throat closing up.
“No,” the Vice-President said mercilessly. “The pacemaker can give you a semblance to a normal heart, but not take the strain of Warp-Space like your real heart is supposed to. You will be able to use your Quirk, probably, but only in a very limited capacity. Being a hero will be out of the question.”
There was a heavy silence. Toki sneaked a look at Keigo, but he was grave and silent, looking straight ahead. He had probably been warned in advance. Toki took a long, trembling breath. Dread was heavy in her stomach.
Most people defined themselves by their Quirk. Toki had always thought she was above that. She was so much more than a teleporter, after all! She was a poet, a dreamer, a good student, Keigo’s friend, an aspiring astrophysicist. But it was different to think of it in abstract terms, and to be faced with the very real possibility of losing Warp-Space. It was such a huge part of her! Toki basically teleported everywhere. Living with restricted Quirk-use would be like living Quirkless. It wasn’t insurmountable but fuck, being powerless for her whole life, after having tasted what it meant to be so strong?! It would be so awful.
Yes, it was better than to be dead. But it would still mean losing something terribly important to her, it would still feel like missing a limb. Toki gritted her teeth. She had been too reckless. And now she was paying the price.
“What’s the other option?” she finally rasped.
The Vice-President explained carefully:
“There is a procedure to clone damaged organs, to create stronger replacements. It’s mostly used with cancer patients. It can be tweaked a little to create a heart able to handle Warp-Space. You will even be able to increase your precision and your weight limit. You probably have hit your limit in term of range, since it’s what was the most difficult thing to handle for your heart… But one hundred kilometers is nothing to scoff at.”
“Sound good… What’s the downside?”
Genmei-san looked at her several seconds in silence. She looked like she was weighting her words. Then leaned forwards, resting her chin on her crossed hands.
“The procedure can only happen in Mustafu Central Hospital. You will have to live in Musutafu until it’s completed. No visits to Naruto Labs will be permitted, although we will keep in touch.”
It still meant leaving Keigo…! For months, maybe years…!
“The procedure will be long,” Genmei-san continued. “It will take a little over a year for surgeons and specialists to map your heart, and take enough samples to grow a replacement one. It will be a long time, interspaced with surgeries, and where you will have to live with a pacemaker unable to handle your Quirk. Then, after the replacement heart is grown, you will go undergo a heart transplant. The recovery period will, once again, take about a year. You’ll have to follow a heavy medical treatment, and at least two additional corrective surgeries. During that time, you won’t be allowed to use your Quirk either. It’s only after being given the all-clear from the doctors that you will be able to train again… And even then, you will have to take it slowly. No heroic training for months, only soft Quirk-training. You will also be heavily monitored. All in one, you will be functionally Quirkless for nearly three years. Since you are nearly fifteen… You won’t have a lot of time to train before taking the Hero License Exam at eighteen.”
She paused, then, just as Toki was opening her mouth to speak (three years? In Mustafu?! Away from her only friend?! Basically Quirkless?!), she added in a lower voice:
“This procedure is also extremely expensive.”
Toki shut her mouth, her eyes widening. If she had a normal heartbeat, it would have skipped a beat. Oh. That wasn’t good, at all.
“The sponsorship program aims to guide talented children away from villainy and give them hero licenses so they can serve the public,” the Vice-President told her, slowly. “The Commission invest in you, and in return you invest in making society better. As Mera-san told you… Your commitment ceases once you reach eighteen and get your hero license. If you decide to be only a part-time hero, or a freelancer, or to retire in a few years later to become something else, it’s up to you. Passing the license, swearing to defend the public, it’s enough for us to get our money’s worth. But if the Commission is paying for a human heart, then… Our investment become way bigger. We won’t be giving you a necessary medical procedure, but something that is essentially an organic support item.”
Toki felt like her face was carved from stone. If her heart hadn’t been hooked to so many tubes and wires, it would have been beating wildly, like a caged animal. She made eye contact with Keigo, and even without speaking a single word, she knew he remembered their conversation about that as well as she did.
They don’t give money for free! They’re already training us so we become hero, if we continue leeching off them afterward, then we give them a say in what kind of hero we’re going to be, and what if it’s something we don’t like?
“How much money this operation will cost?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.
The Vice-President didn’t flinch:
“About two hundred million yens for the heart. The whole medical procedure, with the follow-up and corrective surgeries, will be about three hundred millions yens.”
Toki’s eyes nearly budged out. That was a lot. The money she had left from her mother’s stash didn’t cover a quarter of that sum, and Sayuri had had a lot of money.
“What do you want?” she asked warily.
The Vice-President raised an eyebrow:
“We don’t know. That’s the problem. How can we know what kind of threat will be there in three years? What need will we have of your skills?”
Toki stayed quiet a few seconds, feeling a bit stunned. She hadn’t anticipated that. The Vice-President nodded, as if her silent was an admission of some sort.
“If you choose the transplant, the Commission will pay for it. We will also pay for housing and tuition…” The Vice-President’s eyes narrowed, and she stressed her following words: “But you will own us a considerable debt, equivaling to the sum we will have spent on your care. Maybe you will repay us by reversing an important part of your salary to the Commission. Or maybe by granting the Commission more control over your missions. It doesn’t matter. But betting on you is a gamble, Quantum, and you understand we have to protect our interests.”
You are an investment, Shirayuki had said, once, a lifetime ago. Heroes all are. All we can hope, is being worth to be gambled on.
Toki breathed in, breathed out. She tried to think how she could handle that much money. Maybe if she worked her ass off… If she turned commercials and versed all her profits to the Commission… If she didn’t go to college… If she lived on the streets and never had to pay rent or grocery money…
No, even with all that, she wouldn’t be able to win hundreds of millions of yens with no string attached. Maybe a quarter or a third of this sum, nothing more. She would have to take the missions they gave her, and she would have to do so for years.
For a brief second, she tried considering it objectively her other option. She could walk away and go back to her oldest dream, being an astrophysicist. It would be hard, but she could do it. With a Quirk that destroyed the user’s heart, AFO wouldn’t bother her… probably. She would be safe.
But the truth was… It wasn’t equivalent. Giving up heroism would mean giving up Keigo. He would keep following his path, and they would become strangers, and she would lose him. And the thought was enough to make Toki’s throat close up, to make her eyes burn with tears, to make her hands clammy and feel panic rising in her chest.
She couldn’t give him up. She wasn’t ready. Keigo was… He was her friend. Her family. There was only one of him in the whole universe. A boy, with one life as short and blinding as a shooting star. Toki had already given up her family once, and it had broken her heart to do it, but it had been her choice. Now… Now, it wasn’t even one.
No, there wasn’t any choice at al. Was there?
Debt or not, she knew her decision had already been made. She had known since the moment they had told her she had two options, and one of them was to walk away. It would mean forfeiting their protection, their wealth, the guaranteed quality of her education. It would mean forfeiting any future as a hero, any meaningful place by Keigo’s side. It would mean giving up her Quirk, her power, her strength, what she had spent so many years cultivating with care and pride.
She couldn’t do that. Maybe it was cowardly. But she couldn’t give it up. Her future, Keigo, her Quirk, she loved them. She couldn’t imagine leaving.
“I will take it,” she whispered. “I will take the heart transplant.”
Something like satisfaction passed on the Vice-President’s face.
“Very well, Quantum. You won’t regret it.”
From the corner of her eye, Toki could see Keigo collapse in relief, his wings getting everywhere. Her jaw twitched in irritation, or amusement, she wasn’t sure: and she turned to slap him on his fluffy head, breaking the tension.
“What, you thought I was going to give up?!”
“Ow! No, I had total faith in you! I was just a tiny bit concerned, yanno!”
“Concerned about me giving up?!”
“Well, you are kind of an airhead with no impulse control, so I couldn’t be sure…”
“I’m not!”
“Oh, you sooooooo are.”
“I’m not! Come here so I can hit you!”
Keigo dodged her half-hearted punch, laughing, and for a second everything was normal again. Then the Vice-President cleared her throat, looking faintly amused. She turned to Toki again:
“Hawks has offered to pay back your heart transplant after starting his own agency, on the condition you became his partner. Of course, you had to accept it first…”
“What?” Toki yelped. “Hawks, you can’t…!”
“I told you before,” her friend shrugged. “I don’t mind. Besides, you would do the same for me, if our positions were reversed.”
At that, Toki had nothing to say. He was right. If it had been Keigo’s health… Keigo’s freedom, or something that he valued as much as Toki valued hers… Then she would have made the same deal with no hesitation.
“You don’t have to accept,” Genmei-san pointed out.
“That’s good, because I don’t,” Toki said stubbornly. “My injuries, my responsibility.”
“When we become partners, all our debts will be merged anyway!” chirped Keigo. “It will be fifty-fifty!”
Toki squinted: “Isn’t that for marriage?”
He leaned forward with a shit-eating grin: “Oh, Quantum, are you proposing to me?”
Toki was so taken aback she only managed to sputter helplessly, which seemed to delight Keigo to no end. The Vice-President snorted wryly, before saying more seriously:
“You can share the debt, if you want. What matter is that the Commission doesn’t invest in you in vain. But, from a personal standpoint… I believe that this investment is worth it. Yes, it’s beyond our duty of care as your guardians, but you deserve it.”
Genmei-san was not, by any consideration, someone that Toki could have considered as soft. She had a round face but hard, cold eyes the color of iron, and she never smiled. But at that moment, for the first time, her face softened a little.
“I’m very much aware that you two are a package deal. You are a good team, and it would be a waste to separate you. Hayasa and Okamoto both advised against it. I will make sure you can keep in touch and that you still go to the same summer camps in August, if you wish. Become heroes, and I will support both of you in your endeavors.”
She stared at the both of them, and suddenly her face was deadly serious. There was a cold glint in her eyes that reminded Toki of steel and fire.
“I’m betting on you.”
And Toki knew the Commission’s big names weren’t gamblers. If Genmei-san was betting on them, it wasn’t on a whim. It was just like Genryusai, the Commission’s President, had once betted on All Might.
oOoOoOo
Leaving Naruto Labs felt a little surreal. This place had been her home for years. It was actually the place where she had stayed the longest since… Well, since Hinohara, her birth village, where she didn’t have many memories because she had been so young. So yeah, it felt surreal… And a little heart-wrenching, to be honest.
Not that Toki had much of a heart actually, ah. Two weeks had passed since her awakening. She had gone under surgery and she now had a small scar under her clavicle, where the surgeon had implanted the pacemaker. Her heart was now beating normally, with a reassuring thud-thud, as if nothing had happened. The pacemaker was so small she couldn’t even feel the bump of the metal battery in her chest. She tried not to think about it much. But hey, she couldn’t exactly help it.
Unbiddenly, she thought about her parents. What would they think of it? What would they think of her, now, so weak and helpless? Would they laugh and say she deserved it? Toki felt like she did.
Her leave was scheduled for the end of the month. They had to find her a place to stay, buy shit like a computer for her online classes, scramble to find a competent caretaker to keep an eye on her, cancel her inscription to her baseball club and her breakdancing club (she was banned from all sports for at least four months, to let her heart rest). In the meantime, Toki wandered aimlessly in the Labs. She wasn’t allowed to train… or to go to the workshop… or to climb on the roof… or anything, really. And she had to walk now, like a plebeian, because she couldn’t teleport anywhere. Gods, had the park always been so big?
Some of the researchers and staff members came to say goodbye, a little awkwardly. It was a nice attention, and Toki felt touched. Those people had no obligation towards her. As a kid, Toki had sometimes been a brat. She had crashed into their stuff more than once with her teleportation. But hey, you can’t live six years with someone and not start caring a little about what happened to them, right?
She spoke with Hayasa-sensei. He was in a wheelchair, which came as such a shock Toki’s knees almost buckled under her. Her brain came to a screeching halt. She had known he was injured but this was…!
“It’s temporary,” Hayasa-sensei reassured her. “I have artificial ligaments and they couldn’t handle the strain. I’m getting replacements soon.”
It would have been difficult to quantify the relief that flooded through Toki’s body other than to say it was significantly more than a scooch.
“Artificial ligaments?” she parroted.
“Yes. I suffered a career-ending injury fifteen years ago. Just like you, my body couldn’t handle how fast I could go. Artificial ligaments are good enough for training… but they need long cool-down period and are absolutely unsuited to the kind of speed needed for a full-time hero.”
Toki frowned, and her hand mechanically went to the tiny scar above her heart, where they had put the pacemaker.
“Did the Commission pay for your prothesis? Is that why you ended up teaching here?”
Hayasa-sensei sent her a piercing glance, but shook his head:
“No. My insurance covered it. After my accident, I worked as a private trainer affiliated with my brother-in-law’s agency in Tokyo until the Commission offered me a job to train Hawks… and you, afterward.”
Uh. Maybe Toki should look into getting insurance later on. That sounded safer than relying on the HPSC’s generosity.
“You’re from Tokyo, sensei? You never said!”
Hayasa-sensei huffed quietly, amused: “I don’t. I moved there to join with my brother-in-law’s agency after I graduated. I wasn’t close with him, though, and my relationship with my sister’s family became strained after my injury. It was no hardship to move.”
“What’s the agency’s name?” Toki couldn’t help but ask, suddenly curious.
“You may have heard of them, they’re quite successful… It’s the Idaten Agency. My sister married Tetsuya Iida.”
Toki nearly chocked. Idaten Agency that was the Engine Hero agency, she remembered that from her lessons with Okamoto. But more importantly, it was the Iida agency! Iida, from canon!
Was Hayasa-sensei married to someone in future-Ingenium’s family? Was he Tenya Iida’s uncle?! She scrutinized him with attention, and yes, Hayasa-sensei did have a square jaw like Iida, didn’t he? And he wore glasses, so he probably had the same bad vision… The hair, skin tone and eyebrows were different, but Hayasa-sensei could very well be a canon-character’s uncle! Holy shit!
Why did Toki keep meeting relatives of canon-characters, without ever recognizing them? She had lived with Hayasa-sensei for six years now! And she knew his Quirk was to run fast, which was basically Ingenium’s specialty! Was she that inobservant? Crap, she had probably met canon-characters without recognizing them, if that was the case…
“I know about it,” she said in a slightly strangled voice. “Hey, out of curiosity, if I ever go back to Tokyo and want to say hello… Can you tell me about them?”
Hayasa-sensei squinted at her, but didn’t comment her strange reaction.
“There isn’t much to say. My sister is named Tomomi. Her husband Tetsuya Iida is Fugeo, the Engine Hero. They have a son, Tensei who must be in high school… No, he probably graduated by now. I don’t really keep in touch.” He paused. “But maybe I will go and try to reconnect, once my contract with the HPSC come to its term in a few years.”
Toki nodded, suddenly serious. She didn’t have the guts to say it to her teacher’s face, but he should reconnect with his family, because a family willing to love and support you (which they had apparently done in the past, since he had joined their agency) was something precious. Not everyone had garbage relatives like Toki or Keigo.
There was a short silence, then Hayasa-sensei sighed, a wishful smile on his face.
“It may be unprofessional as your teacher to say this, Quantum, but I am going to miss you. It won’t be the same without the Terrible Twins.”
Toki was already tearing up at his confession and was ready to tell him she was going to miss him to, but the second sentence made her let out a startled laugh:
“The what now?”
“Ah, damn. Oh, well, you’re leaving, so there’s no use keeping it a secret anymore. It’s how the staff call you and Hawks. Since you’re always joined at the hip…”
“This is awesome, why didn’t I know that before?!” Toki grinned, bouncing on the balls of her feet in excitement.
Hayasa-sensei shrugged, but there was a small smile on his lips: “It annoys Okamoto-san.”
“I’m pretty sure breathing annoys Okamoto. He’s prissy like that.”
“Language, Quantum,” her teacher reprimanded her. But his eyes were laughing.
Toki gave him a cheeky grin:
“You know, I’m going to be undercover as a civilian for the next three years. I’m going to have to swear like a normal teenager. It’s a mission requirement!”
“Keep telling yourself that, Quantum.”
So. Toki was saying goodbye to everyone. Even Okamoto found a moment to stiffly said to her that he hoped she wouldn’t forget his lessons. Toki generously tried not to be a dick to him, and nodded politely. Honestly, she didn’t hate the guy, but he was so annoying. Did he had to be condescending all the time?
Okamoto, Hayasa-sensei, the staff, the researchers in the workshop… Keigo, especially Keigo… Toki was saying farewell to everyone. It wasn’t easy, but it could have been worse. She was leaving forever, but she had always been destined to do that anyway. She was only leaving a little over three years in advance. The real heartbreak here (ah!) was that she was leaving alone, while Keigo was staying.
But her options had been either to say goodbye for three years, with regular contact and whatever, or to say goodbye forever. So, really, it wasn’t that bad. Still, it was going to be their longer separation yet, and they both were worried, sad, grieving, anxious, frustrated. Keigo was hovering constantly, never leaving her side for long (unless he was pulled aside by Hayasa-sensei for Quirk-training, or Okamoto for their lessons, neither of them having stopped for him). Toki was fretting, constantly checking that Keigo remembered the name of her Discord server, or making elaborate plans to reach each other’s if for one reason or another the HPSC cut contact.
The Discord server… She had warned them, too. Well, as much as she could, which wasn’t much.
________________
< ShootForTheStars: Yo
> PinkIsPunkRock: SHE LIVEEEEEES
> NotOnFire: Stars! been a while!
< ShootForTheStars: yeah sorry I was in a coma
< PikaPika: … you’re joking
> PinkIsPunkRock: i’m sorry you were WHAT
> EndeavorSucks: uh what
> ChickenNuggets: she was
> PikaPika: !!!!
> ThisIsFluffy: a ghost!
> EndeavorSucks : !! you’re the endeavor fanboy!!
> ChickenNuggets: sup
> ChickenNuggets: fanboy and proud
> NotOnFire: Oh you’ll get along GREAT ah ah
> ChickNuggets: I sense sarcasm
> PikaPika: no Chicken, you don’t get it… @EndeavorSucks’ name isn’t what he thinks but what he want to happen to him (͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
> ChickenNuggets: oooooh
> EndeavorSucks: fuck all of you
> NotOnFire: you don’t mean that buddy
> EndeavorSucks: yeah you’re right, I’m saving myself for a beefcake with flaming tiddies
> ChickenNuggets: lol lol lol
> ThisIsFluff: is nobody going to talk about Stars being in a godamnn COMA?!
> ChickenNuggets: she’s typing her answer, wait for a wall of text
< ShootForTheStars : Sorry. Long story short: I have a heart condition, which nobody knew about (not even me) until I had a freaking heart attack in the middle of training. My heart stopped and it’s basically a miracle there were enough people to give me CPR for nearly an hour (first in the park where I dropped, then in the ambulance, then at the hospital) because it didn’t want to start back! Anyway I have a pacemaker now. But it’s not a long-term solution so my caretakers are offering me a brand new artificial heart. I have multiple surgeries planned so I’m moving to Musutafu to live near the hospital. @PinkIsPunkRock maybe we will see each other! Also be nice with @ChickenNuggets, i brought him back here because I’m going to miss him a lot and we’re going to keep in touch via discord
> PikaPika : …
> EndeavorSucks: …
> NotOnFire: … shit
> ThisIsFluffy: damn, Stars. i don’t know what to say
> PinkIsPunkRock: it would be great to meet you, Stars! Although the circumstances suck
> ThisIsFluffy: are you alright?
< ShootForTheStars: A bit shaken up right now.
< ShootForTheStars: but I will be.
________________
Keigo quickly befriended the rest of the group chat, and soon he was making a habit to log in every evening to read their messages, tease EndeavorSucks, add fuel to the current debates, or just lighten the atmosphere with jokes. It was reassuring. At least the server couldn’t be monitored by the HPSC like their phone calls or their email. No matter what happened, nobody could take that away from them.
Fuck. Toki wanted to cry. She did cry a few times, in secret, in the shower. She didn’t want to leave. She was going to miss Keigo so much.
They had never been apart for more than a few months, and now… It was going to be so hard. Toki had known loneliness before, but that was different: she hadn’t known anything else. But now, she had a friend, family, and she was going to leave him behind.
She would wake up without the prospect of taking her breakfast with Keigo and laugh over their toasts about the pranks they planned to pull. She wouldn’t have him at her side anymore, to share a knowing glance in class, pass notes, snigger at their private jokes. There would be no one to train with her, challenge her to play super-accelerated tag, or climb rooftops. Actually, she wouldn’t be able to do any of these things anymore, but sharing them had been half the pleasure. She wouldn’t be able to whisper with him until midnight about changing the world, about hero costumes, about what was a black hole, and how to fight Quirk discrimination. Nobody would come to her in the middle of the night to snuggle after a nightmare. Nobody would go to her to share crazy conspiracy theories, or tell embarrassing secrets, or bare their soul in a hushed voice.
Keigo had been half her world for years, and in a few days he would be gone. Well, hundred kilometers away, at least, which amounted to the same things when you couldn’t teleport. Toki could feel her poor little heart wrinkle like a piece of paper just thinking about it.
So if in those last few days, Toki and Keigo clung to each other even more so than before, nobody said anything. If they spent all their night in each other’s room, nobody batted an eyelash. If Toki shred a few tears against Keigo’s shoulder when they slept snuggled up in his bed, he didn’t mention it; and if Keigo’s eyes were a little red-rimmed, she didn’t mention it either.
They were allowed their farewell. They were allowed their heartbreak. Toki was leaving. They knew it wouldn’t be easy. After all, weren’t they nicknamed the Terrible Twins? Ah, Keigo had had a good laugh when Toki had told him that.
Gods, she was going to miss him like a limb.
It was… the end of an era.
It would have been simpler if that heart attack hadn’t happened. It would have been safer, also, if she had taken the other option, the pacemaker one, and given up on being a hero entirely. But hell, she had trained six years to become a hero, she wasn’t going to give up now. Yes, it would be long… It would be painful… But you sometimes had to take a leap of faith to be able to fly. The bird metaphors would be better suited to Keigo, maybe, but Toki was starting to think she wasn’t so reasonable as she liked to think herself to be. It wasn’t Keigo who had hidden a heart defect for years because he was a stubborn ass, after all. When it came to ambition and risk-taking, Toki was as bad as him. They were both Icarus, flying on wings made of wax.
Maybe the Icarus comparison was more apt she had had thought, Toki mused. After all… The original myth had two parts. Daedalus had said to his son, ‘don’t fly too high, or the sun will melt the wax, but don’t fly too low, or the water and the waves will surely weigh down the wings, and you will die.’ It wasn’t well known. Most people only learned about the first part. They repeated the tale with only half the lesson, until the essence of it became lost. It was a shame that all people did was use this as a cautionary tale against the dangers of hubris, and never the dangers of apathy. As if to constantly sneer at them how dare you.
Well, Toki dared.
Toki dared. She wasn’t afraid of impossible goals: challenges delighted her. She would reach the stars, even if nobody had turned their eyes to the sky in more than a century. She would be a hero, even if it took her years of pain and having her chest cut open, her heart ripped out and new one stuck in its place.
Space and heroism were both fantastical dreams. Reaching one was already ambitious, but two? It was verging on the ridiculous. Sometimes Toki wanted to laugh incredulously at how she had willingly barred herself from so many easier paths. But you can’t help your dreams, after all.
What was the point of being alive, if you didn’t chase them?
Because Toki had nearly died, and it made her heartrate skyrocket better than any pacemaker in the world. She could have died. Wasn’t that wild? It was the same ‘holy shit, that happened?!’ feeling she had had after rescuing Mihoko Shinsō from her car, after watching the building crumble during her father’s and All Might’s battle. Shock, incredulity, terror, all mixed in one. She could have ceased to exist, just like that, a little muscle stopping and her brain shutting down, her soul gone, her mind reduced to nothing! Seriously, the fact that she could be killed… The fact that human beings in general could be killed through physical means was so ridiculous.
A person, any person was such an infinitely complicated web of thoughts and feelings and beliefs, and such an unbelievably huge amount of knowledge, and the idea that you could destroy that when a muscle weighting half a pound said ‘nah man, that’s enough for me’, it was absolutely surreal. The idea that you could remove knowledge and emotion and memory from the world with a physical object was literally unbelievable. People were huge and complex and the fact that you could kill the person, kill their mind, kill their soul, by killing the body was wild. Just… Imagine throwing a brick at the Tokyo Tower and it just fucking crumbled?!
(Yes, Toki was having a tiny-weeny existential crisis. She had a near-death experience. She was allowed. Or maybe it wasn’t an existential crisis, but just an existential realization. Was there a term to tell how enormous and overwhelming it was to realized that you were only one person, mortal and fragile, and that your life could disappear as easily as a snuffed-out candle? Probably. Toki was probably too young at fourteen to call it a mid-life crisis, but hey, who knew, maybe she would die at twenty-eight.)
Anyway. The day of her departure, there wasn’t a crowd to see her off. There was no need to make a big show of it. After all, last words were for fools who hadn’t said enough, to quote a famous socialist. Okamoto hadn’t sought her out, all the researchers had said goodbye, Hayasa-sensei had given her an awkward hair-ruffle. Even Kameko-san had called to fret about her health, then tearfully tell her that she was going to swing by Musutafu one day, so Toki better hang on, they would see each other soon!
So on that sunny Tuesday morning, as she loaded her bags in the car’s trunk and the driver was politely pretending to chat with the security guard to let her have some privacy, there was only Keigo to see her off.
They had already told each other’s everything there was to say. Toki breathed in, then out. Why did she feel so nervous? And Keigo didn’t look much better. He was standing right next to her, hands nervously shoved in his pockets, wings held tight against his back.
“You’ll call, right?” he fretted.
“Of course. And you will write and text, right?”
“Yeah, obviously.”
There was a short silent. Toki swallowed. Her throat felt tight, suddenly, and her eyes were burning. She lowered her gaze.
“I’m going to,” she whispered weakly, “miss you so damn much.”
Keigo sniffed. Toki’s eyes snapped back up, alarmed, and she let out a panicked squeak when she saw his eyes were filling with tears, his lips trembling. She waved her arms frantically:
“Don’t cry! Or I’m going to cry to, and then we’ll never stop!”
Keigo let out a wet little laugh, then stumbled a step forward, grabbing her by the shoulders and letting his head fell forward. Their foreheads knocked together lightly, and Toki froze. They didn’t move. Their faces were so close… Toki could count Keigo’s eyelashes, see the tremble in his smile, the way his golden eyes were half-open and staring at her as if hoping to carve her face in his memories. Her heart squeezed in her chest.
I love you, she thought belatedly, but the words stayed frozen on her lips.
“It’s not forever,” he whispered. “You will come back.”
It was too raw and honest. Toki felt like she was seeing something too intimate, almost. Blood rushed to her head, and she let out a nervous laugh that ended up in a strangled sound almost reminiscing of a sob, emotion winning over embarrassment. Don’t cry, she scowled herself. Don’t you fucking dare to cry, you choose this, you have to see it through.
Toki closed her eyes, pressing his forehead against his. She moved her right hand just enough to grip his wrist and squeeze it a little.
She loved Keigo. He was her best friend, her family, maybe something more. It wasn’t something she would dare to utter out loud, and Keigo neither. It felt too obvious and too personal at the same time. But she knew… And it was in that kind of moment, however how rare, that they knew. They didn’t need words to see they felt the same.
“Yeah,” she breathed, a little chocked up. “I will come back, I promise.”
oOoOoOo
That evening, the very first she would spend in the studio the Commission had given her in an apartment building they owned… the first thing Toki would do would be to have a good cry.
And then, afterward, would open her poetry notebook and start writing.
When she’d been packing her bags, she had put her old notebook, the full one, in Keigo’s room. Maybe he would read it, maybe he wouldn’t. It was easier to leave the choice to him once she would be gone. But the new notebook, with its crispy white pages and barely a few poems already written, she would open it and start filling page after page, because her heart felt ready to burst with so many feelings she couldn’t quite put into words.
Then she took her Quirk analysis book, the old one where she had written her notes on her teleportation since she had been old enough to think about it. It had laid untouched for five years now. After joining the sponsorship program, Toki had continued updating it for a few months. Maybe she didn’t trust Hayasa-sensei to share his observations with her, or maybe it was just habit, she didn’t remember. But she had written less and less, and at nine years old, she had shelved the notebook one evening and just… forgot to open it later. Toki snorted, turning the pages covered with her childish scrawl. There was no order in her observations. It was astonishedly well done for a child, but as a teenager Toki has higher standards. Also, five years without notes meant that this was ridiculously out of date. Oh, well… She had no training to fill her days anymore. She should buy a new notebook and copy her old note, updated of course.
It was now June. Toki still had online classes to finish the middle-school curriculum. She had finished the cursus in math, and was halfway to finish it the high-school one in physics, too, but she was still average in literature, geography, History and all that stuff. Now that she didn’t have training, she Toki was confident she could get ahead in her studies. Unless all the medical crap tired her out and slowed her down… Well. She would cross that bridge when she would get to it.
In the following days, Toki slowly settled in. It… It wasn’t bad. Just weird.
Her new accommodations were good, in any case. She lived alone but since it was an HPSC-owned building, almost all of her neighborhood worked for the Commission and had been warned by their respective superiors to keep an eye on Toki. Considering how polite and sympathetic they had been, Toki suspected the Vice-President of having spun a truly tragic tale. Maybe they all thought she was the orphaned niece of a very important guy, or that she was part of a scandal? Meh. No matter. They were nice and they were keeping an eye out to make sure she was safe, and that was all that mattered.
As an added layer of security, she had a new name. The Commission hadn’t wanted her to go back under the Aratani or the Taiyōme surname, for which Toki was secretly grateful. But maybe the Vice-President was only looking for her own interests: it would be hard to keep her identity under wraps if any of her well-meaning neighbors remembered those names and started digging. Taiyōme wasn’t exactly a common name, after all.
Anyway, it was in the past, now. Her new ID now said her name was Toki Hoshizora. Just reading it made her grin. With the HPSC, each time she had to go to a summer camp or any place that required a fake name printed on some sort of ID, the guy in charge of making those papers had given her a stars or sky-themed name, just as Keigo had fire-themed or red-themed names. It was good to know that this guy was still at it. A name meaning “starry sky”…
That was a nice parting gift from Naruto Labs. Thank you, fake ID guy, whoever you were.
The only person to know the truth and all its details was Mera. Yes, the Yokumiru Mera that had recruited her six years ago! It had been a shock to see him again after all these years. Turned out he lived on the floor below her apartment. He would check on her basically every day, either in person or with a phone call. He would also be in charge of accompanying her to the hospital for the surgeries. But he let her have her space, as long as she was reasonable. She was allowed to go out (if she kept her GPS wristwatch on her) and to explore if she wanted.
The apartment building was well-situated. It was barely twenty minutes away from the hospital and there was a direct subway line. Her neighborhood was calm but still lively, with plenty of shops and café. Lot of heroes patrolled here. Not that there were villains to catch: this place was pretty safe. It wasn’t exactly right next door to Yūei, but it was barely thirty minutes away, so it was on the teachers’ turf. If Toki decided to go to Yūei (and why the hell not? She couldn’t take the hero course, sure, but it was the best high school out there. The name only was enough to open a lot of doors. If she wanted to study astrophysics, it would help a lot!), she was already in the right place.
But well, she hadn’t gone to see it with her own two eyes. Actually, Toki hadn’t explored much yet. She had to admit, it was scary to go out there on her own, being basically Quirkless. Without Warp-Space, she felt naked. And she didn’t have Keigo to reassure her. She hadn’t realized how emboldened she had been by the knowledge she had him at her back until he wasn’t there anymore.
She had lived on her own before, but well, it had been a while. So she looked online how to clean her apartment, what kind of schedule to keep, how to organize the tiny place. It wasn’t much: she had a living room with a small kitchenette, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a small balcony. It was kind of spartan, too. Toki hadn’t brought any decorative trinkets with her besides an Endeavor poster given by Keigo as a joke a few years back, and it was just plain sad. This place looked empty and unlived in! Toki was going to live here for three years, she kind of wanted to make it comfier. But well, she was broke. She had an allowance each month… but it was tiny. She could ask Mera-san for more, but she didn’t dare yet.
It was a good thing that the Commission took care of her rent, and of her meals. Since apparently they didn’t trust her to not survive on junk-food, they delivered most of her groceries, and even gave her prepared meals thrice a week.
The first month or so, Toki didn’t dare venture too far. She stayed in her apartment most of the time. She followed her online classes. She caught up some reading. She discovered new mangas and animes. She constantly kept open a tab on her laptop with the Discord server open.
She also had a fit of paranoia and swept the place for mics and hidden cameras, because excuse me, nice or not the HPSC was still a shadowy organization and spying into people’s home was exactly the kind of shit that a shadowy organization would pull. But to her chagrin, she came up empty-handed. She found a camera above her doorstep, outside, but nothing else. Maybe the HPSC had better things to spend their money on than spying on a Quirkless teenager, after all.
She had her first appointment at the Musutafu Central Hospital at the end of June. It was where she had last seen her mom, and she dreaded the memories this place would drag up. But to her great surprise, it was fine. The hospital had been more intimidating in her memories. Now it was just a building. Her exam wasn’t even on the same floor as the maternity ward. She went with Mera-san and he kept the conversation light, looking entirely unconcerned and at ease, and it helped reassure her.
Anyway, the whole exam barely lasted an hour. The doctors poked and prodded at her, scanned her chest a lot, took several blood samples, told her to exercise regularly but without pushing her body too much, then let her go. All in one, not so bad. She was glad to be back home, though.
Toki didn’t leave her computer much since she had no more training or clubs to go to, and she was concerned about becoming a shut-in… But she quickly realized she didn’t have to worry about that. She did go out at least once a day, sometimes for several hours. Come on, after six years of daily training, she felt like she was suffocating if she tried to stay cooped up all day! But well, restless or not, she still hadn’t gathered all her courage, and so she never went very far. She circled her building’s block, then the next, but that was pretty much it. She didn’t really have a destination, anyway. She just walked around, trying to befriend stray cats and to take picture of patrolling heroes.
Then it was summer and she was too bored to keep sticking to her safe little routine. She didn’t dare to meet with PinkIsPunkRock yet, but… She started venture further and further. She was waiting for the moment where Mera (or another ‘handler’) showed up to tell her to stop, but it never happened.
When it came up almost two weeks later, during Mera-san’s daily visit, the man only shrugged:
“You have hero training, don’t you? I saw your records. Pacemaker or not, you are blue belt level in Krav Maga and you have experience with parkour, street fighting, and high-stakes strategizing. You’re aware of your limits, you have good judgement, and you’re the kind of person to be careful rather than overconfident when confronted with an unfamiliar environment. So I trust you not to take unnecessary risks… And if someone try to attack you, well. Too bad for them.”
“Jeez, shouldn’t you tell me not to be violent?” Toki snorted.
“It’s a violent world,” Mera-san replied, deadpan. “As long as you don’t use your Quirk, you’re good.”
“I’ll keep it in mind. Hey, can I have a taser, just in case?”
“No.”
“A knife, then. A small one!”
“Seriously? What if you stab someone?”
Toki gasped, looking indignant: “Hey, it’s a very versatile tool! And if I’m kidnapped in the streets, I can’t escape bonds by teleporting anymore, so I would need to find a way to cut of the zip-ties…”
“How are you that knowledgeable about how kidnappers operate?” Mera squinted.
“Blame Okamoto and the maybe-vigilante-or-reformed-villain he took us to so we could learn to fight dirty. Hobo-san had a tendency to paint the bleakest scenario possible before starting beating us black and blue. Also, regarding the stabbing, I can assure you that anyone I stab was rather desperately asking for it.”
There was a silence. Then Mera dragged his hand over his face, and sighed:
“…. I’ll see what I can do.”
In the end, Toki was allowed a small knife, but also two flash-grenades and a pepper-spray. She had to wonder if Mera was anticipating her to turn vigilante. Not that she intended to do that, but well, if she came across a mugging, she knew exactly who was going to run away screaming, and that wouldn’t be her.
And Mera was a surprisingly agreeable handler. Seriously, anyone who let her have a knife was good in her books.
Anyway. She started exploring, going further into the city each day. Soon, she managed to reach the part of Musutafu where she had wandered for month as a homeless runaway. She went back to her favorite libraries, feeling a bit nostalgic. Then, because she was pragmatic, she started looking for the different boxes full of cash she had hidden everywhere. Some were on rooftops, where she couldn’t go anymore without her teleportation, so she had to give up those ones. And about three boxes were missing in the others hiding places… They had probably been discovered by cleaning staff or repairmen. But at mid-July, after weeks of research, she had managed to find about half of what was left of Sayuri’s money.
It wasn’t enough to cover the cost of a heart transplant, sure. But it was reassuring to have a few hundred thousand yens in handy. It made her feel safer. Just in case.
Not that she felt unsafe. But well… The only person she really trusted to have her back was Keigo. Other than that, there was no one that knew her enough, who was strong enough… Who was aware of all the stakes… And who loved her enough to go to extreme length in her behalf.
She didn’t want to run away from the Commission. She liked them… she trusted them, too, weirdly enough. They had made a deal and they were keeping their word. But you know the saying: trust, but verify. She knew how easy it was to be trapped with an authority figure you trusted. She knew how easy it was for someone with complete control over you to start seeing you as a possession instead of a person.
It wouldn’t mean bad words, disdain or violence. Meteor and Sayuri hadn’t been cruel or violent, either. They had sincerely believed they were doing their best, and it probably hadn’t even occurred to them that they were tearing her apart. That was how toxic relationships began. It wasn’t loud. It wasn’t obvious. The poison didn’t hit like a gunshot. It seeped in quietly, slowly, and you didn’t know it was ever there until months after.
At least if it came to that, Toki would know the signs. Toki’s parents had wanted her love, and the Commission wanted her trust, but in the end, both had been after the same thing: her loyalty.
Toki still remembered the warning signs. The feeling on being on edge. The paranoia, the constant low thrum of anxiety, the self-directed anger at her own passivity. Love, trust… Loyalty… It was something you were supposed to give wholeheartedly. It wasn’t supposed to be draining. It wasn’t supposed to be tiring. It wasn’t supposed to make you blame yourself. Toki had loved her parents, but it wasn’t how love was supposed to be. It wasn’t supposed to choke you with self-hatred and anxiety.
Gods, it had been years, why were her thoughts cycling back to her parents again?
Sure, the Commission had taken her in and took the place of the authority figure in her life, but they weren’t exactly parental. Even Hayasa-sensei, the adult she was the closest to, didn’t fit the bill. And she didn’t even want to bring up Mera. He was treating her like an intern in need of off-handed guidance, and that was fine with her. Honestly, Toki really didn’t need a parent. Especially not a dad. She had issues with her mom (she had never visited her grave after the funeral, not even asking to: she wasn’t sure she could gather enough courage)… But the issues with her dad weren’t to be touched with a ten-foot pole. She had put him in prison for gods’ sake.
She didn’t regret her choice. It was okay to be selfish and leave. There was never any crime in putting yourself first. When people said otherwise, when her mother and father told her that she only belonged here, she had refused to believe them. They had only wanted to knock her off her feet so that they could keep her on the ground. Maybe they loved her, but it didn’t change how they had hurt her, frightened her, chained her down. She hadn’t been wrong for wanting to escape. It wasn’t her fault. She couldn’t have changed them. She shouldn’t have to. It wasn’t Toki’s responsibility to reform her parents. This was how they were, how they always had been, and she couldn’t blame herself for what they had chosen to do.
But she had hurt them, too. Escaping had been her right, but denouncing them, arresting them, that hadn’t been for the sake of her survival. That had been… for her conscience, for the greater good, for revenge maybe: she wasn’t sure. But the point was that even if it’d been right, it’d felt wrong.
Toki regretted it, and at the same time, she didn’t. She would do it again. It would hurt and she would cry and she would rather do anything else, but she would do it again. She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she just turned away from the harm they did to innocent people. Even if that meant harming them.
Did that make her cruel? She was sorry about how it had happened, and all the pain that had ensued from the arrest: but you can be sorry about something and still not regret it. She hated the way the heroes had handled it, with so much violence and collateral damage… But well, she couldn’t have done it by herself, so it had been her choice to give them the tips, hadn’t it?
Still, Toki regretted, not what had happened, but how it’d happened. The way everything had gone down. She regretted the way that building crumbled, and how her father had howled with rage while raining down rubbles on people. She regretted how her mother had learned the truth, and how alone she had been, and how she had died. Toki had done that, done that to people who loved her. She felt so ashamed.
She had never been able to visit her mother’s grave. Some part of her wanted to shrivel up and die when she thought about it. Toki had led to her own mother’s dead. She didn’t deserve to visit her grave. It was her fault. Her sin. Her origin story, her mistake.
Yes, Toki had blood on her hands. Like father like daughter, apparently.
And still… Toki couldn’t regret deciding to step up and stop them. Did that make her a hypocrite? So many people had died because of Meteor’s Crew. Toki bear the thought of becoming a bystander, of letting more death happen. Ironical, that by trying to stop the violence, Toki had enacted violence on her own family.
She wondered if her parents had had regrets, too. If Sayuri had been sorry for lying and trapping her. If Meteor had been sorry for using her.
But no apologies would fix what had happened, anyway. Toki’s betrayal, Meteor’s murder, Sayuri’s death, nothing was forgivable. With stuff like that… Apologies were like band-aids, when what you really needed was stitches.
(Her parents would never forgive Tok for what she had done, but that was alright. She would never forgive herself, either.)
Once upon a time, she would have talked to Keigo about it, just to get it off her chest. But it was harder to write it, or to say it on the phone. They talked constantly, either on the general Discord server, or in PM, or by phone. Some night they felt asleep with the call still ongoing, their conversation trailing off in whispers, then in distant, slow breathing. But it just wasn’t the same.
Weird, uh? Toki was now in one of the biggest cities of the country, with at least six neighbors who passed by her apartment each day to give her food or just check on her, and a gigantic city where she wandered for hours each day, passing hundreds of people… But she felt way lonelier than on the tiny Shikoku island, in the secluded labs where she lived with her best friend and a handful of researchers.
July came.
Kameko-san dropped by. It had been a while since Toki had seen her. But the cat-lady seemed as energetic as ever. She was there for two weeks, for work (she was hoping to have a promotion again!), and she absolutely insisted on visiting Toki. Weren’t they friends, after all? So she invited her to a fancy restaurant the first day and, after Toki had inadvertently complained her apartment was threadbare, she started covering her in gifts for her home. She texted her pictures of colorful rugs or pretty framed pictures, and if Toki replied with any positive comment, the thing was delivered in her mail in the following days. Toki didn’t really have the heart to refuse, because one, she wanted that stuff, and two… because how could she said no to Kameko obvious enthusiasm? For a cat-lady, she had the biggest puppy eyes that Toki had ever seen. And she seemed to delight into showering the young girl with gifts, like an exuberant fairy godmother granting fifty wishes at once to make up for several years of absence.
Also, the Toki bemusedly noted that most of those presents were cat-themed. Not all, but certainly over half. Kameko was really taking her whole aesthetic seriously, uh?
But it was good to see the young woman again. Toki hadn’t forgotten that Kameko had been the one to give her a way out, and how passionate she had been about the fact that Toki had a pure heart, deserved better, and all that stuff. Toki didn’t remember the exact wording. She remembered that Kameko had bought her waffles, still. And, either by nostalgia or as a wink to their first meeting, the cat-lady also brought her to her cat-café the next week-end.
“So, what’ that promotion exactly, Kameko-san?”
“A great one!” Kameko exclaimed enthusiastically. “I’m currently handling HPSC’s relation with a small hero agency in Osaka. It’s my first solo job! I usually have a sempai, but now, I’m ready to work alone! It’s though, journalist are sharks sometimes… But I like it! Even if sometimes it’s so crazy I feel like a wedding planned dealing with a bridezilla and her stepmom at the same time…”
Toki let out an ugly snort of laughter, then pulled herself together:
“So, what do you actually do?”
“Basically? Page through the mission roster and submit the most relevant ones to the agency, keep in touch with the Commission for updates, look into the mission reports so I can warn them if there’s something fishy, report and evaluate the heroes or sidekicks who fuck up, work with the public relation guy before releasing a statement, read his accountant’s report so I can make sure he doesn’t play with the price range of his merch, walks in the city and check online to listen to what people says about heroes, do some private investigator’s stuff if the hero need something checked quickly… I’m a manager, a secretary, occasionally a spy, and some sort of supervisor babysitter, who supervise all the other babysitters like the accountant or the lawyer or the publicist.”
Toki whistled: “That’s a lot of supervision for a single hero.”
Kameko shrugged:
“Well, the hero is in charge of kicking ass. We fill the relevant paperwork and if he steps on any toes, we deal with it. Yeah, it’s a team effort… But considering heroes use superpowers to step on people toes, or sometimes their house, it’s better to be safe than sorry.”
She had a point. Toki couldn’t even begin to imagine the caution needed to handle heroism when heroes used super-strength or unleashed flames hot enough to melt buildings! That was a nightmare wrapped in red tape.
“You’re kind of young to have that much responsibility, aren’t you?” she mused.
Kameko winked: “Thank you! But I’m twenty-five now. Remember, Mera-san was the same age when he led a critical mission for the HPSC.”
“Uh? Which mission?”
“Recruiting you, dummy.”
Toki opened her mouth to say it wasn’t that big of a deal, then closed it. Warp Quirks were rare. Her Quirk was an extremely precious resource, the kind of thing that could make a villain unstoppable… And that power it had been between the hands of a feral kid related to known criminals. Of course recruiting her had been a big deal. It wasn’t about educating Toki, aspiring astrophysicist, but about acquiring the young Taiyōme girl, a villains’ child with an unstoppable power… And Mera-san had actually succeeded at it. So. Fair point.
“But alright, let’s say you’re right,” she said. “You kind of climbed the career ladder pretty fast. When I met you, you were barely out of high school.”
“I will have you know I was a very promising high-schooler!” she laughed. “But more seriously, I have a good contact with people. I’ve an eye for detail, I’m willing to compromise, and I’m not a suck-up like most bureaucrats, so heroes like me. It helps a lot.”
The server brought them their snacks, and several cats started wandering close, looking at their plates. Toki began demolishing her waffles, Kameko started on her cake with a squeak of delight, and of a short while there a lull in conversation.
“What about you?” Kameko asked after a while. “You said your first exam went well, but other than that… Are you really okay? It can be hard to live alone. It’s a big change.”
A big change? Toki smiled bitterly. That didn’t even begin to cover it.
Her whole world had turned upside-down. Her body had betrayed her. Her Quirk was virtually useless. She was going to undergo several surgeries and it terrified her, because who wouldn’t be scared at the thought of being cut open on an operation table? And the worst of it… The worst of it was that she had to leave Naruto Labs. She had to leave the familiar hallways, the green park, the friendly researchers, the cook who made her cake for her birthdays, the staff who smiled at her, the workshop and its scraps she could turn into sculptures. She had to leave behind Keigo, her best friend, her family, the one who had never left her side for six years. Her whole world was… shattered. Because of that stupid heart-attack, everything was broken.
And now… She had to pick up the pieces. Nothing could go back to what it was before, she knew that. But she could make something out of what was left. It would be a lot of work. But it was that, or give up.
“I’m good, Kameko-san,” she smiled. “I’m not going to lie, it’s hard. But I’m not done. I’m far from done.”
Aratani, Taiyōme, Hoshizora, it didn’t matter the surname she carried. She was still Toki. And she was a fighter at heart.
Notes:
And it's the end of the training arc ! Next will be the high-school arc =) Guess which high-school she's going to go ? =D
I'll be updating "Snapshots of Wisdom" too, so don't forget to get a quick look !
Anyway, this chapter was BRUTAL. It's actually almost worse than the ACTUAL heart attack lol
It's also the whole point. Toki's injuries aren't minors. It's kind of like Midoriya's arms in canon. It's not a sprain that will heal: it's irreparable damage that will cripple her even when healed, because she insisted on overusing her Quirk beyond what her body could handle. Exactly like Midoriya did to himself. How many of us read that chapter (or watched that episode) and thought "holy shit, he could lose his arms?!" with horror? Well, that the same scenario.
Children are reckless and Toki even more so, because she has something to prove. She's arrogant and overconfident in her ability to handle her own problems. She made a bad decision in the spur of the moment, or rather, several bad decisions: not telling anyone about her chest pains, not telling Hayasa-sensei she had taken medecine, not stopping when the pain got worse. She's fourteen, she's allowed to be stupid. But mistakes have consequences.
And, now she's paying the price. She needs to learn to deal with the consequences of her own actions. The HPSC gave her a rough training, yeah, but it's Toki who went too far... not the Commission.(Also healing Quirks are really rare and i headcanon that Recovery Girl is the best Japan has to offer. So unfortunately Toki is beyond what Quirk healing can do. Make no mistake, the HPSC is pissed about losing Toki as an asset. They only had two crappy options: letting her go, or make a huge investment. You know how in canon Mera works overtime because the HPSC is streched too thin? They don't have the mean to hire more people. They have good connections but they're not rich. This cloned heart is going to make a big dent in their budget, so when the Vice-President is sayng that she's investing in Toki, she means every word.)
Also ! The cloned organs are and idea i got from "You and What Army" by The Feels Whale (miscellea). A great fic based on a MHA/Star Wars fusion, i 100% recommend.
I'll see you next month ! =)
EDIT 22/08/2022
So i recently found out that Quirk-suppressing cuffs are a fanon creation, and aren't canon at all! So i removed them from the story. It doesn't really change anything to this chapter, though ^^
Chapter 14: Old and new friends
Summary:
Toki is still adjusting to living as a civilian. She met an online friend face to face. Then an unexpected meeting bring her back to some old ones.
Notes:
Hey ! Long time no see =) I've been BURIED into work, it's crazy. Also, my inspiration for BNHA is slowing down. I unexpetedly fell back on ASOIAF fanfiction, of all thing.
Anyway. Here is a new chapter !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
OLD AND NEW FRIENDS
Toki and Keigo were brought back together in August, for their usual summer camp. It was the one near the beach, where they had made so many good memories. At first it was strange to see each other after nearly three months apart, but in a matter of hours they were chattering a mile a minute, as if they had never left.
Seeing Keigo again was so amazing. Toki felt like her chest was going to explode from happiness. She couldn’t stop smiling; Keigo couldn’t either. They spent their time glued to each other, chatting and teasing and laughing, filled with the kind of manic energy that came with a joy too intense to be contained. They pranked teachers, they ran around the beach, they dived in the sea, and made crazy game of tags with the other kids.
It was like old times… Meticulously composed and well-organized utter fucking chaos.
Even without Warp-Space, Toki was a force to be reckoned with when it came to a prank war, or just to the art of creating confusion. After all, even if Keigo and her were in equal footing when it came to lead a summer camp into anarchy, Keigo was usually too sensible to start things. Toki was always the instigator. Ah ah, fun times!
So they chased each other in the forest and the rocks near the sea, they played crazily competitive games of hide-and-seek that ended with sparing, they sneaked out at night to watch the stars on the rooftop. Well, they didn’t watch the stars so much as talk under them. Sometimes Toki excitingly spoke of this constellation or that one, or about how it had been discovered that such black hole was born from the collision of those two stars, and it devolved into what kind of spaceship she would build later, how she would acquire an Ion Drive. Or she told him about her new place, about Kameko’s gifts, about Mera’s easy-going nature, about funny memes she had saw online, about the sound of cars passing by and the chatter of the street in the night, so different from the silence of the park at home. Sometimes it was Keigo who filled the silence, telling her about what was going on in Naruto Labs, about the doctor who had left and the old woman who had replaced him, about how a tree had fallen down on the running tracks, about what kind of sketchy place Okamoto had brought him to, about how Hayasa-sensei was making him learn trapezes stunts.
“Okamoto is making me learn Hanakotoba, of all things!” Keigo whined. “What use is there to the language of flowers? It’s not like I’m going to send coded messages with daisies. We invented cellphones for a reason!”
“Can you even pass messages with flowers?” Toki wondered out loud. “Maybe with a bouquet, and the number or roses are coordinates…”
“Or by sticking a note in the middle of the flowers,” pointed Keigo, pragmatic.
“Good point. Oh well, knowing what flowers meant can be a good way to be interesting at parties! Like, you ask someone what their favorite flower is, then you start listing all the hidden meanings and all that simpering stuff…”
“That simpering stuff,” Keigo repeated, sniggering. “Alright, what is your favorite flower then?”
Toki scrunched her nose, thinking about it.
“Uh, I don’t know. Dandelions?”
Keigo raised himself on his elbows to shoot her an incredulous look: “Seriously?! You could pick laurels, iris, or even sunflowers, and you pick a weed?”
She shrugged a little helplessly: “Well, dandelions symbolize everything I want to be in life.”
“Fluffy and dead with a gust of wind?”
“Unapologetic,” she corrected him. “Hard to kill. Filled with sunlight, bright, beautiful in a way that the conventional and controlling hate but cannot ever fully destroy. Stubborn. Happy. Wild. Highly disapproving of lawns. Full of wishes that will be carried far after I die.”
Keigo’s face softened. He let himself fall back in starfish position with a muffled laugh, just close enough that Toki could feel the heat radiating from his body right next to her. If she reached out, she could take his hand in her.
“Damn, I didn’t know you were going to be all poetic about it.”
He was so close and so far away at the same time. Had he found her poetry notebook yet? Just thinking about it made her heart jump. She shook her head, and laughed it off.
“I’m a poet, it comes with the territory.”
If had found her notebook and he had started reading it, he didn’t say. Toki still wondered. Maybe he had, maybe the words had reached him, somehow… She didn’t dare to ask. She wasn’t sure if she was ready for the answer. It was like their unsaid and undefined feelings towards each other… They knew, but they didn’t dare to say it out loud.
Later on, Toki would quickly look online for the meaning of dandelions in floral language. It meant healing, from emotional pain and physical injuries alike. It meant intelligence. It meant surviving through challenges and injuries, and it meant having the warmth and power of the rising sun. It meant lasting happiness and youthful joy. It meant getting your dearest wish fulfilled. Dumbfounded, Toki read and reread the website. Nope, no mistake, it was the meaning of the dandelion flower. Damn. For a weed, that was a seriously deep message. Maybe that flower suited her even more than she had thought.
The camps only lasted three weeks, though, and it passed in the blink of an eye. Soon, too soon, it was time to say goodbye again.
Keigo went back to Naruto Labs, his training, the familiar grounds with the park and the tall buildings. Toki went back to Musutafu, her lonely little apartment, her online classes, and her hospital visits.
On the first of September, it was time for a second appointment. Mera-san came with her for that one, too. It would be surgery. People were going to cut her chest open, then take pictures and samples of her beating heart to clone it. Just thinking about it make Toki’s palms sweat and her stomach twist with anxiety. The operation wouldn’t be long, fifteen minutes max, but she would be sedated, asleep, while people would be playing around her internal organs, and… What? It creeped her out. It was a normal reaction.
The surgery went well. Toki went to sleep and woke up three hours later with her chest aching and a stitched wound on her sternum. No complication. It would scar, but hey, that was already a given, considering that her chest would be reopened at least four more times in the following years (for sample-taking, the actual transplant, and eventual corrective surgeries). Toki had already given up on the idea of wearing shirts with a deep neckline.
It was fine. She wasn’t vain about it. Toki was slim, with a cute face, long dark hair, and striking eyes. She didn’t need to show off her boobs to be feminine. Or to be pretty. She didn’t have much of a cleavage anyway, and thank gods for that, because she was only fourteen. Well, nearly fifteen, but still!
Beauty had never been high in her priorities. She had never tried another hairstyle than the twin macaron buns her mother had taught her, she didn’t wear makeup, and she felt awkward in fashionable skirts or short dresses. She liked tight jeans with comfy sweaters, or crop tops with baggy pants. But she also owned a pleated skirt and a leather jacket, for example. Her tastes were eclectics. The only constant was that Toki’s shirts always had high neckline to hide her scar for the pacemaker surgery. Oh, and that she loved boots with laces and good ankle support. She was a pragmatic girl. Wearing heels was a big no-no. She couldn’t make three steps before falling down.
Kameko-san tried to gift her some jewelry, but Toki didn’t feel comfortable wearing anything that dangled and could be grabbed. The most she could bear were little earrings. At first, Kameko-san gave her clip-on, but Toki suddenly realized nobody could stop her and got her ears pierced.
It was a fancy she couldn’t have indulged while in Naruto Labs. She needed an adult to give parental permission, seeing as she was a minor, so she badgered Mera-san for four days straight until he gave up. Toki was so enthused by his acceptance that she got her ears pierced in three different places each. Which, ouch. But she could wear piercings now! It was cool!
Anyway. Jewelry and fashion sense aside… Toki felt comfortable in her own skin and her own looks, and that was all that mattered. Well, in any case she didn’t have more issue with her own image than most teenagers. At fourteen, there were girls who started wearing make-up or dieting. Toki couldn’t fathom it.
Her only issue with her own body was her compulsory need to do some kind of exercise every day. If she didn’t walk outside two hours, or do some push-ups, or practice her breakdancing moves, she felt fat and flabby. It wasn’t a disorder, per se, but maybe several years of intense physical conditioning had rewired her brain to be anxious without it, and it tied with her self-image.
Oh, whatever. It wasn’t important anyway. Toki was fine. If she started nitpicking at her food, then that would be a definite red flag. She had read articles about eating disorders and that shit was no joke. Especially for a teenager living on her own and with several heavy medical procedures scheduled in the near future.
Anyway. Time passed.
Toki amped up her efforts with her online classes. She still had the middle-school cursus to complete in most subjects, but she was studying high-school level lessons in math and physics. She didn’t have much to do these days, so she was hoping to advance as much as she could in the high-school cursus. Maybe she could even finish most of it before enrolling! She was already three-quarter done. She had always liked those subjects, where things made sense and the answers were logical.
She also started looking for online university-level classes. She wouldn’t become astrophysicist by sticking to the basics! Also, maybe she could look into Musutafu’s universities… Maybe there would be one that would let her sneak into lectures.
There weren’t many universities that studied space and astrophysics anymore. Not only in Japan, but in the whole world. Toki’s best bet was to study physics, or engineering with a major in quantum physics… Pass a Master’s degree, then a PhD… And then, join the JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, their equivalent to the USA’s NASA). They didn’t launch satellites anymore, but they were still active. They were monitoring and managing the satellites already in space, keeping an eye out for meteorites, watching meteorologic changes, that kind of thing. It was the only place where Toki would be able to really study the universe.
But let’s track back. She shouldn’t put the cart before the horses. Before university, she still needed to graduate… And that meant going to high-school. She knew Keigo was signed up for Koraku High School, but the Commission didn’t have plans for Toki. Or, if they had, they hadn’t informed her… So she was taking it as a sign she could start planning. Why not, after all?
There were still months until the end of the school year, but lot of middle schoolers were already picking their high-school. Almost every high-school had an entrance exam to pass if you wanted to join. It was usually in February, so the answers came in March, just as the school-year ended. It was almost a year away, but a year passed fast. When she broached the subject with Mera-san a few days later, it wasn’t exactly out of the blue.
“I want to join Yūei,” she told him abruptly. “There won’t be any problem with that, right?”
Mera blinked. “You know you can’t use your Quirk.”
“I want to join the general education, not the hero course,” Toki rolled her eyes. “I’m not suicidal. Although, it would be funny to try and join the hero course while Quirkless. I’m sure I could hack it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” snorted her handler. “It’s true that the Quirk doesn’t make the hero, but you still need something to survive this job.”
Toki raised both eyebrows. She didn’t argue, but she disagreed. She had read enough fanfics Before to remember that a Quirkless Izuku Midoriya could have ended up a hero in his own right. Like Batman or Iron Man in the old comics! Quirks weren’t everything. Eraserhead basically fought Quirkless and he was still badass. Seriously, with good martial art training, some on-the-fly analysis, and a willingness to hit people’s weak points, you could be a very competent fighter… And, consequentially, a very competent hero.
“I don’t intend to join the hero course anyway,” she replied. “Not because I couldn’t do it, but because I don’t need their hero training. I’ve been training since I was eight. Honestly, with that free time I want to progress further in my academic studies.” She paused, thoughtful. “I could join the support course, maybe. I wasn’t the best in the workshop but I like engineering…”
She could even joint the business course if she wanted. After all, you needed to know your economics before trying to resuscitate a project as ambitious as space exploration. That was the kind of venture that usually took hundreds of thousands of people, several international resources pooled together, and a fuckton of money.
“Do as you wish,” finally said Mera. “The Vice-President said that the Commission would pay for the high-school of your choosing, after all. But you will have to remember that Yūei is kind of famous. Their students are broadcasted on national TV every year with the Sports Festival.”
Ah crap, she had forgotten about that. She cringed. Yeah, so much for keeping a low profile. Not that she was particularly worried about being tracked down by her father’s friends or enemies (it had been six years, and she had changed names, so she felt pretty safe), but… Her father was probably spitting mad about her betrayal. And prisons had TV. Meteor was smart and had a good memory: if he saw a girl named Toki with twin buns and the right age, no matter how much she had grown and changed, he would put two and two together. And Toki was pretty defenseless at the moment.
“I will figure something out,” she decided. “Maybe I will pretend to be sick. Or maybe I will dye my hair and wear sunglasses. Or maybe I’ll just twist my ankle and never go further than the first event, or… whatever. I’ll manage.”
Mera-san shrugged: “Your choice. Do you need anything to prepare for their entrance exams?”
Toki smiled, pleased. It was always nice to get what you wanted on the very first try.
“Some middle-school level books. I’m super-advanced in some subjects, like math, but and lagging behind with some others, like literature…”
“Sure. I’ll speak with the Vice-President and order some books for you.”
Mission accomplished. Toki was going to Yūei. General education, not hero course like the canon’s protagonists, but still. It was allegedly the best high-school out there, and there were real pro-heroes on the grounds, and she would learn so many interesting things in a real high-school instead of sticking to online classes! Ooooh, she was so excited already!
________________
< ShootForTheStars: So
< ShootForTheStars: Pink, in what year are you at Yūei?
> PinkIsPunkRock: Second, why?
< ShootForTheStars: I’m going to general studies next year =D
> PinkIsPunkRock: NO WAY
> PinkIsPunkRock: i will be your senpai!
> EndeavorSucks: wow, nice going stars!
> ThisIsFluffy: not going to try for the hero course?
< ShootForTheStars: not with my heart condition…
> ThisIsFluffy: oh fuck i forgot i’m sorry
< ShootForTheStars: don’t sweat it
> NotOnFire: good for you Stars! hope you get in!
> ChickenNuggets: GENERAL STUDIES?! Why not support?
< ShootForTheStars: manual labor sucks
> ChickenNuggets: point
> ChickenNuggets: but you could make grenades and other fun stuff to pass time
> PikaPika: congrats Stars!
> PikaPika: also now I’m worried as to what constitute fun stuff to pass time for Chicken
> ChickenNuggets: I don’t know what you mean
> EndeavorSucks: he’s probably an arsonist
> NotOnFire: why is that the first thing on your mind?
> ChickenNuggets: do you get off on fire, @EndeavorSucks?
> Chicken Nuggets: (¬‿¬)
> ThisIsFluffy: … he’s got a point
> EndeavorSucks: I wont take criticism for someone called CHIKEN NUGGETS
< ShootForTheStars: why? Your username is dumb too
> EndeavorSucks: how could you betray me like that Stars?
< ShootForTheStars: honestly? Very easily
> PinkIsPunkRock: omg xDDDDDDD
> NotOnFire: also what do you have against fire? xD
> ChickenNuggets: she’s right, your username is stupid
> EndeavorSucks: well YOUR username is stupid
> ChickenNuggets: True
> ChickenNuggets: I don’t deny it, but cut me some slack, I picked it when I was twelve!
> PinkIsPunkRock: That’s no excuse
> PinkIsPunkRock: I picked mine at twelve too and it’s nice
< ShootForTheStars: me too!
> ChickenNuggets: it’s stupidly long
< ShootForTheStars: you’re impatient tho
< ShootForTheStars: And it doesn’t make your username less stupid
> ChickenNuggets: ah ah guilty as charged!
- ChickenNuggets has changed their username to NotHawks -
> NotOnFire: is that a dig at me?
> PikaPika: …
> ThisIsFluffy: What does that even mean
< ShootForTheStars: AH AH AH
- ShootForTheStars has changed their username to NotQuantum -
> PinkIsPunkRock: Uh
> NotOnFire: Is that a private joke between you two?
< NotQuantum: You can say that
> NotHawks: hey can we go back to Endy’s fire fetish?
> EndeavorSucks: NO WE CANNOT
________________
oOoOoOo
October came and went. Toki celebrated her fifteenth birthday pretty much alone. Mera-san called, Kameko-san, too, and of course Keigo (who passed on the birthday’s wishes of Hayasa-sensei and some other people from Naruto Labs). She got a few cards in the mail. She also got a gift from Keigo: two big hairpins to hold her buns in place. They looked like little crowns, and they were bright yellow like dandelions. She loved them instantly.
She missed Keigo. It wasn’t the same to write or call. Considering that a human being started forming coherent memories at three years old… Toki had more memories of them being together than of them being apart.
Also, being alone in her tiny apartment, or alone in her long walks, gave her way too much time to think about their relationship and it was driving her crazy.
They were friends, best friends, and Toki loved him, but was she in love with him? Was she attracted to him? Romantically? Physically? S-sexually?! Or all of the above?
I mean, yes, probably. She wanted to spend her life with him, she adored him. He was vibrant and warm and bright and cheerful and quiet and analytical and amazing. But was it love-love? What if it was just friendship and codependency? And… Yeah, she was attracted to him, but… what if it was just because she didn’t know what her type was, and the horny part of her brain had just latched on Keigo because he was familiar?
And what about Keigo’s feelings? Did he love her? Was he in love with her? Shit, he had talked about flowers, which ones was it already?! Maybe there was a message behind those flowers. Maybe he had been trying to tell her something, and she had missed it! Or even before, maybe he had tried to make his feelings clear and she hadn’t noticed? But wait… on second thought, maybe he hadn’t, because if Toki couldn’t make head or tail of what her feelings were, it would be ridiculously unfair for Keigo (who had way less time to ponder about it!) to make sense of his.
Damn it! Why was she always thinking about it? Was it teenage hormones speaking? Or was it just a side-effect of separation anxiety, second-guessing everything?
She still wondered if he had read her poems, but never dared to ask him directly. She wrote lots of new ones in her notebook, these days. Sometimes it was about loneliness. Sometimes it was about anger and rebellion. Sometimes it was about feeling powerless and angry at her powerlessness. But sometimes, it was about him. About friendship, and love, and longing.
The stars would be
so proud
to know that their atoms
created somebody like you.
Toki wasn’t stupid. She knew this separation was getting to her. Oh, she wasn’t really alone. There were daily phone calls or visits from Mera-san, and a few words exchanged with her oh-so-helpful neighbors: that was enough to make sure she didn’t go insane with isolation. But it wasn’t enough to stop her from feeling homesick… or from feeling lonely. Yeah, she had her online friends, and it helped. But she wanted someone to hug. Someone to babble to, about the latest conspiracy theory or about another one of her interests. Someone she could trust; someone she could love.
She had contemplated the idea of going back to Mihoko Shinsō’s apartment, once or twice. She didn’t know why. Or maybe she did… Mihoko-san had been nice and honest in a time in Toki’s life were kindness and honesty were both in short supply. Meeting her had been her saving grace, her starting point. Kameko-san had been the one to offer her a way out, but Mihoko-san had been the one to make her realize what she could become, how strong she was, how important she was.
For months… no, years… Toki had focused on being small and unnoticed, curling defensively around her notebooks and knowledge, and waiting for the storm to pass. Even when she had denounced Meteor’s Crew to the heroes… She hadn’t felt strong, she hadn’t felt safe. The storm had only gotten stronger. But with Mihoko-san… For the first time, Toki had offered her hand in help to someone, and had been helped in return. It had made a lifelong impression on her.
But well, she was ashamed to try and reconnect with Mihoko-san now that she was weak and basically defenseless. She had been so proud, when she had sent her that letter, telling her that she was strong, that she was off the streets, that she was going to be a hero. After bragging like that… Her set-back was embarrassing. Shameful, even.
So no, Toki didn’t try to find Mihoko-san again. She still had her phone number, though, and her address. She had saved both on her phone, just in case.
But she still wanted a friend. Ideally, Keigo, because fuck she missed him. For years they had occupied the same personal space, sharing food, holding hands, cuddling when they had trouble sleeping, and well, Toki didn’t consider herself needy but she wasn’t used to living alone so long, and she felt almost touch-starved. She went to cat café just to have something warm and alive to hug to her chest a few hours, how sad was that?
She even once considered going to a therapist to pour her heart out to someone, but the idea was flushed down the toilet before even properly forming. Yeah, right. She didn’t need some pontificated dude telling her she had abandonment issues. She knew that already. She just needed… a solid hug. And to write, frenetically, until putting the words on paper was enough to lift some of the weight that crushed her chest.
I think I like my brain best in a bar fight with my heart
I think I like myself a little broken,
with rough edges,
a little harder to grasp
I like poetry better than therapy anyway
the poems never judge me for healing wrong.
But not matter how much writing helped, how much holding purring kitties to her chest and trying to befriend stray cats helped… Well, it wasn’t a substitute for a human presence.
Toki was lonely. She was extremely reluctant to approach people now that she was Quirkless, so it didn’t help. But after another month, then another… She decided she was now brave enough to try and met PinkIsPunkRock in person. It was, after all, one of her safest options. Her online friend wasn’t a total unknow. Toki was still reticent to mix the life of ShootForTheStars (or rather, NotQuantum) with the life of Toki (who, hilariously, was actually Quantum), but… Well. She wasn’t under as much scrutiny as before, in Naruto Labs… And frankly, she didn’t have much to lose now.
Anyway. Toki set up a meeting with PinkIsPunkRock.
She knew the safe thing to do when meeting an online acquaintance was to tell an adult but, well, she didn’t exactly have a trusted adult in her corner right now. So she told Keigo, and set up the meeting in a cat café so there would be people around. She asked for a picture of PinkIsPunkRock holding one finger up, then another with two fingers up, to be sure it was a real person taking selfies and not some creep hiding behind a teenager’s picture found online. She asked for her real first name. Then, to the actual meeting, she brought her knife and pepper-spray, just in case.
Turned out her paranoia was unwarranted. Toki arrived well in advance and ordered a hot chocolate to wait (a tabby jumped on her knees, and Toki was immediately distracted by the cat’s cute little paws and its intense purring). At the scheduled time, the cat’s café’s door opened, and her friend arrived. Toki recognized her from the pictures, and shyly waved from her seat. They exchanged a smile.
“Pink, right?” Toki said awkwardly.
Her friend snorted: “You can call me Sachiko. Hello, Stars.”
Toki beamed: “Hello, Sachiko! I guess you can call me Toki. And I can see why you picked that username!”
Sachiko touched her hair with a self-depreciating smile, but Toki didn’t see why. Sachiko’s hair was cut in a short bob, with bangs brushed to the side, and it was pink. Not neon-pink… More like soft pastel pink with golden undertones, like a peach or something. It was very pretty.
Sachiko was actually a very pretty girl. She had an oval face with big silver-grey eyes, a mischievous smile, neatly brushed hair, and she wore a purple turtleneck that showed off her slim waist and her athletic built. When they talked a little more, it turned out that Sachiko practiced karate and boxing. She had a mean right hook and could kick a grown man in the chin hard enough to knock him out cold!
Oh damn, Toki had found her soulmate. In no time at all they were chattering like lifelong friends, like they did on the server, except it was now real life.
Sachiko had PinkIsPunkRock’s passionate streak, constantly challenging the system and pointing flaws, revolted by injustice in all its form, going feral as soon as it was suggested that the strong were abusing the weak. But she was also a lot more subdued in real life, taking time to reflect and analyze before passing judgement. She didn’t swear nearly as much, and she had a lighter attitude. She also teased Toki less, probably because she was scared of making her run away. And she was more exuberant, earnestly talking about herself and her studies.
“Yes, I want to try and transfer to the business course next year!”
“The business course?” Toki repeated. “Why?!”
Sachiko shrugged: “Well, you have to learn the rules before breaking them, right?”
Toki let out a startled laugh. That sounded exactly like something PinkIsPunkRock would say on the server.
“Well, you’re not wrong. What, you intend to work in economics or something like that?”
“In management actually. Something in the entertainment industry, ideally.”
“Really? I would have thought you would go in politics! Or in heroics, to change things… Did you ever think about joining the Commission?”
“Nah, that’s not for me! I don’t have the patience to climb the social ladder to change things from the top. I want to help people right now. I can be an activist to shake up things, and I can run a movie theater at the same time.”
“Why a movie theater of all things?”
Sachiko shrugged, slurping her smoothie. “I like it. I like organize stuff, doing useful things, even if it’s filling paperwork. I like to create. Sure, I’m not an actor, but bringing media to the public is part of the creation process. Marketing things, helping send a message… I like having a team, too. Hum, maybe I should look into normal theaters instead. Sure, it would be more work, but… Organizing the scene and playing around with the costumes could be lot of fun!” She smiled dreamily, before asking brightly: “What about you? Want to shake the system later? You could, you have a good head on your shoulders and you always raise good points.”
“Sorry,” Toki said with an apologetic smile. “I’m playing by the rules. I want to be an astrophysicist, like I said on the server, but I also want to be a hero.”
“With your heart condition?”
“It won’t be a problem in a few years. I’ll have my transplant just in time for passing the License Exam at eighteen.”
Sachiko faltered, looking suddenly wary.
“Are you sure? It’s a very difficult exam… You won’t be able to pass it without training intensely. After three years on medical leave, it’s virtually impossible. Unless you can train even with your heart condition? You must have a strong Quirk. What is your Quirk, actually? You never said.”
Yeah, that was on purpose. Toki coughed.
“It’s not the Quirk that makes the hero, you know. And let’s say that yes, I have a strong Quirk… but I can’t use it until my heart is fixed. For the next three year I’m functionally Quirkless. But that’s not important. I’ve been training for heroism since I was a kid. I have my hero name picked and everything, and friends to help me sign up in the exam even if I didn’t follow a hero course in high-school. I can hack it. Don’t worry about me.”
“Even then…”
“Don’t worry about it,” repeated Toki, louder. “Besides, even if I don’t get my hero license, I’m too much of a busybody hyped on an amazing Quirk: I will probably turn part-time vigilante or something.”
It made Sachiko snort with laughter: “How can you be a part-time vigilante?”
“By working on a PhD at the same time, obviously!”
“Ah, yes, I forgot, you’re a genius and you’re going to terraform the moon.”
“Actually, terraforming the moon would be impossible because there isn’t enough gravity to hold an atmosphere, so it would be better to terraform Mars. And I’m not quite there yet, I’m not sure the right technology even exists, and anyway I want to launch satellites to explore deep space and find habited planets… But yeah, you’re right on the genius thing.”
Sachiko laughed, eyes cringing in amusement:
“Alright. I look forwards to your discovery of little green men.”
They talked a lot. But it didn’t escape Toki’s notice that Sachiko had never talked about her Quirk either.
Anyway. They chatted about everything, from their respective dream jobs to their criticism of the latest hero fights, or their debate about social justice. Toki got a little heated up when the conversation turned towards Quirk discrimination, because since she was temporarily Quirkless she had done a little digging about Quirklessness statistics and the numbers were straight-up horrifying. The suicide rate alone was chilling. And nobody was concerned with it because Quirkless people were less and less common, and most of them were old people, so why should society concern itself with a dying breed?
Turned out Sachiko hadn’t really considered Quirklessness in all of her quests for social justice, and she got on board almost immediately. Quirkless discrimination was a weird mix between Quirk discrimination (the good and heroic Quirks VS the bad and villainous ones) and also ableism. Quikless people were seen as disabled, weak, pitiful… But they weren’t’ just ignored, like most disabled people were. They weren’t just lesser, they made people uncomfortable, and it attracted scorn and anger. The vast majority ignored them, but it was common for them to also be harassed, attacked, all that jazz. Their lack of Quirk made other people angry and insecure. They saw it like a reminder that they weren’t really exceptional after all: that they were just as human as the baseline, non-powered person who still looked like them and breathed the same air as them, and it was apparently enough for Quirked people to hate the Quirkless ones.
So, basically, when Sachiko and Toki went to their separate way, both girls were super fired up about Quirkless discrimination. As soon as they logged online that evening, they went on a rampage to sign up on Quirkless support campaigns and tear down Quirk supremacists on Tweeter. Toki even had the wildly absurd thought of finding where Izuku Midoriya currently lived so she could unleash Sachiko on his bullies. That would be a sight.
And just like that, Toki had a friend.
At first, she didn’t want to appear needy and stick to Sachiko like glue. The older girl was a little impressive after all. Not that she was super-muscular or anything, but she gave out that feeling of having her life together and knowing where she was going. For Toki whose internal monologue was usually a string of question marks interspaced with exclamation points, well, it was a bit intimidating.
But Sachiko had apparently no reluctance at all to act the part of the earnest senpai. She told Toki about Yūei's entrance exam for the general studies course. She gave advice, shared jokes to lighten the atmosphere, and dutifully enquired about her health when Toki had to go to the hospital. She invited her to spend the New Year at her place, too!
It was the first time Toki was invited anywhere. She was petrified with nervousness at first, but it turned out to be funnier than she would have thought. The guests were mostly people of Sachiko’s age, so older than Toki, but they were all nice and chatty, sharing most of her interests and passions. A boy even flirted with Toki, which flustered her to no end. It was… kind of nice, actually. She felt like she was part of the group. She hadn’t really fit in with adults, but she had always been apart for the kids her age during summer camps. She was more attuned to teenagers a little older than her, apparently.
So Sachiko became her friend. Not as close as Keigo (nobody would get as close as Keigo, he was basically her soulmate), but important nonetheless. The bond they had was different than the one Toki had with Keigo, but also different than the one ShootForTheStars had had with PinkIsPunkRock. Sachiko was older, more responsible. And Toki was maybe very mature for a teenager, but she was still lonely and lost, while Sachiko was strong and confident. So Sachiko took a more… protective role. The older friend, keeping an eye on the younger one.
Yes, senpai was the right word. Sachiko had taken Toki under her wing.
On the server, nothing really changed, but PinkIsPunkRock seemed to be looking out for her more actively than before. She was taking her side when they were all teasing each other, and pinging her more often to share her findings about social justice campaign and other stuff Toki would be interested in. Nobody seemed to have noticed, although NotOnFire at once joked that PinkIsPunkRock was flirting with her. But none of the other had said anything. Keigo, or rather NotHawks, was a tiny bit colder towards PinkIsPunkRock… but that was probably because he felt lonely at Naruto Labs.
Anyway. January came, and with it a new medical exam. It was, like, the fourth now. No surgery, but several radios, some blood samples, and a long interview with a nutritionist. Toki took the opportunity to ask if she could go back to some training. Walking was all good and fine, but she really wanted to join a sport club. Maybe for boxing. Although Sachiko had praised her karate club, and Toki was kind of tempted to try it.
The doctors gave her the ok, on the condition she didn’t push it. No more than one training session a week! Doing sports was encouraged for people with pacemakers, but Toki was also recovering. She wasn’t supposed to work with the same intensity as she had at Naruto Labs, where she had the routine of a high-level athlete. It sucked, because Toki liked to push herself to her limits. But she would take what she could get.
Also, she could now join Sachiko’s karate dojo. Yeah.
Joining a dojo made her nostalgic for her Krav Maga club back on Shikoku Island. Sachiko’s club was bigger, louder, with more little kids, and students of wildly different levels. Sachiko herself was green belt (intermediate level), which meant she had a solid grasp of the basic and could kick serious ass, but she wasn’t at the top yet. Toki had practiced karate for nearly a year when she had joined the Commission, before switching to ballet, and her memories coupled with her practice of Krav Maga allowed her to bypass the beginners’ white belt and start with yellow. Nice. Yellow was her favorite color anyway!
It turned out that Sachiko was actually better than the other green belts in her class, but she had never been allowed to pass the test to get a blue belt because of discipline issues. Long story short: she had used karate to pick fights with people outside the dojo, and word had gotten back to their instructor. For every fight Sachiko got into, he forbad her to take the test, or join a competition, for a month.
“So I can’t take the test or join a competition until June,” explained Sachiko, beaming.
“You’re on probation for six months?!”
“Bear in mind that when sensei implemented that rule, I had just gotten my green belt and I was barely fifteen.”
Toki quickly did the math, and her jaw fell. “It’s been two years?!”
“Closer to three, but yeah!” Sachiko laughed, scratching the back of her head and looking both embarrassed and pleased with herself. “I don’t really look for trouble, but when I see people getting bullied or anything… You know how I get.”
PinkIsPunkRock, social justice warrior. Toki shook her head fondly. Yeah, she could picture it. But still…
“You could at least try to be subtle.”
“Oh, I’m very sneaky, I assure you. Pika may have admin privilege but I’m the one running the server, hadn’t you noticed? Also, subtlety is all well and good, but it rarely works in case of emergency. Especially when people are getting hurt.”
“Still,” mumbled Toki. “You shouldn’t be so casual about breaking the rules.”
Sachiko looked at her with fondness:
“I’m not, I assure you. But you should know, miss future-part-time-vigilante… Sometimes it’s worth it. If you are so committed to being perfectly lawful that you cannot see the value of breaking a law to defend yourself or others, you’re not good, you’re obedient.”
That was deep. Toki ingested that without a word, turning the sentence in her head while her class warmed up, before switching to a lesson about high-kicks. It was going to integrate well into her fighting style: Toki had some upper-body strength, but she wasn’t a brawler, mostly because it was hopeless against people like Hayasa-sensei or Keigo. She relied more on jumps and kicks. It would be nice to train her legs again.
Sachiko wasn’t wrong. Rules were good, rules kept people safe. But sometimes the rules weren’t enough, or they were misused, and you had to take justice and safety into your own hands. Toki knew it very well. But… She had never been an innate rebel. She pointed faults and nitpicked at the system’s flaws but she still supported it as a whole. To take out her parents’ Crew, she had turned towards the police and the heroes, the lawful authorities. Even on the run, she had always considered inevitable to end up in foster care, because staying in the fringe of society hadn’t crossed her mind. Part of the appeal of the HPSC’s sponsorship had been the legitimacy of it. Toki didn’t see a problem with breaking the rules if needed, but her first instinct was always to play fair.
If she had to qualify her character, she would say that she was Lawful Neutral.
That was why she wanted to be a hero, after all. Because she wanted to help people, but she wanted to do it by the rules, with an organization to support her, allowing her to be as efficient as possible. The fact that having a support system would also help her to pursue other activities outside of heroics (like astrophysics!) was a nice bonus.
Still, Toki admired Sachiko’s determination. Her confidence, too. She had learned how to fight for the purpose of fighting bullies (and not even her own bullies!). And she had done it knowing the system wouldn’t help, would even sanction her! Toki wouldn’t have dared. Well, maybe she would have, but that was because she already had combat training. But as an unexperimented kid, she would have kept her head down. Maybe tied the bully’s shoelaces together later, or helped his victim to get up… But she wouldn’t have interfered. She was mouthy and sarcastic, not necessarily brave. She wouldn’t have taken the initiative to get stronger to be able to intervene, like a warrior preparing to go to war.
She would have tried to help, yes, but she wouldn’t have changed her life for that.
Was it selfish of her? Did it make her a bad hero? She had to wonder. Toki hadn’t been born on the path to heroism (far from it!), but she had willingly joined it in exchange for safety, protection, and perspective for her future. She would do her best as a hero, one day. But would her best be as good as the average of a born-hero, someone who physically couldn’t stop themselves from saving people and getting into trouble? Someone like All Might… Or Izuku Midoriya… Or even Keigo Takami?
Maybe, a little voice said in her head. But look how they all ended up. All Might is expected to die before hitting his sixties. Midoriya is going to damage his own body almost beyond repair before being old enough to legally drink. And Keigo is going to be burned, tortured, crippled; almost killed, barely in his twenties.
Being born with heroism in your blood is a double-edged sword. You shine so bright, and you burn yourself out. It’s not bad to have some more restrained heroes out there, to stay sane and keep the self-sacrificing nutjobs in line.
Sure, Toki would never be the kind of ideal hero All Might was, so awesome and pure and devoted he was almost holy: she would never be the kind of hero that Stain would endorse, the kind of heroes who seemed more than human for the strength of their devotion. But on the other hand, she didn’t have to be. Toki could take it one step at the time. She could do her best because she chose to, doing what she was armed to do, without burning herself out to be more.
She didn’t have Sachiko’s drive or Keigo’s ambition, but that was alright. She would be her own kind of hero.
oOoOoOo
In February, it was Yūei’s entrance exam. Most high-schools held their entrance exam at the end of the month or the beginning of March, but hero schools did theirs three or four weeks before that, so the students could apply, fail, then resolve themselves to apply elsewhere. Everyone wanted to be a hero. To try and apply to a hero school, even if it was a guaranteed failure, was almost a rite of passage for teenagers with something to prove… And almost every teenager had something to prove.
The competition would be rude. Yūei was one of the best high-school out there, and they were very demanding. Toki spend almost two weeks psyching herself up, reviewing her notes frenetically and double-checking everything. She had signed up for general studies, but had also filed an application for the support course, just in case.
The day of the exam came. Toki knew she was prepared, of course, and both Sachiko and Keigo had assured her they were sure she would succeed. But she was still shaking with nerves when she entered Yūei. Some part of her couldn’t help but look everywhere with giddy wonder, because hey, it was Yūei, the heart of the Plot! Holy shit, she was in! But another part of her was wondering with growing panic if she had done the right choice, if she had worked enough, if her eclectic cursus covered everything…
She didn’t see Eraserhead among the teachers. But she saw a glimpse of Present Mic. And Nedzu showed up! Toki mentally cooed because even if it was impossible to know if he was a rat, a bear, or an otter, and even if he was a scary mastermind… He was adorable. He had such a soft and squeaky voice! And a small snout with little whiskers! And cute little toes beans! Pink little toes beans!
Ahem. Back to the point.
The exam wasn’t as difficult as she had feared. Some literature questions were hard, but the science part of the test was a breeze. There were actually two exams: a first one for everyone, and a second tailored to each course. The one standardized test for everyone was in the morning, then the students were let out to lunch, and after than they were split up and send to complementary exams according to the course they wanted to join. Heroes went to fight robots, business course students were sent in another room for some other exam, and the support course hopefuls were brought to a workshop where they were told to go wild. The general studies exam would be held the next day, since a lot of students actually picked it after being rejected from another course. That was fine. Toki couldn’t match the creativity of some of her competitors (some guy with green hair was building a drone from scratch! How?!) but she had fun. She was thinking about what she would need if she had to pass the heroic entrance exam Quirkless and, channeling her inner Katsuki Bakugou, she ended up making two flamethrowers that could be attached to her boots, to kick and explode robots at the same time.
Her idea wouldn’t be enough for her to pass… probably. But whatever. She was aiming for the general studies anyway.
The next day, she came back to pass the general studies exam, feeling more confident in her abilities. She recognized a lot of kids who had, yesterday, gone to the heroic exam. There was a guy with blue hair, for example. And another, a Black kid who sneered at his neighbors. A girl with orange hair falling in her face, too. Toki didn’t really try to remember their names: there was no point until they were all actually accepted.
The exam was harder than the preliminary one they had to do the previous day, but still doable. Toki still struggled on some literature and history questions, but the math part was really easy. Almost too easy. It was one thing to know that she was advanced in that subject, having nearly completed the high-school curriculum: but still, it made her feel as if she had missed a trap somewhere. She seriously hoped it wasn’t the case. It would be so stupid to screw up her entrance exam because of a math question, when it was her best subject!
________________
> NotHawks: How did it go?
< NotQuantum: good, I think
< NotQuantum: I probably won’t go into support but general studies is a guaranteed win
> NotHawks: I knew you could do it! ᕙ (` ▿ ´) ᕗ
> PinkIsPunkRock: congrats! Want a celebratory drink?
> ThisIsFluffy: I hope it’s non-alcoholic because if i remember correctly you’re both underage
< NotQuantum: why must you suck out all the joy out of my life?
> NotOnFire: congrats!
> PikaPika: wait, did I miss something, do Pink and Stars know each other?
< NotQuantum: we live in the same city, we’ve met
> ThisIsFluffy: Stars is the one who’s met the most people from this server IRL!
< NotQuantum: Chicken and Pink, that’s only two!
> PikaPika: that’s still more than the rest of us
> PinkIsPunkRock: what, are you suggesting an IRL meeting?
> EndeavorSucks: I’ve met @NotOnFire, too
> NotOnFire: dude!
> NotOnFire: way to expose me
> ThisIsFluffy: you’ve met?! When?!
> EndeavorSucks: last year
> EndeavorSucks : it was totally random
> NotOnFire: I didn’t know anyone besides him in that damn city, and I didn’t have a single yen to pay for a train ticket home
> EndeavorSucks: wait let me tell them
> NotOnFire: aw man do you have to?!
> NotHawks: well I want to know, it sounds good
< NotQuantum: I want to know too!
> ThisIsFluffy: tell us!
> EndeavorSucks: alright kids, buckle up
> EndeavorSucks: about ten months ago I got a ping late at night and it was Fire, in PM, asking for a huge favor
> EndeavorSucks: I believe the exact terms were ‘as big as you imagine Endeavor’s dick to be’
> EndeavorSucks: which is how I knew it was serious
> PinkIsPunkRock: AH AH AH
> PikaPika: I mean, considering how jacked the dude is, he probably has a massive… equipment
> EndeavorSucks: having a big dick doesn’t count if he shoves two thirds of it in his personality
> EndeavorSucks: but I digress
< NotQuantum: lol
> EndeavorSucks: so i ask him what his problem is, he tell me he’s stranded in Yokohama, he doesn’t have his wallet, the next train is in barely half an hour and he doesn’t want to sleep on the streets, can i please come and give him some cash so he can hightail back home, pretty please, he will repay me and give me his firstborn child if I don’t breathe a word of it to anyone
> EndeavorSucks: and he also ask me, like, as an afterthought, if I don’t mind, to please bring him a pair of pants. No big deal. Nothing important. Because that’s the kind of normal demand a human person makes all the time.
> PinkIsPunkRock: … omg
> NotOnFire: well you can go fuck yourself for my firstborn child now
> EndeavorSucks: as if I wanted your hellspawn anyway
> ThisIsFluffy: SHOTS FIRED
> EndeavorSucks: I go to meet him, with a pair of pants in my bag, and of course absolutely dying to meet this lunatic
> EndeavorSucks: and so it turn out that NotOnFire, our resident sassmaster, IS ON FIRE
> PikaPika: what
> EndeavorSucks: he has a fire quirk. He came to Yokohama to meet a pretty girl, because apparently college students have nothing better to do with their life than take the train for hours to visit some rando met online (although yes I’m aware that we are all rando met online). And she was apparently SO CUTE and SO PRETTY that he apparently lost control of his Quirk and burned his clothes
> EndeavorSucks: so he was hiding NAKED in a station’s bathroom
> EndeavorSucks: and he couldn’t buy others clothes because the chick had PICKPOCHETED HIM and ran away while he was catching fire.
> EndeavorSucks: And here is the story of how i met our friend Fire, ladies and gentlemen: buck naked in a men’s bathroom, and very much on fire
> EndeavorSucks: I gave him pants, he gave me his most ARDENT thanks, then he hightailed out of here and I just stayed where I was, hysterically laughing.
> NotOnFire: … in my defense it was very awkward for me.
< NotQuantum: i am. on. the FLOOR
> NotHawks: this is hilarious i’m crying
> PikaPika: i love this, thank you SO MUCH for sharing this Endy
> ThisIsFluffy: xDDDDD
> PinkIsPunkRock: we are never letting you live that down man
________________
So it was life as usual.
The results came in barely two weeks later. Toki had failed the support course exam (not surprising) but she had scored high on the general studies exam. She actually came first in the preliminary test, and third in the general studies test! It was pretty good. Toki went to have that celebratory drink with Sachiko, as promised, and they stuck to non-alcoholic drinks in a cat-café.
Toki was really fond of cat cafés, now. It felt so good to hug a friendly cat. Sachiko was very tactile, casually slinging an arm around her shoulder or giving a playful shove, but she wasn’t a hugger. And Toki wasn’t one, either, so it would have felt weird to ask.
She wondered who had been the last person to hug her before Keigo. Maybe Meteor? A quick hug, a hair-ruffle after training…. It must have been weeks before the last heist, at last. And before that? She didn’t know. Maybe her mom, before their argument.
In the early days, her mom had been tactile and loving… but the distance had grown after their first big argument, and the gap between mother and daughter had never closed. Jeez, what kind of pathetic childhood was that? If Toki had kids one day, she would never make them feel as crappy as that. She would spoil the shit out of them.
Well, if she had kids. She couldn’t really imagine it. She wasn’t opposed to the idea, though. Maybe one day. After the League of Villains was defeated, of course. Because Toki was sure that since she had inherited her mom’s Quirk, she had also inherited her weakness, and she wouldn’t be able to teleport while pregnant, and here she was, mentally digressing again. How had her mental process gone from hugs to the impact of pregnancy on her Quirk?!
Anyway.
It was now March. It had been nearly a year since Toki had left Naruto Labs. It felt weird to think about it: it seemed like no time had passed, as if her long absence didn’t compute; and at the same time, Toki felt almost homesick. In March and May usually came rougher training, Hayasa-sensei taking advantage of the clear weather, just cold enough to bite but still warm enough for long lessons outside. Now Keigo was alone in those lessons. It must be lonely. He was on the Discord server almost every night, and since he had showed his clear disinterest before, it betrayed how bored he was.
For Toki, March meant end-of-the-school-year exams, mostly. She had already completed some courses but she had to retake tests to gauge her levels and complete her file. It wasn’t very hard. Toki still applied her herself, wishing to have an exemplary record. She was already accepted into Yūei, but it sure didn’t hurt. Like Keigo said: if something deserved to be done, it deserved to be done exemplarily. He was an overachiever like that.
May also meant that Toki had another medical appointment coming. Once again, Mera-san walked her to the hospital, and then stayed out of the examination room to browse on his phone in the waiting room. Meanwhile, Toki was made to run on a treadmill with an oxygen mask to measure her endurance for nearly half an hour, then she had blood samples taken, then a radio. Honestly it was kind of draining. But she was used to this song-and-dance by now, and so it didn’t faze her the slightest when the nurse told her that the guy bringing her test result was going to be the surgeon in charge of her heart transplant.
She did feel a twinge of curiosity (the guy was going to mess wither internal organs, she wanted to see what he looked like), sure. But she was totally unprepared for the way said surgeon looked at her when he entered the room.
The nurse left, keeping the door open for him, and the doctor walked in the room while reading her file. Then the door closed behind the nurse, he raised his head, and suddenly did a double-take. He was staring as if he had seen her before and wasn’t quite managing to place her face. It was such an incongruitous reaction (Toki had really common features), that she couldn’t help but feel like she was missing something.
Did… did she know that guy? Was he with the Commission or something?
Toki squinted. He was very vaguely familiar. Tall, with spiky purple hair, a square jaw, dark eyes almost black, huge eyebags as if he hadn’t sleep in a week, large shoulders… Still, she couldn’t place him. Maybe she had passed him on the streets once? Honestly, she wouldn’t have looked twice at him normally, he wasn’t that distinctive; but the way he was staring… It looked like he was recognizing her, and Toki was left scrambling for recollection.
The doctor finally cleared his throat, and said slowly, his eyes never leaving her face:
“It’s nice to meet you. I’m Dr. Hajime Shinsō.”
Holy shit. Toki jolted upright on her chair. Shinsō?!
Her eyes widened, seeking an air or resemblance in the doctor’s face, his hair… Purple hair, standing up, like Hitoshi’s in canon… He had a wedding ring… Fuck, had Mihoko-san kept pictures around? Toki didn’t remember. But then she realized her reaction had been enough of a giveaway, and that Dr Shinsō was smiling wryly:
“I see you’re familiar with my name.”
Yeah, that was definitely him. Toki grinned:
“I am. Although I wasn’t called Hoshizora then.”
“Toki the Teleporter,” Dr Shinsō said with amusement.
Toki winced. What a corny nickname. Especially now that she couldn’t teleport.
“Not so much, these days. You, ah, you saw my file?”
“Briefly,” the man frowned. “I’m only going to conduct the transplant surgery, I wasn’t involved in your previous exams. You will receive an artificial heart, won’t you? There is a defect in your natural one.”
Toki had a brief moment of hesitation, because what the hell, was she really going to disclose her medical history and her worst weakness to a guy she had just met? But then she considered that he had access to her file and could start digging on his own, so it was better to rip the band-aid in one go. She shrugged, affecting nonchalance.
“I forced my Quirk too much and my heart quitted. That’s why I need a new one. Teleportation doesn’t work with a pacemaker. So I’m benched until I’m totally cured, and the transplant is just the first step.”
Dr Shinsō looked stricken. There was a silence, then he cleared his throat, awkwardly.
“I didn’t know it was that severe. How are you holding up?”
“Well I’m not dead,” Toki deadpanned. “So I would say I’m good.”
Dr Shinsō raised an eyebrow, as if to say ‘your standards are so low I’m wondering if you’re fucking with me.’ Toki snorted, then shook her head:
“Nah, I’m really good. Being Quirkless sucks, true, but it’s only temporary. I have other passions besides training, thanks gods. I have friends… And I’m going to Yūei next month. General studies, not heroic, but it’s still a good high school that open a lot of doors.”
Dr Shinsō looked surprised, then honestly pleased: “Oh, Yūei? Congratulations! I graduated from their general studies, too. The school’s name has prestige. Not that having a hero as my English or math teacher helped me much to become surgeon…”
Toki laughed, and Dr Shinsō looked pleased, but he soon become serious again. This time, he took the time to stare at her, as if evaluating her possible reactions, before offering cautiously:
“Mihoko would be delighted to see you again, you know.”
Toki’s shoulders dropped down slightly. Yeah, she knew. But that was part of what held her back. Mihoko-san probably saw Toki as someone strong and brave, and she was just… a stupid teenager. An idiot, kicked out of hero training because she had thought that not telling anyone about her chest-stiches was clever. Ah.
Dr Shinsō saw her grimace, and narrowed his eyes. Very briefly, he glanced toward the hall, where Mera-san was still waiting. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, and colder, too.
“Are you in trouble? If your guardian is forcing you to stay away, I can…”
“No!” Toki interrupted, widening her eyes and gesturing wildly. She could appreciate his intentions, but he really had the wrong idea, she wasn’t in need of a rescue at all! “No, it’s not that! I’m not in trouble with my guardian, I just… Ugh.” She rubbed her forehead with a groan, then admitted: “I kind of hoped to see her when I was successful, you know? When I had my life together and a hero license and all that jazz. Now, instead of the hero-in-training I bragged I was, I’m just a Quirkless nobody.”
Putting it into words made it sound a bit ridiculous. Why did she care about making a stranger proud? But Mihoko-san wasn’t just a stranger: she was the first person Toki had saved. The first person who had made her think about offering her hand in help, despite the fact nobody had done the same for her.
Meteor may be Toki’s origin story, but Mihoko-san was Quantum’s.
“You’re not,” Dr Shinsō said lowly, and Toki blinked, surprised by how serious he looked. “You could be a hero in training, a janitor or a drug addict, it wouldn’t change the fact that you saved her life. You saved my wife and my son, at great risk to yourself, and without you they would both be dead. They owe you every single breath they took since that day. There isn’t a universe where you could possibly disappoint Mihoko, or Hitoshi, me. You already are our hero.”
Toki flushed to the roots of her hair, and stammered a weak denial. Her cheeks were burning with embarrassment and a weird mix of emotion that made her heart swell in her chest. She ended up hiding her face in her hand, ears red.
“You can’t just say that! I have a heart condition!”
“It’s still true,” Dr Shinsō pointed out. Toki didn’t need to see his face to know he was smirking, probably enjoying watching her squirm. “And it would really make Mihoko happy to see you again, so I have to insist.”
“Ugh,”, muttered Toki, still hiding. “Fine. I will see her.”
But when she lowered her hands, she was smiling. She was dragging her feet but part of her was happy to have that decision made for her. She had missed Mihoko-san’s kindness and warmth.
Dr Shinsō’s face softened, and he looked almost relived. He would probably have backed off if Toki had seemed uncomfortable with the idea.
“Tomorrow,” Toki decided. “I don’t want Mera-san to get all overprotective on me if I start meeting strange women.”
Mera was so far from overprotective it was almost funny (that was the guy who, over learning that Toki planned to wander in the city for hours, had given her weapons and wished her luck!), but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be whiny about it and the additional work it made him do. For example, when Toki had joined Sachiko’s dojo, Mera-san had run background checks on all the instructors. The Commission had a very hands-off policy, but they didn’t quite let go of the leash…
“Tomorrow, then,” Dr Shinsō echoed with a smile. “I probably won’t see you for a while… I basically live at the hospital by now. But in any case, I’m glad to finally meet you, Toki Hoshizora.”
“Same,” she offered awkwardly in return.
Dr Shinsō chuckled, then a nurse knocked and entered to give them the last page of today’s tests’ results. Mera-san was let back in the room, and both Toki and Dr Shinsō pretended that their conversation had never happened.
The tests were good. Toki was as healthy as she could be. The mapping of her ribcage was now complete, and the labs was now going to start fabricating her new heart. It would a be long process, several months at least, and there would be another sample-taking surgery in June… but her replacement heart would be ready by August. The final product would be one of the best artificial organs on the market, if not the very best. Since it would power her Quirk, it was more akin to an organic engine than to a simple pump. It was about five times stronger than a normal heart. Toki would never have to worry again about low blood pressure.
And that was wild, wasn’t it, to know that now they made artificial organs? Especially customized ones, built to be more powerful and more durable than normal human flesh. Toki had known that Hayasa-sensei had artificial ligaments, but still!
The artificial transplants of Japan were one of the best in the world. Since Japan was… very uncomfortable… with the idea of organ donors (or just the idea of opening up dead bodies in general), they were pioneers in that field. More than pioneers, they had dominated it since the twenty-first century. The medical field was classified as ‘heroic support’ for the sole purpose of giving licenses to anyone who had a medical Quirk, and people who could grow flesh or clone body-parts had been involved into this kind of research for years. It was a huge deal.
Anyway. Toki’s new heart would be a little bigger than her old one: basically the size of the heart of an adult, instead of a teenager’s. Since Toki was still growing, it also meant that her adult heart would be a little bigger than the average person’s. It would also be a little heavier, made of denser and more resistant cells. This time, there would be no micro-lesions weakening the muscle. And the risks of transplant rejection were incredibly low, almost non-existents: her new heart would be made from her cells, and alimented by her blood, so it would basically share her DNA. There would be some plastic tubes and titanium bits around it, but it would be removed latter, with correctives surgery.
The transplant surgery was planned for mid-September. Toki would have to miss several days of school, but it couldn’t be helped. Dr Shinsō assured her that she would be back in school in no time. Then it was time to say goodbye, and Toki left the hospital with a date with the operating bloc…
And another date that made her almost as nervous.
Seeing Mihoko-san again would be like going back to her roots. Some people were like that, so strongly associated with some memories of a time or a place that brought us back to who we were when we first met them. Especially when they had been out of the picture for some time. Mihoko-san was her last tie to her time before the Commission… or rather, her last positive tie. Meteor’s crew remained, but hopefully Toki would never have to see them again. She was sure that if she faced them, she would turn back in a frightened little girl, chocking on her anxiety, her longing for freedom, and her hopeless rage.
She didn’t regret that time. Toki hated who she had been during that period of her life.
But when her path had crossed Mihoko Shinsō’s, Toki had already been different. She had still been lost, but she hadn’t been frightened and angry anymore. Blaming herself, blaming All Might, and tired, yes, but… less prone to lashing out. She had been healing, hoping. Those weeks on the streets hadn’t been a very pleasant time, sure. The loneliness had been taxing, and she had to be more resourceful that any child should have… But that time alone had also been like a balm of her soul. After a year and half with Meteor’s Crew and the subsequent arrest, with that collapsing building that still haunted some of her nightmares, Toki had felt like an exposed nerve rubbed raw. That month and half alone, on the streets, had given her the time to build herself back up.
And when she had met Mihoko-san, she had been healed enough to stop running. She just hadn’t realized it.
Seeing the kind-hearted woman again would bring back a lot of memories. Mostly good, but also bittersweet. Toki would never regret saving Mihoko-san and little Hitoshi, never. And she had decided that she would never regret her choice to go with the HPSC, exchanging her freedom against safety and perspectives. That choice had given her a way out of the streets, education, and Keigo, so of course she couldn’t regret it. But that training had cost her her health in the end, and even if it was only temporarily, Toki couldn’t help but feel a little bitter. She had been stupid. She had ruined things for herself. It wasn’t how she had wished to see Mihoko-san again… Toki would have liked to see her when her life was unquestionably better, when Toki was unquestionably happier than when they had first met.
But hey, it was too late to ponder about roads not taken. Toki was here now. She had met Mihoko’s husband: the cat was out of the bag. It was too late to turn back. May as well face the music.
So, the next day, during her afternoon stroll across the city, Toki went to the Shinsō’s place.
Even seven years later, she still remembered it. It wasn’t very far from one of the gyms where she used to sneak in at night to take a warm shower. She had crossed times and times again the bridge where Mihoko and her son had nearly died. The neighborhood was familiar. It was one of the good ones, well-situated, where heroes patrolled with regularity and no villain tried their luck. A safe area to wander, as a homeless kid trying to stay below the villains’ radar.
So Toki went to the Shinsō’s apartment building. She couldn’t teleport past the electronic door, thus she slipped behind a delivery man, using her best puppy eyes to look like a harmless teenager who had every right to be there. And then she ended up in front of the door, wringing her hands and feeling like an idiot.
What was she going to say? Hi, long time no see? Ridiculous. Did Mihoko-san really want to see her in the first place? Maybe Dr Shinsō had exaggerated. Maybe he had just said that to make conversation. Maybe she should just go back…
Toki was on the verge of chickening out and turning back when the door opened, as if someone had heard her internal fretting. She froze.
Mihoko-san was a little older than in her memories. She had some crow’s feet at the corner of her eyes, a rounder chin, a less defined waist. But her lavender hair was the same, long and wavy, pulled in a messy bun. Her eyes were the same, too: just the same purple as Sayuri’s, but wider, softer, kinder. Her smile hadn’t changed, either. It was just as bright as before.
“Hi,” croaked Toki. “Long time no see.”
Mihoko-san laughed and opened her arms. It took no effort at all to breach the distance between them, and then Toki was engulfed in the most motherly hug of her life. She squeezed her eyes shut and let her forehead rest on Mihoko’s shoulder, smiling despite herself, and hugged back.
“Welcome back,” whispered Mihoko.
Later on, there would be time to talk about their lives. There would be enough time for Toki to talk about her injuries and the long road to recovery ahead of her, enough that she would let it slip about her deal with the Commission, enough for her to mention Kameko-san, Keigo, and Mera-san. There would be time for Mihoko to tell her about her own life, about how she had started graffiti art again, about how she volunteered in a nursing home several days a week now that Hitoshi was going to school, about how she worried about her son, who had inherited her Brainwashing Quirk, her son who was so bright and hopeful but who was slowly becoming cynical because of the stigma against villainous Quirk. There would be time to talk, and laugh, and reconnect, and get to know who they had both become. There would be time to meet Hitsohi, who didn’t look like a baby now, but more and more like his canon-character with gravity-defying purple hair and a thoughtful frown.
But now, just for a moment, Toki allowed herself to shut her eyes and hug back, and let herself become the same little girl she had been at eight. A little scared, mostly lost, kind of hopeful: but for the very first time in a while, wholly seen and wholly loved.
Notes:
Aw. Little Toki deserves more love.
Anyway. Kudos to everyone who had guessed that Toki would meet the Shinso again. Althought i bet none of you had guessed that it would be through Mihoko's husband ! xD
Here is how i headcanon Sachiko :
So, for those of you who are curious about Toki's meltdown over being a teenager with separation anxiety... this is resulting from her childhood trauma which she would deny to be trauma (yes, i'm talking about her mom casualy abandonning her as leverage or punishment). Ah ah. Hope you liked it!
Gods, i remember being a teenager and freaking out about not knowing if i was simply friend or in love with a guy, and what was WRONG with me for not being in love at age fifteen. I had no idea that being AroAce was a thing. Is Toki AroAce? No idea. Probably not. Ace maybe, but not Aro. But figuring herself out is going to take her (and ME, since i'm kind of discovering her as i'm writing!) some time.Anywayyyy if you think that Keigo, isolated and hormonal fifteen years old who only has one close bond with a girl his age, is NOT going through the same phase, then i don't know what to tell you. But just as Toki had said multiple times: they don't talk about it, because emotional vulnerability is terrifying.
Also, yes, the flowers Keigo mentionned have meaning! Here they are if you are curious...
- Laurels: perseverance, ambition, victory.
- Iris: faith, hope, wisdom. Yellow iris mean passion.
- Sunflowers: adoration, longevity, loyalty.And yes, that was Keigo being subtle; and that was Toki totally missing the subtext x)
EDIT 29/08/22 / some spelling mistakes were corrected, a few sentences tweaked to make more sense. No major edits done.
Chapter 15: Welcome to Yūei
Summary:
Just what it says on the tin : Toki joins Yūei. It goes great.
Notes:
Hey i'm not dead ! it's been a while since i updated, sorry. real life smacked me in the face. It happens.
Enjoy !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
WELCOME TO YUEI
Most kids had parents to fret about them going to high school. A mother, a father; gentle and trusted figures who would cook lunch, give advices, tell their child to do their best. Toki couldn’t really fathom it. She didn’t have parents, not anymore, but she did well enough without it.
Honestly, the gaggle of adults she had inherited instead was almost as bad. Or as good, depending on how you wanted to see it.
First, there was Kameko-san, who called her almost every day, sent her good luck charms and tutorials about how to tie her necktie. There was the Vice-President, who wrote her a brief email with a very formal encouragement to do her best, and also sent a thousand yen in her bank account as a little gift. Then there was Mera-san, who didn’t really look like he cared, but who actually showed her how to tie that damn necktie, and even offered to drive her to the school for her first day (Toki declined, but the thought was nice). There was Hayasa-sensei, who didn’t technically write to her, but who told Keigo to tell Toki that she was going to kick ass (or at least, that was the gist of the message). Then, there was Sachiko, who wasn’t quite an adult (she was only seventeen… and half, but still!), who took her on a shopping trip the day before school started, and bough her an awesome pair of sneaker-boots that reached to her knees. It gave good ankle support, the soles were high quality and absorbed shocks to make running more comfortable, the toes were sturdy enough to grasp a climbing hold during parkour… They also had the perfect color scheme: dark grey with orange edging. Just discreet enough to be acceptable at school, but still funky!
Then there were the rest of her online friends, although they were far from being helpful. NotOnFire joked about dating advice, ThisIsFluffy warned her against skipping classes, PikaPika was of the opinion that school was overrated, and EndeavorSucks agreed with him. No help from here.
Toki had also one more adult in her life, now, and that was Mihoko Shinsō.
It was… strange. A good strange, but strange nonetheless. Every adult in Toki’s life wanted something from her. Mera-san, Kameko-san, the Vice-President, they wanted her to work for them, she was an investment. Even if they sincerely cared for her in some way, they would leave if Toki broke their agreement and quit the sponsorship program. Sachiko was a little different, because she didn’t care about Toki’s Quirk, but their friendship was still conditional. It wasn’t anything bad, and after all, Toki expected the same from all their Discord’s members. Attention, good ideas, support, like-minded opinions. If Toki started having different views, or oppose the server’s debate, then there would be a rift between them, and eventually they would burn their bridges.
But Mihoko-san cared for Toki even without her Quirk, even without her analysis and debate. She cared for Toki because of something that had happened years ago, in the past, something that couldn’t be changed. In some sort of twisted way, Toki felt selfishly glad for it. Mihoko-san liked her because Toki had been a hero once, and that couldn’t be taken from her, so it meant that her affection couldn’t be taken back either. She knew it wasn’t logical, but go and tell that to her feelings.
Toki didn’t hang out with Mihoko-san as much as she did with Sachiko or with her online friends, or even with Mera-san who was basically her caretaker (albeit a very distant one). But she did swing by her apartment sometimes, either to drink tea, or to do her online homework. Toki had lived for years in a facility filled with busy scientists, and even after months in Mustafu, she couldn’t quite get used to the loneliness of her empty apartment. It was nice to do homework knowing that Mihoko-san was busy painting in the other room while humming under her breath, or while Hitoshi was playing with hero figurines on the carpet next to her.
Hitoshi had been surprising, too. Toki knew what she could expert from Mihoko-san, she knew her and she had enough data to extrapolate. But Toki had… basically never really frequented eight years-old children. At eight, she had been a homeless runaway, then she had been shut in Naruto Labs and her only child companion had been Keigo, who was adorable but certainly not a normal eight years-old. So she kinda expected Hitoshi to be immature and their conversations to be awkward.
But it turned out that Hitoshi was smart, surprisingly sassy for a kid so young, and had plenty of humor. He was kind, and had the easy smile of someone who had been loved and cherished his whole childhood. But he also had the reserve and the cynicism of someone who had faced loneliness, maybe even discrimination. He always seemed a bit stunned when someone who wasn’t his mom praised him, eyes wide like a surprised kitten. He was adorable. He already was a little like canon-Hitoshi, with the stoic silences and the intense focus, but he was also more innocent, more childish, more open.
He hadn’t breached the subject of becoming a hero, but maybe it wasn’t his dream yet. Toki didn’t push. She was happy to be accepted by their little family, and honestly, she didn’t need more than that. If Hitoshi decided to share his dream with her, that would just be icing on the cake: but the simple fact that he accepted her, joked with her, sassed her, and welcomed her in his home, that was more than good enough.
But Toki didn’t have a lot of time to get to know him. Because, sooner that she would have wanted, it was April… and with it, the school’s start.
Yippee.
Toki prepared. She neatly knotted her tie, even if it took her about fifty tries. She left her knife home to avoid ringing the metal detectors, but took her pepper-spray in her pocket, and practiced her kicks and jump in case someone was a dick to her. She put on her new favorite boots (it gave her a super punk-rock look with her uniform!), and clipped her hair in twin buns with the yellow clasps Keigo had gifted her for her last birthday. She had all the school supplies she needed, and even blank notebook just in case, along with some glittery pens because she had never grown out of her love for shiny colored ink.
Still, when she entered Yūei's gate, her stomach was into knots. She hadn’t been in a real school, surrounded with classmates her age, since age eight.
Well at least here she knew one person, Sachiko. Her senpai would probably let her lunch with her to avoid the mortifying ordeal of eating on her own on the first day. Still, lunch was four hours away, and Toki had to go through the morning first. Fun.
Her class was 1-C. When she entered, she noticed she wasn’t the first one. Sitting in the front row, there was a pair of twin students with identical gray hair and dark eyes. One of them was wearing purple lipstick, but both were androgynous enough that Toki had no idea of their gender. There was also a guy with spiky black hair, wearing green sport wristband and a matching headband, who was dozing in the back. Next to him was a guy with a green beanie and a medical mask, hiding almost all of his face except for his dark purple eyes.
Toki picked a place near the windows and started doodling in her notebook to wait.
Very soon, the class started filling up. Two students, then five, then ten… They were twenty in total. Seven girls and thirteen boys. They didn’t seem to know each other: none of them had come in pair. Some tried to make conversation, whispering with their neighbors, but most of them stayed quiet… at the exception of one rowdy boy at the back: a dark-skinned kid with hair in dreadlocks and his shirt half-undone.
They didn’t have to wait long until a teacher with cropped black hair and an unkept goatee came to fetch them. He didn’t look very old, maybe thirty-five or something, and he wasn’t very charismatic with his faded cardigan and his slouched posture… But they were at Yūei, it was their first day, and so as soon as he walked the door total silence fell in the room. Even the rowdy boy in the back shut up.
“Hello everyone,” their teacher drawled. “I’m Class 1-C’s homeroom teacher, Kagemaru Norogawa. Now, it’s time for the school’s Entrance ceremony, so… Everyone comes with me in a calm and orderly fashion. There will be time to do a round of introductions later.”
He looked nonchalant about the whole affair, as if blind to his students’ nervous eagerness. Toki briefly wondered if he was a pro-hero, like most of the staff at Yūei. Sure, she was in general studies, but there were heroes teaching normal subjects like math and English, so it wasn’t impossible. Norogawa-sensei’s face wasn’t familiar, though.
Anyway. He unhurriedly led them to the big hall where would happen the School Entrance Ceremony, a vast hall filled with other students. There were all separated by classes, every group standing straight and in an orderly bloc like a miniature army. Toki had never been to an Entrance Ceremony, since that kind of stuff only happened in middle school and high school, and so she listened with polite curiosity.
It really wasn’t worth that much fanfare. Firstly, older students sang the school anthem, which was kind of cool with how extra Yūei was. They had a surround system and flashing lights and everything. Then the principal climbed the stage… Nedzu! He was both super-freaky, because it was a talking animal, and absolutely super cute. Toki wanted to shake his little paw with little toes beans, and squeak in delight. His fur was probably so soft!
Ahem.
So Nedzu climbed the stage (on a box helpfully put there by a teacher to help him reach the mic). He welcomed the new students and read all their names one by one. It sure took some time, since they were one-hundred and sixty of them. Toki barely paid attention to that part, although hearing him welcome Toki Hoshizora made her heart jump a little.
Then, after the pomp and fanfare, they got to the main event: Nedzu gave them a heartfelt ten-minutes speech. They were all congratulated on being good enough to be there, then Nedzu remined them that although Yūei was primarily a heroic school, all students were expected to give their best, because everyone could be a hero in some way. Because, after all… from office workers, to store owners, fishermen, repairmen, to lawyers and even the ones whom you have to pay your electricity bill, well, everyone had a place, everyone helped others, everyone was a hero.
The feeling was nice. It was a way to say that in the awe and splendor inspired by the heroic warriors in modern society, most seemed to have forgotten that these heroes weren’t the ones holding this society together. Toki agreed. But there was also a very Japanese undertone to Nedzu’s life lessons, which was that your worth was only tied to your usefulness. The morality was encouraging, ‘yes you can be heroic even if you’re not a pro-hero!’, but … people still had value even if they were un-heroic. But okay, in a beginning of school speech, Toki could see why the principal choose to foster in his students the desire to work hard, instead of handling platitudes to reassure them that yes, they were all special snowflakes and he loved them very much even if they turned out to be useless.
Paraphrased, of course.
Anyway. It a little under two hours. It was nice but Toki didn’t really see the point. Maybe it was because she had been homeschooled for so long. She didn’t really have a esprit de corps with her peers, or the institution they were now part of.
The students were then let go with their respective teachers. Norogawa-sensei brought them back to class. Once they were all sat down, he clapped his hands and exclaimed:
“Well! Principal Nedzu said the most important, but I guess I can repeat it: welcome to Yūei. Here are your schedules. You will probably recognize some of your teachers’ names. Most of them are heroes.”
“Are you a hero?” brashly interrupted the Black kid in the back.
Norogawa didn’t seem bothered by the kid’s rudeness, and simply blinked. “No. It’s too troublesome. I’m simply the school’s guidance counselor and your homeroom teacher, and it’s already plenty enough of work.” He leaned back, then gestured at them: “Now, why don’t we start with a round of introductions? Let’s start with the front row.”
Were introductions a normal part of the school experience? Toki didn’t remember that from her elementary school, but hey, it was pretty far away. And she had skipped the middle school experience. In any case, it was convenient. Oh, Toki had absolutely no hope to remember everyone’s names, but she could make a good effort.
One after the other, each student rose, stated their name, and a few facts about themselves. Their birthday, their favorites subject, or their dream job… And almost everyone told their Quirk. Toki’s stomach twisted with an unpleasant and unfamiliar feeling. Stage fright.
Because of course Toki Hoshizora didn’t have a warp Quirk. Toki Hoshizora couldn’t teleport because her heart would fail. Which meant that when Toki had filled her paperwork, well… even if the Commission would have covered her up if she had put down a fake power… she had been honest, and she had written…
“My name is Toki Hoshizora,” she said when it was her turn, rising from her seat and speaking calmly even if her heart was pounding. “I like astronomy and poetry, and I practice karate. My favorite subjects are math and physics. And I’m Quirkless.”
She waited for a beat, just to make sure she didn’t look as if she was rushing back to her seat. She returned the stares of the students who were gawking at her, and she didn’t lower her eyes. Her heart was still beating loudly: but this time it wasn’t stage fright, it was another kind of tension. Exhilaration, defiance, determination.
Toki was well aware that, in what concerned her Quirk at least, she had been born lucky. Warp Quirk were rare, and hers was very powerful. But she didn’t have it right now. For the next years, she was going to be Quirkless… And she wasn’t going to shy away from it. Even if she knew there was a stigma associated with Quirklessness.
Maybe because of it, actually. She knew that Quirkless people were disliked, rejected, bullied. Toki had to admit it scared her a little. But the idea to build some pyramids of lies like a house of cards to hide her condition… It made her annoyed, frustrated, angry just to think about it.
So, no. If she was going to be temporarily Quirkless, she wasn’t going to hide and make up excuses to avoid the scornful glances of bigots. She had nothing to be sorry for. Yes, the prejudice against Quirklessness scared her: but it wouldn’t go away if she pretended it didn’t exist, would it? So, maybe it was just a sick wish to prove herself without her wonderful Quirk… But she wouldn’t hide. She would face the truth. Besides, Toki wasn’t as scared of bullies as she had been in the past. She was strong, now! She could kick and punch, but she could also argue back, stand proud, and know that people had her back. Toki wasn’t exactly itching for a fight, it wasn’t in her nature, but she wouldn’t shy away from one either. She had trained for that for too long.
So yeah, she looked at them in the eyes, and when she sat back down, it was slow and unhurried. A show of nonchalance, to make clear that she clearly wasn’t ashamed.
This time, the lull between one introduction and the next was significatively longer, almost five seconds. But then the next guy rose and introduced himself, a little slower, as if thrown off balance, and just like that the round of introductions continued.
Norogawa-sensei didn’t comment. That was fine: Toki hadn’t expected him to. She remembered how, in canon, Midoriya’s teacher had participated in the bullying. Even if Norogawa seemed correct, she had to stay wary. She knew that adults weren’t exempt from prejudice.
Classes started pretty normally. They had Japanese, then History, then it was time for lunch. Toki stayed after the bell to ask Norogawa-sensei about her advance in math and other subjects. She wanted to be allowed to skip classes to attend online lessons. She had managed to find a university in Musutafu where she could get a Master’s degree in Fundamental Physics. Several lessons were broadcasted online. Probably not enough to obtain the Master’s degree, but it would give her an edge. If she managed to follow half the classes for the three years of her schooling here, then once she graduated and joined the university for good, she would have no trouble obtaining her Master’s degree in two years instead of five. Probably. Maybe. She could hope, alright?
“Ambitious,” Norogawa raised an eyebrow when she told him about it. “I personally have no objection. You may need a pass to leave campus, but if it’s online classes, you could go to the library or even have an empty classroom reserved. Clear it with your math and physics teachers, and it will be fine.”
“And if I finish the science curriculum, can I have those hours free too?”
Norogawa looked faintly amused.
“If you manage it, yes. I have to ask: why did you join a high school if you are that eager to get out of classes?”
“I may be good in math but I’m no prodigy,” Toki protested. “I’m actually way behind in literature and Japanese. I read a lot, just… not books. Besides, I have been encouraged to have a normal high-school experience. I have been homeschooled most of my life.”
At least that was what her file said. Toki Hoshizora, fifteen years old, daughter of two fishermen who died at sea when she was four, became ward of the state for a few years, before being taken in by Yokumiru Mera who a distant cousin of her mother. Homeschooled from age seven to now. Genetical heart disease, and currently on the waiting list for a viable heart transplant, meaning her trips to the hospital were expected. Most of that file skirted near the truth to be believable, while being incredibly tamer than the real deal. Well, she wasn’t going to complain. At least the Taiyōme name appeared nowhere.
When Toki left the classroom, her peers had already gone to lunch. Nobody had waited for her, which didn’t surprise her. She managed to find her way to the cafeteria and also managed to find Sachiko. Her pink hair was like a beacon in the sea of students. She was sitting with one or two classmates, but she gladly welcomed Toki among them, and happily introduced her to her friends. They spend the whole lunch chatting about how Sachiko had transferred from general studies to business course, and the difference between the two.
It was only when Toki went back to her classroom that she had her first typical high-school experience. Because hey, what would high school be without some teenage drama? The teacher wasn’t here yet, but most of the students were already in class, twirling their thumbs and waiting for the bell to ring while gossiping excitingly. It was the perfect moment for a show of bravado.
“Hey, Quirkless girl!”
Toki raised her eyes from her phone. It was the dark-skinned kid from before, the loud one, who was smirking down at her. There was another guy by his side, a fat boy who towered almost a head above the average teenager. Either a grunt or the peanut gallery. Or both.
“Are you talking to me?” she said, not raising her voice.
“What, are you deaf?!”
Confrontation. Ah, damn. Toki didn’t show her sudden spike of nerves, but something tense and anxious rolled in her stomach. Still, she hadn’t been taught by the Commission for nothing: Okamoto’s lessons in adaptation, corporal language, and subversion were now coming in handy. Thank you, improv group. She plastered on her most pleasant smile:
“Only vaguely surprised by your rudeness, but please, don’t let that stop you. What can I do for you?”
The Black kid floundered a little, taken aback by her apparent inability to read the mood. He took a step toward her desk. Toki carefully didn’t react, only tilting her head to keep looking in his eyes, pleasant smile in place. The boy’s eyes narrowed.
“So you’re think you’re smart?”
“Ahah, no need to be all insecure about it! Nobody’s perfect.”
More students were listening in. The loud kid (what was his name? Kuro-something…) flushed slightly, probably annoyed at her levity. He slammed a hand on her desk, and sneered:
“I know that! Especially considering that you’re here. Did you cheat on the entrance exam or something? How did a Quirkless girl got in?”
Toki taped her chin, feigning thoughtfulness. The fact that Kuro-dude was invading her space was getting her hackles up: it reminded her too much of Meteor and his casual disregard for her personal bubble. But the key was to not let it show. Pretending to be completely blind to intimidation tactics was an art in itself. Also, the way he was getting more and more worked up was very satisfying.
“Well, I walked there, obviously. But I guess I could climb the wall and sneak in the window if I put my mind to it.”
Someone snorted. The would-be bully narrowed his eyes. Toki continued to smile blandly. She wondered how far she could push it…
Then the bell rang and at the very same time the door opened with a bang, signaling the arrival of their English teacher. The loud kid jerked back and a very familiar hero walked in, exclaiming gleefully:
“HELLOOOOO LISTENERS! Time for your lesson! Everyone back to their seat, yes that mean you, Kurogumo and Jinpachi! It’s now EEEEEEENGLISH TIME!”
They two boys scampered back to their desks (so the loud one was Kurogumo and his henchman was Jinpachi, alright, noted), and Toki leaned back on her seat, never losing her nonchalant smile. Inwardly, she let out a relieved sigh. Crisis averted. Now, she just had to run circles around this would-be bully until he gave up. It didn’t seem insurmountable.
In a way, it was easy, because it was basic negotiation training… and the stakes were way lower than the hostage situations or villain infiltration scenarios that Keigo and Toki had discussed countless time in Strategy Lessons. But it was also not easy, because it was real life, and no matter the tolls Toki had been handled with improv groups, speech specialists, and life experience on internships… It was different, when it concerned her own, real life.
Still. Low stakes. Low to medium difficulty level. She could do it. Keigo would have been better (he was a natural with people, while Toki was always curter), but Toki could still deal with that minor annoyance without breaking a sweat. Being smooth and charming was part of a hero’s persona as much as a cool name… And Quantum was training to be a hero since she was eight.
Game on.
oOoOoOo
High school wasn’t that different from a normal school. The teachers were more accommodating than those in her elementary school in Tokyo, at least. The science teacher was very happy to learn that Toki was more halfway done with the curriculum, and offered to have her sit her lessons with the third years instead of being bored in class. The math teacher was Cementoss (another canon character, although Toki didn’t remember him well) and after checking that she would use her time in a responsible manner, he accepted to let her sit out his lessons without a fuss. Same thing with her physics teacher, although he was more reluctant.
Not a single one of them commented on her supposed Quirklessness.
The novelty of a Quirkless student wore off, eventually, but for the first month or so Toki felt a little like she was walking on eggshells. Twenty teenagers findings their balance in a stressing environment, with social pressure at its finest, was bound to be chaotic. But it was also, in a way, kind of fascinating to watch. Everyone tried to fit in, but was also desperate to be unique in some way.
The most noticeable guy in the class was of course Kurogumo. His full name was Kokuten Kurogumo. He was apparently half-American… or rather, half African-American and half Japanese. He was their Bakugou, in a way. Loud, abrasive, rude, always in dress code violation (he constantly wore his white shirt open to reveal merchandized clothing under it)… But well, he wasn’t as bad as canon-Bakugou. He wasn’t as aggressive, or as violent, or as obsessed with being the best. He was less threatening, too. Kurogumo was kind of short, a good dancer, pretty funny with his friends. He wasn’t as charismatic was Bakugou, but he sure was more likeable.
Still, he was a bully. He hated being looked down on, and he liked having control. He didn’t look for a fight with those stronger than him, but he seemed to have the urge to step on those below him. Just your run-of-the-mill high school bully, a popular boy who wanted to assert dominance.
Toki clinically judged his threat level, and dismissed it as low-level. Sure, he liked to push other people around, but as long as Toki joked, took his provocation lightly, and brushed him off, it never escalated. He wasn’t Bakugou and she wasn’t Midoriya. There was no real hatred here: Kurogumo was only testing boundaries.
If Toki let him think she could be a victim, then she would become one, as simple as that… So she deftly evaded the dynamic he looked for. She didn’t cower, but she didn’t challenge his supposed supremacy either: she didn’t mock back or act in a way that would make him feel threatened. It wasn’t hard to make him lose interest. She wasn’t a scapegoat, but she didn’t push back in the way an enemy would either. She slipped through the cracks. It was a delicate balancing act.
(Still, Kurogumo usually turned to her first when he wanted to annoy someone. If Toki was optimistic, she would say that it was because she was funny. But she knew he wanted to laugh at her, and it took effort to redirect the jabs so their public would laugh with her instead. Kurogumo was a dick. They would never be friends, or even friendly. He probably didn’t have a problem with Quirkless people. He was just looking for a bone to pick with someone.)
Kurogumo was, unsurprisingly, the first to acquire loyal friends. Bullies were always charismatic like that. There was Hiro Jinpachi, his henchman from day one. He was tall and fat, imposing without being particularly muscular. He had a round face with a double-chin and small, narrowed eyes. His head was completely shaved except for a short, bright orange mohawk. He mostly followed Kurogumo around, but that didn’t stop him from interjecting jeers and pointed remarks here and there. He was judgmental and arrogant, and very competitive.
Then there were the twins, the ones with silver hair who always sat in the front rows. They were both boys, Seishi and Usaji Nibayashi. Toki hadn’t quite figured out the trick to tell them apart. They were both tall, pale, lanky, kind of androgynous, with asymmetrical grey hair covering the part of their face. They also wore shoes from different pairs. If one came with a blue sneaker and a red one, then the other would have a red one and a blue one. It was their thing. Anyway, the Nibayashi twins weren’t bad on their own. But once enabled by a ringleader like Kurogumo, they prodded and pushed each other, gave bad advices and worse ideas as if it was a challenge, and constantly added fuel to the fire.
The other students were less rowdy. Toki still didn’t know them all. There was Sawayomi, a girl with reddish hair and a punk attitude who sometimes got into shouting matches with Kurogumo and his crew. She was the Bakugou of the class… or rather, they both were Bakugou. They both hated the school dress code, too. Kurogumo already walked around with an open shirt to show off his colorful t-shirts, but Sawayomi took it to another level. She wore sport leggings under a skirt, a studded belt that wouldn’t have been out of place in a metal concert, and constantly had her shirt untucked and her tie loose. And the worse was that she totally rocked her aesthetic. Toki secretly admired how she managed to cool and edgy instead of scruffy.
Apparently she and Kurogumo came from the same middle school and they had… a weird relationship. Toki didn’t know if they had been friends, mortal enemies, boyfriend and girlfriend, or bully and victim: and if that was the case, who was the bully and who was the victim. They mostly yelled at each other and insulted each other. But pair them together for a class project and they worked seamlessly, trading quips and sharing inside jokes with ease. Or at least, as long as they were sneering at their competitors…. then, once their alliance had ended, their bickering resumed. It was honestly quite baffling. Were teenagers always that bad? Toki wasn’t that bad… was she?
Anyway. Besides the two of the… The students were pretty well behaved. Mostly Toki sat with either the class representative, or the three nerdy ones who hung out in the library almost as much as Toki herself.
The class representative was the nicest of the bunch, hands down. His name was Masamune Aokotsu. He had pale mid-long blue hair, sky-blue eyes, and a perpetually kind smile. He was fairly handsome, too. And he was genuinely nice, which was a surprise. As a perfect class representative, he was helpful and police, always ready to help, but he had enough humor to not be a stuck up.
The three nerdy kids weren’t as nice, but they let Toki share their space and they had a tacit agreement to have each other’s back when some jackass tried to barge in their group, or interrupt their lunch. The first one was Zaku Morimoto. Pretty unremarkable: dark hair, dark eyes, medium heigh, usually wore sportwear or at least a sport headband. Calculating and observant, he was reserved and very focused. Then there was Daiki Yaibadosu, a tall guy with dark purple eyes who wore a green beanie and a medical mask, hiding most of his face. He was intelligent and loyal, but also wary, almost timid. The last of their group was a girl, Izumi Kinjo. Izumi was pretty, a classic nadeshiko beauty, with pale skin, long black hair, dark blue eyes. It was a shame she was so often sneering down at people. She was in turn condescending, clever, organized, competitive, polite. She was a mix between a prissy rich girl and a mellow teacher’s pet: sometimes her mood’s swings gave Toki whiplash.
Anyway. Toki didn’t immediately make a BFF in her new class, but that was fine: she hadn’t expected to. She didn’t really need more.
She wasn’t an outcast with her classmates, at least. Toki had wit and a pleasant demeanor, and without being close to anyone she managed to fit in pretty well. She was never picked last in P. E. class (however, it may have to do with her insane athleticism instead of her bright personality). She had no difficulty to fit with one group or the other, or to find a friendly crowd to sit with at lunchtime. They were all nice and welcoming, and Toki was friends with all of them in the way smooth-talkers managed to be friends with everyone. But she wasn’t close with anyone, and in her free time, she would rather be on her own. She had the Discord Server. She had Sachiko.
She had Keigo, too.
He was in high-school too, now, and just like her he had managed to integrate just fine in class, being liked by everyone without letting anyone in. Toki called him when she was walking home after classes. She had memorized his schedule and took care to always call after his lessons. Sometimes he was the one to call, and it always brought a dopey smile to her smile, the phone almost slipping from her fingers in her eagerness to answer. They chatted during the whole walk to Toki’s studio, then more. Toki usually put the phone next to her computer, on speaker, and they continued talking all evening. They spoke of their lessons, of their peers, of what they had read recently, of ideas and conjectures for the future.
They talked about their pasts, too, rarely. Neither Toki or Keigo had any desires to revive painful memories. But sometimes, it came up.
“My mom tried to call me today,” Keigo said one evening. “She reached out to the number they had given her, the main one at Naruto Labs. They told her I was away, but they took her number and passed the message to me.”
“Shit,” muttered Toki. “What did she want?”
He let out a short, joyless laugh that crackled on the phone.
“To reconnect, apparently. Because I’m so grown up now. She wants to know if I’ve been good, what I intend to do once I’m a hero. Truth is, once I reach eighteen, unless I said otherwise, the Commission’s deal ends with her, too. She won’t get any more checks.” There was a short silence. Then, softer, he whispered: “I know she only care for the money. It’s just… It’s stupid. I keep wondering if maybe she has changed.”
Keigo didn’t have with his mom the same relationship that Toki had with Sayuri. There had been no bargaining for her love, here, maybe because there hadn’t been any motherly love in the first place. Tomie Takami had always been neglectful, borderline abusive. But she had cared for her son. Not well, mind you. She had given him small presents to keep him quiet and well-behaved. She had remembered to buy food and clothing for him. And most of all, she had taken him with her when her his father had been arrested. She hadn’t abandoned him to run.
It was no more love than what was showed by a distracted pet owner to his dog, but for Keigo who had grown up like this, it was enough to feel… maybe not gratitude, but kindship, affection, melancholy. There was bitterness and anger, too. But Keigo had always been too kind. His gratefulness for the bare-minimal of care she had showed him, outweighed any well-deserved resentment.
“What do you want to do?” Toki asked.
“… I don’t know. I want her to have changed. I want her out of my life. I want her to choke. I want to take care of her. I’m not sure. What would you do?”
“Oh, man, I’m really not qualified to answer that question. I put my parents in prison, remember? Well, my dad at least.”
She had pushed her mother to the grave, too, so it wasn’t exactly better. On the phone, Keigo snorted, then sighed.
“Yeah. I don’t want to see her. I want her to be gone. But if she has changed and I toss her out, well, I feel like it would be wrong. What if your father changed, would you let him go back in your life?”
Toki’s hand clenched on the phone, then forcefully relaxed. She tried to keep her tone light: “It’s more of the opposite problem, actually. I wronged him more than he wronged me.”
And now Meteor undoubtedly hated her, like she deserved. Keigo sighed again, although this time, it was lighter.
“You’re right, that doesn’t help me at all. Well, I think I’m going to stick with what I was already doing.”
“Which is?”
“Ignoring the problem until it goes away.”
Toki snorted: “Not a good long-term solution, honey.”
A second later, she froze, mortified. Where the hell did that pet-name came from?! There was a short, baffled silence at the end of the line, and Toki briefly considered tossing herself from the nearest bridge… then Keigo carried on as if nothing was out of the ordinary, and the girl almost collapsed in relief.
“I mean, I’m also going to the Vice-President to tell her that even if I continue leeching out from the HPSC after graduating, I want to cut all ties with my mom afterward, so there would be no need to continue showering her with money.”
Toki’s eyebrows rose in surprise. Wow, that was cold. Also, fucking awesome. Way to go, Keigo! Then she frowned. Wait a minute… In canon, Keigo’s mother had still been in the HPSC’s care. She had had a mansion and everything. She was the one who had told Dabi about Keigo’s history. Did that meant that Keigo would change his mind or that his mother would find a way to weasel back in his good graces later on? Or maybe in canon Keigo had never taken that decision, which meant that something had changed…
“I support that,” she finally said.
“Yeah, I figured you would,” he said, and she could hear the smile in his voice.
Irresistibly, she smiled back. Then she grew grave again:
“Can I ask why, though? You usually don’t… push away people so decisively. I’m completely on board with it, and I think it’s well-deserved, but I’m kinda surprised.”
There was a beat of silence. Then, her friend said slowly:
“Because… I don’t own her anything. There are people more deserving of my time, my money, or just my attention, and I shouldn’t… I shouldn’t let her shame me or guilt-trip me into taking care of her. I should be taking care of me.”
“Even if she had changed?”
“Even then,” he said, more forcefully. “Her growth doesn’t entitle her to a second chance with me. The part of me that care about her would be proud of the strides she’s made, but the part of me that care about myself knows not to indulge in her energy ever again. I know that if I give her an inch, she’ll take a mile. She will take everything from me, and… even if I sort of feel like I owe it to her, because she’s my mother… the stakes are too high. It’s not just me. It’s everybody who’s going to depends on Hawks, too: and I can’t give her that.”
That was deep. Toki closed her eyes for a moment, and inhaled deeply. Her own mother would never have a chance to change. Her own father, well, she doubted he ever would. But if they had… If they did… Toki didn’t know if she would have had the strength to turn them away a second time. She always thought the best of people. She was a poet, and unzipping her chest to every kind of hurt just because she refused to stop hoping was part of the deal. It didn’t make her weak, but she sometimes wished for the strength to cut off all ties.
But Keigo had. He had decided to cut off his ties to his mother. His neglectful, dismissive, abusive mother. I am so proud of you, she wanted to blurt out. She swallowed it back, and smiled instead.
“It’s good,” she said, and if her voice was a little rougher, neither of them commented on it. “You did good.”
“I haven’t done it yet!” he laughed a bit sheepishly.
“Well, what are you waiting for, my blessing?”
“Ugh, no. I want to wait until Mrs. Vice-President come to the Labs. She should be here next week to have an update on how my high-school experience is going. The answer is great, by the way. Everyone loves me and I actually convinced three guys that aliens were real just yesterday, it was hilarious.”
“What?! Oh, you have to tell me!”
The conversation turned to lighter topics. Keigo wasn’t really into conspiracy theories, but he did find them funny, and if he could use them to mess with his peers… well, he was all for it. Some of those theories were downright insane, but some other could sort of make sense if you squinted, and it was these one that Keigo found the most interesting. He shared some of them with Toki, who was fascinated. There was a theory that about vigilante Stendhal’s Quirk, a notoriously cruel and brutal vigilante who seemingly fought Quirkless with knives and katanas. There was a theory about the Commission secretly trying to clone All Might. There was another one about an international organization who manipulated their government to spy on helpless civilians. There was also a story about an immortal criminal boogeyman able to steal Quirks.
(Toki winced at the last one. Yeah, it wasn’t as much a story as Keigo thought.)
Anyway. Back to the point. Slowly, Toki started getting used to this new routine. She did stupid teenager things, like pranking a peer by telling him there was a pop quiz today to make him panic, or sneak out with the rest of the class to try and spy on the heroic lessons. Not that they were successful. The hero student trained in specialized training grounds, away from prying eyes and fragile civilians alike.
Anyway. Yūei was the top high school of Japan, but Toki found it… disappointedly normal. Especially the hero course.
Maybe it was because she had been mostly raised by the HPSC, whose standards were kind of fucked up. Or maybe it was because of her own expectations of heroes-in-training? At Naruto Labs, preparing for heroism included Quirk training but also Okamoto-training, which meant polishing a various assortment of skills ranging from socialization and deception, to hacking and first-aid. Toki and Keigo had also been encouraged to dedicate hours of their time to studying society as a whole: heroic society, but also how it impacted the rest of the world, and was impacted in turn. What appealed to people, what were civilians’ most pressing worries, what kind of message sent such or such heroes, what kind of insidious consequences could have such or such televised fight…
But Yūei’s hero class? It was combat, first and foremost. Maybe some rescue training, and some lessons about heroic laws and… that was it. Honestly, it was a serious let-down. Studying economics, sociology, the how and the why of criminality… It was never considered. Alright, Yūei was a high-school and most of those topics were covered in university, but still. For people who were aiming to become figureheads and examples in society, like All Might, shouldn’t there be lessons on how said society as built? Apparently not.
And it wasn’t just Yūei! Nobody taught that in any heroic school. There wasn’t even a class on politics, even though Pro Heroes were civil servants paid by the state (and whose salary could vary with politics). Student were encouraged to go to university to learn that kind of stuff, but… The overwhelming majority of heroes stopped their education after high school, becoming sidekicks in a hero’s agency and learning the job here. Sure, immersion was a good way to prepare to the heroic work, but… Would it be so bad to have more theoretical knowledge? There was stuff you couldn’t learn on the streets.
And yes, Toki was aware of how elitist and Ravenclaw that sounded. But she stood by it. Some things had to be learned in class and in books.
Sachiko had a friend in heroic course who had told her they had a lot of theorical lessons in third years, about laws and ethics, but even if it was good it clearly didn’t cover economics, or sociology. Also, why third year? Because it was their last year before going pro? But by that time, they had already done field-work and maybe picked up bad habits! Especially if they had worked in agencies who focused of fighting villains and looking good on TV instead of trying to solve the underlying issues.
Heroes solved present problems without learning about how to make their role evolve and adapt. Which shouldn’t be an issue, in that exceptionally peaceful era: except that said era was going to collapse sooner than expected, and then where would be the heroes who had only learned to punch problems in a fight? Sure, fighters were good. But if all society had to look up to was a bunch of brawlers, well… that was going to suck. Good luck figuring how to rebuild things (especially a society wrecked by the League of Villains) when you had absolutely zero background in handling long-term issues like poverty and discrimination. Maybe the HPSC could figure out things, but it wasn’t their job to lead the heroes by the hands. And it was a too herculean of a task! The Commission was already understaffed! And shady as fuck!
Anyway. The point was that Toki looked at the heroic curriculum and felt weirdly disappointed, because she had basically completed it at age fourteen.
But well, she had had about six years of heroic training, from age eight to almost fifteen… While those students were just only beginning theirs. And they only had three years until graduation. It was no wonder that their curriculum was poorer than the special training regimen cooked up by the HPSC.
Toki didn’t rant too much about it to Keigo. He was training to be a hero and the HPSC fully expected him to carry society on his shoulders after All Might’s fall (not that they had any idea how brutal that fall would be). It would be awkward. But she did rant about it to Mihoko-san. She was getting more and more comfortable in the woman’s presence, and sometimes their light conversations took unexpected turn. Like that time where Mihoko talked about an idea she had for a painting and that ended with Toki and her planning how to best build a scaffolding to reach a high wall and paint in on a fifty meters tall factory wall in the middle of the night. Or that time where Hitoshi was trying to convince his mom to buy him a cat, and Toki joined in, and in the end, they completely derailed and ended up picking the top ten names for a dragon.
“Maybe you should write a letter to the Principal then,” suggested Mihoko.
Toki paused mid-rant, a bit startled. She hadn’t even thought of that.
“I can do that?”
“Teachers are supposed to listen to their students’ concerns, aren’t they?” Mihoko blinked. “Surely you went to your heroic teachers when you thought you were unchallenged or worried by a class. Isn’t it how you became so advanced in astrophysics?”
“In math and physics, not astrophysics yet,” muttered Toki, frowning. “But yes, I did… But it was different back there.”
“Why?”
Toki struggled with her words. Because I was important, and I’m not anymore. She had been Quantum, hero in training in a super-privileged facility. Now she was Hoshizora, Quirkless student of general education. She knew her own worth was the same, intellectually, she hadn’t changed… But her environments, her allies, the way people looked at her, everything was different. In a heroic school, no matter how they preached that the others courses were useful, a Quirkless nobody didn’t matter. And so, the idea of raising her voice to change things now hadn’t crossed Toki’s mind.
“It’s not that important,” she said instead. “I have high standards.”
She had liked her time at Naruto Labs but she was also aware that such intense training wasn’t normal, and shouldn’t be generalized to a school. It was too much, too specific. Still, she frowned. Just because her own training had been insane didn’t meant that the normal heroic curriculum didn’t have room for improvement.
“If your insight is valuable, then you should try and share it,” advised Mihoko as if she had read her mind. “Maybe you can become a teacher, later, if you still have this cause at heart.”
Toki shrugged, but the suggestion nagged at her. So, after a while, she borrowed at pen and paper, and tried to draft an anonymous letter pointing out things that she would like to see in heroic class.
You know, just in case. Everyone dreamed to be a little of a reformer, after all.
It was more difficult that it seemed. There was a delicate balance to find between helpful and condescending, too humble or too arrogant, simperingly polite or excessively rude, too bitter or too passive. Toki had plenty of criticism for the hero society as a whole, alright. All Might’s cult, the way Japan had built its safety on the shoulder of one man, the uber-commercialization of heroes, how people based their value of a person on the strength of their Quirk, the way this prejudice allowed for abuse, the fucked-up entrance exam that favored physical Quirk over the subtler ones… But most of it was completely irrelevant here, so she had to take care to not let her criticisms spill in her recommendation. She had to only focus on heroic education at Yūei right now.
It wasn’t easy. It took her a few days, and multiples conversations with several people, including but not limited to: Keigo, Sachiko, and Sachiko’s friend in heroic (a girl with blue hair named Emiko with a super-hearing Quirk).
Finally, Toki managed to articulate her argument in a calm and logical manner: the kids needed a better understanding of the mechanism supporting the industry. Hospital staff, police, firefighters, official, insurance workers, journalists, informants, even vigilantes, they were all so interlaced with the heroic industry they were basically part of it. But it wasn’t official, it was more like an unspoken agreement, sometimes on the fringe of legality (especially where informants and vigilantes were concerned): and so, heroic students weren’t taught about it in class. They sometimes weren’t taught about it during their internship, either, because their bosses didn’t trust them not to blab with virtuous indignation if they had to work with a vigilante. So the students were basically blind to a huge part of the industry. Yes, it wasn’t the prettiest part: it was business transaction, paperwork, and mostly pointless information to retain. But it was important to realize that heroes weren’t icons to be put on a pedestal. They were just a cog in a machine. Not even the main cog. Nurses and police officers saved more people than they did. It was important to know that, and to respect that. It was important to learn how those people worked so you could adapt to help them, instead of expecting them to play second-fiddle to your glorious adventure. There were codes to learn, system to conform to. Otherwise, you hindered real help and just wreaked havoc.
(Sachiko’s friend in heroic course, Emiko, didn’t even know that police could give missions to heroes. She was in her third year. It was a complete scandal.)
Toki had really wanted to add a second point, which was that heroes should do more team-up, or at the very least discourage the idea of working solo. They should learn how to evaluate an ally, instinctively go to cover each other’s weak points, and try to be adaptable enough that an unexpected team-up didn’t immediately make crush their formation. A lot of heroes were so unused to working in duo that if they were in a fight with a villain, and another hero showed up, it created chaos more than it helped. If they managed to work together, they attacked one at a time, instead of actively collaborating. For Toki who could work with Keigo with her eyes closed, it was absurd.
But she couldn’t point that flaw to the school, because in this peaceful era, team-ups weren’t necessary. Heroes were safe. They were allowed to play solo adventurers, because All Might was here to keep the dangerous criminals in check. The young heroic students were taught to cultivate their individual skills, and if they wanted to learn about cooperation, they were free to do so in their own time. It was in no way imperative.
So she would have to do with only her first critic, then. Well, fine. She didn’t even intend to post if, after all. She was just… keeping it, and if six month or so she was bored with her schoolwork, well she would start some drama by sending a flow of anonymous letters to Nedzu. Ah! It would be fun, wouldn’t it?
And in a corner of her mind, she also wondered about Mihoko’s other suggestion. Becoming a teacher had never crossed her mind before. But… she couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like.
She couldn’t help but think she would like it.
oOoOoOo
After two weeks at Yūei, Toki had found her footing. She wasn’t quite friends with anyone, but she was in good terms with her classmates, she did her homework with the triumvirate of nerds (of which she was almost an honorary member), and she ate lunch with either Sachiko and her friends… Or on her own. She was fine with that too.
She was here, she mattered, but she didn’t have any significant relationship with anyone. Well. No great loss.
Sometimes Toki wondered about the impact of all of her little interferences. She probably wasn’t aware of most of them. Maybe she had impacted the bus driver’s life, maybe she had given an existential crisis to the cashier at the superette, maybe she had given a nudge in the right (or wrong direction) to some random guy at the dojo. She would never know.
She did know she had impacted some people’s lives. Mihoko-san, of course. But also Keigo. Maybe Hayasa-sensei. And from there… Hadn’t they changed other people’s lives, too? Hitoshi Shinsō hadn’t grow up an orphan. Keigo’s mom wouldn’t be able to leech from the HPSC anymore. And the Iida family, maybe, would meet their uncle if Hayasa-sensei decided to reconnect with them.
Once upon a time, she had worried about upsetting the canon-story line. Now she had grown up and this concern seemed almost ridiculous. Every single person on Earth was a force of chaos, making unpredictable decisions and choosing their own fate according to parameters that changed with every other person’s unpredictable decisions. Canon was just one possibility in a multiverse endlessly expanding. Canon was what would have happened in one very specific universe if nothing changed at all. But things had already changed. Maybe in canon one janitor had decided to quit his job, and in this world, after seeing the news of Meteor crushing a building, he had tried for a promotion instead. Who the fuck could know?
Every event was the product, not of a single interference, but of countless factors impacting each other. It was chaos. It was freedom, too. Toki wasn’t some kind of Chosen One because she had been reborn. She was a cog in a machine, like every other random person on Earth. She could see part of what that machine could have been in canon, and that was it, that was the extant of her advantage thanks to her reincarnation. It didn’t grant her more power or more responsibility.
She would touch and change people’s lives, but so would other people. So would every person she would ever meet in her lifetime. It didn’t make her extraordinary. It didn’t even make special. The best Toki could do was to hope that the change she inspired would be a good one, and hope than other people would try and do the same.
What was she even alive for, if not for this? Why did people exist for, if not to make life a little less difficult for each other?
So Toki could live, and dive headfirst into this chaotic world without fear of breaking something that didn’t even exist in the first place. There was no fate to defy, no destiny to rewrite. There were only people, making their individual choices. Toki wasn’t particularly brave, but you can’t live through what she had lived and not come out with a particular brand of fearlessness.
Strange. Toki would never have described herself as fearless. Especially now that she was Quirkless. Being able to teleport had always made her a bit reckless, but she always thought things carefully, weighting risks and worrying about failure. But mingling with normal people, people who hadn’t been raised by villains or trained to be heroes by the HPSC, it made her reconsider. Normal people didn’t obsess over completing their homework early to get ahead in the curriculum. They didn’t monitor their own progress with a watchful eye. They didn’t formulate their stories like military reports. They had no trouble shrugging off their worries to go to the cinema, they were interested in sports and in TV shows, they had no issues with connecting with people their own age… And they didn’t fight like she did.
Not that there was anything wrong with the way Toki fought. But she had been taught to take down bigger and heavier opponents quickly, and it showed. Martial arts mixed with street fighting and professional submission holds. It made for a dangerous combination. Toki had always thought of her skillsets like a carefully loaded weapon, to use with prudence and measure.
She hadn’t considered how impressive it would be for kids with no combat experience.
Toki used to eat lunch with Sachiko, but sometimes she wandered alone to find a quiet place and browse online on her phone. Maybe do some homework, or watch a short video about astrophysics. Quiet places were far and between at Yūei. More than once, Toki walked on a couple kissing, or on two guys growling at each other…
This Friday, she heard the trouble before turning the wall and getting in full view of this corner of the park. She could have turned away but she heard Kurogumo’s growling voice, and wondered if he was pushing around someone else. Sawayomi wasn’t a victim, she gave as good as she got, but maybe Kurogumo had decided to take lunch money from some kid in another course? She approached, quietly, and snuck a look around the corner… but the scene that greeted her was very different from what she had expected.
There was Kurogumo, all right. Sawayomi, too. Both were standing next to each other, tense, not looking at each other like they didn’t want to acknowledge the other, but still standing close enough that they almost seemed to present a united front. Their eyes were fixed on a guy their age, tall and lanky, with a shock of bright red hair, red-tinted sunglasses, and arrogant smirk in place. Two others teenagers were standing behind that one, like spectators, snickering to themselves. It was clear it wasn’t a friendly encounter.
“Do you remember what I told you little parasites back in middle school?” the guy in sunglasses drawled. “I told you not to apply to Yūei. I told you to stay the fuck out of my way. I’m hero material, not you.”
“I’m not in the hero course, Akashingai,” Kurogumo said through gritted teeth.
But his voice was higher and more nervous than usual. Sawayomi scowled, but she had her hands balled in fist, as if ready to defend herself.
“Don’t play dumb,” sneered the guy (Akashingai, apparently). “I know you took the entrance exam. Of course you failed, a weakling like you, but it wasn’t enough to teach you your place, was it? I said don’t apply to Yūei. What did you fail to understand?!”
“I’m not in the hero course,” Kurogumo repeated, lower.
Akashingai growled. Then, quick as a snake, he raised his sunglasses: a thin ray of light burst from his eyes and struck Kurogumo in the face, making him step back with a yelp of pain. It didn’t even last a second: Akashingai lowered his sunglasses again, cutting off the light, and Kurogumo staggered back, holding his face. When he lowered his hands, Toki realized with a shock that his nose was pissing blood, and already bruising purple, as if he had taken a hit with a baseball bat. His skin was also darker: it was hard to see with his black skin, but it was like he had a violent sunburn.
Toki widened her eyes, her mind already whirring. What an interesting Quirk! It wasn’t a beam of light, it was a beam of energy. Kinetic energy, maybe? In any case, it was strong, and it hurt. Very good for a frontline hero. Dangerous, powerful, but it could also be precise. Very versatile. Were there drawbacks? The light came from his eyes, and it was bright: it had to hurt his pupils. Oh, unless it came from his pupils. Maybe they could absorb light and reject it later with additional strength. In any case, unless he had a really, really evolved morphology, he probably couldn’t see while emitting that much light from his eyes…
“It was just a little warning,” Akashingai said flatly. “Don’t make me hurt you for real.”
Kurogumo swallowed, and stayed silent. It was disturbing. Then Akashingai turned to Sawayomi, and Toki could see how she straightened, jaw tensing.
“Now, you. I thought you would stay out of trouble, you freak, but I should have known that it’s always the quiet ones, uh? I told everybody that I was the only person in that fucking school worthy of going to Yūei. Do you need a reminder of you place, too? Hm? Do you?”
It was really starting to paint a very unpleasant picture. Toki had mentally compared Kurogumo and Sawayomi to Bakugou because they were loudmouths and one of them had bullying tendencies. But it was jarring to see them face to their own Bakugou, someone who was indubitably stronger, more dangerous, more arrogant, better trained: someone who could and would hurt them, and never think twice about it.
“Fuck off,” snarled Sawayomi, but her voice almost vacillated. “Don’t bring me in your fucking mind-games with Kurogumo! It’s none of your business which school I go to.”
“You made it my business when you thought ignoring me was a smart idea,” Akashingai growled. “Now… not only I’m not the only one from Nabu to win a spot at Yūei, but you scored better on the theorical test, thanks to your cheating Quirk. What the fuck were you thinking, stealing my first place from me?!”
Did Bakugou-style douchebags only have one possible origin story? Don’t apply to the same school as me! How dare you personally attack me by being better! Learn your place you fucking extras!... I mean…. Really?! Couldn’t you do something a little more original?! It was so cliché.
Sawayomi gritted her teeth but didn’t answer. Her yes flickered briefly toward the exit, but Akashingai would only have to take three steps to his right to block her path. Then her eyes stopped on Toki and widened. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to make Akashingai turn back to face her.
Ah, crap.
“What are you looking at?” he sneered.
Toki pondered, for maybe half a second, if she should run away like she hadn’t seen anything. But that guy was irritating, and honestly she didn’t feel like bending to this bullshit. So she pretended to think about it for a second, then declared frankly:
“Nothing really important.”
Instead of taking it as an insult (which it was), that condescending prick thought she was declaring that she hadn’t seen anything. He shooed her away with a sneer:
“Then fuck off already.”
Well that settled it. He was going down.
Toki looked at Akashingai, with his mean grin, his half-undone tie, his jacket rolled at the sleeves to show off his arms. Then she looked at his two lackeys, with neat uniforms and amused smirks, leaning on the wall. The way they stood, with their weight nonchalantly balanced on their heels, confident and powerful: cocky, too cocky. Not ready to spring into action. The distance between Akashingai and Kurogumo, between him and Sawayomi, how he had stepped away from his buddies, how far he was from the wall. How slippery the grass was, how close was the nearest security camera, how it looked like for an external eye, what Toki could get away with, what this guy could get away with…
Toki considered it in a glance, like she had been taught in Naruto Labs during those lessons with Hayasa-sensei where she had to spot twenty hidden balloons in a blink: then she did the math. It was doable. Even if she didn’t have a Quirk. There was a risk, and it made her heart beat faster… but she could still do it, and the thrill of it was enough to balance her rising anxiety.
Finally, some action.
“Can’t,” she said, keeping her tone light, and sauntering closer as if she didn’t have a care in the world. “I was going to invite those two to do homework.”
“What?” the redhaired guy blinked.
He was kind of slow to understand he was being taunted, wasn’t he? Toki continued advancing, smiling, discreetly appraising the distance between then. Akashingai scowled:
“You can’t do that,” he sneered in the confident tones of a hen which had worked out a perfectly good pecking order where he was at the top, and wasn’t about to go updating that belief based on mere evidence.
“Of course I can! It’s homework, not an exam, we’re allowed to work together. You know, bonding over math, that kind of stuff.”
Kurogumo and Sawayomi were looking at her as if she was crazy. Akashingai narrowed his eyes, and stepped forward. Only a little less than four meters between then now, and Toki continued strolling nonchalantly towards her target…
“Wasn’t I clear enough?” he spat.
“Well I’m obtuse in purpose, so don’t beat yourself too much about it,” she replied with a cheeky grin.
With a snarl, Akashingai lowered his sunglasses, and a powerful ray of burning light shoot from his eyes: and in the same time Toki sprang in action. The light hadn’t even completely formed that she threw herself forward and dropped low to skid on the grass, her momentum carrying her right in front of Akashingai. His torrent of light didn’t follow her, staying high and passing above her head, so Toki had been right and he was blind when he fired, thanks fuck: but Akashingai was putting his sunglasses back on, his satisfied smirk turning into wide-eyed shock when he saw he had missed, he was lowering his eyes and his pupils were glowing, preparing to fire again…
… And Toki, who was just close enough, threw an uppercut so strong his head swung backward. His next shot of light roared harmlessly toward the sky.
In the same move she snagged off his untied tie, slipping it off his neck, and skidded behind him. He tried to turn around with a scream of rage, but she neatly stayed one step ahead, at his back where he couldn’t attack, and blindfolded him with his own tie. A twist, a knot, and it was done in the blink of an eye.
Akashingai tried to take the blindfold off, obviously, but Toki gripped his hand and twisted it behind his back in a painful submission hold… before quickly tying it behind his back with the other end of the tie. If he tried to yank his arm, it only tightened the blindfold. Now Akashingai was turning frantic, and desperately tried to bat her away with his last free hand. No such luck. Toki sidestepped his assault, undisturbed. Then she grabbed his jacket and yanked it off his shoulders. With the closed buttons in the way, the garment only managed to free his arms down to the elbows before staying stuck, completely blocking his arms behind his back.
She stepped back to admire her work. Then, as an afterthought, she gave a downward kick so her heel caught the edge of his baggy pant. His trousers fell to his knees, making him stumble… and Akashingai fell face first on the grass. Blindfolded, tied up, and pantsed for good measure.
Take-down complete.
The whole thing had barely lasted four seconds. Five if you were feeling generous. Toki breathed out, her heart thundering, adrenaline still high. Holy shit, did that just happen? Oh, okay then. She plastered a bright smile on her face, then turned to face both Akashingai’s grunts, and her own classmates.
“That’s why the dress code says to do your tie properly,” she said very seriously.
Kurogumo and Sawayomi threw her identical incredulous looks, as if they couldn’t believe that she was saying something so lame. What? Keigo was the one who could give quirky replies without pausing. Toki didn’t have his talent with quips!
Then the two henchmen rushed her with a yell, and light-hearted conversation flew out the window.
They had their Quirk activated: one guy had spike on his arms, the other breathed fire, she couldn’t get too close… So she rushed toward them, slipping below their extended arms and gripping their pinky fingers in the same move to twist as hard as she could. They screamed, and Toki nearly took a face full of fire, barely managing to roll to evade it. She still felt the unbearable heat on the left side of her face and the back of her skull, and for a wildly panicked moment she thought her bun was on fire, but she didn’t have time to pause and check, she was right there she wanted them…! And so she jumped upward, snatching both of their ties (solidly tied this time) and rolling over the fire-breathing guy’s shoulder. Dragged by the neck, her enemies crashed into one another, too close to be able to attack without injuring each other… And Toki solidly tied their ties together. The two henchmen ended up stuck with their necks so close they were practically kissing, completely unable to lower their heads to see said knot. They started yelling indignantly.
Again, five seconds at most. Well, closer to six. Toki exhaled, then grinned. She still got it. Using her environment at her advantage and fighting dirty? Hobo-san would be proud. All those painful lessons had paid off! No matter how much the years had passed, she was still queen of the swift take-down.
“On second thought, putting a tie in the dress code sound a bit unsafe,” she added just to drive her point home.
Then she patted her hair. Not on fire, thankfully, but hot and bristle, probably a bit burned: damn, she really hoped she wouldn’t have to cut it!
She sighed, then turned toward Kurogumo and Sawayomi. They were both looking at her like she was batshit insane. Toki raised her eyebrow, then gestured to Kurogumo’s bloody nose.
“Want to go to the nurse to check that?”
The black teenager looked at her, wide-eyed and incredulous, then let out a slightly hysterical chuckle: “Yeah, sure, why not?”
And they got the hell out of there. Not that Toki didn’t trust her knots, but well, there was being reckless and there was being idiotic. Now, Toki was ready to put that episode behind her and move on with her life (preferably to eat her bento, because she was still hungry as hell). But they had barely reached the building entrance when Sawayomi blurted out, unable to keep silent any longer:
“How the hell did you do that?!”
“It was insane!” added Kurogumo, grinning like a lunatic. “You fucked him up like it was nothing, and it’s Akashingai!”
Toki blinked. Yeah, that guy had been tall, strong, and had a dangerous Quirk, but that was about it. He evidently had no combat training, and he had been overconfident and badly prepared. She didn’t really get why they were so stunned. Then she remembered how she had compared Akashingai to ‘their Bakugou’, and how in canon Midoriya had been so childishly convinced his bully was invincible, and… alright, she could get it. Although it seriously jarred her brain to think of Kurogumo and Sawayomi, arguably the most explosive jerks from her class, as a folder for Midoriya.
“He’s not as good as he thinks he is,” she finally said.
“But you’re Quirkless!” sputtered Kurogumo.
Sawayomi punched him in the kidney: “Don’t be a dick, asshole! She saved your ass!”
Toki scowled. The rush of the fight was quickly fading. She should be used to Kurogumo’s scorn by now. But now that she had saved his sorry hide, it ranked.
“I am Quirkless, yeah,” she said when they both looked at her. “I’m still better than you at math, and I happen to be better than him at combat. Don’t sweat it too much. Anyway, will you be fine to go to the nurse on your own? I still didn’t had lunch.”
They both nodded, looking a bit stunned. Toki nodded, then turned on her heels and went in search of a quiet place to eat her lunch.
The incident didn’t have any repercussion. Neither Akashingai or his grunts filled a complain, apparently. They were probably too mortified. No alpha male claiming to be the best wanted to admit that a Quirkless general student had beaten their ass in such a humiliating manner. Toki knew for a fact that a security camera had caught the incident, because she had eaten here a few times and knew that this place wasn’t as isolated as it seemed (virtually no place in Yūei was unmonitored). But no teachers mentioned it. To be fair, Akashingai had attacked first, so Toki was the victim here. Ahahaha.
Neither Kurogumo or Sawayomi mentioned the incident, either. Sawayomi made sense, because she didn’t mingle with people or gossip. But Kurogumo was always chattering with his friends, so Toki would have expected for him to brag about taking down a heroic student, or just use this story as a way to direct incredulous or invasive questions towards Toki. But he had underestimated Kurogumo. He had more dignity than that, apparently.
So no, the incident didn’t change things. Much. Because Kurogumo never bothered her again. There something in his eyes that wasn’t quite respect, but maybe acknowledgement. He didn’t try and provoke her anymore, or taunt her. But he didn’t start ignoring her, either. He continued sitting next to her in group project, and to grin at her while joking, but the hostility was gone. This time, he was trying to laugh with her, instead of at her.
No, they weren’t friends, and they probably could never be. But they could live and let live each other. That was enough.
Besides, the main change wasn’t Kurogumo’s attitude. The main change was that the very next day, as Toki had put her trail down in the cafeteria to eat, Sawayomi slammed her own trail next to her, then aggressively pulled a chair and started eating.
“So,” the redhair finally said between two mouthfuls of curry. “Want to pair up for the next English assignment?”
Toki blinked, taken aback. Then she shrugged, and agreed. Sawayomi was rude and pushy but she wasn’t a bad student. Also, she had apparently decided to be on Toki’s side. Was it how normal teenagers made friends? Toki imagined it usually involved less violence. But hey, she wasn’t complaining.
She was making friends in her class. Really, she was getting good at that ‘normal life’ thing.
Notes:
Meh, i'm not really pleased with this chapter, it feels almost too flat. But i enjoyed Toki's fight. It really show how, althought she's still sees herself as basically average, she's so competent it's downright ridiculous.
Here is what Sawayomi looks like :
I'll update "Snapshots of wisdom" with pictures of Toki's classmates, so stay tuned ! =)
EDIT 29/08/2022 : Some mistakes corrected. Grammar edited, too, especially at the begining of the chapter. Keigo's speech about his reasons for cutting off his mother was expanded and clarified.
Chapter 16: On the path to heroism
Summary:
Toki thinks about her future as a hero and what it will mean. Also: she got a friend, yeaaaah !
Notes:
Here i am with a new chapter ! Thank you for your amazing comments everyone ! It's fuel for the writer ! =)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
ON THE PATH TO HEROISM
Having Sawayomi as a friend and Kurogumo as… well, not a friend, but at least an approachable acquaintance instead of a borderline nuisance… it made for a very different high school experience.
Kotone Sawayomi was tomboyish, brash, loud and determined, but her similitudes with Kurogumo ended here. She never got out of her way to bother people, and she hated public attention. She sometimes reminded Toki of a feral cat, hissing and spitting if you tried to touch it.
The metaphor was actually pretty apt… Sawayomi had a touch-based telepathy Quirk. She could read people’s thought with skin-to-skin contact, and she loathed it.
Nothing was more invasive or unpleasant than being bombarded with the internal monologue of someone when you were trying to mind your own business. Especially since people could sometimes get feedback from her: and having your thoughts read by a stranger was even worse. So Sawayomi hated being touched. But she didn’t like covering up: she saw wearing gloves as an admission of weakness. Instead she mostly protected herself by glowering ferociously to anyone invading her personal bubble, or by yelling and punching to enforce her personal boundaries. It worked pretty well.
Other than her spiky personality, Sawayomi wasn’t actually bad company. She was rude and abrupt but she always listened with attention. She was actually more patient than Toki would have given her credit for, and had a good sense of humor under her aggressive demeanor. She was in a punk rock band, and did competitive rollerblading. Her bedraggled uniform with a punk belt and sport pants under her skirt had been her brand since middle school, apparently; Sawayomi had quite a few anecdotes about teachers scolding her for violating the dress code while young Sawayomi challenged them to show her where, exactly, the rules book said that wearing leggings under skirts were forbidden.
Anyway. Sawayomi was all right. She reminded Toki of Sachiko, a little, or at least in the way she was all bristling and ferocious at the slightest perceived slight. But Sachiko was calmer. More idealistic. More righteous, too. Sachiko was angered by any injustice dished to the world at large, while Sawayomi was mostly centered on her own privacy and safety.
It was no wonder she didn’t get along with the rest of their classmates. At first she liked Toki because Toki was badass, probably… but as days passed, Sawayomi relaxed a little, and it became clear that what she appreciated the most was that Toki never pushed her for answers about her Quirk or her bad mood. Toki also respected Sawayomi’s personal space with a care that, apparently, most teenagers didn’t have.
Toki still sometimes ate lunch with Sachiko, or the three nerds, or the class rep. But it was also nice to spend time with Sawayomi, who was perfectly happy to eat in silence while browsing her phone.
“With your skills, you could be in the hero course, you know,” Sawayomi abruptly said one day. “I get that it’s not everyone’s jig. But you are good at it, and more importantly you liked it, I could see that. So why didn’t you go for heroics? It can’t be because you’re Quirkless. You’re stronger than Akashingai and he was the king of our middle-school.”
Another point in Sawayomi’s favor… Touch-telepathy or not, she was hella perceptive. Toki shrugged and tried to deflect:
“I find that hard to believe. That guy has no training. He would be out of his depth in a parking lot puddle.”
“He’s strong,” Sawayomi insisted. “His Quirk is crazy powerful.”
“Doesn’t make him any less of a douchebag, tho.”
“True. But don’t think I didn’t notice you trying to avoid my fucking question.”
Ha, so much for deflection. Toki mulled her answer, then decided to be as honest as she could possibly be.
“It felt pointless. Hero students spend several periods trainings their Quirk and it’s no use to me. I would rather learn about interesting stuff.”
Sawayomi side-eyed Toki’s laptop, where she was currently taking a physics test for her online course. Her online university course.
“Well,” she said dryly. “That, I completely believe. Think you can complete your university course before even graduating high-school?”
Toki seriously pondered her answer. A few weeks ago, she would have said no. But the high-school curriculum was easier than she would have thought; she had plenty of free time, and since she had signed up for a university course stripped to its bare essential, she actually had a shot to it. Usually, a university course had between six and ten classes. Toki only took six, the minimum: basic physics, advanced physics, nanophysics, theoretical mechanics, spatial geometry, and theory of relativity. It was fucking hard, but still manageable.
“Maybe not the three years needed to get a bachelor’s degree,” she conceded. “But I can definitely finish at least two years, and complete the last one after graduating.”
“Geez, I was joking, you overachiever!”
So. Having a normal school friend was pretty neat. Toki couldn’t talk about hero training or about online activism with Sawayomi, but it was fine, she had plenty of other interests that her new friend shared. Like (surprisingly) poetry. Sawayomi wrote song lyrics for her band. They also liked parkour. Sawayomi was surprisingly good for a civilian. She also had a skateboard, which fascinated Toki. After a few days, without any prompting, Sawayomi aggressively offered to teach her.
Sachiko found very cute the fact that Toki was finally making friends, but proudly claimed that she remained her one and only senpai. Bah, if that made her happy, why the hell not. Keigo on the other hand wasn’t as enthused; he was worrying about Sawayomi’s temper and grumbling that Toki was going to let her grades fall if she was distracted by skateboarding.
Embarrassingly, it took Toki several hours of conversation on the phone to figure out Keigo was feeling jealous. It made her feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Some part of her was squealing in glee, like, ‘awwww, he cares!’… which of course was ridiculous. Of course he cared! Of course he was feeling jealous! Wouldn’t Toki feel jealous, too, if Keigo started blabbing about this new friend he had and with whom he spent all of his time, learning a new sport, telling jokes, sharing his lunch?
(Yes, she would. Toki just had to imagine it to feel a stab of lava-hot envy in the pit of her stomach, and something like dismay closing on her throat. Damnit.)
She didn’t know how to tell him that. She didn’t know how to tell him he would always come first, either… Or at least she didn’t know how to do it without sounding a bit condescending because, really, how ridiculous of him to worry about being dethroned from first place in her heart! So she tried to innocently mention that he was her best friend, or that she couldn’t talk about really important stuff with Sawayomi, or that Keigo was the only person with whom she was talking about her future. It felt strange to said it out loud, even when keeping her tone light. As if she was barring a part of her heart. Still, it worked, and Keigo was in brighter spirits when they hung up about two hours later, when it was time to go to sleep. Seriously, she spoke with him almost more than she spoke with her classmates, and he lived several hundred kilometers away.
Am I in love with him? She had never answered the question. She loved him, she knew it. She wanted to grow up then grow old with him, share his burdens and his joy, built a future, guard his back, have breakfast with him every morning, talk and laugh about stupid things, debate about more serious ones, share her secrets with him, grow and change, and spend every day looking at his dumb face and making him smile. That was love. Tenderness, admiration, devotion. All of it.
And Toki also wanted to kiss him, and she found him stunningly attractive, so… She knew she was also attracted to him.
But was it romantic love?
Toki couldn’t be sure. She knew what love was supposed to be like, but in the movies and the books, romantic love had always seemed… more intense and more superficial at the same time. It was supposed to be all-consuming, not to leave any doubt or question, wasn’t it? But Toki had so many questions, constantly. It was in her blood to always ask why, to always want to know more.
And also maybe, just maybe, she hadn’t been raised with a good model of what love was supposed to be. Her parents had loved each other but she had only saw them interact for a year, and their love had always made Toki feel both jealous and threatened. For most of this time, she had looked at them like enemies. I mean, yeah in the end Toki had turned out all right, but in hindsight her childhood had been… a little fucked up.
Love was too hard to define, too hard to quantify, too hard to consider reliable. Just as knowing consciously that love shouldn’t have to be earned or deserved was different from holding back tears at night because her mom was casually making her believe she was abandoning her…. Well. Knowing that Keigo was the most important person in her life and one of the first persons she had thought about kissing was different from telling herself that it was romantic love. And calling it romantic love made it sound cheaper than the soul-deep trust and affection that bonded them. It was hard to define what was friendship and what was love: it was harder to consider what was platonic devotion and what was romantic love.
The Greeks had seven words to qualify the different types of love. Toki would have liked being able to separate her feelings into neat little boxes corresponding to each definition, but it was just one big messy ball of, you know, feelings. Rocket science was very simple in comparison!
Once or twice Toki almost wanted to talk about it with someone. Sachiko, or maybe Mihoko. Hell, she would probably have opened up to Kameko-san if the cat-lady had swung by Musutafu while Toki was having an existential crisis about being attracted to her childhood best friend. But in the end, she never spoke about it. She was too used to keep her cogitations to herself.
Well, to herself, and her notebooks. Sometimes poetry was both the best escape, and the less painful way to face reality.
I have this urge to be reckless
I am frightened of becoming old
and having no memories at all
I know that climbing forbidden fences is wrong,
but I still keep falling in love with the wrong people,
I keep falling out of metaphorical tree,
I’m dying to do something
worth remembering.
There’s no logic, really
It’s just that if I bleed now,
I have a lifetime to heal
There were seven types of loves according to the Greeks, and sometimes Toki felt like she was feeling all of them, or some other days like she had never been touched by any. There was a certain kind of loneliness in being face to face with your thoughts without being able to open your heart to anyone. There was freedom in it, too. Nobody would judge Toki for the things she didn’t say out loud. She was free to feel, think and daydream as much as she liked.
Being in Yūei was her chance at it, wasn’t it? A chance at stepping back. Looking at her life with new eyes. Taking a break. Considering new ideas and having friends that wouldn’t have fitted in her life at Naruto Labs. Like Sachiko, Sawayomi, maybe even Kurogumo… Mihoko-san. And even little Hitoshi.
Funny story. It was the same week as Toki’s (short) brawl with Akashingai, and the subsequent birth of her friendship with Sawayomi, that she and Hitoshi really talked for the first time. And, to no one’s surprise… or at least, not Toki’s… it was about heroics.
(Yeah, some things didn’t change. In canon Hitoshi Shinsō may have been a bitter orphan, and in this word a beloved child… but in both universes, he had known rejection and discrimination from his peers, had been driven by spite, and still wished to be a hero. You don’t get to pick what your dreams are.)
It had been a bad day for Toki and Hitoshi both. Sawayomi had been broody and silent, so Toki had been bored in class. She hadn’t managed to have lunch with Sachiko. Also she had her first test in History, and although she had never been bad, her grade was barely average. For her, who was so used to effortless excellence in academia, it stung.
Hitoshi had a bad day, too. He came home with a scowl, Mihoko-san looking upset. When Toki inquired about their bad mood, Mihoko said in a clipped tone that Hitoshi had been picked on by some classmates and had lines to copy, which roughly translated to ‘he hit back and the teachers are pissed at him’. Oh, Mihoko had probably already given an earful to the teacher. She was protective of her baby, after all. But considering how frustrated and unhappy she looked, and how Hitoshi was glowering, it didn’t take a genius to figure that they hadn’t won that argument.
Five minutes later, when Mihoko had left to stress-bake some cookies, Toki had a look at the lines that Hitoshi was mulishly copying. ‘I will not use my Quirk on my classmates’. Ah. Yikes. That explained some things, too. Toki opened her mouth to awkwardly offer a platitude, then remembered that she wasn’t supposed to know what Hitoshi’s power was. The information had never been offered to her. So she frowned, and hazarded:
“Are your classmates mean because you have your mom’s Quirk?”
Hitoshi tightened his grip in his pencil, and glowered at her: “What’s it to you?”
“Nothing. If they’re so opposed to someone forcing them to stop in a non-violent manner, maybe you should kick them in the nuts next time.”
She was careful to keep an eye on the kitchen as she said it, because she had a feeling Mihoko wouldn’t approve. But apparently, she had kept her voice low enough, and the noise of cookies-making (bowls clicking, eggs cracking, muffled swears when the weighting scale indicated she had put too much flour…) didn’t stop. Hitoshi briefly looked thrilled at the advice, then he snorted bitterly:
“Yeah, like that would improve my image.”
Wow, he had such serious considerations for an eight years old. Although, Toki had had pretty much the same mindset at his age. Kids had more depth that adults thought. Especially kids forced to grow too fast.
“Sorry,” Toki offered lamely. “For what it’s worth, it’s not your fault children are awful. The nail that sticks up is hammered down, and all that. They just need an excuse to band against someone.”
“It doesn’t help that I have a villain’s Quirk,” muttered Hitoshi.
The girl frowned, straightening in her chair.
“Hey, don’t say that. Mind Quirks are feared because it’s harder to guard your mind than your body, but they’re awesome.”
He looked faintly taken aback. Toki leaned forward and insisted:
“I’m serious. A lot of heroes rely too much on their physical Quirk, so when in some way or another their power are disarmed, they’re useless. Mental Quirk are different. It’s harder to guard against them. Their users are also more resilient, because they’re used to fight basically Quirkless. Do you know the pro-hero Sherazade? She can make people completely engrossed in a talk with her: they can’t focus on anything but the need to respond, to continue the conversation. It’s some kind of hypnosis. She can make you babble, lose focus on your task, forget about what you’re doing even if it’s a question of life or death, or tell all of your secrets. That sound scary, doesn’t it? Like something a villain would use to steal your credit card’s info. But she specializes in hostage negotiation and terrorists’ take-down. She’s badass.”
“… I never heard about her,” Hitoshi blinked, dazed.
“She’s an underground hero,” Toki explained. “Her Quirk work better if the villains are unaware, you know? Underground heroes are usually discreet, they don’t have statistics and merchandizes like limelight heroes… But Sherazade had been around for more than ten years now, so she has a reputation. The police love her.”
Sherazade had also been a recurring figure in Toki and Keigo’s Strategy Lessons, where they had to solve a made-up situation with a villain, a hero, some victims, and a disaster scenario. It was always funny because Sherazade didn’t have a physical Quirk and was notorious for only using a short baton when cornered, and still, she managed to be extremely successful in villain apprehension.
Still… for a conversation with Hitoshi about how good underground heroes could be at fighting, Toki would have liked to use Eraserhead as an example. But she had never looked him up, so her knowledge was limited to her canon-reminiscences eroded by time. Not great, if she wanted to carry out an argumentation. Besides, Eraserhead was kind of young… He was the same age as Present Mic, and for having him as an English teacher, Toki knew he couldn’t be more than twenty-two, maybe twenty-three max. It was his first year as a teacher. Eraserhead was still a beginner and so, completely unknown from the general public.
“Are there… are there heroes with villains’ Quirk?” Hitoshi asked hesitantly, looking almost wary.
Toki waved her hands indignantly, her good old analytic instincts resurfacing.
“There’s no such thing as a villain’s Quirk! Some people have cool and heroic Quirk, such as telekinesis, teleportation, or control over fire… and they are douchebags, criminals or murderers! And yes, there are people with scary Quirk who also do good. I mean, Ryuku can turn into a dragon. She swallows livestock whole. When she turns into a monster in the middle of the street, people don’t think: oh, that’s cool! They think: holy crap I’m gonna die. Same with Gang Orca. He looks absolutely terrifying, but he’s currently ranked fifteen on the Billboard Chart, and he’s probably going to end up in the Top Ten. Hum… There also are people with invasive mental Quirks, like Ragdoll of the Wild Wild Pussycat, who can spy on people. It’s not the Quirk that make the hero. And actually, subversive Quirks like mental ones may be better suited to heroic than flashy powers! They’re more versatile, more precise, and all in one more useful. Can you imagine how great Brainwashing would be to stop an armed bank robbery, instead of, said, Endeavor going blazing inside the building, triggering the fire alarm, getting shot at, injuring the villains, and maybe even burning the money?!”
She paused, realizing she had maybe gotten a little ahead of the initial subject, and awkwardly cleared her throat.
“Well, anyway, mental Quirks are awesome and there’s tons of heroes who have them. Why? Are you interested in heroes?”
Hitoshi didn’t say anything for a few seconds. He was playing with his pen, eyes lowered, looking pensive.
“Yeah,” he whispered finally. “I want… I want to be a hero.”
He raised his eyes, jaw set, looking almost defiant. Was he expecting a challenge? He wouldn’t find one here. Toki completely approved. Hell, she even expected it. So she only raised an eyebrow.
“It’s a big commitment. You will have to train hard. It’s not a decision to be taken lightly… especially at your age.”
“I’m not too young,” Hitoshi fired back. “I’m eight! You were the same age when you decided to start training to become a hero.”
Touché. Toki winced. Mihoko must have told him.
“Still,” she insisted. “I got injured so badly I’m on a break for three years, and that was only training. Alright, fifty percent of that injury was my fault for being a masochist idiot, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s dangerous. You will have to be in peak condition basically all the time. You can’t half-ass it. Are you sure that’s what you want?”
“Yes,” the kid repeated fiercely. “That’s what I want.”
Toki held back a small smile. In canon, Hitoshi Shinsō had ardently wished to be a hero, too. But until now, she had no indication it was the same in this universe. After all, his life in canon had probably been very different from his life here.
“What does your mother think about it?” she asked curiously.
There was a second of silence. Then from behind her came a soft, kind voice.
“I will always support you, whatever the path you choose, Hicchan.”
Mihoko was standing in the kitchen’s doorway, leaning on the wall, a tired smile on her lips. Toki realized that the noise in the kitchen had stopped a while ago. Oh, damn. She ducked her head, embarrassed. She really ought to pay more attention her surroundings.
Hitoshi frowned at his mom, wary:
“You don’t think Brainwashing is suited for a hero, though…”
“Oh, Hicchan,” Mihoko shook her head, “it’s not that. I don’t like my Brainwashing, and I never wanted to be a hero. But you? You’re so kind, and smart, and brilliant, and more powerful than I ever was. Of course you can be a hero. You can be anything you set your mind to.”
Hitoshi lit up. It transformed his face, his eyes wide and sparking, his pinched mouth stretched in an elated grin, wonder painted on his grumpy little face. Toki smiled, too, even as she felt a spike of jealously. Or maybe it wasn’t so much jealously as much as longing mixed up with resentment, or some bitter melancholy. For an irrational moment, she wished that her mom, her dad, any of her parental figures had ever said something like that to her.
“You should probably join a sport club if you’re serious,” Mihoko teased her son. “You’re ready for that? You hate P. E. classes.”
“I will manage,” Hitoshi grinned. “It’s for a good cause.”
Toki swallowed back her bitterness, and offered: “I know a good dojo. I mostly do karate here, but they offer a lot of options, and they welcome students of all levels. It’s not very far, either.”
“Oh, you still do karate?” Mihoko blinked. “I thought you had stopped, with your injury…”
“Practicing a sport is encouraged. Besides, I need to stay in shape. I’m on a medical break, but I’m still going to be a hero at eighteen, so I can’t really afford to slack off.” She paused, and added with a grin: “Also, I like kicking ass. So, you know, win-win.”
Mihoko pinched her lips, briefly looking worried. But then she nodded, quietly accepting it was Toki’s life and Toki’s choices, and turned to her son.
“What do you say, Hitoshi?”
And so Hitoshi Shinsō joined the dojo this same week, starting on path to heroism a good seven years before canon.
It didn’t change much in the grand scheme of things. Hitoshi was more tired, but he was also more confident, and maybe happier. Or at least Mihoko said so. Toki honestly didn’t know him enough to judge. That event had nevertheless brought them closer. Hitoshi had always been quietly acceptant of Toki’s presence in his life and his house, but now he started to open up a little more. He asked questions about heroic training. He sometimes told her about stuff he had done at the dojo.
Toki wasn’t going to complain. She really wanted to make friend with Hitoshi, because he was Mihoko’s son but also because he was smart and funny and clever and she genuinely enjoyed his company, but she was aware that she was the intruder in his life: it was up to him to make the first step. They were still like two cats sharing a territory, cautiously circling the other, curious but not yet playful.
There was no rush. There were already going in the right direction. And Toki still had time. She had all the time in the world.
oOoOoOo
It was now the end of May. A little over a month had passed since the beginning of the school year. So much had happened that Toki hadn’t noticed the passing of time. Stupid. Because she should have noted it on her calendar… There was a specific kind of event just around the corner.
Yūei’s Sport Festival.
Fuck. Toki had honestly forgotten it. Seriously, she could have done without that whole farce. It only existed to make heroic students look good. Maybe in other circumstances Toki would have taken a gleeful joy into stomping heroic students in the ground, brandishing her Quirkless status like a flag; but she was supposed to be discreet. So that was out. She had to endure this joke and let herself fade in the background as discreetly as possible. Urgh.
Their teacher announced the Sport Festival with little fanfare. Most of the class groaned or sighed. They really didn’t see the point in entering a Quirk competition with heroic students. But some of the kids were really pumped up…. and to the surprise of actually no one, the most excitable student of all was Kurogumo. He was kind of vindictive about it, too.
Toki wasn’t surprised. As Akashingai-the-bully had said: Kurogumo’s Quirk wasn’t very impressive, so he had failed the heroic entrance exam. But he still wanted to kick ass on national TV to impress the pro.
A little part of Toki was scoffing disdainfully at the idea. Kurogumo didn’t have half the determination that Hitoshi Shinsō had in canon. He hadn’t done his research about a possible transfer, he didn’t train, he didn’t even plan anything beyond showing off and seeing what would happen. The worst was that his Quirk wasn’t even bad. He spat silk, like a spider. He could probably pull of Spiderman’s moves, or tie up criminals, or do a lot of interesting things with such a nifty power! But he was lacking in creativity, and without trying to compensate his lack of strength with versatility, well, he wasn’t that great.
“I will show them all!” he still bragged.
“Keep dreaming, dumbass!” scoffed Sawayomi.
Kurogumo only grinned: “Jealous? It’s not like you have anything to show off, with a peeping Quirk!”
“What are you calling a peeping Quirk, you asshole?!”
“Well it is! Don’t take airs with me, you didn’t even bother take the heroic entrance exam!”
“I’m a telepath you fucker, that doesn’t work on robots!”
“Like I said,” he smirked. “That’s a peeping Quirk.”
“I’ll kill you!”
“Settle down, you two,” signed Norogawa-sensei. “So, the Sport Festival. You have to show up and actually make an effort, yes, even if your heart isn’t into it. I’m aware that this event is used to promote the Hero Course. Participating as general students can feel pointless. But you are still Yūei students, representing the school, and so you have to give your best.”
Yeaaah, Toki was so not doing that. Quirkless or not, she had more combat training that any kid here. She was the queen of the swift take-down after all. She could probably even beat up some heroic students, as long as she managed to get the drop on them. Case in point: Akashingai.
“Also, don’t forget the event is televised,” he added after a pause. “No funny behavior, and no bedraggled uniforms, you hear me?”
They all grumbled their assent, while Toki winced. Ah, yes. TV. Yūei's Sport Festival was kinda like the Olympics games. It was a big event, broadcasted live on national television, and people waited excitingly all year for it. After all, it was the only sport competition allowing Quirks’ use. Adults weren’t allowed to use their Quirks to fight outside of hero-work, so competitions involving superpowers were non-existent. Most schools had that kind of competition happening once a year…. But Yūei was the only school to broadcast it nationwide.
It was an occasion for hero agencies to scout for talent, but also for students to show off their abilities in a safe setting. And since the public was addicted to flashy fights, well… It wasn’t hard to see why the festival was such a big deal.
It meant that it was followed everywhere. Even in prisons. Maybe not live, but in the following months (and sometimes the following years), a few clips resurfaced regularly. And Toki really didn’t want to appear in one of them.
She didn’t know in which prison her father was… Or Fujio, or Homura, or even Nono. Some of them were probably in maximum security establishments. Meteor, at least. He was maybe even in Tartarus. Other, like Nono or Homura, had probably managed to get into lower-security prisons, because they didn’t have as much blood on their hands and could probably make a plea for good behavior. In any case, at least one of them had access to a TV. And if one of them recognized Toki, they would warn the others. They would find a way.
Toki didn’t think that Meteor’s crew would break out of prison to go on a revenge spree and murder her in her sleep, not really. But that wasn’t a chance she wanted to take now that she couldn’t teleport the fuck away from them. So. Discretion it was.
She considered faking some illness. Was whooping cough still a thing? Apparently not. Mera-san also sadly informed that he couldn’t make her a fake note to say that she was sick. Yūei required a real doctor’s note to excuse a student from the Festival. Crap. Well, time for plan B: drop quietly during the first event… And in the meantime, make herself unrecognizable. Even if a camera caught a shot of her face, nobody should be able to identify her. She considered investing in glasses before dismissing the idea. Too fragile, and too superficial. Maybe contacts? And a change of haircut. She couldn’t afford to half-ass this.
Time to pull out the big guns.
“Hey Kameko-san!” she called brightly as soon as her friend picked up. “Do you know a good hairdresser in Musutafu? Someone how can grow my hair?”
“… Do you want to have extensions?” the cat-lady said, sounding vaguely incredulous.
“Not exactly. Have you ever watched that old Disney movie, Mulan?”
Their class had three days to prepare. Great. The very next day, Toki went to buy colored contact to turn her orange iris a golden brown, and some make-up to contour the hell of her face and change the shape of her features. She asked Sachiko for tips but her friends didn’t wear much make-up, and was no help. Thankfully, there were online tutorials. Sachiko also enlisted the help of her own friends, and one of them (Emiko Shimizu, the heroic student with super-earing!) promised to do her make-up before the event.
Then, the evening before the Festival… After much consideration, and nearly talking herself out of it six times… Toki went to a hairdresser. If she needed a change of look, there was no other option. Her twin buns were too distinctive.
Since age four, she had worn her hair in twin buns. Like macaron, like panda ears, like Mikey Mouse: the comparisons had never lacked. It wasn’t very sophisticated. It was cute, it was practical, and more importantly: it was her brand. Now, she also wore accessories in her hair, like the yellow clips gifted by Keigo. She had grown to really like them. A touch of yellow in her hair, that was so cool! Maybe she could get used to pins or colored elastics or maybe other clips, later. In any case, she loved her hairstyle. Even when homeless, she had cared for her hair, shampooing it, conditioning it, combing it, and carefully twisting it into twin buns every day. Maybe it was vain. But she liked it.
She had sweaty hands when she walked in the hairdressing salon. She had always had long hair.
She walked out with a pixie cut.
(No, she hadn’t asked Kameko-san’s recommendation for growing her hair out, but to be sure that she would be able to get it back after cutting it short. It turned out that several hair salons employed people who could grow their client’s hair. Some people used their Quirk, because they owned the salon and so they were allowed to use their power on their private property, but other salons employed part-time some retired heroes with cosmetic Quirks, who made a comfortable living using their Quirk as subcontractors for beauty salons and the like. Crazy, uh?)
Anyway. Goodbye, long hair. With a short haircut, Toki looked smaller and older at once. Her bangs were messier, making her forehead wider. Without the added volume of the two buns on her head, she looked almost more delicate. She had trouble believing it was her in the mirror’s reflection. She looked like a masculine twin of herself. With the golden contact lenses, it was even worse: she looked like a cross between herself and Keigo. Toki took a few pictures on her phone, for posterity’s sake. It was remarkable enough that she wanted to keep proof.
She sent of photo to Keigo with the caption ‘I’m cosplaying you for the festival (>‿◠)’. He answered with a series of exclamation points and keyboard smashes that Toki found very entertaining. She had sometimes wondered if people found her hairstyle childish… But well, now at least she knew for sure that at least Keigo was fond of it.
The next day, her new hair made an impression. Mostly because Sachiko and her friend Emiko were waiting for her near the changing rooms, and Sachiko’s horrified wail attracted no less than four different teachers who thought there was a murder.
“WHAT DID YOU DO TO YOUR HAIR?!”
“Did it caught fire?” the heroic girl, Emiko, asked with genuine interest. “Because let me tell you, that looks like you went into the kind of disaster you can’t recover from.”
Toki patted her pixie cut defensively: “What? I don’t look bad.”
“You look like A BOY!” screeched Sachiko.
It was the goal. Few changes were as drastic as a gender change, and since gym uniforms were unisex, Toki could easily pretend to be a guy for a day. But woah, someone had strong feelings about that! Toki pouted:
“A hot one, at least?”
Sachiko spluttered helplessly, which caused her friend Emiko to look absolutely delighted at this turn of event. Sawayomi chose this moment to turn the corner, and stopped short, looking bewildered.
“Hoshizora?! Did you lose a bet?”
“Alright, I’m going to be offended if you keep this up,” Toki said to no one in particular. “I’m not disfigured, only unrecognizable… and very androgynous, considering my sport bra is actually one size too small… But that’s the point!”
Sawayomi squinted: “To pretend to be a boy?”
“Well, I always liked Mulan. I also helped put a villain in prison a few years back, and he doesn’t know where I am but he certainly does remember my hairstyle, so… if by accident I end up on national TV, I’m playing it safe and making sure he doesn’t recognize me.”
Sawayomi and Emiko both paused, digesting that. But Sachiko only nodded wisely, as if that piece of information lined up perfectly with what she already knew of Toki. And maybe it did, after all.
“I guess that make the contouring even more important then?” Emiko said weakly, holding up a makeup bag.
“Absolutely.”
And that closed the subject. It didn’t stop the rest of Toki’s class from screeching when they saw her, but at least nobody bothered her excessively. The Sport Festival could begin.
In the canon, it was an important milestone for the heroes’ journey. A cornerstone of the story, even! The protagonist announced himself to the world, showing off his Quirk and his cleverness. There were laughter and tears. Friendships were born. Gadgets were used. New characters were introduced (yes, that’s you Hitoshi!). Tragic backstories were revealed, and trauma solved with epic battles and heart-wrenching shouting matches. There were some good fights, and a few that were truly impressive. Toki didn’t remember how many episodes it had lasted but it had been long, it had been great, it had been rich and varied and tense, with high stakes and great rewards; and it had been important.
In her world, well. Toki was a general student with absolutely no desires to shine whatsoever, so the whole event was a bit of a let-down.
They entered the stadium after the heroic students, the crowd roaring in enthusiasm. Toki had a slightly fixated smile on her face and was almost shaking with nervousness. She was hiding within the mass of her classmates, even when they had to line up to listen the student representative (a boy from class 1-B who had taken first spot at the entrance exam). Toki didn’t retain a word of his polite and encouraging speech: she was surreptitiously looking for the cameras. She spotted at least twenty journalists on the first row of the public, and that was without counting Yūei’s cameras in the walls. Great. That didn’t make feel her better at hall.
Then, with a rumbling like an earthquake… The ground rose, walls growing around them in all directions. Students gasped and several of them swore out loud, stepping back instinctively. It was obviously the work of Cementos. In a few second the walls were already four meters tall, enclosing them completely… But Toki had time to see the pattern they formed. It was a maze. The walls formed longs corridor with sharp angles, colliding in big hallway or ending abruptly in dead ends. Right now, the students were trapped in the center of a labyrinth sprawling across the whole arena… And she had a good guess about what their task was going to be.
“AAAAAAND LOOK AT THAT!” screeched Present Mic. “IMPRESSIVE! Look at this maze! The walls will randomly change to prevent anyone from mapping the labyrinth! It’s every man –or woman– for themselves! FINDING THE EXITS IS NOT GOING TO BE A WALK IN THE PARK, FOLKS! Especially since they are moving every two minutes or so! But YOU CAN DO IT! Or at least, the fastest can do it… that’s right! ONLY THE FIRST FORTY STUDENTS TO GET OUT OF HERE WILL MOVE ON TO THE SECOND EVENT!”
So, a race, hum? Well, that wasn’t so bad. Toki just had to pretend to be lame at it. If she had her Quirk, she would have gotten out no problem… But hey, there was no use in considering the what-if. She had a job to do.
“EVERYONE GET READY, BECAUSE THE FIRST EVENT IS A GOOOOOO!”
Five sections of the walls trapping them sank in into the ground, leaving openings to five different corridors. Toki didn’t move, but several dozens of students took off with a roar. A boy from class 1-B immediately started attacking the guy next to him, maybe settling a grudge or maybe hoping to thin out the competition. No matter: Toki waited for a few seconds, then flew in a direction at random.
To her surprise, four different people follower her. Sawayomi, but also the nerdy trio: Morimoto, Yaibadosu and Kinjo.
“You have a plan?!” hissed Kinjo, eyes a bit wild, her perfectly brushed hair already in disarray.
“Uh, not getting smashed by heroes in training with something to prove?”
“Can’t you smash them right back if that happen?!” snapped Sawayomi.
“Gym uniforms don’t have ties!”
Sawayomi let out a nervous chuckle at this reminder, while their three other classmates looked utterly confused. They reached an intersection: Toki mentally thought about what the labyrinth had looked like when the walls had started shifting, and took right. None of the other argued with her, and following without questions.
Suddenly Toki saw a girl with dragonfly wings and two boys with bat wings soaring through the sky to escape the maze. Very soon Present Mic bellowed:
“ONE, TWO, AAAAAND THAT’S THREE OF THEM! Having wings sure help to get by! The rest of their classmates are going to have a harder time!”
Another intersection: Toki took right again, following the same wall. Then there was another, and they almost collided with another group of students. Akashingai was among then, and Toki tensed a little…
“Out of my way!” he growled, his eyes skidding on her without a hint of recognition.
Toki obediently flattened herself against the wall, taking Sawayomi with her just in time. Akashingai and the others heroic students continued running. A few seconds passed, then Sawayomi started sniggering. Toki snorted:
“Wow, that disguise is even better than I thought.”
“You know him?” said Morimoto, frowning.
“Yeah, something like that.”
But seriously, her already low opinion of Akashingai was now plummeting even further. He had a powerful and flashy Quirk, but that was apparently his only quality! Not only was he a bully, but he was also overconfident and plain stupid. Toki wasn’t exactly his enemy, but she had proved she could beat him and even humiliate him. He should have remembered her face. Not just because she had bruised his ego as a high-schooler, but because he had been beaten, as a future hero, and he should be able to remember and to identify threats.
Gods, he was probably going to be cosmetic hero, wasn’t it? Proud, flashy, and virtually useless. Pathetic.
(‘Cosmetic heroes’ was a slang used to describes heroes that were in the show business more than in the actual thick of thing. They could fight, they could rescue, and sometimes they were competent professional that took their job to heart… but they were just better at being circus attraction than at the rest, and they exploited it. They were mostly interested into making money from popularity pools or flashy contests. They usually fought against low-level villains, and the point was to delight the public more than it was to arrest the perp. Several of these heroes had been stripped of their license for actually colliding with villains. Not by helping them or anything nefarious, but by staging fights to look good in front of cameras even if it caused propriety damage… Even if, in some cases, people got injured or killed. Yeah, ‘cosmetic heroes’ were a thing. And it wasn’t a nice term.)
Anyway. They ran into Akashingai the aspiring hero, he didn’t recognize Toki… and that was the most exciting event to happen to Toki personally in that Festival. So yeah, kind of a let-down.
They ran into a couple of others guys, but the smart ones had quickly guessed that the labyrinth was designed to be unescapable if you played by the rules and stayed on the ground… so the real competition happened on top of the walls, where students had climbed and were now busy running, jumping, and fighting.
Present Mic announced another escapee, then another. After then minutes or so, a dozen of students found an exit, apparently half by mistake, half by design. Then there was another heroic student managing to escape… Then a few others… Toki was mentally keeping count. The others concurrent Toki’s group into were getting either frantic or more and more resigned. Then, finally, Present Mic yelled that the forty-second student had managed to escape from the labyrinth… and that was it, that was over. Well, for Toki and her classmates at least. They could go back to the bleachers to watch the rest of the spectacle without risking getting stomped by over-eager wannabe-heroes.
“Aren’t you disappointed?” Sawayomi asked Toki when they went to their seat. “You could probably have made it.”
Thankfully, Kinjo, Morimoto and Yaibadosu weren’t close enough to hear her. They still didn’t know Toki was secretly a hardcore fighter.
“Nah,” Toki said lightly. “I have no plan of going further in that dumb Festival. What about you?”
“Not really interest in being a hero, either. Besides, my Quirk isn’t good for fighting.”
Toki stopped, and frowned. “What are you talking about?”
“What?” barked Sawayomi, defensive. “You know what my Quirk is, right?!”
“Yeah, of course. But you never thought of using defensively? It could make you the deadliest hand-to-hand fighter in Japan, since you could probably read your opponent’s next six moves by just gripping them. Not counting the fact that you could blast them with the memory of, I don’t know, breaking a bone or something, to make them startle, or even believe that they have broken their arms.”
Sawayomi had stopped walking, and was now looking at Toki with a strange expression on her face. Toki blinked.
“What?”
“… Nothing. It’s just, each time I think I have you figured out, you throw another curveball at me.”
“Don’t take it personally,” Toki advised her. “I’m excessively strange.”
oOoOoOo
Once in her seat, Toki really enjoyed watching the rest of the Festival. The second event was a team battle, capture-the-flag style, with four teams of ten students. The point of the event was to eliminate half the students to keep only twenty competitors for the tournament. Team fighting wasn’t the kids’ strong suit, but they did okay. It was clear that some of them had experience training against one another and were familiar with each other’s tactics.
Akashingai had a really powerful Quirk, and it gave him an almost unfair advantage. He was also very fierce in his flag’s defense, and he played an important part in his team’s victory. Still, once the third task began… He soon started showing sign of slowing down. He was constantly rubbing his eyes behind his glasses. Quirk overuse? In any case, he was eliminated in the second round, after fighting a guy who blew ashes. The tournament continued without him. Good riddance.
Toki noted than most of the competitors, if not all of them, had very flashy Quirks. Light, flames, wind, smoke… None of them had mental Quirk. Or non-physical ones, like enhanced senses. Toki thought about Sachiko’s friend, the girl named Emiko who had super-earing, and frowned. This whole Festival was supposed to be just that, at festival, a sport, but… it did set the tone for what heroes looked for, didn’t it? Because society didn’t look for nifty little powers with sneaky applications, or for people who could solve problems creatively. No, they looked for a spectacle. They looked for a show, for a gladiator fight.
Case in point: the victor of the tournament was a guy who could turn into lava. Go figures.
It was a great show, sure. But it was a show. It wasn’t… it shouldn’t be what society looked for to keep the peace. Toki couldn’t quite articulate it, but the idea really bothered her. She had liked the spectacle, sure, but the implications kind of left a bitter taste in her mouth.
She turned it in her head during the next few days.
(She had much to do during those days, mostly because Sawayomi wanted to hang out more. Also, it took several sessions to the hairdresser for her hair to grow back, and Toki desperately needed something to distract herself. Really, having short hair was so weird!)
Toki liked pulling problems apart. General problems, but also things that disturbed her personally. Maybe it was because the Commission had always encouraged her to analyze and scrutinize every detail. Or maybe it was because she had been raised by Sayuri and every single tiny red flag had to be watched immediately, because it could announce a minor disagreement as well as a shit-show of epic proportion. Or maybe it was just in Toki’s nature to dig and nitpick until she had found satisfaction. She liked puzzles. She liked complicated questions. A world where there were no interrogations, only mindless acceptance, would be both mind-numbing boring and awfully dangerous.
So. Flashy Quirks and how everyone loved them, to the detriment of the quieter but more useful ones, like super-earing or mind-control. It wasn’t the first time Toki had pondered the question. It was hard not to, when she was training to be a hero. But now, away from Naruto Labs, she had more insight. She could look at the issue with more detachment.
It wasn’t a Yūei problem. It was more of a societal one. Or more precisely, an All Might one, Toki realized with a jolt. Because it was him who had organized this heroic society, created the desire for rankings and the model of what the perfect hero was supposed to be. Poor All Might probably hadn’t foreseen that but… Becoming the Symbol of Peace had some fucked-up results.
The fact that he was called Symbol of Peace, for once. Symbol of Strength, Symbol of Order, or maybe even Symbol of Japan would have been more appropriated. Because peace wasn’t supposed to be violent. Mankind had other symbols of peace, for gods’ sake! And they hadn’t been fighters! Remember that time Gandhi punched a man into the stratosphere? Or when Nelson Mandela dropped the atom bomb? Yeah, the societal and cultural implications would be rather bleak.
That was Toki’s world, still. A world where peace was assured, not by treaties and accords, but by the threat of overwhelming force. The threat of All Might bearing down upon you with all his might. Because might made it right. Oh, on the surface, this arrangement wasn’t much of an issue for the majority of law-abiding citizens. At least, it wouldn’t be if not for the way this society pushed people toward villainy with discrimination and restrictive Quirk use, but that’s not the subject.
The deeper issue, here, was the idolization of violence.
Heroes weren’t a symbol of abnegation and hard work: they were a symbol of destruction. They had the monopoly of legitimate violence. And they didn’t half-ass it! You just had to look at the top heroes to realize how overkill they were. All Might punched so hard the sheer pressure changed the weather. Endeavour killed it with fire. Ryukyu used claws, fangs, and probably ate livestock whole. Edgeshot made his body thin as a razor and punched at speed of sound!
Let’s consider the more innocuous criminal, like a shoplifter. What strategies would any of these heroes employ in that case? Step one, offer chance to surrender. Step two, murder? These heroes did not have a non-lethal option.
And that’s a real problem. Not just for these heroes, but for the society that had elevated them to the Top Ten, rankings which accounted for popularity more than anything else. Because this was a zero-sum scenario: if brutality rose to the top, then utility was pushed to the bottom.
Non-violent heroes simply did not have a clear path to success. The realm of heroism was all but institutionally sealed off for them. There was a reason Eraserhead was an exception rather than the rule, there was a reason Hitoshi was already so bitter about his dream, there was a reason Akashingai was such an arrogant dickhead, there was a reason Sawayomi had never considered her Quirk good for heroic work. Society wanted heroes who fought villains. That was what their purpose had become. And anyone who couldn’t conform to that mold got pushed out. Heroes had deviated from their original purpose; they now existed only for the spectacle of the fight.
All Might’s position as the Symbol of Peace didn’t not extol heroism, but rather violence in heroism’s name.
And Toki had another revelation, because… the next hope of the HPSC, the person supposed to relay All Might after he retired… that was Keigo and Toki.
They both had flashy Quirks, but more importantly, their powers were versatile and non-destructive. Oh, it could mean that the HPSC had no hope of finding someone like All Might and so they bet on a different style, so their new competitor wouldn’t be constantly overshadowed by the Symbol of Peace! But it could also mean (and with how clever the President and Vice-President were, Toki would absolutely bet on it) that they knew this pattern wasn’t sustainable. Extoling violence, even in the name of order and justice, never ended well. Having a warrior as your leader was all well and fine when you had to end a war, but in peace time, it created a particular kind of restlessness.
Keigo and Toki… Hawks and Quantum… They were supposed to be the solution to that.
They were supposed to rise high in the rankings and be incontestably more efficient than all the super-violent heroes; and they were supposed to do that while being smart about their power, to lead by example. Would an exploding kid like Bakugou act the same way if his inspiration was Hawks, swift and calm, who was admired for never causing any collateral damage, instead of All Might who leveled city blocks when plummeting his opponent?!
Holy shit, Hawks and Quantum were supposed to succeed All Might.
Alright, Toki had known that already, but in an abstract way. From the beginning, she had known that her role as a hero was never going to be a cushy side-job. It was always going to be intense, and take more than half her life, even if she cleared her schedule to continue her astrophysics studies. But it was only when Mrs. Genmei had told them she was betting on them that Toki had glimpsed the enormity of what was expected. It hadn’t quite sunk in at the time. She had her heart condition to swallow, her departure from Naruto Labs to prepare. But now, well. It all came rushing back, and it was good thing that she was already siting down.
Her silver lining was that… in all probability, it wouldn’t happen. Well-laid plans never survived first contact with the enemy, and all that.
The Commission’s plan was probably to have Hawks and Quantum take over in ten years or so, when they would be at the peak of their condition. All Might would retire due to old age, without drama, leaving behind him a society ready to be guided in a more peaceful age. Genryusai-sama was probably aware of AFO’s existence, even, and was waiting for All Might’s to kill him before bringing his new players on the board.
But it wasn’t what was going to happen, right? The League of Villain was going to make their entrance and reveal that All For One had survived. Succeeding All Might would be a collective effort, all heroes coming together in the wake of his forced retirement.
Besides… It was kind of arrogant from the HPSC to think that they could pick the new Number One. Maybe a stronger hero would emerge. Hell, Endeavor was still alive and kicking, and he wasn’t the Number Two for his charming personality: he was hella strong.
Anyway. In conclusion, All Might’s time was nearly over, not because he was old but because this glorification of violence risked getting out of control. The HPSC knew it and was making plans for it, plans in which Hawks and Quantum figured predominantly. Plans that would only come to fruition if All Might ended AFO and then retired peacefully. But if nothing changed from canon (and Toki didn’t think external factors had impacted the timeline enough to change that), then AFO would survive, All Might wouldn’t retire, and in seven years or so society would plunge headfirst in a new war, this time against the League of Villains.
Urgh.
________________
< NotQuantum: so
< NotQuantum: hypothetically
> EndeavorSucks: I already don’t like this
< NotQuantum: how would one go about reforming the whole hero society so we don’t have this ridiculous media circus anymore and instead of glorifying flashy quirks we look for useful ones, like enhanced senses, hypnotism, and things like that?
> NotHawks: did you spent too much time thinking about school again?
> NotOnFire: I love how you imply that school gives Stars inclinations of revolution
> NotHawks: oh, it totally does.
> ThisIsFluffy: Besides, you shouldn’t be surprised, we all pretty much joined this discord to complain about the uber-commercialization of heroism
> PikaPika: that’s a debate for @PinkIsPunkRock
> PikaPika: But let me throw in my two cents:
> PikaPika: So of course the first, very first thing needed is: that the flashy and destructive heroes stop being indispensable, or at least become less so
> PikaPika: it’s a sad truth but actually, when you have guys like Toxic Chainsaw or Wolfram or Moonfish running around, you need powerhouses to stop them
> PikaPika: They don’t make the majority of villains, but shit, there’s a lot of them
> PikaPika: now, criminality has decreased a lot since All Might’s became the symbol of peace
> PikaPika: twenty years ago (you’re too young to remember it, but I was already alive, you youngsters!), there were people like that pretty much in every city, making the news every day or so
> PikaPika: now they only make the new once every three months, sometimes once a year!
> PikaPika: like, remember that thing with Hellmaker in Fukuoka? It was a tragedy. But twenty years ago people would have been numb to it because it was the kind of disaster they saw too often
> PikaPika: But back to the point
> PikaPika: if you want to get rid of the super-violent heroes, then you have to replace them with less violent heroes who keep the country just as safe as them
> PikaPika: … but it would be safer, easier and all in one more logical to get rid of the hyper-violent villains first
> PikaPika: And then, once you’ve done that
> PikaPika: the second thing is: teach people to value Quirks that aren’t as flashy as those of the hyper-violent heroes
> PikaPika: it’s a vicious circle, in a way, because the glorification of powerful Quirks encourages those who have them to take the center of the stage, either as villains or as heroes, and it fuel the next generation desires for powerful Quirk, and so on
> PikaPika: So my point is: get rid of the villains (not totally, you cant’ do that, but enough to leave our society some wriggle room to adapt to a new age instead of being in survival mode), and teach people to value other skills besides the ability to punch a bitch
> PikaPika: There. Pink, you have the floor.
> EndeavorSucks: …
> NotOnFire: … mic drop
> PinkIsPunkRock: nothing to add for now, that was very well explained
> PinkIsPunkRock: I would just add that ‘getting rid of villains’ doesn’t necessarily mean tossing them in prison, but also cutting the problem at the root and addressing the societal problem pushing people towards villainy (discrimination, inequality, lack of access to resources, lack of education, etc.)
> ThisIsFluffy: 👍
< NotQuantum: wow
< NotQuantum: well thanks guys
< NotQuantum: you gave me a lot to think about
> NotHawks: … yeah, same
> EndeavorSucks: you have revolutionarily idea too, Chiken?
> NotHawks: ah ah, no!
> NotHawks: but I want a world where heroes have time to relax so, you know, considering the how and the why of heroism is always a good thing
< NotQuantum: ( ͡^ ͜ʖ ͡^)
> PikaPika: what’s with that face Stars? Is that another of your private jokes?
< NotQuantum: ( ͡^ ͜ʖ ͡^)
> NotHawks: ( ͡^ ͜ʖ ͡^)
________________
So yeah. Change was coming. Wasn’t it inevitable, in a way? No society could stagnate. Especially not a society with so many forces of chaos inside. Superheroes, supervillains, sensational news, social medias sending messages at the speed of light, ideas going around in every direction, easy access to documentation…
And Toki would be in the thick of things. Even if she wanted to avoid it, it was too late now. She was involved. As the Commission’s sponsored prodigy, as a teleporter with a very coveted Quirk, as the daughter of criminal on the path to heroism, but also (or maybe, mostly) as a member of society. As a person who wanted to study at university, who wanted access to vast group projects and an advanced field of studies. As a person who lurked online and signed petitions, shared posts and articles about social justice and equality. As someone who wanted to be part of this brilliant, wonderful and completely insane world.
But it was still a few years away. And in the meantime, well, Toki was allowed to enjoy her time.
At the end of the month, she had another hospital visit. It was only a routine control, but since it was Dr Shinsō who welcomed her, they ended up chatting a lot. He even offered to show her the lab where they were growing her new heart. Musutafu Central Hospital was actually a huuuuuge complex with around thirty building, half of them dedicated to research, an few other specialized in medical treatment with Quirk use.
In one of the labs, there were gigantic… vats… tubes… aquariums… thingies… that looked like they came straight from a science-fiction movie. In canon, AFO had grown his Nomus in similar tanks, if Toki remembered correctly. Human-sized glass tubes filled with greenish fluid. Was that kind of décor normal for every mad scientist? Not that Toki would call her doctors crazy scientists, but still, you had to be a little weird to grow organs in your basement.
“And this is it!” said Dr Shinsō with a proud smile.
Toki stared into the cultivation vat holding what would eventually be her new heart. For now it was still mostly plastic and protein scaffolding, but visible tissue had started to accumulate and stretch across the gaps in the lacy armature. It didn’t look like a heart, yet, but she could see the structure.
“Weird.”
“It is,” Dr Shinsō admitted. “But really, those artificial organs are very convenient. They save about twenty people every year from degenerative illnesses and the like. It’s a pity that the whole process takes so long, and that we have to map and sample the organs first. Otherwise, we could create ready-to-use organs for any person in need of a transplant.”
Toki thought about people in cars accidents or in villains’ fight. Well, that explained All Might’s case. If he hadn’t asked doctors to prepare copies of his organs in case of grievous injuries, they wouldn’t have anything to transplant. It explained why, in canon, he was missing a lung and a stomach.
“And there’s no anti-rejection therapy needed?” she checked.
Dr Shinsō pointed at the ruby liquid the proto-organs were suspended in.
“Non. Those are your organs. They contain your DNA. They’re being fed by your cloned blood. If there’s a rejection we’ll know about it long before I put them in you.”
“And the new heart would be able to support my Quirk without problem?”
Now that a few weeks had passed since their first meeting, Dr Shinsō had ample time to stick his nose into her file. He wrinkled his nose:
“I did look at the studies of your actual heart. Without calling what happened ‘Quirk overuse’, you definitively pushed yourself. Your new heart is designed to withstand this kind of treatment and more. But you will still have to take care of your health!”
“… My heart attack occurred in an intense Quirk training session. When I’m a hero, there will be missions like that.”
“Your new heart won’t fail you if that’s the case,” Dr Shinsō reassured her before frowning. “But you will have to take care of your limits. We’ll know more about where they are exactly after the transplant, but as a doctor… You will be able to have the schedule of a full-time hero, that’s for sure, but for the love of everything that’s sacred, that does not mean overworking your Quirk every single day. Muscular damage is cumulative rather than immediate.”
Toki frowned, already mentally recalibrating her expectations. She would have to optimize her timeline to be the most efficient possible. And she would have to test her limits, of course. And speak of it with Keigo.
Well. Silver lining in all that: if Toki was forbidden to do overtime, then the Commission wouldn’t be able to stop her from studying astrophysics. Debt to the HPSC or not, she refused to abandon her dream like that.
She hummed pensively. Then she realized Dr Shinsō was watching her quizzically, and rose an eyebrow:
“What?”
“Nothing. Most patients are freaked out when talking about the surgery and long-terms consequences. I would have expected you to me more scared. Especially considering your age and… the things you had to go through.” He hesitated, then added, lower: “It may not be my place, but from what I can guess… terrible things have happened to you in the past. I wouldn’t blame you for being frightened and angry about this whole operation. Considering who is paying for it, I’m guessing you will never be free to abandon the path of heroism.”
He wasn’t wrong. For a wild, panicked second, Toki tried to consider what he knew, what he could have guessed. Her age and her health problem were in her file. He knew she had a fake name. Mihoko knew, and had probably told him, that Toki was running away from someone and had been living in the streets for weeks. Was there enough here to connect Toki Hoshizora with Toki Taiyōme?! Was there enough to extrapolate about why the Commission was keeping an eye on her, why her other options had been slowly cut off? She didn’t think so, but Dr Shinsō had been so deliberate in his choice of words she had to wonder.
“I’m not being forced on that path,” she said slowly.
“Are you sure?” he said hesitantly.
This time she frowned, annoyed. Yeah, she was only fifteen and he probably thought she was a dumb kid taken advantage of, but Toki was well aware of where she stood, thank you very much.
“Yes, I am. You were right, terrible things have happened to me. I’m still me, heart attack and hero training or not. Thank you for worrying, but following that path is my choice. I still get to do more with my life than just save it.”
Hajime Shinsō looked a little sad, then.
“I know. I knew since you saved my family when you were just a child. It’s still a shame that if fell on your shoulders.”
Toki had nothing to say to that. Because yeah, it was sad that this world needed a kid to waltz in and save people that other adults couldn’t help. Did Toki regretted things that could have been, wishing for a normal and loving family, for a peaceful childhood spent growing up at a normal rhythm? Maybe. But her life had been fucked up from the very beginning. Because she had been born with big dreams, because she was Meteor’s daughter, because she had a warp Quirk.
Normality had never been an option. At least, with the HPSC, she had managed to make the best of her situation.
Notes:
A slow chapter, but meh, i really wanted to talk more about Sawayomi. Her picture is in "Snapshots of wisdom", the next work in this series, if you want !
Also, i wanted to share my headcanon about how the HPSC views All Might and how they planned for his retirement. In canon, they bet a lot on Hawks, and not just as their agent. If he was only a pawn it would have been easier to make him an underground hero. He has the skills for it. But nooooo, he rose high in the rankings. It was in large part due to Hawks' desires to be a limelight hero, true, but i think the HPSC capitalized on it. Being Number One comes with a lot of push and i guess they would rather have charming Hawks (who's in their pocket) filling that role rather than surly Endeavor.
Also, if you want a drawing of Toki with her short hair, there's one :Anyway, i hope you liked this chapter !
EDIT 01/09/2022 :
Some spelling mistakes were corrected. Also, when Toki speaks of heroes with mental Quirk, she doesn't use Sir Nighteye as an exemple (his Quirk is a well-kept secret).
Chapter 17: Heart and soul
Summary:
Life continue. Toki get a new heart. In both senses of the term. Whooops.
Notes:
Not a lot of action, but stuff happen. Also, Toki get her heart surgery... and she finally figures she's in love. Spoilers ? Naaaah, you had guessed it x)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
HEART AND SOUL
After May came June, then July and the holidays. Toki was waiting for it impatiently, because summer holidays meant summer camp, which meant that she was going to see Keigo again! Sure, they chatted online, and on the phone almost every day; but it wasn’t the same!
But well, they wouldn’t be reunited until August, so she had time to kill. In July, like last year, Toki had to find a way to occupy herself. She mostly spent that time with her new friends: Sachiko, Sawayomi, some people from the dojo… but also Mihoko-san and little Hitoshi. The Shinsō family even invited her to come with for a week-end at the beach. Mihoko phrased it like Toki would do her a favor, babysitting Hitoshi while Mihoko and her husband spend time together; of course she couldn’t say no… but in the end, Toki realized it had been a strategy to include her in the family’s outing. Not that she complained, though. They had fun building sandcastles and plashing in the waves, and when it was time to come back Toki almost dragged her feet.
Somedays it scared her, how wholeheartedly Mihoko-san had accepted her and included her in her own family.
Toki wasn’t supposed to have that. She wasn’t allowed to have that, not after what had happened to her real family. It would have been one thing if Toki’s affection for Mihoko-san and her son had been one-sided, if Mihoko-san had accepted it good-naturally but kept Toki at arm’s length. At least one of them would have put boundaries to kept Toki in her place. But no, Mihoko-san wanted Toki to be part of her family. Mihoko-san wanted her to go on holidays with them, Mihoko-san didn’t mind her being called “Hitoshi’s older sister” by the guy selling swimsuits! It was nice. Too nice, maybe, too soft: things like that didn’t happen, things like that didn’t last.
It filled her heart with warmth and fear in equal measure. And at night Toki laid awake, sometimes, wondering what the fuck she was doing. Because what the fuck was she doing? How could she be allowed to play house with a nice family like that? A family with an absentee father, a caring mother, and a little brother who was almost the same age as Hikari would have been if he had lived. Toki wasn’t stupid, she could see the parallels, alright?! The important, genius father who kept out of his family’s way but dearly loved them. The smart, kind mother, with the same purple eyes as Sayuri, the same soft smile. And the young boy with his mother’s eyes and his mother’s Quirk, almost the right age…
Yes, what the fuck was she doing? She couldn’t get used to it. One day they would all wake up. Mihoko would realize this stranger had no place in her home, or Dr Shinsō would say he didn’t want to mix work life and private life, or maybe Hitoshi would get annoyed at having to share his mom’s attention. Toki shouldn’t get used to it. She wasn’t allowed to have it.
She had destroyed her family once. Meteor was in prison, Sayuri dead, and little Hikari too. How strange: Hikari had never really been a person in Toki’s mind, only a vague concept that her mother had been ready to die for… but it was only since meeting Hitoshi, a boy just the right age and maybe even the right eyes color, that the reality of Hikari’s could-have-been existence had come to Toki with the suddenly of a bucket of cold water to the face. Hitoshi was whole, and alive, and unique. Hikari could have been like that. Hikari could have been a person, instead of a corpse. He had been fully formed and viable, he had a name picked out and everything, he had been wanted. And he had died. Because of Sayuri’s weak condition, or because of bad medical care, or because of the stress caused by Toki to her mother, there was no way to know. He was dead.
A dead brother, a dead mother, an imprisoned father. Yeah, Toki had really fucked up things for her family. She had destroyed it. She couldn’t trust herself to have a new one. She couldn’t trust the universe, karma, people, to not screwup again. The only family she had, the only family she needed, was Keigo and the HPSC. It should have been enough.
(But oh, couldn’t she enjoy this brief respite while it lasted? If felt no nice to have a mom who didn’t need to play mind-games with her. So nice to know there was a dad in the picture, and not have to worry about it. So nice, to have a little brother so smart, so sassy, so bright and kind and alive. Surely, Toki could enjoy the lie just a little more. She only had two years left before closing this parenthesis in her life and going back to hero work, anyway.)
So. Toki enjoyed those stolen moments, softly, quietly. She knew it wouldn’t last forever, but she could appreciate it while it lasted.
Weeks flew by and in August, Mera-san drove Toki to the summer camp. It wasn’t at the beach this time, but in the country. There were barely twenty teenagers. The camp was an old temple, and during those three weeks, they were supposed to learn to live without wifi and electronic devices.
It looked like a punishment, but they had plenty of activities: a small farm to take care of, a weaving atelier, a theater where they would prepare a representation, and at the end of those three weeks there would be a small festival in the village. The kids had been encouraged to pack a kimono or yukata, and Toki (who had never owned one of these) had frenetically looked online for a garment that she would like. She had finally found her happiness with a space-themed kimono (of course). It was a deep purple cloth, with colorful printing of drifting planets and ribbons of light in cooper, yellow and pink tones.
“I’m not sure it will send a strong enough message about what a space nerd you are,” Keigo said very seriously when he saw her folding the kimono in her cupboard.
There were no dormitories, only little rooms with twin beds. Most kids bunked up with a person of their gender, but nobody had batted an eye when Toki and Keigo had claimed a room for the two of them. Toki snorted:
“Let me guess: your is bland, boring, and picked by the HPSC?”
“Well, yes. But it’s not like I had the time to go shopping! Besides, I don’t really care as long as it’s fashionable. When I’ll be a hero shooting commercials, I will have publicists and managers for that.”
“Urgh, don’t tell me about it. I bet your hero costume will just be a remix of our training uniform.”
It was a sucker bet: thanks to her canon-knowledge, Toki already knew it. In Naruto Labs their training uniform had consisted in black sneakers, black socks, wide brown khaki pants, and a black t-shirt. As a hero, Keigo (or rather, Hawks) would wear the same kind of pants, short boots instead of sneakers, and would pick a yellow pattern to brighten his shirt… but the similitudes between the two outfits were obvious.
“Yeah, and what will your hero costume look like?” Keigo fired back, grinning.
When they were younger Toki had designed a ton of possible heroes’ costumes for them. The most embarrassing one was a full-body armor, Iron Man style, that looked like the user had been swallowed by a sentient rocket.
“Hey, there were good designs in there!” she protested half-heartedly.
“Like the rocket one?”
“Gods I hoped you’d forgotten,” she groaned. ‘That damn rocket one. I must have been sooooo sleep-deprived to think it was good idea.”
“At least you learned you have no future in the fashion industry.”
Toki put a hand over her heart, feigning outrage: “Hey! It’s not my fault. Experimentation is a part of life! Everyone has to bloom in their own sunlight.”
“They should put you under a heat lamp and leave you in the basement,” Keigo grinned.
Toki tossed a pillow at his face and he didn’t even dodge, cackling madly. But Toki was grinning too, a tension she hadn’t been aware of slowly bleeding from her chest. It was just like before. They hadn’t seen each over in a year, but they were still fine. They were still as weird and close and friendly as before.
Seeing him still filled her chest with warmth. Making him laugh still made her beam. And when their eyes meet, there was still the same tenderness.
If their bond could survive time and distance like this, did it really matter if it was romantic love or platonic friendship? It was strong, intense, and if Toki was lucky it would last for years.
Why would she need more?
This summer camp was half oh-let’s-find-inner-peace-in-this-peaceful-retreat, and half forced-logoff-therapy-slash-punishment for teenagers that their parents were forcibly tearing from their laptops and video games. As a result, their group was very… colorful. There were a few kids who seemed to come straight from a yoga commercial, wearing pale clothes, rising early, taking cold showers without complaining, eagerly talking about living in harmony with nature. There were others who wore streets clothes and a constant frown. Others that were tentative about the whole thing, and often utterly baffled by the kitchen’s workings, considering there was no microwave. Then there were those who were pissed about the whole thing and either shut-off completely in horror, or threw tantrums when they were expected to contribute to anything.
Keigo and Toki weren’t quite enthusiastic about the whole thing (they both liked their comfort, and that mean hot showers!), but they had lived without electricity before. Their Boys/Girls Scout days weren’t so far behind them. They knew some useful skills, like how to sew, how to make a fire. This summer camp still had novel experiences, like how to weave clothing, how to make origami, how to do laundry without a washing machine, how to use a traditional kitchen with only a fireplace and a sink filled with water from a well, and so on.
It wasn’t all work, far from it. The three adults overseeing their group had plenty of fun activities planned. Weaving baskets was also a time to share stories and jokes, laundry time was rhythmed by songs, they had origami contests, they were encouraged to dress up and play around with the kimonos the weavers were making, they had a theater play to prepare. Toki would have thought that this live-in-medieval-time thing would mostly consist of manual labor, but she had been wrong. As one of their instructors revealed, the medieval peasants worked about five or six hours each day, maybe ten when they harvested the fields… But most of their time was spend socializing, sharing songs and stories, eating with friends at the local inn, gambling, or creating art. The average office worker spent more time laboring for his boss than the medieval peasant did for his daimyo!
Toki missed her laptop a little. She missed talking with her friends online, and she itched to work on her classes. She had printed a lot of articles and lessons to read, but she didn’t even have the time to stop and read them. Every day, there was so much to do… And there were so many activities that needed her participation. In the theater play, Toki didn’t manage to get the role of the heroine, but she got the evil witch one, and immediately immersed herself in the role. Keigo was playing the part of her domesticated parrot, on account of his wings and how hilarious he found the character. They had a blast repeating their lines until they sounded like a completely deranged set of mind-reading twins.
There was story time, in the evening, and Toki loved listening to crazy anecdotes and well-known legends. One of the instructors had started recounting the Illiad, and since it turned out than most of these kids didn’t know Greek mythology, they were all hanging on his every word. Even Toki, who knew the stories, couldn’t help but be absorbed in the narration. After all, the most important thing in the Illiad wasn’t the ending, it was the journey, with all its ironical twists and the prophecies that made the listeners want to tear their hair out in frustration.
Yoga classes were fine. One of the boys had asked to use the dojo to practice judo, and Toki had enthusiastically signed up for some karate practice. Two other teenagers had joined them, and the four of them quickly ended up holding some kind of training/tournament under the hoots and cheers of an excited audience. Keigo had the level to join in but, for some reason, he would rather stay on the sidelines for this one. Toki wondered if it was because of his brittle bones. He was sturdy enough to take a beating, sure, but in a real fight Keigo avoided direct hits and mostly used his Quirk. Here, they weren’t allowed to do that. After all, they weren’t pro-heroes in training, only rowdy teenagers.
Toki and Keigo still had plenty of time together. They were on the same shift for cooking, laundry, or cleaning. They also did the same activities, and since they shared the same room, they usually fell asleep after whispering all until midnight.
It was strange, in a way. They had spent so long away from one another but once reunited, they were still clicking perfectly, like two puzzle pieces meeting their match. Some of it was probably thanks to their long phone calls: they didn’t know everything about each other’s lives anymore, but they were up to date on most of what was going on. Toki knew how was Keigo’s training progressing, what kind of exercise he did, what Hayasa-sensei said, where Okamoto had taken him for the last few week-end, what kind of skills Keigo was expected to focus on in the following months, how his classes were going, the name of his peers, the names of his teachers, which classes he liked the most, what were his lessons at the moment. Keigo knew about Toki’s online classes, about her normal classes, who were her teachers, how she had kicked Akashingai’s ass, how she had become friend with Sawayomi, who was Kurogumo, how was Sachiko, what was going on with her karate lessons, how she had reconnected with Mihoko Shinsō, which online petitions she had shared, what kind of online forum she was lurking on these last weeks.
But you don’t get this familiar, intimate almost, with someone thanks to phone calls only. There was an easiness between them, the way the shared the same personal bubble without a second thought, the way Toki always slept better when she drifted to sleep to the sound of Keigo’s regular breathing, the way they guessed the other’s moves with a single look… That kind of comfort in the other’s presence came from a long acquaintance. Or a maybe a deeper level of trust.
Toki was fifteen… sixteen in a few months. It was almost a decade since she had meet Keigo. He had been her friend, then her best friend, then the single most important person of her life; and she didn’t know when her feelings had evolved. It had been so slow and gradual. They had been childhood friends, they still were, but their love had grown and bloomed, not quite transforming, but gaining so many other aspects.
Toki had always thought of romantic love as cheaper compared to the others. She had never quite got it. How could Sayuri and Meteor’s love be stronger than her own love for her mother? How could romance completely blind her mom to what was right and wrong, or to the fact that her daughter was hurting? In the movies, in the books, it was this sacred thing that occluded all the rest without ever being as rich and complex than the bond forged between family’s members, or two loyal friends, or two fellow soldiers. But maybe Toki had never watched the right movies or the right books. Gods knew her tastes leaned towards fantasy stories instead of realists one, whether it was romantic comedy or teenage drama.
But maybe she had been thinking about it the wrong way. Maybe the way romantic love was portrayed in books and movies didn’t feel right to her because it was designed to be perfect, it was supposed to be the final reward that made the whole journey worth it… but Toki had never viewed love like that.
Love was the journey, not the end. It was trust at its higher level. Love was strong and beautiful but also imperfect and dangerous. Media liked to sell this idea of love like the postcard image of a wonderful sunset over the ocean, but love was the ocean itself, deep and vast and overwhelming, as beautiful as it could be suffocating. Love meant devotion, trust, abnegation, selflessness, but it could also mean jealousy, possessiveness, emotions stroked so high they went out of control until you lashed out.
Toki didn’t have a revelation like a strike of lightning. She just stopped wondering if she loved Keigo in the same way she had stopped only viewing as a friend. Love didn’t fit into a neat little box, anyway. There was admiration, affection, furious protectiveness, pure devotion, tenderness, jealousy, trust, all of that. Love, it was love: it couldn’t be anything else. Toki wanted to spend her life with him, be his partner, have his trust, help and support him and be helped and supported in turn. She also wanted to kiss him and put her hands on him in a decidedly non-platonic way, but it was incidental. It was a consequence of her love rather than the cause.
They would always be childhood friends, but now Toki was in love with him. And for now, it was enough.
The idea of telling him made her heart jump in her chest like a scared squirrel anyway. Even if the atmosphere was romantic. Even if maybe, just maybe, he loved her back… it was still too soon, the revelation too fragile. Besides, they would be away from each other for two years, still, and feelings were already complicated enough without needing to add the complexity of a long-distance relationship between two people with a really limited amount of free time.
(Did Keigo love her back? Toki mentally kept a little tally in her head. The way his voice softened when he said her name, the longing glances, the fond smile, the absolute trust, the way he unthinkingly gave her his jacket when it was cold, all of that were as many points in the ‘yes he does’ column. But, well… The raucous jokes, the easy-going way to speak about the girl in his class who gave him a bento one day he had forgotten his, the fact that he managed to wax lyrical about Endeavor’s abs for twenty-minutes straight… were as many points in the ‘no he doesn’t’ column.)
So Toki didn’t speak about it. She knew, and Keigo knew too, probably, and they let it build between them. They talked until midnight and sometimes fell asleep holding hands. They were so close-knit that every single person in the summer camps believed they were dating, and most importantly, neither Keigo or Toki corrected them… But even when they exchanged furtive glances after somebody’s comments, they never started a conversation about it.
Because if they put all of this in the open, where would it go once they had to part, Toki back to Musutafu and Keigo to Naruto Labs? How painful would it be, to know and to still have to say goodbye? Toki didn’t know if Keigo talked about her to someone, back home. She certainly didn’t. She kept her thought for herself, close to her heart, and in her poetry notebook.
There’s a calculus to wishing.
It’s all about angles of desire.
If you really want something,
don’t you dare aim for it.
Don’t ever speak its name.
It was simpler that way. In two years, maybe two years and half, they would both graduate high-school and start their agency. In the meantime, there was no room to let this thing between them grow. They would have to wait.
Toki had gotten good at waiting.
The three weeks passed, one day after another, between chores, songs, theater repetitions, and long treks in the nearby hills. Then came the festival. Several kids had packed a kimono, as requested, but most of them hadn’t… and in any case, they all loved to play dress-up with the dozens of yukata and kimono stocked at the camp. Some of these garments were made by volunteers, who patiently weaved then printed the fabric. Others had been donated by clients. Others were brought because the owner of the camps loved the design. Other came from the theater’s costumes. In any case, there were plenty to go around and find the perfect outfit. Keigo couldn’t join the fun since he needed specially tailored kimono to accommodate his wings, but Toki and him still gleefully rummaged in dozens of clothes, comparing the colors and the print to find the nicest one.
In the end, Toki still wore the kimono she had bought. She had saw several ones that were gorgeous, especially a white and gold one with print of orange flowers… But nothing could compare to the space-themed kimono she had brought here. It was one of its kind. When she emerged from the bathroom wearing it, Keigo grinned from ear to ear, eyes sparking in amusement:
“Space nerd.”
“And proud of it, chicken boy.”
Keigo guffawed, and Toki twirled around to better admire her outfit. The kimono was a dark blueish purple, streaked with ribbons of color (yellow, pale orange, pink), with drifting stars and planets in rich ocher hues. The obi was a lighter purple, edged in orange and littered with yellow stars. The whole thing was colorful, bordering on eyesore… Still, Toki loved it. What? She had never claimed to have a good fashion sense. She had weird tastes and embraced them wholeheartedly.
They went to the festival together, as carefree as normal teenagers. It was funny to see people turn on their passage, looking more at Toki’s eyesore of a kimono than at Keigo’s bright wings. But even then, they managed to blend in. The festival was filled with stands and a cheerful crowd, and they were, after all, only two teens enjoying their evening. They bought candies, Keigo trounced everyone at the shooting range, they played dexterity games.
They even ventured in a fortune-telling booth where they were told they would both become successful heroes and live happily ever after on the countryside, which was hilarious. Not that they had anything against the countryside, but really, they were both more used to big cities. Rooftops and skyscrapers… It was their natural environment.
“So no little cottage?” Toki grinned when they got out.
“Are you kidding, no! I want a penthouse. And I’m sure you want one to!”
Toki pretended to hesitate: “I dunno, it’s kind of a rich people thing. You know I’m all about equality. Share the resources and unite, you know.”
“Oh, I’m all in favor of socialism too, but that’s not reason enough to give up my penthouse. I can love both social justice and luxury.”
“No one will need a penthouse under socialism,” said Toki.
“All the same, I’d like one,” Keigo told her, amusement dancing in his eyes. “That’s what luxury is: stuff you have that you don’t need. Let’s have socialism where everybody gets a penthouse.”
Toki pinched the bridge of her nose, swallowing back laughter.
“That is against the nature of penthouses. They’re at the top, you see, of other houses. Which are therefore not pent.”
“Pent means top?”
“Pent means slope.”
“So why can’t everyone just have a sloped house?”
“Do you want a sloped house?”
“I want a house with floor to ceiling windows that lets me look down on the little people and comes with an infinity pool. And a fountain. For champagne.”
“Okay, so you can see why maybe that doesn’t quite fit with the egalitarian underpinnings of socialist discourse.”
They looked at each other, and burst out laughing. Then someone started calling back the camp’s teenagers because their theater play was starting soon, and they had to run the whole way back, Toki awkwardly holding the bottom of her kimono to avoid tripping on it, and Keigo flapping his wings to clear the way.
The play was a success. Toki’s role as the evil witch fitted her perfectly: she waved her arms around to make her sleeves flaps, the black coat thrown over her kimono making it seems like she was clothed in darkness, and her megalomaniac laughter was absolutely shiver-inducing. Keigo had the time of his life pretending to be an evil parrot. Their banter, however scripted, was on point and looked spontaneous, borderline flirtatious. They moved with the other actors like a well-oiled machine, and even if there was sometimes a second of uncertainty in their choreography, nobody fell down or forgot their lines. All in one: success.
The beach camp would always have a special place in Toki’s heart, but this place wasn’t so bad either. It was fun and relaxing, away from the rest of the world. A quiet and honest place, to spend time with your friends… to spend time with yourself, too, reflecting about what you felt and how you were going to deal with it.
Love didn’t have to about the clichés of romance. It wasn’t melodramatic violins under the moonlight, or passionate kissing that made you forget every single other important thing in your life, or even burning jealously that kept you awake at night when you were pining for your unrequired love. Love was none of these ridiculous, bigger-than-life ideas. It filled you quietly, softy, growing from a swallow pond to the deep of the ocean. It wasn’t made of extravagant offerings, or of soul-wrenching torments. Love wasn’t like that, as blinding as fireworks in the night. It was like a starry sky, millions of little things shining softly to bath the world in silver light.
Who needed grand gestures to just know, or to tell the other? The best i love you were the little things. A smile. A laugh. A bad pun. The fact that you saved the last part of cake for someone else. A hug. A crude joke. Toki wouldn’t have recognized love in a grand gesture under a firework, because grand gestures weren’t acts of love for her. They were performance, not truth. But she saw love in the little things you shared without an afterthought, the little pieces of yourself you gave without artifice, open and smiling and vulnerable.
Love was about trust. And just like trust couldn’t be born all at once, love took time to grow. There were no grand revelations, no sudden epiphany when everything fell in place. It had always been there, between them, for years. Maybe it wasn’t quite romantic in nature, but it was there, and somehow, even with the little tally in her head, Toki wasn’t scared of not being loved back. Keigo and her had known each other for nearly a decade now. For years, Toki had said I love you with millions of little gestures, and for years she had heard it back.
There were only two years left before Toki and Keigo could be reunited for good. What were two years, in the grand scheme of things?
oOoOoOo
Summer camp ended. Keigo went back to Naruto Labs, and Toki to Musutafu. A week passed, and it was September. School started again. The day of Toki’s heart transplant was drawing to a close.
She had awaited this moment for what seemed to be a small eternity. It felt strange to know it was going to happen in a matter of days, now. Toki watched her calendar with something like trepidation. She could almost feel her old heart jumping in her throat, as if rebelling against the idea.
A bit too late to get cold feet, my dude, she mentally commiserated with her defective organ. We’re in the endgame, now, and three billions yens in debt thanks to your shenanigans. You don’t get to stay, buddy.
The surgery would take one hour, top, but afterward Toki would spend four days in the hospital before being released. And even then, she would be homeschooled for two whole months. So Toki warned her dojo she would be absent… She had Mera-san warn Yūei (as his legal guardian, it was his job!)… And of course, she had to warn her friends. Sachiko already knew, of course, since Toki had talked about her health to the Discord server before. Mihoko was aware of what was happening, too, and Hitoshi had been told the kid-friendly version.
So in reality, the only persons who were completely taken aback were Toki’s classmates.
Ideally, Toki would have only told Sawayomi, who was the only person she considered a friend. But well, since Kurogumo was trying to be all chummy with them, he lurked close by… so he happened to overhear. After that, discretion was shot to hell. Because, apparently, having her ribcage opened and her heart replaced was metal as fuck. Soon everyone knew that Toki was going to have an organ transplant: and suddenly everyone treated her as if she was made of glass.
It was infuriating.
Sawayomi and Kurogumo had seen her fight, so in a way, they were the only persons knowing that Toki was far from fragile. The fact that she had kicked their bully’s ass with a faulty heart seemed to make the whole encounter even more badass, actually. But for the other students, and even their sensei… Ugh. They were all so full of solicitude, suddenly. As if she was disabled or something. One guy even said, in a tone full of admiration “wow, it’s bad enough that you’re Quirkless, but you also have a heart disease? You’re disabled twice over then! You’re so strong for pushing through!” Toki wanted to kick him in the teeth.
In a way, having an ass like Kurogumo pushing her around (and more importantly, being met with resistance) had helped Toki establish herself as someone who wasn’t lesser, more fragile, or to be pitied. Now, though? Well, Kurogumo didn’t push her and even seemed to respect her, which people mistakenly took for carefulness. So they all treated her with kids gloves.
It wasn’t even because of her medical condition. Plenty of people had medical conditions. But having that vulnerability brought to light… It was like people had suddenly remembered that oh yeah, she was Quirkless. Lesser, weaker, and pitiful. Like a fleas ridden, disgusting puppy.
She would have to kick some serious ass after surgery to remind them she wasn’t some damsel in distress, damn it.
The day of the operation came.
Toki tried to play it cool, but truth was, she was almost trembling with nerves.
(Yeah, forget the ‘almost’. She was shaking like a goddamn leaf. The surgery required her to be fasting, but she wouldn’t have been able to swallow anything, anyway. She felt almost sick with anxiety.)
Mera-san drove her to the hospital. She got her blood pressure taken, then she changed into scrubs for the operation. She was led to the anesthesia room next to the operating block, and laid down on a bed before having a respiratory mask put on her face. Her heart was thundering so loudly it felt like it was trying to escape by her throat. Her hands were shaking. Dr Shinsō was in the room with her, with two nurses, ready to take over and wheel her bed to the operating block as soon as she fell unconscious: but Toki was so tense than sleep was the further thing from her mind.
“What if the anesthesia doesn’t work?” she blurted out as one of the nurses started counting backward from ten.
Dr Shinsō stayed unflappable:
“If the gas doesn’t kick in, I have a hammer in my car.”
Toki laughed nervously, as did the nurses. Then everything turned black. Apparently, the anesthesia worked quicker than she had expected. Ah ah. Funny, that.
… And just like that, it was over.
The surgery went well. Of course Toki had no memory of it. Even waking up took her a long time. She was whacked out, fading in and out of consciousness. Kameko-san swung by to see her, but Toki had no memory of that event. The only proof was a shaky recording on Kameko-san’s phone, where you could vaguely hear Toki ramble in a drunken voice about how vegetable oil was made from vegetables, coconut oil was made from coconuts, so the only logical conclusion was that baby oil… and then the recording cut off with a loud guffaw from Kameko-san.
Toki resolved to never do drugs. If that was how she was when as high as a kite, she didn’t want to see what happened if she did it while fully able to teleport. She could totally kill someone. Probably herself.
So. She had a new heart now.
Congratulations?
For three days it was a parade of doctors and nurses in her room, constantly listening to her heartbeat, taking her blood pressure, or drawing blood sample to make sure there were no rejection (although it was theoretically one hundred percent safe, the fact that they were double-checking it was both reassuring and worrying). Then, after three days, she was released home. Since she lived alone, she was given a bracelet that monitored her vital signs to send an alert if anything went wrong, but that was it.
It was a bit lonely, those two months of convalescence. Mera-san called her twice as often; he ended his work sooner than usual to swing by and bring her dinner. Keigo called her every evening, like clockwork, and they usually chatted for almost two hours before going to bed. But it didn’t make up for real, human company. Toki liked to go out, to see people, to jog and explore. Doing some exercise was part of her routine. The first days, when she was still too tired and wobbly to do push up or sit-up, she felt almost sick with unease, as if her body was letting her down. But days passed, and so did the tiredness, the soreness, and the fog in her brain.
Having a new heart was a strange thing to know, intellectually. She couldn’t feel it. But her torso felt tender and sensitive, and the scar…
Toki already had a scar, from the surgery where the doctors had mapped her heart and collected tissues sample. It was down the center of the chest, starting at the top of the sternal bone, just under her neck, and ending just past the end of the sternal bone. It had been large and red, but had quickly faded to a thin white line. Now, though… Having been reopened for a larger, longer operation… The scar was redder and largen than ever. It looked so deep. It gave her chills to realized that a scalpel had dug like that in her chest. Oh, the scar would heal, and fade, but never as completely as the first one. And of course, there would be corrective surgery afterward that would reopen it again, so… Yeah. Toki had no hope that it would ever disappear.
She didn’t consider herself very self-conscious but fuck, that scar was so huge. Toki already wore shirt with a high neckline because she was used to it and it was convenient to hide the scar from her pacemaker’s surgery, but now she would have felt too exposed if she ever tried to wear a t-shirt with a V neck.
At least, since she was stuck at home, she had time to study. She was ahead in her basic physics and advanced physics; but she struggled a little with her others class. Nanophysics, theoretical mechanics, spatial geometry, and theory of relativity were not easy subjects. She would have to study a lot before exams… Well, at least she would have more free time than her high-school classmate, considering she had a lighter work load thanks to her advance in math and physics. Juggling that many classes, from different level, was harder than she had initially thought it would be.
Maybe she should drop one class… No, no way. The classes she could get in her second years depended on the one she completed in her first year, and she had meticulously planned her whole journey. She could afford to fail nanophysics, maybe, but certainly not drop it. Taking only six courses was the bare minimum allowed!
But come on, she could do it. Besides, if she managed to ace her high school science exam… Well, considering she was sitting the third-year exam, she would have finished the curriculum and it would free her more time to work on her university classes.
Really, she had almost bitten more then she could chew. If she had to do heroic training in addition to that, that was for sure, she would be toast. It would be either an abject failure or a burn-out before winter. She understood why most full-time heroes didn’t have time to do anything else. Physical conditioning took time, then there were fights, patrols, administrative work… There just weren’t enough hours in the day to manage higher studies in addition to a normal workload.
One more reason to work her ass off during high-school. She was on a mandatory break from hero training. After that, there would be no excuse. So if she wanted to get her diploma, she had to get ahead as much as she possibly could while she had the time to study.
Weeks passed. September became October, then Toki’s birthday came. She was now sixteen. Even if she was on medical leave, she was allowed to wander around as long as she didn’t do anything too strenuous, so for her birthday she joined Sachiko and some of her friends for a spa day. Toki had never been taken care of and dolled up like that by a flurry of attendants. It was weird, but a good kind of weird.
Also, Toki never had a gaggle of girl friends to chatter with. Even during summer camps, she mostly hung out with Keigo, so girls’ talk had never been a priority. It had always seemed a little… frivolous? But now it was spa day with the girls, so frivolity was kind of the point. Besides, once you were lounging in a pink bubble bath after a massage, conversation kind of naturally drifted in that direction.
“So, Toki-chan!” exclaimed Emiko. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
Sachiko’s friends were three. There was Emiko, the heroic student (a cheerful blue-haired girl with a super-hearing Quirk). Then there were twins from general studies, Amaya and Aiko (both pretty blondes with a water Quirk).
“Or girlfriend!” added Sachiko with a grin. “You only have a thirty percent chance of being straight!”
Toki paused: “Wait, where are those statistics coming from?”
“You mostly hang out with queer people and you have good taste in clothes.”
“I… what?”
Sachiko frowned, turning her head to look at her: “Sure you do. I mostly see you in uniform but those boots you have? They rock.”
“Wait, no, back up, I hang out with queer people? I hang out with no one besides Sawayomi, and you, and Emiko I guess… ooooh.”
Sachiko and her friends started sniggering at her belated realization. Emiko waved a hand:
“We’re dating, by the way. If all the hand-holding and being joined at the hip hadn’t clued you in.”
Toki groaned and covered her face with her hands, cheeks flaming with embarrassment. Damn, that explained why Sachiko and Emiko, who weren’t in the same class or even the same course, were always together! And how Sachiko had known Emiko’s beauty routine enough to guess that she was a make-up expert…
I mean, it could not have been that. Toki and Keigo were that close but they weren’t together, not really. Still, that level of intimacy was usually synonymous with a romantic relationship. Toki really had been clueless.
“I can’t speak for your friend Sawayomi,” Sachiko continued. “Although I got a great gay vibe from her. But anyway, there’s me, there’s Emiko, and there’s the Discord server. At least three people here are queer and out.”
Toki mentally scrambled for an answer other than ‘what, really?’. She finally gave up with a groan. Damn it, people and emotions and little labels were so complicated. She really hadn’t noticed all that stuff. Or maybe she had, it just hadn’t computed. Now she felt kinda stupid. Was she supposed to notice it? Or… acknowledge it, in one way or another? She didn’t know the proper etiquette for that kind of stuff!
“I don’t have a boyfriend or a girlfriend,” she said instead. “I’m probably straight.”
“Probably,” repeated Sachiko with a smirk.
Toki splashed her with some water. Yeah, probably. She had noticed that other people and genders were attractive besides Keigo, sure, but she wasn’t comfortable putting a label on her sexuality yet. She was only sixteen! She still had plenty of time to figure herself out.
“How did you and Emiko met, anyway?” she asked to change the subject. “You’re not in the same course.”
“Oh, that’s a funny story! It was during the Sport Festival…”
It turned out that Sachiko, general student with no offensive Quirk (and Toki realized that she still didn’t know Sachiko’s Quirk, because the pink-haired girl always carefully avoided answering that particular question) had managed to reach the second stage of the Sport Festival by bulldozing through her opponents with some karate moves. In the second stage, there was a team event and she joined forces with the only person who didn’t mind pairing with a general studies girl… Emiko herself. They clicked immediately, and afterward, they exchanged numbers and stayed in touch. Emiko didn’t have a powerful Quirk compared to her classmates, and she didn’t have many friends among her peers. So she started having lunch with Sachiko, then hanging out after school… And they had begun dating a year ago, in second year.
It was a cute story. Bittersweet, too, because Emiko confessed that she wanted to work in an agency near the sea, and… Sachiko wanted to keep both feet on the ground. They had planned to break up after graduation. That resolution left Toki a bit bewildered and indignant on their behalf; but, as Sachiko gently explained, you can love and date someone, and be sad to see them go, and still know it was for the best. They had been friends before being girlfriends, and they would be friends once it was over. There was nothing dramatic about it.
Toki could see her point, kinda. But she still thought it was sad.
But back to the point. Toki had an enjoyable birthday, although that conversation about being queer had taken her aback and made her question herself a little. Then life continued as usual. Resting, studying, going to the hospital for check-ups. In November, finally, Toki was able to go back to Yūei.
She immediately used their first P. E. lesson (in gymnastics, which was perfect) as an opportunity to flatten her classmates and remind them she was not some fragile disabled weakling. She even started a fistfight with Jinpachi, the tallest guy in class, just to end it in ten second with a submission hold. After that, they didn’t treat her like glass anymore, and life as usual resumed.
Good.
Days passed more quietly. Toki had kept up with the class’s workload, so she wasn’t behind. She had plenty of time to juggle with her university courses, her homework, her visits to Mihoko-san, the dojo, and hanging out with Sawayomi. The weather was now too cold to spend hours at the park to skateboard, so they went to Sawayomi’s place (a little studio near campus) or Toki’s.
They talked about heroes sometimes, because, duh, it was the go-to topic for any teenager in a hero school. Toki kept her most contesting opinions for herself, though. Sawayomi approved of heroes and general, and even envied them a little: she wasn’t prompt to criticism like Sachiko or her friend from the Discord server.
And after all, why would she? Sawayomi was rebellious and punk rock, sure, but she lacked the jagged edges of cynicism that Toki had learned to recognize in her other friends. So yeah, she swallowed the rose-tinted narration the media gave of heroism, and never had the need to look for more. But Toki had been trained to be a hero, and she always absentmindedly noticed the traps in the evening news. The media loved to praise those that took on just one more burden again and again, pushing past their limits no matter how much it pained them. The world practically expected it of heroes. But they always wanted more. They pushed for more and more until that person broke, then they wrote it off as a spontaneous, unexplainable tragedy, and moved onto the next one.
Heroes’ deaths in villain fights where tragedy was avoidable were getting rarer and rarer. Twenty, ten years ago, there was one basically every week. Now it was less frequent. Once a year, maybe. Toki mostly remembered Shirayuki’s death at the hands of Hellmaker. How people had cried and whined for her loss, but never for the fact that dying on the line of duty had been expected of her.
But Shirayuki’s death hadn’t been the first. And it wouldn’t be the last.
In December, there was flood in Tokyo. It was the result of an earthquake. Civilian casualties were limited, since most of them had been evacuated safely… But the Engine Hero, Fuego, was reported missing, presumed dead, taken away by the waves while trying to save civilians.
Toki didn’t know that guy personally, but the name rang a bell. Fuego, the Engine Hero… Tetsuya Iida… Head of the Idaten Agency… Hayasa-sensei’s brother-in-law and, in all probabilities, Tensei and Tenya Iida’s father. Damn. Well, that explained why Tenya’s father had never appeared on screen, only his mother and brother.
The journalists were all falling over themselves to said how tragic it was, how he left behind him a grieving widow and two sons, one of them grown enough to take over his agency (Ingenium, the Turbo Hero, previously his father’s sidekick) and the other still very young. Little Tenya was eight, maybe nine. Basically a child.
Toki called Keigo to pass on her condolences to Hayasa-sensei. That’s how she learned that Hayasa-sensei had left Naruto Labs. Not just for the funeral: he had given his resignation. Apparently, it had been a hasty decision. Fuego had died on Tuesday, the news had been confirmed on Wednesday, and by Thursday Hayasa-sensei had resigned. Since it had happened during the week, Keigo hadn’t been there. It was only when he came home from high-school for the week-end that he learned that his teacher had stepped down for ‘family reasons’, and wasn’t expected to come back.
“Wait, Fuego was his brother-in-law?” Keigo exclaimed on the phone. “That would explain it. I thought that Okamoto had booted him out or something.”
Toki wondered if, in canon, Keigo ever had an explication for why the only adult close to him at Naruto Labs had suddenly left. Probably not. Hayasa-sensei had kept his relation with the Iida family pretty secret. Toki only knew because he had told her so.
“Could Okamoto even do that?” she wondered. “He’s a glorified janitor.”
Keigo snorted at their old joke, then grew serious again.
“Nah, he’s gotten a raise and a promotion when you were gone, so he throws his weight around a little more. Last time I saw him speak with Hayasa-sensei they were arguing. Something about me ‘not being performant enough’ and ‘too soft’ or something.”
Yeah, that sounded like Okamoto alright. Asshole. Toki scowled at her phone:
“Seriously, how had he not gotten punched yet? He’s a dick.”
“He’s good at his job. Which is to not get punched in the face.”
“Point,” Toki conceded. “But I bet he doesn’t have many friends. Talent can do many things, but without charisma and a minimum of niceness, you can’t create camaraderie or even loyalty.”
“Not true! I, for one, would follow Okamoto anywhere… but only out of morbid curiosity.”
Toki sniggered. Then, just as she was opening her mouth to ask of Keigo could egg Okamoto’s car or something, her friend blurted out:
“Wait, you think that Fuego was the infamous brother-in-law?”
“Er, Hayasa-sensei just has the one, so probably. What do you mean, the brother-in-law?”
“Oh yeah, you had left already, you weren’t there… Basically I had this guy in my class bragging about how he’s related to a hero, and when I talked about it with Hayasa-sensei he told me he was related to a hero too, his brother-in-law actually… but the guy was a total douchebag. He was actually the reason why Hayasa-sensei had left his family without a second thought to come work at Naruto Labs.”
That checked out with what Toki knew. Hayasa-sensei had been crippled pretty young but had continued working with his brother-in-law’s agency… probably because there was no other work available… until the Commission had offered him a job, which he had accepted immediately, even if it meant leaving his family for years.
“Well I didn’t know the guy so I can’t say,” she finally muttered. “But the Idaten industry is rich, and having a hero agency passed down the family must be a big deal. The weight of the legacy, man.”
“Rich people, pffff. Anyway, do you think Hayasa-sensei is going to come back?”
There was a calculated nonchalance in Keigo’s voice, and Toki bit her lips. She knew what she wanted to tell him, but… The truth was…
“Chances are pretty low. If Fuego was the only thing keeping him from going to his family again, then he’s probably going to stay with them. He had to leave eight years ago…”
“Nine, actually.”
“Shit, really? Well, damn. I can see why he would want to reconnect.” Toki hesitated a second, but fuck it, she liked Hayasa-sensei too. “I could try to track him down online. Then if I find a lead, I’ll try see if I can meet with him. He didn’t leave a phone number, did he?”
“If he did, you know they wouldn’t tell me,” Keigo sighed. But his voice was a little more cheerful when he added: “If you see him, can you badger him into swinging by sometimes? They haven’t found a replacement yet, but I bet he’s going to suck.”
“Sure. Try to find if he let a phone number, and I’ll try to find his address. It will be like our old missions!”
“At least this time, hopefully we won’t learn about anyone having an affair with the secretary,” Keigo chucked.
When she hung up, Toki felt lighter. She opened her laptop and tried to dig for information on the Idaten agency. She didn’t know what had become of Hayasa-sensei in canon, but here… Well, she had the means and the times to try and reconnect, and maybe keep contact. He had been one of the most important persons in her life at Naruto Labs. It was worth it, wasn’t it?
oOoOoOo
November passed, them December. Finding Hayasa-sensei was harder than expected. The Iida family had closed their social media accounts and was laying low, grieving. Toki distractedly stalked Ingenium online, trying to see if a paparazzi had caught him meeting with family, but to no avail. The Idaten family was the picture of professionalism. Ingenium was very young for a hero leading his own agency (he was barely twenty-four), and he was trying to compensate his age by appearing twice as mature as his middle-aged colleagues.
Keigo didn’t have more success trying to get Hayasa-sensei’s phone number. He was a good spy now, and it only took him a week to find out how to get administrator’s privileges and dig into Hayasa-sensei’s file. But there was no phone number. It had been erased. Keigo had great at spying on people to guess their passwords, but he was no hacker. He couldn’t retrieve erased data; this was a dead-end.
Besides, Keigo was kind of discouraged from getting too attached to one of his teachers. Toki hadn’t quite noticed when she had been at Naruto Labs, but… the bond between Toki and Keigo (between Hawks and Quantum) was the exception, not the rule. They weren’t allowed to consider the Labs their home, or their teachers their family. Their stay here was always meant to be temporary, and once they were gone, there would be no coming back, no keeping in touch, no anything. They were here to be taught, supported, cared for: but not to be loved.
The teachers were kind and understanding, but they were first and foremost labs researchers. Giving help and guidance to kids was an extra-task added to their workload, not their actual job. The doctor was supposed to keep them heathy but keep a respectful and professional distance. The whole staff was here for their job, not for the kids. The only persons who were specifically there for Keigo and Toki had been Hayasa-sensei… and Okamoto. And Okamoto was not the kind of guy to get cozy with his charges. So of course, he would disapprove of what he would see as Hayasa overstepping his bounds. Even if all Hayasa had tried was to let a phone number and an explanation to Keigo.
Fuck Okamoto.
Anyway. Looking for Hayasa-sensei, Toki found a lot of stuff about Fuego. The Idaten agency had started with Fuego’s father, a hero named Engine who only had a fraction of his son’s power. Apparently, he had invented a technique to enhance the engines in his son’s legs during childhood. The articles mentioned that Fuego had undergone ‘a lot of pain’ and was even in a wheelchair for age six to seven, before his legs healed and his engines became stronger than his father’s.
Toki really didn’t want to think about, because that sounded a lot like non-consensual surgery on a child, hey, welcome to the fucked-up world of the heroic industry!
Anyway, Fugeo started assisting his father very early, and was trained mercilessly until his father retired (but stayed at his agency as a supervisor until his death ten years later). As a hero Fuego was lauded for his devotion to his job, meaning he constantly pulled double-shifts and stayed late to do paperwork. An absentee father, Toki could guess. Fuego had married young, and his wife had stayed at home to care for their son. There was only two pictures of Fuego with his family online: one for the birth announcement, and one taken when little Tensei Iida entered middle-school.
The Iida family could be camera shy. Or they could be unhappy and isolated. Considering that Fuego had been a douche to Hayasa-sensei, Toki leaned toward the latter. Mean people were usually nasty to anyone under their power. Of course, Toki wouldn’t go so far as to call Fuego an abuser (like Endeavor), but hey, what she learned didn’t exactly paint a happy picture.
Anyway. Tensei had joined his father’s agency after graduating, but only as a sidekick, not as an assisting hero. There were few pictures of them together. Apparently Fuego believed into an hands-off approach to education… He didn’t seem very close to his son. Or to any member of his family. All the statements and interviews in online articles were from coworkers. There wasn’t a single word from his family, and he didn’t seem to any friends outside of work. It was kind of sad.
It was clear that Fugeo had been a lonely, focused man. Strict, severe even, and married to his job. Other than that, well, it was hard to know. Maybe he had been harsh and brutal, like Endeavor. Maybe he had been glacial and disdainful, like Shouto Todoroki could have been, after being hurt so badly in the name of his father’s ambition.
He still had married, and had two sons. He also had welcomed his brother-in-law Hayasa, before and after his crippling accident. So, maybe he had been a douchebag, but he clearly wasn’t that bad… Argh, trying to guess someone’s personality (especially after he was dead and everyone was singing his praises, and after hearing negative things that biased her thought process) from online stalking was too hard!
At least stalking Fuego online turned up a few good information about Hayasa-sensei’s past. His full name and age, his Quirk, his accident, his hero name… All things that Toki had ignored while the man was her teacher at Naruto Labs!
Hayasa-sensei’s full name was Minato Hayasa, and his Quirk was named Fast Legs. It was… exactly what it said on the tin. His legs were incredibly fast, which made him a great runner. He was actually forty (Toki had to double-check that, because Hayasa-sensei had always seemed to be timelessly thirty to her). He had graduated from Shiketsu high-school at eighteen and had worked as a hero, known as Red Racer, for five years… Before encountering a particularly sadistic villain who teared up people inside-out. Hayasa-sensei had survived the encounter but he had needed a lot of surgery and had to retire. The villain had been arrested four months later by All Might.
After his accident, Hayasa-sensei virtually disappeared. He had kept working at Idaten Agency for years but never in the spot light. Toki found his old resume online, and apparently Hayasa-sensei had managed training, patrol organization, paperwork, investigation, and… liaising with the HPSC. Well, that explained how they had recruited him. Stuck behind a desk, Haysa-sensei had probably learned all there was to learn about how to run an agency, and it was pretty inevitable that he ended up being the guy who knew things and so, the HPSC’s main contact.
Anyway. December passed, slowly. There was a follow-up hospital visit, and Dr Shinsō proclaimed Toki perfectly healthy. Her new heart was working perfectly, and all the inside stuff moved around for the surgery was healing up quite nicely. They had left her pacemaker inside her chest, deactivated but ready to switch on if her new heart gave up on her. Toki was given the option to keep the pacemaker in place, as a back-up plan, or to take it out. She decided to keep it. You could never be too careful.
For Christmas, Toki was invited to the Shinsō’s house. They exchanged gifts and ate cake, singing silly songs and laughing at bad jokes. Then it was Keigo’s birthday… Then the New Year… Then Kameko-san’s annual visit, with lunch at a cat-café, some shopping, and a long chat about heroes’ agencies… Then Toki realized that they were now in January, and the end-of-school-year exam were in March, which meant she had only a little over two months to cram in her head all of her notes for high-school classes and university courses.
Time to panic!
She packed her schedule with study-time. Not all the time, though, because she knew it was unhealthy. Hey, she was an athlete, too, she knew that pushing yourself with no regard for your limit was no way to get anywhere in the long term. So she kept time for hanging out with Sawayomi at least one evening per week, sometimes to visit Mihoko-san on week-ends, and of course some time every night to chat with her online friends and call Keigo.
She didn’t get how her peers could be so relaxed about end-of-term exams. Sure, they didn’t have university courses in addition to their workload, but still! They had hours of lessons to learn, and some of the topics were fricking complicated. Japanese classes, for example. Toki had a good vocabulary and her kanji were pretty neat, but literature was a pain in the ass. So many bland authors with an ego to analyze. And it made for nearly a quarter of her grade?! Disgraceful.
Thankfully, she had some distractions to relax.
________________
> PikaPika: Hey I was thinking
> PikaPika: Would anyone be interested in playing Donjons&Dragons with me as you donjon master?
> EndeavorSucks: !!!!!!
> EndeavorSucks: HELL YES
> EndeavorSucks: is there gonna be a dragon?!
> PikaPika: no spoilers, but high chances, yeah
> EndeavorSucks: then I want to be bard
> PikaPika: …
> NotOnFire: … because of the dragon or…
> PikaPika: you know that bards have a reputation for kind of flirting with…
> EndeavorSucks: i want. To. BE. A. BARD.
> ThisIsFluffy: lol
> NotOnFire: ( ͡¬ ͜ʖ ͡¬)
> ThisIsFluffy: then i want to be an elven druid! with a flower crown and some fluffy animals following me around!
> PikaPika: so you would be interested too?
> ThisIsFluffy: are you kidding
> ThisIsFluffy: I think we’re all interested
> NotOnFire: she’s not wrong
> NotOnFire: but can you manage a party that large, Pika?
> PikaPika: let’s try it
> PikaPika: anyone else?
> NotOnFire: alright, I’ll bite! Don’t know about the races or classes, yet, but count me in!
> PinkIsPunkRock: ooooooh @NotQuantum and @NotHawks BRING YOUR ASSES HERE RIGHT NOW THIS IS GOING TO BE FUN!
> PinkIsPunkRock: i will be a PALADIN
> PinkIsPunkRock: loyal Good
> PinkIsPunkRock: and i will SMASH EVIL IN THE FACE
> PikaPika: why am i not surprised
> NotHawks: never played but I’m game
< NotQuantum: … why would you do that to me, I have so many lessons to study before exams (╥︣ ﹏ ᷅╥)
> PikaPika: so you pass?
< NotQuantum: NO
< NotQuantum: ARE YOU JOKING
< NotQuantum: playing dnd with friends is exactly the kind of nerdy stuff I would sell my soul to do
< NotQuantum: I WANT TO BE A WIZARD
> NotHawks: wait are wizards an option
> PikaPika: https://www.dndbeyond.com/classes
> PinkIsPunkRock: why wizard? I would have pegged you as either monk or magician
> PinkIsPunkRock: because, you know. BOOKS.
< NotQuantum: well
< NotQuantum: Eldritch blast seems like a super-thing to wipe out nilly willy
> PinkIsPunkRock: xD
> PikaPika: alright, so I’m going to find time to help each of you design their character, but in the meantime, try to find your name, your race, your class, your personality, your goal, and some background that would justify you becoming adventurers
< NotQuantum: oh man it’s going to be SO COOL!
________________
Should she be working? Yeah. But come on! It was too tempting! Role-play gaming was the kind of thing that had always seemed so exciting in books and movies, but that Toki had never really had a chance to be a part of. Besides, it was kind of a classical teenager experience, right?
Anyway. Toki didn’t neglect her revisions, of course, but she did spend a little more time than strictly necessarily creating her sorcerer character, a female goblin named Iklil with a knack for wind magic. Toki put a lot unnecessary details in her character, such as the name (absolutely no one was going to notice it was a star’s name, but Toki was sticking to her principles), and the design of her sorcerer’s robes, which were black and gold and based on Hawks’ future hero costume.
So, yeah, Toki had fun. Besides, Keigo and her basically designed their character together, so it was double the fun and twice the length of their usual phone calls. He was going to be a halfling ranger whose quest was to find a magical chicken that had escaped from the family coop. His character was named Hen Solo. The whole thing was completely hilarious.
Some part of Toki wanted to invite Sawayomi, share that super-cool thing with her friend… but she held back. You can have different kind of friendship with different people.
Besides, the Discord server knew Toki, the real Toki. Sawayomi only knew Hoshizora. Toki didn’t really want to lie to her friend, but she liked keeping those two persona separate. It didn’t make her value Sawayomi less. It was just… personal.
Her February hospital visit came. Toki did all kind of exercises while hooked up to several machines to read her tension, blood pressure, and the level of oxygenation of her blood. The results were, according to the doctors, very satisfactory. Her new heart was healthy and strong. It was bigger than her old one but was taking as much space as needed, instead of being compressed by the lungs and muscles of her ribcage. Her lung capacity was reduced by 3% percent, since the heart took more room, but it was barely noticeable. It was actually the optimal number: more than 5% and it would start to impact her stamina.
She still had to take several medications to help her body get used to this new situation. Later, she would have one open surgery in July to remove some tubes put in place to make sure her veins connected normally, then, if necessary, another operation in November to make sure everything was aligned correctly. And of course, she was forbidden any Quirk-training until December at least, so almost a year from now.
In the meantime, she could focus on academics.
None of her friends really got her fascination with space. So none of them really understood why she was so obsessed with her school work, how she could take so many classes and pour herself in those abstract lessons about numbers and vectors, letting it devour her free time. Mihoko-san approved, but in the distant way an adult approved of any kid pursuing high studies instead of getting into trouble. Her support was full and unquestionable, but she didn’t really understand what was so fascinating for Toki, how she needed to always learn and know more.
It was nice, in a way, to know she didn’t have to justify or to prove herself to deserve love. But still, Mihoko didn’t get Toki’s frenzied passion for academia. None of her other friends really did. On the Discord server, none of them had gone to college (except ThisIsFluffy, who had gone to journalist school for three years, a slow-paced course she had almost failed). Keigo understood the burning need to do more, to aim higher, to always crave the next step… but for heroics, not for theoretical learning.
Ironically, the only one who came close to understanding Toki’s passion for sitting in class and listening to a teacher drone (the bane of normal teenagers’ existence!) was Kotone Sawayomi.
Surprising, wasn’t it? Toki could never have guessed. Sawayomi was a good student, but too short-tempered to be really excellent, academically speaking. She had the attention to details, she had the brains, but she just didn’t have the temper to put things down and calmly compare two sides of the story. She jumped straight to the conclusion and defended it.
But she understood the need to learn more, even if you stayed late studying, even when the lessons weren’t that fascinating but were still necessary to move forward. Toki hadn’t pried, but Sawayomi didn’t… she wasn’t… she didn’t seem to come from a well-off family. Her studded belt was cool but her sneakers were scruffy, and her bento weren’t homemade but some low-priced prepackaged food. She wasn’t poor, but she wasn’t well-off either. In a chic school like Yūei, it made her defensive. If made her ferocious, like she had something to prove.
Sawayomi was often defensive. She had a short fuse and a foul mouth, that was why Toki had mentally compared her to Bakugou in the beginning. Not so much anymore, but still. Sawayomi was wary and always watched other people with mistrust, always seeing any gesture as an assault and reacting like a cornered animal. She never talked about her family. She never got texts from her mom or dad. Never sent one either. She went back home late without a care, as if having a mother fretting about her was a foreign concept. Toki didn’t ask, and so she didn’t know for sure, but Sawayomi seemed pretty lonely. Since her Quirk made her vulnerable to people’s contact and onslaught of emotions, she had… cut herself from people in general, and from them expressing emotions in particular.
Once, in a psychology book Keigo had recommended her last year (Okamoto made him read a lot of books like that, to know what made people tick), Toki had read that growing up in a household where emotions were not expressed could lead to, among lots of other things, an inability to 'speak' emotion as a language. Those people couldn’t decipher and understand both other people’s emotions and their own, and, literal quote “emotions that are not acknowledged or expressed tend to jumble together and emerge as anger”. Her friend wasn’t hostile, she was just pissed off as a default mode, and it colored all of her rapports with other people.
It wasn’t like Kurogumo, who was funny and charming when he wasn’t a cruel little shit. Or Akashingai, so casual in his violence, not furious but simply contemptuous. But it was a little like Bakugou… Or Endeavor, even. Oh, they were mean, they hurt people, that was a fact. Shitty homelife was no excuse for bullying (or, in Endeavor’s case, straight-up abuse)… But it did give a frame of reference for their overly aggressive behavior.
So Sawayomi was understanding of Toki’s obsession with her classes. She still blew up in anger when Toki couldn’t hang out, and was pissed off when it cut short their skateboard sessions, but she understood. She didn’t smile and laugh ‘wow, you like making your own life difficult’ like Mihoko-san, or teasingly call her prodigy like Sachiko. As if it came to her easily! No, Sawayomi got it. When she called Toki an overachiever, it was said in a grudgingly impressed tone.
Anyway. February passed. March came. And with it, the exams.
Gods, the middle-school exams had never been so nerve-wracking. Sure, Toki had taken them online, so she never had to experiment the tense atmosphere of a class filled with anxious students. Actually, she had never taken an exam in a real classroom setting, so maybe it was this novel experience that added to her stress.
Toki spend the two weeks of exams in a frenzy of quiz, late-night studies, notes-making, notes-reading, and frantic revisions. She sat down her normal high-school exams… The third-year ones for science classes… Then her university courses, one after the others. By the end of those two weeks, she felt like her head was constantly buzzing with information.
The results came in shortly after. A least Yūei didn’t dawdle on that. But well, most of high-school tests were highly standardized, with multiple choice quiz and almost no redaction, so it was easy to correct. Norogawa-sensei handed out their results in the following week.
Toki was in the middle of the pack in geography, history, literature… First in chemistry, no one was really surprised… Second in English, just behind Kurogumo (who was bilingual). And she had, surprisingly, came second in civic education. In science, she was fourth, which was very impressive considering her peers were third-years. But most important, it meant she had finished the science curriculum! Yeah!
Her university classes had been harder. She never got past the fifteenth spot in the rankings, which was a little disappointing for her who was used to excel in everything. But hey, fifteenth on a pool of eighty students, all of them older than her, was nothing to scoff her. It was Toki who had fucked-up perfectionist standards. Blame the HPSC for that.
But even if it didn’t taste like a perfect victory… It was still a success. She had passed.
She had gone to normal high-school, the best high-school in the country, and she had passed. More than that, she had followed a university course at the same time and passed too! Yes, Sawayomi could call her an overachiever all she wanted, but Toki had done it. She had taken a major in physics, and succeeded! And that meant… that next year she would be allowed to take the astrophysics class.
She was one step closer to her dream.
Notes:
Hope you liked it !
It was a slow chapter, sorry. Time pass, Toki settle in her life as Hoshizora, but still it drags on and i have trouble writting it.
Anyway ! Right now i'm writing about the begining of canon ! And i'm stuck. Because narratively, i may have accidentally created the perfect situation for Bakugou to get HIT IN THE FACE WITH KARMA, aka: facing consequences for his bullying BEFORE getting into Yūei, and so, screwing his chances of acceptance.
Now i'm torn, because Bakugou is a great character and i would love for him to be in Yūei. But i also want him to stop being an asshole NOW, or at the very least remove Midoriya from the situation. Yes Bakugou deserves to have his redemption arc... but Midoriya is a person who deserve growth and care too : not a tool to make Bakugou grown up to his detriment.
(Also, if you want to see Toki in her AWESOME galaxy-themed kimono : there is a picture in Snapshots of Wisdom !)
EDIT 01/09/2022
Some spelling mistakes were corrected. Some formating too. Also the part where Toki think about her acceptance in the Shinso family was reworded a bit.
Chapter 18: To be wanderer
Summary:
Toki's life go on. She find an unexpected support with online friends... and anwser a very important question.
Can a Quirkless person be a hero ?
Notes:
Here is the next chapter ! Not a lot of stuff happen. Well, Toki is building more bonds outside of the HPSC's influence. Does that count ?
Also, i really had a good laugh writing the DnD session!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
TO BE A WANDERER
Toki’s second year started with a bang. More exactly, it started with their Discord server’s first Dungeons&Dragons’s party, and it was great. They used the Discord to make a conference call, and a special website to follow the adventure, with maps, characters sheets, and a way to roll virtual dices. Their characters were all flamboyant and hilarious. There was EndeavorSucks’ bard, a Dwarf with witty replies and a great singing voice, looking for his beloved (and sleeping right and left in the meantime). Then there was NotOnFire’s Half-Orc monk with wises replies that were all cliché quotes from old movies, and a phobic fear of birds that played exceedingly well with the subplot of the story where they had to fight a bunch of geese. Sachiko’s Tiefling Paladin, dedicated to truth and justice… and who was absolutely willing to seduce any NPC EndeavorSucks laid eyes on just for the hell of it. ThisIsFluffy played a druid, an elder Elf with a tragic backstory and an uncanny ability to befriend the grossest creatures their party encountered. Toki was playing a reckless little sorcerer, and Keigo a happy-get-lucky ranger. Then there was their Game Master, PikaPika, who led them from clever plots to interesting encounters, and ended up making a human cleric NPC to accompany them, just because it was too tempting to participate just a little.
Toki had the time of her life. It was great. Everything was dramatic and hilarious, and at the best moment PikaPika put boss music and everyone started losing their mind before the fight, it was amazing. NotOnFire’s character almost died, was resurrected, and decided to switch religion (which was not something monks were supposed to do). Toki’s was revealed to be the child of a prophecy of unclear terms, which led to a round of interpretations going wilder and wilder at each passing minute, until they were convinced that she could make meteorites fall if she hopped around a lake while wrapped in ham, and they almost put it to a vote before being interrupted by an orc attack. ThisIsFluffy accidentally killed their main lead to the villain, twice. EndeavorSucks and Sachiko started a passive-aggressive war to see who would seduce the waitress faster, and said waitress gender changed at every turn (because Sachiko was a lesbian and EndeavorSucks was gay) until PikaPika dramatically revealed that said waitress was an agender construct created by an evil sorcerer, at which point Keigo’s character swept in and rolled a natural twenty to seduce the sorcerer and everyone went crazy.
It was the first time Toki had heard everyone’s voice. ThisIsFluffy had a surprisingly grave voice for someone with that username. NotOnFire had a curious drawl, like an accent. PikaPika had the rough timbre of a smoker. EndeavorSucks had a deep, masculine voice, which was a little surprising because Toki had always imagined him like a twink and now she was picturing a huge, muscular beefcake. But they were all her friends. Familiar, reassuring. All batshit insane.
“It’s bullshit that none of the elves wanted to sleep with me,” Sachiko argued in the post-session briefing. “This is a little tavern in the middle of the woods! If not the waitress, at least her neighbor! Come on, I find it hard to believe that none of them are lesbians. They’re all farmers and they love poetry. That’s like, peak lesbian culture.”
“Poetry is lesbian culture?” Toki parroted. “I may end up bi after all…”
There was a noise on the microphone as if Keigo had choked on his soda, and Toki remembered a little late that she hadn’t told him about it. Then EndeavorSucks laughed:
“We could make a full parade! We’re only missing a pansexual now.”
Before Toki had time to analyses that (because wait, what? EndeavorSucks was gay and Sachiko too, but who were the other ones? Weren’t they missing an asexual person and a transgender one somewhere?), NotOnFire piped out:
“What if I had tried to bang one the elves? Would I have been luckier? I’ll have you know I have a lot of game.”
“You’re a monk!” exclaimed PikaPika, sounding half-exasperated and half-trying not to laugh. “None of the elves want to sleep with you because you are a monk. They are respecting your sacred vows!”
“Is it because I’m a guy? Would they sleep with me if I was a nun?”
“No!”
“What, like you wouldn’t fuck a nun?” Sachiko countered vehemently. “I call bullshit! Everyone would fuck a nun. The temptation of forbidden things, come on!”
Keigo made a chocked-up noise of laughter, and asked innocently:
“It would depend on the nun and why she wanted to sleep with me. Like, are we in love, or is she just using me to rebel against the dictums of the church?”
Toki collapsed in laughter on her bed. Judging by the server’s sounds, EndeavorSucks and NotOnFire were down too. PikaPika had given up and Toki could picture him holding his head in his hands, sniggering.
“Sexual politics run deep,” ThisIsFluffy agreed seriously. “I’m not wading into those waters.”
Sachiko made a disdainful noise and declared:
“You’re all cowards. I’m the only brave person in this server.”
“Hen Solo is the only one who got laid, tho,” pointed EndeavorSucks.
“Hen Solo,” giggled ThisIsFluffy. “Got laid.”
The pun was bad enough and the hour late enough that they all started laughing like hyenas. And afterward, they all unanimously agreed to continue the adventure next month. After all, the evil sorcerer had been seduced, but he had revealed he was only his twin brother’s puppet, so they still had to defeat this cruel overlord, right?
So it was great, and the year couldn’t begin better.
Yūei was going to be strange without Sachiko around. Yes, because last year had been Sachiko’s third and last year, so it meant she had graduated, and Toki wouldn’t see her around anymore. Oh, she still lived in Musutafu (for now at least), so maybe they could get in touch in the week-ends… But it wouldn’t be the same. Sure, Toki wasn’t alone: she had Sawayomi, and her classmates. But it was different. Sachiko had been older, more confident. Tiny first-year Toki had really looked up to this fearsome teenager who laughed easily and naturally fell into the role of a protector. She would miss her, that was all.
Anyway. Melancholia never solved anything, so Toki had to focus on the present. She carefully picked her classes for her university cursus this year. She had successfully passed basic physics, advanced physics, spatial geometry, and theory of relativity, so she could sign up for the super-elective course of astrophysics. Not many people studied space these days, so it was a small class: but the dynamics of stuff outside of Earth’s gravity was still a big topic of interest. A way to find clean energy, a way to study gravity-canceling Quirk, etc.
So. Toki needed six courses. She could take more, but she had learned her lesson: six courses in addition to her high-school workload was exhausting. In the end, she picked astrophysics, advanced mathematics, dynamics physics, and quantum mechanics, the four that really interested her. Then, to round it up, she took stuff useful for a future astrophysicist: computer science (to learn about data analysis and complicated issues), and aeronautics engineering (the studies of planes and other man-built stuff that could fly). It was a pretty solid foundation. She hoped she could manage it… Oh, well. Now that she had only half a workload from Yūei, it would be easier. Without math, science and physics classes, and a pass for half of her P. E. lessons, her schedule was pretty cleared!
Still, Sawayomi took one look at the names of her online courses and immediately made a horrified face. It was pretty funny.
Toki wasn’t discouraged. She had validated one year of her Bachelor’s degree. Two more to go, and then… Well, she wasn’t sure. She had to work as a hero, so it would take a good chunk of her time. But she still wanted to continue astrophysics. Could she get a Master while working part time in a lab? She could probably manage it. Ooooh, she would have to keep her hero-persona and her private-persona totally separate, then, a little like Superman and Clark Kent!
And her civilian-persona could keep in contact with all the people she had grown close to as Hoshizora, maybe…
Besides, if she worked part-time in a lab, she already knew which one. There was a big one just south of Musutafu, where had once stood the nuclear plant of Hamaoka. It was a research lab, not particularly turned toward space exploration, but… They studied a little of everything. Their main interest was finding new energy sources. Where better find an engine for a spaceship? Especially considering they had an Ion Drive. Until now, this kind of engine had stayed in Europe, but now Japan had its very first one.
When she had been a kid, Toki had wondered who these things worked, and their apparent efficiency had fascinated her. Well, now she was older, and reading a Wikipedia article proved more than enough to understand the how and the why of this energy source. Basically, the Ion Drive was an electromagnetic field generator. It absorbed electrons from the environment, creating a chain reaction to spin bigger and bigger metal plates until it generated a crazy amount of energy. It wasn’t just electricity, it was straight-up cold plasma, like the kind discharged by the strongest lightning strikes.
A thing like that would be more than enough to move a whole-ass spaceship. It would manipulate the whole thing, the overlapping fields spinning and charging the metal, the internal fuel plates sparking into a cold plasma reaction, propelling it forward, even as the metal would be recharged with electrons from the environment.
Toki could already see it. Years of research and cross-referenced designs and fields of science filled her head, almost making her salivate.
Yeah, if she went there to study, she could have a viable propulsion system for her spaceship before turning twenty-five. Then, of course, there would be other requirements. Atmosphere control, to survive in a vacuum with extreme temperatures… Propulsion with little to no fuel, to breach orbit and to navigate the local solar system… Artificial gravity to prevent physiological degradation… Navigation, but also entertainment, and communications equipment, for obvious reasons. And then some form of food and hygiene system.
And those are just the major problems. There’re also the issues of materials and construction, of figuring out how to pilot… But that was a problem for later. Toki wasn’t required to launch a fully habitable spaceship into space before her thirtieth birthday. If she could start with a satellite for observation, she would already be ecstatic.
Toki Hoshizora, the astrophysicist. Uh. It sounded good. A little on the nose, but it managed to be funny rather than ridiculous. Really, whoever was the guy making false names in the HPSC, he had good instincts.
She realized she had made the name hers, after all this time. She had gotten used to it. When you thought about it, there were many things she had initially rejected before slowly letting them become part of herself. That name, Hoshizora. Her deal with the HPSC too. When she had been eight, she had seen it as a necessary burden. Now, she had completely accepted its inevitably, to the point of looking forward to it, to the point of agreeing to a three billion yens debt to be able to continue chasing it. And there was the HPSC itself too. At eight, Toki had been wary and distrustful of basically any system, whether it was school, the government, or any institution. But now? She trusted the system. She felt protected by it. She wouldn’t call them good or altruistic, but she knew people inside it, she knew how the institution worked, and it made her confident in it as a whole.
Her character in DnD was Lawful Neutral. It wasn’t a coincidence. Toki liked having laws and rules to respect. She liked to have a strong, legitimate structure on her side, supporting her and protecting her.
(In a way, she was Keigo’s opposite. She accepted having a gilded cage, but hated having to follow orders; while Keigo liked the freedom to stretch his wings, and didn’t mind the pull of the leash. What a pair they made: both of them Icarus, flying straight toward the sun. Toki knew how the tale ended up, but she still believed they would be able to pull out a miracle out of thin air. In canon, Keigo had burned, but canon was no more. Toki was here, and she wouldn’t let anything happen. She swore it.)
Anyway. April passed slowly, with cherry blossoms swaying gently in the wind and general air of contentment. There weren’t many villains fights on the news, either. The country looked more peaceful than ever.
Which is maybe why Toki didn’t notice All Might’s absence until Sachiko pointed it out.
Well, it was actually PunkIsPunkRock who pointed it to the whole server, but it was basically the same. After all, even if that sever was a place to hang out, meet with friends, and now play DnD, it had started as a forum to talk about the heroic society. In a way, they never really stopped. They analyzed heroes fight, criticized violent arrests, passed petitions, postulated about such or such villains’ motivation… Some of them didn’t pay as much attention as others, sure. PikaPika and NotOnFire were notoriously laid-back and uninterested by any particular hero. ThisIsFluffy was a journalist, so she liked underdogs stories. Keigo and EndeavorSucks were, of course, always the firsts to talk about Endeavor. Then there was Toki, who threw in her two cents no matter the subject… And PinkIsPunkRock, always down to shake up things and bring a new debate to the table.
________________
> PinkIsPunkRock: did you notice? It’s been nearly a month since we saw All Might
> PinkIsPunkRock: six weeks since his last fight, actually
> PinkIsPunkRock: the blog allmightsightingsinjapan.tumblr.com has a photo of him dated from last month, somewhere in Tokyo’s prefecture
> PinkIsPunkRock: and after that, nothing.
> ThisIsFluffy: Maybe he’s on vacation
> ThisIsFluffy: Chilling on a beach
> NotOnFire: Yeah the man hadn’t taken a break in what, twenty years
> PinkIsPunkRock: People, im serious
> PinkIsPunkRock: All Might is watched by millions of fans alright
> PinkIsPunkRock: If he crosses the street, there’s people snapping pictures
> PinkIsPunkRock: He can’t go incognito
< NotQuantum: …. what are you saying
> PinkIsPunkRock: There’s a theory he’s in the US
> PinkIsPunkRock: I saw the video yesterday but when I went looking for it after checking myself it had been taken down
> PinkIsPunkRock: hella sus
> PinkIsPunkRock: and you know how the news haven’t really shown any big villains fight this last month
> PinkIsPunkRock: well the statistics haven’t slowed down at all despite that!
> PinkIsPunkRock: so it’s a conscious decision on their part to downplay what’s happening
> PikaPika: alright that sound like a crazy conspiracy theory but
> PikaPika: you may be onto something. I just googled ‘all might news’ and there is nothing recent, which is downright weird
> PikaPika: just some blogs talking about all might but without any fresh news either
> EndeavorSucks: omg
> EndeavorSucks: is All Might MISSING?!
> PinkIsPunkRock: hey, I was building to that reveal!
> EndeavorSucks: OMG
> NotOnFire: wait, seriously?!
> ThisIsFluffy: ( ⊙ . ⊙ )
< NotQuantum: ….
> NotHawks: …
> PinkIsPunkRock: im shaking, because this is huge guys. Maybe I’m wrong (because duh, all might!), but on the other hand, what if I’m right? Isn’t that super-scary because DUH, ALL MIGHT?!
> ThisIsFluffy: do you think he retired?
> EndeavorSucks: do you think he’s dead?
> NotOnFire: WOAH
> PikaPika: that escaladed quickly
> ThisIsFluffy: wait WHAT now?!
> PinkIsPunkRock: this isn’t a real possibility, right. Right?
> EndeavorSucks: ohgodohgod
> PikaPika: chill, everyone CHILL
> PikaPika: you scared off Stars and Chicken
> NotOnFire: really? Shit, sorry
> NotHawks: !!!
> NotHawks: I’m here, not scared off
> NotHawks: I was sweet-talking my sport teacher to let me go earlier this evening
> NotHawks: on a totally unrelated topic, ALL MIGHT IS ALIVE, so calm down
> PinkIsPunkRock: how could you know
> NotHawks: magic
> NotQuantum: so?!
> NotHawks: (I’ll call you in five minutes Quantum)
> NotHawks: so All Might is alive, and you’re all blowing this up wayyyy out of proportion. He’s a hero. There is ton of stuff he could be doing that need to stay low. Investigation. Playing bait for a villain. Undercover work (and trust me, for having seen a professional artist at work, even All Might can be unrecognizable with some makeup and a wig). Like, most big names villains like Moonfish or Toxic Chainsaw have been arrested, but organized crime still exist, so it would make sense that All Might tackle that next
> NotHawks: if, and I said IF All Migh retired or got hurt or even killed, you think the news would try to bury it like that? It would blow up
> NotHawks: the fight responsible for his injury/death would also level at least one city block, so: hard to hide, anyway.
> EndeavorSucks: … it makes sense
> EndeavorSucks: now I feel like an idiot for freaking out
> NotOnFire: so not an unusual feeling, right?
> EndeavorSucks: ahah very funny ( ≖ _ ≖ )
> PikaPika: thank you for being the voice of reason *NotHawks
> NotHawks : my pleasure!
> PinkIsPunkRock: well I’m feeling a lot less panicked, but I STILL think it’s fishy
> PinkIsPunkRock: All might is all about being seen, being a symbol and whatnot, so why go silent suddenly
> NotHawks: if he had warned people he was going undercover, that would defeat the purpose
> PinkIsPunkRock: then why asking all the news to cover his ass?
> NotHawks: I don’t think he asked them to do that
> NotHawks: but if he was on a big mission, then…
< NotQuantum: holy shit
< NotQuantum: if he’s on a big mission then the HPSC is covering for him
> NotHawks: bingo.
> PinkIsPunkRock: hum
> PinkIsPunkRock: still finding that radio silence suspicious, but whatever.
> EndeavorSucks: hey I wonder of Endeavor’s popularity had increased since Big And Blonde isn’t stealing too much spotlight anymore?
________________
Keigo called her immediately after, true to his word; but Toki had already guessed what was happening. She didn’t know what Keigo knew, or what he had been told by Okamoto (since it was obviously him the ‘sport teacher’ he was talking too, considering it was a Saturday and he was at Naruto Labs)… but she knew what was going on.
All Might disappearing, and the HPSC keeping it out of the press? It had happened in canon… when All Might had fought AFO. His fight, his injuries, his surgery, and his recovery had been hidden from the public. Of course, Toki could be wrong! But in all his years of heroics, All Might had never gone off the grid. Except for now. Now, in the year 2224, exactly six years before Izuku Midoriya entered Yūei.
It could not be AFO. But really, the chances were almost non-existent.
“So of course Okamoto didn’t come up and said ‘well yes we’re hiding the fact that All Might got his ass kicked’, obviously,” Keigo started without any kind of preamble. “But I did jump from my bedroom’s window on the fourth floor to fly up to him and ask ‘hey isn’t it a little too early for All Might to kick the bucket?’ so I guess I surprised him enough to get some valuable clues. At least, after he stopped clutching his pearls like some offended old lady.”
Toki sniggered, then grew serious again: “Is All Might hospitalized?”
“… How in hell did you reach that conclusion? It was my guess as well!”
“All Might doesn’t do discreet,” Toki shrugged. “Undercover operation is a good pretext, but it would never work. What All Might does is picking fights with strong villains with unbeatable odds, and emerge the victor. It’s not too wild of a bet to guess that one time in a million, he bit more than he could chew.”
“Good point. Actually Okamoto said something like… All Might had asked the HPSC to keep his mission and the aftermath discreet. It was the aftermath thing that tipped me off. It if was the arrest of a gang leader and the dismantling of his black market, then All Might would have used that as a triumph, right? But he wanted to keep it quiet. Which meant it was bad press, something that could shake the people’s trust in him. So either it was something about his past, some dirty secret… or something about his future. About him not being as untouchable as the public likes to believe.”
There was a brief silence on the line. Toki briefly closed her eyes. Yeah, Keigo was probably right. Which meant it was almost certainly AFO. Damn.
“I don’t think it’s bad because Okamoto didn’t seem worried,” Keigo continued, lower. “But he may not have all the relevant information. Maybe he doesn’t know how serious it is. Maybe it’s not serious, actually, but… All Might has been hospitalized for nearly a month, if Pink’s guess is right. His enemy, whoever that his, must have seriously hurt him. Do you think All Might is getting weaker?”
“Or maybe his opponent was the strongest he ever fought,” retorted Toki. “Something like the final boss of Japan’s villain underground.”
“You think? I never heard about a guy like that.”
“If it’s the underground it’s not common knowledge,” argued Toki, heart hammering in her chest. “Maybe we’ll learn about it once we are heroes.”
“Or maybe we won’t because All Might pounded his face in,” her friend pointed out logically. “If All Might is in the hospital, can you imagine what the other guy looks likes? There’s probably not enough organic matter left of him to reconstitute a hamster.”
“Wow, that’s surprisingly gruesome for you.”
“I guess this reveal had put a dent in my good mood. Even if I’m not an All Might fan… learning that kind of stuff is… disturbing. He’s a pillar of society, you know? If he collapses, then someone is going to have to pick up the slack.”
And I don’t want it to be me, was implied. Keigo knew as well as Toki did what were the Commission’s plans for them. But as long as All Might was here… as long as Endeavor was here, too… in clear, as long as neither Toki or Keigo were Number One… well, it wouldn’t fall on their shoulders.
Toki wasn’t too worried about it. First, because canon evidence: society didn’t want someone else to replace All Might. Second, because Endeavor was still going strong and wouldn’t falter until Toki was in her thirties, at least. And third, because even if that happened, even if Toki or (most likely) Keigo ended up on that cursed throne… Well. Guiding society was all well and good. But the time for symbols was clearly over. Having the throne only meant it would be easier to deconstruct it, handling its responsibility to the industry of heroes as a whole instead of placing the burden on a single person’s shoulders.
Aaaaand here she was, digressing again. Toki cleared her throat, and got back to the point:
“Well, if there was someone strong enough to send All Might to the hospital, then it must have been the final boss. No way that guy had a superior. So…”
“… so by deduction, All Might actually toppled the baddest and biggest villain in Japan,” continued Keigo, effortlessly picking up her train of thought. “Which meant that it created a power vacuum.”
“Yeah, but it will take time for the villains to fill that power vacuum and for a new big boss to emerge. In the meantime, even if All Might take a backseat because of his injuries or because he needs a break… We’re probably going to enter one of the most peaceful area of the post-Quirk history.”
“It would be the perfect time for All Might to retire, you mean. Maybe he will even be forced to. Even if he didn’t suffer career-ending injuries, he must have been pretty beat up, it’s the kind of thing that most heroes would consider a wake-up call. You think he would do it?”
Toki frowned. Canon said no. But really, he should. He had defeated his foe, he had brought a new area of peace to his country, he was getting weaker… All Might should start looking for a successor and start to pave his way to retirement now. Let the people get used to the idea. Make the other heroes shoulder a little of his crushing burden. If Toki had been in his shoes, it was what she would have done.
But on the other hands, Toki wasn’t in his shoes. Toki had her own dreams and ambitions. All Might had… What did he have, apart from his role as the Symbol of Peace? Even his friends called him by his hero name. Toki didn’t remember if there was a single person besides Gran Torino who used his first name, and Gran Torino used it to scold him, nothing else. So yeah. All Might wouldn’t make the same decision as Toki would, because he didn’t see things like she did.
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I think that now, the world without All Might is reality that’s going to catch to us sooner or later, instead of a vague possibility.”
“… Yeah,” Keigo said softly. “It’s not abstract anymore.”
I’m betting on you, had said the Vice-President once. The weight of this responsibility felt heavier than ever. And the Symbol of Peace was, unknowingly to the public, starting to falter.
oOoOoOo
All Might didn’t reappear in the public eye until the end of May. Two months of radio-silence was already stretching thin the HPSC’s considerable capacity at misdirection, trickery and misinformation. At the end of the first month there had been a rumor that All Might had been to I-Island, but it had been disproved, and the HPSC had scrambled to redirect people’s attention from this new topic of curiosity. In the end, there had been fake news and testimonies of people having seen All Might in the mountains (where the signal was pretty bad, stopping people from posting about these encounters online). When he came back, All Might casually mentioned actually going to the USA for ‘family reason’, and then tracking a villain through the mountains for at several weeks, which appeared to placate the masses. This story was full of holes; but nobody wanted to look too closely at the flaws in their idol’s statement.
So. Neither Toki or Keigo spoke about in on the Discord server, and after All Might’s reappearance, Sachiko grumpily admitted she had worried for nothing before moving on.
You had to admire how smoothly it had played out. No wonder that in canon, people had been none the wiser about All Might’s condition. Nobody had even noticed his absence. But Toki knew, now. And Keigo knew, too. In canon, had his handlers bothered to tell him what was going on? Probably not. If Keigo hadn’t taken initiative to speak with Okamoto, he would have had no clue at all… And so, when All Might would collapse six years later, he would have been as taken aback as the rest of Japan. Well, not anymore. He didn’t know it was coming, yet, but at least he would notice the signs.
Just as Toki would.
From now on, All Might would be getting weaker. He would only keep his ‘muscled form’ for a few hours instead of all day long. Even if he hid it from the public, there would be clues, evidence, data to compile and to track how fast his power was fading. It had begun. Now Toki knew there was something to look for, and she was on her guard.
(She never had the calling of a hero. It wasn’t in her blood. But Toki was on the firm opinion that your origin didn’t define you, and so she chose to be a hero. She never had the innate instinct to care for Japan, to try and protect it from its doom: but she had chosen this way of life, and she wouldn’t give it up. This place was hers, now, damn it, and she would never launch spaceship if it was reduced to a burned wasteland.)
So. Second year of high school started with a bang, quite literally.
And it didn’t stop. Sawayomi announced out of the blue that she wanted to practice with her Quirk. Or rather, she aggressively asked Toki if she would be down for sparring one of those day.
Toki didn’t know what had caused this change of heart, but she was always happy to help with training. Besides, she was getting good enough with a skateboard that Sawayomi didn’t have much left to teach her. It would be nice to be the one playing teacher, for once.
Training Sawayomi was a trip. At the beginning, it was as unpleasant for one as for the other. Touching her skin mean having either Sawayomi flinching back as if someone had screamed in her ear, or Toki getting a jolt of sounds-pictures-voices-sensations-too-much like a flash grenade exploding in her head. Sawayomi’s Quirk was powerful… but also completely untrained. No wonder she blasted anyone with thoughts, or got blasted, at any contact. She had protected herself by never touching anyone: so of course her mind was open and unprotected, and using it hurt. A little like it would hurt to do manual labor when you had soft hands without calluses.
For the first month or so, even though they sparred (it was what Sawayomi had requested, after all, and Toki obliged, drilling into her friend the basis of throws and blocks), they mostly stayed a meter away from each other, making contact from the tip of their fingertips before jolting away with a hiss of pain. Toki got a punch to the mind one time out of three, while the other two times it was Sawayomi getting punched by the mental recoil of her own Quirk. Her power was more suited to read people than to push thoughts in their mind, but it could do both… and with explosive power, at that. So they had to tread carefully. Toki held out her arm and Sawayomi touched her, focusing on sending one specific though, or in looking for one specific feeling, for trying to block it out. No more than two seconds of contact, with Sawayomi trying to find her limits as gently as she could. They did it while they were doing homework, when they were walking at the park, and even during lunch… although Toki was careful to warn her friend first, least she had a plate threw at her face.
They learned a lot about one another during that time. Toki had flashes of her heart attack, of that cursed day when Meteor tore down a building when fighting All Might, of standing in front of Sayuri’s grave and feeling empty, of rescuing Mihoko-san in the river, of crying in pain and exhaustion after getting beat-up by Hobo-san.
Sawayomi’s touches brought forth the most vivid memories, and those were often the ones bathed in fear, pain, and anger. The human mind was designed to learn from its mistakes and so it held on more tightly on the bad memories. Just the same, sometimes when Toki touched Sawayomi’s skin, she had a flash of a red-haired woman screaming in anger at a man in a firefighter uniform, of the same woman quietly sobbing in a dark living room, of a voice screaming ‘even your own parents didn’t want you!’, of a classroom full of children who laughed cruelly, or of a boy with a freckled face recoiling from her touch with horror.
They didn’t talk about it. Toki wondered what wild backstory Sawayomi had imagined while trying to make sense of the disjointed flashes of memories in Toki’s mind. It probably didn’t paint a happy picture. The backstory Toki had built in her mind after seeing Sawayomi’s memories certainly wasn’t a happy one.
It took… some time. But in June, Sawayomi could brush an elbow against someone and not recoil in pain and reflexive anger. That was tremendous progress. Her touch was gentler. Her telepathy, too.
“I still can’t block it out,” Sawayomi frowned irritably. “But at least I can limit myself to skimming surface thoughts instead of being assaulted by a barrage of everything that’s on your mind.”
Toki hummed pensively.
“Can you go and dig for a specific memory if it’s not at the forefront of my mind?”
“Still can’t. I can read present thoughts, not past ones. The fucking memory thing is just your mind… or mine… associating the mental contact with pain, and having some kind of flash-back of past-pains as a recoil.”
Toki blinked, stuck by a thought: “Can you guess if I’m lying about something? You detect present thoughts. Can you detect if the words match the thoughts and vice-versa?”
“No idea,” Sawayomi said, a grin suddenly lighting up her face. “Let’s try it.”
She offered a hand, palm up. Toki put her fingers on it, and felt the brush against her mind. It was strong but soft, like a steady pressure. What progress compared to two months ago, when every contact was like a kick in the teeth!
“Alright,” she frowned, eyes closed, trying to think of a lie. “I hate lemon candies.”
“… Lie,” grinned Sawayomi.
“Could you feel it?”
“I could sense you remembering the taste, and it was pleasant, so yeah, I could feel it. Try something more complicated next time.”
“Alright. My name is All Might.”
“… Lie. But I also got a vague sense of, yuck, I don’t know, do you have complicated feelings about names? Or All Might?”
“Both,” Toki admitted honestly, letting her hand go.
She had changed her surnames so many times that now only Toki felt like it was still hers. And All Might was both the nation’s symbol and a Sword of Damocles hanging above all of their heads while the oblivious public cheered him on. So yeah, complicated feelings sounded about right.
Sawayomi frowned:
“Being a truth-detector is going to be fucking complicated if I got a barrage of every feeling about some issue or the other while scanning someone.”
Toki side-eyed her friend:
“That sound only specific. You intend to do more mind-reading in the future?”
“… I want to work in the police force. Not as a low-level grunt, alright? As a detective or an officer. Talking to people, seeing how they react and shit. If I have a useful Quirk, I could be allowed to use it on the job.”
“That’s great!” Toki exclaimed.
Sawayomi shrugged, looking faintly embarrassed, and grunted:
“Yeah, it’s not set in stone, so whatever. But the lie-detecting thing could come in handy.”
“Sure,” her friend nodded agreeably. “But if you work with the police, maybe we should work more on using your Quirk defensively. You know, like reading people when you are fighting, and guessing their next move.”
“I can’t read muscular memory. We fucking tried it for two hours straight last week.”
“Alright, that idea is a bust,” Toki admitted, before brightening. “But you could try reading my intend! Not how I’m going to move, but my general strategy, my aim. It could still help you stay a step ahead in a fight.”
“… Most people I’ll be fighting won’t wear short sleeves to give me plenty of skin-to-skin contact.”
“Are you scared?”
“Fuck you, I’m not!”
And to prove it, Sawayomi jumped to her feet and adopted a starting pose. Toki grinned, and rose slowly, rotating her shoulders to prepare for the incoming fight. Mind-reading or not, she still had years of experience on Sawayomi, and she never lost unless she deliberately let the other gain the upper hand.
It was fun. Toki had to enjoy the little joys in life, right?
Anyway. Sawayomi’s Quirk was fascinating. Toki has started filling a whole new notebook about it. She had analyzed her classmates’ Quirk in first year, or at least the ones she had managed to see, but she hadn’t had the occasion to study them up close. Which was a shame, because Kurogumo’s silk probably had very interesting propriety… He could cut through his own webs easily, but otherwise it seemed quite resistant. Could it be used to make Kevlar, like normal spider silk? And the other’s Quirks were all very versatile! Aokotsu, the class rep, could make people fall asleep by singing to them. It was Disney-princess worthy. Then there were the Nibayashi twins’ Quirks: one could make things get cold, and the other make them go cold. They had a thermodynamic Quirk, which basically meant they controlled the flow of thermal energy. Izumi Kinjo, the girl in the triumvirate of nerds (the nickname had stuck) could turn things to gold for one to five minutes. Her friend Morimoto had an unwavering sense of direction and physically couldn’t get lost, even in an unknow city. Her other friend Yeibadosu could make his teeth grow into knives.
So yeah, Toki had plenty of data to fill her notebooks and ponder about the how and the why. For example… she had pretty much figured out that Kurogumo’s Quirk must have a heavy nutriment cost, based on the fact he went out of his way to eat a lot of dairy and even took supplementary calcium pills.
But she was getting away from the point (again). So: back the subject at hand… Sawayomi’s Quirk.
It was named Touch-Telepathy. It required skin-to-skin contact to link minds. And it allowed the transfer of thoughts and emotion in both directions. That was all Sawayomi had deigned say to Toki when they had first started training. Now, in hindsight, Toki had to wonder if that was all Sawayomi had known about her power. She had clearly gone to great pains to suppress it and hide it for years.
So Toki filled her notebook with observation, suppositions, and analysis, and made a point to share anything new with Sawayomi. For example: her Quirk actively targeted the higher levels of the brain, the thought process. Which meant she couldn’t read (or transfer) instincts, reflex, muscle memory. It also meant that if she touched someone who was sleeping, she couldn’t read their dream, or even get a vague sense of their general emotions. Touch-Telepathy also reacted to present-thoughts, so Sawayomi couldn’t go digging for a memory. She could try to make the person bring that memory at the forefront of their mind, either by talking about it or by transferring some feeling to evoke said memory, but nothing more.
Thoughts were difficult to describe. Half the time, Sawayomi couldn’t decipher them. It was a mix of pictures, sound, and emotion. Smell, taste or touch weren’t often perceptible, unless you focused specifically on it. When Sawayomi skimmed Toki’s mind, it felt a like a pressure on her brain. Like being squished like a stress-ball. If the contact lasted longer than ten minutes, a migraine started to build up, and that was if Sawayomi kept her touch light. If she went with brute force, like she had done at the beginning when she had no control over her own power, it felt like getting punched by a taser from inside your brain. In one word: unpleasant.
Sawayomi’s touch linked her mind to her test subject’s… which meant the link worked both ways. She could read thoughts (present thoughts and only about the higher function of brain, but still) but also transfer her own. Share her inner monologue, sent a picture of a place, give a feeling of discomfort to communicate without words… Actually, with that link going in both directions, Sawayomi and Toki could have complete conversation without opening their mouths, just by holding their hands.
In theory, at least. In practice, it was harder, because Toki’s thoughts tended to go in all directions, while Sawayomi barreled straight to her conclusion and her thought process was so fast and direct it sometimes skipped several steps. People could talk vocally together because they shared the same language: but talking telepathically was a bit more complicated, since they didn’t share the same thought process. That was why Sawayomi couldn’t always interpret what she read. To communicate clearly, they both had to focus to make sure to send their thoughts correctly verbalized, and not half-formed and already firing in another direction.
There was also another drawback at this two-way connection thing. It was the fact that, if Sawayomi connected them then let her mind open, Toki could reach on her own and clumsily pull at the link to dive into Sawayomi’s thoughts. It was rough and uncoordinated, and Sawayomi had no trouble pushing back. But… if Sawayomi tried to link with someone who had experience with mental Quirks, or who had a mental Quirk themselves… they could probably turn her own telepathy against her.
(Unbiddenly, Toki thought about the Shinsō. About Mihoko Shinsō, especially, with her touch-based mind-controlling Quirk. But she was really uncomfortable with the idea of asking help from Mihoko-san, who hated her Quirk so much. Besides, it didn’t matter anyway: Sawayomi refused to let a stranger play with her Quirk, even in the name of science!)
So. Between Toki’s new pet project, her online classes, her actual high-school classes, her almost-daily chats with Keigo, and her Dungeons&Dragons adventures (their party was now on their way to find a necromancer who wanted to bring a dragon from the dead, because that apparently sounded like a good idea)… the weeks passed in the blink of an eye. June turned into July almost without Toki realizing it.
July means her first corrective surgery. Her chest was cut open, her new heart examined. The plastic tubes and titanium screws put here to help her ribcage accommodate her new heart were removed. It was short and painless, and when Toki woke up she was way less dizzy than she had been for her actual heart transplant. What she hated the most was the scar. Before the operation, it had become a rosy line, bumpy and tender, but starting to fade. Now, it was red and angry. The texture felt rougher than before. It was even larger. There was no way this scar would fade to a thin white line, now. Toki’s chest would always look as if it had been opened with a rusty butcher’s knife. Yikes.
July also meant holidays. Hanging out with Sawayomi at the skateboard park. Being invited to a play at the theater where Sachiko had landed a job as assistant manager (so: glorified coffee-runner and handyman… handywoman?). Writing poetry late at night, sitting cross-legged on her building’s rooftop. Spending time with the Shinsō family.
They didn’t go to the beach this year. They stayed in the city. They went to an amusement park, then to a roller derby, then to an outdoor park where Toki demonstrated her skateboard tricks; Mihoko-san showed off her skills with rollers blades, and little Hitoshi followed them around on his kid-sized bicycle. Dr Shinsō, stayed sitting on a bench, bemoaning how insane were athletic people. It was kind of funny.
Later that month, Mihoko offered Toki to teach her graffiti painting. It was the kind of activities their stick-in-the-mud teachers (mostly Okamoto, and at a lesser extent Hayasa-sensei) would have been against, so of course she accepted immediately. Besides, she liked drawling!
But she quickly found out that street art was different from doodling on a notebook. There was the matter of scale, but also the fact that you draw on a vertical and often irregular surface, instead of a page you could put on a support at the angle that suited you best. Toki wasn’t a super-talented drawer anyway, so her first graffiti were dreadfully simple: little doodles, and once, a poem stretching in big white letters on a wall.
“I didn’t know your wrote poetry,” remarqued Mihoko while they were packing their supplies.
Mihoko was a free-spirit but not a vandal, so of course she hadn’t brought Toki to deface any building on the streets. They had to drive almost half-an-hour to get to the abandoned neighborhood where Mihoko practiced her art. Ghost neighborhoods like this formed themselves when the buildings weren’t up to norm. In a population with superpowers, it could lead to catastrophes. Especially since Quirks tended to get stronger and more volatile with each generation. Destruction was scheduled in two months and the whole thing would be rebuilt, but meanwhile, people could use it as long as they were discreet.
“I always have,” confessed Toki. “Since I was a child. I usually don’t share it, that’s all. Most of it isn’t mine, it’s stuff that I found online and stayed stuck in my head.”
“Oh. Well, you should share it. It’s beautiful.”
“… I don’t know. I feel a little… personal. Like I’m barring my soul for the world to see. I never really let anyone look at my poetry either. Well, except for one person, but it’s a special case.”
Mihoko zipped the bag closed, mulling over her answer. Finally, she answered, her voice law and careful:
“All art is baring a little of your soul to the rest of the world. It’s putting it out there, and hoping that even though some people will turn away, some people will scoff, and most of them won’t give it a second glance… There is ten, five, or maybe even just a single person who will see it and feel it resonate with their soul. Someone who will see it and think: oh, you too? I thought I was the only one. And those strangers, you will never meet them, but they will love what you’ve made. And through your art, they will love you, as you will love them. Art is like that, like throwing away a lifeline and hope something catches, and you are both the drowning man and the ship passing through.”
She slung the bag on her shoulder with a clanking sound of spray-paint cans banging against each other, and smiled at Toki:
“You don’t have to put it out there if it’s making you uncomfortable. But sometimes, if you want to enjoy the rewards of being loved, you also have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.”
“… That’s a good quote,” Toki muttered, because she didn’t know what to say.
Mihoko smiled mischievously:
“Thanks, but it’s not mine. I’m not as good as you at poetry.”
Then went back home. Toki didn’t know when she had started thinking about Mihoko-san’s house as home, but now she had a hard time letting it go. It was good, with the Shinsō. Simple. There was trust, and affection, and no expectation about her Quirk or her future.
Some part of Toki was itching to go back to training, but some part of her longed to live like this forever.
Before leaving, Toki turned one last time toward the tall wall supporting her first (and probably last) poem exposed for the world to see. The words seemed bigger than life, black edged in white on a faded grey wall, more striking than they ever could be on paper. It made Toki felt naked and vulnerable. It made her felt seen and euphoric, too.
I want to be a mystery
yet to be known
To be together, yet alone
Is it too much to ask,
to be famous yet unknown?
To be wanderer, yet have a home?
oOoOoOo
In August, Toki went to summer camp with Keigo. It was in the mountains, this time, with hiking trails and beautiful landscapes. Toki was grateful to skip the beach this time, actually. The scar on her chest was… kind of impossible to hide in a swimsuit. Not that she was ashamed of it, but it felt awkward.
This place was pretty good. Sure, at the beginning, some jerk tried to establish dominance by mocking her Quirkless status, but Toki knew how to fight and Keigo tolerated exactly zero bullshit behind her back, so that was quickly solved. The camp’s attendants were also very strict in the no-bullying policy. So all in one, it was quickly settled…. And Toki could relax and enjoy her holidays.
She had always liked summer, anyway. Mountains were a new thing (she hadn’t hiked since her Girls Scouts days!) but it was nice. She liked sending time with Keigo again. She liked the long hikes, the rich dinners, the back-and-forth banter as the teenagers washed the dishes. She liked sneaking out by the windows with the girls in her dorm giggling, and climbing on the roof to watch the stars.
Toki liked being able to hold Keigo’s hand, and laugh at his jokes, and casually bump their shoulders while walking. The way they shared the same space. The way she was able to look at him, at how his shoulders were filling out, at how his pale skin turned golden in the sun, at how the wind mussed his hair. The way he looked at her, when she caught his lingering glances that made her heart hammer in her chest, that made her feel naked and powerful at the same time. The way he still lowered his voice to whisper about Naruto Labs. The way they shared inside jokes.
The way Keigo’s eyes had stopped on her scar, one evening when she was in a tank top, and his Adam apple had bobbed up and down when he had asked, voice very low: does it still hurt? He had raised a hand, unthinkingly, and his fingertip had brushed the very top of the scar, just under her clavicle. The scar was rough and ugly, largely unfeeling, but the contact had given Toki’s goosebumps. They had locked eyes and the moment had seemed to stretch to infinity…
… Then someone had yelled downstairs about dinner being ready, both Toki and Keigo had jumped back as if burned; and for the whole evening they hadn’t been able to lock eyes without blushing to the root of their hair. The next day, everything was back to normal, but Toki still couldn’t get the memory of this moment out of her head.
Anyway. Summer camp passed. On the last day, one of the adults gave Toki the address of an online forum for Quirkless people. For support, apparently.
It was touching. In Toki’s experience, when people learned about her (supposed) Quirklessness, they either scorned her for it (like those jerks in the first day) and needed to be put back in their place… or they ignored it entirely, as if it was embarrassing. It was the first time someone learned about it and offered help. On one hand, it could be offensive, as if that guy thought she couldn’t defend herself. But on the other, he hadn’t butted in and hovered protectively during the whole camp. He had only approached her on the last day, after seeing she could handle herself, and offered her a platform of support, just in case. It was a nice gesture.
The online forum was called ordinary.community.com. Toki had never heard of it, but the community was… pretty big. And members came from all around the world, too. They were sub-forums dedicated to each country, so people could speak with peers in the same language. It was pretty cool.
Toki had wandered online a lot, especially to find petitions, to read about Sachiko’s causes (she had a new one almost every month or so), or to surf social media. But she had never actually joined a forum for Quirkless people. It was a new and interesting idea. A little scary, too, because Toki wasn’t really Quirkless: she hadn’t grown up with it, and would shred this burden in a few years, so she felt a little like an imposter? But what the fuck, support was support. If all she could bring to this cause was cheering from the sidelines, she would do. Besides, she wanted to fight against Quirkless discrimination, but what use would her motivation be if she didn’t actually know what Quirkless people wanted?
She created an account on that forum, under the username of Antares. Maybe one day someone who knew her birth date and her passion for astronomy would guess that she picked her pseudonyms after stars of the Scorpio constellation, but the chances were slim.
________________
Antares:
Hello everyone! I’m new!
Short bio: I’m a girl, nearly seventeen now (birthday: 31st October), and I’m at a hero high-school. The general course, not the hero course, although i almost signed up. In the end, the entrance exam scared me off!
I like Quirk analysis, astronomy, math problems, and the color yellow. I want to be an astrophysicist when I grow up… and maybe work part time for a hero agency ahah
Confession time: I wasn’t born Quirkless. I had a Quirk that was too strong for my body, and a few years ago I almost kicked the bucket. Not to go in graphic detail but I’m going to get an organ transplant and if it works, I may get my power back. In the meantime, I am very much Quirkless and I found that forum because, well, someone gave me the link to give me some support. So… Sorry for sounding like a five years old, but: wanna be friends? (っ*︣ ▿ *᷅)っ🎔
Breadsticks:
WELCOME! Nice username, is that from a manga?
EdgeshotSexyAss:
Hello Antares! Let’s be friends! (ɔ*︣ ▿ *᷅)ɔ
DarkSasukeRemix
You’re in a hero school?! I call bullshit
FreeLobster
Welcome Antares! Let’s all be friends! ⊂( *︠ ▿ ︡*)⊃
MemeEdgelord-NowWithSpellingMistakes
Calm your tits DarkSasukeRemix, she said general course, people aren’t picked for their Quirk with that one, and the entrance exam is usually anonymous
Welcome Antares! I hope you will like it here! Whoever gave you this address didn’t steer you wrong: if you want friends and support, you’re in the right place
OrochimaruIsHot
You’re Quirkless from an accident? I am too!
Not to go into the sob-story but I had elastic legs, and I lost them in a car accident seven years ago. I have prothesis now, but I’m functionally Quirkless. It was a rude shock, and I was in dark place for a while. This forum may have saved my life.
So welcome, and I hope you’ll feel at home here! =)
Ibiscus
Welcome! If you like Quirk analysis you and I should get along =) But math?! How can you like MATH?
Maybe it’s secretly your Quirk ahaha
PinkUnicorn
Welcome! ≧◠‿◠≦
________________
The Ordinary Community forum (or OC for short) was a thriving place: they were thousands of members, talking about music or arts or movies or just about their lives. They were talking about Quirklessness, of course: about being Quirkless, about what brand of shoes didn’t crush their elongated pinky toes, about how such politician or such hero had made a disparaging comment, about such other personality had officially endorsed a supportive association, about how to use loopholes in anti-Quirk-discrimination laws to get back at your boss for firing you because of your Quirklessness… That kind of things.
But they were also talking about all and nothing, like on Toki’s Discord server. They shared funny memes, and debated about their favorite heroes, and posted pictures of their pets. They also talked about their struggles, seeking comfort here when they couldn’t have it from their entourage.
Some of them played Dungeons&Dragons, or some other RPG game, and invited Toki along for a quick look at their adventures. She made another character, a gnome Cleric devoted to the god of naps and sleep, named Pipirima, and tagged along some of their games. She was introduced to several video games with riveting graphics and a good storyline. Some people gave her link to online manga or recommended some good anime.
There were so many people! Of course, Toki didn’t have a close bond with those persons like she had with the member of her Discord server. They didn’t always share the same interests, and they couldn’t have long and passionate debate like that. But it was always so active! And they were people coming from so many places! There was even a university professor, who agreed to take a look at her quantum mechanics lessons!
“Did you know there is an online community supporting Quirkless people?” she said to Mihoko-san one evening.
She hadn’t mentioned the forum to anyone yet. She felt a little embarrassed about embracing this whole thing. But it was different with Mihoko-san. For once, she knew Toki wasn’t actually Quirkless. And she usually some really good hindsight.
“You’re not really Quirkless though,” Hitoshi reasonably pointed out, passing thought the kitchen.
“Aren’t you supposed to be taking a shower? You smell like unwashed laundry!”
Hitoshi stuck his tongue at her:
“It’s the price of coming second in the regional karate competition!”
“I already congratulated you! You don’t need to remind me with your smell!”
“I was going to shower, but I hear you moping, so I had to come and tell you were being stupid and overly dramatic as usual.”
“Hey!”
“Kids…” Mihoko-san rolled her eyes, looking faintly amused. “Hitoshi, go shower. Toki, leave him alone.”
Hitoshi grumbled, then pointed an accusing finger towards Toki:
“You’re still not Quirkless!”
“Well, I am, albeit temporarily. And people treat me like I’m Quirkless, so I may as well wear it with pride. So there!”
Hitoshi rolled his eyes, as if finding her needlessly dramatic. Then he turned on his heels to go take the promised shower. Toki shook her head with amusement. What a little brat. Mihoko-san sniggered, before growing serious again.
“I didn’t know about the online forum, but it doesn’t surprise me. You find everything online… You should be careful about what they actually advocate, though. When I was a child, I went to some support groups for people with villainous Quirk… They were all toxic in one way or another.”
Toki frowned: “What, really?”
“Yes. They mostly talked to us as if we were already villains, and we needed to be convinced to resist the temptation to use our Quirk for evil.”
“Is that why you said Hitoshi didn’t need to go to a support group?” Toki wondered. “He mentioned his Quirk councilor had advised it.”
Mihoko’s eyes grew cold:
“That woman probably found her counselling license in a Christmas cracker. She wanted to shuffle all the problematic kids,” and Mihoko added air quotes to underline how stupid it sounded, sneering, “in some support group or therapist just so she could focus on the easy ones. I should have slashed her tires.”
“… Wow, there was no hesitation on that.”
Mihoko-san was so badass. And a little scary when people were mean to her son. Where did she get that spunk from?! Toki intellectually knew that Mihoko was something like forty, but her passion and energy always made her seems at least a decade younger. There were few forty-something years old who would graffiti walls, rollerblade on an almost competitive level, and ponder out loud about slashing some bigot’s tires. Mihoko Shinsō was actually a punk spirit wrapped in a misleading appearance of soft yoga mom.
“The OC forum seems pretty safe,” Toki finally said. “It’s mostly a bunch of people talking about each other about their day and comforting one another when there’s a rough day.” She paused, then added, lower: “They have more bad days than me.”
Mihoko side-eyed her: “You don’t have to join if reading about it weigh you down.”
“It doesn’t. The forum is very well-organized, so I can stick to the happy topics. It just, uuuh, it makes me realize that I have it easy, in a way.”
On OC, there were a lot of people who were… isolated. No friends, no family. Especially the younger ones. Adults had grown up in a world where the statistics weren’t quite as dire: they had often managed to secure a job, to build a network of trusted friends during high-school or college. The teenagers, on the other hand, had it rougher. Quirkless people got rarer and rarer; society got more and more confident in its safety and more and more superficial, and so… yeah. It sucked to be a Quirkless kid. Especially if you were in a crappy school that didn’t care about weak students… or if you had poor parents… or a lack of good connections… which, of course, encompassed a lot of kids’ situations. Long story short: your life sucked if you weren’t born in a place of privilege that could protect you, like what happened with Toki.
(There was a sub-forum called “suicide notes”, because the suicide rates were so high there was just no way to obscure it. As often as once a week, there was new message on that section, lighting up the little icon. Too many Quirkless people killed themselves, and too many left a note here, because here they would be heard instead of being ignored. So the moderators had simply decided to assemble all suicide posts here to avoid triggering people on the rest of the forum. It was… chilling.)
“In regards to your Quirklessness? Yes, you have,” Mihoko-san said bluntly. “But you have faced plenty of hardships that had nothing to do with it. The fact that some people have suffered more or in a different manner than you… it doesn’t negate your own pain.”
Toki opened her moth to parrot her own word, I have it easy, then she closed it. She was thinking about her mom, about her dad, about the building coming down, about weeks spent on the streets hiding from an invisible bogeyman, about harsh training, about collapsing clutching her chest because it hurt so damn much, about turning her back on Keigo and climbing in the car that was bringing her to Musutafu, about the long bumpy scar on her sternum, about sleepless nights trying to cram all of her lessons in her skull because she was short on time, she never had enough time…
Toki could have it worse. She could be Tenko Shimura. She could be Shouto Todoroki. She could be Izuku Midoriya. She could be someone whose life completely sucked without a single hope of change. Yeah, Toki could have it worse: but her live hadn’t been devoid of pain, either. It wouldn’t be for a very long time. The life of a hero wasn’t easy. The life of someone in love with Keigo, Hawks, bright and beautiful and such a perfect metaphor for Icarus that Toki’s stomach twisted just thinking of the danger… It wouldn’t be painless either.
“It’s fine,” she smiled. “I can handle it.”
Toki could see in Mihoko’s worried little frown that she wanted to say that that she shouldn’t have to handle it. She was supposed to live a normal teenager’s life, without pressure, carefree and innocent. But it was fine. Everyone failed at being who they're are supposed to be. The measure of a person was how well they succeed at being who they really were.
Toki wasn’t carefree or innocent. She was Quantum. She had traded freedom for strength eight years ago, and had never looked back. She wouldn’t start now.
Anyway. The OC forum was very kind and welcoming. There were a few college students who cheerfully offered to give her a hand with her computer science classes. Some younger kids quietly expressed admiration when she said she was at a classy hero school (even though she added she wasn’t in the hero course). It made Toki’s heart twist a little, because holy shit, they were barely twelve, or sometimes ten, the same age as Hitoshi; and how was she supposed not freak out when they candidly said that she was giving them hope they could get to a good high-school, as if this was some kind of dream they barely dared to look at?!
The OC forum was also a brand-new place for Toki to geek about stars and science in general, or to criticize and analyze people’s Quirks.
There were a few Quirk nerds among the Quirkless members of the OC forum, surprisingly. Most of the adult were bitter about superpowers, but the younger members were still starry eyed, caught in the hype of heroism. Some part of Toki wondered if Midoriya was part of the OC forum. That would be hilarious. But no member met the criteria she was looking for (a Japanese boy, ten years old or so, talking a lot, super-interested in Quirks, wanted to be a hero, probably had a username and/or an avatar about All Might…).
Fortunately, Midoriya wasn’t the only nerd on Earth, so Toki had plenty of weird people like her to talk to. There was a guy who liked Quirk analysis too, who lived up North… Another one who was a doctor nearing his retirement, always pompously giving advice… An older woman, whose username was “GrannyIsHere”, who was a total All Might fan and had and Etsy shop where she sold knitted caps and scarves with hero-themed colors… A younger boy, in middle-school, who wanted to be an engineer and was despairing about finding a good high-school… a girl who had an Instagram and posted fantastic photos of Tokyo, of her food, of friends, or even herself (and she was really pretty, Toki had to admit)…
Still, Midoriya was never very far from Toki’s thought when she wandered on this forum. It had been a while since she had met a canon character. Living in Musutafu like this, it made Toki feel like she was on the edge of something. She was coexisting so close to Midoriya, Bakugou, Present Mic, Nedzu… and by extension she was so close to the canon-storyline she could almost touch it.
So one day, in late October, when she saw that someone had opened a new topic, titled “Can a Quirkless person become a hero?”, she almost chocked on her hot chocolate.
A frantic check of the user quickly calmed her. It wasn’t Midoriya; or of it was, he had gone to great pains to hide. This person was apparently a girl, bilingual in English and Japanese, actually living in the US… and if Toki’s calculation were right, she was a few years older than him (she was thirteen, while Midoriya was the same age as Hitoshi, so ten years old).
Some people had already answered her post. Some said, gently but firmly, that it was impossible. Some other argued that it wasn’t unthinkable, but the other heroes would never accept it. Some others tried to squirm around the subject, saying that since heroes were people using their Quirk to arrest villains, a Quirkless hero was a little of an oxymoron.
Toki could see, as clear as day, that none of these people wanted to crush this young girl’s dream, but they were all saying no. A few persons tried to be positive. But they didn’t believe in her. Nobody could. Nobody would, because it was the way it had always been, but… but…
Toki put her hands on the keyboard.
This isn’t Midoriya, she told herself. In a way, is that better or worse? Midoriya was favored by luck or fate, and will probably end up being important anyway because he can’t stop himself from being in the thick of things. If it was Midoriya, I would have a specific set of questions to ask myself, because this revelation is part of his path to heroism, and more importantly part of his bond with All Might. But it’s not Midoriya, and it means… it means… Everything is left in the air. There is so much potential for disaster and pain, and so much potential for greatness. It isn’t Midoriya… but there are other people like him, like this girl. Is that good or bad to leave this question unanswered? If I answer it, what kind of ripples will it create? Maybe it’ll be nothing, like whistling in the wind, because even a few decisive words can’t change the way this world refuse opportunities to Quirkless people… But what if it’s not?
What if it helps someone?
That was the heart of the question, wasn’t it. That was why she had sent her notebook to the police, even if she knew her parents would be arrested. That was why she had jumped into Mihoko’s car, sinking at the bottom of the river. That was why she had persevered with her training even when her chest felt like being stabbed. What if it changed thing for the better? What if she regretted not doing it later?
What if it helped someone?
Toki clicked on the button to answer. She scrolled back up to the top of the page, skipping all the defeatist answers from MemesEdgelord, GrannyIsHere, FreeLobster, PinkUnicorn, and so many other people she didn’t recognize.
She started typing. Maybe it would mean nothing. Maybe it wouldn’t inspire anyone. But even if all Toki managed was to make a little girl happy, she had to say her piece. Not only because it was comforting, but because it was true. It was her truth, and it deserved to be said.
It deserved to be heard.
________________
Moxie:
Can a Quirkless person be a hero?
I don’t have a Quirk, and I will never have one. But all my life, I desperately wanted to be a hero. My uncle is one, and he had been a constant in my life for as long as I can remember. I always admired him, not because he was so strong but because he was so kind, he always made people feel safe and happy. I want to bring that kind of happiness to people.
I know I will never equal someone with a flashy Quirk. But I’m smart. I helped my father build support items since I could walk. I created my first piece of support equipment when I was ten. And I’ve been thinking that with enough support items… maybe it’s feasible. I don’t know where to start, because so many hero schools in the US or in Japan (my only two possible options) discriminate against people who don’t have flashy Quirk. When I told my dad, he said he would support me, but I could see he wasn’t taking it seriously.
I don’t even know if I’m taking myself seriously. It’s so big and terrifying. What do you think?
Can a Quirkless person like me be a hero?
Antares:
Yes, you can be a hero.
Where to begin? About 50% of heroes don’t have a flashy Quirk. They use creativity and support items. Some other heroes have a Quirk they can only use a limited amount time each day, and when they have used it all, they still do their jobs. They rely on their training, their experience, their brain.
A lot of heroes rely on support items to fight (Clearpath, Compass, Sherazade). Some of them rely on support items to live (Thirteen). Some of them don’t fight if they can, because they have Quirk totally unsuited for it (Ariel, Viridan, Nova). My point is: it isn’t the Quirk who make the hero. It’s not the support items either. It’s not what you have, it’s what you do with what you have.
Yes, you can be a hero!
No powerful Quirk is helpful in every situation, and there are many situations where a hero’s Quirk is rendered essentially useless and they have to find some other way to fight. You may not have a Quirk at your disposal, but neither do a lot of heroes in a lot of situations. If you’re quick, and clever, and want to help people… that’s all you need, and you will prove it eventually.
I’m not going to lie: it’ll be difficult. You will have to work twice as hard as someone with a physical Quirk, and get half the reward. You will have to be good at running, evading, fighting, being creative, analyzing your enemies’ weaknesses; a thousand things other heroes don’t necessarily need. But you can do it. You don’t need to be a superhuman to do the work.
Yes, you can be a hero!!!
In the pre-Quirk area, being an ordinary person who could stand unashamedly shoulder to shoulder with superpowered heroes was something that made everyone dream. They made comics and movies about characters trying and succeeding at it! So look up Batman, if you want to be an underground hero. And look up Iron Man, if you want to be Limelight hero!
Start slow, but be sure of where you’re going. In Japan, most entrance exams may be unbalanced to favor flashy Quirk. But not being in the heroic course won’t stop you from taking the License Exam. Besides, I know that in Yūei, you can transfer in the heroic course if you impress people at the Sport Festival.
And if you’re still worried, I know several persons in the hero industry. I can reach out. They won’t favor you, but they will give you a fair chance. So… yes, you can be a hero!
I believe in you. I believe in you with my whole heart! You can do it! Prove the world wrong! YOU CAN BE A HERO!
Notes:
Ah ahaha, i LOVE the stories where Midoriya becomes a Quirkless hero. But i don't want to rob him of OFA in this story! Still, this message deserved to be said, so here it is, being told to someone else. Quirklessness is a disavantage in heroics, but it's not a disability and shouldn't be treated like one !
Toki give a list of heroes who relies on support items or fight Quirkless because i thought that, what the hell, i want weak-Quirked heroes, and i deserve nice things.
Those heroes are all OC, sorry, you won't find them on the wikia =) I imagine there are more heroes out there than the canon-characters! So here is a quick list of those heroes and their Quirk, which are just convenient subjects to prove Toki's point. Almost none of them will appear in the fic, but i keep their name in case a convenient plot-bunny need new material to work with....Clearpath: can see through walls. He avoid combat usually, but can defend himself with weapons, mostly ropes and grappling guns.
Compass: can pinpoint the location of a living or non-living target as long as he's seen it before. Long-distance fighter almost exclusively, he uses a tranq gun and a crossbow to fight.
Sherazade: can force people to carry out a conversation with her, to stall or negotiate. She's known to use a police baton as her only weapon. She will reappear later in the story !
Thirteen: canon-character, their support item is their suit.
Ariel: Quirk unknow, theories range from ventriloquism to mental confusion. He's known as "Ariel the Trickster". He uses a collapsible staff to fight. He will be mentionned several times in this story 'cause he's one of Toki's favorites heroes.
Viridan: can ear someone's voice anywhere if he had it memorized beforehand and know that person's face. Basically the perfect spy. He's work with the police, mostly in investigation. He uses martial arts to fight.
Nova: She can manipulate light around her, to turn invisible for a short time. It isn't a mutation like Hagakure, it's a emitter. She avoid fighting, but if she has to, she uses the element of surprise.Anyway. In this chapter i also got to write all my rambings about Sawayomi's Quirk. I one of my early draft i wanted to write a SI story with an OC in Hitoshi Shinso's family, and they would have had Sawayomi's Quirk. I scraped this idea but i still loved her Quirk too much to let it go.
Anyway, i hope you liked it !
EDIT 01/09/2022
Some spelling mistakes were corrected. Sawayomi wants to become a police officer (in the first draft she wanted to be frensic scientist).
Chapter 19: Quantum's return
Summary:
Toki gets her Quirk back. With some new cool features.
Quantum is back, everyone !
Notes:
Me, updating my fic: Readers, I need to end it on this point to keep tension high and give you an enjoyable reading experience
Readers, eyes wide: you CLIFFHANGER readers???? You play with their poor hearts like the FOOTBALL? oh! jail for author!! jail for author for one thousand years!!
Sorry i didn't update for three weeks, especially after leaving you hanging after he last chapter (Quirkless representation!) ! But hey, the new chapter is here. Enjoy !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
QUANTUM'S RETURN
There was a phrase used to describe people, often strangers, as “ships passing in the night.” It was meant to describe how fleeting the intersection of two lives can be, how briefly people we don’t know can flicker in and out of our lives.
But Toki thought about Mihoko’s analogy about art, about being both the drowning man and the ship passing though, and somehow it made her wonder if this meaning couldn’t be taken further. Because sometimes, as you passed another ship in the night, that ship may be the Titanic, and you may hear a cry in the dark. A shout for help. A stranger in crisis.
And in those fleeting moments as Toki’s ship passed theirs, she got to make the choice. Was she the Californian, the closest ship to the Titanic, which saw the distress rockets but did nothing? Or was she the Carpathia, turning on a dime, pushing all steam to the engines, racing to help?
People were still talking about the Titanic in History books, even thought it had been several centuries. Why not, after all? It was such a good, terrible, dramatic story. They still wondered how that catastrophe had happened, why had the Californian not helped the Titanic in that night. Whether it was apathy, incompetence or fear, people would never know: every witness was long dead. But the memories lived. And in movies, history books, online essays… everyone knew that every single soul who survived the Titanic survived because of the Carpathia. Because the crew and the passengers of that ship raced nearly sixty miles through ice fields above their maximum speed in the dead of night, readying life boats to pull victims from the water.
Toki preferred fantasy books over realistic ones but she had read the Carpathia’s story, like everyone. The story of a miracle happening on the Atlantic, because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive streamliner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.
So, yes, people were ships passing in the night. And when given the chance to turn away or do good, you should always err on the side of reckless compassion.
It wasn’t why Toki had picked the path to heroism, but wasn’t it a good reason as any to stay on it?
So, with her limited means, Toki tried to help this nameless girl online who wanted someone to tell her she could be a hero.
And boy, did it blow up! There was a barrage of new answers on Moxie’s post, some of them scolding Antares for her unpopular opinion, other getting enthused about it, some other trying to calm down the debate. In the end, Moxie wrote a long post thanking them all and asking the moderators to close the topic. Debate over.
Most people calmed down after that, probably thinking Moxie had given up. But she hadn’t. The same evening, Moxie contacted Antares via MP, to thank her for her help and tell her she had decided to become a hero. Toki replied with several thumbs-up emoji and a heartfelt congratulations… and, somehow, they started talking.
Moxie lived abroad, but she intended to go to Yūei. She had time, thought: she was only twelve, so still in middle school. She was very clever, and had thought about making a career in support gear if being a hero didn’t work out. Her skills in mechanics were advanced: she wasn’t kidding when she had said she had started young. Without being the next Iron Man, she had already built small robots and big cannons with her dad (a professional support engineer). She didn’t really like the old comics, but she had gotten her hands on Batman’s and Iron Man’s movies, and she loved them. Especially the Iron Man ones. She was actually thinking of having a partly robotic suit, because let’s be real, she would never have the core strength and the unadulterated rage of Batman to help her win fights. But she could have small missiles, tasers, and a cool armor. And Iron Man had a cool design.
Moxie’s dad was American, but her mom was half-American half-Japanese. She had the double-nationality. Moxie had always lived in both cultures, since her father worked closely with several Japanese heroes. Her parents had never married, both wanting a kid but without being in love. But when Moxie had turned out to be Quirkless, her mom had started drifting away. They were still in touch, but they never had much to talk about. But Moxie had an uncle, on her father’s side, who was a Japanese hero! He didn’t visit the Moxie’s family much. But he always called or sent emails, and he tried to visit at least once a year, even if it was only for a few days! He had actually spent a full week to their home this year, and he had talked at length about all the things he liked about heroic work, making Moxie even more enamored with this job. She hadn’t dared to speak to him about it, though. Her uncle could be a little protective.
Toki personally thought this family sounded a bit complicated, and it would have been rude to ask who was adopted between the father and the uncle, so she didn’t. It wasn’t her business anyway. The important thing was that Moxie had a supportive family!
Toki shared a few things about herself, too. How she had been training to become a hero before her accident… How she still planned on becoming one if she got her Quirk back (she always implied she didn’t have it back yet, to play it safe)… How she was an orphan in foster care, but very close to her childhood friend… How she was helping one of her friends with her Quirk… How she had joined a Discord server on Quirk and heroes’ analysis…
Moxie had never been a geek about Quirks. She preferred machines. Still, she was good at deconstructing data to find what made things tick, and she was willing to work for her success: so when Toki advised her to brush on her Quirk analysis (what better way to take out villains, when you didn’t have a physical Quirk, than to outsmart them?), she got to work and started appearing on the OC chat where people talked about it.
So Toki gained a new friend: a younger one, who looked up to her but was quick to banter and ramble a mile a minute about her new interests. Toki wondered if it was how Sachiko had felt when Toki had latched onto her. Being the ‘older sibling’ in an online friendship was sure a weird feeling, since Toki was used to being the youngest of… basically any group she tried to join. But well, she had now reached an age and a level where it wasn’t so strange to have younger kids running in the same circles…
Anyway. October passed, as did Toki’s seventeen birthday. She got a brand-new skateboard (yellow and white, with a perfect weight and superb maneuverability for jumps!) from the Shinsō family. She got tiny studs for her ears from Keigo. A got bunch of cat-themed post-its and stickers from Kameko… A gift-card from Mera-san… and a new DnD adventure from her Discord friends. It was good day.
Toki and Sawayomi continued training the latter’s Quirk. It was betting better by leaps and bounds, now that Sawayomi had getting familiar with its use. The fact that Sawayomi was also becoming familiar with Toki’s mind also helped. They could have telepathic conversations more easily. It was a great boost when Sawayomi needed a little help with her homework.
It… kind of built trust, too. You can’t touch someone’s mind, their unfiltered thoughts and feelings, and not feel understanding. Sawayomi had seen flashes of Toki’s worst memories, and vice-versa. Not enough to get a full picture, or even a clear one (the flashes were too disjointed, to focused on some precise emotion instead of a story): but sharing something so strong and painful created kindship. Toki and Sawayomi were also getting increasingly familiar with each other train of thought. What kind of leaps in logic Sawayomi made, what kind of digression Toki was prone to… Of course it created a connection. They got each other with a familiarity that was usually formed with years of closeness, instead of a few months of Quirk training! Without having ever talked about their past, they had both opened to the other further than to anyone else.
And still, even if they knew each other very well in the present, they never discussed their past and never made plans for the future. Once, Toki briefly wondered why, because even with Moxie (her most recent online friend!) she had talked about where she came from, and what she was planning to do with her life. But… the answer was obvious, wasn’t it? Sawayomi and Toki had befriended each other a little at random, by a stroke of luck, but also with the full understanding that their paths were headed in different directions. They were both fine with it. They liked each other; they respect each other: but they didn’t need each other. They were a good team and they understood each other perfectly, a complete synergy… but compared to Toki’s bond with her Discord friends, their relationship wasn’t so deep. They didn’t have interlacing interests, overlapping projects, or even common acquaintances besides their classmates.
There was this unspoken agreement that once high-school was over, they would go their separate ways. Friends, yes… but eyes looked on the future, not on the past.
Toki suddenly understood Sachiko and Emiko’s breakup a little easier. It was sad. But on the other hand, where else would they go? The road stopped here. They liked each other, really, sincerely, but not to the point of changing their whole being to follow the other. They each had their own dreams and ambitions, and they would each follow their path with the other’s beast wishes.
Wasn’t it a common thing, where Toki was concerned? She was heading towards a hero’s life. Toki Hoshizora was the mask, not her true self. At this point, even if she called herself Toki, wasn’t her true-self Quantum? The girl who trained laughing, focused on her studies, invented new techniques, watched the stars dreamingly, and wanted to fly so high her wings would catch fire? Quantum, Toki, there was no difference, in the end. Except Toki slipped on the mask of a Quirkless girl, Hoshizora, and tried to blend in… while Quantum never lied about who she was and what she wanted.
Ugh, she was giving herself a headache. It wasn’t super-healthy to try and compartmentalize the different part of her past as different factettes of her personality. It made her feel almost schizophrenic.
Anyway. November passed. Then December came… and with it, the doctor’s official permission to start using her Quirk again.
It was a big thing. Mera-san was here. Kameko-san came. Dr Shinsō was present, having argued his place here as Toki’s doctor. Keigo wasn’t here, but Toki knew he had pestered Okamoto for days.
Toki stood on one side of the room. She almost had stage fright. What if she couldn’t do it anymore? What if the pain came back? But Dr Shinsō gave the signal, she breathed, and… in the blink of an eye, she had teleported on the other side.
There was no pain. There was no discomfort. On the contrary, it felt good, like finding her footing again on a familiar ground. Toki broke out in a smile, and people started clapping.
“That was great!” Kameko explained. “The light thing is new, though.”
Uh? The what now?!
“Light thing?” Toki parroted, blinking. “What light thing?”
“Yes, you didn’t notice? When you disappeared, there was a little flash, like when sunlight is reflected by glass.”
Dr Shinsō frowned: “It’s barely noticeable, but yes, Sabira-san isn’t wrong. It didn’t happen before?”
She was sparkling now?! No no no, there was no way she turned into a discount Edward Cullen, no, she refused! She wanted a refund!
“No!” choked Toki. “Is that supposed to happen?!
“Tiny cosmetic side-effect sometimes appears with artificial organs tied to Quirk use,” Dr Shinsō admitted. “I don’t have the list, but I’m aware that in one case, someone with an artificial stomach could make it glow, while his Quirk was normally to digest metal.”
Toki let out a sputtering noise like a car trying to start. It was normal? No! There was a light-show going on! It wasn’t normal at all! Dr Shinsō patiently waited for her to find her words, an amused smirk in place, and Toki finally burst out:
“Am I going to turn into a giant disco ball from a heart transplant?! It doesn’t even make sense!”
“Calm down,” Mera-san rolled his eyes. “I’m sure there is a perfectly reasonable explanation.”
But the glare he was sending Dr Shinsō was almost threatening. Subtext: there better be a reasonable explanation, or else somebody is going to have to explain it to the Vice-President and that somebody is going to suffer a lot.
Dr Shinsō absentmindedly combed his hair, scanning Toki’s file. From where she was, the girl could see that most of it was redacted and unreadable. Probably anything having to do with her name, past, and upbringing. But the part about her Quirk were supposed to be detailed enough for a doctor to understand what he was dealing with.
“Well,” Dr Shinsō frowned. “We just replaced the main engine of your Quirk, there’s probably going to be some minor adjustments. I recommend a Quirk specialist for that… and a nutritionist, too. Different energy requirements are very common for artificial organ tied to the Quirk. Anyway, cosmetic issues in the manifestation of your power can come from several factors. A stronger pull from your portal, generating sparks, for example… although I don’t think it’s the case here. I don’t think you emit light, so it must be a side-effect of Warp-Space, but I don’t see how it may generate it… Maybe redirecting it?”
Toki’s eyes widened with sudden understanding. Light. Redirection. Vacuum. The absence of light was darkness, that why there were black holes, and why Kurogiri’s portals were black in the manga, but… What if it was the opposite? No light being absorbed, only rejected?
“Oh my god, yes. It made sense.”
“You have a science headcanon?” Kameko-san brightened.
Mera-san sighed, and hid his face in his hands, briefly: “Can’t you said hypothesis like a normal person, Sabira?”
The cat-lady only smirked. Personally Toki thought the expression was cool and immediately adopted it, pretending not to see Mera-san sagging in discouragement when he heard her.
“Yes, actually. My science headcanon is that my warping doesn’t teleport photons anymore. So instead of bringing the ones around me… the light around me… well, my portal reject it, so bam! It looks like light bounding off a mirror!”
“Why would your Quirk reject light?” Mera-san argued.
“… I don’t know, it’s just an idea!”
“Non, non, it’s not irrational,” Dr Shinso pointed out. “Artificial organs are grown in an underground facility with no natural light. They are used to neon light. One of the first artificial transplants was an eye that glowed in the dark. It made the papers. I will speak with an expert, but it looks like a solid lead.”
“Cool! How do I make it stop?”
“… You don’t. It’s a side-effect. It goes with the actual act of using your heart.”
“Why would you want to get rid of it?” gasped Kameko-san at the same time. “It looks so cool!”
No! It looked like a cheap special effect! It wasn’t even a blinding flash, just a tiny reflection, like the annoying flicker of light you got when light bounced of your rear-view mirror! So lame! It was embarrassing. She sparkled! Keigo would never let her live it down.
Also, light? Really?! Warp-Space already made Toki a perfect foil for Kurogiri if she ever had to face the League of Villains, and now she had a flashy side-effect to her Quirk to reinforce the total opposition of their Quirks? Did someone want to underline three time in red the title of ‘anti-Kurogiri’ and stamp it to her forehead too?!
“I don’t want a light show each time I use my Quirk!”
“Further testing will be required, but it look harmless,” Dr Shinsō pointed out.
“Yeah, but what about sneaky missions, or anything requiring discretion? Hell, even missions at night! Each time I teleport, it’s going to send flash of light?!”
“I wouldn’t call them flashes… You barely noticed it the first time. It’s more like a shimmer…”
“Oh, right,” Toki said sardonically, “I’m not glowing, I’m scintillating. That’s so much better.”
Kameko-san wiped out her phone, turning on the camera:
“Do it again, so I can show you!”
Toki grumbled but obeyed, and afterward, when Kameko showed her the video, she saw it too. There was a brief glimmer where she disappeared. Not like a flash, more like a straight ray of iridescent light bouncing off a reflective surface. It was shorter than the blink of an eye. On camera, of Toki hadn’t known what she was looking for, it would have looked like an accidental flare due to a bad camera angle.
Point was: it wasn’t blinding or eye-catching like she had feared. It could be excused as a trick of the light, actually. But still, it was so… so… so weird, so ridiculous. She was sparkling when using her Quirk. That was it, that was her life now: the side-effect of a heart-transplant was to glitter like some Disney fairy character. She wanted to hide her face in her hands and laugh hysterically. Seriously?! Her teleportation had been perfect the way it was, there was no need for fate, luck or whatever deity was having a good laugh at her expanse to toss a fuckton of glitter on it to make it flashier! Gods, it was embarrassing. That heart transplant better be worth it.
“It could be your brand!” Kameko-san said with enthusiasm.
“Please don’t said that,” Toki replied weakly, still hiding her face in her hands. “I’m still trying to come in terms with it.”
“I don’t see why it’s so hard. You could rationalize warping, but not sparkling?”
“… When you put it that way…”
An exam was programmed with a Quirk specialist, then another with a nutritionist, then another here a month after to check in her progress. Blood samples were taken. A strict schedule was drafted, allowing Toki to use her Quirk a limited amount each week to give her body time to get used to her new heart. Mera-san relayed the advice of Naruto Labs’ new coach, who said that precision exercises were to be privileged over long-distance jump, and Toki scoffed because duh, that was just common sense. That coach didn’t seem very brilliant. It was hard to fill Hayasa-sensei’s shoes.
Anyway. Toki was also asked to keep her Quirk use discreet. Her heroic training was supposed to be a secret… And for all intent and purpose, she was supposed to be Quirkless. It helped her, well, not blend in, but stay protected. Neither Mera-san nor Kameko-san put it in so many words, but it wasn’t safe to be a young girl with a valuable Quirk, living alone in a big city. Even if AFO was gone (which Toki wasn’t supposed to know about, anyway) the system he built was still in place, and there had always been evildoers willing to treat other people as convenient merchandise. Quirk trafficking was low in Japan, mostly because the police force and All Might had cracked down hard on their business, but it still existed.
(Most parent warned their children very early about Quirk trafficking. It was kind of the typical stranger-danger talk. If an unknown adult seems interested in your Quirk, you don’t go with them, you tell mom and dad immediately! It was a normal, expected part of the safety package that came with being a child in an adults’ word. But Toki had never received that speech from her own parents. In retrospect, it should have been a fucking red flag. There were only two kind of people who didn’t fear for their children to be abducted by Quirk traffickers: heroes from well-established family, because their offspring and their powers were too recognizable, and so, unsellable… and powerful villains. Because what kind of criminal in their right minds would declare war on a more powerful criminal by kidnapping and selling their child? It wasn’t just a precipice for disaster, it was a mathematic formula for total annihilation. So Sayuri hadn’t bothered giving The Speech to Toki, and neither had Meteor. In hindsight, it was a good thing Toki had been so scared of AFO back then. If she had trusted into the system, well, either AFO would have gotten her, or someone else would have.)
(Toki had learned about Quirk trafficking during her Strategy Lessons in Naruto Labs. It was a common problem to solve. The trafficked victims could be young kids, teenagers, women, sometimes men. They were sold as cronies for villains, usually. Their buyer cultivated their loyalty to better exploit their Quirk, and used them as henchmen. It was easy, especially with young kids suffering from abandonment issues. So you had a one in three chance of your supposed victims already being indoctrinated into believing their boss was their only family. Still, it was better than the alternative… Because, very rarely, but it still happened, some victims with exotic Quirks were sold as sex workers. Yeah. Sci-Fi manga world or not, mankind still had a dark and disgusting side.)
(So yeah, Toki had been… incredibly lucky to stay safe until being taken in by the Commission.)
Toki left the hospital with her head spinning with advices and recommendation, a ton things to watch out for and to analyses when she tested her Quirk again, a brand new facet to her power… and a huge grin. Because sparkles or not, she had her Quirk back.
Quantum was back in the game.
oOoOoOo
Toki didn’t speak of her newfound sparkling powers to the group chat. But she did vent about it, extensively, to Keigo. Her friend was sniggering on the phone, apparently finding the whole thing hilarious. And alright, Toki had to admit, it was a little funny, with how ridiculous the whole thing was.
Developing a side-effect of Quirk use was rare at her age, but something that showy? It was like something that came up straight from a shoujo manga. Seriously, she kind of wanted to rant about it on the Discord server, because that level of absurdity was too enormous to not be shared with the world… But hey, there was such a thing as anonymity. Toki didn’t want to burn her cover as a normal teenager just yet. The only ones she could talk about those things were the ones in the known, so… the Commission, the Shinsō family, and Keigo.
Mihoko would have the recap of the situation alright. But Keigo and Toki had history about playing around with their Quirk. It put a new spin on Toki’s angry rant about sparkles, vampires, disco balls and light-show when she just wanted to teleport sneakily to places.
“So now night missions are out!” she complained moodily.
“I though you would be happy about it, you’re not exactly a night owl.”
“Well, I’m not an early bird either.”
“So more like a permanently exhausted pigeon?” he asked innocently.
“Ah! Rich talk coming from the one who can coo like a turtledove!”
Keigo laughed, then made a crooning noise on the phone that sounded exactly like a pigeon’s call. Toki sniggered:
“Yeah, exactly. Want some breadcrumbs to go with that?”
“Hilarious. Hey, anyway, now that you have Warp-Space back… Are you going to stop pretending to be Quirkless to your friends?”
Toki frowned a little. Thing was, she hadn’t really thought about it yet. But as she pondered her option, she realized her decision had already been made. She liked the anonymity that came with being Toki Hoshizora. It wasn’t better or worse than being Quantum, because she still trained and studied, but it was… different. The pace was calmer, the expectations were lesser. Sure, there were problems with that (boredom with the slow lessons, annoyance at being dismissed…) but she still liked having it. She liked having another option besides being Quantum, actually.
“Nah. Firstly, I’m not pretending, I am functionally Quirkless. Well, I was. But yeah, I’m going to pretend nothing has changed. It would be too complicated to explain, and besides… I think I’m going to keep my civiliansona as basic as possible.”
Keigo burst into startled laughter: “Your what now?!”
“Hey!” Toki frowned defensively, but her friend only laughed louder. She raised her voice, biting back a smile: “That’s a legitimate setup! I’m going to go on and live my life as Quantum, but it would be useful to have Hoshizora’s identity somewhere. For university, for example! As Taiyōme or Aratani or whatever, I have no diploma, but Hoshizora is halfway to getting Bachelor’s degree!”
“I can’t believe it, you called it your civiliaAHAHAHAHAHA!”
“It’s not that funny!”
But seeing how Keigo was losing it on the phone, it apparently was. Toki rolled her eyes but played along, rambling some more about her civiliansona and secretly delighting in the fact that a stupid word could reignite Keigo’s hysterical giggles every single time. It always made her feel good to hear Keigo laugh. He often smiled and had a cheerful tone, but it was more out of habit than anything. Real, honest, full-belly laughs were rarer.
Being trained from a young age to become a hero wasn’t exactly easy. Oh, neither Toki or Keigo had an unhappy childhood with the Commission. They weren’t mistreated. They were cared for, and listened to. But it wasn’t a good childhood either. Their chance at growing up innocent and naïve had been shot to hell when their parents had decided to fuck up their lives, very early on. Maybe they could have been happy in foster care, having another chance at being normal children: but Toki didn’t think so. Their innocence had been tarnished forever. So the Commission had taken them in, and yes, it had given them security, stability, and perspectives. But it hadn’t offered them happiness. It was up to them to find their own joy in life.
What a sad life it would have been, if Toki and Keigo hadn’t had each other.
Anyway. Time passed, slowly. Toki started training her Quirk again, very carefully. She started with precision exercises, like old times: peeling an apple by warping the skin in her free hand, trying to teleport a handful of water from one palm to another, create a wind current around her body by warping away some air, that kind of thing. Small scale, big potential.
She also started warping to Yūei instead of taking the train. A twenty minutes ride saved each morning and each evening, that gave her forty minutes every day to do whatever she wanted.
Christmas came, then Keigo’s birthday, then the New Year. Toki exchanged gifts with the Shinsō family. She spent an hour on the phone with Keigo (they devised a circumvoluted plan to sneak in the Naruto Labs to prank Okamoto in memory of the good old days, which they probably wouldn’t do, but would absolutely remember if Okamoto became too pushy). She received the annual visit of Kameko-san, as enthusiastic and bouncy as ever.
Kameko was still working as a liaison between the HPSC and the same hero agency as last year, and she had plenty of new and amusing anecdotes to tell. Apparently someone had misfiled some papers for the agency’s insurance, and the potential fallout could have been disastrous. Because, you see, being a hero was like driving a car. You could get yourself a license to drive a car, but without insurance it was illegal to actually drive. Toki could see the sense in that. Insurance existed to protect people or property you might hurt. It was especially important since heroes caused so much property damage. Anyway, the responsible party was fired, but not after a total freak-out for the whole agency, and Kameko running damage-control for two-weeks straight, giving apology baskets to at least ten people in the insurance company, and miraculously managing to secure a new contract just before the hero’s license turned invalid for lack of insurance.
Those things were probably covered in Keigo’s heroic lessons… But Toki hadn’t known it before being told by Kameko. Oh, she had been vaguely aware, but only vaguely… and when it was about administrative work, ‘vaguely’ meant ‘clearly not enough’. It worried Toki a little: she knew she would be behind, it was inevitable, but she didn’t want to be missing critical information. So she asked Keigo if he could sent her a tiny summary of his heroic lessons, not often, maybe just once a month or so. He flat out told her he had been forbidden to do so by Okamoto, because apparently Okamoto didn’t want Toki to overwork herself, and her schedule was full. He had said, and Keigo quoted, that “if she wanted to study heroic theory, she should clear her schedule.”
Subtext: he wanted her to drop her college courses. What an asshole. Well he could get fucked with a rusty chainsaw, because there was no way Toki was doing that.
Plan B, then. She asked Sachiko if she still had Emiko’s email, and then asked Emiko if she still had her old notes from heroic class in Yūei. The laws about insurance, the procedures, the quota of hours to work, the rules about merchandizing… In a heroic high-school, there were standardized tests about that. Maybe it wasn’t on par with what Keigo learned, but it would be enough for Toki to not make a fool of herself. Probably.
Emiko cheerfully mailed her the totality of her lessons, and Toki resigned herself to adding a new charge to her workload.
Really, there weren’t enough hours in a day for what she had to do. High-school lessons were easy enough, but completing the homework still took time. And she had her college courses. And her Quirk training. Gods, she had to cut down a lot of non-essential activities…
She started with Sawayomi’s Quirk training. It had been put on hold for December anyway, because there had been mid-term exams to focus on. But now, Toki didn’t really have time for it anymore… And in addition to that perfectly valid reason, she also didn’t want Sawayomi to find out about Warp-Space. If she did, she would definitely connect the dots once the hero Quantum started making the news.
So. She told Sawayomi their training would have to stop.
He friend didn’t really take it well. Toki had been as diplomatic as she could, arguing that she was overwhelmed by her studies, she wanted to take a break… But Sawayomi had still been pissed off. As she should be, after all. It was hard for Sawayomi to open up to someone, and Toki was probably her only friend, the only person she had trusted with her power. It made things awkward. They didn’t stop hanging out, but it was weighting on their relationship.
After that, Toki cut down another non-essential thing: graffiti with Mihoko-san. She could still hang out at the Shinsō’s house (she still did, every week-end) but now there would be no adventure to pain fresco on abandoned buildings. Toki was going to do her homework and maybe chitchat a little, but nothing more. She had to go back early to her little studio so she could practice her Quirk training, after all.
She also decided to drop her karate class. She still loved the dojo but she wasn’t really close to anyone here. In a little over a year, Toki would have her heroic license, anyway. She didn’t need to keep practicing. She had been training since nearly a decade. If she worried about being rusty, all she had to do was hunt down Sachiko and ask for a spar. She didn’t need to go at the dojo every Saturday.
With Quirk-training in addition to her workload, the days were awfully full. Thanks all gods above, Toki liked her lessons and she liked Quirk training, so even if it was physically tiring, it wasn’t mentally draining like it could have been. Nothing was more horrible than killing yourself over a task you hated.
She still kept time for her hobbies, though. Lurking on the OC forum. Chatting with her Discord friends. Posting on heroic forums. Keeping in touch with Moxie, coaching her in strategy, analysis, and bouncing ideas back and forth about the kind of hero she wanted to be.
Moxie was actually working on boots that could make her fly, like Iron Man. She was also pulling her hair out over what kind of costume she would wear. She wanted something bright and cheerful, and refused to hide in a full-body armor, for fear of being told that she was only playing hero because she was hiding in a tank. Toki and her (or rather, Antares and her) were pondering how much of a bodysuit you could armor discreetly while still looking like a normal hero costume.
Moxie was both very practical and wildly ambitious about her equipment. Maybe it was an engineer trait? In any case, she was already talking about tasers, flying boots, guns with various drugs to take out her enemy, and hidden tools like trackers or jammers hidden in the bracers of her armor. It was impressive. But she also liked bows, ruffles, accessories, and the color pink a lot. Her final design would probably look like the spiritual child of a tank with a Barbie doll. Toki found it absolutely hilarious.
It was refreshing to talk to Moxie, someday, because Moxie had no idea about Toki’s problems, and their conversations were mostly about Moxie’s problems instead. Keigo, Mihoko, Sachiko, Sawayomi, even her Discord friends, they all knew too much about Toki. About her health, about her Quirk, about how she juggled with high-school and college and other extracurriculars like the overachiever she was.
For Moxie, Toki was only Antares, a Quirkless girl who had a lot of training and helpful advice. Toki had never told her about her heart transplant or getting her Quirk back. Maybe she would, if Moxie got into Yūei… then in the hero course. But in the meantime, she didn’t want to appear as an imposter, pretending to be Quirkless to infiltrate the OC community. She just wanted to be a nice, reliable sempai.
It wasn’t hard. They had loads to talk about. Moxie was very knowledgeable about heroic history and regulations. Maybe it came with growing up in a family turned towards heroism (with her dad working with support items, and her uncle as a hero). When Toki took the time to read Emiko’s lessons, she usually ended up talking about it with Moxie.
After all, Keigo didn’t have the time to be her teacher in addition to being her friend. And Toki talked little enough with him as it was, she didn’t want to turn their relaxed phone calls into strategy lessons! While Moxie was pretty much in the same boat as Toki: they were both studying heroics outside of their curriculum, because they had plans for the future that their teachers wouldn’t adequately prepare them for.
________________
Moxie:
You never studied the history of heroes, but you know a lot about the HPSC in Japan!
Antares:
I had a phase where I dug up everything I could about them because I was worried they were secretly evil. Turn out, no, they don’t kidnap children to indoctrinate them in secret labs. It’s almost disappointing. But the main cause of them not being evil is not their inherent goodness, but rather the fact that they are stretched too thin. There are too many heroes, the industry had expanded above the scope of what they can control. So they can only supervise, push people away from villainy, and hope for the best. They would micromanage everything if they could, though.
Moxie:
Ah I forgot, you also know people in the HPSC, don’t you?
Antares:
A few. My current caretaker work for them. I also have a childhood friend who’s training to be a hero and who has close ties with them, but that’s not my story to tell.
Anyway!
What about the history of heroism in Japan, with the golden age and everything? The golden age is basically All Might rise to power, isn’t it?
Moxie:
It’s more complicated than that! The bronze age, the silver age and the golden age are period where heroism was considered differently. Yes most of the golden age’ attitude towards heroism is linked to All Might, but it’s also a result of the previous events.
So
There was the Bronze Age, immediately after Quirks appeared. Then the Silver Age, where Heroes evolved from vigilantes, soldiers or delinquents to independent professionals. Then the Golden Age started about thirty years ago, with a huge augmentation of the number of Heroes, the modernization of agencies, the commercialization of heroic brands, and competition between the best ranked heroes. All Might is considered being the first Golden Hero, you’re right. He inspired everyone to crack down on villain organizations and gave the Po Heroes a huge boost in popularity! But the golden age didn’t just happen because of All Might, but as a result of what the Bronze and Silver ages’ heroes had built before, too.
Antares:
… I’m beginning to suspect you’re an All Might fan
Moxie:
Who isn’t?
Antares:
I dunno, you seemed really reasonable for one
Privileging brain over brawl
Most AM fans admire him because of his strength, and any consideration for intelligence fly out of the window
ANYWAY
With the lessons I got from my friend, I’m mostly focusing on the beginning, so the Bronze Age. It’s pretty dark. There were anti-Quirks riots everywhere, and heroes were basically the government front-line fighters, because they couldn’t fight quirked people without throwing other quirked people at them.
Moxie:
It’s a bit more complex!
Also, since you hate how commercialized the whole hero stuff is, you should know it started there.
Antares:
What, really?
I thought it was a bit later, you know, when the general populace had stopped being out for quirked blood.
Moxie:
Not exactly! At the Bronze Age… Quirked people weren’t liked back them. There were riots, as you said, and Japan was bordering on civil war with all the anti-quirk sentiment.
Heroes rose without any government approval to restraint the more violent thugs. But most of them were treated as villains, since all Quirk usage was prohibited. Vigilantes weren’t seen differently than the criminals they fought. But still, they persevered! And it’s there that the public image thing started to get really important.
It was public pressure that pushed the government to employ those heroes, because the media had taken ahold of the story and they were becoming incredibly popular.
But of course, the government didn’t trust them; at this time, there was no talk of understanding quirked people or welcoming them into society. So the heroes were frequently thrown into dangerous situations with no back-up and no support items. The government wanted to sacrifice them against rioters.
Antares:
Yeah I know
There were riots, Japan cracked down heavily on the rebels, and the government created a small force of quirked individuals to control the populace and protect innocent civilians.
That’s what’s considered the genesis of the hero system.
It’s either a “brilliant and tolerant move by the Japanese government”… Or realistically, it had less to do with tolerance and more with the need to have Quirks on the side of the law instead of letting all the powered people running wild.
In any case being a hero at that time must have sucked
BADLY
Moxie:
It was.
My uncle, the one who’s a hero… he never speak much about it but I think he had family who died in the Bronze age. He started his career at the end of the Silver Age and I think it was a big motivation.
Anyway… Those heroes were treated like criminals by both their bosses and their colleagues in the police departments. They saved countless lives, but none of them lived past the age of forty, and it's difficult to even find a record of their legal names. The government wanted their identity erased entirely.
BUT
To get back at what I was saying about the hero merchandizing
The government tried to pretend the heroes didn’t exist, but they couldn’t shut out the media. It was the media who popularized Pro Heroes, who broadcasted their fights, who showed the world how brave they were!
People couldn’t help but be fascinated. The love for heroes grew and grew. The government tried to get them to shut up, but they couldn’t! There were illegal websites everywhere, recording of their fights, anonymous testimonies… It was huge.
So the government backpedaled and decided to work with the media. Heroes were glorified. Suddenly, they were a proof than Quirked people were accepted, loved, admired. Heroes weren’t just scary weapons anymore: they were a story with an appealing narrative.
Antares:
Hum. Let me guess. They were portrayed as lone, self-sacrificing individuals who were trying to bring peace to the country?
Not a word about their exploitation, the number of deaths, or the injustice in the country which started the riots in the first place?
Moxie:
You’re so cynical
The government isn’t like that anymore (or at least I hope!)
But yes, it was like that. The Japanese government (and later, the other governments that took inspiration from them, like the US) was just trying to turn a few quirked people into larger-than-life sensations in order to stop the violent riots.
And it worked! The riots concluded more quickly and peacefully than those in other Asian countries. Sure, heroes hadn’t put an end to violence, they just halted it. Crime still exists after all. But they couldn’t have done that without the media and the narrative they created.
Antares:
… And that’s the basis for the whole merchandizing we have now.
Moxie:
Kind of! The Japanese government recognized the potential of the system that they had created… So they started recruiting people who possessed powerful quirks, but also a good image.
The haters would say: Flashy and marketable powers to look good on TV! Unfair!
BUT that was part of the appeal. Society was terrified of Quirks. They needed to have Quirked people to love and admire, or it would have all dissolved into violence. That’s why popularity count so much in the ranking. It’s a legacy of that time of terror. Heroes are legally allowed to use incredible destructive powers: they need to have the approval of society, or they have no legitimacy.
Antares:
You know, my best friend says that the purpose of heroes isn’t to stop villainy, it’s to make the people feel safe
For me it’s more like: the purpose of heroes is to stops villainy so the people feel safe
But knowing that about the dawns of heroes, I wonder if it’s not him who’s right about the purpose of heroes.
Anyway… The system is still fucked up.
And it would be good to have a Quirkless hero to remind people that heroism is about action, not about the show you put on with flashy powers.
________________
Anyway. Toki understood how the popularity of heroes was important. But it had been a different time. This commoditization of heroism and Quirks was still felt strongly today, and it didn’t sit well with her. During the riots, sure, the heroes had been peaceful in comparison to the violent crisis shaking the whole country. But now, the word had changed. And the legitimacy of Heroes shouldn’t be based on how marketable they were. Being popular wasn’t the same as being good. It was a shame that these days, the two were easily confused.
Someone should do something, she thought. But she knew that thinking like that wasn’t very helpful. When someone said ‘someone should do something’, they rarely continued to said ‘and that someone is me’. Toki wanted to, though. She wanted to change things. Make the world a little smarter, a little kinder.
Maybe she would be able to, as Quantum. She would have fame and power, wasn’t that a good start? But she would still be part of the problem, a flashy hero with a marketable Quirk. That was why it felt so important to help Moxie become a hero. Because… because Toki had been handled the right tools to be a hero. But it had been luck and genetics. That calling, that faith, the proof that people could be smarter and kinder and could make the world be so… it was in Moxie’s Quirklessness, in her determination, in her cleverness and in her bravery. Moxie had the heart of a hero more than Toki did.
It wouldn’t make Toki a less adequate hero. So what if she was a scholar before being a warrior? She was still a fighter. Qualities were no less worthy because you have to actively choose to perform them. If anything, the worthiness lied in the act of choosing.
Still. Toki wondered. Maybe Moxie would have been happier with a warp Quirk. And maybe Toki would have been… maybe not happier… but less stressed, less crushed by expectations, if she had been born Quirkless.
But if she had been born Quirkless, many doors would have closed. Maybe Sayuri would have abandoned her. Maybe she wouldn’t have, but Meteor wouldn’t have accepted her in his gang, either, and Toki would have spent her days locked in the appartement, never tasting freedom, never studying stars and Quirks. She wouldn’t have been able to send her notes to the police, she wouldn’t have been able to escape. She wouldn’t have to fear AFO but she wouldn’t have been able to defend herself from other ill-intentioned adults.
She wouldn’t have saved Mihoko-san and baby Hitoshi. She wouldn’t have met Kameko-san and Mera-san, and been taken in by the HPSC. She would never have met Keigo. She would never have decided to be a hero. She would have kept her gaze locked on the stars, but she wouldn’t have had any special allowance to study advanced topics.
Toki’s Quirk had brought her many problems. It had placed a target on her back, had given her a deadly heart condition, and had robbed her of most of her childhood. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to regret it. She couldn’t quite bring herself to regret the path she had chosen, and that had been so heavily influenced by her Quirk.
Her Quirk had brought her pain, but it had also brought her joy. And for that, she could never regret it. It was part of her, just like her love of the sky.
oOoOoOo
January passed, then February. Toki and Sawayomi never resumed their Quirk training, although Toki awkwardly tried to make amends, offering to spar or to go to the skateboard park. Sawayomi brushed her off the first few times, before giving in. She was still cold and grumpy, though. Toki wouldn’t be so easily forgiven.
Toki hadn’t realized what an important part of her life Sawayomi had been until they had started drifting apart. She missed it: the comfortable conversations, the easy trust, the silent understanding, the jokes, the swears words, the shared notes and homework. They still sat together at lunch and worked together in class… but their silence was colder now, and they carefully avoided skin-to-skin contact.
Kurogumo noticed and crudely asked if they had broken up. Toki told him to get fucked, and got a detention for it. She had so much work to do, having to lose two hours of her time in detention nearly made her cry. Thankfully, the end of the school year was approaching. With any luck, her college’s workload would be lighter next year.
She felt stressed and tired. The exams were barely a month away: it was too close. Sawayomi’s coldness also took its toll. Thanks gods she still had her online friends.
________________
> PinkIsPunkRock: Somme bitch came into my theater today while I was replacing out standardist (she’s sick). The Karen started yelling for a refund immediately. Nutcase. Then I told that harpy to get the fuck out of my theater, and when she started screeching louder, I took the fire extinguisher and dozed her with it
> PinkIsPunkRock: it made her crazy vine-hairs calm the fuck down real quick at least
> PinkIsPunkRock: also, she left screaming that she was going to sue us, but we have everything on tape, we’re clear
> PinkIsPunkRock: I got yelled at by the manager for like twenty seconds, but then the steward and the costumer came down to the rescue to tell him how awful that bitch was, and in the end I wasn’t sanctioned
> PinkIsPunkRock: Conclusion: customer service sucks, even in theaters
> PinkIsPunkRocks: I mean my expectations were low, but HOLY FUCK
> PinkIsPunkRocks: thankfully it was just for one day, now I’m back to dealing with administrators and budgets and costumes
> PikaPika: welcome in the real world of douchebags customers!
> PikaPika: I don’t have lot of those though (I work at a classy bar)
> PikaPika: but those I have are either drunk or harassing girls or both, so… it balances out
> EndeavorSucks: poor you
> EndeavorSucks: If I have bad customers I just tell them to suck it up and leave them with their busted light switches
> NotOnFire: ah ah the advantage of being an electrician: people need you
> PinkIsPunkRock: I envy you so badly
> PinkIsPunkRock: ANYWAY
> PinkIsPunkRock: if any of you are in Musutafu this week there’s a play called “Rise Of All Might’s Agency” that’s actually narrated by two secretaries in his agency and it’s hilarious. Like, they walk into the office torn apart with bodies everywhere and a villain on fire laughing manically, and they’re like “that is not ideal”: when in the previous scene they spilled ink all over their keyboard and were like “God Has Abandoned This Timelime”
> NotHawks: damn I want to see it
> NotHawks: too bad I’m stuck half a country away =/
< NotQuantum: it sound tempting, but I’m kind of overbooked…
> ThisIsFluffy : oh yeah, exams coming up?
< NotQuantum: that and the rest
> NotOnFire: … the rest?
< NotQuantum: urgh
< NotQuantum: well
< NotQuantum: I have my high-school class, my college classes
< NotQuantum: and I picked up an extracurricular about heroism that takes me, oh, about four hours a week (it should be three, but since I’m studying on my own and I can’t afford any mistake I’m double-checking everything)
< NotQuantum: and I dropped karate (freeing two hours a week) to do another sport (taking me half and hour each day and double that on Saturday and Sunday)
< NotQuantum: and in addition to that, I argued with my friend at school because I couldn’t help train her Quirk anymore and now things are tense
< NotQuantum: I fucking hope that things get easier next year
< NotQuantum: I will have less work with my heroic extracurricular at least (I’m nearly at the end of the lessons)
> ThisIsFluffy: Jeez
> EndeavorSucks: take a break Stars
< NotQuantum: I cant’, the exams are just around the corner!
> PinkIsPunkRock: well, have you tried patching things up with your friend? It’s the punk-rock one, right? What happened?
< NotQuantum: Basically she has a touch-telepathy Quirk and I’ve been helping her with it. But some time ago I learned something I have to keep a secret, except that I keep thinking about it, so there a 100% probability that my friend will learn about it if we continue training. So I stopped the training.
> PikaPika: is it a bad secret or…?
< NotQuantum: nah, it’s a positive thing. But it’s very very private.
> PinkIsPunkRock: well did you tell her that?
< NotQuantum: it wouldn’t have helped
> PinkIsPunkRock: you never know, maybe she will be more understanding if she has the full picture
> NotHawks: if it’s private, it’s private, and Stars is allowed to keep secret the fact she has a secret
> NotHawks: She doesn’t have to disclose anything to be allowed to make her own decision regarding her friends, so butt off
> PikaPika: fine, calm down, the both of you
> EndeavorSucks: Take long breaks and try to relax, Stars
> PinkIsPunkRock: and if you need to talk, you can always ring me! I’m still in town, we can hang out whenever
> ThisIsFluffy: or maybe try making some new friends at school! Maybe someone outside your class, who will leave you more space than a mind-reader x)
> NotQuantum: thanks guys
________________
Yeah, things were rough these last months. The only easy thing was her Quirk training. She had to actually force herself to not go too fast.
She had fumbled a little with the precision exercises at the beginning of January, just like she had at fourteen. But she had way more time on her hand, way more focus, and so after a month or so of daily exercises, she could peel an apple perfectly. She a few days more and she could teleport water from one hand to another without spilling a single drop. She felt as if her Quirk was restless, demanding bigger and more impressive tasks.
After all, her Quirk was made to warp her body. The precision stuff was an intelligent move she had created, but it was an accessory to her main power, to what her Quirk wanted to do. And what it wanted to do was to warp.
So she did. She went to Yuhei and back without a problem. She didn’t want to risk jumping too far, but she wanted to jump more, so she started going back to her long walk in the city… Except she mostly travelled by jumps on rooftops, covering great distances in a short amount of time. At the beginning, she didn’t go very far, going home after barely an hour of rooftops adventure. But it was too exhilarating to teleport again. Or rather, to teleport on the rooftops again, mixing parkour and jumps and warping to race high in the air, defying the laws of physics with elation. She could feel her blood singing, her heart racing with excitement.
Seriously, if she didn’t have her college workload, she would have dived headfirst into Quirk training, just like in Naruto Labs, and jumped around the city for hours.
She tried to limit her crazy races in the city, of course. She had to avoid heroes, since she didn’t have a Hero License allowing her to use her Quirk in public space: that was a great incentive to stay careful. Besides, the cold winter wing bit her face and hands and he couldn’t play around too long before shivering… But she couldn’t help herself. She loved it: the race, the speed, the rapid-fire succession of teleportation-jump-acrobatics-landing that felt as natural as simply running, she loved it. Toki prided herself on being a scholar, wise and clever and curious, a perfect little Ravenclaw: but gods, she was also a fucking thrill-seeker, and she couldn’t believe she had forgotten what it was like. She felt like she was awakening after months of being half-asleep.
How could have forgotten? Keigo was the one who had wings (and whose fate could very well be to have them burned) but Toki was as much of an Icarus as him, always wanting to go faster, fly higher, defying the statistics with a manic grin until she could touch the Sun.
She loved the height, the speed, the power. The world rushed past, her muscles were bursting with energy, her heart was beating like a drum: in those moments, running and jumping and warping in bright glimmers of refracted light, she couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear, elated. Parkour was the art of crossing urban obstacle, and free-running added more swiftness to it, but what Toki was after was something more, and her Quirk was indubitably part of it. It was like a race against herself. More jumps! More power! More danger! But most of all, more speed! She wanted to be so fast she would be lightweight, her feet barely touching the ground before teleporting again, her momentum making her unstoppable. It was fucking amazing.
She was born for this, she could feel it.
Someday she could almost forget she had been reincarnated. The universe, this life, seemed so much more real than her previous one. Colors were brighter, feelings were stronger, and existence was full of exiting twists. Had she really been reborn in a fictional world? Or had she just dreamed that other universe, so dull and grey, without dreams to push her forward and without the exhilarating feeling of seeking her limits? Life was so much better here. Oh, it was more violent, more dangerous. There were high risks and sometime not so high rewards. But she had no desire to get back to the kind of cushy little life she had had before. Sure, she had been safer, so much safer. Here, there were threats everywhere. Villains could crush building at any moment. Hostage situations were almost weekly in her city alone. Fights happened every day. And when she became a pro hero… Especially side-by-side with Hawks, the future Number Three… She would only get closer to the maelstrom.
But the question wasn’t ‘am I living a life safe from harm?’ It had never been. The question was ‘am I living a life that is worth the harm?’ And Toki’s answer had ben certain from the very first day she had decided to keep her Quirk, even if it meant going into debt, even if it meant surgery, even if it mean abandoning every hope of a cushy little life safe from danger.
Yes, it was worth it. It was so, so much worth it.
She didn’t know if Mera-san was aware of her crazy races thought the city. Probably. She still wore the wristwatch with a GPS in it. But Mera-san never talked to her about reckless behavior, of going too fast, or simply of the fact that she was using her Quirk in public space. So either he didn’t know, or he knew and didn’t think it mattered as long as Toki wasn’t caught. Toki personally thought it was the later, because mid-January Mera-san once innocently dropped in the conversation that if Toki wanted some exercise, she really should go to the abandoned neighborhood at the edge of the city. He even texted her the exact coordinates. That sounded a little like a strong hint to keep her little races to herself. It also implied that Mera-san knew… and that he hadn’t exactly told his bosses about it. The HPSC was kind of a sucker about the rules, but Mera-san was wayyyyy laxer about it. Well, she wasn’t going to complain.
Besides, going to the abandoned neighborhood also made her think about some exercises that she hadn’t remembered when she had been jumping across the city: target practice.
Come on, the whole point of her precision exercises had been to help her control her Warp-Blast, because playing with vacuum and compressed air was dangerous. She couldn’t train with it in a crowded city, but here… Well. If she demolished a wall, who was going to complain?
She shouldn’t practice alone, though. Because, as she said: it was freaking dangerous. But if she dragged Mera-san here, that would be an admission of her training that he so politely pretended not to see, to leave her a little freedom (and not get dragged in her crazy shenanigans). She couldn’t exactly ask for another handler, either. That would put Mera-san in a difficult position. Kameko-san was too busy… and besides, Toki wasn’t sure that she would keep her mouth shut.
That left exactly one trustworthy adult who knew about her Quirk. So, at the beginning of February, after turning the idea in her brain for hours… Toki asked for Mihoko-san’s help.
“I might be boring,” she babbled nervously. “You just have to stand there and criticize, or maybe record some moments so I can observe them later and see what I’m doing wrong, and most of all be there if I ever go in cardiac arrest. Not that it’s a risk! The actual risk is me getting injured by rubble if I screw up my shot. Vacuum is tricky like that. But I swear I won’t train more than half an hour each day, because I’m supposed to take it easy until at least May, and…”
“Toki,” said Mihoko-san, sounding amused. “Breathe. Of course I will come with you.”
“It’s not an obligation, I would understand if you’d rather paint or spend time with Hitoshi, it’s a week-end…”
“I can paint or spend time with Hitoshi every day of the week. If you need a little help on the week-end, then I’m glad to give it. I’m honored that you asked me, actually. I was worried you were taking too much on your shoulders, so… thank you, for thinking of me.”
Toki sputtered a little:
“Wha- No, it’s me who’s supposed to thank you!”
Mihoko-san batted away her protests with a wave:
“What do you need me to do?”
“Well… Basically, there’s this technique I can use with Warp-Space where I warp a pocket of compressed air to use it as a long-range attack. But I need to warp the air from somewhere, so I create a vacuum. I need to practice with my air-bullets until I can fire with accuracy, and I need to control the creation of the vacuum so it doesn’t explode or anything. I’m only practicing at a small scale, so it won’t be too dangerous, but it’s new and I’m still technically on medical leave, so… It would be safer with a spotter.”
Mihoko-san shook her head fondly:
“Vacuum and compressed air. Only you, Toki. Alright, let’s do this! You want to train half an hour every Saturday, then?”
They worked out a schedule. Every Saturday afternoon, after dropping Hitoshi to the dojo, Mihoko would take the train and go the abandoned neighborhood where Toki trained. It was a little bit of a ride, but nothing too long. They would meet there and practice for thirty-five minutes, then Mihoko would go back, and be just in time to pick up Hitoshi after his practice. Toki would actually meet them here, and they would all go back home together to spend the evening at home. It was a good plan. Besides, it also allowed Toki to use Mihoko’s travel time to do her racing training, as she called it, without going overboard.
The actual training wasn’t… very interesting. Mihoko-san mostly looked at Toki trying to figure out how to warp air. It had been years since she had done it, and besides, she had only done it once before being asked to focus on precision exercises. It took her almost a full training session to get the hang of it. And since air was invisible, it wasn’t very spectacular. There was just a BANG when she succeeded… and a brief shimmer where the air had been taken, leaving out a vacuum.
The next day, Mihoko-san packed spray-paint. Fair enough. It was just like that time where she had showed Toki how to do graffiti art, in a way. The neighborhood was even the same. And it helped Toki relax, to know that she wasn’t constantly watched, while not being completely alone.
So. Now, the main task… master her Warp-Blast. How the fuck was she supposed to do that?
The principle was to teleport a pocket of air from somewhere on her body, to her hand, and launch it. If the pocket she warped was the size of her head, and she warped it in a space the size of her fist, it compressed the air, and it fired like an airgun. Well, that was the theory at least. Because controlling the direction the bullet was supposed to go was… a little more difficult. Compressed air had a tendency to decompress in every direction.
So Toki had to make the… invisible warping membrane on her body, the thing that allowed her to warp stuff… a little thinner in one point where she warped the ball of compressed air? It didn’t seem feasible. What were her other options? When she had made her first successful attempts, she had sent her air-bullet like a canon-ball in one direction, but how had she done that? By pushing in one direction, mentally? It didn’t seem quite right…
The solution came to her after almost a dozen tries. It wasn’t just her will that played. It was momentum.
Toki knew she could warp her momentum with her when she was falling. She had also tried teleporting with objects and launching them away from her, because she converted her own momentum in the act of throwing something. Well, the same principle applied to her air-blast. Good news: it meant that now, she had figured how to fire. Bad news: she still had to work on her aim. Also, it was a weakness of this technique. It meant that she couldn’t fire Warp-Blast without moving, whether it was running, jumping up and down, or just throwing something: she had to start a movement to warp the kinetic energy from that gesture into a kinetic force pushing her Warp-Blast in a certain direction.
Second problem, now: the vacuum. More specifically, the fact that she created a vacuum each time she fired a Blast… And that said vacuum produced its own effects. Like sucking up everything around it to fill the vacuum, creating unpredictable air currents. Or, more often than not, making Toki stumble with the impact, because the vacuum was against her skin, and the air pressure vanishing from that area was strong enough to make her stumble.
But now, it was March. And it meant that Toki had to put that problem on the backburner to focus on her exams.
The end-of-year exam weren’t very difficult, this year. Or at least, the high-school ones. Toki fell a little in the class’s ranking (she went from third place last year, to seventh place this year), but it didn’t bother her… much. Privately, she thought it was really the limit. There was no way she would allow herself to drop more. She was used to be the best, after all.
The college exams were a lot more difficult. Honestly, Toki had to pull several all-nighters and cut herself from all social life in order to frenetically study for the exams until she felt ready. And even them, she still exited the exam room feeling as if she had been steamrolled and turned into a pancake. The good news was that she had passed all of her courses, so YES, she had passed the second year of her Bachelor’s degree, YEAH! But some of her grades were barely above average. Like, Toki rarely had a grade under 16/20… But she had barely scrapped a 12/20 on computer science… And, worse, she only had 10/20 on quantum mechanics. For someone whose hero name was supposed to be Quantum, it was the heigh of irony.
Seriously, trying to juggle Quirk training plus high-school plus college plus heroic studies (because she was still studying Emiko’s notes as if it was a real class, and in addition to that she did her best to dig deeper with Moxie, as a kind of self-study oh heroics) plus a social life… it was crazy.
At least she had Emiko’s final notes and some experience about it thanks to the HPSC, so she could ingest in a few weeks the equivalent of a year of classes, but still. It took valuable time. For example… Toki had fuzzy memories of learning about some civil court cases about heroic blunder and excess of brutality. But to pass the class (or whatever theorical test she would be given at eighteen) she needed to know the date, the circumstances, the final decision of the jury, the name of people involved, the societal consequences of the jurisprudence. It could have been interesting, but the legal language was so dry and bland! Really, Toki could never have studied law. It was too tedious.
Anyway, her schedule was packed. Next year would be more or less of the same, which filled her with apprehension. Oh, she would spend less time on heroic studies (she would have finished Emiko’s notes in a few months anyway). But she would have to train her Quirk more. And with her classes in addition to that…
Wait, maybe she could flunk her university classes. Not all of them, of course, but one, maybe two. It would force her to repeat the failed classes next year, and so she would get her Bachelor’s degree a year later but… It would be better, on paper. If Toki Hoshizora got her Bachelor’s degree in one year instead of three, it would look like she was a genius, sure, but it would still raise less eyebrows that if it was revealed that she had passed her Bachelor’s degree before graduating high-school. Toki’s civiliansona was supposed, after all, have all the time in the world after high-school to pursue her academic interests, instead of rushing to complete them before being shuffled in heroic work.
She couldn’t wait until graduation. Once she would be a hero, she could rest a little… And yes, she was aware of the irony.
But when she would be a hero… She wouldn’t be alone, would she? Not like she was here, without being able to talk about her problems with Sawayomi, and without the full attention of Mera-san. She was leaning tentatively on Mihoko-san, but she couldn’t burden her with her problems.
When she would be a hero… When she would be Quantum… She would never be alone again. She would have Keigo by her side. Maybe Kameko-san. A bunch of sidekicks. Hayasa-sensei, if Toki managed to find him and convince him to join their agency. Oh, yes, fully becoming Quantum would have a price. A hazardous job, a three billion yens debt, and all the dangers that came with jumping headfirst in the main canon-intrigue, however twisted and disrupted it was.
But Toki wouldn’t be alone. She would be loved, cared for, supporter. And for that, well. She was willing to make that jump, and see what happened.
(She had always been Icarus as much as Keigo, anyway.)
Notes:
Hope you liked it !
It's a little slow, but we're approaching the end of the high-school arc... Brace yourself for incoming heroism ! Only one year of school left ! That's just two chapters !
Also, kudos for those who guessed WHO Moxie is x) I left tons of clues !
The little bit about the Titanic, the Carpathia and the California, is from a famous Tumblr text post that makes me cry every single time i read it. And i read it at least four times now. It's by https://mylordshesacactus.tumblr.com/ and it's beautiful.
Chapter 20: Love is in the air
Summary:
Toki knew she was a in love. She would have to be deaf, blind, and completely lack self-awareness to ignore it. The point was: she hadn't intented to act on it.
Well. You know what they say about best laid plans.
Notes:
SO MANY THINGS TO TELL. So, in this chapter, there will be : several coming-out, mention of Lady Nagant, Toki being crushed by teenage existential dread, and ROMANCE. Beware =)
Also : Toki has been described as a funky little ball of pondrances and i am sohere for this.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
LOVE IS IN THE AIR
Toki’s third and final year at Yūei started with letters from the HPSC. They wanted her to send the design for her costume. Toki had until October to submit her ideas.
She started by sending a few written directives: she wanted a bodysuit and a jacket, most of all. Then she had a plethora of requirements about the exact resistance of the material and how she needed boots and gloves reinforced for fighting. She had daydreamed about her costume for years, but she didn’t have a definitive design yet. She also had a few sketches for Hawks’ outfit, but… well. It was Keigo’s choice. Maybe he would stick to his canon-costume. Gods knew that some of the designs Toki had worked on when they were kids had been bloody stupid.
(But some others were straight-up awesome, like the one based on the Black and White Eagle-Hawk. Black boots, baggy white pants, black shirt, a black coat doubled with white fur, and a bright orange visor. Wasn’t that cool? It was a real shame that Keigo had no sense of style. Really, she loved him but his fashion sense was atrocious. He liked beige and brown and he owned flame-patterned underwear. Loser.)
Anyway. Besides thinking about her hero costume… Toki had to prepare a lot of stuff, especially the Hero License Exam right after her actual exams. Which mean getting back to the high-level athlete shape she had been in at fourteen, which needed a lot of time and careful planning.
Good news: she had finished Emiko’s notes and was all caught up on the theory of heroism! It had taken her a lot of time, but those hours had been well-spent. The Hero License Exam usually had a theorical test for people who took it without passing by a hero school that took care of that. Toki wasn’t naïve enough to hope that she would get a free pass because she had been raised by the HPSC. Maybe the Vice-President would go for it, but nitpicking people like Okamoto would never let that happen. Too perfectionist. Too mean, also.
So, without her self-assigned heroic-class… If she reduced her college study-time by a third (she elected to fail two class, of the six she took: it would be enough for her to fail the year without having to work too hard next year to pass her Bachelor’s degree)… And if you took in account the fact that she had finished about half the high-school curriculum, and that without math/physics/science/chemistry she barely spent three hours a day in a classroom… Well. It was doable.
Toki carefully selected her college courses. The four classes that interested her were astrophysics, advanced mathematics, dynamics physics, and quantum mechanics, just like last year. The two classes she had decided to fail would be general engineering and spatial mechanics. There, settled. It made for twelve hours of class each week, with about four to five hours of independent studies to stay on top of things… Yeah, she could fit that in her schedule no problem. She would leave Yūei a little late, if she used their library to work, but it would do. That way, she would completely separate the Hoshizora-work (academics) from the Quantum-work (Quirk training, parkour, Quirk analysis online, general preparations for getting back in the game). And she would still have a little time in the evening and on Sunday to relax and chat with her friends! Perfect.
She would have to slow down her study sessions with Moxie, but the girl looked like she was handling her training well. She wasn’t an enthusiastic athlete like Toki, but she did practice with determination. Moxie was really preparing herself to go to Yūei with every advantage possible. Toki had forwarded her Emiko’s notes, annotated with her own observations. She couldn’t so much more. In the end, it was Moxie’s journey, not Toki’s.
April passed. It was Pride Month, a fact that had eluded Toki since pretty much always, but apparently this year there was a parade in town. Toki didn’t join, however. She was too busy studying. But it made her wonder if Sachiko was there. How many of her friends were there, how many would fit in, how much she would fit in.
Toki had never really thought much about her sexuality. She was attracted to Keigo, sure, but she found plenty of others people attractive. Sachiko, for starters. Or even Sawayomi, and boys was Toki glad to have that revelation after they ended their Quirk training. Kameko-san, too… Wait, all of those were girls. But Toki was in love with a boy. Did that make her a bisexual by default? Or maybe she was demisexual? Or simply straight but with too much appreciation for the female body because of society’s brainwashing about femininity being an object of desire? Urgh. Putting a label on yourself was too complicated.
Problem was: Toki wasn’t the kind of person who, faced with a too-complicated answer, would settle for some half-backed truth and said ‘meh, good enough’. She always wanted to dig deeper, to ask questions, to experiment, to know.
She knew how Keigo made her feel. How he made her happy, made her feel safe, made her feel understood and cared for, made her feel hopeful and nervous and clumsy and powerful at the same time. How it made her want to make him happy, like a fixed point in the universe. How it made her terrified of something happening to him, how it made her fierce and proud to see how strong he was, how it made her elated at the thought of fighting by his side. How it made her write poetry because she didn’t trust spoken words to reflect the depth of her feelings.
No word is strong
yet gentle enough
to convey what I feel for you.
Maybe she wouldn’t have fallen in love with him if they hadn’t been raised side by side. If they hadn’t had been two kids stuck together in a facility full of adults and mostly devoid of warmth. They had both been so lonely. Then they had each other, and they had grown together like young vines leaning against one another for support, now so intertwined that separating them would be like amputation.
Toki was a scholar. She liked to have neat little definitions for everything. She knew what love was supposed to be, what friendship was supposed to be, what family and romance and brother in arms and best friend and soulmate and partner were supposed to be. But Keigo was all of it while simultaneously not fitting any definition at all.
Those eyes of you
could swallow stars, galaxies and universes.
What hope
did I ever have?
Keigo was The Most Important Person of her world… but Toki still had trouble defining what it was. Romantic love, for sure, although slapping the label ‘romantic’ on the trust and devotion she felt seemed excessively simplistic. But if that was love, what about all of her confused feelings about pretty girls and pretty boys? Was it attraction or crushes? Or simply appreciation? It was hard to measure anything to the mass of all compassing feelings she had toward Keigo. There was surely trust and affection, and desire and camaraderie, but everything was so tangled she didn’t know what kind of feeling she had towards other people she was attracted to. She didn’t even know if finding people aesthetically pleasing meant that she was attracted to them for real!
Anyway.
So Toki asked on her Discord who was straight. Turned out, not many. EndeavorSucks was gay, and so was Sachiko. ThisIsFluffy was AroAce and transgender (which suddenly explained why EndeavorSucks had once said they had enough to make a whole parade). PikaPika was demisexual, probably, but mostly uninterested in sex/gender/relationship. Keigo used the occasion to nonchalantly said he was bi, which everyone could have seen coming. Toki had a little freak-out about it, because if he knew that, then she was supposed to be able to figure it out too, they had been raised the same way, they should have the same database, right? Anyway, she had a small existential crisis. Everybody she knew was queer. Basically only NotOnFire was straight, but he was on thin fucking ice with how often he was flirting with gay NPC during their DnD parties.
The DnD adventures were still going strong, by the way. ThisIsFluffy had died once and the whole party had to go on a side-quest to revive her character… meanwhile her ghost followed them, invisible but able to talk in their dreams or to possess animals, which could lead to very creepy nightmares or highly comedic moments when she tried a game of mime while possessing a squirrel. And of course, their group’s main topic of conversation was if their characters were straight, the answers being a resounding NO.
In the downside, Toki didn’t really get a clear answer about how you could know if you were definitely attracted to both genders. On the flipside, her dilemma made Sachiko laugh, and the older girl invited her on a date the following week-end.
Well. That was… unexpected. But Toki still had a tiny crush on Sachiko, her pink hair and her unwavering confidence, so she accepted. A friendly date. If that was a thing. And so, on Saturday, Toki ended up at a cat-café, nervously straightening her buns while Sachiko was happily chatting about her day, guiding her toward her favorite seat.
Come on, she was seventeen and she had lived before, she could totally handle a date. Right? Right. No need to freak out!
“Have you seriously never been on a date before?” Sachiko teased her while they sat.
“Is it so hard to believe?” the younger girl muttered.
“Kinda. You’re very cute, you’re smart, and you have a good sense of humor. Hell, if I wasn’t dating Emiko back then, I would have probably asked you out. You were —and still are— straight up adorable.”
Toki turned red and made a noise like a car trying to restart. Sachiko laughed:
“Relax, I’m not proposing. Oh! Is it about that? Are you saving yourself for The One?”
They were barely five minutes in this date and Toki already wanted to sink through the floor. She groaned, putting her head in her hands to hide how her face was turning crimson in embarrassment.
“I’m not saving anything! Virginity is a construct anyway. I just never had the time. I’m passing my Bachelor’s degree in high-school, it barely leaves me a few hours to hang out online. And I never really fell for anyone in Musutafu, so…”
“Well,” smirked Sachiko. “I didn’t ask about your virginity, but thanks for the info.” Toki sank lower in her seat, mortified. Her friend patted her arm good-naturally before growing serious. “But you know, you don’t have to fell in love with someone to go one a date with them. Or to go out with them. Or to have sex with them. It’s not a requirement.”
“It would feel dishonest…”
Sachiko raised an eyebrow:
“Towards who? Because if they know you’re both on the same page, there is no problem. Emiko and I, we knew we didn’t want to get married or anything, just have a good time and be close to someone during high-school. It’s not like we promised anything else to each other. Or to anyone else,” Sachiko added after a pause, looking pointedly at her.
The Discord members knew that NotQuantum and NotHawks were childhood friends, separated for a few years, but still close. Toki was fairly confident none of them had read too much in their relationship. None of them, except Sachiko, of fucking course. She had a true talent to stumble on the best-hidden secrets. She didn’t even dig for it, she was just very intuitive and good at reading people.
“I didn’t promise anything to anyone else,” Toki sighed. “It’s juts… Alright, spit it out. What do you think is going on with me?”
Sachiko put her chin on her hand, and stared at her for several seconds.
“I think you and NotHawks are some kind-of star-crossed lovers,” she finally said. “Or at least you think of yourself that way, even if the word ‘lover’ freezes you like any teenager with too much hormones and an undeveloped pre-frontal cortex. You aren’t in a relationship, but you want to be. Don’t think I didn’t notice how he went completely silent after I invited you on a date, or how you have that high-pitched nervous giggle each time his freaking character in DnD rolled the dices to seduce some NPC. I figure you’ve been joined at the hip since you were kids, and that was it, there was no one else… Then you moved to Musutafu just in time for teenagerhood to hit you like a train. Hormones, attractive people, and distance to add a little flavor. And now you’re twisting yourself into knots about your sexuality because you’ve been away from him for years, you have noticed other people, and you’re trying to figure out what is love and what is attraction.”
Toki opened her mouth, then closed it. It was… it was so spot-on that it was unnerving.
“That is honestly scary. Have you ever thought about working in investigative journalism?”
“Nah, I’ve no talent for storytelling. I’m a busybody, that’s all. I could be a good therapist, I guess, but I’ve been told I’m too blunt. So, tell me about what your crisis!”
Toki rolled her eyes, but complied. Who else was she going to talk to? At least Sachiko was her friend, relatively close to her age, and kept the conversation light instead of diving into darker topics. Like how Toki was supposed to manage a love life with her tremendous workload. Or if Toki wasn’t traumatized by the fact that her parents had been so obviously in love and had thought it a convenient excuse to hurt a lot of people (herself included) because they were locked in their little fantasy. Or how being a hero was usually incompatible with having a balanced, happy love life.
So Toki started speaking, and the date went on. It was a strange date, spent dissecting how one of the two parties involved was interested in other people than the other party in said date, but well, both Sachiko and Toki were plenty strange to start with. Besides, as the pink-haired girl had said: as long as they were on the same page, it was completely fine to break the rules of how things were supposed to go.
Toki talked about what she liked about Keigo, while trying to not talk about Keigo at all (because hey, secret identity and all that), which mostly made her talk about her. Then she talked about what she liked in others people… which led to lot of sputtering when Sachiko effortlessly guessed that Toki was talking about her when she spoke about ‘pretty hair’ and ‘inspiring confidence’. Busted. Anyway, Toki also spoke about Sawayomi, all rough edges and fierce loyalty, with a core of steel and a deep hurt in her heart. And about Kameko-san, pretty and energetic, who managed to get everything she wanted while making it look easy, and who was so damn nice and optimistic without ever seeming insincere.
Sachiko and Toki continued their date, still talking. Not only about Toki’s crushes and he issues with love and attraction, though. They talked about what it meant to be queer, about the LGBT’s history in Japan (not great), about laws and prejudices. About marriage, about partnership, about codependent relationships, toxic ones, healthy ones. Toki vaguely alluded to her parents being more enamored with each other than with the well-being of their daughter, then quickly closed the subject by implying they were dead.
They left the cat café after a while, and wandered to a supermarket. They browsed around clothes, make-up, or books. Sachiko actually had to physically drag Toki away from the library, which they had a good laugh about afterward. They went to the park to eat some ice-cream while sitting in the sun, as if it was a proper date.
Was it a proper date, actually? Toki pondered the question and decided that actually, yes. They were friends, they went on a date. It wouldn’t lead to anything serious (or rather, anything at all), but they still had a good time getting out together, spending time talking with undertones that were a little more than just friendly. So yeah. A date.
Sachiko even opened the doors for her like a true gentleman. Toki playfully kicked her in the shin, but her friend only laughed.
When it was time for it to end, Sachiko walked her back to her apartment complex. As much as Toki had been anxious at the beginning, she had relaxed. She now felt a little jittery for a whole other reason. How were dates supposed to end, anyway? With a goodnight kiss at the door? Not that Toki would be opposed to kissing Sachiko, but… Did that still fall under the terms of their agreement? Did Sachiko even want to kiss Toki?
“I can still hear you overthinking,” Sachiko teased her.
“Sorry,” Toki apologized, rubbing her neck nervously. “It’s kind of my default mode. Hmmm, for what it’s worth I had a great time.”
“Great!” Sachiko beamed. “And you feel more confident about who you are and what you are attracted to?”
“… Yeah,” Toki said after a pause, realizing it was true. “I am, actually. Thank you for, you know, listening to my rambling and… being my test-date. If I wasn’t already kind of committed to my studies,” and to someone else, although Toki had enough tact not to say that out loud, “I would probably ask you out— So I guess that settles it: I’m definitely bi.”
Sachiko chuckled softly: “Some people don’t need to do actual run-test before being sure of their sexuality, you know.”
“Well, those people are more in touch with their feelings than I am, I suppose.”
“True! Even a genius like you can’t be awesome at everything. You would be too powerful if you could study astrophysics as a leisure hobby and be well-adjusted emotionally.” Then Sachiko clapped her hands and grinned: “So! We absolutely don’t have to, but if you want to go the extra-mile in this test-date, there’s the goodnight kiss. What are your thoughts on that?”
Toki immediately flushed red, and her eyes dropped to Sachiko’s lips. Her heartbeat rocketed up, her whole body lighting up with something like giddy nervousness. The idea was… tempting. Actually, she couldn’t think of a good reason why she shouldn’t do it. It was, in some way, much less intimidating than talking about the tangled mess of her feelings and about her definition of self.
“I’m not opposed to it,” she squeaked.
Sachiko laughed softly, then leaned down, slowly, raising Toki’s chin with her finger to get the right angle. Toki’s heart was hammering in her chest. She was suddenly hyperaware of her hands hanging uselessly at her side, shouldn’t she try and touch Sachiko? Maybe hold on her waist or—
… and they were kissing, and it was fine, it was good, it was soft and pleasant and Toki had been worried for nothing, actually.
It was only a soft press of lips, at first, then Sachiko moved back just a little, and maybe Toki instinctively chased her mouth, eyes closed, but suddenly they were kissing again. It was soft and warm and comforting, but there was a spark of pleasant tension, like a low electric current thrumming under their skins. The potential for more, just there, making Toki’s heart beat faster. Seconds passed, maybe minutes, kissing and breathing and kissing again, softly then not-so-softly then slowly again, until Sachiko breathed deeply and took a half-step-back.
“Just checking,” the pink-haired girl whispered, and Toki tried to not notice that her eyes were a little darker and her voice a little lower, “you’re still don’t want to date me?”
Toki let out a bark of startled laughter:
“That is so manipulative of you to ask that question now, of all times!”
“Can’t fault a girl for being smart,” Sachiko winked.
But she also took a step back and the cold air rushed in the space being their bodies. The moment had broken. Toki’s heart was still beating a little wildly, her lips tingled, and she felt pleasantly buzzed… but her head was clearer and she could see Sachiko had been right to put on the brakes. It was a friendly date, after all. They could flirt and tease and kiss, but in the end, they had to leave on completely platonic, friendly terms.
And they did. They kissed once again, then said goodbye, and then Sachiko left with a cocky smile and a skip in her steps. She probably felt very proud of herself. She could be, Toki realized with amusement: even if it was a one-time thing, it had been a great date.
________________
> PinkIsPunkRock: Yo
> ThisIsFluffy: SHE’S HERE
> ThisIsFluffy: HOW DID IT GO, HOW DID IT GO?!
> EndeavorSucks: oh shit today was the date day wasn’t it?!?!
> NotOnFire: the what
> PikaPika: did you fucking forget
> PikaPika: Pink was supposed to ravish Stars today
> NotOnFire: WHAT?!
> PinkIsPunkRock: hey, there was no ravishing planned, it was just a date
< NotQuantum: also ravishing sound old-fashioned, and virginity is a construct
> ThisIsFluffy: VIRGINITY?!
> NotOnFire: can we even talk about virginity if it’s between two girls
> PinkIsPunkRock: well it depends on your definition
> PinkIsPunkRock: I personally define the fact of losing your virginity as ‘achieving an orgasm during sexual intercourse with another person’, which doesn’t exclude w/w intercourse
> PinkIsPunkRock: of course with this definition the true question is: how do straight girls ever lose their virginity?
> EndeavorSucks: SHOTS FIRED
> PikaPika: do you need ice for that burn, only-straight-guy of the chan?
> NotOnFire: fine, I will shut up x)
> ThisIsFluffy: ANWSER ME
> ThisIsFluffy: HOW DID IT GO @NotQuantum ?!
< NotQuantum: it was good. We went to a cat café and we ate ice-cream
> PinkIsPunkRock: yeah and I spend about 40% of the date listening to Stars wax lyrical about things she found attractive in other people, which was a novel experience for me.
< NotQuantum: you didn’t have to tell that part
> EndeavorSucks: … did you spend your time telling your date that others people are hot, Stars? Because that’s bad etiquette.
> PinkIsPunkRock: oh no, we also spoke a lot about queer history and others serious topic
> PinkIsPunkRock: and self-confidence issues and how Stars has trouble understanding how superficial attraction works when her only reference point is the One True Love
< NotQuantum: THANK YOU Pink you can Stop Talking ANYTIME NOW
> EndeavorSucks: how that sound heavy
> NotOnFire: xDDDDD
> EndeavorSucks: did you kiss?!
> PikaPika: … are you actually shipping them like some 12yo with his favorite manga characters?
> EndeavorSucks: shut the fuck up
> PinkIsPunkRock: ahah
> PinkIsPunkRock: nah we didn’t
> PinkIsPunkRock: but on the plus side Stars now know she is attracted to both genders, and I know what her type is
> NotHawks: you do?
< NotQuantum: you do?
> PinkIsPunkRock: pretty, confident, dangerous, optimistic, and secretly soft =)
< NotQuantum: … uh
< NotQuantum: that, uh. That sound about right.
________________
oOoOoOo
Life went on. Figuring out her sexuality and getting her first kiss could have been life-changing, maybe, and in some way, Toki had almost expected it to. But no, it was just… something she had done. Now when she thought about kissing or about attraction, well, instead of floundering in the dark, she actually had references to look up. So. Not unimportant, but not life-changing either. It was just a stepping stone in the ever-lasting task of figuring how to be yourself and becoming a confident adult with Life Experience.
Toki was seventeen and half. In a few months she would be eighteen. A whole ass AdultTM. That was… awfully intimidating to think about.
There was no magical switch appearing when you turned eighteen to make you feel confident in your skin and in your skills. You didn’t feel ready when you turned adult. You didn’t even feel adult. It wasn’t a level-up. Real life didn’t work like that. There was just a pile of experiences that came with age, and… the more time passed, the more you thought when confronted to a task: ‘oh, I’ve done this before’. And that was it, that was what being adult felt like. Having done this before. Floundering less and less about more and more stuff.
Or at least Toki supposed so. If a magical confidence switch appeared on her eighteenth birthday, she wouldn’t say no.
Anyway. Keigo hadn’t been weird after Toki and Sachiko’s date. He had almost immediately guessed that The Kiss had happened though, so Toki wondered if she was too transparent or if he really knew her that well. When she asked him about it, he just laughed on the phone, and said lightly ‘nah, it’s just that you usually go for what you want’, and uh. That was another thing they had in common.
They went for what they wanted, even if they had to take the long way around, like having heart surgery and a medical leave of three fucking years. But they were both too driven to give up a goal only because it was hard.
It was funny, in retrospect, to think of how much she had in common with Keigo. Not just at their core but also in their hero personas, in how they interacted with the world. Hawks and Quantum were both part of Keigo and Toki (or rather, Keigo and Toki were part of Hawks and Quantum) but their heroic personas were strikingly similar. Or at least Toki could see how her persona was similar to canon-Hawks. Using humor to deflect, laughing it off when someone tried to assert dominance, pretending success was easy while working their ass off, hiding cold ruthlessness behind a warm smile, scheduling themselves to the gills to fit several days of work in twenty-four hours and go faster, always faster.
So. May passed. Toki continued studying diligently. She didn’t go on another date with Sachiko. She used a little of her free time to go at the skateboard park with Sawayomi, because it had been ages and it was nice to compete with an old friend. She still spent her Saturday afternoons in the ghost neighborhood, running around then training with her Warp-Blast until her aim was perfect.
She had done baseball for a full year, for fuck’s sake, it shouldn’t be so hard. Mihoko-san said she was too harsh on herself, and alright, Toki always managed to hit her target, now. But Mihoko-san should see that good wasn’t enough. If Toki fired a blast as compact as a bullet, then it needed to be as precise as a fucking sniper. She couldn’t afford to hit slightly to the left when she was standing ten meters away. She had to get it perfectly right.
Also she was also working on another move with compressed air. Instead of firing it from a distance, she could fire it from point blank rang in time with a punch, to make it look like if she punched super-hard. But she would have to blast wider area with less compressed air, and… yeah. That needed more precision exercises. Again.
In June, the HPSC’s President (the old and terrifying Genryusai) quietly passed away in his sleep.
It didn’t make the news. It happened almost secretly. But it was a big shift of power, so Toki got a call from Kameko-san who was almost bustling from excitement. The President had been the one to implement the ‘sponsoring program’ in Naruto Labs. He had also completely transformed the institution’s structure. His death marked the end of an era. He’d been a stern and ruthless man, but extremely efficient.
He’d led the HPSC from the heroic Silver Age and into the Golden Age, after all. Many praised All Might for society’s change, but All Might was just one man. He hadn’t changed the laws, encouraged the media, created the Tartarus Prison, and pushed for reforms. That had been a group effort, and it certainly wasn’t All Might (good-natured, a bit clueless, terribly bad at social clues All Might) who’d coordinated it.
But in a way, it was good thing that the President was passing the mantle. Toki was almost sure he would have retired anyway. AFO was (presumed) dead, and All Might still going strong, so the society was at no risk of collapsing and could now go on a more peaceful age. The world didn’t need a ruthless Genryusai heading the shadowy organization that coordinated heroes. The world needed someone calm, someone whose default mode wasn’t ‘the only good enemy is a dead one’.
Yeah, in that metaphor, the President was kind of Mad-Eye Moody in the Harry Potter saga. Great in a war, with a cold-blooded personality and no second-thought about getting his hands dirty. Kind of unsettling during peace, though.
But in that metaphor, the Vice-President (Genmei-san) was… well… Dumbledore. Good strategic mind. Always stayed on top of the wacky plots going on in her turf. Uncannily well-informed. Way less intimidating than a cold-blooded killer. Absolutely loathed murder, even for the greater good. Could stand strong against assholes and bigots. Powerful. Those were all good points.
But Genmei-san always pretended to be nicer than she really was, and that was a bad point.
Toki didn’t like it: the uncertainty, the fact that if (when) it would be time to cut loose, she wouldn’t see it coming because Genmei-san wouldn’t give her a fair warning, she would just start plotting behind her back instead of bringing her in the confidence. Oh, she didn’t think that Genmei-san was corrupt. If memory served, the Meta Liberation Army had killed her in canon, so that was a serious point in her favor. But… well. Genmei-san would do the right call for the greater good when push came to shove, sure, and she would probably be sad about sending a young hero get killed. But she wouldn’t have the guts to be upfront about it. She would try and tell the young hero he was going to win anyway, because she believed it was kinder for people to die fighting for what they believed rather than knowingly going to their death.
Or so Toki supposed. Genmei-san had always been nice, supportive even. She had never coerced them in anything. Using persuasion and bribes wasn’t the same as using force and threats, anyway. But she hadn’t beaten about the bush about betting on Toki and Keigo, either, and Toki knew what that meant. Not only because she had been trained for it, but because she remembered the canon. Some parts stood up more vividly than others. Like the one where Hawks got almost burned alive.
Anyway. Genryusai-sama died. Genmei-san became President. There was no ceremony or anything, but the following week, everyone in the HPSC got an email. Toki supposed the heroes were informed, too. She wondered if All Might had known what it meant. She wondered if he knew, if he had been informed of the fact that he owned a lot of his success to Genryusai. Probably not. It would make All Might so sad and bitter to realize that it wasn’t the purity of his ideals that had brought a new era to Japan, but rather a lot of money tossed to journalists and informants so they could corral him towards the strongest villains and spin the story how they liked.
This change at the HPSC didn’t perturb Toki’s routine anyway. She still worked her ass off to keep up with her studies, trained with her Quirk, spend time with her friends, and hung out at the Shinsō’s appartement on the week-ends. She went to the hospital for a last check-up, too. Apparently no further corrective surgery was needed, which was a plus. But by now it had been asserted with certainty that the light-show side-effect of her Quirk would never go, and just as she had guessed, it had to do with her new heart’s rejection of photons. Dr Shinsō had showed her a picture of her new heart during her first corrective surgery (gross) and it had looked a little shiny, almost as if it was wet. Dr Shinsō said that it wasn’t a film of fluid, but simply the heart’s surface that was naturally reflective. By now, since the heart had fully integrated in her body, it was probably twice as shiny. If someone cut open her chest, the heart would basically glow. That was a seriously disturbing visual.
Anyway. Her new heart was fine. Her diet had to be adjusted a little and she had to ban red meat from her usual regime, which was a crying shame. On the plus-side, she was encouraged to eat more sugar, especially before and after training. That meant she had a free pass to eat her favorite lemon candies. Yeah.
July came, as did the holidays. Like every year, Toki had free reign over how she would spend the first month, and then for the second she would see Keigo again at summer camps. This year, though, she was briefly tempted to ask if Keigo could come here, in Musutafu.
She was going to leave in a few months, but… this place… and who Toki had been here… it had become important to her. She wanted to share it with Keigo, even just once, before having to say goodbye. She wanted him to meet Sachiko and maybe Sawayomi. She wanted to show him the skateboard park and her favorite cat-café. She wanted to bring him to the ghost neighborhood so they could race on the rooftops.
She wanted to introduce him to the Shinsō family.
They didn’t replace her birth parents but… but… Toki was self-aware enough to know she was getting too comfortable around them. She talked with Mihoko-san about her grades, about art, about dancing, about skateboard and rollerblades, innocently begging for interest and validation like a needy stray cat. Mihoko-san wasn’t Sayuri. No amount of compliments, reassurances and easy banter could make Toki’s issues about her mom disappear. But she was… she was projecting, maybe. She didn’t even know why she had latched onto Mihoko-san. Because she had been nice to her that one time? Because she had purple eyes? Because she was there, and has so easily accepted her back in her life?
And by adopting Mihoko-san, Toki had accidentally adopted the rest of the family. Even Dr Shinsō, who was often absent. He still treated her as she was completely within her right to camp on his living room every Saturday, joked with her, and thought about her birthday just as he thought about Hitoshi’s.
And Hitoshi, too! Toki hadn’t expected to like him so fast, but the little bugger had dug a place in her heart. He was smart and funny. And even if he was just ten (or rather eleven, having celebrated his birthday at the beginning of the month), he was hilarious to banter with.
Every day she spent time with him, she could see a little more of who he would become. Oh, Hitoshi Shinsō wasn’t yet the cynical kid he would be in canon, but Toki could already see traces of it. It was in the way his eyes narrowed with distrust when you spoke about a deal too good to be true, or in the way he trained single-mindedly to reach his goal. He was becoming a small terror in his karate class.
But he was also sassy and fun, and more importantly, he was her friend. And she liked spending time with him. To tease him, talk with him, even advise him about his future training.
“I used to do ballet to help with balance and reaction time,” she smirked at him.
Hitoshi scrunched his nose in horror with exactly the same expression Keigo had when Hayasa-sensei had suggested the idea. It was hilarious.
“I’m not a ballerina!”
“Not with that clumsiness, you’re not. Seriously, karate is all well and good but maybe you should switch next year. If your mom agrees.”
Hitoshi slurped his apple juice pensively.
“I’m not taking ballet,” he finally said.
“Your loss. There’s gymnastics, though. Or parkour! Dead useful to move through the city. And next year, I will officially be a hero, so I can start looking into support items if you want. You Quirk may not always be enough. Imagine you fight a deaf villain!” Then Toki frowned, stuck by a new idea. “Wait, you’re still young. Maybe your Quirk can still evolve to bypass the response system. Of maybe you can still train it that way, to stop relying on verbal response anyway…”
Hitoshi gulped the rest of his juice, then tossed lightly the briquette to Toki’s head. She caught it in the air, and he smirked:
“The Quirk analysis can wait a little. Not that it’s lame, although it’s a little chilling, but let’s keep the holidays for fun and the school year to dissect my future, right? In the meantime, you said we would go at the park. And then that we would pet cats.”
“Fine, fine. It’s my first time babysitting, don’t be mean. You have your bike?”
“Obviously. And it’s not babysitting, I’m eleven!”
Toki snorted. Yeah, she had pretty much adopted the whole Shinsō family. She had no idea how the hell it had happened, but… yeah. She loved them. And when she would leave, it would break her heart.
(Good thing her civiliansona, Toki Hoshizora, was planning on sticking around.)
oOoOoOo
In August, Toki and Keigo went to the usual summer camp at the beach, again. Toki had the forethought to buy a bikini cut like a halter top, with a high neck that managed to hide her entire scar. This camp empathized eco-responsible behavior, so they had tasks like cleaning beach, cooking food from local markets, learning about fish, and all that jazz. Whatever. It was still a summer camp. Kids were encouraged to have fun, learn to man a boat, swim and laze in the sun.
Everyone had a tiny, individual room, but within the first night Toki could hear that her neighbor had a guest. Either that or she had a very vocal dream, and really, Toki wasn’t shy but it felt downright voyeuristic to stay here when the girl next door was screwing someone with loud appreciation, so she got back into old habits and went to hang out on the roof.
Within five minutes, Keigo had joined her. Thanks to his feathers, he had probably known where she was the moment where she had climbed out of the window.
“You could have warped,” her friend pointed as soon as he sat down next to her.
“Yeah, warping luminously in the sky is very discreet,” Toki drawled. “Besides, it’s funnier this way. I feel like a delinquent.”
Keigo sniggered and playfully punched her:
“That’s not gonna help your career take off.”
“I’ll be fine. I have faith in my own merit.” She paused, then added: “And also in nepotism, to be totally honest.”
Keigo laughed and let himself fall on his back, wings flaring up as if making a snow angel on the warm tile roof. Toki grinned then followed, crossing her hands behind her neck to stare up at the sky. It was summer, so night fell pretty late, and there were still wisp of sunset on the horizon: but you could already see the stars. Toki’s eyes wandered from one constellation to another. Cassiopeia, Lyra… Scorpio, too. Her favorite constellation. With Antares, its brightest star, at the top.
For a few seconds, they were silent, sharing the peaceful moment without a sound. Then Keigo spoke again:
“I missed Hayasa-sensei those last few months. Okamoto think he’s the king of the schoolyard now.”
Toki groaned: “Is he still a dick?”
“Yep. Awfully good at his job, I don’t deny it. I’m learning loads. But he’s gotten even more criticizing and condescending since you left. Also, since I’m in high-school he’s basically interrogating me every week-end to see if I have civilian friends. I don’t know if he wants me to integrate or he’s losing his shit at the thought that I could lose precious training time with trivial matters.”
“Knowing him? Probably both. That guy was never happy with anything we did.”
Okamoto always demanded perfection. Toki would have liked to said it was kind of hypocritical coming from a short, fat guy with a stick up his ass, but truth was… neither her or Keigo had never seen Okamoto fail at anything. With cards, bluffing, trivia games, quizzes about heroics, hard questions about taxes and regulations: he knew it all. And he had contacts with every single facet of the hero world, from stealth trainers to maybe-vigilante, from clinics to support items’ shops. It would have been easier to dismiss Okamoto and his constant disapproving frowns if the guy hadn’t been so effortlessly good at his job. It was frustrating.
“He once saw me talking with a boy about homework near the entrance and gave me The Talk in his car for the whole ride back,” Keigo added. “The longest two hours of my life. I was this close to opening the windows and tossing myself out. Better to crash into a truck’s windshield like a suicidal mosquito than dealing with Okamoto talking about the average quantity of lube needed during intercourse.”
Oh gods, the nightmare.
“Yeah, I’m glad I don’t have to deal with him anymore,” Toki groaned. “Also, having The Talk with the Labs’ doctor was mortifying enough, I can’t imagine what I would have been if Okamoto had been there. He would probably have insisted on me doing a presentation on the top three options on feminine contraception. Even if the contraception is more the guy’s job anyway!”
In the past, birth control had mostly been a women’s issue. Pills, implants, etc. But they always had secondary effects, considering they were altering a hormonal cycle. So a little over a century ago, someone had a strike of common sense and realized it made much more sense to shoot a blank than to fire at a bulletproof vest, and so male birth control had been promoted until it became the norm. Either with pills, or an implant, or a gel injection. The goal was to shut off a non-essential mechanism, instead of impacting a hormonal cycle that constantly self-regulated. Secondary effects were minimal or inexistant, and everyone was happy. Also: it was completely covered by the universal healthcare.
Sometimes it felt good to live in the future.
“I feel you,” sniggered Keigo. “You’re probably not wrong. When I started high-school he tried to get access to my medical record to make sure I was on birth control. I got the injection at thirteen so I’m in the clear until I’m twenty, but Okamoto didn’t know that. He absolutely wanted me to get on the pill. Apparently he was scared that hormones would hit me in the face like a pack of bricks. Like I would go on a slutty rampage to impregnate anyone with a uterus in a twenty miles radius or something.”
Toki burst out laughing. She couldn’t help it, the image was too hilarious. Also, imagining rigid Okamoto saying the words ‘slutty rampage’…!
“Did he actually say that?!”
“Nah, but I was feeling a strong slut-shaming vibe from him. Totally in character.” Then Keigo hesitated briefly, before looking at the sky and adding lightly: “But he did say it was good thing you had been send away, because if you hadn’t, you and I would probably have started screwing at fourteen. Again, his words, not mine.”
For a second Toki just blinked, taken aback, because there was being rude and there was being rude. But yeah, that kind of disparaging remark designed to make someone squirm was right down Okamoto’s alley, so she scoffed. Asshole.
But… she had to grudgingly admit he probably wouldn’t have been wrong. Keigo and Toki’s relationship was fusional to said the least. They had been living in each other’s pockets for years, sharing the same personal space with ease, touching, hugging, sleeping in the same bed. Add a Molotov cocktail of hormones and romantic tension and… yeah. Maybe not at fourteen, because yikes, but at fifteen or sixteen they would definitely have crossed that step.
Toki tried to put on an air of casual annoyance, but her heart was beating a little faster. It was the closest Keigo had come to speak about this thing between them. And he was blushing, she could see how red his ears were. Well, Toki wasn’t exactly as cool as a cucumber either. She could feel her palms getting sweaty, and had to swallow twice before speaking.
“Pffff! Like we would have been caught. I can freaking warp and you have intruder-detector wings.”
She stared resolutely at the sky, but from the corner of her eyes, she could see Keigo turning sharply toward her. Then he grinned from ear to ear, eyes sparking mischievously:
“I dunno, we could be distracted.”
Toki sniggered. The banter was good and familiar, but there was something else too. This was new territory. There were butterflies in her stomach, and strange, giddy nervousness closing her throat.
“Well, isn’t sneaking around to make out a typical teenager experience? We kind of needed that, with us being pushed on the path to exceptionalism from childhood.”
“Humm, maybe that kind of typical teenage experience is overrated,” theatrically sighed Keigo. “It sure must be nice, but maybe people exaggerate.”
“What, you have never kissed anyone in your fancy high-school?”
Keigo shrugged: “Nah. Which is downright weird because everyone in my grade is persuaded I am super-experienced. Okay, I may be a friendly, and maybe a little flirty… but I never even gave a peck on the cheek to any of my classmates! And still they thinks I’m some sort of Don Juan leaving a trail of broken heart in my wake. It’s pretty funny actually.”
“Oh my gods,” Toki grinned. “I can totally believe it. They just look at you and immediately imagine you can make girls —or boys!— swoon with a single kiss. Like a reverse Sleeping Beauty’s Prince.”
Keigo let out a bark of laughter and turned on his side to lean on his elbow, leaning down on her with a grin:
“I’m more into men than into boys, but yeah, that sound about right. What about you, could you make boys and girls swoon with one kiss?”
He smacked his lips. It was probably a joke but Toki couldn’t help the way her heart jumped. She felt giddy and lightheaded, a little like before kissing Sachiko: but way more intense, because it wasn’t Sachiko, it was Keigo. It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. His face was so close: she could count his eyelashes, see the flush in his cheeks and the way his pulse beat rabbit-quick in his neck, betraying his own nervousness…
“I don’t know,” she breathed, ignoring the way her heart was beating wildly. “Want to test it out?”
Keigo took a small, sharp breath. His gaze dropped to Toki’s lips. She didn’t move: she couldn’t, not now, not after laying her carts on the table. It was his turn. Some part of Toki’s was berating her, it was stupid, there was reason their relationship hadn’t been discussed before, it would make things messy and complicated. They were supposed to wait until they were adults and free (or, well, freer) to take a decision. But for the love of God, Gandalf, Merlin, or any divinity out there, Toki couldn’t think about it clearly.
Their faces were mere inches from each other. She felt like dizzy and exhilarated, like someone running toward the edge of a cliff to gain momentum before jumping. She had always loved heights. Maybe a little too much, even.
Toki didn’t know who leaned forward first. But she did, or maybe he did, and they were kissing.
It started slow and soft, almost timid. Then Keigo’s hand carefully cradled her jaw, he tilted his head to have a better angle, and Toki’ fingers slid in his hair. The kiss grew more confident, more insistent, but still careful and tender, as if afraid of breaking the spell. She didn’t remember closing her eyes, but she had, because she reopened then when they parted for air.
Their eyes met. She had never seen Keigo look so soft and unguarded, eyes bright and smile so fragile. Toki’s heart was beating like a drum. She smiled, too, before letting her forehead fall against his. She felt almost overwhelmed: so happy and so nervous and relieved at the same time, like her emotions were all over the place.
“Hey,” said Keigo, softly, with a smile in his voice. “Stop thinking so hard.”
“Overthinking is kind of my brand,” Toki replied, realizing with mortification that her voice was a little rougher than usual.
She almost expected to wake up and find out she had dreamed the whole thing, but Keigo was still here, with a dopey smile on his face, the corners of his mouth pulled up so high on his cheeks that it probably hurt. Toki felt her state-of-the-art artificial heart lurch almost painfully. He was here. He was looking at her with something like tenderness and adoration, and he was so important, so important to her, that there was no use trying to held it back now. That was it, she was gone, she had leaped over the edge a long time ago, there was no point in denying it anymore…
“I love you,” she blurted out. “You do know that, right?”
He was her first friend, her best friend, the one who had grown up with her, inspired her, saved her maybe. He was the reason she had signed off her life to the HPSC, and she would do it again, in a heartbeat. Of course she loved him. Keigo smiled up at her with those honey-bright, wonder-filled eyes, and Toki’s heart dropped to the floor.
“I know,” he said fondly. “Love you, too. Sorry I didn’t start with that.”
Toki let out a short, nervous giggle. She felt lightheaded, as if drunk, or high, or both. She wanted to laugh and cry and fucking dance, and she couldn’t move a muscle beside smiling like an idiot. Holy shit, it was happening.
“Gods,” Keigo laughed, still grinning from ear to ear. “We should have done that four years ago. Why the hell didn’t we?”
“… There was a good reason, but I just can’t think of it right now.”
“I know, right? We’ve been basically dating since we were twelve. You… I… Shit, with that partnership thing we’ll have as heroes, it’s basically like we’re engaged. I can’t believe we didn’t do that sooner. I spent so much time thinking about it, it’s almost embarrassing.”
Me too, Toki wanted to confess: but instead, she laughed. A clear, giddy sound that unfurled in the twilight sky like a ringing bell. Somehow they had sat up, still barely a breath away from each other: she leaned back on her arms, her chest bursting with happiness and love and joyful incredulity, he loves me, he loves me back, he said it, it’s real!
“Really? You spent so much time waxing lyrical about Endeavor’s butt that I worried you were gay.”
He flushed crimson.
“Oh, he was my bisexual awakening, no argument here. He’s still a big fantasy of mine. But it’s a fantasy, you know? While you’re…”
He trailed off. Toki’s smile softened, and even wobbled a little. Her eyes were burning, because she was stupidly emotional. She could feel Keigo’s warmth radiating from his body. He was so close, and speaking openly about his feelings: everything felt too honest and raw. How could it be so nerve-wracking, when her heart was bursting with incredulous happiness?!
It was too much. She hadn’t though this through. But oh, she couldn’t take her words back now. It was like a dam had broken now, there was no taking this moment back, and the words wanted to tumble out uncontrollably. Toki let out a nervous laugh, and let her head fell down on Keigo’s shoulder to hide her face. He was here, bright and warm and happy, and he loved her: the combination of all these impossibilities was enough to make tears burn her eyes, to make her heart thunder more strongly than any fight.
“You know there’s no going back for me,” she muttered against the fabric of his t-shirt. “You’re it. I’ve known for years. I would… I would follow you until there’s no road left.”
She heard the ruffle of feathers. Keigo’s arms wrapped around her. He was strong, for someone so lean and short: Toki had always loved that about him. How strong he was, how reliable, how confident.
“You’re the most important person in my life,” he whispered back against her neck, his voice low and rough. “When you were gone I keep thinking, what would my life be if I haven’t met you? It wouldn’t have been bad, you know me, I always make the most of any situation. But I would have been so alone. Nobody knows me like you do. Nobody has been here for me like you did.”
He took a big breath, and Toki could feel it shuddering in his chest. He was as nervous as her, she realized, and it made her feel better, to know that he felt as stripped bare and vulnerable as she did in this instant.
“You’re my best friend and my partner,” Keigo said, a little lower. “I want us to work at the same agency and buy a stupid penthouse together, and I don’t want it because we fight well together but because you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I want… I want us to marry, and have kids, and grow old, retire, until I become your cranky trophy husband and you become an old astrophysicist teacher. So I would follow you until there’s no road left, too.”
Toki let out a wet little laugh, tightening her embrace around him. She raised her head, bright copper eyes meeting gold.
“I’m on board with that plan,” she whispered.
This time, it took no effort at all to lean forward and kiss again.
oOoOoOo
Were they dating? Probably. They hadn’t put a label on it. They had simply added a romantic aspect to their existing relationship. Maybe dating wouldn’t be incorrect, but it seemed a little weak. After all, Keigo had basically proposed to her. And she had said yes.
Toki felt lightheaded and stupidly happy just thinking about it. These days, she couldn’t stop smiling.
Their relationship didn’t change much. They were already spending all their time together anyway. Keigo and her managed to keep this dating thing a complete secret with no effort at all.
Sure, there was the thrill of being allowed to kiss now, of having their cards laid on the table and having their feelings reciprocated (and it was a high Toki would need a few weeks to get down from). But it didn’t mean they had lost all self-control. The physical chemistry between them had always burned bright without leaving them desperate. So yeah: even if most people were absolutely sure they were dating because of how casually close they were, nobody saw them kissing or worse. They were perfectly well-behaved.
Although, come to think of it, it was mostly because they sneaked out a lot.
On the roof, in a secluded corned of the cliffs, in the dunes, in their rooms. They were teenagers with several years of pent-up tension to release, so yeah. It went from innocent touches to exploring to sex very quickly.
It was great. They kissed, fumbled in the dark, tried a few things, teased each other. They were both completely unexperimented after all, so they went at their own rhythm, testing what they liked, with no pressure. Toki had no idea sex could be so playful and relaxed, that there could be laughter as well as soft closeness or hungry passion. They had a wild adventure to steal condoms from someone else, and in the end (since Keigo was on birth control and neither of them had any STD, thank you extensive health checks) they didn’t even use them… except to make water bombs.
They spent time with the other kids. They did their chores. They swam in the sea, and cleaned the beaches, and joined the communal meals near the fire to exchange wild stories with their peers. It was a summer camp like any other. If they disappeared more often than not, well, nobody noticed it.
They also talked. A lot. They had always talked a lot: about their thoughts, their ideas, their plans for the future. But now there was a whole other facet of their future to talk about. Like, were they really planning on living together right after graduation Yes. Were they planning to marry? Er, not yet. But Keigo liked the idea, and Toki was… not a freaked out as she would have expected to be.
They talked about all the tiny things they hadn’t dared to mention before. Things than ran too deep, or felt too stupid or maybe too shameful. Toki opened up about the people she had met and wanted to keep in her life, as Toki Hoshizora if nothing else. Sachiko, the Shinsō family, maybe Sawayomi. She talked about how she felt awfully guilty, sometimes, of encroaching in the Shinsō family like some cuckoo. She told him, slowly, carefully weighting her words, about the Quirkless forum and about Moxie. How she had decided to help her become a hero, for all the Quirkless people out there who needed to look up to someone.
Keigo told her things he had kept secret, too. More specifically, about how he had trained with a heroine sponsored by the HPSC, and how she had abruptly vanished.
After Hayasa-sensei’s departure, Keigo had been given new Quirk trainer at Naruto Labs, but it wasn’t a retired hero, only a sport coach with a background in analysis. As a result, Keigo had mostly trained (very confidentially) with a pro-hero who was on medical leave for depression. Then, the same week where the HPSC’s President had died, this heroine had left. The staff at Naruto Labs seemed to heavily imply she had retired. But there was nothing online. Keigo secretly thought she had been killed, or maybe run away.
Being a deserter wasn’t a good thing when you were a pro-hero. Especially if you were sponsored by the HPSC. They wanted their investment back. A deserter was automatically branded a villain… and since it made for bad publicity, the HPSC had a strong interest in making said villain disappear quietly in the most remote prison they could.
Toki was a little hurt that Keigo had never mentioned that missing pro-hero, though. But well, she didn’t exactly have a leg to stand on, had she? She had kept quiet about the exact nature of her relationship with the Shinsō, too. And she had only did it out of selfishness and embarrassment, not out of fear of having stumbled on a political plot.
“What was her name?” she asked.
The sun was high and scorching, and they had found a quiet place in the shadows of the trees near the house. The laughter and screaming of their peers, who were playing a rather aggressive game of volleyball in the waves, were distant and sounded almost like the cry of seagulls. Toki was flat on her back, like a starfish, and Keigo right next to her, on his front, wings flapping slowly to fan the air. They were both sunburned and sweating, with a cold drink next to their hands. The typical summer afternoon.
It felt soft and comfortable, the stifling warm like a blanket cutting them from the word. Toki wanted this day to never end.
“Lady Nagant,” sighed Keigo without raising his head. “You probably don’t know her, she is half underground. She is a sniper, so flashy fights aren’t her things. But she is very pretty, with blue and pink hair, so she ended up in lot of commercials and stuff.”
The name didn’t ring any bell, but Toki made a mental note to google it later.
“Why was she your sensei if she was on medical leave?” she frowned. “Genmei-san wouldn’t have let that happen. She’s a sticker of rules.”
Keigo didn’t answer right away. When his spoke, his voice was low and strangely hesitant.
“I don’t think Genmei-san knew. Lady Nagant only spoke about the President. Apparently she was his right-handed woman or something like that. And she was more of senpai than a sensei, so she didn’t really teach me anything. I think… she was supposed to come to Naruto Labs to see a psychologist. Sparring with me was a convenient excuse to hide it.”
Heroes avoided psychologists like the plague. It was a glaring weakness, something that could easily be exploited by any villain. Baring your soul and talking about all your triggers with a civilian? Hell no. But sometimes talking was necessary. A mental wound needed healing as much as a physical one, after all. So the HPSC had trained psychologists, and assigned them to heroes when they had serious issues that couldn’t be solved otherwise. There was one psychologist assigned to Naruto Labs, although neither Toki or Keigo ever had to speak with him. He usually went where heroes needed him.
If Lady Nagant had needed a shrink so badly, and for something so confidential they had made her go to Naruto Labs in secret… Well. Maybe she had ran away after all. Toki remembered Genryusai, his cold eyes, his sharp tone, how matter-of-factly he had talked about All Might’s victories being his. If Lady Nagant was his right-handed woman, she had probably seen some heavy stuff.
“I’m sorry,” Toki finally said.
Keigo shrugged: “Why? It wasn’t your fault. And I only knew her for something like three months, so that’s twelve weekends at most.”
“Still,” Toki insisted. “Can’t I be sorry it happened? It’s sad. And worrying.”
“Yeah, I figured,” Keigo said lowly. “First Shirayuki, now Lady Nagant… People raised in the sponsoring program tend to burn the candle at both ends.”
Toki had noticed, too, but she had hoped not to talk about it. She thought about Keigo, about canon-Hawks with burn scars everywhere, his vocal cords permanently damaged at twenty-three, and she winced.
“There’s other heroes who do just fine. Recovery Girl, for example. There are sidekicks, too. And Mera-san also mentioned Snatch as being from the sponsored program. I looked him up, he’s in his forties and he’s fine.”
He also worked as bodyguard for the police, so more as support than as frontline hero. He also wasn’t very powerful. Polyvalent, yes (he could turn into sand) but not overwhelming. Not like Shirayuki, who had been the Snow Queen of Fukuoka; or like this Lady Nagant, right-hand woman of the President.
Not like Toki and Keigo, either. Not like Quantum and Hawks were asked to become.
“Besides, we have each other,” Toki continued with more confidence than she felt.
Keigo hummed in response, then sighed:
“I know. It’s just… You’re right, it’s sad. It’s unfair, most of all. When people leave Naruto Labs, nobody ever tell us where they go.”
It had happened with Hayasa-sensei, too. People left; they knew that. They couldn’t get attached. The only sure thing in their life was the fact that they had each other. Anyone else was unreliable, anyone else was bound to leave them behind. But it was still hard to not get attached, to not feel pain when people left anyway.
Still, Toki felt a little jealous. This woman, Lady Nagant, she belonged to a part of Keigo’s life which Toki was excluded from. She knew it was irrational, and a little immature, but hey! She was a teenager, she was allowed to be a little immature from times to times. She wanted to be a part of every facet of Keigo’s life. Including the training at Naruto Labs with mysterious senpai.
She liked being Toki Hoshizora, but being Quantum was an important part of her, too. And she missed it so much, sometimes.
There was danger in being a hero. Not only villains and fight, but also… the weight of society, all those onlookers who judged you and expected you to be a paragon of goodness so they wouldn’t have to be. The weight of the HPSC, too. Toki owned them a lot of money, and she would have to take missions for them. Sure, the HPSC were on the good guys’ side, but you can do awful things in the name of the greater good. Cold-blooded murder wasn’t Genmei-san’s style, or at least Toki didn’t think so: but Genmei-san wasn’t the whole Commission. If Genryusai’s right-hand woman had ran, then there were shady things going on that Toki needed to beware.
They wouldn’t order Toki to kill people. But they may order her to stand aside as people were killed. Like they had done with Hawks in canon, ordering him to infiltrate the League even if it meant looking the other way as they murdered civilians. It made Toki’s stomach turn. But hey, maybe the HPSC wouldn’t dare ask it of her.
They knew she had been given this exact choice at age eight, and they knew how it had ended.
Anyway. Summer camp passed almost too quickly. They talked and laughed and shared secrets, and sneaked around using Firece Wings and Warp-Space as if they were back at Naruto Labs. The grounds weren’t as secure, so crazy chases with flight and teleportation were out… but they had plenty of ways to wander around, explore and train.
And, well, make other fun things with less clothes on, too. Because they were seventeen, high on happiness, and horny as any teenagers that just had received a love confession from the person they’ve been pining after for five years at least.
Toki wrote more love poems in her notebook. Keigo confided that he had read her old notebook, the one she had left in his room before leaving. Toki didn’t know if she was mortified or flattered, or both. She distinctively remembered writing a lot of stuff about honey-bright eyes, and endless comparison to Icarus.
But she had new material for her prose, now. The anticipation, the pining, the soft wonder of waiting without haste, it had its beauty, sure: something soft both soft and fragile, made for melancholic poems about contemplation. But now she wasn’t waiting anymore. She had jumped and learned to fly. She had it, she was done waiting, and it made her so, so ridiculously happy. She almost couldn’t believe it. Life didn’t give good things like that, she was going to wake up and realize it’d been a dream.
It's so hard for me to put you into words
because I love you in ways
I've never loved anyone else.
But days passed and she didn’t wake up. She was still Toki, who loved Keigo and was loved back, who had friends, who had a powerful Quirk and no health problem, and a brilliant future ahead of them. It was good, too good to be true, but it was real. Maybe all her bad karma had run out. Maybe it was how life was supposed to be.
After all, maybe Toki had already paid enough for her past sins. She had passively let Meteor’s Crew harm innocents, then betrayed her family, maybe caused her mother’s death, absolutely caused her father’s imprisonment, lied, run away, worried people, was rude, recklessly played with her health, sold her soul to the HPSC. She had done plenty of wrongs. But maybe she was allowed good things too. Maybe she didn’t have to pay her whole life for her bad circumstances and her bad choices.
It probably wouldn’t last. Summers were always like parentheses: a few weeks out of time, out of the real world of past responsibilities and worries about the future, where only the present existed.
Later, when they would have their own agency and would be in charge of their own schedule, they should keep the habit of taking vacations during the summer. They would never get back to those innocent day before becoming heroes (Toki wasn’t naïve enough to believe that nosediving into heroics wouldn’t leave them a little more delusional with the world) but they could still use this time to breathe. To get away from reality. To just find themselves, and each other, just like they had during all those summer camps, when they were carefree and unbothered about their future.
Not that Toki felt unprepared for the real world. She had snitched on villains and lived homeless for weeks at age eight. She was a great athlete. She had survived a heart attack, even coming back stronger. She was so academically advanced it made her teachers weep, and she fully intended to get her Bachelor’s degree in astrophysics before hitting twenty. But still. Being an adult was intimidating and not just because Toki would be hero. Being an adult meant responsibility. Doing her own taxes. Having to start paying the HPSC back for their investment. Being labelled ‘mature’ and ‘responsible’ and ‘ready’ even when you didn’t feel like any of those things.
So yeah, it would be good to still have this: a week or two near the sea, to relax, and forget about their jobs, and just be the two of them. But well, knowing them, they wouldn’t resist talking about work…
“You haven’t finished designing your costume yet?” ginned Keigo, flopping on her bed.
A bunch of sketches and notes scattered on the floor. Because no, Toki hadn’t finished designing her costume. At all. It was the last day of summer camp and she had plain forgotten. She was actually hoping to get some work done while Keigo was swimming (how could he stand the heat, it was a mystery: Toki was more of a delicate flower!)… until he got back soaking wet. Toki let out a shriek and kicked him out of bed:
“Are you coming back from the beach? You’re wet! Get out!”
Keigo had actually dried off with a towel, probably, because he wasn’t dripping: but his hair and wings were still soaked. He laughed, jumping back upright to shake his wings off like a wet dog. Water rained everywhere. Toki screeched like a banshee and started chasing him around, which predictably ended up with her tackling him out of the window. Served him right.
“Sorry, sorry!” he sniggered, hovering outside with a lazy flap of wings, and poking his head back in with a bright grin. “I couldn’t resist. Want to come for a swim? It’s our last day!”
Toki huffed, then let herself fall back on the now wet bed. Oh, whatever. It wasn’t like she was sleeping in her room these days anyway.
“I’m almost done. I’m just picking colors and final details. I suppose you’ve finished early by pawning off the work on one of the HPSC’s designer? What did you tell them, ‘I want something that look like my training outfit because it’s comfy, but more badass?’ At least I hope you didn’t ask for flame-patterned pants.”
Keigo, who had just climbed back inside, laughed easily:
“So mean! But yeah, pretty much. In the end I got brown pants and a black shirt, but a fur-lined jacket for the cold, and a cool visor. The final design kinda looks like an aviator’s outfit. I can still made adjustments if we want matching outfit, though,” he added with a wink.
So, basically, his canon costume. Toki sniggered, then showed him her designs. She had actually already planned for Hawks’ costume, and had shamelessly used the under-suit gold pattern for inspiration. She didn’t want their costume to match exactly, but… Well. Keigo was her hero, her inspiration. It was only fair that her hero outfit reflect it.
“I have a bodysuit. The top half if back, the rest is white, and there’s going to be a gold-pattern. I have a few options about that pattern. Then a warm sweater jacket… gloves, boots, and a connected visor with a GPS. That’s all.”
Keigo dived in her notes and drawings, making interested noises when he found a particularly interesting sketch. There were plenty. Toki had always liked bright colors, so the yellow and orange were kind of non-negotiable.
“Oh, I like this design!” he exclaimed. “The yellow pattern looks a little like mine, but mmmh, sharper. And you kept the central logo.”
“It’s a star,” Toki defended herself.
It was, and it was not. Keigo and Toki’s costume both had a diamond shape in the center of their golden pattern. It was discreet, but… it did evoke the HPSC unofficial sigil. The HPSC didn’t have an official logo or crest, but their headquarter was situated in a building whose façade bore a decorative diamond shape. Unconscious associations could be made. In short-hand code, the symbol for the HPSC was a lozenge, for example.
“I like it,” Keigo decided. “What about accessories, like boots and gloves and stuff? Did you already choose a design?”
“Not yet. You can help me pick the rest.”
In the end, they had the perfect design for Quantum’s costume. It would be a white suit, with golden details. The top of the suit would be black, though, and there would be the famous golden pattern on her chest. Then there would be a bright orange jacket, with a hood to keep her head warm. Black boots reaching almost to her knees, and black gloves with reinforced knuckles. A visor, too, with a HUD’s display. There, design chosen. Toki wouldn’t actually see it until next year, when she would pass her Hero License in April. Keigo would get his costume sooner (he had to pass his Provisional License in September), but Toki was still on medical leave until… Well, until late November, actually. It was only then that the HPSC was allowed to give her a training schedule again. Doctor’s orders.
After they were done and Toki had put her final design in an envelope, they sat in silence for a few seconds. The sun was high and the room filled with light, and they could head the sound of gentle waves on the beach. It sounded so peaceful. So serene, almost eternal.
But they would go home tomorrow. Summer camp always lasted three weeks, not a day more. It had really passed in a blink, this year.
“It’s going to be so weird to go back,” Keigo finally said, as if reading her thoughts.
“I know,” Toki sighed. “We’ve been going back our separate ways for nearly four years now, but now it’s… it’s going to be different.”
Not that much. They would still call each other nearly every day, and chat on Discord, and talk about their plans, and be sure to be reunited soon. But… there would an added weight to their separation, now.
“It’s not for long,” Keigo said reassuringly, taking her hand in his. “High-school will end soon enough.”
Toki looked at her joined hands. She thought of Yūei, of Sawayomi, of comfortable afternoons spend lazing around in Mihoko’s appartement. She thought about skateboarding at the park, about Hitoshi’s easy laughter, about Sachiko’s teasing tone. She thought about her little studio, about the ghost neighborhood where she could train alone and without any expectation. She had known it would end. She was looking forward to the life she would have once it all ended. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t miss it, either. The calmness, the distance of it. Being simply Toki, aspiring astrophysicist, with no heavy burden to carry.
“I worry about that, too,” she replied quietly.
But they were together. They had been from the start. And nothing really bad could happen as long as they had each other, right?
Notes:
How do you write a romance in a story without making it a love story ? That's my dilemma. You know, i wrote four Self-Insert. One was AroAce, the other gay and aromantic, the last one straight but not interested in anyone. Toki is my first character who is 1) allosexual, b) romatic, and c) interested in someone. So she's going to be my first original character to have a real romance. And not just something on the side, no: something that's a core part of her story.
I DON'T KNOW HOW TO WRITE ROMANCE. I really don't. But I know Toki's in love, and what the hell, now i have to write it !You know when i started writing this story i wouldn't have envisionned, not in a MILLION YEARS, that i would fall in the cliché of "the OC-insert enter a relationship with the author's favorite character". It's so lame. I don't really like it in other fics... and still, here i am. I'm not a clown, i'm the entire circus.
Anyway. I'm currently finishing up Toki's costume, it's very pretty. I'll post a picture in "Snapshots of Wisdom" =) Hawks is going to have his canon-costume i fear.
Toki, always the artist, was thinking of a Hawks' costume looking a little like this one : https://twitter.com/juniperjadelove/status/1247914395256012803
Unfortunatly, Keigo has no fashion sense and instead of selecting this brillant idea, he's going to stick with what's familiar... A hero costume that looks a little like his training outfit at Naruto Labs. The designers are despairing.Anyway ! I hope you liked this chapter ! Halfway through it i was like "this is PG-rated, please Toki DO NOT have underage sex on the roof" so it was very dramatic for me to write, too xDDDDD
See you soon ! Reviews give me life !
EDIT :
now there is a smutty bonus if you want to read about Toki having sex on a roof xD
Chapter 21: Mentor and students
Summary:
Toki is going to be a hero. It's not really scary, when you're not alone.
Notes:
Here is the new chapter ! We'll see more of Moxie... We'll meet two new heroes... and we'll meet again an old friend ! =)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
MENTOR AND STUDENTS
In September, Keigo passed his Provisional License Exam. He got it easily, and immediately sent a bunch of photos to Toki so she could admire his brand-new costume and license. His outfit was pretty much what he had worn in canon, except he wore an orange-tinted visor instead of a yellow one, which was a subtle nod to Toki’s own orange outfit.
He also had Endeavor-themed headphones. Urgh. Toki prayed he would grow out of it as soon as possible.
His License didn’t have his civilian name on it. It was allowed under the Heroic Identity Protection Act, but it was still rare. Usually, no one with only a Provisional License bothered. But she could see why it was different for Keigo… After all, the HPSC wanted to keep his surname under wraps.
Keigo started interning on week-ends at some hero’s agency in Shikoku, not far from Naruto Labs. Toki continued her studies. They called each other every evening. They tried phone sex and mostly ended up laughing at each-other while making fake sultry-voices. Yeah, not happening. They probably didn’t have yet the necessary self-confidence. No matter: they would see each other soon enough.
Life went on. Toki had a few brainstorming sessions with Moxie about her heroic studies. They had been talking for more than a year now, and the young girl seemed as determined as ever. She still had no support on the Ordinary Community online, so she had stopped talking about her ambitions on the forum, but she certainly hadn’t given it up. She had spent the last year building machinery, collecting designs, studying Japanese laws and the school cursus. Moxie had also sat down her father to have a serious discussion with him about her future and, after a small meltdown and lot of fretting, her dad had agreed to sign her up for Yūei.
It made Toki felt weirdly pleased. It wasn’t just a pipe dream anymore. With all of Moxie’s progress and preparations… Now, having a Quirkless heroine seemed like a real possibility.
Toki wondered why it hadn’t happened in canon. Maybe Moxie had needed that encouragement from Antares to decide to act. Or maybe in canon, because a butterfly had flapped its wings or something like that, Moxie hadn’t had access to the same resources. Or maybe she never had the idea of watching Iron Man and drawing inspiration from him. Or maybe everything had played the same, but her talk with her dad had gone differently, and her father had put his foot down and refused to let his only child go gallivanting in Japan.
________________
Moxie:
Dad said that I should finish middle-school in Japan if I’m serious about going to Yūei
Somewhere posh, ideally. So I can speak better, be integrated, have references from Japanese teachers, etc.
He doesn’t like the idea of me going (obviously) but he’s really taking it seriously and thinking about ways to help me!
I feel dumb for freaking out so much about talking to him. It was nerve-wracking, sure, and we both ended up crying, but it feels good to know he’s on my side whatever happen.
Antares:
Gods I wish my parents had been this supportive.
You’re lucky to have a dad like that, Moxie!
Moxie:
I know <3
Besides, Dad had a job offer that would made him move from the US next year, so I would have changed middle school anyway
Some part of me wish I could come with him because his new lab is going to be amazing, and there’ll be a lot of new ideas to play with to make new support items!
But moving there is going to be super-complicated, I would need a visa, and then moving to Japan the next year to go to Yūei would be even more complicated…
So yeah, I will move to Japan next year if everything go well
Antares:
That’s freaking awesome!
Do you have anyone to welcome you? Besides my amazing self of course x)
You have a Japanese uncle right? A hero if I remember well…
Moxie:
Er, about that… I still haven’t told my uncle. Dad is hesitant to do it, too
My uncle is… well. He’s super strong, has an amazing Quirk, he’s basically the poster-boy for what heroism is supposed to be…
He never looks down on people weaker than him! But he has a tendency to do everything by himself because it’s normal for him to be the strongest and to keep others away from danger. The thought of sharing his burden doesn’t really cross his mind.
Ultimately, he would support me, I think
But he would also give me a whole speech about how I’m fragile, how it’s dangerous, how I should be realistic, how he’s telling me that for my own sake.
And it would break my heart, so… I kind of waiting for the last moment. Like, when I will book my plane ticket to Japan and not a second sooner.
Antares:
I won’t live in Musutafu anymore next year… but if you want i can recommend some safe place to live (I live in a HPSC-owned building, so no creeps, good hero patrols in the neighborhood, etc.)
And of course I will come to meet you!
… Also I will have to tell you some stuff about who I am, what I do, and my Quirk… but that’s for later. I don’t want to try my luck so I will announce it on the forum in March if everything goes well.
Moxie:
OMG
You lost your Quirk in a training accident right? Can you… get it back? Is that what it’s about?!
Antares:
Pretty much
(Which mean that I can get back to heroic training, so you know, we will be colleagues)
(but let’s not talk about that yet)
Moxie:
WHAT DO YOU MEAN ‘LET’S NOT TALK ABOUT THAT’
How can you say something like this and leave me hanging?! Holy crap ANTARES you’re going to be a hero too! It’s amazing!
Antares:
Nothing is sure yet, so I would rather not speak about it, sorry ^^
Tell me about your support items instead
That’s what we were supposed to discuss today, you know x)
Moxie:
Nhhhhg I won’t stop thinking about it, I KNOW IT
But fine!
So, my amazing suit is going to be:
- A bodysuit (with tasers in the bracers and a utility belt)
- A jet-pack to fly
- Mechanical boots connected to the jet-pack
- And for long-distances attack: a shield
Antares:
… a shield?
Moxie:
I got the idea from Captain America!
I want something small, like the length of my forearm…
But I will toss that titanium frisbee SO HARD
It’s going to bounce around, knock off people, then zip back to my hand thanks to a system of magnets in my bracers. Pretty badass, right?
Also, having a shield is a pun on my name. Which I WON’T tell you yet. But you’ll laugh once you learn what it is.
Antares:
Ah ah alright!
I REALLY like the idea of the titanium frisbee, not gonna lie
Bounce-bounce-bounce SMASH IN BADDY’S FACE
Moxie:
AJFKAHJKSS I’m crying, bounce-bounce-smash 😂 😂 😂
The shield is going to be named Bounce
Antares:
How are your martial arts class going, by the way? And gymnastics?
Also, I guess you don’t need me too, but… If you want, I can look up good middle-schools near Yūei, and look for info about studios in my building
Moxie
Thanks! I would like that =)
It’s going well. I want to switch classes next year, though. With a jet-pack and mechanical boots, my agility is going to be limited. I was thinking about boxing and maybe a sport that would help my sense of balance. Maybe aerial gymnastics, or trapeze.
Antares:
Boxing is awesome. I did some, in the past.
And for your balance, reaction time, and core strength… well, as my old teacher once said: did you ever try ballet?
________________
It was always fun to talk to Moxie. Simpler, in some ways. When Toki spoke about her to Keigo, he teased her, saying that she had adopted a kid, but… Well, he wasn’t very far off. Toki liked Moxie, she liked helping her. Was it what a senpai was supposed to be like?
Anyway. Toki fished information about the building: the studio’s price range, the terms of lease, all that stuff. It was good to know in case Toki Hoshizora wished to keep a foot in the door, right? But in the end, Toki decided that if her cviliansona stayed in Musutafu, she could find better. This building was all nice and good, but there would probably be bigger places, out of the HPSC’s sight, on the other side of the city. She still emailed her findings to Moxie. Toki Hoshizora would need to leave the nest soon… But for a young middle-schooler living alone, this place was perfect.
Moxie mailed her some schematics for her jet-pack and her boots, and Toki had to admit, it was very impressive. She had a background in engineering too, but that stuff was way above her level. If by some extraordinary lack of chance Moxie didn’t manage to become a hero, Toki wanted to snatch her up and hire her for support in her agency. Her future agency. Her future common agency with Keigo. Whatever. That was such a mouthful, they really needed a name for it.
Most heroes’ agencies took on the name of the hero that carried them. Like All Might’s agency, Endeavor’s agency, and so on. If you wanted an agency that treated its heroes equally, you needed a hero team, like the Wild Wild Pussycats… and so, you needed a team name.
Funny thing, but Keigo and Toki had never thought about a team name.
Toki texted Keigo about it, and offered to just name their business “Hawks’s agency”, because it honestly didn’t bother her to stay in the shadows. She would be a hero, not a sidekick, sure, but she was perfectly happy to let her partner steal the spotlight. Keigo threw a fit. He was completely opposed to it. It was insulting to Toki’s abilities, and insulting to him. Like he would undermine his own partner like that! She was fifty percent of this business and she had to own up to it. They were a package deal, for fuck’s sake.
And okay, he had a point. So Toki apologized, and… tried to find good names. They spend the following days bouncing ideas back and forth. Eolia. Rising. Ascending. Mirage. Zenith. It was so hard to settle on a name! They wanted something badass but still simple. Something that reflected both of them, that evoked the sky, light, speed, ambition.
And Toki was a poet, so she also wanted it to be pretty, inspiring, and elegant. So sue her, she deserved nice things in life.
October came. Moxie turned fourteen and Toki wished her a happy birthday. She continued studying, training her Quirk, doing parkour in the ghost neighborhood, hanging out with the Shinsō family. Soon her medical leave would be over, and Toki didn’t know if it filled her with relief or with dread. A little bit of both, probably. Her grades were still at a good level without much effort on her part, although she really had to make an effort to stay ahead with her university courses.
At the end of October, the HPSC mailed her a bunch of assignment. Quizzes about the history of heroics, charts about heroes ranking, shorts lessons about the laws on Quirk-uses, arrest warrants, heroic Licenses. Her training had resumed.
She turned eighteen at the end of the month. The Shinsō family took her to the planetarium to celebrate. Toki tried not to think about the fact that she had never asked it of them, they had simply thought she would love it and wanted to make her happy… while Sayuri had to be asked and begged for a while: and even then, she had used the occasion to backstab her daughter.
Gods, she would have been so much happier being born a Shinsō. She would never have met Keigo, though. It made her feel guilty to wish for an easier life when the consequences would have been so hard for others people (Meteor wouldn’t have been arrested, Keigo would have grown up alone, etc.). Besides, she knew she would have missed stuff from this life. She was happy with her Quirk, even if it came from her parents. She liked training to be a hero. She hadn’t liked going through hardships as a child, but she was glad to be strong, quick to think on her feet, and resilient. If she had been born Toki Shinsō, she would have none of these things.
Anyway. November came. Toki was now a legal adult, so she made several bank accounts in separate banks, under different fake names . It wasn’t difficult. She was good with photoshop. Besides, she still had several fake ID because she had sometimes kept her fake identity cards after summers camps when she was a child (mostly when the fake names were good). It took very little effort to change the picture and the names. Okamoto hadn’t exactly taught them that, but he had made them learn how to copy and modify document. Those ID wouldn’t pass any serious examination, but since the bank only wanted a scanned copy, well, her ruse held.
She also took care to make the money untraceable, opening the accounts with cash money only. If the bank required that the first deposit was made by bank transfer, Toki asked Mihoko or Sawayomi or Sachiko to lend her a modest sum by transferring it to said bank. She paid them back immediately, and after the initial transfers, all bank were happy to accept cash.
Toki liked the HPSC. She wanted to be a hero. But she wasn’t stupid. The HPSC wasn’t wholly good, it was made from people with individual goals, minds easy to corrupt, and their own thirst for power. She couldn’t rely on them for everything. If, or rather, when the HPSC would crash and burn, she needed to have her own parachute.
And said parachute needed to be big enough for Keigo, her, and however many strays Toki managed to pick up in the following years. That included Moxie, Hitoshi (because he would be interning at their agency, that was for sure) and anyone whose welfare become their responsibility.
No pressure.
Anyway. Mid-November, the next assignment emailed by the HPSC also contained less quizzes and tests, but still some lessons about heroics and how the business worked. There was also a psychological assessment, which made Toki scowl. Of course, it wasn’t presented as a psychological assessment, but seriously, she wasn’t going to believe that the HPSC was sending her a “personality test” to compare it to her astrological chart.
Just to troll them, she filled as much of this personality test as she could with actual quote from stupid astrology websites. Yes, she was a Scorpio. According to your-zodiac-sign-and-what-it-means.com, that then she was ‘an extremely deep and emotional person’, and was ‘intense in all things she did’. She was also ‘a natural leader’ and ‘could be very serious’. Ah! That kind of vaguely worded generalities could describe anyone. It sounded good, though, so Toki intended to milk it for all it was worth.
She wasn’t going to make any effort to impress the HPSC’s shrinks with her brilliance, but she was totally down to baffle them with her bullshit.
Still, she had to stay closer to the truth than to full-on lies, so she only wrote personality trait that mostly applied to her, instead of completely making stuff up. Also, sometimes the tests called for personalized answers. For example: ‘what is your stance on non-violent acts of villainy’ or ‘what do you suggest to help in the reformation of former villains’ or even ‘give one main flaw of the heroic system and as many ideas as you can to fix it’.
Toki had to admit, they were all interesting questions. Alright, the goal was to get answers that would reveal a lot about her feelings and motivations, true. But the questions were constructive, interesting, they made her think about what she wanted to do as a hero.
Toki ended up filling her personality quiz in the evening, during her daily phone call with Keigo, pondering over some of the questions. Keigo had done a similar test, too, and Toki was pleased to find that most of their answers were similar. They both argued that reformation was better than punishment. They both pointed that most villains were either poor or discriminated against, and sure, they may be genuinely brutal and selfish, but they weren’t inherently evil.
“The question about the flaw of the heroic system is pretty good,” Keigo chirped, sounding as if he was distractedly scribing on paper. “I went on a whole rant about how heroes have the exclusivity in the legal use of their Quirk, which create a culture steeped in admiration but also envy, while depriving the ordinary citizen of the use of their powers to better their life.”
“Nice,” admired Toki, glancing at her own answer. “I wouldn’t have thought of that, but it’s true. Isn’t there a way to have a non-heroic License to use your Quirk?”
“There is, it’s called a Non-Combat License. Basically it’s for people behind the scenes, like doctors with healing Quirks, secretaries with memories Quirks, engineers with building Quirks who work on support items. It’s not very well-know because you need to be vetted by the HPSC and have the support of several heroes, then you have to pay a fee, and then you have to pass an assessment test to verify you have a good control of your Quirk.”
“Uh. Kind of impractical. Remind me to change that if I ever take over the universe.”
Keigo made a gleeful noise. She pictured him at the agency where he was interning, filling paperwork on the sofa in the empty break-room instead of sitting at a desk, the phone nested between his shoulder and neck, twirling a pen between his finger with a shit-eating grin.
“I’ll be sure to do that.”
“Hum, next question! Oh, that’s a hard one. ‘What argument besides natural empathy would you use to advocate for the use of your Quirk in acts of heroism rather than villainy?’ Well, that’s a nice way to ask to prove we’re not evil.”
Keigo made a thoughtful noise. There as a rustle of paper. He was definitely at his internship doing paperwork.
“Yeah, that one slumped me a bit. I don’t know how to explain that you should just… care about other people.”
“They know you care about people, anyway. I wonder why they need this question for… To see what your secondary motives are, maybe. Money, or fame, of stability…”
“Good point. I ended up putting fame. I would reaaaaaally enjoy having an Instagram account, for one.”
Toki snorted, eyes on her paper. Fame wouldn’t suit her. But money… It was believable. After all, she was already three billions yens in debt to the HPSC. Wait, maybe they would interpret that as a desire for independence, to get rid of her financial ties to them… It wouldn’t be wrong, per see, but Toki didn’t want to put them on the defensive. She picked up her pen, before deciding on another answer.
“I’m going to go with ‘personal disinterest for evil’. Like, as a scientist, I think it’s dumb to be mean. I say that in a professional capacity.”
Keigo cracked up: “Seriously?!”
“Hm. I just think goodness is more interesting. Evil is constant. You can think of different ways to murder people, but you can do that at age five. But you have to be an adult to consciously, deliberately be good, and that’s complicated.”
“Always the Ravenclaw,” her friend sighed with fondness.
“Oooh, did you end up finishing Harry Potter, by the way?”
“Yes! I totally forgot to tell you. I was so sad about Snape! He was my favorite, even when I thought he was totally a traitor. And to think he was heroic all along! At first to avenge his best friend, and in the end because he ended up believing in the good cause!”
“Really? My favorite character is Harry. He was good comebacks, but also, I love how clueless he is sometimes.”
“Of course you would go for the main character,” he sniffed. “So unoriginal.”
“Well having Snape as your favorite is hardly original too! I bet you’re a Slytherin. Do an online quiz right now.”
“I’m at work!”
“Well, you’re not working, are you?”
In the end, Keigo took the quiz, and Toki opened her laptop to take one too. The idea of being sorted in a Hogwarts’ House was too tempting. To no one’s surprise, Toki was a Ravenclaw. Keigo ended up being a Gryffindor, to his great delight. They playfully bickered about it for days, Toki claiming he had cheated to get into the House whose color scheme suited him best, and Keigo arguing that she was just jealous because her favorite character was a whiny teenager.
So, life as usual.
oOoOoOo
In December, Toki’s assignment from the HPSC also included a time and place to meet with a committee to evaluate her abilities. Mera-san offered to drive her, but Toki replied with a cheeky grin that it wasn’t too far and that could warp there. Or, at least, on the sidewalk. She would need a badge to get in, could the President please mail her one? Mera-san sighed deeply, but complied, and the next day Toki had a shiny pass that looked very official.
This time, the tests sent by the HPSC were more about violence: how she felt about it, if she sought it out or avoided it, how carefully it needed to be used in the heroic profession. The actuals lessons and quizzes were about the procedure of arrests, the relationship between heroes and police, some news articles to analyze about excessive violence during villains’ arrest…
That was the reason why Hitoshi would be such a fantastic hero. He could subdue people in the most non-violent way possible. Toki had once pondered how heroic society idolized violence. There was a whole societal issue about peace being granted not by treaties and alliances but by the threat of All Might’s overwhelming force. Society wanted heroes who fought villain: brutality rose to the top and consequentially pushed utility to the bottom. It had disturbed her then, how cruel it was, and how normal at the same time. There was something pleasing in realizing that the HPSC was aware of this issue. Or, more accurately, that they were aware it was an issue, and not a simple fact of life.
But of course, they knew. It was why they had picked Toki and Keigo, and why Genmei-san had betted on them. They were to succeed to All Might. Maybe not as Number One, but as a symbol, as a model, as an inspiration. The age of beating up people to a bloody pulp in the name of peace had been necessary to end the reign of villainy, but it was over, it was done. Now was the time to be quick and clever, to be polyvalent rather than destructive.
But it would be long. When history is steeped in blood, trying to carve a new path didn’t wash the red from your hands. You could still find bloody handprints on everything you touched. This violent mentality wouldn’t go away in Toki’s lifetime, no matter how hard she tried.
Oh, whatever. She wasn’t going to renounce for so little. Toki was a fighter; she wasn’t ashamed of it. There was a saying in one of her old fantasy book… ‘be chivalrous when you can afford it and merciless when you cannot’. Toki intended to live up to it.
________________
> PinkIsPunkRock: soooo when is the next DnD party?
> PinkIsPunkRock: My schedule for this month is almost booked
> PikaPika: uh
> PikaPika: no idea
> PikaPika: I’m super busy with work right now, so maybe in January
> NotOnFire: I’m cool with it
> NotOnFire: I have exams this month
> NotOnFire: not gonna lie, I’m held together by energy drinks and duct tape at this point
> ThisIsFluffy: besides, isn’t everyone too busy to play anyway? It’s December! The time for parties, families, loved ones!
> EndeavorSucks: meh. It’s overrated anyway.
> NotOnFire: the only people who say that are the one who’ve been dumped recently.
> NotHawks: ooooh, burn!
> EndeavorSucks: t(>.<t)
> EndeavorSucks: rich talk from single guys
> NotHawks: hey, not true, I have a girlfriend!
> EndeavorSucks: you do?
> ThisIsFluffy: you do?
> PinkIsPunkRock: OMG YOU DO?!
< NotQuantum: yeah, he does.
> PinkIsPunkRock: you knew?
< NotQuantum: I was the very first informed, actually =)
> PinkIsPunkRock: … I see… (¬‿¬)
> ThisIsFluffy: when did that happen?
> NotHawks: This summer! It was super-romantic
> ThisIsFluffy: oooh, so it’s been four months at least! Nice! You must like her!
> NotHawks: oh yeah
> NotHawks: I’m going to marry her. Waiting on my first paycheck for a ring.
> EndeavorSucks: w-what?!
> NotHawks: I’m browsing online jewelry stores as we speak
> NotHawks: and also real estate so we can move in together
> EndeavorSucks: w-wait aren’t you moving too fast?!
> NotHawks: you’re right, let’s buy a bigger place so I can anticipate building a nursery for our kids
< NotQuantum: in a penthouse with an infinity pool?
> NotHawks: oh yeah definitely. And a fountain. For champagne.
< NotQuantum: she will say yes for sure x)
> PikaPika: xDDD
> NotOnFire: How Endy fell for it! xDDD
> PinkIsPunkRock: ASJHFACK
> PinkIsPunkRock: Holy fuck IS THAT HAPPENING
> ThisIsFluffy: are we invited to the wedding? =)
> NotOnFire: I bet Stars is going to be flower girl xD
< NotQuantum: don’t worry, I have a place of honor saved!
> PikaPika: xDDDD
> PinkIsPunkRock: ( ಠ ͜ʖ ಠ )
> PinkIsPunkRock: One day it’s going to be hilarious. But now, you have no idea how hard I’m facepalming.
________________
There were three people in the world who knew about Toki and Keigo dating, now: Toki, Keigo, and Sachiko. It was funny, in retrospect. Toki could have told Mihoko-san, but… nah. The moment never seemed right. And there was no way she was going to tell Sawayomi, since they had drifted a little… or Kameko-san. Not that she didn’t trust Kameko-san, but well, she would have to snitch to her bosses, right? And Toki didn’t want to have to deal with a moralizing lecture about fraternization and stuff like that. She was an adult now, she could make her bad decisions on her own!
Anyway. The days slipped by. A few days before Christmas came her appointment with the HPSC. She put her assignments in a backpack, her shiny badge around her neck, and went.
The HPSC’s office where she had her appointment wasn’t in Musutafu proper, but several kilometers away, at the edge of the city. Toki suspected they had a training ground. This suspicion was proven correct was soon as she appeared in the sky over the building (because yes, of course, if she was going to go there on her own, she was going to do it with her Quirk!). It was next to what could have been qualified as a ghost neighborhood if the place hadn’t been carefully surrounded by high wall, hidden by big trees. It was a fake city, just like the one Yūei had for their own heroic exercises.
Toki appeared in front of the building. She removed her protection googles, her scarf, her hood, her gloves, and put them in the pockets of her winter coat. Teleporting in the sky in December was cold was fuck. Then she entered the building like she owned it, making her badge click on the unlocking mechanism. Damn, she felt so grown-up.
The committee evaluating her were a panel of four persons in suits, and two heroes in uniform. Toki didn’t know either of them. The ginger one was vaguely familiar, she had maybe seen him on TV once or twice… Oh, whatever. The committee welcomed Toki warmly enough, acting like cordial acquaintances rather than prissy professors waiting to give her a bad grade, and the girl relaxed infinitesimally. At least those guys didn’t seem hostile. They exchanged trivialities about the weather, mostly so they could ‘ahhh’ and ‘oooh’ when Toki described flying here with multiple teleportation, and everyone introduced themselves. One guy worked in Public Relations, he mostly worked with young heroes… Another worked in Proprieties Damages, and liaised with multiple insurances compagnies… The woman of the group was a psychologist, of fucking course… Then the heroes introduced themselves, too.
“Inferno, the Fiery Hero!” said the first one, a young man with an angular face, with an arrogant swept of his orange hair to the side. “I was sponsored by the HPSC like you. I hope you can impress me, little kōhai.”
“You were?” Toki repeated, surprised. “I asked about sponsored heroes, a while back, and your name didn’t come up.”
“A while, mm? Then I was probably a sidekick. I’ve opened my agency six years ago, but before that, I worked for Endeavor’s Agency.”
Toki nodded, and looked at the second guy. He seemed to be about the same age, in his early thirties, but he stood taller, unsmiling, and had much larger shoulders. His hero costume was distinctly reptilian, with huge clawed hands covered in green armor.
“Salamander,” he said gruffly. “S-ranked hero.”
Toki blinked. Villains were ranked this way (B-rank, A-rank, S-rank…) according to their level of dangerosity. Missions were also ranked like that. But heroes? They were only ranked by the Billboard’s Chart, by efficiency and popularity. Toki had never heard of an S-ranked hero before. She opened her mouth to ask, but then the head of the committee briskly walked up to them to announce it was time to begin. Toki swallowed back her frustration.
They started with a review of her grades, then of her past medical check-ups. They didn’t have access to anything past her eighteenth birthday (it was good to know that doctor-patient confidentiality wasn’t a total sham) but they had copies of everything that had been said and done while Toki had been a child under their care. Anyway, they had all studied the file beforehand, so they mostly just asked Toki some precisions. Did she felt ready to get back to training? Had she been truthful with her doctors about no suffering from any chest pain after the surgery? How had she used her Quirk since getting it back? If she was to start her Quirk training immediately, and how long would it take her to get back in perfect shape? And so on.
The shrink noted that she had signed up to university too, and congratulated her on that. Apparently following a Bachelor’s degree before graduating high-school was unheard of, for heroic students. It was too time-consuming. Well, leaving a double-life was consuming, but Toki fully intended to keep doing that, so… thank you very much, ma’am.
Anyway. After twenty minutes of questions and answers, they got to the cool part… the Quirk evaluation. Toki was given the prototype of her suit to change in, then they all went to the fake city.
It was Toki’s first time in her hero costume and she couldn’t help but slow down in front of every window to admire her reflection. She loved it. The bodysuit was white and black, with a gold pattern on the chest that descended on her tights and legs. She also had an orange sweater vest, warm and solid, with hidden pockets in the sleeves that were just the right size to put in knifes (or a candy bar). A dark leather belt was slung around her hips, with a big pouch to carry supplies. Then there were combat boots, both sturdy and comfortable, black with while laces and orange edging. The whole thing was striking, and Toki really loved the color scheme: white, orange, gold, black, something bright and badass and uniquely hers. She had taken a few selfies in the changing room to send to Keigo, and she couldn’t wait to see his reaction. She looked so cool.
Anyway. They all arrived to big, empty street. The suits stayed on the sidelines, but Inferno and Salamander led Toki to the center of the road. Salamander leaned back against a lamppost, looking bored, but Inferno clasped Toki on the shoulder with a toothy grin:
“Well this is it, Quantum. We’re going to start with a spar. When you bring your Quirk into play, I’ll bring mine. After that, it’s fair game. The first one to put the other in handcuffs win. No lethal hits, although you probably wouldn’t be able to land one on me,” he added with a touch of condescension. “Salamander here will put on a timer for twenty minutes. Try to hold until then.”
Toki mentally scowled, irritated by his paternalistic tone. But she only snorted with a lazy grin:
“I’ll do my best, senpai.”
She had standards police-issued cuffs in her pouch. The ones Inferno had were a little bulkier and in a darker material, which immediately rang alarm bells in her head. Maybe they were Quirk-suppressant. Anyway, she didn’t have time to contemplate it. Salamander hit the timer…
… And Inferno attacked.
Alright, here was the things: most heroes with flashy, physical Quirks didn’t bother learning hand-to-hand combat. Why spend hours, days, months to learn holds and throws and hits when you could solve the problem by blasting lasers with your eyes? That was why, when they couldn’t use their Quirk or when their Quirk weren’t adapted to a certain situation (like when Kamui Wood had been faced with the Slime Villain in canon for example)… well, the heroes were reduced to sit on their asses and whine about how powerless they were, no better than civilians. That was why Toki’s combat training was her greatest edge. Even when Quirkless, she had been able to kick ass… Because she was trained, and the people she had faced down usually weren’t.
But Inferno was a sponsored hero just like her. And with the first blow, it became obvious he had had exactly the same training. Boxing, or maybe Krav Maga: in any case, he hit fast and relentlessly, pushing his whole upper-body into it but keeping both feet on the ground too firmly for Toki to try and sweep his legs. Crap, he was strong. He was also taller and heavier than her, and Toki hadn’t sparred with anyone for months, while this guy was clearly more experienced. She gave as good as she got, but within five seconds Inferno had started making her lose ground.
Toki grabbed his arms to twist it into a submission hold, but he wrenched himself free; she hit him in the stomach to make him lose focus, but he stayed undeterred; she aimed for the eyes and throat but he used his heigh to stay out of reach. Toki’s heart was starting to beat faster, with adrenaline and frustration and an edge of panic. Nothing worked, he was too good. Oh, fuck it!
Her next attack was accompanied by a fait shimmer of light around her body, creating a small vacuum… and a ball of compressed air was released just in front of her hand for the next punch. This time, muscular guy or not, Inferno was thrown back three steps, bending in half with a wheeze. Toki didn’t waste any time in jumping on him, grabbing his arm and snapping one cuff in place… then Inferno headbutted her in the chin and Toki staggered back, seeing stars.
“I thought you were a warper,” he wheezed accusatorily. “Was that your Quirk?”
“Oh, you known, senpai,” Toki smiled even if her heart was beating rabbit-fast and her chin was throbbing in pain. “I have more than one trick up my sleeve.”
Inferno grinned ferally: “Well, if Quirks are coming into play… Let’s remove the kiddies’ gloves.”
And he erupted in flames.
Oh. That was where his name came from. Holy shit, Fiery Hero indeed. It was like the Human Torch had a baby with Endeavor on steroid. The man was basically a column of fire, with a predatory grin barely visible through the light. The heat was so intense that it hit Toki like a physical thing, making her eyes water. She warped five meters away in a blink: but not before seeing her cuffs fall from Inferno’s wrist, twisted and half-melted.
Well, that was unfortunate.
Some part of Toki was swearing up a storm, because really, she should have seen it coming. It had been a trap from the beginning, and now she had no way to win! But some other part of her was grinning, something between feral and elated, because that was what she had missed so much, that was it. The thrill of danger, the tension, the split-second decisions, the high-stakes, the fight.
Inferno charged her and Toki danced out of his reach, teleporting once, then twice. Then her brain was suddenly back online, analyzing patterns, adding new information. Inferno’s flames were so burning hot that they melted metal, and close combat was out of the question… But he didn’t seem to have any long-distance attacks. Maybe it was a weakness of his Quirk? Because those flames were super-strong, they probably took a lot of energy to maintain. Maybe the flames lost power if he tried to shoot them away from him. Or maybe he could only generate flames, not control them: it was a possibility too. In any case, Toki could rely on long-ranged attacks to get out of that one. There was no way she could win the match by cuffing him, now, but if she outlasted him…
She saw a glint of metal in the flames, and paused. Inferno still had his own cuffs in hand, to try and slap them on her. His cuffs were heat-resistant, that was why they looked so different.
Well. Now Toki had a plan.
A crazy game of cat and mouse started, Toki alternating into launching Warp-Blasts (it hit Inferno’s physical body, sure, but it also fueled his flames, which made the heat stifling… and reduced visibility) and trying to jump at close range to snag Inferno’s cuffs. She didn’t even have to touch him, she just had to get good visual then warp the space where the cuffs were. But it was ridiculously hard. The fire made her eyes stink, the burning air made her feel like she was chocking. Once or twice, she had to teleport away for a second to take a big gulp of fresh air to sooth her burning lungs. Gods, she had never fought a fire user before, and now she knew she hated it. It was infernal. Pun intended. But she had to do it, she could win, she could…!
She didn’t win.
The timer hit its mark before Toki could steal her prize. She probably wouldn’t have managed, to be honest. It was frustrating, but Inferno was basically untouchable with all that fire. The infernal blaze that was his column of fire had nearly doubled. The whole street was boiling: air chocking hot, asphalt melting, some buildings already catching fire. Visibility was hell.
When the shrill alarm rang through the street, Inferno stopped, then lowered his flames before letting them sputter off: but the air stayed scorching, the road and the building radiating so much heat that they were burning to the touch. Toki was drenched in sweat. Her costume had protected her, but her face and fingers were red and hurting, as if badly sunburned.
“Time’s out,” gruffly called Salamander, emerging from a side alley. “Quantum, burn cream. Inferno, go cool down. There’s a hose two streets back.”
Toki left the burning area. A drone system started making water and foam rain on the devasted street. A few meters back, there was some kind of first-aid station, where she was given a gel to apply to her burns. It was silky and cool to the touch, giving almost instant relief.
Inferno joined her a few minutes later, faintly smoking. No, not smoking: water was evaporating off him, Toki realized when she saw some part of his outfit still wet. Inferno must have been doused in cold water, and was so hot it was evaporating of him almost instantly. He had been gone less than five minutes and was already dry.
“Not boiled alive?” Inferno asked, raising an eyebrow.
“You sure gave it a good try,” Toki retorted. “Thankfully, I’m very slippery.”
Inferno rolled his eyes. Then, after a moment of consideration, he said reluctantly:
“You did well. I didn’t expect you to last so long. People usually pass out if they stay too long in close proximity to my fire. Why didn’t you try to escape the heat?”
“I did,” Toki admitted easily. “I took regular breathers a little away, to not choke to death in that hellhole. But if I tried to run, you would have followed, right? You don’t use long-ranged attacks. And if you had followed, well, soon enough the whole city would be on fire. Now we just have a street melted off.”
It was how Endeavor had defeated Hellmaker, many years ago, in Fukuoka. He had cornered him, limiting the damages to one place, so they would both cook to death in one street while the rest of the city stayed safe.
There was a beat, then Toki grinned avidly:
“So, what’s your Quirk? Your flames are even more powerful than Endeavor’s, I bet!”
“True,” Inferno said arrogantly. “He was probably glad to see me go before I started overshadowing him. I’m nearly at his level. My Quirk is called Infernal Pyre. I can generate intensely hot flames on my body, and I have a near-perfect heat-resistance. It demands a lot of energy, though. I have to split my focus between generating the flames and resisting heat. If I go to one hundred percent of my power, I would probably vaporize myself.”
Jesus fucking Christ, he was powerful. The HPSC really knew how to pick them. Toki absentmindedly rubbed more gel on her reddened fingers, then lowered her voice:
“If that’s not indiscreet… How did you end up with the HPSC?”
Inferno side-eyed her for a second. They were alone in the first-aid tent, but Toki knew that some stories weren’t easy to share. She offered an olive branch:
“I was taken in at eight. My parents were both villains. I snitched on them to the police and ran away. The Commission found me a few weeks later.”
Inferno’s face didn’t soften. But he breathed deeply, and finally said, a little brusquely:
“I was taken in at twelve. It was the sixth house I’d burned down. My father was a runaway villain and my mother was forfeiting custody. It was the HPSC or foster care.”
Foster care with a destructive Quirk, huge property damage on his records, and a villain as a father? That would have sucked. Inferno would have been called a villain, and probably grow up to be one, feared and neglected. Toki could see why the HPSC had snooped in. She could also see why an angry, terrified kid would grasp this opportunity with both hands.
“Do you regret it?” she dared to ask.
He looked at her. Without his arrogant grin, he looked older.
“Do you?”
“… No, not really.”
“Me neither,” he said decisively. “They gave me the tools I needed to control my Quirk. They also got me a job at Endeavor’s Agency, which I wanted for years. And they gave me the money I needed when I started my own agency. I’m a great hero, and if I hadn’t gone to them, at best I would be a second-rate villain.”
Inferno wasn’t wrong. The HPSC wasn’t perfect, but it was the lesser evil.
They chatted for a while. Toki felt a little off-balance, and it took her a few minutes to find out why. Inferno talked to her like equal. Even if he was arrogant and called her kōhai, he treated her like an adult and a fellow hero. It wasn’t something Toki was used to, coming from other heroes. Hayasa-sensei had been her teacher, Shirayuki had been clearly superior. But Inferno, a thirty-something adult licensed hero with a successful career, already considered Toki like someone who had earned her place.
Or maybe she was reading too much into this. But it still gave her a lot to think about.
Anyway. A few minutes later, Inferno got a text message (Toki noticed he had a bulky pager instead of a normal smartphone, probably because delicate pieces of technology didn’t have much fire-resistance), and they went back to the main building. Salamander was already there, talking to the guys in suits and looking annoyed. Toki belatedly realized that maybe Salamander hadn’t been here as an adversary for her to fight, but as an evaluator. You know, as an experimented pro-hero well-versed into Quirk-training, like Hayasa-sensei had been.
That impression was confirmed soon after. Mostly because they didn’t ask Toki to fight him, actually. Salamander stayed on the side, but when the committee’s members talked about Toki’s performance, they offhandedly referenced Salamander as having seen her do this or that. Apparently the cameras watching her fight with Inferno had melted, but Salamander had stayed on site to continue watching.
… Toki hadn’t seen him on the street. He had started by watching them from the lamppost when they were sparring, she remembered, but after that he had vanished. Either he had gone inside a building (in which case he should have been cooked alive by the heat) or he was frighteningly good at hiding.
“Congratulation, Quantum,” finally said the head of the committee. “You pass with flying colors. You demonstrated an excellent control of your Quirk, versatility, ability to keep your head cool during a fight, and good strategy. No intense training is required to bring you up to the level of the License Exam. Of course, you can schedule some training sessions in the meantime. March is still three months away.”
“Well, I have a busy schedule with all my classes,” Toki said hesitantly. “But I would like to do one combat training session before the exam. Once in February? I have a dojo I can go, but… I can’t spar seriously with civilians, you understand.”
The suit nodded thoughtfully. Training dates were arranged. Goodbyes were said, and Toki left the place with Inferno’s good luck wishes for the rest. But when she left, she still had a few questions left unanswered.
Like, what was Salamander’s role? What was his Quirk? Him and Inferno acted towards each other like equal, maybe even friends, but did they work together? How was Salamander aware of the sponsoring program, that was very hush-hush, if he wasn’t a sponsored kid too?
And what the hell was a S-ranked hero?
oOoOoOo
Googling Inferno and Salamander turned up some info, but not much. Inferno was thirty-one, Salamander thirty-four. They worked in the same city but not at the same agency. Inferno had his own, the Fiery Agency, but Salamander was an underground hero. Information about him was sparse. He had been noted to stay at the Fiery Agency pretty often, and some people had even mistaken him for a sidekick.
But then Google drooped a gem into Toki’s lap, because while she was looking through the heroes in Inferno’s prefecture, she saw the roster… and there, just there, in the list of retired heroes volunteering for emergencies in Osaka, there was Red Racer.
Red Racer. Hayasa-sensei. He was in fucking Osaka, holy crap! Toki directly texted Keigo to tell him. And of course Keigo immediately lost his shit, because they had been looking for Hayasa-sensei for years without managing to find a single clue, but here it was!
Now they just had to get in touch. Osaka was big. But hey, Hayasa-sensei had been a professional coach, so Toki started looking for places that offered both physical training and some kind of Quirk training (it was called Quirk counselling for kids, but whatever, that was basically the same thing, right?). There were a few. She managed cross-referenced them on social media, stalking their photo albums, until she found a picture of a gym where Hayasa-sensei was in the background. She screenshotted the pic and send it to Keigo, and within minutes he replied with a string of shocked emoji and exclamation points.
So. Toki had passed her Quirk assessment, and had found Hayasa-sensei. Clearly this month was under favorable stars. She tried to push her luck a little more, and went to badger Mera-san about being able to invite Keigo there for the New Year. Or visit him, she wasn’t picky. Or they could just ditch everyone for a few days and go visit some other city, like normal teenagers did. Toki had heard that the fireworks were great in Osaka. Just a thought.
“Are you dating him or something?” Mera-san asked, raising an eyebrow.
Toki rolled her eyes.
“Yes, totally, I’m inviting my childhood friend and only family to my crappy place so we can have underage sex on the couch, you got me. Come on. It’s my last winter free, I want to make some good, normal memories before I start being a hero full-time.”
Mera-san made a face:
“Fine, I’m sorry I asked. I will pass along the message to the Genmei-san. Besides, you’re an adult, you can do whatever. I won’t freak out if you leave, but keep the GPS watch and text me where you are. And, for the love of God, do not engage with a villain’s fight.”
“Hey! I never did that! Why are you thinking the worst of me?”
“You didn’t because you were on medical leave, in a city bustling with heroes. But Hawks has a provisional license, you don’t, and the both of you have, allegedly, a tendency to enable each other. I’m only saying… Stay in the clear.”
So. Toki now had the okay of her handler. All that was left was securing Keigo’s. She filled him in, and he approved wholeheartedly. But well, his handler was more or less Okamoto. Or at least it was until Keigo got his official hero license! Keigo was actually laying the groundwork to make sure Okamoto would get out of his life at that exact date and not a day later. He had paperwork ready, asking for ‘anyone but Okamoto’ to be liaison between the HPSC and their future agency. At Naruto Labs, he had planted rumors that Okamoto was sabotaging Keigo’s personal relationships with others people (which wasn’t completely untrue, but probably not voluntary on their teacher’s part). He also had offhandedly mentioned to Genmei-san herself some foul things Okamoto had said, either about All Might or Toki or other people that Genmei-san genially respected or liked.
Yeah, sometimes Toki forgot it, but Keigo was a little shit and he didn’t need anybody to save himself. Slytherin indeed. Why the fuck the Sorting Hat wanted to put him in Gryffindor, Toki had no idea.
Anyway, Keigo was one hundred percent onboard with the idea of going to Osaka, both to look for Hayasa-sensei and to have a full week-end with his girlfriend. He was absolutely sure that Okamoto would say no, though. So going there for Christmas was out.
But hey, Keigo would turn eighteen on the 28th. He just had to wait for the next day. Okamoto may be his handler, but it was still unofficial. Okamoto’s main authority came from the fact that he represented the Commission as Keigo’s legal guardian. And as soon as Keigo turned legal, well, there was no more guardianship.
It was weird to think about it, but they were adults now. Not dependent on the authority of parental figures… But not fully-fledged heroes affiliated with Commission, either. They were in a gray area, and in-between, their last window of freedom.
The days flew by. Soon, too soon, it was Christmas. At Naruto Labs with some researchers for Keigo, and with the Shinsō family for Toki.
They were all a little tense, as if it was her last Christmas together. Dr Shinsō knew that Toki had signed up to be a hero and that the HPSC held her leash, and Mihoko-san had probably guessed it, too. Hitoshi didn’t know, however, and he chattered happily about his classes and his presents, completely obvious to the tension.
Toki wanted to tell them she would be here next year. She would find a way, as Toki Hoshizora, to make things work. But she couldn’t promise that, because… What if things didn’t work? What if the she had too much on her plate, what if the HPSC found out and forbade her, or, worse, what if she slowly turned away from this life and found more interesting things to do? Maybe next year she would want to celebrate Christmas with her boyfriend her all of her new heroic friends. She couldn’t know. She had no idea what the future would be like.
Well. She hadn’t exactly decided what it would be like, either. So maybe the fault was hers, for being so indecisive.
She had contemplated her options but never really taken any decisive steps. Her future as Quantum was certain, but what about Hoshizora? She hadn’t made any plan for after her Bachelor’s degree. She hadn’t started searching for a place to lay low. She hadn’t decided if she was going to stay in touch with Sawayomi. She hadn’t decided which persona she was going to introduce to Moxie. It wasn’t even a strategical consideration; it was just plain and simple uncertainty.
Which was dumb. And a bit cowardly. Did some plans call for waiting? Yes, many plans called for delayed action; but that was not the same as hesitating to choose. Not delaying because you knew the right moment to do what was necessary, but delaying because you couldn't make up your mind… there was no cunning plan which called for that.
Did you sometimes need more information to choose? Yes, but that could also turn into an excuse for delaying; and it would be tempting to delay, when you were faced with a choice between two painful alternatives, and not choosing would avoid the mental pain for a time. Abandon Toki Hoshizora and threw herself fully into being Quantum? Or keep both personas and hope she could manage, that neither facet would crack? Toki couldn’t pick. So she wavered and delayed, mentally making excuses, telling herself she still had time.
She offhandedly mentioned that if she couldn’t make it for Christmas next year, she would try to be here for New Year at least. It wasn’t a promise, and it wasn’t an explanation either. It wasn’t even a plan. But Mihoko and her husband both relaxed slightly. Because it was still a decision.
I won’t cut you out once high-school end. I won’t forget about you once I’m a hero.
Christmas passed. A few days later, so did Keigo’s birthday. The next day was a Friday, so after class, Toki took a train to Osaka and booked a hotel online. She knew Keigo was also on a train, gleefully calling Naruto Labs to tell them he had plans to celebrate his birthday and to please notify Okamoto that he wouldn’t be back before Monday… Oh, Monday was a holiday! So make that Tuesday, then. He would have told Okamoto himself, but he didn’t have his number. Too bad, right?
Then he hung up and shut off his phone. Keigo out.
They got to Osaka within an hour of each other. They found the hotel. Keigo mocked her because she had booked a room with twin beds, really?! But Toki retorted that maybe the HPSC would track down her reservation, to which Keigo replied she was paranoid, to which Toki said that she fully interned to push the two beds together and he could either help or sleep on the floor, and after that… well. They moved the beds. And they didn’t argue at all for the rest of the night.
The next morning, Keigo woke her up at dawn. Which, granted, wasn’t exactly early (it was the middle of winter after all) but ugh, it was a week-end after all. She was an early bird, usually, but she still needed her beauty sleep.
“Nonsense,” cheerfully said Keigo over breakfast. “You’re already beautiful.”
Toki turned crimson and choked on her toast. Keigo grinned from ear to ear, delighted by her reaction.
“What, has nobody told you you’re attractive before? Well, I can’t let it stand. Toki, you’re good looking to the point where it makes me mad sometimes. You haven’t had a pimple since we were eleven and it’s deeply unfair, except I really like looking at you so I guess it evens out.”
“Well,” sputtered Toki, red-faced and steam all but coming out of her ears, “you’re the one who look like a model and you’re unfairly attractive too so I’m the one who lucked out. Now can we please go on with our mission before I just self-combust out of sheer embarrassment?”
“Okay, sure, but don’t think I’m going to forget how adorable you are when flustered… Hey, don’t pinch me, fine, I’ll drop it!” He leaned back, sniggering, before becoming serious: “So, about our brilliant plan. It doesn’t go much further than ‘find the place where Hayasa-sensei had been photographed’, I guess. Want to explore the city a little more? It couldn’t hurt to have some drop-points for Warp-Space.”
Good idea. Toki nodded, then frowned:
“What if Hayasa-sensei had left his job? Or gone on holidays?”
“Then someone more accommodating than Okamoto will have his phone number. And maybe he’s in. You know him, workaholic he is. Speaking of which, do you have a speech prepared? Because getting stalked by two ex-students halfway across the country may freak him out a bit.”
Yeah. And Toki really had a logical speech prepared, about how they wanted him to come work in their agency, about how he was the best trainer around… About how she wanted him to train her own protegee, Moxie; and later on, Hitoshi. But she also wanted to ask him if he was okay, if he had resolved his issues with his family, if he could come home. He had been the closest thing they had to a parent at Naruto Labs.
“Yeah, don’t worry. I’ve got a speech. But you better have my back when I say I want him to help whip our agency into shape.”
And so they went exploring the city.
Osaka was a huge city, with a lot of attractions. There were museums, historical monuments, shopping districts, theaters, Christmas markets, and hero agencies… Toki and Keigo took the train to play tourists, obviously. They started with the northern side of the city, then went into counterclockwise patrol route, from west to south to east. Toki didn’t even notice they were doing it until midday, when they stopped to get lunch in a yakitori shop and started bickering over a map to know where they would go next. It was kind of funny, how efficient they were without even having to think about it.
It was also chilling, to realize that this efficiency, this training, had become second nature to them. It wasn’t something that most young adults had, even those who trained to be heroes. Even seasoned professionals didn’t necessarily think like that. It wasn’t in their nature. Heroes dealt with villains one at a time, with commercials and publicity stunts in between. They were civil servants, fighter and rescuers, but also showmen. They didn’t think about long-term strategy, as if they were preparing for war.
But Toki and Keigo did. They had been trained for it.
The HPSC prepared their heroic children to be soldiers, not just heroes. It was a remnant of a darker time, since this program had been founded during the Silver Age, where the Symbol of Peace hadn’t yet emerged. But maybe it was also a voluntary goal. Heroes were becoming weak and complacent, relying on All Might’s strength instead of their own. The HPSC needed strong people to hold the line when the Symbol would falter.
That was the thing with governmental organizations: they always knew that you couldn’t count on one person to hold a country together. People were fallible. People were mortal.
All Might had fought AFO two years ago. He had started slowing down, although people hadn’t noticed yet. He fought less often, and happened less on camera. He had completely stopped doing publicity stunts, focusing on fighting with the limited time he had. His sidekick Sir Nighteye had started his own agency, leaving All Might alone. Sometimes days went past without anyone hearing about him, but then he popped on the other side of the country to throw himself headfirst in a fight, smile at cameras, then disappear again. The public loved this new unpredictability, but it wasn’t hard to see it was also disorganization. All Might was flying from one fight to another, desperate to still be here, to still matter. He wasn’t taking care of himself and he didn’t have any place to call home.
The consequences weren’t too visible, yet. But Toki was aware that the clock was ticking. She hadn’t timed his appearances but she could probably safely assume that his work-time had been cut in half.
… Aaaaand why was she thinking about that when she should enjoy her week-end? All because of a stupid map. She really needed to stop overthinking things!
Anyway. At the end of the day, they finally went to the big gym at the edge of the city where Hayasa-sensei was supposed to work. If it had been night, maybe they could have used their Quirks to fly discreetly, but in broad daylight? It was just asking for trouble. Shame. A good flight would sure have soothed Toki’s nerves. While they were walking down the street, she felt almost jittery. What if Hayasa-sensei didn’t want to be found?
It was too late to think about it. They were here. It was a big building with a wide hall decorated with potted plants, promotional posters and a planning for their activities. Some lessons were geared towards adults, but some were aimed at kids, with a side of Quirk-counselling. The gym advertised that they could handle people with physical Quirks difficult to control, and that they offered one-one-one lessons for kids hoping to become heroes who wished for the best physical conditioning. Considering the hero-mania in Japan, it was kind of an obvious bait, but… this kind of lessons would be right in Hayasa-sensei’s alley.
And then, as if summoned by her thoughts, the man himself appeared.
For a second they all just stood there like a deer in headlight, Hayasa-sensei still holding the door of the changing rooms. He hadn’t changed one bit. He was as tall as Toki remembered him. His shoulders may even be even larger, like he’d been working out. His hair was maybe a little longer, but still held in a messy ponytail. He even had the same rectangular glasses.
Then a shocked grin broke out on his face, and Toki and Keigo both beamed like lunatics.
“Hi, sensei!”
“Quantum! Hawks! My god, you’ve grown up!”
They had almost rushed to each other before awkwardly stopping, as if unsure of if they should shake hands or hug. They had never been affectionate. But they had been comfortable with each other, and it took no effort at all for Toki to reach out and knock on Hayasa-sensei’s shoulder, skipping around him as if she was ten again and unable to stay in place at the perspective of a new game of hide-and-seek.
“Holy crap sensei, have you been working out? You weren’t this large in my memories!”
“I don’t run as much, it left me time to practice more combat sports and bodybuilding,” he admitted, batting her hand away affectionally. “What about you? How is your heart? Are you better?”
“Of course! I got a heart transplant and everything. My medical leave ended last month, and I had a Quirk assessment where, and I quote, I passed with flying colors!”
“And I have my provisional license!” added Keigo with a huge grin, wings flapping excitingly. “I ranked first, just so you know, because I’m awesome like that!”
It was like a dam broke: they started babbling excitingly about all they had done in the last years. Toki talked about Yūei, Keigo about his high-school and hero training, and Hayasa-sensei continued smiling, asking questions, looking delighted to hear what they had been up to. Toki had never seen him so unabashedly pleased and relaxed: it was almost giving her whiplash, to reconcile this relaxed, civilian-Hayasa, with her stern teacher. They were still the same, but this Hayasa-sensei seemed way more approachable. He only interrupted them once to close the gym (they had the forethought to come in near closing time), then they all went together at a restaurant. Hayasa-sensei insisted on inviting them. They had a lot to talk about.
Hayasa-sensei looked furious when he learned that Okamoto had erased his contact information from the Labs’ computers. He hadn’t really dared to call after leaving, since it would have been unprofessional, but it had never been his intention to ditch Keigo without an explanation. Just like Toki had supposed, he had left right after learning the death of Fuego, his brother-in-law. He had called his sister, and she’d been so distraught he had immediately packed his bags. He had left an explanation to the Labs, and had specifically asked Okamoto to present his apologies to Keigo for bailing like that… but of course, Okamoto being a prick who disliked Hayasa-sensei personally, he had conveniently forgotten. Asshole.
“I tried to look you up in Tokyo but I couldn’t find anything,” frowned Toki. “I was only by pure coincidence that I saw your hero name in the list of heroes living in Osaka.”
“That’s probably because I signed on the Heroic Reserves here,” Hayasa-sensei admitted. “I didn’t do it previously, but well, I varied my skillset here. The damage to my Quirk won’t allow me to go back to full-time, limelight heroic. But I learned I could offer the world more than my speed. Anyway, how did you end up looking up heroes in Osaka?”
“She was stalking some other hero!” denounced Keigo with a shit-eating grin.
“I was just looking him up online! He’s a sponsored hero like us, of course I was curious! I just did a little digging!”
“So you looked through his social media, candid shots of his agency, the official listing, and the list of heroes he could possibly be associated with? Very deep, your digging.”
Toki sputtered. Then, to her great surprise, Hayasa-sensei laughed. Four years ago he would have berated them half-heartedly, amused but unwilling to let them act too immaturely in public. What a change!
“You’re much less of a stick in the mud than the last time we saw each other, sensei!” exclaimed Keigo without any tact.
Mortified, Toki kicked him. But he felt the hit coming with his feathers, and effortlessly avoided the strike without even having to glance at their legs below the table. Cheater.
“I’m off-duty,” Hayasa-sensei defended himself. “Besides, it’s a holiday… And I’m not your teacher anymore. But the first one of you who swear will have to run laps, just like the good old days.”
Keigo grinned.
“Oh, heck.”
“You’re on thin ice.”
“Be nice!” Toki chided them. “Come on, Hayasa-sensei, tell us what you’ve done during those last four years. Did you take up yoga? How are things with your family?”
She immediately cringed, worried she had been too abrupt. Maybe it was something her teacher wanted to keep private. But Hayasa-sensei easily shrugged:
“Things are fine. I helped my sister and her sons for a while.” His eyes turned somber for a second: “Fuego wasn’t a good husband for her, nor a good father to his sons. I helped as much as I could, but I didn’t have my place here. It was also pretty clear that my eldest nephew feared that I would steal his father’s agency… or that I would tarnish Fuego’s memory in the eyes of his brother, or the press. My sister and him both want to bury the past.” He sighed deeply. “Anyway, we parted in good terms. I left eight months later, when I got a good job offer here. This gym specializes in training children with bad control over their Quirk. Sport gives them an outlet, discipline, and some counselling. So… I moved here. I took up boxing. And I passed a certification in Quirk Counselling last year.”
“Nice!” whistled Keigo. “So you like it here?”
Hayasa-sensei considered, then nodded. “Yes, I do. It’s a nice city. I like teaching, I like hero work, so…”
Toki felt her heart sink a little. She covered it up with a dramatic groan:
“Damn! There goes my recruitment speech.”
“Recruitment speech?” parroted Hayasa-sensei.
“Well, we wanted to have you help whip our future agency into shape. Also make sure our sidekicks take us seriously. Aaaaaand maybe help me train the kids I’ve accidentally taken as students. But if you like it here, well…”
Hayasa-sensei blinked. He looked baffled, then fond. “Really, Quantum? You have students? And you let her, Hawks?”
“Let her?” Keigo retorted with a scoff. “You can’t stop Quantum from doing stupid stuff, you just keep up.”
“Okay, first of all, rude,” Toki scowled. “Also, my students are awesome. The first one is going to be the very first Quirkless hero ever. She is a genius and she will knock out so many villains’ teeth, just you wait. And the second one isn’t technically my student, yet, because he’s still in elementary school, but he has the most powerful mental Quirk, and he’s going to be an amazing hero.”
Hayasa-sensei’s eyebrows had risen more and more during her little speech. He shook his head fondly, then leaned against the back of his seat.
“Well, why don’t you tell me a little more about them? And about your future agency?”
Toki and Keigo’s exchanged a lightning-quick glance. That wasn’t a yes for the recruitment speech. But it was a solid maybe. Without needing any concertation, they both launched into an enthusiastic recounting of their ideas. The designs, the name, what kind of sidekicks they would need, what kind of organization. Then Toki went on a tangent about how she had met a girl who wanted to be a Quirkless hero, and how amazing her support equipment was, and how seriously she took her physical conditioning and her studies…
Maybe four years ago Hayasa-sensei would have shaken his head with derision at the thought of a Quirkless heroes. Many Quirked people would. But Hayasa-sensei had been Quirkless too, following his accident. He had gotten artificial ligaments, sure, but he would never be as fast as he was before. And still, he had joined the Heroic Reserves. He had started boxing and bulked up, which would have been a heresy for a pure speedster. So, he didn’t approve, but Toki could see him think about it, and really, it was already fantastic progress.
In the end, they didn’t leave with Hayasa-sensei recruited. That would have been too good. But they did leave with his info contact, and a promise to keep in touch.
So, all in one, their little getaway was a success. They spend the following day getting pampered at the hotel’s spa, making plans for the future, and congratulating each other on their successful mission. They celebrated the new year with a bottle of champagne delivered to their room. And later that night, after the countdown and the fireworks and the New Year’s wishes… They went flying.
It had been ages since they had been able to fly together. A real flight, where they could race through the sky, high above the multicolored light of the city, playing with the wind and chasing each other with exhilaration! Keigo may be the one with wings, but they had both been in love with the sky from a young age.
Reaching for the top had always been in their nature, after all. And with their Quirk, Hayasa-sensei at their side, and the future filled to the brim with opportunities… This new year was going to be a good one. She could feel it.
Notes:
Hope you liked it !
Cookie for you if you had guessed that Hayasa-sensei would come back. I grew attached to him x)
Inferno and Salamder both have fanarts of them, that i'll post in "Snapshot of Wisdom".
Here is Inferno :
And here is Salamander :They are secondary characters but i like them, so expect them to be reccuring characters x) Also, the mystery of S-ranked heroes is going to bother Toki until she get an explanation!
ALSO ! I have a very important question for you folks, because i'm terribly lost. Which is the correct Todoroki timeline ?
In Chapter 250, according to Fuyumi, it's :
Rei burns Shoto ; then she’s hospitalised ; then briefly after Touya goes to Sekoto and “burn alive”But in Chapter 302, narrated by Rei, it's :
Touya’s accident happens ; then Rei has a breakdown and burns Shoto ; then Rei is hospitalisedSo which is it ? I'm tearing my hair out. I THINK it's the second one but i would like a second opinion... or third.. or fourth... or as many as i can get =)
EDIT : I completely forgot but i also wanted to ask you about names for the ship KeigoxToki ! xDDD
So there's three possibilities :
1 - SpaceWings (combination of their Quirks' names, Warp-Space and Mighty Wings. Also, space is Toki's passion)
2 - StarWings (combinaison of their titles, Starburst hero and Wing hero. Also the name Hoshizora, which is Toki's civiliansona, means "Starry Sky")
3 - SunWings (little nod to the Icarus imagery that litters their relationship and their character arcs. Also Toki's real name, Taiyome, means "Sun Eyes")What do you think ?
Chapter 22: Reaching the top
Summary:
Toki graduates high-school, gets her Hero License, and learns what an S-ranked hero is. Let's just say: she's NOT thrilled with the anwser.
Notes:
Oh boy there is a LOT in that chapter. I especially loved the License Exam. I drew inspiration from the manga's cavalry battle and i don't regret it !
Anyway. Enjoy !
Also, to talk a little about my life : next week-end i'll be at a mass-LARP and I CAN'T WAIT. Whacking people with foam swords and pretending to be a pirate witch with wind powers is, like, the greatest thing ever. MWAHAHAHAHA.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
REACHING THE TOP
The year 2227 was the third year since All Might had fought All For One. Nobody knew, of course, but with her knowledge of the canon-timeline… Toki could start to see clues. So in January, Toki innocently asked Sachiko if she hadn’t noticed that All Might was appearing less and less. She didn’t personally have the time to draw comparative graphs, but once directed to a mystery, Sachiko was like a dog with a bone. The pink-haired girl started investigating, imagining a plethora of theories to explain why their Symbol of Peace was making himself scarce. Maybe he had a family? Maybe he had a secret lover? Maybe he was dying? Maybe he was taking undercover missions abroad? Maybe he was considering becoming a part-time hero to ease the public in the idea of him retiring in few years?
Because the results of Sachiko’s investigations were kind of damning. Before, All Might had always been active, day and night, almost fourteen hours a day, often even more. Now? It was seven hours a day max. Still a full day of work, still nothing that rang alarm’s bells… but it wasn’t normal for All Might (the overachiever, the man who never slept, the one who was always here) to satisfy himself with something like that. Something had changed.
Toki knew what, obviously. And this declining curve stayed the same in the following years… Well. All Might would be forced to retire in three or four years, max. Unless he died first.
Gods, why hadn’t the HPSC grabbed him by the shoulders and shaken him until he faced reality?! It was so frustrating. The public didn’t know, but the HPSC had to be aware of what was going on! Just by looking at Sachiko’s charts, Toki could see something was wrong.
They still had time to avoid disaster, so why nobody was taking that time? Why was All Might continuing to push himself to his limit, as if there was no other choice? He still had years before him, and Japan was more peaceful than ever! People should start right now to prepare to a life without the Symbol of Peace as a security blanket. And All Might now only had a few years to make that happen, so why wasn’t he doing anything? He could tell people he was starting to work part-time only, for example. Maybe he could swing it as a way to give more opportunities to others heroes. Maybe he could just say (more realistically) that he approached his sixties and, like a father, was now starting to entrust part of his work to his children who would one day succeed him.
But instead, All Might clung to his job, to his past, to something unsustainable. He would get killed, sooner or later. And instead of having learned how to face reality on their own, the people who looked up to him would just be frightened children whose security blanket had been violently ripped from them.
And who would have to deal with that disaster? Other heroes. More specifically: Hawks and Quantum. Man, she did not look forward to that.
January passed, then February. Toki had her appointment with the HPSC to have one combat training exercise as a final preparation for her License Exam. To her great disappointment, the hero she had to fight with wasn’t Inferno or Salamander. She would have liked to pester them with questions… But no, it was an older man with a metal-controlling Quirk. He was here for an eval after several months on medical leave after a critical injury. He was still in good shape, and his Quirk gave Toki some trouble because metal was everywhere. Having the zipper of her vest bail on her was not a pleasant experience, but whatever. She won, and that was the important thing.
Oh, and Toki had finally figured out how to create a vacuum without being unbalanced by it! By creating not one big pocket of vacuum, but more like a sheet of vacuum all around her body, to spread the effect. She had done something similar during her fight with Inferno, but she hadn’t actually thought about it until afterward.
She still really wanted to speak with Salamander again, to finally get an explanation about what S-ranked heroes were. She almost asked Keigo once or twice over the phone, but… she wanted to untangle this mystery on her own.
Also Inferno had been a nice sempai. Brash and arrogant, but Toki preferred that over coddling. At least it was honest. Inferno was a nightmare to fight, especially for her who relied heavily on close-combat, but she could guess he could teach her a lot. So yeah, she was interested in meeting him again. Maybe speak a little about how to manage an agency, what sidekicks were expected to do, that kind of stuff.
The kind of stuff that, once upon a time, Shirayuki had been supposed to teach them. She had been the rising star of Fukuoka, the beloved prodigy, the most promising heroine of the decade. Even if Toki had only meet her once, in passing… well. With the way the President had spoken about her, and how even Okamoto had been almost proud when he mentioned her achievement… It had never been in doubt that Shirayuki was what Hawks and Quantum were supposed to aspire to be.
But Shirayuki had been killed. So now Toki had to look elsewhere for a heroic sempai to emulate.
Inferno had given her his phone number so Toki started texting him sometimes, mostly to ask random questions about heroism. Because she was a teenager and liked to needle, she also sent him a lot of memes about Endeavor. Keigo wouldn’t appreciate them because he was blinded by Endeavor’s charm (pfffffff!), but at least one person was guaranteed to laugh their ass off when Toki sent a side-by-side comparison of Endeavor with the Pokemon Emboar.
Inferno took time to answer her questions, probably because he had a job and was busy, but he always did. And he found the memes absolutely hilarious. Toki counted it as a success. Hey, maybe all that training with Okamoto hadn’t been in vain, if she managed to befriend people that easily!
She asked about Salamander, from time to time. How was he doing? Were they working together? Apparently it happened more often than not. They were both totally independent heroes but they lived in the same area and it wasn’t rare for them to cross paths. They also seemed pretty close in real life. Inferno referred to Salamander casually, talking about his bad taste in coffee and his nagging about keeping a strict schedule. He never mentioned the S-rank thing, though.
When Toki worked out the courage to ask, finding a roundabout way of mentioning it as off-handedly as possible, Inferno’s answer was brief… and not nearly as helpful as Toki could have hoped.
It’s an access level, he wrote. Basically S-ranked heroes are better informed and sent on more confidential and important missions than normal heroes. They often have to take back-up, though, and I’m usually Salamander’s. Between the two of us, I’m the powerhouse, obviously.
What kind of important missions? Toki immediately typed back, devoured by curiosity.
Clearly not your business, since you’re not aware of it.
Toki scowled at her phone. Go figures. He didn’t want to tell her. Rah, she should have asked for Salamander’s phone. He had been the one to introduce himself as S-ranked, which meant he would have been more willing to talk.
She didn’t ask Inferno for Salamander’s phone, because it would have been suspicious (and also because she was starting to suspect Inferno and Salamander of dating, which made it a little awkward if her intentions were misinterpreted). But she kept the idea in a corner of her mind. One day, she would get to the bottom of it. New mysteries were always interesting, and the waiting part had its own thrill… but actually finding the answer was the best part.
Time passed.
Toki kept in touch with her friends. On the Discord, she was slowly preparing to come clean. She couldn’t hide her identity forever, since she had the brilliant idea of making her username NotQuantum. On its own, it shouldn’t be suspect! But once she would be a hero and appear on TV with a hero named Hawks, her friends were soon going to put two plus two together.
The wisest thing to do would be to leave the Discord server. It was a security risk. They knew too much about her. She didn’t think they would sell this information to anyone, but… a few careless words could be enough to tip off any villain who wanted to take a crack at Japan’s youngest heroes. Okamoto had given them lessons about it: avoid revealing too much online, keep your Quirk a secret because the Quirk registry is not as secure as the government wanted you to think, plant false clues to avoid people connecting your heroic identity to your civilian ones…
Yeah, Toki and Keigo had kind of screwed up on that one. Mostly Toki. The reasonable things to do would be to leave the Discord. For a while, at least. But Toki didn’t want to, she would miss her friends too much, so… she was postponing her decision. As long as Quantum didn’t appear on TV, she was fine, right?
The other online friend Toki should warn was Moxie. She was coming to Japan very soon. In April, actually: just in time for the new school year. If they meet in real life, Toki would have to disclose her heroic identity to be able to honestly train her friend. But she was strangely reluctant to do it. It was easier to be the nobody in this relationship, to simply be a Quirkless girl helping a peer. It would seriously change things if Toki revealed the massive power imbalance between them.
So she postponed that decision, too. Really, she was becoming excellent at procrastinating.
Anyway. In March, it was time for the end-of-year exams. This year, Toki had worked her ass off because it was graduation, and she wanted to be brilliant. She studied day and night, cutting off her downtime and even a little bit of her Quirk-training time. She wanted to ace this shit. You didn’t graduate high-school every day! Sure, the actual grades didn’t matter much in the real world (very few bosses looked at your grades when you were an adult looking for a job: they looked at your practical experience instead), but Toki didn’t want to impress the Commission or a potential recruiter: she wanted to impress her future university. She would have to complete her Master’s degree, then a Doctorate. And those people looked at grades. So, really, she had to excel. Go big or go home.
And Toki went big. She didn’t get a perfect score, of course… But she got excellent grades everywhere.
She was the fourth ranked in the 3-C class, behind Masamune Aokotsu (the class rep), Daiki Yaibadosu and Izumi Kinjo (two third of the nerdy trio). She also managed, to her great surprise, to actually pass her university courses. Not all of them, she had failed the two she had planned to fail, but… She had excellent grades in the four others. Which meant that this year, when she would retake her courses, she would keep her excellent passing grades and only have to re-pass the two class she had failed. It gave her an almost laughable workload compared to the previous years!
But back to the point. It was the end of high-school, so she had to say goodbye to her friends. She had to say goodbye to Sawayomi, mostly, and it was… kind of awkward. They had been close, but not that close, and they had drifted away those last few months. Toki couldn’t even promise to stay in contact: she didn’t know what would become of her civiliansona, Toki Hoshizora. So they said goodbye, and Toki keep her friend’s phone number, but… It felt weird. Like unfinished business.
“We’ll keep in touch, right?” Toki tried to smile.
“Right,” Sawayomi said flatly.
But she didn’t seem to really believe it. And Toki could see why. She had kind of fucked up their friendship, hadn’t she? Sawayomi was a loner who didn’t trust anyone and lashed out at the slightest perceived aggression, but she had still approached Toki, welcomed her, befriended her, trusted her. Hell, Toki had been the only person Sawayomi had trusted enough to help her train her Quirk. It was a huge gesture.
And Toki had threw it back in her face, stopping their training without warning, avoiding confrontation, lying about her reasons. Friendship was hard, and sometimes it ended badly, but this time Toki knew it wasn’t anyone fault but hers. She had managed to stay friendly with Sawayomi, but the trust and the comfort were gone.
She opened her mouth to try and justify herself, then hesitated. There would be nothing that would make things better. Maybe confessing her reasons would help her feel better, like a weight off her chest, but what about Sawayomi? It wouldn’t fix anything on her end. She would just get a bunch of excuses in addition to Toki fucking off to live an exciting life without a single glance behind.
“I’m sorry about ditching the Quirk-training,” she said anyway.
“Whatever,” her friend grunted.
“No, really!” Toki insisted. “I just had a huge secret to keep and… it was too risky. I trust you, but actually letting you know would have been unsafe and borderline illegal, so I just stopped the training. Sorry. I should have been a better friend.”
Sawayomi frowned:
“Are you in trouble?”
Toki carelessly waved a hand, although she was touched by her friend’s concern.
“Nah. Just got involved into my caretaker’s business, and he work for the Hero Public Safety Commission, so… sensitive information, you know? Anyway, I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying you’re sorry.”
“Does that mean you accept my apology?” Toki grinned.
Sawayomi let out an amused snort.
“Yeah, I’m not good at that. Alright, unfuck you or whatever. I’m still pissed about you lying, though. So you owe me, alright?!”
“Well, obviously.”
“Good,” Sawayomi grunted. “What are you going to do for college, now? Staying in Musutafu?”
And just like that, the subject was closed. It didn’t fix everything, and it wouldn’t make up for the months of awkwardness and resentment, but it was better than nothing. And it had cleared the air a little. Toki beamed.
“Probably not. I’ve almost finished my Bachelor’s degree, so I’m going to Fukuoka to… continue studying.”
Aaaaand she was right back at lying. Toki repressed a wince. At least she had gotten better at it. She would never be a con-man like Keigo (his mask was impeccable, and he could fake casualness, affection, or panic, with the same ease as an Oscar-winning actor), but she could lie with a straight face. The way Sawayomi nodded, believing her immediately, made Toki felt awfully guilty.
“Nice. I’m leaving town, too. I’m going to a forensic training course with the law university in Osaka.”
“Osaka?” Toki repeated, brightening. “My old teacher lives here. I stalked him once.”
“Jesus Christ. What the hell are you going to get up to while I’m not watching?”
“Hey! I’m not a delinquent, you know!”
“Sometimes I have to fucking wonder!”
Toki laughed, and teased her right back, falling in the familiar pattern of their usual banter.
Sawayomi and her parted on good terms, in the end. It still felt like unfinished business, with a tingle of awkwardness and anger. But it wasn’t as bitter as it could have been. And… maybe they would see each other again. Maybe Toki would drop by Osaka after getting her Master’s degree. Or maybe Quantum would work in this city, and cross paths with a forensic scientist with reddish hair and a punk wardrobe. What a head-trip it would be!
Anyway, Toki didn’t really had time to worry about that, did she? School was over, but it only meant that the real work had begun.
Barely a few days later, she had her License Exam.
That was it. That was the day she had prepared for since she had taken Kameko-san’s offer. It was the day where she would officially become a hero. Keigo had passed his Provisional Exam so, after a private evaluation, his License had become definitive. But Toki had to pass the test, like everyone who didn’t have a Provisional License already. It very common. Some candidates had passed the provisional by the skin of their teeth, others had temper issues and were forced to retake the test to reevaluate their attitude, some other people were passing the exam freelance (mostly adults who had been training on their own)… It was a lot. According to statistics, for this exam, there would be several hundred people.
Toki had approximatively five hundred opponents. It should have panicked her. But in her mind, there was no worry about her success. She felt oddly calm. Ten years of her life had led her up to this moment. The time for panic and stage-fright was long past.
What would her father think, if he had known his daughter was preparing to become what he hated the most? Unbiddenly, Toki wondered. She had never asked about Meteor’s fate. Maybe he was in Tartarus. Maybe in some other prison. Maybe he had become mad with rage and resentment, or maybe he had calmed down and started studying laws to pass time and try to appeal his cause, like the smartest criminals sometimes did. She didn’t know. She wished she could know, suddenly.
So much of her life had been impacted by him. Now, she was an adult, preparing to enter one of the most dangerous professions in the world. Maybe it was time to face the past. Maybe it would bring her closure.
Alright. After the exam, she would ask. What would the President say, ‘no’? Pfff! As if.
oOoOoOo
The Hero License Exam was organized by a tall man in a suit that Toki didn’t recognize, who looked pissed enough to breath fire. So, okay, then, not a laid-back guy, she could guess. Hopefully he wouldn’t give them too bad of a grade. Toki did find a few of the others organizers familiar, though. There was one guys she had met during Okamoto’s lessons, something about insurances and propriety damages… another dude who had worked at Naruto Labs for a while… the same psychologist she had seen when the committee had evaluated her… and Mera-san, who was sorting thought papers with a mulish look. Toki winked at him in passing. Ah ah, yeah, climbing the ladder meant having to do more tedious tasks, too!
Anyway. The candidates were all assembled in the center of a big arena, and told the rules. The game was simple. They were all going to be let loose in this arena, in a fake city. Each candidate had a headband worth ten points. You won if you managed to bring fifty points to the jury at the end of the test. The more points you got, the higher in the ranking you were. And before the beginning of the test, each candidate was assigned a ‘target’ whose headband they had to retrieve to success. The jury warned them than several people could have the same target, while others could very well have no have hunters on their trail. The assignments were randoms.
When Toki was given the paper with the photo of her target, she noted with a jolt of surprise that they were actually five photos, not one. There was also a line of text written underneath, with a sixth picture.
Added points if you can protect their own target.
That was the sixth picture, then. Apparently the five guys had all the same target. It was a girl with long blonde hair, cat ears, and a bright grin. Toki looked at her photo for a few seconds, pondering her options, before shrugging. Oh, well. She wasn’t going to say no to bonus points. Challenge accepted. She slipped the paper in her pocket, scanning the crowd to find her five, no, her six targets. One, two, three…
“And the exam is starting NOW!” yelled the someone in a microphone with as much enthusiasm as Present Mic commenting the Sport Festival. “Do your worst!”
Everyone started attacking, and Toki safely teleported away. She couldn’t help but beam, though. The race, the stakes, it made her feel both elated and a little ballistic. It was her favorite time of a day, after all: fight o’clock!
The arena was almost the same that Class 1-A would use in canon for their provisional license: it was less polished, with only two fake sceneries (an industrial city, and a rural area with houses but also trees and a river), but it was still huge. Appearing on top of a building was Toki’s best way to supervise the scene. The tower was high, safe, and gave a great view of the arena… so Toki immediately looked for the girl with cat’s ears. Since her targets were hunters, they would all converge on their prey eventually. She could totally protect her while using her as bait.
Case in point: barely five seconds had passed and already one of her targets was descending on cat-girl. It was a lanky guy who moved with weird undulating moves, like a snake. They started fighting ferociously, kicking and jumping with incredible agility. Cat-girl was actually a real acrobat, with a feline grace and an incredible bounce in her jumps, and a long tail that helped her keep her balance mid-air, to land on her feet every time. Toki watched the fight a few seconds to get a good feel of their respective abilities…
… Then she darted in, grabbing snake-guy by the neck and appearing on the other side of the arena with him, before grabbing his headband and warping away. The guy barely had time to let out a screech of protest: when he turned, swinging blindly at his opponent, Toki was already gone.
Toki warped back in her spot… and immediately had to dodge the cat-girl, who had pounced at her like a kitten on a mouse. Toki hadn’t expected it, and she barely managed to teleport away with her headband.
“Hey, what the fuck?” she shouted, ten meters away. “I saved you, a little gratefulness wouldn’t be amiss!”
“Sorry for that!” the girl shouted back, launching herself at Toki’s head once again. “But you’re my target!”
“Oh, those bastards,” Toki growled.
It was probably Mera-san’s idea. He seemed lazy and apathic, but he had a weird sense of humor, too. He was probably laughing himself sick in the control room while watching this.
Toki immediately decided to pay him back. Hum… Well, nobody had said that she had to get only fifty point to pass, right? Or that you couldn’t give points to people. Cat-girl was the only person Toki wasn’t allowed to touch, but everyone else was fair game. She grinned feraly.
Time to add some more chaos to this exam.
“Hey!” yelled Cat-girl, looking pissed. “Don’t you run away from me!”
“Try to keep up!” Toki retorted without slowing down.
There was guy with four headbands slung around his neck fighting another guy who had three: Toki snatched all the prizes and continued running. Or rather, her version of running, which was to appear then disappear in the blink of an eye, just the time to see what’s ahead of her before teleporting there, in the air, on the ground, on rooftops, zigzagging to make it harder to catch by surprise. There, another group fighting! One, two, five, ten headbands… Toki jumped in the fray, catching as many prizes as she could. One of the guys had a tentacle-Quirk, and managed to steal back a few headbands from Toki: but she still got away richer than she had arrived.
The groups she had robbed started chasing her, yelling. But then the cat-girl somersaulted in the middle of their band and started stealing the few headbands they had left, before starting chasing Toki again; meanwhile the group started chasing the both of them, and then one of Toki’s targets spotted cat-girl and started chasing her too… and the whole thing was so hilarious Toki couldn’t help but cracking up. Oh god, it looked like a scene straight from a cartoon. The only thing missing was a coyote planting dynamite on railroad.
“Oh, look, another group!” she yelled gleefully.
Said group was larger, about twenty people fighting on a large area. Several were without headbands, others had two or three headbands slung around their necks or arms. Toki cackled evilly… then started tossing around her own headbands like confetti.
They were a few muttered ‘what the hell?!’ but after a second a stupefaction… people threw themselves on the precious bands of tissue in a frenzy. The chaotic but clear battle became a total pandemonium.
It was like feeding a swarm of pigeons: wings flapping everywhere, feathers blasting around like someone was exploding pillows, yells and screech of rage. In the chaos, Toki managed to snag a few other headbands. One, two, three, five, seven, oooh and one of the guys here was her target! She grabbed him by the neck and hop, she was gone just as her pack of pursuers were arriving.
She could hear Cat-girl’s scream of rage in the distance. It was very satisfying.
She dropped her target on the other side of the arena, stole his headband and warped away… but this time, not before getting splashed with something thick and sticky. When she landed on a building a few streets away, she stayed stuck. Her target had a glue Quirk! And a quick-drying one at that! Damnit.
On anyone else, it would have worked, but Toki only had to focus for a few seconds before teleporting herself, and not the glue, a few meters away. Her Quirk was such a cheat-code, it wasn’t even funny. Some people had the power to change their hair-color, and here Toki was, fucking with time and space and the rules of quantum mechanics. It felt even a little unfair for her competitors… But hey, warping came with own issues, like a family of criminals and a three billion yens debt, so Toki didn’t feel too bad about showing off.
She continued her rampage. She jumped in the middle of a fight, tossed a few headbands, stole others, and ran away while everyone was fighting over the easy points laying on the ground. Well, it wasn’t exactly easy points: more like bait, actually. Or fuel added to the fire. Toki had once used potato chips to lure seagulls in a teacher’s room in summer camp, and it was exactly like that. People went ballistic when they saw the headbands tossed around. Fifty points just laying there, it meant that the fastest one to grab them was guarantee to pass the exam with just one fight instead of having to hunt down more competitors. And in the chaos, well… Toki had no trouble at all stealing more headbands.
It was great. Toki had a lot of fun bouncing around the arena, creating chaos everywhere. She never ran away too far, keeping Cat-girl within sight. She hadn’t forgotten about her bonus task. Twice, she subtly defended her from one of her targets. But well, the instructions had never said anything about protecting Cat-girl from other threats. She had to earn her place here, too! So if it was a random competitor making grab for the headbands Cat-girl had managed to collect, she was on her own.
Honestly, this game was pretty fun. Toki even had a close call with her fifth and last target. He managed to steal a few headbands from her. Toki also got grazed just as she was relieving him of his nine headbands, making him scream in rage… and it turned out he had a paralyzing Quirk.
Toki only realized it after grabbing his headband and feeling her left knee become numb. She quickly stumbled back, but the numbness was already spreading to her leg. Quick, she ran away, warping to a small, dark corner she had spotted during her rampage.
She already had more than a hundred points, so she had passed, obviously. But her left leg was down. The paralysis didn’t spread much further, thankfully, but it was still unpleasant as fuck. Her whole leg was completely useless, as if anesthetized. She didn’t know who this guy was, but if a simple contact could do that, he could probably send someone into cardiac arrest by holding their hand. Unless he could control the intensity of the paralysis? In any case, that was one powerful Quirk.
Toki sat down against a wall and decided to call it a day. She already had a lot of headbands, and she had generated a truly horrific amount of chaos. Some people had probably gotten fifty points just because of her intervention, completely fucking up the expectations of the HPSC. Yeah, she had probably given all of them a big headache. There wasn’t probably much time left in the exam, anyway.
Then a shadow jumped on the wall in front of her, and aggressively pointed an index finger in her direction:
“You!”
“Oh,” Toki blinked, surprised. “Cat-girl. What a surprise.”
“My name is Lady Siam,” hissed Cat-girl, before taking a dramatic pause. “And you are my opponent! I will have your headband before this test end, I swear it! I will bring my score to fifty and I will pass this exam!”
Toki looked at her dozens of headbands. She had no idea if the original was still in there, honestly. She had taken and given so many, sometimes from the same persons several times in a row… It wasn’t like the original had any particular value, anyway.
“Oh, this headband?” she said, picking up a random one. “Well, you only had to ask. There it is!”
Lady Siam sputtered, turning red, steam all but coming out of her ears. “This is not how it’s supposed to go!”
“Do you want me to have this gift-wrapped too?” Toki innocently asked.
“It’s not… I don’t… Take this seriously!!”
“I can’t,” Toki shrugged apologetically. “I fucked this exam so much that the HPSC may actually kill me if I continue. So… Sorry, this is my last chaotic hurrah.”
She gently tossed the headband to Lady Siam, who just watched her with a half-baffled, half-outraged expression. The band of tissue fluttered in the air… and landed in Lady Siam’s hands just a second before the ring of the alarm signaling the end of the test.
“THE TEST IS OVER,” said a computerized voice. “NO FIGHTING AUTHORIZED FROM NOW ON. All competitors must go to the assembly point.”
Toki tested her weak knee again. Yeah, not getting better. She turned to Lady Siam, and winced:
“So, since I’m half-paralyzed and the test is done, do you mind giving me hand to get back there? I would warp, but I’m afraid to fall flat on my face once I reappear.”
Her opponent, bless her soul, was as straightforward and honorable as her introduction speech had suggested. She let Toki use her as a crutch to teleport without falling over, and they went to the assembly point with a single teleportation. Lady Siam showed impressive sportsmanship, complimenting Toki on her amazing Quirk and her high score. Honestly, Toki was pretty proud of that one. She still had about twenty-five headbands draped around her neck and shoulders.
Medics passed through the crowd, giving first-aid to those who needed it. Toki’s paralysis was deemed temporary, since the guy who had that Quirk could only maintain the effect for a few minutes. She actually felt a little better already. In half-an-hour or so, the effects would be totally gone. She just had to wait it out.
Several guys in suits passed through the crowd of competitors, collecting headbands while noting stuff on a notepad. Mera-san was the one who collected Toki’s and Lady Siam’s headbands, giving the warper the stink eye. Toki shrugged unrepentantly. What? Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
A big billboard had been set up at the front, and soon after, a guy with a megaphone announced that everyone’s score was going to be displayed with their hero names. If they passed, their name would be green, and if they failed, it would be red. Everyone anxiously leaned forward… and the board light up.
Toki had a score of two hundred and eighty points. She was first. The second only had ninety points. Honestly, she had crushed the concurrence. Sorry guys, but with an over-powered Quirk and intensive training from age eight, she just wasn’t on the same level. Toki almost felt sorry. Had Keigo dominated his own exam like this? Probably. Here, the test was designed so only one guy in five would pass, but with Toki’s stunt, it was closer to one in ten.
“You are Quantum, aren’t you?” softly said Lady Siam, eyes still on the billboard.
Ah, yes, Toki hadn’t introduced herself. But the name Quantum was proudly displayed next to her ridiculous score, and the cat-girl had seen how many headbands she still had when the guys in suits had collected them. Toki smiled awkwardly.
“Yeah, that’s me. Quantum, the Starburst Hero. Nice to meet you, Lady Siam.”
Yeah, the Starburst Hero. Toki was embracing her scintillating powers. This name also had the advantage of not telling what her powers were at all, which was a nice bonus. Was it star-powered? Related to combustion? Did the power come in short bursts? No one would know. That was the point.
Anyway. Lady Siam’s shoulders dropped slightly, before she straightened:
“Well, I am Lady Siam, the Feline Hero! You may have won this fight, but I will not be discouraged so easily. Every good hero has a rival, and it seems I just found mine! Oh, unless you already have a rival?”
Toki bluescreened: “Er, no?”
“Perfect!” the cat-girl exclaimed loudly, slapping her on the shoulder and nearly sending Toki face-plating on the ground. “I hope we’ll see a lot of each other in the future! If it’s not indiscreet, where did you train?”
“Private tutor”, Toki sputtered, still trying to come in term with the fact that she now apparently had an Eternal Rival like some kind of shōnen protagonist. “He’s been training me since I was eight, but I was on my own those last few years, since he moved to Osaka.”
“Same! It’s actually my grand-father who taught me. And a few martial arts tutors. And a ballerina with a vicious right hook. I couldn’t afford a heroic course in high-school, but here I am, passing the Heroic License Exam on my own! Hard work really pays off! And of course, natural talent. They are nothing without each other!”
Toki was now examining her new rival with a vaguely alarmed look, fruitlessly trying to identify something like and off-switch. Fortunately, her name was called by Mera-san a little further back, and she hastily said her goodbyes before teleporting to her handler. If she used his tall stature to hide, well, no one needed to know.
“Congratulations”, Mera-san said, dry as dust, handling her a shiny laminated card. “Although we could have done without your little stunt.”
“It was funny!” Toki defended herself while taking the card. “But I apparently won a great rival in the process, so karma had already punished me.”
The card was her license. A real heroic license! There was a blacked-out space in the place where her civilian name should be: just like Hawks’. She looked at it a few seconds, trying to feel accomplished, or relived. But no, it just felt normal. Like doing something expected. She had never really been stressed about this outcome because it had been pretty much inevitable.
“Go home and celebrate,” Mera-san smiled. “Tomorrow, you can discuss your plans and your options with the President. But right now, you established a new record and you can be proud of that.”
“Oh? I beat Hawks?”
She couldn’t help but feel delighted. His Quirk was much better suited to hero work than hers.
“The grading system vary with every exam because the test change each time,” Mera-san tempered. “But yes, you beat him. In terms of general chaos, if nothing else. Oh, and you might want to warp back home. If you pass by the building’s door, the chief is currently smoking to calm his nerves and he may yell at you for making him change everyone’s scores. Your little gift-giving idea totally screwed the points system. He already made three interns cry… and had just downed a whole coffee pot with an energy drink afterward, so at this point, either he’ll be able to breath fire or he’ll go into cardiac arrest.”
“… Duly noted.”
oOoOoOo
So. Toki was a hero now, just like Keigo. Yeah! Now, they could open their own agency. Which meant they needed a loan. No bank would give such a tremendous amount of money to two teenagers freshly out of high-school… but the HPSC would, of course. For a price. Picking where the agency would be located, and having a say in their patrol routes and their missions, for example.
They had already known that. But it didn’t hurt to remind themselves of what their options were, just to be sure they didn’t regret their choice. Even if in the end… well, the decision had been made years ago.
And that’s how they found themselves in the President’s office, discussing locations, the pro and con of buying a building versus renting it, which contract sign with which insurance company, what kind of sidekick to hire. Toki and Keigo would co-head the agency, but in exchange for funding, the HPSC would pick some of their missions until they had paid them back… and even after.
“What about my debt?” Toki pointed out. “I already own you three billion yens. Doesn’t that make me insolvent?”
“Not if I take half!” cheerfully pointed Keigo.
“You can do that,” nodded Genmei-san. “Or the loan can be in Hawks’ name only. You’ll still co-lead the agency but, as Hawks will be the main provider, you will have a debt towards him, not the Commission.”
Toki frowned. Keigo shook his wings impatiently, whining:
“Aw, why make things complicated? I’ll benefit from Quantum’s surgery, too, since she’ll provide half the manpower of our duo. Surgery, artificial organs, equipment bills, sidekicks’ salaries, rent… Let’s just pack it in one big package called ‘funding’. We’re going to reimburse it fifty-fifty anyway.”
“… Fine,” Toki agreed reluctantly. “But since it’s my fault we’re already so much in debt, you’ll have to let me pay you back something. Maybe in term of popularity… When we both arrest someone or solve a case, it’s your name that’ll be put first, and it’ll be an arrest to your credit. What do you say?”
“It will make you shoot up quicker in the rankings,” Genmei-san pointed out when Keigo scowled. “Didn’t you want to make it in the Top Ten before twenty?”
Toki hid a smile. Endeavor had been in the Top Ten by age twenty, too, and the Number Two hero by age twenty-one. Keigo clearly aimed to follow his record… and maybe even beat it.
“Urgh, fine, let’s do that. But not for all of our common arrests! For half? The rest will be attributed to the both of us together, ‘cause you know, we’re a great duo and people are going to notice if we never arrest anyone together on official paperwork.”
“Alright, sold.”
They shook hands solemnly, as if signing a real contract instead of bickering about which one of them would have to fill paperwork. Then they turned back towards the President, who was looking at them with an eyebrow raised. They both grinned sheepishly.
“So, next point of order,” Genmei-san continued calmly. “The location of the agency. As you expect, the Commission want to prioritize Fukuoka. There are three areas where it would be opportune to set up an agency…”
They had to find the approximate location, then approve papers to send people building-hunting, then decide where they would live. Most heroes’ agencies had living quarters for heroes or sidekicks on night-shift, but for the long-term, it wasn’t a viable solution. They would need a separate space to really help compartmentalize work and home: it helped with mental health, especially in a job as time-consuming as heroics.
Toki and Keigo wanted a penthouse. It was an old private joke. But they also innocently threw in that they needed three bedrooms, for guests. Just in case Genmei-san would start having ideas about them living together. Honestly, neither Keigo or Toki had ever spoken about keeping their relationship a secret… but they had an implicit understanding that some things were better kept private. The HPSC already knew a lot about them and how close they were: they didn’t need to know about that in addition to the rest. It would be too easy for them to use it as ammunition, claiming that they were emotionally compromised (as if they weren’t already, since age eight) or that they should go public to boost their publicity.
Anyway. They also talked about which sidekicks they wanted to hire. Genmei-san already has a list of people looking for jobs: freelancer, young graduates, but also people who wanted to leave their agency to work elsewhere and try to make a name. They should start with two or three sidekicks max, and hire people with experience.
Toki also hoped that Hayasa-sensei would call one morning to ask for a job. She would give him one in a heartbeat. He could still do a hero’s job, he had proven it. So what if he couldn’t sprint for fifty kilometers anymore? He was still fast, smart, and strong. Neither Eraser-head or Sir Nighteye needed speed to pound villains in the dust, and they didn’t have shoulders half as large as Hayasa-sensei’s.
(Also, if Hayasa-sensei came, Toki was sure she could ask him advice on how to train Moxie. If there was one person who understood you could be a hero even if you couldn’t use your Quirk fully, or even not at all, it was him. Toki wouldn’t have considered it before, but since seeing Hayasa-sensei in Osaka and seeing how he had changed, how he had bulked up, how more serene he was… well. It had given her some food for thoughts.)
Anyway. Since they were on the topic of underlings… Toki also wanted to pass a teaching license to be able to take interns later on. The President looked a bit taken aback, but agreed readily.
“Of course. I didn’t know you wanted to be a teacher, Quantum.”
Keigo only rolled his eyes, because he had no interest in teaching. Toki could guess why. He wanted to create a world where heroes had time to relax, where fighting constantly wasn’t a necessity anymore. Raising a new generation to follow his footsteps seemed a waste, almost like an admission of failure. But there would always need to be heroes, or at least people capable of standing up against injustice and violence, and that was why Toki wanted to have students. Because she wanted to share convictions, methods, ideals, hard work. She wanted to help other people grow. Like Moxie, or Hitoshi.
“I haven’t really thought about it until a few months ago,” she confessed. “But someone once told me that if I wanted to make some change in the heroic educational system, then I should do it myself and become a teacher, and… it stayed with me, I suppose.”
“Oh? What changes would you make?”
Toki made a face:
“That’s a little far away. Let’s just say: Yūei's heroic course isn’t all that cracked up to be. Hawks and I had completed their curriculum at age fourteen. They’re missing a lot of the unofficial stuff, like stealth training, acting training, first aid, or even knowledge of the unofficial rules of heroism, like the fact that heroes work with vigilantes.”
Keigo patted her thigh, smirking:
“Sure you don’t want to become a teacher at Yūei to whip them into shape?”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Toki retorted, totally straight-faced.
She wasn’t even joking. Seriously, Yūei needed good teachers, or at least, better ones. But hey, the priority for now was to get a teaching license. The President readily agreed to forward her the necessary paperwork so she could follow the required classes and pass it within the year.
Then they talked about other stuff, like patrol routes, areas of surveillance, coordination with the police… and coordination with others heroes, too. Usually, heroes’ agencies established some sort of rotating system, so one agency worked on Monday, another on Tuesday, etc. It was a good system, but too rigid. Some agencies were better equipped to handle some problems, and some agencies were too understaffed to cover another ones’ patrol area.
So Toki put another idea of hers on the table (one that, this time, had the full support of Keigo): more heroic team-up.
Maybe not a team-up, but more like a collaboration. The agencies loaned each other heroes when in need, and work together rather than independently. It was actually a good system, mostly implemented in rural areas where there was a lot of ground to cover and not a lot of heroes. But in the cities, it was less used. Mostly because heroes were super-focused on their individual statistics, on catching the journalists’ eyes, and making the front page. Heroism was about putting your life on the line, true, but it was also about performing. When there were so many brightly-dressed people competing for the media’s attention, being noticed took more work.
It was actually a real problem because some heroes weren’t made for fighting. No hero was defenseless, of course. Although some heroes were rescues specialists, they still needed to have combat abilities. First of all, because where there were heroes, villains tended to follow, so they needed to know how to at least defend themselves and those around them. But there was another reason, less obvious: not engaging in combat seriously hurt their popularity, and popularity was primordial because it was a huge part of the official rankings. And since their state-versed salary was depending on their ranking… Well. They had to make a choice between affording to eat, or hiding from the spotlight. Because of that, most heroes couldn’t dedicate more than half their time to rescues. They were obligated to spend a good chunk of their time earning money: either with a side-job… or in patrols and fights, but also in interviews, commercials, and other popularity-raising stuff.
It created a frankly unhealthy competitive atmosphere. Both Toki and Keigo thought it was stupid. So emphasizing collaboration was going to be their first step to totally change this mentality.
“I’m surprised you would be willing to work this way,” the President frowned. “I applaud your spirit of cooperation, but if you want to shoot up in the rankings, solo work is more eye-catching.”
“I’m more surprised that you don’t encourage team-up more,” Toki replied with an uneasy grin. “You know, with the all… situation with All Might?”
Genmei-san frowned, her eyes suddenly sharper:
“What do you mean?”
Toki shifted on her seat, a little uncomfortable. She actually didn’t want to said it out loud, it seemed disrespectful, but…
“You know, with All Might dying?”
“What?!”
Toki jumped on her chair, and resisted the urge to send a wide-eyed look at Keigo. Alright, she had suspected that All Might was hiding his condition, even from the HSPC, but they had to know he was fucked up. In canon, they hadn’t been so surprised at his retirement, right? And they had called back-up when he had gone fight AFO in Kamino, so they had known about his time limit and his waning strength… right? I mean, it would be ridiculous if the HSPC didn’t know. They were supposed to know. All Might had refused to even talk about retiring and the HSPC couldn’t do anything about that, but they had to… to prepare a little, at least. The ex-President, Genryusai, had said that All Might was his masterpiece, surely he had closely monitored his decline…
But Genryusai was dead, Toki reminded herself with dread. And maybe Genmei-san, so much better suited to leading the Commission in an area of peace, hadn’t been given this crucial piece of information.
“What makes you said that All Might is dying?” Genmei-san repeated, voice hard and unforgiving.
Keigo mimed hiding his mouth behind his coat. No help coming from here. Fine. Toki took out her phone, typing quickly to pull Sachiko’s diagrams about All Might’s decreased appearances.
“He went missing a full month, about two years ago. Since then, his activity has constantly slowed down, to the point where it’s nearly cut in half. Either he’s preparing to retire, which is inconsistent with his character and with the lack of official announcement, or he’s been grievously injured and is trying to keep up appearances even if his health his failing. Look, I have the exact math here.”
Because of course Toki wouldn’t advance such a wild hypothesis without solid math to back it up. Genmei-san grabbed the offered phone, her eyes jumping right then left of the screen, scrolling down rapidly to see the whole length of the PDF document filled with comparative analyses and detailed graphs. Her face looked carved from marble. Her lips tinned the more she advanced in her lecture, and Toki could almost see the muscles tensing in her jaw.
Oh, man, Genmei-san was pissed. Someone was in big trouble.
That someone was probably All Might. Because holy shit, apparently he had hidden his decline from the HPSC? It was ballsy. Kind of stupid, too. He was going to get yelled at so much. And the Commission’s liaison at his agency was probably going to bet sacked for missing something like this, too.
“Have you shown this to anyone?” Genmei-san finally asked after several seconds.
“Shown?” Toki repeated, feigning incredulity. “I found this online. It’s not my research. I only double-checked the data to make sure the guy wasn’t pulling facts out of his ass.”
Genmei-san’s grip tightened on her phone.
“I see.”
The fact that other people, people with no connection the Commission, could guess that All Might was dying, without any internal intel… it looked pretty bad, yeah. No wonder Genmei-san was so pissed. Thank you for your hard work, Sachiko. Those graphs had finally come into handy.
Even Keigo, who knew or at least suspected Toki had asked Sachiko for this study, looked vaguely impressed by the massive fuck-up.
Toki extended her hand in a wordless demand, and the President gave her phone back, albeit reluctantly. Yeah, Toki liked Genmei-san just fine, she was a huge improvement on Genryusai: but she still wouldn’t trust her with her personal phone. There was her Tumblr account on here, for gods’ sake.
The President briefly closed her eyes, and stayed silent and immobile several second. Then she let out a long, measured breath, and when she reopened her eyes there was nothing but cold resolve in them.
“Quantum, send me those graphs on my secure email address after this meeting. It is, indeed, something that the Commission will have to address…. But it’s not the topic of this meeting. So, let’s get back to where we left. Team-up with others heroes, in the name of better cooperation. I suggest to start doing it in three to four months, once you’re already well-established. It will also give you time to study those heroes, to make your team-up more efficient and more impressive.”
Toki and Keigo looked at each other, then Keigo shrugged:
“Sure. It shouldn’t be hard: we’re used to team effort. Besides, we’re both very quick on our feet, so adapting shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Good. Then… your agency will need a public relationship’s expert, but that angle is doable. Next, your level of authorization. You’re new heroes, so you won’t be given any B-ranked missions or A-ranked missions for a while. The HPSC only assign those missions to proven professionals. But I strongly advise you to seek out those kinds of missions by yourself. Target high-level threats, don’t hesitate to engage villains, cooperate with the police to assist them in as many arrests or rescues as possible… and in six month you’ll probably have a good enough record that we’ll be able to handle you those missions without being accused of nepotism.”
It made sense, and they both nodded. But talking about missions’ rankings suddenly reminded Toki of something… And since they were on the subject of uncomfortable topics and that no topic could get more awkward than revealing All Might’s imminent demise to the Commission’s President, well, she wasn’t going to hesitate.
“Hey, I have a quick question. What’s a S-ranked hero?”
Keigo tensed slightly. Ah, crap, it was probably something he knew, then. She should have asked him, instead of springing this on Genmei-san. But the President didn’t seem pissed. More like… annoyed.
“Who told you about them?”
Toki hunched her shoulders and mimed zipping her lips. No snitching. Genmei-san frowned:
“Heroes are not supposed to be ranked by abilities outside of the Billboard chart, so this classification is extremely unofficial. As you know, the S-rank only apply to villains with a body count. The heroic equivalent mean that the S-ranked heroes are the ones allowed to kill in the line of duty.”
Toki froze, feeling as if someone had dunked a bucked of cold water on her.
“What?!” she blurted out unthinkingly. “I thought it was an access level!”
“It is,” the President acquiesced. “But S-ranked heroes, since they are given the most sensitive missions, are also the most likely to find themselves in no-win scenario. And in those cases, they are allowed to use lethal force. If a normal hero kills in the line of duty, even accidentally, then they face trial as the one responsible for ending a life. If an S-ranked hero kills during an S-ranked mission, then it’s the Commission who’s responsible, as the one having given the order to kill if necessarily.”
Toki just stood there, a little shocked. Sure, she had known that the Commission couldn’t have its hands clean, being a shadowy governmental organization who deal with superpowered criminals on a daily basis, but that… it was kind of a little hard to shallow.
She shouldn’t have been surprised. But somehow, she was. She had… forgotten. She had started liking them, trusting them. Too much, maybe. She felt blindsided by the reveal.
“So you give out assassination missions?” she asked in a high-pitched voice.
“No,” Genmei-san replied immediately.
Toki breathed in, then breathed out, deeply. She wanted to believe it, she really did, but she knew how the world worked. She knew how easy it was, to see people in your way as obstacle, and to simply decide to remove them.
You didn’t have to be a monster to kill, you just had to stop people as people and see them as nuisance. Like Meteor did. Like Sayuri did, too.
“I want to believe you. I need to believe you, because I have to believe in this cause to be a good hero. But you’re going to need to give me a hell of a speech for that.”
For a few seconds, there was silence. Keigo didn’t speak, either. Genmei-san hesitated, as if weighting her words. Then, finally, she leaned forward, putting her hands on the desk.
And she spoke.
“S isn’t an indicative of rank. It simply meant hierarchical superiors. Basically, S-ranked heroes are the heroes the Commission trust the most, the one who are above any suspicion of corruption. The ones trained to coordinate other heroes, to respond to the most delicate or destructive fights. They are Japan’s last line of defense. They are not a secret order of assassins. But they do know a lot of sensitive information, and when a mission demand lethal force, because the enemy cannot be stopped or contained otherwise… Then it’s a S-ranked hero who’s send there. But those villains have all been defeated, now. This facet of the S-ranked heroes’ work isn’t needed anymore. Since I’ve been named President, I’ve banned assassination missions. You don’t need to worry about it.”
Toki tried to find it reassuring. She didn’t. It was Keigo who remarked, flatly:
“You haven’t been President for so long.”
Genmei-san pinched her lips.
“Yes. And in the past, there had been misuses of power. But that time is over now.”
Keigo let out a sharp breath. When Toki turned her head, she saw he was watching the President like a hawk.
“Is that what happened to Lady Nagant? She was sent to kill people, then turned on you?”
Toki jolted. She had honestly forgotten about this Lady Nagant. But it would fit, wouldn’t it? The fact that she was the ex-President right-hand-woman… her depression… the fact that her visits to Naruto Labs were hidden… and the fact she had simply disappeared one day.
Genmei-san took a second too long to answer. That was, by itself, answer enough. Yes, she had given her assassination missions. Or rather, the Commission had. Toki should have guessed it, and in some way she had known since the moment the words ‘allowed to kill’ had been uttered… but she still felt a stab of betrayal. The Commission was supposed to be the Good Guys.
“Yes,” reluctantly admitted the President. “When assassination missions still happened, a few years ago… Each mission was approved by the government, each target deserved his fate, and each mission saved dozens of people. But I won’t lie to you: it was still assassination, death given as a punishment without a fair trial beforehand. And… after Genryusai-sama’s death, some things came to light. It turned out Lady Nagant carried out unauthorized missions. We don’t know if she took them all by herself or if she was given incentives by the higher-ups. Of course, all those missions were for the good of Japan, to make it safer. But they were still… unauthorized.”
So old Genryusai had been sending assassins after villains behind the HPSC’s back, uh. Somehow, Toki wasn’t surprised. She remembered a little too well how cold and piercing his eyes were.
“The fact that there were assassination missions in the first place is fucking awful,” she growled.
“It was war, Quantum,” the President said sharply. “You grew up in a time of peace, but the Golden Age isn’t that old. Heroes were outnumbered and outgunned, prisons were useless, All Might was fighting day and night and it still wasn’t enough. Yes, killing is evil, this is the rule number one of heroism. But some villains were unstoppable, and the death of every single person they murdered was on our hands for refusing to take action.”
Toki shut up, cowed. It felt easy to judge the President, here and now, but Toki hadn’t been in her shoes, in a time before the Symbol of Peace. In a time before AFO’s defeat. The History books painted a rather bleak image of those not-so-far-away times, where crime was common, poverty very high, and insecurity the norm. In that kind of world, it would be easy to be desperate. There would already be so little hope to start with.
In the canon, in the manga, AFO’s successor had been enough to ignite a full-out war. There had been cities torn apart, hundreds of deaths, society almost collapsing. So AFO in person, at the heigh of his strength? Yeah. To stop someone like him, Toki wouldn’t think twice about using lethal force. And AFO wasn’t more evil that some of the villains who had plagued Japan for years. Fuck, Toxic Chainsaw had a body count in the fifties, and he had been arrested only two years ago.
Villains were dangerous. It was nice to play the Good Guys. It felt rightful and noble to say that you were merciful, and that you would never kill because you were a Good Person. But sometimes you didn’t have that luxury. Some criminals were just too dangerous, too hard to stop, too impossible to lock-up. Killing another human being could never be a good option, because it wasn’t like putting out a mad dog or culling a diseased branch off a tree, it was ending a person’s life… but sometimes you were forced to make the choice. You had to look at the value of that human life weighting against something else: the lives of hostages, of decades of pain and terror, or simply against your own life, because you wanted to live and that person was going to kill you if you didn’t kill them first. You had to look at it, and make a choice.
“It will not happen again,” the President said coldly. “After Genryusai-sama’s death, the whole thing underwent some major changes. We almost eliminated the whole S-rank entirely, but unfortunately, we have no system to replace it.”
Toki didn’t dare to speak up, but Keigo rose an eyebrow and said for her, dubiously:
“Would you even need to replace it?”
“Yes. Obviously! S-ranked heroes are a special order of professionals with unparalleled skills. They have access to a lot of classified information, and enough accreditation that they can coordinate hero teams without the Commission holding their hand. They have special training to deal with situations that must be kept out of the media, like Quirk trafficking or terrorism. And most of all, they are trusted. While the common heroes are warriors, and could become soldiers in an all-out war, the S-ranked heroes are all trained officers, with resources, coordination, experience. Every time a major operation is launched, and even if no S-ranked hero is assigned to it by the HPSC, they still end up in the thick of things because it’s what they do. They run the battlefield. They stop it from being a disorganized stampede. They make it work, even if ninety-percent of heroes these days are only there for show. More than All Might, they are the backbone of heroism, the ones to make sure the whole thing doesn’t crumble into anarchy!”
Toki had never seen the President so animated. Oh, she barely raised her voice, but hearing this impassionate speech, seeing her shoulders square up, her eyes burn with determination, her jaw clench with ferocity… well. It was a total change from her usually stone-cold face. Toki blinked, taken aback, but this outburst stopped as soon as it had begun, and the President schooled back her features in her usual impassible mask.
“Anyway, there will be no more abuse of power in the HPSC and no more assassination missions.” She scowled, and there was a brief flash of anger in her eyes: “Especially not in relation to the S-ranked heroes.”
Toki thought about her canon-knowledge of Hawks and his infiltration mission. It had been an S-ranked one, there was no way around it. And it had ended with a villain’s death. Oh, Hawks had done his very best to avoid it, until his hand had been forced. Because between Twice’s murder, or the massacre of all the heroes who were coming, it was barely a choice at all… but still, someone had been killed. Killed by a hero, with the Commission’s blessing.
Toki would probably have done the same, if she had been in his shoes. Sure, she could see the logic in it. But she really, really didn’t like it.
“You won’t have to worry about it for a while, anyway,” finally said Genmei-san. “You’re still young. And if it can reassure you, the number of S-ranked heroes who had to take a life can be counted on one hand, and they all did it in self-defense.”
That did reassure Toki, weirdly. But she still didn’t like it.
“Was Hayasa-sensei a S-ranked hero?” suddenly asked Keigo. “That’s why you recruited him at Naruto Labs, didn’t you?”
Toki gaped at him. Hayasa-sensei? What the hell? But Genmei-san had a small, fleeting smile, apparently pleased, and inclined her head:
“Well-spotted, Hawks. Yes, Red Racer was a S-ranked hero. He mostly worked in analysis and coordination, if I remember well. I told you: most S-ranked heroes are simply fighters that we know we can trust.”
Hayasa-sensei?! Shit, that put a whole new spin on this story. Toki wouldn’t have guessed it in a million years. Keigo was wayyyyyy more perceptive than her.
For a second, they were all silent. Then Keigo cheerfully said:
“Well, it doesn’t actually change anything, does it?”
Toki rounded on him, eyes burning, a furious interjection already on her lips. But he met her eyes dead-on, and only raised an eyebrow. She stopped, heart sinking.
Did it change anything? They had signed up for this cause years ago. And yes, they would have to be stupid to believe that a shadowy organization devoted to fighting criminals, with a man like Genryusai at its head for forty years, had never gotten its hands dirty. Hell, even All Might, hailed as a paragon of heroism, had once killed a man in cold blood for the greater good… or he had given it his best try, at least. Yeah, AFO was very much alive, but not because All Might had tried to spare his life. And could Toki blame him? There were monsters you couldn’t stop unless you were willing to go to desperate lengths. Once, Toki had weighted the lives and freedom of her own family against the safety of dozens of strangers, against her own life and freedom, and she had made a choice. It had been the right one, but the guilt and the helplessness still choked her when she thought about it. It wasn’t so different.
But more importantly… Toki and Keigo were already too deep. They were too deep because even if they didn’t approve the idea of killing anyone, they understood it. Because even if they refused the idea of murder, they were still ready to fight. It wasn’t in their nature to quit. They had fought and bleed and waited so much for this day. What, were they supposed to give it up when reality turned out to be not as squeaky clean as they had imagined? No. This future was theirs. And you can’t change the world if you refuse to engage in it.
“No,” she admitted slowly, eyes fixed on him. “It doesn’t actually change anything.”
She breathed in. Breathed out. Faced the President once again.
“So let’s continue. Once our agency is set in Fukuoka, I want to transfer my university courses in a local college. It would be useful to keep Toki Hoshizora’s identity somewhere, do you have a plan for that?”
Genmei-san inclined her head:
“Of course. Let’s see our options…”
It didn’t matter if the Commission had dirty secrets. Toki and Keigo had already swore to fight for them and for the people of Japan. Especially now that the Symbol of Peace was wavering. It wasn’t the moment to quit.
They were in this together, for better or for worse.
Notes:
So ! The HPSC is a shady organization. Other breaking news : water is wet!
Seriously, the Lady Nagant plot NEEDED to be adressed, but i also don't want to fall in the cliche of "the HPSC is evil". I like that kind of stories just fine but i also love portraying shady people in suit (yes, like Genmei-san) as people who just... do their best? Even if they are not paragon of vitue. So, there it is. Genryusai did what he did for the Greater Good. And Genmei-san does what she does for the Greater Good, too, except she has a better moral code than him.And both Quantum and Hawks are wayyyyyyy to deep to get out, now.
Anyway ! Lady Siam has a file in "Snapshots of Wisdom". So does the guy with the metal control Quirk Toki fight for her evaluation. Please go and check those out ! =)
And I also wanted to ask you about names for the ship KeigoxToki ! xDDD
So there's three possibilities :
1 - SpaceWings (combination of their Quirks' names, Warp-Space and Mighty Wings. Also, space is Toki's passion)
2 - StarWings (combinaison of their titles, Starburst hero and Wing hero. Also the name Hoshizora, which is Toki's civiliansona, means "Starry Sky")
3 - SunWings (little nod to the Icarus imagery that litters their relationship and their character arcs. Also Toki's real name, Taiyome, means "Sun Eyes")
Chapter 23: Icarus
Summary:
The myth of Icarus is in two parts. Daedalus had said to his son, ‘don’t fly too high, or the sun will melt the wax, but don’t fly too low, or the water and the waves will surely weigh down the wings, and you will die.’ Most people only learned about the first part, and so they only knew Icarus as a cautionary tale against the dangers of hubris, and not against the dangers of apathy. Toki wanted to make the fully story known.
Notes:
Here it is ! The chapter where the childhood/training arc end, and where Toki and Keigo both really start being heroes !
I'm also pleased to annonce that the ship name for Toki and Keigo is : SunWings !
With the name of that chapter, you can guess how fitting it is =)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
ICARUS
Quantum and Hawks started their heroic work two days later, in Fukuoka. Their agency hadn’t been built yet (the building was going to be bought in a month, then there would be some renovation, then hiring… it wasn’t an instant process!), so they were officially free-lancing heroes, wandering around the city arresting villains and helping people, with no official headquarters.
But the important thing was: they were heroes. They had learned about the Commission’s dirty secrets and they were still on that path. What else could they do? They had already given ten years of their life for this cause. They had already decided to change the world for the better. Were they supposed to run away because their allies didn’t have clean hands?
So Quantum and Hawks made their heroic debuts. Because even when Toki had been angry and betrayed, there was no thought of quitting.
Quitting was for people who didn’t care enough. Toki cared so much that sometimes she felt like her heart could burst. It was her world, now, her home. She couldn’t just walk away. She hadn’t done so when she had been weak and Quirkless and scared, so why the hell would she do it now?
It was in their nature to investigate, though. Toki liked to crack down mysteries, and Keigo was constantly snooping around. So they started digging as much as they could on S-ranked heroes. Turned out there wasn’t much. First of all, S-ranked heroes were (according to the President, which Toki later confirmed with Kameko-san) very few. Thirty, forty max. Most of them were underground or half-underground heroes. Infiltration and swift take-down in the shadows wasn’t the limelight heroes’ forte. The limelight S-ranked heroes were actually mostly in the Top Ten, because when a hero reached this stage, he was automatically awarded this rank. It was considered that their rankings were proof enough of their competency, their management abilities, and their strength of mind.
Besides, they were the strongest around: if there’s an S-ranked missions around, they were the ones who were going to get it in priority, not some low-ranked expert sniper.
In addition, Toki realized that… since the Top Ten heroes were under public scrutiny, hopefully it would force them, and their superiors, to keep their hands clean. In canon, Hawks had almost sabotaged his infiltration of the League with his efforts to avoid collateral damage with the attack at High-End. So Toki could grudgingly admit that maybe the President had been honest about that.
Not like it changed anything. In the end, the choice had never been between Good and Bad. Things were never so clearly cut in the real world. The choice had always been between trying to do as much good as you could… or not caring about the bad.
Toki tried to do good. So did Keigo. And, for all their flaws, so did the Commission.
Anyway. Trust, but verify. So between patrolling the streets, stopping shoplifters, giving directions to lost tourists, arresting a wannabe-robber, recuing cats in tree, and helping grandmas carries their groceries (a typical hero’s day when there was no major crime falling on their lap!)… Toki continued digging.
She grilled Kameko-san about S-ranked heroes. She contacted Mera-san about it, too, with limited success. She almost called Hayasa-sensei, but she didn’t want him to feel like she was too reliant on him… especially since she was a fully-fledged hero now. So she just texted him a photo of her hero license to give him the good news, and… waited for him to get back at her. Maybe. An if he did, well. She would find a way to sneak some questions in their conversation.
Three days after starting their heroic work in Fukuoka, Toki and Keigo made their first big arrest.
It was a jewelry-store robbery, with the robbers escaping in a car chase. Seriously, why was it always cars? Those things were too dangerous. Toki was never learning to drive, that was for sure.
So. Two cars, filled with people armed with guns, and a fuck-ton of money and jewels. Obviously, cameras were everywhere. It was the perfect set-up to make a grand entrance… and of course, Toki and Keigo weren’t going to disappoint.
Hawks descended from the sky like a vengeful angel, almost crashing in the first car: feathers zipped under the doors and opened them, snatching the robbers and sending them flying in the airs, then grabbed the wheel and slammed on the brakes. It was spectacular: a flurry of crimson feathers flying like arrows in all directions, catching and restraining the criminals while the car was stopping with a screech, Hawks perched atop it with wings flared wide. Several pictures of him made the front page the next days, and the video of the arrest went viral.
Toki was slower in arresting her own car, but hey, in her defense, she didn’t telepathically control telekinetic feathers. She had to do the job with her own two hands.
She warped in the car, grabbed two people at random, warped out, then repeated it until there was just her in the speeding vehicle. She slammed the brakes (the only pedal she could identify in a car), killed the engine… and since it wasn’t enough to completely stop this monster, she warped out and let the car crash down against a sturdy lamppost. Then she went back to the guys she had warped out: because she had the foresight to drop them two meters high in the air, half of them had twisted their ankles while landing. They couldn’t run. They tried to fight, but in close combat Toki hadn’t yet found her match.
She handled their ass to them on a platter, even when a guy waved a gun in her face.
And if felt good. The fight, the action, flashing right then left, disarming, grabbing, using her Quirk and her combat training, twirling between punches like a dancer then kicking down with ferocity… It was something like a second nature now. Easy, and fluid, and it made her state-of-the-art heart beat faster with terror and exaltation, the same adrenaline rush that made flying so exciting. The danger, the rewards, the effort, the fact that she was actively doing something.
That was what heroic was about. Doing something. Choosing to do something, instead of running, of hiding, of waiting for a savior that would never come.
Sometimes, when she contemplated the fact that her mother had died, that Meteor was locked up and probably furious, or that the Commission’s ex-President had employed assassins for decades… of course Toki felt down. It felt like there was nothing of moral value in the world, nothing at all worth saving.
But then she thought about moments like this. About the thrill of the fight, about the rush of success, about the reverent feeling you get when you do something good, when you actively contribute to make the world a better place with your own two hands. So what if the world was rotten? All the more reason to fight until her last damn breath to make something of it. If you believed there was nothing but darkness in the world, then it was the highest pursuit of humanity to slay it.
So. Toki wrangled down five muscular guys armed to the teeth, and she had never felt more confident in her path. She was Quantum, for better or for worse, and she owned it.
Obviously, someone happened to film the fight on his phone, and Toki kicking ass became viral within twenty-four hours. Not as much as Hawks’ swift rescue and spectacular demonstration of his Quirk, but still. Martial art in action was impressive.
“I got six!” bragged Keigo when he sauntered toward her, cops loading the villains in the back of a police van. “In less than a minute, too!”
“It’s not a race,” Toki snorted, handcuffing the last guy.
“Speak for yourself, slowpoke.”
“Hey, not everyone can just tie up six guys simultaneously. I had to punch mine, you know! It takes time! One of them had a gun!”
Keigo immediately frowned. “Are you hurt?”
“Nah. Like he would have been fast enough to shoot me!”
They were both very much aware of the public watching this unfolding with excitation, waving around cellphones to film the fight… and delighting in the witty banter afterward. Starting as a hero wasn’t all about first impressions, but it did play an important role. Not just the fight, but also how the heroes acted, if they were nice, if they felt safe. It was especially important for new heroes. Toki felt weirdly anxious about seeming fake… But the banter came easily to her, and seeing Keigo acting so naturally helped her relax a little. She was also grinning fiercely, still riding the high of the fight.
It didn’t take long for a few journalists to excitingly emerge for the crowd who was cheering the heroes, and soon enough Toki and Keigo had a few mics shoved in their direction.
“What are your Quirks?”
“What an impressive fight, young lady! Are you a martial art expert? Did you train with Edgeshot by chance?”
“Your wings are amazing! You can control your feathers? Incredible! I’ve never seen anything like that!”
“How long have you been heroes? You seem young, but you’re already strong!”
“Are you a duo or is it a chance encounter?”
“Do you know each other?”
“You seem to be new heroes, I’ve never seen you before! Can I have your names?”
The last one to have spoken was a guy wearing a badge from the NNN (Nippon News Network, the Japanese equivalent of the CNN in England of example), and it was towards him that Toki and Keigo turned, both smiling brightly. They hadn’t exactly repeated what they would say for their first-time interview, but even before opening her mouth to speak, Toki knew they were on the same page.
“He’s Hawks!” she introduced her partner cheerfully.
“And she’s Quantum!” Keigo added, grinning.
“A new duo hero?” excitingly asked a woman, trusting her mic toward them. “Do you have a team name?”
“Not yet!” Keigo laughed. “We just started last week!”
“We’re freelancing, but we’re thinking about making our own agency very soon!” added Toki.
The agency thing was well underway, but as Okamoto would say: it was always better to make the public feel involved. When Toki and Keigo would announce their agency’s beginning, now the public would feel like they had been part of the decision process, just by virtue of being here for their team’s debut and watching their ascension.
“Are you planning on staying in Fukuoka?”
“How old are you? Did you train as sidekicks with a hero here?”
“A word for our viewers, please!”
Hawks flared his wings, even if he didn’t need to do that to take-off. It makes several small feathers fly, and people stepped back reflexively, before letting out impressed ‘aaaah’ and ‘ooooh’. He sent the journalist a disarming smile:
“I would love to stay and chat, but there’s a bar fight two blocks down and it seems some help is needed. Let’s go, Quantum!”
“Way ahead of you!” Toki laughed, disappearing in a flash of light to reappear high in the air, already going in the direction of the closest bar. “See you later, everyone! Stay safe!”
“It’s not the last you’ll see of us!” Hawks added, laughing, before launching himself into the air.
And just like that, they were introduced to the public.
Things went faster after that. They encountered more villains. They usually teamed-up, but they always went their separate way for at least half of their patrols, so they could cover more ground. There were so many things to do! At the end of a single day, usually Toki had arrested about five people, helped a dozen of people carry stuff or find their way around town, assisted in one or two car accidents, stopped several fights, exchanged words with one, ten, twenty curious bystanders and sometimes as many journalists, and wandered across the whole city.
She acted. She did good. And more important, she was seen doing good. She had a flashy Quirk and an impressive track-record, and soon enough her popularity skyrocketed. Keigo’s, too.
Crimson wings and scintillating teleportation were kind of hard to miss.
Usually the days were pretty calm, and nothing much happened. But there were days when a villain came out of nowhere, sometimes with a dangerous Quirk, sometimes with a band of criminals behind him: and Toki had to fight. Her Quick was showy and efficient, so she won, usually… or rather, she hadn’t yet lost a fight… but she had to actually put her back into it, because the fighting was serious. She had to take care of bystanders, be mindful of the collateral damage, keep an eye on the others villains to see if they were using her as a diversion! And the fights were sometimes brutal. It wasn’t play-fighting anymore. If she let her attention wander for a spit-second, the bad guy wouldn’t hesitate to gut her with a freaking knife!
From dawn to dusk they patrolled, fought, jumped, flew, assisted lost civilians, helped kids find their parents. They cracked down on crime more heavily into the industrial area near the place where they intended to have their agency. Lots of small-time villains were using this place to hang out and coordinate. While Hawks and Quantum mercilessly chased down their gangs, catching them by dozens and thoughtfully cleaning the whole neighborhood… they also sneaked in at night to distribute jobs offers or motivational pamphlets in the mailboxes.
The HPSC buying a building for their agency also started making the value of the place go up, and it wasn’t hard to sweet-talk commercials into looking for investments here. Open a shop, hire new people, that kind of thing. After all, they would have two young, brilliant and popular heroes as the face of this new district!
It was a crazy rhythm but it paid off, and it paid off quickly. Two weeks after their debuts, Hawks and Quantum were already going viral on most social media, with several arrests to their names. You could google their name and find a Wikipedia page, and several blogs ran by fans, even. Within a month, their numbers were so good they were nearing the top hundred heroes, even though they weren’t nineteen yet! If you took in account the fact that there were more than three thousand heroes in Japan, it was enormous. Their popularity was off the chart.
Toki suspected the Commission to play a little role in all that (using their influence in the media, encouraging journalists to talk about their duo, emphasizing how efficient they were, posting gifs and video of Hawks and Quantum being cool but also nice and efficient…). After all, neither Toki or Keigo officially had a public relation manager, but their image was… very-well managed.
But hey, all those compliments didn’t fall out from the sky. They worked hard. Keigo was so nice and helpful, everyone loved him. Toki was a little more camera-shy, but she enjoyed nearly the same popularity. The public found them to be charming and approachable, but their strength and their impressive track-record also made their duo almost awe-inspiring. Keigo already had a solid fanbase among all the young adults! He had easily picked up the social media slang and, since he had a twitter account, he took care to reply to most of the fans who tagged him online.
Toki didn’t have a Twitter. But that didn’t matter. Oddly enough, her fanbase was mostly composed of teenagers and preteens. She had once found a few teenagers bullying another one out of his lunch money, so she had chewed them out and added the closest middle-schools to her patrol routes. After that, well, it had blown up. First of all, she had scared the shit out of the little bullies. But they had apparently loved it, and there was at least five separate facebook posts relating the incident with mounting excitation. Then she had continued swinging by, just to wave at the kids during recess, look around for any creep, and continue her patrol… But it was enough for her to gain an incredible popularity among the teenagers. Apparently kids loved having a hero swing by every week to take selfies. Especially someone so young. Quantum wore an almost opaque visor, true: but her height, stature and voice were enough for people to guess she was barely out of teenagerhood herself.
Keigo and Toki received their first offer for a joint interview for a local news reporter… Keigo got his first offer for a solo interview from Japanese Buzzfeed Unsolved, to ask about his wings… but Toki got her first solo interview request from a high-school newspaper.
Kids liked her. She couldn’t help but feel strangely touched by it. She had never considered herself a real role model because, let’s face it, she was barely more than a kid herself. But… she was happy that children were looking up to her. She thought about that time where Mihoko-san had said that Toki could be a teacher, or that time where Keigo had jokingly suggested she teaches at Yūei, and suddenly it didn’t seem so unfathomable. She would probably even enjoy it.
Who was she kidding? She would probably love it. She would terrorize those little shitheads like there was no tomorrow!
Anyway. The job became routine, well, as much as a job as unpredictable as this one could become routine. But Toki got used to being recognized, felt more confident in her interaction with civilians, and stopped feeling awkward or unexperimented when chatting with others heroes she crossed paths with.
So. Hawks and Quantum continued soaring towards the top, and it became time to go clean towards their online friends.
Because now, they were respectively Number 115 and Number 124 in the official Billboard chart. Next month, they would reach the Top Hundred, probably, and then they would maybe get on national news. Maybe at the end of the year they would be on the Top Fifty, or even the Top Ten, with how fast they were climbing. Most people wouldn’t recognize their names. But there was a certain group that already knew about Hawks and Quantum, especially associated with one another, and they weren’t that dense. They would guess who they were immediately.
________________
< NotQuantum: Hey guys
< NotQuantum: I have a confession
> NotHawks: Yeah, and me too.
> PikaPika: uh oh
> PinkIsPunkRock: Finally!
> NotOnFire: wait, you know what this is about, Pink?
> PinkIsPunkRock: yeah, Stars told me during our date
< NotQuantum: er
< NotQuatum: alright, there’s that, but it’s actually ANOTHER confession
> NotHawks: ??? what did you told her during your date?
< NotQuantum: that I was in love with you
> NotHawks: ah okay
> ThisIsFluffy: WHAT THE FUCK
> PikaPika: …. what
> EndeavorSucks: you dumped your girlfriend?
> EndeavorSucks: wait
> EndeavorSucks: was Stars the girlfriend all along?!?!
> NotHawks: yup.
> NotOnFire: Holy crap! Congrats, you two!
> PinkIsPunkRock: wait I’m confused
> PinkIsPunkRock: what’s the other confession then?
< NotQuantum: …
> NotHawks: …
> PinkIsPunkRock: this silence is ominous as fuck.
< NotQuantum: well, the first thing you have to know, is that we never really lied. Everyone is allowed their privacy. It just turns out that we choose out usernames at twelve, because the future seemed very far away, and now that it’s upon us… there’s no way to hide it anymore. It’s only a question of time before all of Japan learn it. But you are our friends, and you deserve to hear it from us.
> NotHawks: Yes. And even though we’re going to have to take a little distance with this Discord for a while, just the time things calm down a little… We love you guys! You brough light and happiness in our lives when they really sucked. I’m going to miss our DnD parties like crazy.
> ThisIsFluffy: why does that sound like a goodbye speech?!
> PinkIsPunkRock: you’re scaring me
< NotQuantum: so, for the great reveal… Don’t be too mad we hid it, okay?
> EndeavorSucks: hid what?!
< NotQuantum: https//:quantum-heroic-license-image.png
> NotHawks: yeah I didn’t take a picture of mine, but same
> PikaPika: … ok I have to admit I did NOT see that coming
> ThisIsFluffy: OMG
> ThisIsFluffy: is that thing real?!
> EndeavorSucks: wait. Wait. WAIT. You two are fucking heroes?!
> NotOnFire: I’m hallucinating
> PinkIsPunkRock: WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT
< NotQuantum: =)
> PikaPika: well let me just say
> PikaPika: MOTHER
> PikaPika: FUCKING
> PikaPika: PLOT-TWIST
________________
The Discord was in a frenzy for a little while, but Toki and Keigo both disconnected and waited until things calmed down. They were also soon to be the happy owners of a building for their agency, so they would have to start renovations and hiring sidekicks. Their schedule would be crazy for at least two months. Toki barely had time to follow her online classes.
Oh, and Moxie was arriving in Japan! Toki hadn’t had the chance to welcome her at the airport, though. Moxie had apparently reunited with her uncle, then run into ‘family trouble’ (Toki suspected she had a row with her uncle after telling him she wanted to enter Yūei), and hadn’t offered Toki a chance to meet. Still, Toki wasn’t losing hope. She had grown attached to her little student.
Sooner or later, they would meet. Toki was kind of apprehensive about coming clean and telling her she wasn’t Quirkless anymore, but… that was a problem for later.
Moxie probably already knew. Toki had left the Ordinary Community forum the day after getting her hero license. She had posted a short goodbye message saying that she was going to get her Quirk back thanks to a medical procedure, and that she didn’t feel like she had a legitimate place here. So she had to say goodbye. There had been several nice answers but also several jealous ones. Toki tried to not dwell on that, to not tarnish her memories of this nice forum.
But back to the point.
Toki and Keigo’s main preoccupation was their agency. Right now, they were still laying the groundwork to be able to open it, and be credible heroes. It was going well. They were starting to be pretty well-known in the city. It was… kind of crazy, actually. Barely three months ago Toki was struggling with her final exams, and now… Now she was an adult. She had a job. She was famous. When she patrolled the streets, she mostly stayed at rooftop level, but still people waved at her, cheerfully called out, or yelled encouragements. They recognized her. It was weird.
But, strangely enough, it didn’t feel like an imposture. Toki would have kinda expected that, because being famous was such an anathema to the persona she had hidden behind during all these years. She should have remembered that Toki Hoshizora was the mask of Quantum, and not the other way around. He true self was the same person who had eagerly chatted with various sidekicks through all Musutafu, and dived into a river to save Mihoko-san. This was Quantum, and now Toki was just living in her own shoes instead of pretending to be someone else. So yeah, it felt a little weird to talk to people on the streets, to pose for selfies with middle-schoolers, or to charge confidently towards a villain without any fear of being recognized: but it was her. It was who she had been all along.
It had just taken a while to find it, that’s all.
So. Hawks and Quantum continued to ascend. They stopped a brutal fight between villains. They coopered with the police in a raid against a drug-dealing ring, and saved no less than five people in the ensuing shooting. They intervened when a building caught fire downtown, braving the flames to rescue the civilians trapped in the higher levels. They bantered with fans. They smiled easily for the cameras, and cheerfully gave out autographs every time they were asked. They had rough fights and bad days, but never severe enough to put make them slow down.
And of course, they had the Commission’s loan, so money was never a problem. Young heroes had to start slow, had to worry about their budgets, had to make do with crappy headquarters in their hotel room and with subpar equipment. But it wasn’t the kind of problem Toki or Keigo faced.
They also travelled a little. Oh, Quantum and Hawks usually stayed in Fukuoka or in the immediate neighborhood, but it didn’t look good if heroes were stuck in one place, so they made a point to take some missions very far away from home once in a while. It was easier for Toki, who could warp. It also helped that Quantum wasn’t shy about wanting to team-up with others heroes, bolstering up their popularity, while Hawks would rather work alone.
Which was funny, because Hawks was kind of the antithesis of the broody, solitary hero. He worked better with others than Quantum did, even. But he was too fast for most people to keep up! His feathers allowed him to be in nearly ten places at once, simultaneously doing several different tasks. It was just too hard to find people who could compete. Especially since he refused to slow down. Quantum had no problem adopting someone else’s pace, but Hawks… He was always in a rush.
Oh, he wasn’t brash or dismissive because of it. He liked it when people tried to keep up with him. He didn’t want to sit back and let everyone else do the work, he wanted to work with other people: but he simply refused to slow down to do it. He wanted people to reach and exceed his level. And it was difficult to find people who could. Toki was actually pretty sure she was the only one.
Man, their future sidekicks wouldn’t have easy lives with Hawks around, mh?
Anyway. The point was: Quantum went to others cities. She ran into Inferno once. She also saw Salamander afterwards. They didn’t talk much, mostly making small talk, but Toki managed to slip in the conversation that she had been told about S-ranked heroes and wanted some perspective about it. Salamander only shrugged and said it was above her paid-grade. Which, alright, true. But also: rude.
Oh, whatever. There was already so much going on in Toki’s life that her investigation could take a backseat for a little while, anyway.
Toki hadn’t exactly forgiven the Commission about the existence of S-ranked heroes. It had been a hard blow. But there would never be anymore assassination missions, the President had promised them. And… She had to believe her. She had to keep believe in the Commission, in the good they did in the world.
Because what would be the point, otherwise? Toki had already sworn to fight for them. She had already given so much to this cause. Ten years of her life, her brand-new heart, and all of her plans for the future. She couldn’t quit now. She didn’t want to quit. Not now, not ever. It was her home, damnit. So what if it wasn’t perfect? She couldn’t run and hope to find some magical paradise elsewhere.
It was her home, and she was going to fight for it.
oOoOoOo
“So who’s going to be our Commission guy?” Toki asked about nothing one morning.
Keigo blearily opened one eye, although he had probably been woken up by the smell of coffee rather than by her voice. It was six o’clock, barely dawn. Toki held his mug in one hand without making any move closer to the bed. With a groan that sounded like something coming from a zombie, Keigo extirped himself from his wings and his duvet, and made grabby hands at the coffee until Toki relented and gave it to him.
Living together was kind of strange, after being apart so long: but it was kind of great, too. They had their little habits. They had to get used to the other’s mannerisms, like the fact that Toki never put the cap back on the toothpaste tube, or the fact that Keigo rarely remembered to do laundry. But they shared the same space with ease. They had found a great penthouse not too far away from their agency, and they had settled there with barely-contained enthusiasm, spending their evenings shopping online for furniture, painting walls, moving stuff around, and… Hum. Well. Toki didn’t know if it was hormones, their first taste of freedom, of the thrill of finally being heroes: but they had fucked on every flat surface in their new appartement, and yes, that included the floor-to-ceiling window. The memory was enough to make her cheeks burn with arousal and embarrassment in equal measure.
“What Commission guy?” finally asked Keigo after downing his shot of caffeine.
“You know. The one who deals with the paperwork, babysit the accountant and the public relation guy, and pass us notes when the President want to give us a top-secret mission. Our agency’s handler, basically.”
“Do we need one? It’s been months. We manage well enough.”
“First off, it’s only been two months. And seconds, we were freelancers. Soon we won’t be anymore. The building has been bought, the renovations are nearly done, and we’re going to officially start our joined agency in less than four weeks. We’re going to have headquarters, and a territory to surveil. Even if we already unofficially had one, well… now it’s official, and we need a Commission guy to make sure we are responsible little heroes.”
Keigo let out a tiny grunt:
“As long as it’s not Okamoto.”
“Gods, no. I was thinking about Kameko-san, actually.”
“Good point,” Keigo hummed pensively. “Besides, you’re basically unmanageable if you don’t work with someone you like, so the President’s options are limited.”
“Hey, rude!”
“I’m not complaining. It’s always better to have a friend pulling the strings instead of a fat asshole.”
Toki, who was taking a slip of her hot chocolate, snorted and nearly inhaled her drink with her nostrils. Not sexy.
It was now the end of June. Things hadn’t exactly calmed down. Hawks and Quantum were still working at a frantic pace, rising higher and higher in popularity polls, and cleaning Fukuoka with devastating efficiency. They got up early and went to bed late. There was so much to do: they had to be alert, but also be nice to people, meet as many as possible and remember their names to expand their network, be ready to fight, fight, never neglect proper procedure so their records stayed spotless… and also make an effort to keep in touch with the police but also the local heroes, who weren’t happy about the newbies stealing their glory. They rarely had time to takes breaks. Toki was sooooo happy to only have two online classes to follow this year! Six courses, especially as complicated as astrophysics, would have been unmanageable.
“Do you know if she wants the job?” Keigo asked after a silence.
“I mentioned it to her and she seemed enthusiastic. She’s due for another promotion soon, anyway. It’s been three years since her last one, and that girl can’t seem to stop climbing the hierarchical ladder.”
Kameko-san was almost thirty now, but Toki eternally saw her as the bright-eyed nineteen years-old with a cheerful attitude and an almost unnatural amount of luck. Besides, Kameko hadn’t changed that much in ten years.
She had a sharper smile and bigger boobs, but that was it.
“She’s the one who recruited me, so it would be fitting,” Toki continued. “If I remember correctly, she wants to work with young and dynamic heroes, so…”
“She would be hard-pressed to find younger or more dynamic,” grinned Keigo.
Well, they weren’t the younger heroes around, since most fresh graduates were also freelancers and fairly active. But they were the most wildly successful. Fukuoka hadn’t been unsafe, but had been a tense city, with many villains, disorganized heroes, and a general sense of lassitude because nobody seemed to be able to create order here. But in less than three months, Toki and Keigo had already cleaned house pretty thoughtfully. Since the Commission was covering their expenses to allow them to work full-time without worry, and making sure there were always journalist around to witness their exploit… They were constantly succeeding under the flash of cameras, and it was snowballing from there. They ascension seemed almost miraculous.
Toki had known that most heroes were taking it easy, and she had known that Keigo and her had been trained to exceed the average heroic level. But still, it was kind of dizzying to outpace trained professionals so fast.
The fact that they were teaming up also helped a lot. They both had a frankly crazy amount of arrest to their names, but each time Quantum saved someone or fought a villain, it also increased Hawks’ popularity, and vice-versa.
Toki finished her mug of hot cocoa, then took her visor on the bedside table, and put on her gloves, then her orange jacket:
“Well, I’m off! I’m patrolling sectors six to nine this morning. Meet you at lunch at this yakitori restaurant you like, downtown, at the top of this big building with the classy bar at street level?”
“Alright,” smiled Keigo. “I’ll do sectors two to five then, and we can patrol the rest of the city together in the afternoon until six. We have this interview at NNN’s studios then, with a photoshoot and everything.”
“Damn, I forgot. Do you think we should swing by the penthouse to change?”
“As long as we don’t get covered in exploding garbage beforehand, I don’t see a reason why. They deal with heroes often enough; they should know we get a little ruffled and sweaty after a full day’s work! Besides, sweaty or not, we are both beautiful enough to make up for it.”
Toki snorted. “True. Didn’t you get an offer for a modeling contract?”
“Ugh, don’t remind me. We really need a secretary to read those things and manage our agenda. I don’t know how I’m going to fit modelling in my schedule. Maybe if I start patrolling at night… Wait. Didn’t you get a modelling offer too?”
“I turned it down. It was lingerie.”
Keigo grinned from ear to ear:
“Did they send you a free sample at least?”
Toki tossed a pillow at him, then grew serious again.
“Honestly, I’m not opposed to the idea in general. But having my scar on display is going to raise too many questions. Quantum isn’t supposed to have health problems.”
Keigo nodded. Yeah, he got it. They both had an image to maintain. Granted, this image was based on who they really were, but they needed to appear stronger, more polished, and more carefree than they actually were. The public wasn’t interested in their struggles, only in their success.
Hawks played very well the part of the stereotypical cool-guy. Of the two of them, he was the one deemed more carefree and easier to talk to. Toki wasn’t uptight by any mean, she goofed around as much as he did, but she was more inclined to speak about serious topics, and scrunched her nose disdainfully when people talked about rankings and popularity. She was also ruder than Hawks, who smiled a lot and neatly sidestepped compromising questions. Quantum smiled and laughed, too, but she answered direct questions in a somewhat abrupt manner… and without any of the niceties that most heroes added to their speeches.
For example, questions like “would you die for your job?” were a way for most interviewed heroes to profess who devoted they were to their cause. How great and magnificent heroism was, and how noble were those who died for it. Even Hawks paid some lip-service to this rhetoric. It fitted with his image.
Quantum was more abrupt. Yeah, if she died in the line of duty, she wouldn’t consider it a waste. But she wasn’t suicidal. Heroism was an important job, but at the end of the day, a job. There were professions that saved lives too, like firefighters, police officers, doctors, nurses. All, life-saving professions. But they weren’t expected to die to do their job, were they? At the end of the day, those professions probably saved more lives than heroes did.
Hawks and Quantum hadn’t been heroes for very long but they were starting to have a brand. Hawks was the cool guy, who liked popular things and was wholly devoted to the public. He liked people and they returned it tenfold. His incredible efficiency and workaholic tendencies were carefully hidden behind a façade of being chirpy and laid-back. Quantum was more brutally honest. She was chatty and cheerful like her friend, sure, but more disdainful of public adoration, more militant too. She cared more about the little guys: kids, disabled people, stuff like that. It made her appear more naïve than Hawks, probably, but also more serious? Whatever. They were both young, devastatingly efficient, rather humble, and pretty likeable… but they were different. They attracted different fans, they saw the heroic world with different point of view. It probably hadn’t escaped people’s notice than it was Quantum who signed petitions or gave money to beggars, while Hawks was the one to willingly talk to civilians and take time to be friendly.
Hawks attracted the spotlight, and Quantum made their partnership intriguing. Which was pretty much exactly what they had been aiming for, so: success.
“Anyway,” Keigo sighed. “You better call Kameko-san today, then. In a few days I’m going to try and pick a mission outside Fukuoka, and I’ll see if I can swing by Osaka to say hello to Hayasa-sensei. Because besides those two, well, we don’t have anyone we really need in our agency, right?”
“We’ll need some sidekicks,” tempered Toki. “But that can wait. Oh, crap, I also need to pass my teaching license. Once the agency is officially open, I need to put that in my schedule.”
“Workaholic.”
“Tss, look at who’s talking!”
Keigo shrugged, as if to say: ‘so what?’. Toki sniggered, then checked the time on her alarm clock, put her empty mug on the bedside table, and stretched her arms.
“Well, I’m off. See you at lunch!”
Flash! She disappeared in a shimmer of light, reappeared in the hallway to grab her boots, then disappeared again. She materialized about four kilometers away, midair, already twisting her body to increase her momentum to jump on a roof… then started her usual patrol on rooftops, mixing teleportation with parkour to maximize her efficiency.
She was usually the first to wake up, and the first to leave in the morning. Keigo left later, and they either joined up or made separate patrol until they separated. Toki ended up early, or rather, earlier than Keigo. She needed at least two full hours a day to work on her online classes. She took some time during her lunch break, but she preferred working from home, so she ended her workday before dinner… while Keigo finished hours later. Sometimes he took the morning off and worked at night, too. Criminals tended not be nocturnal (because they needed sleep, like everyone) but there were still a few villains who preferred to cause chaos under the cover of darkness, and Keigo’s silent feathers were more useful in these situations than Toki’s scintillating teleportation.
Anyway, their slightly decaled schedules were useful. By relaying like that, they could work almost nineteen hours a day. Besides, it also had the added benefit of hiding the fact that they were living together. For now, even if some people had obviously speculated that they were dating (because they were a girl and a boy hanging out, and hello heteronormativity!), nobody had seriously considered it. But if they started arriving or leaving together, well, that would kind of shot the whole pretense to hell.
Anyway. Within five minutes she heard shouting, and ended up stopping a violent argument between two men in a parking lot.
It had been intimidating, the first few times, to step between two grown adults and cow them into behaving themselves. But Quantum had gotten the hang of it. Be confident, be nice but be stern, laugh at criticisms and threats. Toki didn’t have to be eight foot tall to be intimidating: she was stronger than those guys, and it was only a matter of projecting it with enough certainty that they would feel it and back off. She resolved the situation, made them write statements about the scratched car, then continued her route.
Quantum spent most of her time very high up, flying over the city, eyes quickly scanning the streets for any sign of trouble. No crash, no smoke, maybe there wouldn’t be any car accident today. Good. She was almost done with this part of sector seven, now…
Flash! she already jumped to her next stop, a rooftop with a great view, and started her usual parkour route, keeping an eye on the streets below. Here, an old man needed help to cross: flash! She appareled at his elbow, politely offering him to give him a hand, then helping him cross the street while chattering cheerfully about her day. They reached the other sidewalk, the man thanked her, she said goodbye, and flash! She was gone. One rooftop, two rooftops, oh, that one was slippery, and someone had left garbage here from an impromptu night out… better watch out. She took out her phone and quickly texted the neighborhood’s cleaning service without slowing, jumping on the next building.
Patrol continued. She waved hello to some people leaving for work, helped an exhausted guy change a tire on his car, then found a missing cat she had been keeping an eye out for, and teleported the whole way back to return it to its tearful owner. She politely refused his offer for a recompense, and accepted to pause for a selfie, making a peace sign and grinning behind her visor. Then she checked the time, in the left corner of her HUD, to be sure she wasn’t late. She had thoughtfully quadrilled a good quarter of the city, and Fukuoka wasn’t small by any means. It was important to be visible, to make sure people (and villains) knew she was looking out for people everywhere in this city.
Toki realized that she had settled in a routine. A heroic routine, where Quantum did most of the work and Hoshizora was just an afterthought.
She did miss some things from Hoshizora’s life, sure. She missed spending time with the Shinsō family. She missed the Discord server and the DnD parties. She missed coaching Moxie, too. She missed Sawayomi, and Yūei's classes, and going to the skateboard park. But… She liked being Quantum, too. She liked being able to act, to use her Quirk, to do good, and not have to hide. She liked being by Keigo’s side. She liked be able to be part of something greater, something that made the world a little better, a little safer, a little kinder.
She didn’t regret being Quantum. Even after learning about the S-ranked heroes. And wasn’t that the important thing, after all? It made her happy to do good. It made her happy to be Quantum, plain and simple.
Although, she had to admit, it was kind of exhausting to be gallivanting all day long. By the time her patrol ended, Quantum had surveilled four different neighborhoods, stopped two shoplifters, helped three old ladies, saved an excited kid from being run over by a careless driver, stopped said driver to give him a severe dressing-down, prevented one attempted burglary, emptied an overflowing garbage can near the park, and stopped a screaming match between two thugs ready to come to blows.
Quantum had also signed the petition of a group of protesters who were doing a sitting to protest discrimination in their enterprise, swung by the cash dispenser to have some spare change she could give to the homeless guy who lived by the bridge, and escorted home two school-girls who were worried about being followed by a creepy guy. She then tracked down said creepy guy, and dropped him to the police station so he could explain his life choices to a very unimpressed police officer. Life as usual.
Toki checked the time in the corner of her HUD, then nodded to herself. She still had time. She dialed Kameko-san’s number, and, wandering the rooftops and keeping an eye on what was going on in the city, offered her to be their Commission guy.
She wasn’t surprised in the least when her friend agreed enthusiastically.
“Absolutely!” exclaimed Kameko-san on the phone. “Honestly I think the President was intending to assign me to your agency anyway, because I have a meeting with her in two day and your name has come up… but if you request me, that’s even better. There was talk of assigning me to Mirko, since she’s a rising star despite being a freelancer, but I guess that’s going to be tanked.”
Mirko? Ah, yes, the rabbit heroine. She had been a hero for two or three years already, and she was doing well. Toki remembered her from canon, but she hadn’t had the chance to meet her yet. Hey, maybe in another world Kameko-san had really been assigned to Mirko, after all. The bunny heroine didn’t have an agency, a team, or even a real headquarters, but… in the canon-timeline, she probably had a good Commission’s liaison, since she had managed to rise in the Top Ten in her twenties.
“Who’s going to take her on, then?” Toki asked curiously.
“No idea. Maybe they’ll try to shuffle her with another agency, although for what I know about Mirko, she won’t take that well. Oh, whatever, it’s not my problem. We’re going to work together, Quantum! It’s great! You know, I totally saw that coming. Remember, ten years ago, I mentioned it could happen. And guess where we ended up, mh?”
Toki allowed herself a small, fleeting smile. Yeah, it had been a long road. Ten years. But they had ended up working together, just like Kameko-san had said, when she had been a cat-girl barely out of high-school and Toki had been a feral runaway with eyes full of mistrust.
“I’ll bring it up with the President when I see her in two days,” Kameko-san continued. “Do you want me to say something else? I know you wanted to hire your old teacher, Red Racer.”
“He isn’t Red Racer anymore, and that’s between us and him,” Toki refused. “I’m not going to use the President’s influence to try and bring him back. If he wants to join us, it would make me happy, sure, but it needs to be his choice.”
“Suit yourself. Oh, by the way, I followed your last interview, and as your future PR manager, can you please try to sound like you don’t think rankings are dumb?”
“But rankings are dumb! There are heroes and there are villains. That’s the fight people should worry about. Number One? It’s a joke. A public opinion piece ran by gossip magazines that worry more about sales than merit.”
She could almost hear Kameko roll her eyes.
“Get off you high horse. Rankings are a good way to know heroes’ strength and to show off their skills. If you are too condescending, your image of humble and hardworking girl is going to be affected. People don’t like when heroes sneer on what they like, and they like rankings.”
“Urgh,” Toki muttered with reluctance. “Fine, I’ll tone it down. I have an interview this evening, so I’ll probably go with the innocent act, like: ‘oh, no, I don’t care about rank, I’m just happy to do my best’ or something like that. Then Hawks can chirp in about how he like competition more than me, and redirect their attention to his latest photoshoot or something.”
“… You work so well together it’s almost scary. I’m gonna love working with you two. Did you already pick a name for your agency yet?”
Toki couldn’t help but grin. They had a hard time picking something, true, but they finally had found the perfect name not so long ago. It wouldn’t mean anything for people who weren’t mythology nerds like Toki was, but the myth was famous enough that a lot of people would notice the not-so-hidden references.
“Yeah,” she smiled. “It’s going to be the Icarus Agency.”
Because Hawks and Quantum… Keigo and Toki… They had always been driven and ambitious to the point of recklessness. They had always wanted to be faster, go higher, reach new heights. Like Icarus, reaching for the sun.
The myth was in two parts, after all. Daedalus had said to his son, ‘don’t fly too high, or the sun will melt the wax, but don’t fly too low, or the water and the waves will surely weigh down the wings, and you will die.’ Most people only learned about the first part, and so they only knew Icarus as a cautionary tale against the dangers of hubris, and not against the dangers of apathy. Toki wanted to make the fully story known.
Besides, she had never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans, but rather about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.
Hawks and Quantum would fly higher than anyone before. Just you wait.
oOoOoOo
Only a week before Icarus’ grand opening, everything started to neatly slot into place, like a puzzle assembling itself. Renovations were done, the building was ready. Hawks and Quantum had announced their partnership in a few interviews, and had officially started hiring (although the selection process had been going on for several months now). It was now summer. The criminality in Fukuoka was an all-time low. Hawks and Quantum were both now in the Top Hundred heroes, rising through the ranks with an ease that was nothing short of miraculous. They multiplied arrests, rescues and interventions, and still found time to answers interviews and signs autographs. The medias favored them a lot (probably because of the Commission) so they never sparked controversy.
Besides, the HPSC had started shifting their narrative to encourage team-up among heroes. They were using Hawks and Quantum as an example of how heroes could bolster one another, how a team could be greater than the sum of its parts. Several dozens of hopeful sidekicks had already sent them their CV.
Hawks went to Nagasaki for a short mission and teamed-up with a well-known hero agency, making for a great show of cooperation and assuring the mission was a total success. The HPSC immediately took hold of the narrative to promote more team-up.
No heroes had yet spoken against it, but it probably wouldn’t be long before some of them started bellowing that teaming-up was for weaklings. It had happened in canon after all. Toki would bet money on Endeavor being the first to refuse to work with other people. He was way too proud. Or maybe it would be All Might? He had been very discreet those last few months. Maybe he had gotten a dressing down from the President and was now trying to not attract too much attention…
Anyway. Things were starting to calm down, but they would soon accelerate.
All Might’s retirement, for example. The Commission couldn’t force him to retire, but having a weakened Symbol of Peace who could be killed on live television anytime was worse than having no Symbol at all, so they would probably try to strong-arm him into stepping down, one way or another. Toki wondered, with some sick sort of morbid curiosity, how that would play out. All Might was more stubborn than a donkey: the Commission would need to make a show of force to make him accept his weakened state. Maybe they would ask for a fight against Endeavor? Ah! That would be funny.
Then there was Hawks and Quantum’s rise to the top. The higher you were in the rankings, the more difficult it was to rise more, since you were up against very popular people. But seriously, if after three months Hawks and Quantum had managed to get into the Top Hundred, it wouldn’t be stretch to assume they would be in the Top Twenty, or maybe even the Top Ten, in the following year. Had Hawks climbed so fast, in canon? Toki wasn’t sure. Endeavor had become Number Two at age twenty-one, and this record had never been broken. Shit, adding her own weight to this race had really boosted Hawks’ progress, uh?
Toki also had to worry about a bunch of stuff, like… well, keeping in touch with the Shinsō family. It wasn’t hard to text them, but it was different. Mihoko-san had told her she suspected Hitoshi to have trouble with some bullies, but she had no proof. Hitoshi wasn’t forthcoming either, when Toki texted him to enquire about his training. She wished she could go back there, hang out on their couch, share silly stories, made them laugh, try to be helpful. She felt responsible for them. For little Hitoshi, especially. She had promised she would help him become a hero, after all. In canon, Hitoshi had been bitter after facing a lifetime of loneliness and discrimination, and it made Toki’s stomach twists into knots to think that maybe history was repeating itself already.
Another person she had promised to help, but found herself kept at arm’s length, was Moxie. Her online friend was now in Japan, finishing middle-school in a posh school in Musutafu, to try and join Yūei next year. But since coming to Japan, and reconnecting with her uncle (the hero one), Moxie had been… pretty distant. Toki worried
Oh, Moxie hadn’t given up, she still gave update on her training and her plans, but… She didn’t talk much about her day or her family anymore.
________________
Antares:
Is everything all right with your uncle? He hasn’t tried to discourage you from becoming a hero, has he?
You’ve been kind of quiet lately…
Moxie:
Well, he has. But he’s very busy so, besides one lecture when I told him, and some pointed remarks when I got home with bruises from parkour, he hasn’t said much.
It’s nothing you should worry about.
It’s personal, between my uncle and me. We had a row about the dangers of heroism, and the necessity to not lie to your family, and, well. It’s been kind of tense. He isn’t home often, so we never patched things up.
And some classmates in my school are jerks.
Antares:
Sorry to hear that…
Is there anything I can do to help?
You know, I’m a hero now!
Moxie:
I figured xDDDDD
Also I’ve been trying to guess WHO you are and I’ve narrowed it down to twelve heroes!
Antares:
Twelve?!
Moxie:
Well, I know you’re a girl, you’re four years older than me so you’re eighteen and half, which mean you had your license for less than a year. You didn’t go to any hero school because you were Quirkless for a while, and you use martial arts. That narrows it down, but not enough to be 100% sure.
But since you once told me your favorite color was, and I quote, “gold or maybe orange”… I think you’re Quantum
Nobody else could pull off a bright orange jacket
Antares:
Hey, I’ll have you know, that jacket is awesome
Also: congrats!
You have amazing deduction skills
Moxie:
\o/
I’m so awesome
And I can’t fricking believe I’m friend with QUANTUM, I’ve been coached by Quantum for two years now, afghjskfs
This is so surreal
Antares:
We’re going to have to meet one day, I hope you won’t freak out
Moxie:
Don’t worry, I’m already getting over the fangirlism
Besides… I don’t think now is a good time to meet. I want to set things right with my uncle first.
________________
So something was going on with Moxie, but it didn’t seems too serious. Yet. If her uncle continued to be a jerk, or if her problems with her classmates worsened, Toki was one hundred-percent down to go to Musutafu and start slamming people’s heads against walls.
Anyway.
Toki had to juggle one last thing with the Icarus agency… her university courses. Actually, since Hitoshi was ghosting her, Moxie was secretive, Sawayomi was miles away and focused on her studies, and Toki had temporarily abandoned her Discord server, the university thing was pretty much the only ‘Hoshizora’ thing that was going well.
There had been a twist because, since she wanted to start the Master’s degree’s classes, she had to show up in person at the local college. She could get most of the classes online, but the university required her to attend studies group once a week at least. It had been an experience, mostly because Toki had to scramble to create a subtle disguise for her civilansona. She really didn’t want someone to recognize her.
But she had to admit she had a lot of fun. Her hero-persona and her civiliansona looked similar, obviously, but Toki put some effort into making the two as physically different as she could. Quantum had a visor to hide her face, and it gave the impression she had brown irises (she also wore brown contacts when she had to do a photoshoot without her mask, which wasn’t often). Hoshizora had paler eyes, almost golden, thanks to colored contacts. They both wore twin buns, but Hoshizora was vainer and wore ribbons or colorful hair-ties. It also had the added benefit of making her hair appear darker. Neither Quantum or Hoshizora had a specific fashion style, so Toki decided to stick to her hero outfit when she was Quantum, and to never wear orange or form-fitting pants when she was in plainclothes. Hoshizora wore mainly black, purple or blue: colors that were not associated with the bright Quantum. Their voices were different, too, and the way they stood. Quantum spoke like she had been taught in theater class, with her stomach, loudly, to be heard. She stood tall and strong, back straight but legs flexibles, like a boxer or a gymnast. Hoshizora wasn’t supposed to know how to do that. Her voice was slightly higher-pitched, and a little quieter. She was also less grounded, always balancing on the tiptoes or on the heels of her feet. She didn’t square her shoulders to appear larger, not like Quantum did. On the contrary, she appeared smaller.
A more talented actor would have also tried to made them behave differently as possible, like making Quantum more commanding or Hoshizora more reserved, but Toki didn’t bother. Changing her mannerisms wasn’t really difficult (thank you improv training), but it seemed like a lot of effort for very little gain.
Besides, she remembered a little uneasily how her mother had been ‘the perfect spy’, able to change her whole behavior as well as her appearance, and… she didn’t want to try and find out if she had gotten that talent from her mom, too.
Damn it. Ten years later and still, her family still haunted her.
Toki had asked the President what had happened to Meteor’s gang, just as planned. And the President had, two day later, sent her a huge file with the whole thing. Copies of their trial’s transcript, dates, notes, photos, and a typewritten summary of who those people were and what they were doing now. Everything was thoughtfully documented. And… It should have made Toki felt better, to have those answer. But it didn’t.
She was wondering what it would take, to finally have closure.
Nono, full name Yukimi Nono, the gang’s driver. She had found closure, her. Nono had been imprisoned for six years, then let out for good behavior. It probably helped than, in the gang, she was pretty much the only one with no blood on her hands (it turned out Sayuri had shoot people during Meteor’s first heists, and Toki really didn’t know what to think about that). Nono had turned her life around, leaving villainy behind her for good. She was married now, and had a kid. She had moved to China, to a little coastal town where nobody knew about her past. Toki wanted to said ‘good for her’: but she still felt a little bitter. If Nono had been able to change all along, then why now, after six years in prison, why not before?! Before all that pain, all those senseless murders, before Toki had to tear her heart in two and denounce the gang to the police?
Fujio, full name Fujio Awai, the gang’s sharpshooter… he had done the opposite. He hadn’t changed at all, expect maybe taking a turn for worse. He was sentenced for life, because of his involvement with Meteor but also because of nearly a dozen murders and twice as much assaults that occurred during his downtime between robberies. He had been imprisoned in a different establishment than Meteor or Homura, and so he had started making his own little empire, cutting ties with his old associates. He had become a caid, ruling over a little crew of inmates with an iron fist. He would never get out.
Blaze, full name Hiromitsu Homura, the gang’s fire user… he was dead. Murdered in a prison riot this year. During the last years of his life, he had tried to make amends. He had even tried to reconnect with his family… well, what was left of it. His daughter, four years older than Toki, had been bullied so badly in middle-school following her father’s arrest that she had killed herself. After that, the mom and her surviving child (a son, one year older than Toki) had lived off-the-grid in a small village somewhere in the North. They had moved back to Musutafu after six months, probably when they ran out of money. The kid had then tentatively exchanged letters with his dad for years, up until his death. Toki felt a strange kindship with him, this boy who had lost family to crime and prison, and who never manager to figure out if he loved or hated his father.
And Meteor… well.
Meteor, full name Ryūsei Taiyōme, the gang’s leader and main fighter. Sentenced to twenty years of prison, and exemplary prisoner. The first year had been… difficult. Meteor had made trouble, trying to find out what had happened to the rest of his family. It had gotten worse after Sayuri’s death. And the questioning of police officers, who had apparently lost track of his daughter, had sent him into fits of rage. Toki tried not to think too hard about that.
But Meteor had always been smart. He wasn’t laser-focused on a goal, or ruled by reckless bloodlust. He wasn’t a stereotypical villain. He had chosen to be a criminal because it was profitable and he didn’t care very much about collateral damage, not because he reveled in chaos. Oh, he liked violence well enough. But he was also patient and composed. He was a good strategist. He hadn’t been the gang’s leader for nothing. You could easily forget it, when you only saw him during a fight: but Toki also remembered how charming he could be, how just and direct were his questions, how educated he could be when telling a story. Meteor wasn’t a common thug. He was clever.
So, once locked up in a cell, he hadn’t spent his time fruitlessly rattling the bars of his cage. He had sat down and started to think of how to get out.
Toki hypothesized he had first started to try and pick the lock, then tried to charm the guards. Or both. But he hadn’t been manically focused on escaping. He had been focused on getting better. Having his fun, passing the time. So he had started reading books, and getting the education he had never bothered getting after high-school. He now had a Master’s degree in criminology. Damnit, he was more accredited than Toki now! It made her blood boil.
But the cherry on top was this: considering his model behavior, he had been transferred out of Tartarus and in a medium-security prison near Shizuoka. He had consulting with the police, and he had shown himself willing to collaborate with the authorities. He’d already been consulted on a few cases. There was a note in his file saying a hero had marked down Meteor as someone who ‘would be more useful on the outside’!
It pissed off Toki. It pissed her off even more to see the logic in it.
Meteor had a powerful, showy, incredible Quirk, the kind of power that was revered in this discriminative society. He was also useful. He knew how powerful villains thought and worked. He had contacts with the criminal underground. He was charismatic, intelligent, and (unlike most villains) he could be reasoned with. So of course, it wouldn’t have been irrational to try and use him. Because it could work. Meteor would let himself be used and would use the police in exchange, gaining favors, comfort, and one day… freedom, maybe.
But being free wasn’t the point. The point was to be important. To be necessary, to have the power in the conversation, even if that meant having to play nice with the authorities.
Meteor wouldn’t fight it: of course he wouldn’t, he had no reason to. He thought his family was dead. Fujio and Nono, the only survivors, had abandoned him and started over, one in prison and the second free. Of course Meteor would be all for this program, if he had nothing else. He wasn’t ambitious. Outside of protecting his crew, all Meteor had wanted was to be comfortable and entertained. A consultant program could give him that. It would even get him out of prison, if he played his cards right.
But, oh, the irony of it burned. Ten years later, after all that pain and suffering, her father was only now bending to the rules of society, and pretending to be nice. It ranked.
(And it was dangerous, too, because it only worked as long as Meteor didn’t have any other goal to distract him. But if he ever found out Toki was alive, there was no way to know how he would react. In some twisted way, wasn’t she all he had left? Maybe he would want to reconnect. Or maybe he would want revenge. But learning that his daughter lived would absolutely change his priorities, and Toki couldn’t afford that.)
“What are you moping around for, again?”
Toki jumped about one foot in the air, then rounded up on Keigo who was watching her with a smirk.
“I’m not moping, I’m thinking.”
“Oh? Tactically fretting, then?”
“Aw, are you never going to let that go?” she laughed, playfully pretending to punch his arms. “That was ages ago!”
“And it was hilarious. Now, what were you thinking about?”
They were on the balcony, on the top floor of their agency. It would be their office. For now, the place was empty and smelled of fresh paint, like the rest of the building, but they were expecting to furnish the place tomorrow. It would look a lot better with colorful chairs, glass desks, wooden shelves, and some posters on the wall.
Anyway. Toki shrugged, and answered honestly:
“The fact that my father is in prison and would have an aneurism if he saw me there. What about you? What got you tactically fretting enough to leave your paperwork?”
He grinned.
“Better thoughts than your moping. I got an email from Hayasa-sensei.”
Toki beamed, delighted, and clapped her hands in a spontaneous gesture of enthusiasm. “Is he coming?”
“Yep!” Keigo laughed flapping his wings and nearly levitating a few centimeters from the ground. “He should arrive in a few minutes. If he’s not at the doors already, actually.”
As one, they leaned over the railing to see the street near the entrance. A taxi was parked here, and just as they watched, the door opened to let out someone with dark purple hair and large shoulders. At this distance, Toki couldn’t see his face, but there was no doubt about it: it was Hayasa-sensei.
“… When exactly did you receive this email?” she asked without turning.
Keigo shrugged:
“Two weeks ago. I wanted to surprise you. You would have done the same if you had been the one to check Icarus’ mailbox.”
Toki’s smile softened. Keigo had tried to surprise her because he had known she needed cheering up. She had been… a little gloomy, after receiving the file from the President. Not enough to affect her performance on the field, or ruin the high of her debut as a pro-hero, but… enough to makes her a little melancholic in the evenings, that was all.
She didn’t say anything. She just leaned on his shoulder, briefly, and from the corner of her eyes she could see his pleased smile. He squeezed her hand, then said lightly:
“Come on, let’s go welcome him. And Kameko was very clear about the fact that we are to do so inside, and not by jumping over the railing like suicidal lemmings, by the way.”
Toki laughed, but she refrained from jumping from the balcony like she would have loved to do. Instead, she slung her arm around Keigo’s shoulders and teleported them both in the big hallway on the ground floor. Hayasa-sensei was already inside. He was apparently introducing himself to Kameko-san. They both turned towards them when Toki materialized, and a small, sincere smile appeared on their old teacher’s face.
“Quantum, Hawks. Nice to see you again.”
“Sensei! Hawks didn’t tell me you were coming!”
Keigo gasped in mock outrage, and tried to kick her: “Tattletale.”
Hayasa-sensei raised an eyebrow. “Well, it’s not like I can take away your desserts for bad behavior now, kids.”
“You actually can,” Keigo pointed out. “Since you’re going to be our coach and everything.”
Toki blinked. Most heroes managed their training by themselves, without a coach. Although it was mostly because they didn’t have the money to pay somebody to sit around. People in a hero’s agency had to contribute to the whole thing. Most heroes in the Top Ten had coach, though, but they were often also sidekicks or administrator… or they only worked part-time, so the agency wouldn’t have to waste a whole salary on someone who didn’t concretely help the enterprise.
“Wait, you’re going to be our coach?”
“On paper,” Hayasa-sensei rectified. “Part-time coach, manager, paper-pusher, too. But I trust you can handle your training on your own. You’re adults, now. I will only step in if someone is neglecting their health to the point of cardiac arrest.”
“Aw man, that was once…”
Keigo grinned, bouncing on the balls of his feet:
“But, wait for it! Hayasa-sensei is going to be part-time coach because he’s also going to be a part-time sidekick! He’s going go back to heroism!”
“Really?” Toki brightened. “That’s great! As Red Racer?”
Her teacher shook his head, but he seemed pleased by her enthusiasm.
“Not as Red Racer: I can’t sustain his pace, and I don’t want any comparison. Besides, my methods have changed. I’m a more efficient brawler. Better at close combat and infiltration, too. I’ve hatched things out with the Commission and it had been decided that I would do well as an underground hero… Or, well, an underground sidekick, for starters.”
“So Icarus hired him!” Keigo beamed. “And now the old team is back together! Except this time, we’re the boss!”
“I can still make you run laps, Hawks.”
“Yes sir, sorry sir!”
In the background, Kameko-san sniggered, amused by their antics. Toki couldn’t help but laugh, too. It was so familiar and comforting, just like old times. And for a moment, she managed to push Meteor out of her head.
Meteor was her father and yes, she loved him, but he hadn’t raised her. He hadn’t cared for her, taught her, made her confident and talented. Her family had been shattered beyond repair when she had sold out the crew, but she had found another one at Naruto Labs. Smaller, a little more stuck-up, and with lots of baggage and the Commission’s oversight: but a family nonetheless. Hayasa-sensei, Keigo, Kameko-san even… they were Quantum’s family.
And together, they would make the Icarus Agency fly higher than anyone before.
Notes:
Look at how cool Toki looks here ! <3
Anyway, I hope you liked this chapter !
The next chapter will be after an ellipse of six months or so, and we're really starting to get close to canon now.
Also : i wrote two separate fics that will be part of the Wisdom-verse. I will post them when the timing is right xD
One is about Bakugou. It's part canon-divergeant OS, part character-analysis. And the other is... a monstruous fic of about 85k words (for now! it's still growing!), about Meteor. It's insane. It will also probably be ranked Explicit. I have no idea how this character took such importance but now i'm ATTACHED and so, Meteor will probably reappear in this fic. Toki better brace herself xDAnyway ! Don't forget to check the last chapter of Snapshot of Wisdom, i'll put there a fanart of Toki and Keigo in their hero costumes =)
See you soon !
Chapter 24: New beginings
Summary:
Kameko rolled her eyes: “I promise I’ll be nice to your boyfriend.”
“Don’t call him that,” Toki replied automatically.
“Why do you bother pretending otherwise?” her friend asked honestly. “Hayasa and I both know how close you are. And you’re living together!”
Notes:
i'm not dead !
I just frantically wrote my fic about Meteor, like, non-stop, for days, and i COMPLETELY forgot to post x)
So thank you mightgaiishot for reminding me, because whoooops !
Anywayyyyyyyy ! This chapter start with an ellipse, so it's five month after the last chapter. Yeah it was boring to tell how they settled down and i wanted to move the narration along so ! We have a small time-skip. Also it allows me to better separate the pre-heroism arcs and the pro-hero arcs.
I'm also trying to change my chapter summaries ! Before, i tried to summarise the chapter in one sentence, but now i'm trying to put a small sample of the actual chapter. Do you think it's better ? Or should go back to one sentence summaries ?
Anyway. Here is the chapter... Enjoy !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
NEW BEGININGS
Five months later.
It was barely ten o’clock, but already the Icarus Agency was bustling with activity. Quantum warped in the main hallway with a flash, and immediately had to take a step back to let through a harried-looking secretary who was carrying a huge stack of papers. Toki reprimed a smile, then set out in the direction of her office. She tried to walk in the agency as much as possible, so she could be visible and, well, accessible to people who needed help.
Because Icarus employed ten people, now, and wow, it was certainly a change from the freelancing days! They had two heroes, five sidekicks (well, four and Hayasa-sensei), Kameko as a manager, and two secretaries.
It was pretty cool. Toki’s morning patrol had been nearly cut in half since hiring sidekicks. They had trouble keeping up with her, but since they took care of the aftermath of villains’ arrests, it made for an impressive gain of time. Although the members of the agency often joked that Quantum’s patrols were actually longer than Hawks’ because she slowed down for others. Yeah, famous heroes or not, she still took time to sign petitions, give money to beggars, patrol near schools, and clean up overflowing trash cans.
This morning she had already arrested four wannabe-villains, helped out at least a dozen people, prevented two car accidents, rescued one cat, and escorted six different middle-schoolers to class. One of them had missed his bus and was ugly crying because he was going to be late: thanks to Warp-Space, he had arrived five minutes early!
“Quantum!” Kameko-san exclaimed in the hallway. “I need you to sign these for the new line of merch…”
“On it,” Toki replied, taking the paperwork from her hands and already scanning the first page as she continued walking. “What’s new this morning?”
Kameko-san kept up the pace with her, barely checking her tablet before enumerating:
“Five requests for interviews, one search mission on the HPSC roster that I signed Hawks for, one promising lead on the False Flag case that I put on your desk… and you have a psychological assessment to take for your teaching license: I put it in your schedule for this afternoon. Did you ditch Sunspear and Ocelot again?”
“I didn’t ditch them, I let them come back on their own. It’s a formative experience,” Toki answered distractedly, still reading and walking at the same time.
“You have sidekicks for a reason.”
“To help me with patrol, and patrol is over. They’re fine, they’re five blocks away. I made them run a lot so I told them to get back at their own pace.”
Sunspear and Ocelot were two sidekicks of the agency, the ones Toki had taken with her for her morning patrol that day. Sunspear had probably been Hawks’ sidekick in canon: his hero costume, with a bird’s mask and a red toga, was kind of familiar. He had a great endurance and could basically photosynthesize sunlight, as well as spit it out in blinding or burning hot flashes of light. Ocelot had a less flashy Quirk: he had a tiger-like mutation. He looked like some kind of weretiger, half-man half-feline, with paws-like hands and feet, big furry ears, and sharp teeth. His mutation gave him tiger-like strength and endurance, as well as enhanced earing. They were both excellent sidekicks. But they still weren’t as fast as Warp-Space.
Toki signed the first page, the second, then slowed her reading of the third. It was a contract with a brand she knew of, and she frowned:
“Didn’t this company used child labor in China to produce their clothes?”
“They did,” Kameko-san admitted easily. “But since I know your stance about it, I double-checked and they stopped last year, when their security council was replaced. They still face a lot of criticism but they are now an ethical enterprise. Well, as much as you can be ethical and makes millions in a capitalist society.”
“Fair enough,” Toki acquiesced. She signed, and passed to the next sheet of paper. “Man, do we really need that much merch?”
Kameko shrugged: “What can I say? The sportwear brand that signed with us is selling really well. Everybody wants a Quantum sport jacket. It’s your fault for picking such an easily marketable outfit.”
“Orange is a great color and more people should wear it,” Toki retorted, signing the page and passing to the next one. “No new missions for me?”
They were now almost at the elevator. Well, the first elevator: there were three, side by side, because there was a lot of going up and down in their agency. They passed a sidekick, Tyto, a short man who wore an owl mask and loose clothing reminiscing of some kind of fantasy monk. He waved at them in passing but didn’t say a word. Tyto never really talked: he made up for it by being their most precious asset for night missions, with his perfect vision and his nocturnal schedule.
“I put the list of possible missions in the pile,” Kameko pointed out. “There are a few that you could do, but none of them are urgent. Take your time to pick. You’re in the top twenty now, you can do almost anything.”
How wild it was, to be barely nineteen and already in the Top Twenty heroes! Keigo hadn’t even celebrated his birthday yet, so he was still eighteen… And ranked eighteenth in the newest Heroes Billboard Chart. Toki was number twenty. Sure, it wasn’t the Top Ten yet… but they were getting close. After less than a year as heroes! What a wild success! The annual Billboard Chart had been released last week, and since then, the interviews demands and the team-up offers were piling up.
Thank you, nepotism. Icarus was good, but the HPSC interference played a huge part on their popularity.
“I’ll see about it,” Toki decided while they entered the elevator. “What else? Nothing turned up in Mercury’s patrol?”
Mercury was Hayasa-sensei’s new alias. Toki felt oddly touched he had decided to keep up the ‘Antique Greece’ theme they had going on with Icarus. Anyway, Mercury was part-time coach, which meant he worked with Kameko-san as some sort of general manager… but he was also part-time underground hero, and really, having one of those in the agency was actually a huge boost.
Underground heroes faced very different threats than most limelight heroes, Toki had already known that, but she hadn’t fully measured how much. Underground heroes delt with the quiet side of villainy, like money-laundering rings, or skilled hitmen… but they also faced down absolute boogeymen that limelight heroes had no idea even existed.
All For One? It was basically an urban legend for limelight heroes. Not only it meant he was good at hiding, but it also reeked of a cover-up by the politicians to avoid panic. But underground heroes knew of him! They knew him under different names, like Soul Stealer and Puppeteer, but the fact that there was a man who could take and give Quirks and had been alive for nearly two centuries? It wasn’t common knowledge, sure, but it was hardly a secret. Hayasa-sensei, or rather Mercury, had stumbled across that story in his second week at Icarus Agency!
Besides, there were other monsters out there. Monsters hiding in the dark that the general public, and even most frontliners, didn’t know anything about. Like… War Dog, a gigantic werewolf whose bite turned you into some kind of zombie and never healed, bleeding until you died. Or Switchblade, a body-hooper who possessed people, then abandoned them when they were fatally wounded, finding himself another host. Kuma, a woman who could put people in suspended animation in little glass balls, like snow globes for souvenir, and who liked to collect pretty things (animals, flowers, young men, children). And Stain, a former vigilante who was starting to turn more and more violent, leading people into traps to stab them and leave them to bleed to death.
Stain, the Hero Killer… He was another canon-character. He would eventually be known to the limelight heroes, but not before killing, what, twenty heroes if Toki’s memories were right? And that was without counting the civilians and the vigilantes he had killed before.
The reason why those villains weren’t well-known to the public was because they were quiet. They were never filmed and didn’t destroy anything more expensive than a trash-can. They were after people, not propriety or the spotlight. So the public didn’t know about them…. And most limelight heroes didn’t, either. Those monsters were the job of the police or underground heroes.
Which was why having Mercury in the Icarus Agency was such a bon. Hayasa-sensei was great at investigation, infiltration, and collecting intel. So he could put Hawks and Quantum on the right tracks to catch some of those villains. Unlike Endeavor or All Might, both Hawks and Quantum could easily step into underground roles. They had multiplied their arrest rate by two, and considering how high their usual rate was, it was impressive. They were actually in the process of tracking down the producers of a drug called Trigger. Toki vaguely remembered this drug to be canon, something maybe connected to the Eight Precepts, Overhaul’s gang… Well, if that was true, she and Hawks were better equipped than most to deal with this villain, since they had long-ranged attacks…
“Nothing much,” Kameko answered. Even though they were alone in the elevator, she had lowered her voice. “The number of instant-villains had dropped since the destruction of that base last month. Which could be unconnected, but Mercury is investigating to see if this base was used for distributing Trigger, if that’s the case… who distributed it.”
Instant-villains were exactly what it said on the tin: people who went on a rampage, becoming villains, before waking up disoriented and often horrified. All of these rampages were triggered by drugs.
“Hum. There’s more instant-villains near Yokohama, Osaka or even Musutafu. Wants me to drop in? Trick question, I intend to do it anyway.”
“Fine, but you don’t get to bring Hawks,” retorted Kameko. “I need to have one of you here at all time. The end of the year is usually a great time for chaos.”
“Dang it. You better not charge his schedule, we’re already overworked!”
It was hard to think they were already nearly in December. Toki felt like those five months had passed in the blink of an eye. In June, they had barely started moving in the Icarus building. And now… well. There was a world of difference.
Kameko rolled her eyes: “I promise I’ll be nice to your boyfriend.”
“Don’t call him that,” Toki replied automatically.
“Why do you bother pretending otherwise?” her friend asked honestly. “Hayasa and I both know how close you are. And you’re living together!”
Toki was saved from answering by the elevator’s stop. The doors opened with a ding, but they weren’t on the top floor yet. Zero, the agency’s fourth sidekick, entered and nodded at them while balancing a pile of metallic suitcases (probably full of support items) in his arms. Zero was quite polite, but it was always hard to judge his mood, considering the fact that he wore a black costume that completely covered his head. Well, it helped him stay mysterious at least. It was a good fit for their local ninja. Zero’s Quirk allowed him to stretch his body as thin as he wanted, and if you added that to his mastery of stealth, it made sense for him to have a costume blending in the shadows.
Then Zero took a step back to let through none other than Hayasa-sensei, who was yawning and still in hero costume. Not that it was very obvious, since his hero costume was designed to help him blend him in a crowd. He wore jeans, a sleeveless undershirt, and reinforced gloves. His special boots (partly robotic, and designed to withstand his high speed) could even be mistaken for rangers from a distance.
“Hi, Mercury!” Toki chirped. “Late night?”
“Good morning Quantum,” her teacher said, rubbing his eyes. “I went to bed at four in the morning. I’m getting too old for night patrols.”
“You weren’t obligated to come,” Kameko frowned. “You have the morning free…”
“I know, but I wanted to continue working on the instant-villains thing. A few phone calls, comparative spreadsheets… I can do that from my office.”
“Ah yes,” Toki smiled ruefully. “I forgot the infamous spreadsheets.”
He had dozens of them to evaluate and monitor Toki and Keigo’s progress back at Naruto Labs. They exchanged an amused glance. Then the elevator dinged again, and Zero exited swiftly. Hayasa-sensei rubbed his eyes again as the door closed again.
“By the way, Quantum, I saw you had the whole New Year marked as ‘out of town’ on your schedule. Going on a vacation?”
“Yep! In Musutafu to see some friends,” Toki admitted.
To see the Shinsō family, more exactly. She had a promise to keep, after all. And… well, she also wanted to meet Moxie. They hadn’t been able to organize a meeting during summer, and Moxie was getting more and more evasive about her unavailability. Toki was starting to be worried. Like, actually worried. Being this evasive wasn’t like her friend at all.
“What about you, sensei? Any plans for the holidays?”
“Maybe going to Tokyo see my sister,” he shrugged. “Nothing is set in stone. It’s almost a month away, anyway. And what about you, Sabira-san?”
“Family reunion,” Kameko sighed. “Extended family reunion. I love my parents, but my cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents can be a bit much.”
Toki patted her shoulder comfortingly, grinning. Then the elevator dinged again, this time having reached the top floor. They exited, Hayasa-sensei entering the office labelled ‘Management’ that he shared with Kameko when they weren’t both running around, and Toki, followed by Kameko, going to the frosted glass door leading to her own office… well, the office she shared with Hawks.
It was a big room with huge glass windows and a balcony with French doors. The furniture was comfy yet modern, with glass desks, colored chairs, a big couch with cushions, some plush carpets, a few bookshelves where heroic manuals cohabited with newspapers, police files, and a few manga… There were two billboards to mark down their research, a little fresco of the word ‘Icarus’ in big letters above the balcony’s doors, and a few fans’ drawings pinned to the walls, next to maps or heroes’ posters. It felt like home, you know?
Toki’s desk was on the right side. The chair and the laptop were both orange, while Hawks’ were red. Toki put the paperwork on her desk, hoped in the chair (next to the bowl filled with lemons candies, because she was an adult and so she was allowed to have her favorite candies all the time, yeah!). She continued reading and signing while Kameko counted on her fingers:
“First priority: follow the lead on the False Flag case. Then please check those interviews invites, and send me a text to tell me which ones you’re accepting. Ideally all five, but at the minimum three. You need better exposure through the country, and during your last interviews, you dropped a line about fighting against the little injustices that has sparked controversy online.”
“I was talking of people speaking out against bullies, it’s not that hard to get… Wait. Do you think I should talk about wanting to change the system, like, allowing more people to use their Quirk for their jobs, or making Quirk discrimination illegal?”
“… Well. Heroes don’t usually do that. And you don’t exactly have the kind of pull needed for instigating change at a legal level.” Then Kameko grinned, something feral and delighted shining in her jade green eyes. “But you know what? We can make that happen. Just make sure I proofread your speech to make sure you don’t sound like a Meta-Liberation Army sympathizer, and it should be fine.”
“That’s a risk?” Toki asked, dismayed.
Kameko shrugged:
“They were the only ones pushing for free Quirk use. The core of their message is surprisingly reasonable. But propaganda villainized them, and of course their leader became more violent with the years… and straight-up insane in prison after being pumped full of drugs twenty-four hours a day to keep him harmless. So when he published his book it was a steaming pile of extremist garbage. Those who read it these days are fanatics. They consider it religion, not really politics or history. But the idea of ‘everybody should be free to use their power because it’s a part of them and nothing to be ashamed of’ had been around since, well, the dawn of Quirks. Restricting Quirk use to either villainy or the act of stopping villainy is something that came when Quirked people were the minority and lived in fear. Now, it’s unsustainable. Quirk use isn’t the only marker of a villain anymore. It’s only a matter of time before the laws change. But people don’t like being reminded of the system’s flaws, so… Yeah, there will be pushback. There always is.”
Toki would have thought that Kameko Sabira, rising star of the HPSC, wouldn’t be in favor of changing the rules. Kameko liked having rules because she mastered them, used them to their full advantages, made them her playground. Making less rules seemed like it would deprive her from a vast source of entertainment. And of money, too, because if Quirk-use stopped being an offence, a lot of infractions would disappear, and it would be less work for the heroes.
But Toki suddenly remembered that the first time they had meet, Kameko had been using her Quirk in public, in total violation of the law. Because it had been necessary. Because she had the power to do good while arming no one at all, and the idea of staying passive just to comply with an outdated rule probably hadn’t crossed her mind. Kameko was cheerful, ambitious, a busybody, and as fickle and capricious as a cat… but at her core, she was like Toki. She had seen a victim in need of help, and her body had moved her own.
Then Kameko grew serious again:
“But word of advice: if you want to push change, you better get support from people with pull. I know how important it is for you to fight against discrimination, but your voice alone won’t be enough.”
Toki grimaced. Yeah, she was aware. One person couldn’t move society. Yes, one person could make all the difference, but in the long term you needed numbers. Numbers, and propaganda. In a super-mediatized world, it was extremely important.
“Anyway!” Kameko said brightly. “I’m off to take the city’s pulse, listen to rumors, and bribe some people for useful tips. Remember, tomorrow I have an assignment for the HPSC in Osaka so I won’t be there. Hey, can you beep me when Hawks arrive? I have a ton of paperwork to give him. There’s a magazine who wants him to do a photoshoot as an underwear model.”
“Will do,” sniggered Toki.
Kameko waved, then left, cheerfully skipping in the corridor. How the hell could she skip in heels? Granted, they weren’t very high, but they were hella pointy. And noisy. On the agency’s floorboard, you could always hear her coming. For a cat, Kameko made a lot of noise when she moved. Curious how she seemed to have felines habits, like her love of milk and her mischievous streak, but none of a cat’s physical abilities…
Anyway. Toki went back to her paperwork.
It was soothing, in a way. The office was calm and brightly lit, and Toki had always read fast and easily. Kameko used color-coded post-it notes to divides the piles into different categories, too, which was nice. Missions reports from sidekicks to check, offers of team-up, interviews requests, urgent mails, important messages, legal stuff she had to sign off, interesting articles for her to read…
She worked quietly for at least an hour. Probably more. It wasn’t hard to get immersed in her reading. For all she was a dynamic heroine with plenty of energy on patrol, Toki had always been a little bookworm at heart, always delighted to just sit down and read. Even of it was just paperwork. Besides, heroic paperwork was marginally less boring than office paperwork. Or maybe it was just that Toki liked paperwork, period. That was actually a real possibility. Compared to fighting, it was really relaxing.
She read. She sorted out papers. She signed. After a while, she decided to take a quick break and looked at her email. The agency had an email box (managed by everyone, but mostly Kameko), but Quantum also had her private mail, and could also access Hawks’. There was nothing of interest, anyway. Most heroes worked on hard copies anyway, since they feared hackers, so they exchanged letters more than emails. Toki went back to her paperwork, reading the current HPSC and the list of missions Kameko had put together for her. Hum, why not. She signed up for several long-ranged patrol in rural areas, and for security at an art expo. Maybe she could wander around to watch the paintings.
There was plenty of work, actually, and she could probably stay buried in paperwork until evening. It was kind of comforting to slowly organize the backstage of her heroic shenanigans. It was fun to run around, parkour on rooftops, or wrestle with shoplifters, but paperwork made the thing really concrete, you know? There were letters from people who wanted to know her. Checks and bills and money to manage. Places to be, places to choose. Running a heroic agency was actually a lot of organization.
Toki kind of liked it. She loved the action, the company, and the opportunities. But she also liked all the boring stuff that went with it.
She only raised her head when she heard the balcony’s door click open. Keigo entered, hair wind-swept, his orange visor slightly askew after a long flight, and looking very pleased with his morning patrol. Toki couldn’t help but smile at him with hopeless fondness.
When Keigo saw her, his grin brightened, and he walked straight to her, stealing a lemon candy on her desk as he passed.
“Hey,” he smiled. “I’m home.”
Gods, she loved that idiot.
He leaned over the desk and Toki met him halfway, eyes closing, an irrepressible smile curving her lips. It was a brief kiss, barely a peck, but afterward they stayed a second immobile, foreheads touching. It was almost more intimate than a hug. This close, with his wings fanned out like that, Keigo could hear her breathing, her heartbeat, the heat radiating from her body. Toki didn’t have magic feathers to feel his presence this intensely. Sometimes she regretted it. But having him here, sharing this quiet moment, was enough. This close she could smell he had borrowed her citrus-scented shampoo, and it was so normal, so stupid, that she couldn’t help but feel some unknow emotion grip her heart.
She was so lucky to have ended up here. She was so lucky to have this, every day, all the time.
“Hey,” she whispered back. “Welcome home.”
Yeah. They were home, after all. As long as they had each other, they were home.
oOoOoOo
Winter had been mild until then, but as November ended and turned into December, the weather suddenly turned freezing cold. There was snow. Keigo and Toki often found themselves fighting impromptus snowballs games during patrol, which was great. But slippery roads meant more accidents, which was… not as great.
Anyway. They were expanding their patrol routes, slowly but surely. Fukuoka would stay their home-base, but the goal was to make the whole island their turf. It was a work on progress. After all, they had been heroes for less than a year!
But it was working. Other heroes in the area weren’t always welcoming, often feeling as if the two youngsters were stealing their thunder, with their blinding ascension through the rankings and their incredible popularity… and they weren’t completely wrong. But at least everybody could stay professional.
It didn’t hurt that both Hawks and Quantum were trying their hardest to be approachable.
It was part of their hero persona. Around the public they were calm, casual, friendly, reliable, and friendly. People had to feel at ease when they were around, to trust them. They were the nice heroes next door.
On a solo mission near Kyushu, Hawks met Mirko. In canon, they had been friends, so Toki wasn’t surprised when it happened. From how Hawks told the story, they didn’t hit off immediately: the Rabbit Heroine didn’t like to share fight or patrol. But they hung out a little afterwards and managed to find some common ground, laughing and joking. Mirko was apparently brash and loud, but also plenty funny and sarcastic. Hawks also met Best Jeanist later, during a photoshoot with a famous fashion magazine, and they bantered like old friends immediately. And finally, Hawks also met briefly Sherazade during a police briefing, although they barely exchanged a few words. Toki was jealous: Sherazade was one of their favorite heroes, and she would have loved to meet her in real life.
When she had begun training at Naruto Labs, Toki remembered she didn’t have a favorite hero. She didn’t even like heroes. Now… well, the whole thing at grown on her. She still felt a little derisive of the whole merchandizing, but she knew of enough heroes to have favorites. Like Sherazade, Ariel, and so on. Oh, Toki didn’t admire heroes like Keigo admired Endeavor, with approval and hunger all wrapped in one, but she liked them. She respected them.
Especially when they didn’t have flashy Quirks. Actually, none of Toki’s favorite heroes had a flashy Quirk. None of them were canon-characters, either.
Maybe they had died before canon, or maybe they had stayed under the radar. Or maybe they had retired. Toki didn’t know their ages, but Sherazade had been around for something like fifteen years now, so she was nearing thirty-five, maybe even forty. She had a Quirk that allowed her to forcibly carry a discussion with someone. When she spoke, her interlocuter felt compelled to continue the conversation. It allowed her to stall, to negotiate during a stand-off, to interrogate people. Toki had never meet her, though. But Sherazade had been used as an example of cunning and efficiency in a lot of her strategy lessons back at Naruto Labs.
Another of her favorites, Ariel, was younger than Sherazade: he was in his late twenties, max. His Quirk was unknow. Was it the ability to confuse his enemies? An agility-based power? Speed? Something to do with his intelligence? Or maybe something about luck? Nobody knew for sure. It was almost a meme online. Oh, Ariel wasn’t famous, but he was well-liked and mysterious. He was mostly known for his acrobatics and witty one-liners, so he was very liked by online fans. He was pretty badass, too. And he worked solo, unlike most underground heroes who were closely assisted by limelight heroes or by police forces.
Witty underground heroes with non-flashy, probably-mental-based Quirk. Uh. Maybe she liked them because they remined her of Hitoshi Shinsō, actually. That was a thought.
Anyway, Quantum didn’t encounter any canon-characters, which was a shame. But she met plenty of heroes. She travelled a lot. She quadrilled Kyushu Island, but she also went up to Japan’s main island: to Hiroshima, Osaka, Nagoya, Shizuoka, Fukushima, even as far as Sendai. The only place she avoided was Tokyo. She hadn’t been there since Meteor’s arrest and she had no plan to change that anytime soon.
Travelling allowed Quantum to meet quite a few people, and even some undergrounds heroes, usually working with the police forces. Some limelight heroes, to exchange intel or team-up for an afternoon, which boosted their respective popularity. A few famous heroes, too, like Titania who was currently ranked Tenth in the Billboard Chart, and who was a surprisingly athletic old woman with a durability Quirk.
Quantum also saw old friends. She met Inferno again in Osaka, joining his agency for a violent villain chase that ended up with fourteen injured people and a collapsed bridge. Still, the end result wasn’t so bad when you accounted for how bloody fast that villain had been, and the amount of collateral damage he was willing to make. Then Toki ran into Salamander a little while later, during a second mission in Osaka.
Salamander wasn’t very sociable. He made Toki think of an odd mix of canon-Bakugou (rude, abrasive, constantly annoyed) and canon-Aizawa (blasé, cold, and absolutely loathing the media). But he apparently liked Toki well enough to talk a little. Maybe because with him or Inferno, Toki felt sufficiently at ease to drop the casual mask and be a little more serious.
“Did you see the President recently?”
“Not since starting Icarus,” Toki blinked, startled. “Why, should I expect her to make a tour to distribute Christmas gifts or something?”
Salamander made a face: “You can bet that if she climbs out of your fucking chimney it’s to give you a lump of coal. I heard she contacted the most powerful heroes on the S-ranked list. She didn’t tell them shit, but just having her enquire about their level of strength is enough to send alarm bells ringing. She’s probably looking to give someone a truly fucked-up mission. Just a warning.”
“A fucked-up mission how?” Toki asked, worried.
Salamander scowled, and briefly looked around to be sure nobody was near them, before lowering his voice.
“No idea. But it must be shady or she would reach out to the Top Ten. And it must require a powerhouse, or she wouldn’t ask so many people trying to find the perfect fit.”
Toki had an unpleasant realization:
“You think Hawks or me could be the perfect fit?”
Salamander shrugged.
“A fucked-up mission usually needs someone strong and discreet. You’re both. You also owe her, so there’s that, too.”
“Great,” she muttered. “Just what I needed.”
“Just… keep your head down.”
“I’ll avoid saying Bloody Mary in front of any mirrors,” she joked.
She didn’t dislike the President. So far, Genmei-san had always kept her word about every single one of her promises, and Toki didn’t have anything to complain about. But still, when dealing with people who had power over you and a history of doing shady things, it was better to stay cautious.
Toki thanked Salamander for the warning, and resolved to keep an eye out.
December was an eventful month. People were busy with Christmas shopping, so there were plenty of shoplifters or thieves, a few reckless drivers, and a lot of stressed people who were more on edge than usual. But for university, it also meant end-of-term exams. Quantum ran around with Hawks doing heroics, but Toki Hoshizora had to study and sit exams at the local university.
Fun times.
Alright, the Fukuoka Science University wasn’t bad. Quite the contrary, actually! It was big, well-funded, and filled to the brim with brilliant minds. The lectures were goods, and the work was challenging but not insurmountable. Toki was completing the two courses she had intentionally failed to complete her Bachelor’s degree, but at the same time she was also following several classes for the Master’s degree. There was a lot of math. The kind of math where it was all letters and symbols mixed in equations, without a single number in sight. Astrophysics mingled with classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and electromagnetic theory. It was complex, fascinating and, in a sense, almost elegant. Like reading a partition and suddenly understanding the music whose tone the planets and stars danced to.
Most of Toki’s classes were online, but she had a few lectures she had to attend in person. And of course her exams required her to actually go sit in a classroom. She didn’t mind. Actually, she preferred it. It was nice to study at home and progress at her own pace, but it was also kind of freeing to slip on her Hoshizora mask and blend in with the rest of the crowd. Colored contacts, a touch of make-up, some casual clothes, colorful ties in her twin buns, and she was completely different from Quantum, the hero who patrolled this very same city.
Her hairstyle used to be kind of distinctive, but since Quantum had become a local celebrity, a lot of girls wore their hair in buns, now. When Toki was a kid almost no one tied their hair like that: but now almost one in five girls she passed on the street had the same hairstyle! Unbelievable.
At least it helped her blend in. Not that she had many friends who would try to poke hole at her fake identity. She had plenty of friendly acquaintances and had no trouble finding people in her class to sit with at the cafeteria, and could insert herself seamlessly in any group of chatting students, but she wasn’t really close to anyone. She missed Sawayomi, sometimes. Or Sachiko. With them, Toki had had something real. Now, well… even if Hoshizora was part of who Toki was, it sometimes felt like a lie. Some superficial truths weren’t enough to make a whole person.
So yeah, Toki felt a little isolated sometimes. But never lonely. You can’t be lonely when you’re passioned by something: especially in a group of other people who loved the very same things.
Toki still texted Sawayomi, but it was rare. They were both very busy. And Sachiko… well. Toki had muted her messages the day where she had left the Discord server. PinkIsPunkRock was a good friend, but she was also noisy and scarily intuitive. Coming out as a hero had already revealed a great deal about who Toki really was, there was no need to give Sachiko more ammunition.
But maybe they could reconnect, one day. Later, when things would be less hectic. When Icarus would be settled. When Toki wouldn’t have to juggle hero work and university. There would be a good time for it, Toki knew it: she just wasn’t sure what it would look like.
Whatever. There was no rush.
Midterms came and went. Toki aced her Bachelor’s degree exams, and was less sure about the Master’s degree’s ones she had sat too, but at least it was done. Then came Christmas. Some heroes took holidays, but Icarus Agency stayed on call.
And on Christmas Eve, Toki met Moxie.
It was completely unforeseen. But late that evening Toki got a message from Moxie, telling her she was in front of her agency and she needed help. So Quantum cut her patrol short, and got back to Fukuoka in a few jumps, mind whirling with alarming possibilities. For gods’ sake, Moxie lived in Musutafu! What was she doing here? Wasn’t she fourteen? No, she was fifteen now. But still, she was a kid. Why was she four hours away from her home? Did her uncle know? Why did she need help, was she in trouble?
It wasn’t how she had envisioned meeting her protegee, that was for sure. If she had to pick a place and time, she would have chosen a day where she was off-duty. A day where they could meet as Antares and Moxie, friends from an online community.
But did she really have the luxury to nitpick? For months now Moxie had been weird. Since coming to Japan, actually. She was quieted, more subdued. Before, she had always talked a lot about her work in school or how supportive her father was: but here in Japan, she never uttered a word about her classmates, and barely more about her uncle. Moxie had confessed there were arguing, but nothing more. So now, Toki couldn’t help but wonder how bad Moxie’s situation was.
She wasn’t celebrating Christmas with friends of family. It was already a big warning sign. And why wasn’t her uncle with her? Was their relationship so bad?! If the man had his estranged niece all alone in a foreign country for the holidays, what could be more important than to be with her? Seriously, Toki needed to find that dingus and give him a serious talking to. He was supposed to be a hero, so why wasn’t he taking care of the problem right in front of him?
Flash! Toki warped in front of her agency. She nearly collided with someone, and said person took a step back with a startled little squeak. And then suddenly, Antares was face to face with Moxie.
She was young. Alright, Toki had known that, but it was still a shock to see a teenager. She had a round face, wide eyes, a startled look, and long, wavy blond hair that reached down to her mid-back and flapped in the wind. She wore a fluffy cap and a woolen coat, both in bright shades of pink. Her eyes were a little red, as she had cried recently, but her face was dry.
For a second, they just looked at each other. Then Toki grinned.
“Hi, Moxie. It’s nice to meet you.”
The girl a stuck out a hand before blushing, remembering she was in Japan, and bowed awkwardly instead:
“Nice to meet you too, Antares.”
“You can call me Quantum. Or, well, Toki. It’s my name after all.”
Moxie straightened, and smiled shyly:
“Well, my real name is Melissa.”
She didn’t call out Toki on only giving her first name, and belatedly the girl remembered that Melissa was from America, where using someone’s first name wasn’t as big of a deal as it was in Japan. Not that Toki minded: after knowing each other for nearly four years, they completely deserved to be on first name basis with one another.
“So,” Toki said after an awkward pause. “Why don’t we go inside?”
Technically the public wasn’t allowed to enter a hero agency, but there were exceptions for family, guests, interns, and so on. Toki opened the door, and brought Moxie… Melissa inside. The secretaries weren’t there, but they passed Tyto on their way. Toki didn’t introduce them, only waved at the sidekick and dragged Melissa with her to her office on the last floor.
Melissa looked everywhere with something like wonder. She barely dared to sit on the couch. Toki started making tea, keeping an eye on her guest and wondering how to start the conversation. It was obvious Melissa was fretting about something. After months of avoiding a meeting face to face, now she was seeking her out? There was something going on for sure.
“You were in the neighborhood?” she asked lightly.
Melissa cringed.
“I… not really. I did want to meet you, really, I just didn’t want you to see how it was in Musutafu. At school, or… at home.”
Toki frowned, immediately serious: “Do you need help?”
“… No. It’s complicated. I keep telling you things were fine, but, uh, they weren’t really fine after all. With my uncle and with, well, with my school. Kids in my class are kind of mean.”
“I figured,” Toki deadpanned.
Melissa shook her head. “It wasn’t so bad in the beginning. They aren’t awful. There’s some of them who are pricks, and others who treat me like I’m furniture or something, but they always… they let me join groups and spend time with them. But lately I’ve been finding my desk covered in graffiti, and they tried to lock me on the roof twice. Like it’s a game.” She let out a little, bitter laugh. “My uncle would say it’s proof I don’t belong here.”
Toki narrowed her eyes.
“You uncle said that to you?”
Melissa pressed her lips tightly, then shook her head. When she spoke, the words came slowly at first… then quicker, almost pouring, as if she couldn’t stop.
“Not in so many words. But we’re at odds. We’re really, really at odds. He’s ignoring me and uncomfortable, and I’m mad. I’m so mad against him. He had been injured several years ago and he never told me about it. I found out by accident. He would have lied to me forever, and when I confronted him he tried to brush me off, telling me it wasn’t my business! He almost died. He should have retired. But he kept on lying to me, to his friends, to everyone, even to my Dad, and… He forced me to lie to my Dad about it, to keep it from him, and that’s almost worst. No, the worst is how he constantly deflect and avoid the subject! He acts like me finding about his injury is the problem, when actually him being injured is the real issue here! And now… It makes everything super-tense. I guess his injury explains why he’s worried about me being a hero, but he’s so dismissive about it, like I don’t even have a hope to make it! Like it’s baffling that I would even think about heroism when I could stay on the sidelines, where my place actually is, according to him! Sure, he wants me to stay safe, but what I want and how hard I work to make it possible doesn’t even seems to matter to him! Ever since I arrived in Japan and told him about wanting to be a hero, he had always tried to discourage me. He’s trying to be kind about it, he really is, but it’s even worse. He just… he clearly doesn’t believe in me. He thinks I’m too fragile. The first few times I went to him because teachers were assholes or because one classmate used his Quirk on me in class, it turned in a whole lecture about how I should take it as a sign that being Quirkless makes me too vulnerable. I don’t bother coming to him for help anymore. It makes me so furious! When I came to Japan, I thought I could rely on him: but instead I have to fight against his negativity in addition to everyone being assholes and I’m just so tired of it!”
She took a big, trembling breath. For a moment, there was silence. The kettle whistled, and Toki started pouring tea just to have something to do with her hands. She didn’t know what to say. Maybe because Melissa’s rage and desperation were hitting a little too close to home.
She wasn’t unfamiliar with dismissive parental figures, after all.
“I’m sorry,” she finally offered.
Melissa shook her head, trying to discreetly wipe her eyes.
“No, it’s me. I should I reached out. I knew you would have helped. I just… I was ashamed that what they all said was still getting to me, I guess.”
Toki opened then closed her mouth, unsure of what to answer to that. Yes, Melissa should have come to her. But Melissa was also trying to be a hero and stand up for herself, so it wasn’t illogical for her to keep quiet. Besides, what had happened between her and her uncle seemed pretty serious: of course it would be hard to speak of it to a stranger. So yeah, Toki couldn’t exactly fault Melissa for her silence. In hindsight, it was easy to said that she could have done things better. But at the time, Melissa had simply done her best.
“What do you need?” she said instead.
Melissa breathed in, then out. When she spoke, her voice was strangely subdued.
“I want you to support me. Even against my uncle.”
“Of course!”
“Antares… Quantum. Toki. I’m serious. My uncle is influent and powerful. And what I told him about his injury, it can never get out.”
Toki frowned. A strange suspicion began to form in her head. Slowly, she asked:
“Why? Do I know him?”
Melissa let out a little, nervous laugh.
“Sorta. My name is Melissa Shields. I’m the daughter of David Shields, the support equipment engineer. My uncle is All Might.”
… Well. Toki had her work cut for her, now.
oOoOoOo
Melissa stayed late at the agency. When a few sidekicks went by, Toki introduced her as ‘a future intern’ and didn’t expand. Really, the less people knew about it, the better.
Thinking back, Toki should have guessed it. Seriously?! Melissa Shields existed in canon! Or at least, she appeared in a movie taking place at I-Island, and I-Island existed. She was the right age! Quirkless! A genius of support items! And all that speech about her famous uncle, the hero… Really, Toki ought to guess it.
Anyway. This evening, they mostly talked. About how Melissa’s life was going. About how she trained. About how her uncle… All Might… didn’t help her. And oh boy, the face Melissa had made when Toki had told her that All Might’s injury wasn’t a secret, that the HPSC knew, and that people online had already found out! Apparently All Might had been sure that everything was still firmly under wraps. Oooooooh, he was going to have a nasty shock when the President confronted him. Toki could almost feel bad for him. Almost. She was still mad about how he treated his niece.
It wasn’t that All Might was abusive or neglectful. But Melissa had needed him and he had pushed her away. Maybe he was scared. Maybe he was projecting his fears on her. After all, he was injured, weakening, and his whole life revolved around his strength, so he was probably in the middle of a very long existential crisis. He had been curt with Midoriya in canon, and had only admitted the boy’s worth as a hero when offering him his power. But this All Might wasn’t there yet. Canon was still three years away. All Might probably wasn’t even looking for a successor. And even if he was, he probably wouldn’t have given his power to his beloved niece.
Maybe he would, if she ran straight towards danger like Midoriya. But that was a stupid way to recognize heroism. It came in many shapes and form. Melissa’s quiet resolve didn’t make her less worthy of heroism than Midoriya’s desperation.
The end result was the same: All Might had pushed his niece away. She had told him about her dream, and he had panicked. Maybe trying to divert her from this path was a way to stay in denial. If weak, Quirkless people couldn’t be heroes, then there was no way Toshinori Yagi was starting to become weak and Quirkless, right? Because who would he be without his power, without heroism? What would he be?
(Hell, Melissa hadn’t even known his name was Toshinori Yagi until coming to Japan and seeing his name on the mailbox. He had always been All Might. His heroic person was all he had. He didn’t exist outside of it. Had it been the same in canon? Had All Might been forced to make Toshinori real because he didn’t have any other choice than to use his name in the skinny form he couldn’t escape? Gods, that was deeply messed up. And Toki thought she had issues with her civiliansona!)
So now Melissa had enough of being told to be realistic, not matter how gently her uncle tried to be. She wouldn’t give up. She needed someone to believe in her. Someone who would train her, and support her, and, if need be, to recommend her to Yūei. All Might had told her what the entrance exam was (because of fucking course he had) to discourage her. Except that it had only made Melissa angry at the blatant favoritism Yūei showed. Now she wanted to try the recommendation exam.
Of course, even if she failed, she still had the Sport Festival to transfer to the hero course. But it was only a last resort.
They talked strategy. Toki had food delivered, and they ate. It was only hours later, after midnight, that Toki brought Melissa back to Musutafu. It was just a matter of a few jumps, after all. Melissa lived in a neighborhood Toki didn’t know, so they finished their journey on foot.
“It wasn’t how I expected Christmas to go,” Toki frankly admitted.
“Sorry to drop on you like that. Did you have to cancel plans?”
“No, I was on shift. If someone had called for an emergency, I would have gone, so it didn’t change anything. The only issue is that Hawks is going to whine about having to patrol in the cold while I was staying warm at the office.”
They stopped in front of a tall building with glass doors, and Melissa took out a security card. Toki frowned:
“Is your uncle home?”
The girl shook her head. “No. He’s always working. I told him I would be with friends, so he isn’t supposed to get back until tomorrow at least.”
Good. Meeting All Might in his skinny form would’ve been dreadfully awkward. Toki still had… mixed feelings about him. And not just because he had messed up with Melissa.
Meteor’s arrest was eleven years away, but somehow the resentment was still burning. It shouldn’t have ended that way. It shouldn’t have happened. But it had. It had happened, and Toki was allowed to grieve, to be mad and sad and horrified. All Might claiming it was a success, claiming all would be fine because he was here, it felt like an insult to her grief. So yeah, eleven years later, Toki still had issues about the guy.
“I’ll try to be in Musutafu more often,” Toki said suddenly. “But I don’t want to you feel alone why I’m not here, so… I texted you an address.”
“An address?” Melissa repeated.
“A Discord server address. When I was your age and alone, those people were my best friends. None of them are heroes, or engineers, but they are all good analysts. And they must be missing someone for their Donjons and Dragons party.”
Melissa laughed and thanked her. Then, right before opening the building’s door, she hesitated again.
“Thank you for listening. Really, it… it means a lot. If you didn’t believe in me, I don’t know where I would be.”
But I know, Toki thought. You would have been in I-Island, with your dad. You would have never learned about All Might’s injuries. You would have made peace with the fact that you couldn’t become a hero. You would have been happy, maybe. I think. Or at the very least you would have been content with your life, and safe.
A ship in the harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.
In another world Melissa had picked safety over ambition. It didn’t mean that the choices she had made in this universe were wrong. It just meant they were different. She just had more options. Things changed. Toki had changed things. Tiny ripples that would one day become waves. She didn’t know if she felt excited or scared about it. So she just shrugged:
“Nobody knows. I just hope it works out in the end.”
And that was that.
Melissa went home. Toki came back to Fukuoka. As she expected, Keigo whined about being left to patrol in the cold, and they celebrated a late Christmas by eating a ton of chicken nuggets at the nearest KFC.
Toki told him about Melissa, all of it: she was Moxie, she lived in Musutafu, she was bullied by her peers, and her uncle was fricking All Might. At least Keigo understood how headache inducing it was.
All Might. The man, the myth, the legend. The asshole. He was a hero, he was a good hero even, but… there were so many but. He carried too much. He was too important. He played at being God and maybe he had the best possible intentions doing it, but it was too big. Now he was carrying the whole concept of peace on his shoulders, and he was going to let people down. He already had. The unsaved ones, how were they supposed to feel when All Might kept saying that everything was fine because he was here? No wonder Tomura Shigaraki hated him. The little part of Toki who was still Toki Taiyōme… she felt the same sometimes.
At their core, people had good ideals. Truth, and justice, and peace. But those were hard to live up to, so people wanted heroes to live up to their ideals for them. Heroes were just people though, so it wasn’t any easier for them to live up to their ideals than anyone else. They gave this responsibility to All Might instead. And in the end, there was a world where people talked about justice and peace, but no one really fought for those things. People who needed help often didn’t get it, but everyone kept going on about what fair and wonderful place the world was since heroes were supposed to make it perfect. Since All Might was supposed to make it perfect, especially.
And yeah, the world wasn’t that bad. War, famine, pollution and poverty had been virtually eliminated. This world was more brutal and discriminatory than the one Toki remembered from her past life, but it was also, ironically, safer and happier. So really, it would be hypocritical to say that this society was doomed.
But All Might was doomed. He was only human, and he would fall. Some petty, morbid part of Toki wanted him to fall, because then people would wake up. Because he would wake up, too. He would stop fake-smiling and lying to everyone, pretending that he made things right when in fact he was just a placebo, keeping people complacent and not fixing anything.
Anyway. Time passed. Keigo celebrated his nineteenth birthday. Melissa joined the Discord server. No new unfortunate event fell on Toki’s head.
Then, soon enough, it was New Year.
Since Icarus Agency had been on call for Christmas, they had the day off. Keigo went to a fancy party for heroes. Mirko would be there, as well as Inferno, and even a few underground heroes like Sherazade. Quantum had been invited too, of course. And really, considering who would be there, Toki had been tempted. But in the end, she had declined. She had a promise to keep.
So Toki went to Musutafu to see the Shinsō family.
She went back wearing her Hoshizora disguise. Golden contacts, ribbons in her twin buns, and a pretty dress in dark purple that didn’t invoke whatsoever the warm colors of Quantum’s costume. It also had the advantage of matching the Shinsō’s weirdly colored hair. She could almost pretend to be a member of the family. She tried not to think too hard about that.
Six months ago they had been a central part of her world. She had told them about her problems, her hopes, her dreams. Now she felt almost like a stranger. She had fought villains now. She had seen new heights, enjoyed luxuries food, done photoshoots, become famous. She had also met All Might’s niece, holy crap. And the President was looking to give someone a fucked-up mission. Yeah, Toki hadn’t forgot about that. She had warned Keigo, but since then… she hadn’t heard anything.
The President hadn’t come knocking at Icarus’ door. Which wasn’t surprising after all: when Genmei-san had admitted to the existence of S-ranked heroes and S-ranked missions, she had clearly shown her reluctance to bring Quantum and Hawks in the secret. They were too young. They were also too… codependent. If one of them (or, let’s be realistic: Toki) decided to strain against the reins, the other would follow. Not that two kids could do much against the HPSC, but they could create bigger waves than a single rebellious agent.
So Genmei-san probably didn’t want to bring them in, or at least, not yet. Still, Toki remembered Salamander’s warning. That fucked-up mission would need doing, sooner or later, and even if she was humble Toki wasn’t blind: Hawks and Quantum weren’t just rising stars, they were powerhouses with versatile skills, and probably the Commission’s best bet.
But she couldn’t tell that to the Shinsō. So she smiled, she talked, she let herself be swept in the conversation. She tried to forget about the looming danger, and to enjoy the party. She owned them that much at least. They were so all glad to see her.
Dr Shinsō wasn’t here, he was on shift this week, but Hitoshi and Mihoko were both thrilled, barely able to stay in one place. Hitoshi, especially, was pestering her with questions about her job, and what it was like to work with real-life heroes.
“What, like I’m not a real-life hero?” she asked with mock-outrage.
Without missing a beat, the boy replied: “I’ve seen you trip on your own socks and faceplant in the wall. You’re going to have to do more than don a fancy jumpsuit for me to be impressed.”
Looking at Mihoko, Toki waved in Hitoshi’s direction indignantly, as if to say ‘what the hell, is he roasting me? Is he allowed to do that?!’. But no help was coming, Mihoko too busy cackling.
“Exam time was a difficult period for me,” she retorted with as much dignity as she could muster, which wasn’t much when everybody was thinking about her slamming in a wall.
“We noticed,” Mihoko-san sniggered. “I hope you’re taking it easier now. And you have Hawks-san to watch your back, don’t you?”
She grinned: “Well, I didn’t slam into any billboard recently, so he’s doing an okay job I suppose.”
They talked some more. Mihoko-san told her about her friends, about going rollerblading, or tagging the highest walls in the city. She also told funny stories about her husband’s work, and some pranks he and his friends had been up to during college. Toki then shared some things about going to modelling agencies or shooting publicity spots, and joked about Keigo’s fashion sense. It wasn’t actually that bad. At least he tried to stick to warm colors and streetwear, so it wasn’t like a dressed like a clown. But his jackets were so bright it almost hurt the eyes. Most of his clothes were picked by fashion designers, so it was either something black and practical, or something horrendously tacky. Hayasa-sensei had once said he had an outrageous bowling alley carpet fashion sense, and Toki couldn’t find better words.
Then of course it opened the door to more questions about Hawks, about what it was like to work with him, about how long they had known each other… because apparently Mihoko-san had kept the small photo Toki had sent her all those years ago, the one taken in a mall next to Keigo. Granted, you could only see Keigo’s unruly hair, but this fluffy hairstyle was very distinctive.
Mihoko-san never pressed too much. But Hitoshi couldn’t hold on for much longer, and eventually he blurted out:
“Are you two dating?”
“Hitoshi!” scowled Mihoko.
“What? Come on, the suspense is killing me! There’s all sort of theories online, with like, a ton of pictures and everything! Then you show up and start telling how wonderful he is, what am I supposed to think?”
Toki groaned and hid her face in her hands.
“Yes, Hitoshi. We are dating.”
She hadn’t intended to said it out loud. Or at least, not tonight. Besides, ‘dating’ seemed such a weak and reductive word to explain what they were doing. But… wasn’t dating part of what they were doing, anyway?
“Gross,” Hitoshi muttered, looking absolutely delighted. “I knew it.”
“But this is a secret, got it?” Toki added, waving a finger threateningly. “No babbling.”
“Of course, who do you take me for?!”
“Point,” Toki conceded. She knew Hitoshi and Mihoko wouldn’t tell a soul. They were her friends, and they knew how to keep a secret.
“Is it serious?” Mihoko asked softly.
“As a heart attack.” Toki replied. Mihoko made a face, and the girl grinned sheepishly: “What, too soon?”
“I hope he doesn’t have the same humor that you do.”
Toki couldn’t help but laugh, a fond look on her face. Yeah, fat chance of that. Keigo and her had the same poor taste in jokes and puns.
“He does, sorry,” she said fondly. “But he’s much more of a people person than I am. He’s smart and funny and so very lovable. You’ll see when you’ll meet him.”
Mihoko looked pleasantly surprised by that, and Toki realized that she had just more or less promised to introduce her boyfriend to her. Crap, she really was in too deep. Fortunately Hitoshi didn’t let her any time to freak out because he almost bolted upward, grinning like a lunatic:
“We’re going to meet Hawks?! AWESOME! When?! When?!”
“Well certainly not now,” Toki scoffed. “Maybe when you’re a little older, with some training. You’ll have internships in high school, anyway.”
“I am training already!” Hitoshi protested. “I joined a gym club this year, and I’m going to try parkour next year!”
“What about karate? I thought you liked it… Also, didn’t your mom wanted you to join something a little calmer?”
She threw a questioning glance at Mihoko-san, who shrugged. “Yes, a music club or an art club would look good on his resume. And it would be nice for him to have a hobby that doesn’t include training.”
She had a point.
“I picked the drums,” Hitoshi piped up. “I like music and I have all the art stuff I want at home, anyway. I’m okay at it, I guess. But I still want to do parkour. I like karate, but I want to try something new. Besides, I saw videos of your hero fights online, you don’t use a lot of martial arts. It’s mostly jumping around.”
“Yeah, but that’s my own style!” Toki protested. “There’s a little bit of breakdancing and ballet in it, but that doesn’t mean you should start dancing. Each person has their own style… although it’s true that gymnastics and parkour are really useful.”
And in the end, without really knowing how they had gotten to that point, Toki ended up drafting with them a training plan for Hitoshi to follow.
She couldn’t come often to Musutafu, but she could manage to be there at least one time a week, usually on the week-ends. She hadn’t done it yet because… Icarus Agency was still new, it was more important, she didn’t have time to go laze around at the Shinsō… but it wasn’t really lazing around if she was here for a purpose, right? Besides, she had also promised Melissa to train her!
Or maybe she was just waiting for an excuse to come back. She liked hanging around the Shinsō. She liked chatting art and random nonsense with Mihoko-san, she liked teasing and laughing with Hitoshi, she even liked the dry humor of Dr Shinsō when he was around. It felt comforting, familiar. She liked knowing that they knew her, all of her, and didn’t judge her for it. Like family, almost: like a family should be.
She didn’t say it. It was one of those things that sometime bubbled close to the surface without ever managing to escape from her lips. It would have made it too real, too vulnerable to the harsh reality. So instead, after planning what kind of training Hitoshi could have, when she could be there, and how they would train to use a capture-scarf-thingy without the capture-scarf thingy (Toki was going to try and get one, but it probably wouldn’t be easy considering it was a very specialized support item), she tried to think of what else she could add to the training and ended up saying wishfully:
“Maybe I could even get Melissa in it. I think you would get along well.”
“Melissa?” parroted Hitoshi, frowning. “Who’s that?”
Toki blinked. She was almost sure she had mentioned her… no, wait, she had mentioned the Quirkless online community to Mihoko-san, but nothing more. She had chickened out and never told anyone, besides Keigo, about her online kōhai.
“She’s an online friend, a few years older than you. We met on an Quirkless support website. I’ve been giving her tips for training, ‘cause she’s going to be the first Quirkless hero.”
“Quirkless hero?” Hitoshi blurted out. Toki glowered at him. He apparently took a second to rethink what he was going to say, before inquiring tentatively: “Well, that’s going to be… interesting. You wouldn’t be training her if she had no chance, right?”
“Exactly. She’s perhaps even more suited to heroic than I am. She has convictions, you see. And she’s a freaking genius. She’s going to fight with armored boots, a robotic shield, and a jetpack to fly…”
It didn’t take much probing from the Shinsō for Toki to start talking about her friends. Her ideas, her determinations, her crazy inventions, but also her funny fashion sense that mixed bulky robotics with frilly pink stuff, or her love of old American comics. Hitoshi looked a little jealous to not be the only kōhai in her life, but clearly learning that Moxie was Quirkless had put him on the backfoot: he probably had never met a Quirkless person in his life, and he oscillated between being interested, dismissive, and kind of awkward about it. Mihoko took the news with way more grace. She pestered Toki with questions, and when Toki mentioned that Melissa lived in Musutafu, she looked interested by the idea of meeting her.
It was still up to Melissa, Toki warned then. But the idea had been planted. And… if Melissa was so lonely, maybe she wouldn’t mind having some friends in Musutafu, too. Hitoshi was a sassy little shit, true, and Melissa an exhausting bundle of energy, but Toki had a feeling they could get along like a house on fire.
Then Mihoko noticed the time, and quickly jumped on her feet, eyes sparkling:
“Come on, children, it’s nearly midnight. Let’s go on the balcony to see the fireworks!”
The night was clear, with not a cloud in sight. The city had lowered its lights for the occasion. Not enough for the streets to be dark, of course, but enough for the fireworks to be clearly visible. So when midnight rang and fireworks exploded in the sky, it lit up the whole city.
White, red, gold, green, blue, purple: fountains of colors and explosions of brightness in the pitch-black sky. It was beautiful. Toki hadn’t seen many fireworks in her life, after all, and she craned her neck to try and see as much as she could, grinning in delight. Hitoshi and Mihoko let out excited exclamations that got lost in the thunder of explosions. In the streets, some people yelled ‘happy new year!’ to each other, and Toki couldn’t help but let out a little laugh.
So much had happened in those last few months. And now… Now it was a time for new beginnings. For better or for worse. Right here, right now, Toki allowed herself to feel a little optimistic.
The canon-timeline was only three years away, now.
Notes:
Sooooooo did you like it ? =D A nice little transition chapter. With (finally) the introduction of Moxie !
Some wordbuildings details because i need to overshare :
- War Dog, Switchblade, and Kuma : those characters are inspired by (or straight-up came from) the fanfic "Switchblade" by Cacid, which is INCREDIBLY interesting. There are some fascinating ideas and plot-points that i fell in love with. This fic gave me an unprecedented angle on the MLA war, Destro and his ideals... and the possibility that the Japanese's government has worked with AFO in the past. The last arc is darker and (spoiler alert) several main characters straight-up die... which i hate... but not enough to deter me from reading that fic until 4 am! A great read, would 100% recommend.
- I made fanart for Sherazade and Ariel ! I found the base art on Pinterest from fanmade redesign of Miraculous Ladybug characters, if you can belive it x)
Both designs will be posted on "Snapshots of Wisdom"!
We won't meet those heroes any time soon, but i wanted you to see Toki's favorites heroes. Both underground, both sassy, both with discreet Quirks, and both DRESSED IN ORANGE. x)- I headcanon Inferno to be a canon-character. In my head, he was killed before canon. Actually, he was killed in the villain chase mentionned in this chapter, because he didn't have back-up. Since in this universe, Toki was there, the villain didn't have the opportunity to corner Inferno, and it never devolved into a fight, much less a fight to the death. So he only ran instead of deciding to murder the hero on his trail.
- I made fanart for Titania, the heroine i mention in this chapter as the current no. 10 hero ! Here it is :
Titania will become important later. Much, much later, granted, but she will!
I find it frustrating that in shonen manga, you can have old men as mentors and warriors, but never old women. When you have an old woman, she's usually a healer. Or look younger than her real age. Or BOTH (like Tsunade in Naruto). So here: have an old lady who can and will kick your ass. As a treat.
Chapter 25: Whatever it takes
Summary:
All Might was… he was so strong. Toki tried to think of how many times she had seen him on the news, plummeting villains, crushing rockslides, stopping trains, ripping open walls with his bare hands, so unnaturally strong that it had inspired the fanatic awe of a whole country. And unbiddenly, she thought of a building falling on its side and collapsing, the earth shaking with the impact, the cloud of dust swallowing streets and growing, always growing, until it engulfed the whole neighborhood like some nightmarish monsters, and people were screaming, and Meteor was yelling...
She closed her eyes.
Notes:
I've nearly finished my fic on Meteor and it's SO HARD to find the point where i have to stop. Meteor is sleazy and charming and bloodthirsty and ruthless, and what the hell, I've grown attached to that dickhead.
Anyway. That's a problem for later.
For now : the chapter ! And it's in this chapter that the "All Might arc" really begins !
Enjoy !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
WHATEVER IT TAKES
Icarus Agency needed a new sidekick, or maybe two. Their workload had increased. Kameko had sent Toki a few auspicious profiles, and she idly scrolled down the list during patrol, keeping an eye on her phone and the other on her road.
Since said road was taking her through rooftops and skyscrapers, there wasn’t a high probability of collision, but still. She had once slammed against a parabola and she wasn’t eager to repeat the experience.
Some of the candidates were promising. There was guy with a lava Quirk that Toki recognized as the Sport Festival winner when she was in Yūei… a young woman who had a telepathy Quirk, pretty cool… an older guy with control over rocks… Mmh. Not bad, not bad. Most of them were currently in coalition-style agencies, so they had experience with how the real world of heroism worked. But to move forward, those young sidekicks needed more resources and responsibility. Of course, a coalition-style agency couldn’t offer that: their goal was not to help people rise high, only to give their members a security net.
Yeah, coalition-style agencies were a thing. The majority of hero agencies in Japan weren’t coalition-style, though: they were called ‘pyramidal-style’. They were usually named after the single hero that ran them, and they had a lead hero, possibly a number of secondary heroes that were none the less billed as combatants, and any sidekicks those heroes might employ. There was generally something of an unspoken pecking order to them, with those closest to the lead hero receiving the most resources and press attention. Same thing went on when the agency was led by a team, like Icarus was. It helped building efficiency, managing money, and climbing ranks. Several people working towards a same goal were more efficient than several little cells working alone. Sure, the sidekicks and secondary heroes didn’t get much recognition, but they got huge paychecks, a strong team, a better success rate.
That kind of hierarchical structure wasn’t for everyone though, so there was a not-insignificant minority of agencies that were run differently. Some heroes stayed completely solo, like Mirko, or Ariel. But very often, there were coalitions of independent heroes, pooling resources so they could all function unobstructed by workplace politics. They had smaller means and were less efficient, but they weren’t less dedicated to the task.
A lot of underground heroes worked in collation-style agency. Their system allowed them to work solo more easily, all while having access to a true agency’s resources, information network, and financial backing. These agencies generally didn’t bear the name of a single leader, but rather chose a name that reflected the image of all the involved heroes. Like Blackcloak, the agency Salamander was part of, with members spread out from Tokyo to Hiroshima. Or Centerstage, the agency in Musutafu where Present Mic and Midnight worked.
Anyway. Toki was jerked away from her considerations when her police-communicator (integrated in her visor) suddenly crackled to life. She was on patrol, so she immediately stood to attention.
“Villain sighting in the Rishi neighborhood, probably a strength Quirk, assistance requested.”
Oh, some action! Toki grinned, then grew serious again. She did enjoy hero work, but she was also aware of the stakes. Come on, let’s be professional. She slipped her phone back in her belt-pouch, and touched the radio hidden in the fake chocker she wore at her neck:
“Quantum here, I’m responding. Location and description of the perp?”
Flash! She teleported in the Rishi neighborhood. She didn’t know the place well, but the HUD in her visor displayed the directions to help her get as close as possible from her goal. There was a brief crackle as the radio reconnected, and the dispatcher quickly answered:
“Copy that. The villain is on Hitoro’s street, near the supermarket. Looks like a domestic dispute going out of hand.”
Flash! Toki reappeared in the air, right above the supermarket, and quickly scanned the area while in free-fall. There, there was a guy shouting at a cowering woman, a small child hiding behind her. Right next to them, a car’s alarm was blaring, the vehicle toppled over as if tossed away by the villain in a fit of anger. Yep, strength Quirk alright. A few curious people were already slowing down, some of them stopping on the sidewalk to film with their phones. Better to end this quickly before a crowd assembled: it could turn really nasty.
Toki warped right next to the shouting guy. She could barely hear him with the blaring alarm, but he was shouting something about the woman cheating on him and the kid not being his? Yikes.
Well, that wouldn’t do. She grabbed him by the shoulder and, as he rounded on her with a snarl, warped them both in a nearly-empty parking lot five kilometers away. No screaming alarm here, and more importantly, the targets of his anger were now out of reach.
“Let’s calm down a little, shall we?” she smiled.
“Stay the fuck out of this!” growled the man, slapping her hand away.
“Can’t do. It comes with the license. Listen, if you are mad that’s fine, but if you start yelling at people and being aggressive, I’m going to have to arrest you. You seem like an upstanding citizen! So, why don’t we take a big breath, and start over?”
If friendliness didn’t work, casual arrogance with a dash of joking flamboyance were always good ways to defuse a fight. It made the other guy feel a little ridiculous. Being cocky helped reassure people around, too: why would they be scared if the hero was so confident?
For a second it almost worked. The man breathed, looking thunderous but as still as a statue. Then he exploded with a roar, trying to punch Toki so suddenly she barely had time to doge. She actually felt his fist graze her cheek.
“SHUT UP!”
“Alright, so negotiations are over I guess,” Toki muttered, teleporting three meters away to avoid another punch.
With a roar, the man launched himself after her. His arms muscles seemed bigger, and when he leaped at her, his feet lefts cracks in the concrete. Not just a strength Quirk, Toki thought, dodging another hit. Strength didn’t augment mass. So what was happening? Mass augmentation? Muscle augmentation, maybe? Yes, probably! When he took another swing at her, Toki noticed the bulging veins on his neck and his arms, and the seams of his shirt ripped when he armed his shoulder to try and hit her again. The cloth was torn to shreds. Either that guy’s shirt had suddenly shrunk or he was getting bigger. Not enough to be noticeable, but having shoulders two inches wider could make a lot of difference in term of strength. His next hit missed Toki, again, but it cracked down the ground upon impact.
She dodged again, then again, feeling like she was playing a deadly game of whack-a-mole. This guy was hella fast.
He bellowed a second time, the muscles on his neck standing more prominently, the rest of his shirt ripping again at his waist. Had he gotten taller?! Even his face was apparently deformed by his anger, with thick maxillary muscles that gave him a jaw like an orc. Oh yeah, his Quirk was almost certainly muscle augmentation. So that guy had to have a limit. Maybe how much his bones could support? No, maybe his bones strengthened with his muscles. Then it was a matter of general mass, until he got too heavy to move even with reinforced muscles? Or maybe something else… and maybe she should focus on the guy who was ripping out a streetlamp to toss it at her face instead of trying to analyze his Quirk!
Toki ducked another swing, this time using Warp-Space to get away, before deciding this little chase had lasted long enough. Time to counter-attack.
She jumped as if to punch him, warping a ball of air from her left hand to her right, compressing it in the process. The compressed air exploded between her fist and the face of her enemy, stronger than any punch she could do on her own.
BANG!
Both of them were thrown in opposite directions by the uncontrolled explosion. Toki landed on her feet. The other guy was thrown straight into a car, denting it upon impact: but he got back up, growling. A normal person would have been knocked out. Toki steeled herself. She needed to strike with more strength.
Another Warp-Blast, a punch, a kick: she managed to make him step back a few feet, and she was on him in a slip-second, grabbing a taser in her belt-pouch… but he batted her away with a wide swing of his arm, hitting a car and flipping it without pausing.
He was now over ten feet tall. Jesus Christ, it was impressive. He could take a gigantic blast without suffering any damage, apparently. But he was much slower than before. Something to consider. He was probably getting tired. Quirk usually had drawbacks. Something that augmented his body to this insane degree had to tire him out pretty fast.
He attacked again, and this time, flash! She ducked under his punch tried to touch his arm, imagining a band of space along her fingers and warping with it. It wouldn’t damage him to badly but it would be like ripping a band of flesh, it would hurt him, slow him down…!
But it failed. Shit, she could warp part of stuff but only if she focused, not in a middle of fight.
He grabbed her and she managed to slip from his grip by teleporting away, but not without having the breath knocked out of her. Damn, he was strong! If she hadn’t jumped away, he would have crushed her ribs. She almost tripped in her landing, and the man launched himself at her again, even bigger than before, face twisted by anger…
Toki snarled. In a split second she imagined a huge, elongated bubble of space above her head, taller than a truck, taller than the nearest building: a heartbeat, and this towering bubble of air, this incredible amount of space and mass filled with billions of atoms, was suddenly warped in a marble-sized space in front of her outstretched hand, right as the villains was reaching her.
BANG!!
This time the villain went flying several meters back, and the impact was strong enough to crack the pavement. He stayed encased here, visibly stunned. His budging muscles started deflating, slowly, like pieced balloons.
Toki had teleported just as Warp-Space exploded, so she had avoided the same fate, but her wrist throbbed with pain. Yeah, human joints weren’t supposed to handle this kind of pressure. She winced, but didn’t move for her perch on top of a truck, waiting to see if the villain was going to start fighting again. But he didn’t. Once it was clear the guy was done for the day, she let out a tiny sigh of relief. Then she checked the time in the corner of her HUD.
Two minutes and thirteen seconds. Still too slow. She scowled, and switched on her radio.
“Quantum here. Villain forcibly calmed down. Requesting transport at the parking lot near the fifteenth highway. He’s currently kind of… embedded in the ground.”
“Copy that. Police is five minutes away.”
“Five minutes?” Toki repeated, checking the time in the corner of her HUD. “That’s an eternity. I have to go back on patrol. You know what, I’ll bring the guy to the precinct myself. I’ll be there in one minute and twenty second, can you give them a head’s up so they can clear the landing pad and prep a cell? Thanks.”
“For the last time, the waiting room is not a landing pad. But will do. Thanks for your assistance, Quantum. Over.”
Toki smirked and muted her radio before going to check on her poor victim. She cuffed him, chattering good-naturedly all the while to keep distract him from the fact that she was patting him down, and checking his eyes for any sign of a contusion. She found none. The guy probably had a skull like titanium. She took the time to explain to him what was going to happen (which boiled down to: get to the police station), more to let the dispatcher time to warn the police than by courtesy. Then she warped in the police station’s waiting room, cheerfully passing custody of the villain to the nearest guy in uniform. She teleported back on her patrol route, then checked the time again. Right on schedule.
Damn, she had forgotten to check if there were any camera near the fight. She didn’t use her Warp-Blast often, but when she did, she always faced a barrage of questions about her Quirk during the following days. From afar, it looked like explosions or super-powered punches, so of course it didn’t align with people’s idea of a warp Quirk.
Oh well. She would dodge questions, as usual. It wasn’t like people could find answer anyway. They couldn’t even try to find her power’s name in a database… because the HPSC didn’t track what Quirks heroes had. That was one of the things that Toki wholeheartedly approved. They couldn’t guarantee the security of that kind of database, so they didn’t try to get it. Give them credit, they took the private identities of heroes very seriously! The public Quirk registry was notoriously insecure and if someone was able to cross reference the two databases they could dox every hero in the country. The Commission didn’t even ask at the exams because there could be recording equipment there. Oh, some heroes noted their power on their License, other talked about it freely on TV: but underground heroes or simply people who wanted to keep an edge preferred to keep their Quirk a secret.
Like All Might, for example. He’d been a hero for, what, thirty-five years now? And he had never once disclosed what his Quirk was. Not a peep about its name, or even what it did. He only laughed or evaded the question if someone asked about it. Of course, people were curious: but the specifics of any hero’s Quirk were protected by the Heroic Identity Protection Act, just like their civilian names.
It allowed Toki to gracefully dodge any question about her Quirk, too. She never gave anything more precise than ‘I have a warp Quirk’. She also liked to misdirect, implying that the light that came with her warping was its source, and not a side-effect. Online, fans had even nicknamed her Quirk ‘Lightburst. There were enough videos of Toki to show evidence of her scintillation each time she used her power.
Still, Toki she tried to avoid cameras as much as she could. If she could keep a few aces up her sleeves for when she would fight a real, dangerous villains (like, the League or a Noumu) she would feel a little more confident.
Anyway. It was life as usual.
She finished patrol and came back to Icarus to do some paperwork. She also worked on her online classes. The only new thing was that… she also prepared for spending the next day (Saturday) in Musutafu, training Melissa and Hitoshi.
She had offered Keigo to bring him and meet them. He hadn’t been opposed, per see, but still… kind of strangely reluctant. Especially about the Shinsō family. He had told her it was a little soon, and Toki hadn’t pushed. She was a bit nervous, too. It was kind of a ‘meet the parents’ situation, except that the Shinsō weren’t her parents, not really, she was just projecting an absurd amount of filial affection on their family, and they were all aware of that, which was also very embarrassing. The point being: she was nervous. And Keigo was, too, probably, which was enough make her weirdly apprehensive, like some kind of feedback loop.
Both Keigo and the Shinsō family were very important to her. It was frightening to think that maybe they wouldn’t get along, and exhilarating to think that maybe they would… and at the same, there was a strange dissonance into introducing them. Keigo, Hawks, was part of Quantum’s life; while the Shinsō had been part of Hoshizora. They both knew Toki, but in two very different contexts.
Not that it was bad. Those two extremes were part of her. She was the reckless warper but also the nerdy student. Dividing those two parts of her in ‘Quantum’ and ‘Hoshizora’ was only helpful in maintaining a mask to hide her identity from the public: Toki didn’t really create a divide in two fundamental parts of her personality.
(The ‘mask’ thing was really working well to hide her civiliansona, though. Quantum was supposedly the mature one in their duo, and with a few half-truths, it had helped her create a veritable role to hide behind. She liked to misdirect with a few indirect statements. For example, saying that she was older than Hawks and that they had picked their heroes names when she had been eight and Hawks six, had led the public to believe that Quantum was actually older than Hawks by two years. Two separate truths, taken out of context to create a credible lie. It was pretty clever.)
Anyway. She was finishing her little side-project (basically finding a suitable training ground, and texting Melissa and Hitoshi the location) when Keigo and Kameko came in, deep in conversation. When he saw her, Keigo brightened:
“Quantum! Tell her I’m right!”
“He’s right,” Toki obediently said, smirking.
“Oh, of course you would take his side,” Kameko sniffed, looking like a haughty cat.
“Well, yes. But also, what are you right about, Hawks?”
He sauntered to her desk and sat on it, wings fluttering in excitement. He smelled like sweat, wind, and rain. He was probably just coming back from patrol.
“Heroic team-up! Did you see the new tweets?”
She really needed to get a Twitter. With a muffled imprecation, Toki grabbed her phone. On Tumblr, several people were reblogging screenshots of a long threat of tweets, and Toki scrolled down to find some semblance of chronological order. Then she gave up, downloaded Twitter on her phone to create an account, and asked her boyfriend:
“What happened?”
“Long story short? Best Jeanist announced he was teaming up with Gang Orca. Since they’re both high-ranked, it’s attracted attention to the team-up trend the HPSC is pushing, and Endeavor tweeted that he was in support of team-up!”
There were so many things wrong with that sentence.
“Endeavor tweets?” Toki repeated. “He’s a boomer! Also: he’s in favor of team-up? Mister McGrumpy Lonely Wolf, as sociable as a lump of charcoal?”
“He’s a very hot charcoal briquette, I’ll have you know.”
“That doesn’t make up for his whole personality!”
Keigo shrugged, conceding the point but unconcerned. Of course he wasn’t: he liked Endeavor’s brutal brand of honesty. And his hot body, too. Toki didn’t see the appeal, there was way too much beef on that man, but hey, everyone has their tastes.
“Best Jeanist is ranked sixth, and Gang Orca is ranked eleven,” Kameko interjected, sitting on the couch. “Until them, most team-up has happened with lower-ranked heroes, so it mostly flew under the radar. It’s been what, six months since the Commission started pushing for heroes to team-up? The idea took off, but not enough to make waves. Mostly the appeal laid in the popularity bonuses and the paychecks, and neither of those are extraordinarily. But it publicized the idea enough to interest the really popular heroes… and now we can finally see results, with Top Heroes partnering up. Although Endeavor’s endorsement is unexpected.”
“Not that much,” Keigo chirped in. “He works very often with the police, emergency dispatchers, and the firefighting department: that’s how he has the biggest number of cases closed.”
Yeah, basically Endeavor worked with anyone who wasn’t the Hero Public Safety Commission. Then Toki realized that, since the HPSC has been using All Might as their poster boy, maybe there was a reason why Endeavor so disdainful. More than a question of resources, it was maybe a question of not wanting to work with people who so clearly worshiped his rival.
“He doesn’t do team-up with others heroes, though,” Toki pointed out.
“Actually, he does!” countered Keigo. “But only for one mission at a time, so no real partnership. And he only does it with underground heroes.”
Toki’s eyebrows rose. Wait a minute… Oooh, clever. Underground heroes weren’t ranked in popularity pools. They took credit for arrests and cases solved only in their paperwork to calculate their salary. For the press, their arrests were credited either to their agency (if they had one) or the police… or, if their teamed up, with the limelight hero of the team.
So Endeavor bolstered his stats by taking solo credit for shared work. Toki scowled. Not cool, man. Oh, well, from what she knew of canon-Endeavor, he hated taking underserved credit (like what had happened with Stain!), so he probably pulled his weight. Still, that was an underhanded method to raise his stats.
“Well I say that Endeavor isn’t really in favor of team-up with limelight heroes,” argued Kameko. “He works well with others, sure, but he hates it. He’s only approving the idea of hero team-up to show up All Might.”
Keigo stood up, puffing up his wings:
“And I say he’s genuine. He’s a professional, he’s smart, he can see which direction the wind is blowing: he approves team-up because it’s logical. Not to cozy-up with the Commission or to piss off All Might.” Keigo paused, then amended: “Although taking the opposing stance to All Might’s may play a little part, alright.”
Since learning of All Might’s weakness, nearly a year ago, the Commission had started taking things in hand. And for that, they had used Icarus’ popularity. They hadn’t acted officially, but the media’s approval and the multiple references to how efficient their teamwork was certainly hadn’t fallen from the sky. The idea of heroic partnership had slowly caught on with the public… and after a few months of the media gushing about how great Quantum and Hawks worked together, the Commission had made their move. First by announcing that ‘to reflect reality’, heroes who teamed-up could raise each’s others popularity pools. Then, after a few months, there was a bonus check to covert the ‘travel expenses’ of heroes who partnered up, even if they were in the same city.
It wasn’t flagrant yet. But the Commission was slowly trying to douse the burning competition that pitted heroes against each other. They encouraged teamwork, cohesion, support. The shift wasn’t really noticeable, but it was happening. Keigo and Toki teamed up with other heroes regularly, for example. More and more heroes were learning how to march together and merge their patrols instead of butting heads for public attention. And now that Top Heroes were openly in favor of this new system, it could really take off...
… Or come crashing down if the revered Symbol of Peace spoke up.
“All Might doesn’t do team-up,” Toki frowned. “He’s famous for it. He only ever had one sidekick ever, even! Is he going to spit on this idea in social media?”
That would be a catastrophe. But Kameko grinned:
“I wouldn’t worry about that. He’s never opposed the HPSC’s policies before. Besides, the President has probably planned for it and briefed him. Also, do you think he manage his social media himself? It’s his Commission’s liaison who has the Twitter password.”
Toki grinned, feeling weirdly giddy. In canon, she was sure of it, that hadn’t happened. Team-up had only been popularized when heroes had been scared by the Noumu. Hell, the trend had started with Hawks and Endeavor, after All Might’s retirement! But now, it was starting much, much earlier… which meant that maybe it would to create a stable structure that would stay in place even after the Symbol of Peace would be gone.
All that thanks to Toki’s propensity to run her mouth, Sachiko’s comparative charts, and the President’s reactivity. Something was finally done. Something good was finally done, because Toki had acted. Wasn’t it the core of heroism?
“Hey, hey, hey,” grinned Keigo, leaning in her personal space until his face almost touched hers. “Do you think we could swing by Musutafu to try and team-up with Endeavor?”
Toki made a face, swallowing back laughter:
“… Let’s start by retweeting him. Meeting him in person can wait.”
“Killjoy!”
oOoOoOo
This week-end, Toki went to Musutafu.
She had asked both Melissa and Hitoshi if they would be okay to meet, and they had both accepted. So Toki wasn’t surprised to teleport in the Shinsō’s appartement to see Melissa enthusiastically showing her support items to a jaw-slacked Hitoshi. Toki had to admit, it was kind of impressive. A jet-pack that doubled as rocket-launcher, propulsion boots with hidden weapons, bracers with grappling hooks, and of course the famous shield.
Everything was pink or white. It looked adorably girly.
“Does the shield bounce?” Toki couldn’t help but ask, eyes brilliant.
Melissa grinned, probably remembering their old joke:
“Yep! It wasn’t easy to find a material to do so. Metal doesn’t normally bounce, you know. I had to use two different alloy and ceramic plating to get something as close as possible to Captain America’s shield. It won’t bend, it won’t melt, it won’t break, and it’s lighter than a hunk of metal. It’s probably the most expensive thing in my equipment. The rest, I can easily fix, but this… Not so much.”
Hitoshi shifted from one foot to the other, probably feeling underdressed. Melissa wore a sport shirt, tight and sleek, in a bright pink color that matched her support items, and had brand new sport leggings. Hitoshi was wearing baggy sport pants and a ratty t-shirt, all in black. Although Toki noted with a delighted grin that he was wearing red Hawks-themed sneakers.
“I was thinking of starting with some parkour,” Toki said, vaguely gesturing at her own get-up with running shoes, a cropped sweater, and comfortable pants. “Are you up for it?”
“Sure!” the kids both chorused, looking delighted.
“Where, exactly?” asked Mihoko-san, poking her head in the living room. “And do you need adult supervision?”
“I’m an adult, Mihoko-san,” Toki reminded her with a grin. “Besides, I’m a hero, they’re safe with me. There’s an empty area that looks good, I’ll text you the address, but you can come if you want to.”
Mihoko looked at her for a second, then smiled.
“I trust you. Just bring them back in two hours and half, starting now. And be careful!”
Toki gave her a two-fingered salute: “Scout’s honor.”
Then she made Hitoshi and Melissa put on coats, and warped them to the place she had noticed… or well, as close as she could get with her memories of the place. The rest of the road, they did in the air, with Hitoshi on her back and Melissa in her arms. A series of quick jumps mid-air, then a soft landing on the ground, and they were here.
Both kids were hyped-up by their short flight. Well, if you could call that fly. Toki warped high, started falling, found the place she was looking for from her vantage point, and teleported at the same altitude in that direction, again and again, until she was close enough for her final jump to the ground.
Once there, they started stretching, then Toki led them to a series of obstacle. A succession of short walls to divide gardens, a façade to climb, and so on. She had never played the part of the teacher before, so she felt a little nervous. However, she quickly got into the task at hand. It wasn’t very difficult, since her students had some experience. Hitoshi hadn’t done much parkour, but he was agile, athletic, and had an excellent balance. Melissa had more experience, clearly, but still Toki found points that needed some work, like how she tried to muscle her way through obstacle instead of relying on her flexibility.
Because parkour was such a ridiculously male dominated sport, the "correct technique" for a lot of movements played to a male body’s strengths: upper body strength, higher center of gravity, etc. But the way Toki had learned was different, because Hayasa-sensei had been good teacher who did his research. So Toki had learned to demolish any obstacle course by moving in ways that make sense for her body. She didn’t muscle her way up over a wall, she just threw a leg up over it. She didn’t use upper body strength to balance and jump from one grip to another, she used her hips to swing, and so on. It required more flexibility and less core strength, even if she had that in spades.
Anyway. They played around for an hour at least, jumping, climbing, challenging each other to reach such or such point, running around exploring the place, sliding down stairway ramps, and even tumbling down balconies in a fashion that would have made Mihoko-san have a heart attack. Fortunately Toki was here, warping here and there to catch them every time a foot slipped, every time a grip failed, every time they tripped or toppled.
In the end, they took a break because the two kids simply couldn’t keep up with Toki. After all, she was a hero in top-shape, and they were… teenagers. Melissa was fifteen, Hitoshi twelve. They were totally within their right to collapse like beached fishes, exhausted.
“Don’t fall over like that, stretch or you’ll get cramps!” she still warned them with amusement.
With a groan, they both obeyed. Toki felt a rush of pride. Hey, being a teacher was kind of fun, actually.
“Can’t feel my hands,” wheezed Hitoshi.
“Lucky you,” groaned Melissa. “I can feel everything and it hurts.”
Toki grinned at them: “And that was light training! Come on. On a scale from one to ten, how much do you want to kill me right now?”
“… I’m hovering somewhere in the high thirties.”
Toki laughed, and sat cross-legged on a bench. It was sunny, but they were still in January, so now that they weren’t moving around, she could really feel the cold. She shivered, and wiped out her phone to look at what she had marked down for this training session. Climbing, check; agility, check; balance, check; endurance… needed work, but check. Oh, there it was…
“So!” she exclaimed brightly. “Now, let’s talk weapons! I know Melissa is armed, but what about you Hitoshi? What would you pick if you had a choice?”
Hitoshi brightened: “What, like a katana?”
“What is up with kids these days?” Toki muttered. “Not, not like a katana, Jesus. Something less deadly and more versatile. Like how Sherazade has her baton, or Ariel his collapsible staff, or Eraserhead his capture-scarf. Something that can kick ass when you need to get physical.”
Hitoshi didn’t know about Ariel or Eraserhead. What a shame! Toki gleefully opened phone to show him some pictures. Both were underground heroes, so there wasn’t much online. But being a hero herself, Toki had access to the HPSC’s network, and it had taken very little effort to download on her phone the hero license of a few underground heroes with interesting methods. Of course, in canon, Hitoshi was mainly inspired by Eraserhead… but that didn’t mean that Toki couldn’t encourage him to show interest into her favorites undergrounds heroes.
Ariel was an incredible acrobat. And Sherazade was both ruthlessly brutal and very graceful. Also, Arial had a fox-themed outfit and Sherazade worse a sunset-colored puffy skirt that made her look like a cheerleader. They weren’t a lot of heroes who wore bright orange costumes, and it played no small part in Toki’s appreciation of those two.
What? It was one of her favorite colors!
And yeah, Hitoshi liked Eraserhead’s fighting style (go figures: a Quirk that erased people’s powers could easily be called villainous, so of course Hitoshi would feel kindship with him). But he also said that he looked like a hobo and that having his weapon as a scarf looked stupid. Like a ‘half-dressed mummy’ were his exact words. Toki hoped she could meet Eraserhead one day just to repeat that to his face.
Also, the thirty-seconds footage and the badly angled identity photo she had downloaded from the HPSC were grainy and bad quality, but still. Eraserhead looked almost familiar. She had probably managed to pass him on the streets or something… and to not recognized him, because apparently she was really bad at identifying canon-characters. Fuck her life.
Anyway. It devolved in a passioned argumentation to try and pick a weapon that Hitoshi deemed cool enough, with Melissa pitching her two cents here and then. It was surprisingly lighthearted and funny.
They talked about batons and staff and other sticks to beat up people with. They looked nunchakus online and had a good laugh at videos of eager teenagers trying to play ninja and hitting themselves in the face. Then Hitoshi tried to look up whips and other rope-like weapons, and Toki almost tackled him to get the phone before the search revealed Midnight in all of her R-rated glory.
Finally Hitoshi decided he liked the capture-weapon better. But using it as a scarf was stupid, so Melissa came up with the idea to have two capture weapons, wrapped around his arms from wrist to elbow like compression bandages. It would look cool, more like a badass fighter wrapping his arms for protection than like a comatose mummy forgetting to dress up in the morning.
(Toki also thought it would look a little like Rock Lee’s bandages in Naruto, and the visual was so funny that the idea had her immediate approval. Now, if she could convince Hitoshi to dress in green…)
“Eraserhead is the only one who use that,” she frowned, looking at the (very sparse) data she had on the underground hero. “It’s not verry common. I don’t know if I can get you a training weapon before you join Yūei.”
“Oh that’s not a problem!” Melissa exclaimed brightly. “I can probably make one!”
“Really?” Hitoshi asked, hesitant.
“Really. My uncle had a workshop installed in his house when he learned I was coming, and well… he’s not supportive of my dream of being a hero, but he’s one-hundred percent on board with me making support equipment.”
“Your uncle gave you a workshop?” repeated Hitoshi.
“He has money,” Melissa shrugged. “It doesn’t make up for the rest, but hey, I’m not going to said no to a workshop just to spit him.”
Hitoshi rose an eyebrow. “Rich girl.”
Melissa stuck her tongue at him. Very mature. Toki tossed a pebble at them, bringing back their attention on her, then clapped her hands.
“Melissa, let’s test your support items, okay? We’re cooled down enough, and I don’t know about you, but I’m freezing.”
Melissa had brough all of her stuff in a gigantic backpack. First were the boots. Technically they were enough to make her fly, but standing on two flying pieces of footwear was a delicate balancing act. The jet-pack helped give her stability and direction. Melissa demonstrated by flying from one point to another, then by doing spins and loops with great agility. Toki was impressed. Melissa had clearly practiced a lot.
The tricky part came when it was time to add weapons to her flying system. Oh, Melissa could aim and shoot her little rockets with reasonable accuracy. Most of them were flashbang or deafening grenades anyway, so she didn’t have to be super-precise. She was better with the shield. It was fixed to her arm-guard with a magnetic lock until she tossed it, at which point it disengaged and could be thrown. She had also trained a lot. True to her words, Melissa had made the shield bouncy, and launching it in an enclosed space made for a deadly game of dodge-the-metal-frisbee.
Flying was complicated. Using grappling hooks or rockets was complicated. And controlling a metal frisbee weighting nearly five kilos was complicated. Melissa had more or less mastered theses skills individually, but together… let’s just say she ended up ass over kettle more than once, and that was the best case scenario. Toki had to jump in action several time to intercept the shield before it caved in her ribs or skull after a clumsy throw.
When they went back to the Shinsō, they were all exhausted, and Hitoshi had gleefully filmed the more embarrassing of Melissa’s falls. It would make for an educational souvenir, at least.
They hung out for a while at the Shinsō, debriefing and eating Mihoko’s cookies. Then Melissa packed her stuff and went back home. Soon enough, Toki had to do the same. She wasn’t scheduled for patrol later this evening and wanted to take a shower before that. They said goodbye, promised to see each other again next week… and just like that, Toki had added ‘hero training’ to her routine.
She was so damn proud.
Obviously she bragged about it to everyone she knew. Well, she didn’t name anyone, or say anything about their Quirk (or lack of thereof) besides that they were non-physical… but when asked about her week-end, she proudly announced she had taken on two students and had been training them. On a non-official capacity, obviously, although she totally could made them her students as soon as they joined a hero course in high-school.
Yeah, she had her teaching license, now! It had come in the mail earlier that week. Another thing she could brag about. Not all heroes had one. Sure, a lot of them did, but not all. For snooping around the HPSC’s database, Toki knew that All Might didn’t.
Anyway. Days passed, and Toki got used to this new rhythm. Patrol, fight, training, paperwork. Then fundraisers, interviews, photoshoots, some publicity spots. Being Quantum, then being Hoshizora. Going to class, studying. Going to Musutafu, training, laughing, planning. Preparing.
Icarus Agency recruited another sidekick, a young woman with a telepathy Quirk, named Psyren. She could hear people’s thoughts: the more intense their emotions were and the stronger their thoughts were broadcasted. It made for a great mugging/accidents/crimes-detector, because she could pinpoint adrenaline spikes across almost the whole city. Her main drawback was that prolonged Quirk-use gave her migraines.
Telepaths were a special brand of heroes. Not everyone was comfortable with them. Especially when they were passive receptors like Psyren. When she activated her Quirk, she couldn’t block one specific person to guarantee their privacy. So of course people were… cautious, around her. Toki tried to not be, but hey, having someone hear your thoughts was unsettling. Toki couldn’t control her knee-jerk reaction. Keigo was the same. What they could do, however, was to control was their actions. So without even having to talk about it, they were both polite, open, and made sure to never show any distrust. Maybe Psyren could hear that sometimes Quantum and Hawks weren’t as comfortable as they seemed, but the people around them would only see trust… and they would take their cues from their bosses.
The team-up trend continued among heroes, which was a good thing. All Might’s social media posted a few platitudes along the lines of ‘congrats for your team-up’ and nothing more, but at least it didn’t oppose the HPSC’s policy. And the Symbol of Peace was giving less and less interviews those days, so there wasn’t really an opportunity for him to screw up.
Endeavor didn’t come back on his word and stayed supportive of heroic team-up, which was a surprise. But apparently he only accepted team-up from people who could keep up with him, and that was pretty rare. Huge police forces with an underground hero as support: alright, that qualified, maybe. But a single hero? That was rarer. He did patrol occasionally with Best Jeanist, though, or some of his ex-sidekicks (like Inferno, in Osaka): so it must count for something.
Keigo was almost bouncing around in excitement, because he wanted to be able to keep up so badly. Hawks and Quantum were still only in the Top Twenty… but if they got close enough to the top, Toki had no doubt that Keigo would try to offer a team-up to Endeavor.
Or maybe just show up in Musutafu and bother him until he was satisfied. Both were equally possible.
Anyway. After some trials and errors, Melissa made a capture weapon for Hitoshi. It wasn’t white like Aizawa’s, but pale grey, almost silvery. The cloth was a bit narrower, probably taking in account Hitoshi’s size. Their next lessons were centered around how to use the damn thing. Toki had no idea how to do it. She was almost tempted to hunt down Aizawa and bring him here to have him explain. But he would probably tell her to shove it, so… they had to make do. Fortunately, between Melissa’s resourcefulness and Hitoshi pure pig-headed determination, they managed to make some progress, day after day. Hitoshi had taken to wear the capture weapon on him at all time beneath his sweater’s sleeves, until it become second nature.
After a while, Melissa also gave Hitoshi the Discord server’s address. She asked Toki’s permission’s first, which was an oddly touching gesture (Toki didn’t own this place), but the point was: Hitoshi had joined the Discord.
And Toki felt… a little envious.
She had missed her old friends. Sure, after coming out as a hero, Keigo and her had felt it was better to create some distance…. But enough time had passed, right? It had been something like seven months. That was basically a lifetime on the internet. So she decided she didn’t have to deprive herself of friendship and fun conversations anymore. She created a new account, and went back to her old friends under a new name.
________________
- Welcome! Antares has joined the chatroom! -
> Moxie: oh hey!!!! Hello!!!
> PinkIsPunkRock: welcome!
> PikaPika: Damn this place has been so quiet for nearly a year, and now we get 3 new members in less than a month
> EndeavorSucks: ‘a year’ it’s been six months dude
> Megamind: yo
< Antares: Thank you everyone for your welcome
< Antares: also to come totally clean I’m the one who gave the link to Moxie
< Antares: … and I also have a confession to make
> Megamind: damn already?
> PinkIsPunkRock: HOLY SHIT
> NotOnFire: what?
- Antares has changed their username to DefinitelyQuantum -
< DefinitelyQuantum: hi guys!
< DefinitelyQuantum: sorry for leaving. Things have been a little crazy.
< DefinitelyQuantum: but I’m back, if you’d still have me
> PinkIsPunkRock: I FUCKING KNEW IT
> PinkIsPunkRock: STARS!
> PikaPika: holy crap it’s her!
> EndeavorSucks: welcome back!!!
> NotOnFire: wow it’s so surreal! welcome back!
> PinkIsPunkRock: wait, don’t frighten the new guys
< DefinitelyQuantum: oh that’s okay, they both know
< DefinitelyQuantum: I’m the one who gave them the link after all ( ͡ᵔ ₒ ͡ᵔ)
< DefinitelyQuantum: They’re my beloved little fledglings
> PikaPika: what
> NotOnFire: what
> Megamind: oh we’re fledglings now?
> Moxie: I like it!
> EndeavorSucks: agaksgezazt it’s hilarious, you have ducklings!
> PinkIsPunkRock: I have sooo many questions. where is your chicken boy? how is it to be a hero? how is it to be a hero especially since I know you have a brain and can criticize hero society? and also: I am going to kill you for leaving us hanging for SEVEN MONTHS. but I may spare you if you apologize because i love you.
< DefinitelyQuantum: … sorry?
> PinkIsPunkRock: i’ll take it. but you’re on thin ice.
- DefinitelyQuantum has changed her username to Antares -
< Antares: it’s better to make a clear distinction ^^’ Also for those who don’t know Antares is the name of a star! I’m keeping my thematic.
< Antares: I won’t be around often because… well. I have a very, very busy schedule, with my job and all that
< Antares: but I’ll be back, I promise
> EndeavorSucks: you better!
> NotOnFire: hey quick question can I have your autograph
> PikaPika: have you no shame?
> NotOnFire: no
> NotOnFire: but I haven’t got an autograph either
> Moxie: xDDDDDDDD
> PinkIsPunkRock: you know we should really plan an IRL meeting, it would be crazy
< Antares: good idea. and *NotOnFire I’ll give you my autograph the day we met in person, how’s that?
________________
It was nice to be back. Toki had six months of gossip to catch up, and the rest of the chat gladly filled her in.
ThisIsFluffy had left the Discord about three months ago. It had been a gradual process. She was too absorbed by her job, her boyfriends, others passions, others friends. She had almost-left several times before, so no one was actually surprised. ThisIsPunkRock had a new girlfriend, girl a little younger than her, who loved theater and was studying to be a teacher. It was a secret, though, because the girl wasn’t out and was scared of her family’s reaction. PikaPika was still a bartender. EndeavorSucks had hooked up with NotOnFire, it hadn’t worked out, and they were still friends. NotOnFire had lost his part-time job, was broke, and had to move back with his parents.
And Toki couldn’t stop smiling while reading the flow of message on her phone, because… well, those people had been such an important part of her life, for so long. Getting back to them, getting back without lying…
… it felt a little like coming home.
oOoOoOo
In February, Melissa was getting marginally better with her support items. She was also happier, which was just as important. Her classmates were still dicks, and her teachers not much better, but… she had friends now. She had Toki, she had Hitoshi, she had the Discord server.
She still hadn’t made up with her uncle. All Might. Damn, it was still hard to reconcile the two concepts. All Might, the legend, the hero who smiled and pretended to be unshakable… and Melissa’s uncle, the inured guy in denial who spent his time telling his niece that she was too fragile for the real world.
Well. He didn’t tell her that, or at least not like that. But yeah, he told her she had no hope of being a hero, that she should be realistic, and really, it was for her own good. Being patronized was already annoying, but being served the same lecture, again and again, for months… no wonder Melissa was mad. But when she raised her voice in protest, her uncle acted bewildered and wounded, as if she had no reason to be angry with him.
Ugh. Family. Sometimes you just wanted to high-five them in the face. With a folding chair, preferably.
So Melissa and her uncle were at odds, and staying that wasn’t going to change anytime soon because there was no way in hell Melissa was giving up heroism. And All Might couldn’t do anything to stop her. He didn’t even dare to bring her father in the mix. Maybe it was for the best, considering that David Shields knew of his daughter’s dream and supported her, because he would have torn All Might a new one for dismissing his baby like that!
Anyway, yeah, All Might couldn’t stop her. After all, Melissa knew his secret. Privately, Toki thought that yeah, it was hard to make someone stay in line when that they held a massive leverage against you. Would Melissa dare to use it? Probably not. But maybe All Might didn’t want to test that theory. It was scary enough to be forced to share a huge secret with your child, or close enough: but if in addition to that you were in serious disagreement with said child, and always at each other’s throats because of it… well. Talk about an awkward situation. All Might was probably feeling trapped.
Not that Toki was empathizing with him or anything. It was his own fault for being an idiot! But yeah, she could imagine how tense the atmosphere was in All Might’s home. It was probably worse now. Instead of being on edge and looking for a fight, Melissa was just giving him the cold shoulder. It made reconciliation even more difficult to try… if All Might even wanted to try. He hadn’t changed his stance on Quirklessness and heroism. Asshole.
Anyway. Melissa was getting better. Hitoshi, too. He still found himself tangled with his capture weapons more often than not, and trying to imitate Spiderman’s moves hadn’t ended well (introducing him to Marvel may not have been Toki’s brightest idea)… but both teenagers were still better than at the beginning. So. Toki didn’t really have any complain.
She didn’t really have any complain in general actually. Life was good. She had reconnected with her Discord friends! Icarus Agency was successful! Her classes were interesting! Her sidekicks were doing a great job! Keigo and her had fun patrolling, fighting, and working together! They were happy. Toki was happy. Incredible, wasn’t it?
Of course it was too nice to last. So when Toki’s phone rang one afternoon, displaying the name “Disney Step-Mother” (and yes, that was Genmei-san’s name in her phone: so sue her, Toki was hilarious)… Well, she wasn’t as surprised as she could have been.
Guess that the President had to enlist the little prodigies’ help for her fucked-up mission after all.
“Hello,” Toki announced with false cheer as she picked up. “You have reached the automated voicemail of Quantum. Please leave a message after the beep!”
“I sign your paychecks,” Genmei-san answered dryly.
“One day it’ll work,” Toki sighed. “So, are you calling to ask about my day or is it to give me a S-ranked mission?”
“I can do both. It’s called multitasking.”
Wow, someone had woken up on the wrong side of the bed this morning. Toki eyed her phone, a little distrustful.
She was on patrol with Hawks, and jumped from rooftop to rooftop while he flew high in the air. They usually stayed within visual range of each other, but it wasn’t rare for one of them to stay on task while letting the other dive to the streets to save a pedestrian, catch a shoplifter, or give direction to a lost tourist. It was only when facing a villain that the both of them converged on the same target. So right now, Hawks was idly flying a few streets away, scanning the ground. Toki made a spit-second decision and taped the radio in her fake-chocker, sending a sequenced burst of static to Hawks’ earpiece. Almost a kilometer away, she saw him stiffen and change course.
“I thought we were too young for S-rank,” Quantum said neutrally.
This time Genmei-san sounded almost reluctant. “It’s not a S-rank mission. It’s not a mission, per se. Only an informal challenge, as a personal favor to me, a test of your abilities, and for the betterment of heroes society.”
“… You do realize how ominous that sound, right?”
Completely silent, Hawks landed next to her. Toki moved the phone a few centimeters away from her ear so he could hear, just as the President sighed.
“Yes, I’m aware. And as it isn’t a mission, I cannot impose you to complete this task. You have to accept it freely. But you’re the best suited to it, Quantum.”
“Because I’m the fastest hero alive?” she joked.
“No,” Genmei-san answered coldly. “Because with your Quirk, and the ways you are able to use it, you have the potential to one of the most dangerous.”
Unbiddenly Toki’s mind flashed back to her beginnings with Warp-Blast and partial teleportation, how she had thought about warping only part of people to neutralize them, about how a single blast of compressed air had pulverized a lamp like a bullet, about how deadly teleportation could be if you got creative with it.
Warping Quirks were rare but they were also pretty straightforward. You needed to be really twisted inside the head to try to think in term of atomic connections and neuronal patterns in order to trick you own brain into being able to change the way your Quirk worked.
“And why, exactly, do you need someone dangerous?”
If it had been anyone else, Toki would have thought that Genmei-san was hesitating. Maybe she was weighting her words. After all, Toki’s tone wasn’t the most inviting. She was on the defensive, and it showed. But when the President spoke, her voice was calm and level.
“I want you to fight someone.”
That sounded… pretty normal. Toki frowned:
“That’s all?”
“Not really,” the President answered grimly. “I don’t only want you to fight him: I want you to defeat him. To defeat him utterly: to make him afraid, terrified even, shaken to his core. To use your Quirk to its full potential to beat him. I want you to not just try to hurt him, but to do so. To give him the worst reality-check you can.”
Toki’s mouth fell open and eyes widened, shocked. That was brutal. And it was coming from Genmei-san, which was borderline surrealistic. The President was ruthless but she always kept her hands clean. She hated blunders or excessive violence. And now she was asking Toki to assault someone?!
What the hell?!
Toki closed her mouth then opened it again without managing to make a sound, at loss for words. But the President wasn’t done.
“The fight will happen in a closed arena, in utter secrecy, and with the best medical care close at hand. Once the fight is over, you’ll be both patched up and it will be like nothing happened. Nobody will speak of it. There will be no footage. You’ll be healed afterward, but there’s still a risk. If you are injured, it will likely be extremely severe, as your opponent won’t be pulling his punches. You won’t be killed. But you’ll have to fight to the best of your abilities, and if he does the same… it won’t be pretty. I would rather not ask this of you, Quantum. But the stakes are too high, and we’re running out of time. Unfortunately, there are few heroes who can proves to this man he’s not invincible, and even fewer fast enough to keep up with him. You happen to be the only one to be both.”
Oh gods. She wasn’t asking her to brutalize a villain. She was asking her to fight in a planned match. And to prove to someone they weren’t invincible… Oh, no.
Toki’s grip on her phone became white-knuckled. Her blood was beating too loudly in her ears. She sought Keigo’s gaze, then avoided it, because he looked shocked but there was no understanding in his face: he hadn’t guessed, he didn’t know like she did. Because she knew. She had opened her big mouth and told the President, and now the President was doing something, like she hadn’t done in canon, because in canon the Commission hadn’t known…
She closed her eyes.
“It’s not a villain, is it.”
A brief silence. “No. It’s not.”
Oh, gods and stars above. Toki really wished she’d be mistaken. When she opened her eyes, she saw Keigo’s horrified face. Ah, now he understood. And apparently, he didn’t like it any better than she did.
“What if I don’t want to?”
Just as she was saying the words, Toki knew that they were meaningless. Even if she didn’t want to, she didn’t really have a choice. She owed the HPSC too much. Sure, this fight wasn’t a real mission, but if she wanted… the President had many means to twist her hand.
“Then I’ll ask someone else, but that person won’t have your odds of success.”
Toki scowled. The President was right. Salamander wasn’t sturdy enough. Inferno was strong, but he had no long-ranged moves. Hawks was fast, but he didn’t have devastating attacks. He couldn’t cut a man in half, or launch explosions of compressed air, make someone drop fifty feet in the air with only a touch, rupture eardrums, or any of this shit.
But Toki did. Toki was the only one who did.
“Fine,” she bit out. “But you owe me big time.”
She hung up. It was rude, yeah, but after that conversation she was entitled to be rude. And she really didn’t want to let the President the opportunity to say more. Jesus, just that was more than enough.
It didn’t sink in immediately. But when it did, she had to sit down and hid her face in her hands for a second. Oh gods, what had she accepted to do?
I want you to beat someone. Not a villain. Of fucking course it had ended up like this. Toki should have seen it coming. She had even thought, half-ironical half-serious, that maybe the job would be given to Endeavor.
Because how else convince All Might he needed to step down, except by challenging him to a fight and making him lose?!
Toki hadn’t thought much about All Might as a hero these days, because she had been too busy wrapping her head around the idea that he was an uncle. Unfortunately, All Might was still a hero. The Number One Hero, actually. The Symbol of Peace, the one who carried society on his back, and the one who was going to falter sooner or later, and let everyone down. The one who was injured, and whose injuries weren’t a personal matter because his health was the stuff of national security. And now that the President was aware, well… the HPSC had to do something. But hey, that wasn’t part of Toki’s job: or so she thought. She had relayed the info to the President, now it was up to her to act, right?
But of course going against All Might was no easy task. Maybe the President had tried for a calm conversation. Or maybe financial repercussions. The media had certainly done its part, speaking of ‘new generation of heroes taking the torch’ and so on. But to avoid panic, the President couldn’t force All Might to retire, like the HPSC would do with another grievously injured hero. The announcement needed to come from him. Coercion against the Symbol of Peace wasn’t really possible.
And All Might wouldn’t respond to logic, to emotional needling, to pleas or to heated arguments. The only thing he would submit to was strength.
Oh gods. Toki had to fight All Might. She felt like she was going to throw up.
“Please tell me this is not what it looks like,” Keigo said flatly.
Toki groaned. She stayed on the ground, head in her hands. The ground was nice. Very close by if she needed to actually pass out.
“What does it look like?”
Keigo narrowed his eyes.
“From my perspective? It looks like the Commission wants to force All Might to step down, and he agreed to settle it in a secret fight club. And you agreed to be the Commission’s fighter. Against All Might, the unbeatable Symbol of Peace who can punch out buildings.”
“Then yes,” she said weakly, still hiding her face. “It’s what it looks like.”
Keigo mutely waved his arms around as if to encompass how insane it was, eyes wide and wild, then he took a step back and started pacing, running his hands in his hair and leaving it ruffled like a bird’s nest. Toki empathized. Some part of her was sharing his agitation, because it was pure madness, she was just nineteen, she couldn’t face All Might, holy shit she was going to die. But the frenzy would come later. For now there was only shock, and bone-deed dread.
It needs to be done, said a little voice in a corner of her mind. That was the end-game when you told the President about her Symbol of Peace wavering. It’s a good thing that it’s happening, it means history is moving.
Yeah, but that didn’t mean she wanted it to be her! All Might was… he was so strong. Toki tried to think of how many times she had seen him on the news, plummeting villains, crushing rockslides, stopping trains, ripping open walls with his bare hands, so unnaturally strong that it had inspired the fanatic awe of a whole country. And unbiddenly, she thought of a building falling on its side and collapsing, the earth shaking with the impact, the cloud of dust swallowing streets and growing, always growing, until it engulfed the whole neighborhood like some nightmarish monsters, and people were screaming, and Meteor was yelling, and still All Might kept smiling…!
She screwed her eyes shut and forced herself to inhale, then exhale. If she didn’t focus on breathing, she was actually going to throw up.
Keigo suddenly dropped to a sitting position in front of her. Toki took one last gulp of air, and looked at him.
Her best friend. Her partner. The person she loved the most in the whole world. He was still wide-eyed and looking freaked out, but there was a new tension in his jaw, like he was already bracing himself for impact. Because he was still here. He had just learned Toki was going to dive head-first in a truly fucked-up mission, and he was already starting to mentally prepare for the impact, because the idea of running of denying it hadn’t crossed his mind once. They were in this together. It was so stupid, and so logical, because if their position were reversed of course Toki would have done the same. She breathed deeply, and couldn’t help but feel her heart soften. Knowing that she wasn’t alone already made things seems a little less dire.
Keigo was looking at her almost fixedly, but his golden eyes were razor-sharp and focused. He took a breath, as if to center himself, and finally blurted out:
“Can you even win?”
Well. At least he hadn’t told her it was impossible. But of course Keigo wouldn’t think that beating All Might was impossible. He didn’t admire the man like the half-brained masses, after all. He admired Endeavor because the Number Two had violently rejected the idea that All Might couldn’t be dethroned. And… just like Toki, Keigo had access to Sachiko’s graphs and charts. He knew that All Might was getting weaker.
But still. Weaker didn’t mean weak. All Might had inhuman strength. He could be torn open and keep fighting. Toki didn’t have ten percent of that strength. What she had was speed, scrappiness, and dirty moves that were still very theorical because she had never dared to use them against a real opponent.
Can you even win?
He hadn’t said it was impossible. He didn’t think it was impossible. There was no incredulity in his voice, no disbelief. But there was dread there, and terror. All Might wasn’t the Symbol of Peace because of his kindness or his charity, but because of the overwhelming threat he was for anyone who dared to cause trouble. He was only a man, so he could be beaten: but the strength it would require, the damage his enemy would take, the devastation this man could rain on an opponent…!
How could anyone hope to stand against such a monster?! It would be like trying to fight a tsunami or an earthquake. You could only hold on for dear life and pray it didn’t kill you. But the worst thing was: Toki couldn’t back out. Not because of the HPSC. Not because of coercion or external pressures or anything. She couldn’t back out because that fight needed to happen, and the President had been right, there was no one else who could do it.
Toki had to do it, because she wanted it to happen. Not the fight, but the change. The rift. The divergence. The issue of this fight. It had to be done, and it couldn’t be anyone else. So she didn’t want to back out, no. But it was still so terrifying.
Can you even win?
“I don’t know,” she answered shakily. “I really don’t know.”
Notes:
So.
Yeah, that's why this is called the "All Might arc" of this story.Surprise ? x)
(by the way, coalition-style agencies come from the wonderful fic "Heroics and Other Things That Don't Require Superpowers" by
TheNarator! A great read for all fans of Quirkless Izuku ^^)
Chapter 26: Rising star and meteors
Summary:
For so long Toki had focused on being precise, fast, and polyvalent, rather than being showy and brutal. After all, the HPSC wanted its new heroes to be a model that did not incite senseless destruction. But the potential for destruction had always been there.
Warp-Space was a precision tool because Toki had cultivated it as a precision tool, but if she applied her dedication to make it destructive, then it was a destructive Quirk. There was no way around that.
(Quantum VS All Might. There was no way this would end well for either of them.)
Notes:
So i was planning on posting this chapter Monday, but then i thought "if i was a reader and an author had ended a chapter with such a cliffhanger i would have gone apeshit" and i also thought "be the change you want to see in the world!" and...
... and yeah i was starved for validation also.So here it is! The chapter !
The title is super-pretentious BUT i like it so whatever.
Anyway. ENJOY !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
RISING STAR AND METEORS
As unbelievably as it sounded, life went on. The fight with All Might was scheduled for the end of the month. There was no rush, and Toki had plenty of time to just… digest the fact that she had agreed to fight against the Symbol of Peace.
It made her feel a little sick.
She couldn’t tell anyone. Well, Keigo knew, but that was it. Kameko and Hayasa-sensei were both kept out of the loop. And why not? First of all, telling them would mean telling why the HPSC wanted All Might to retire, and his injury was still confidential. And secondly, this fight wasn’t a mission. It was a favor. It was personal.
Besides, Toki didn’t really want them involved.
She wanted things to move. She wanted the President to take action, and make All Might face reality. She wanted to avoid the Kamino disaster, with All Might’s weak form broadcasted live, an almost-lost fight, terror, uncertainty, instability, anger and insecurity. She wanted to protect people from that, and it could only happen if steps were taken to prevent Kamino. So either All Might didn’t falter, or a security net was put in place to limit the consequences of his faltering. As simple as that.
And since All Might was only human, well. The only solution was to prepare the world for change. It had to start with preparing All Might for change. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Symbol of Peace didn’t want to hear it. He thought himself strong enough. Of course he would meet the HPSC with scorn. Of course he would tell them he would only step down when he was beaten. In another world, it would have worked… but it wasn’t that world.
So Toki would have to fight.
Also, All Might had been a dick to Melissa, so he deserved to be punched in the face fair and square. Toki wouldn’t be able to make him empathize with Melissa, but if she beat him… if she forced him to feel weak, too… maybe he wouldn’t be so cruel with his niece, who had no Quirk and yet such big dreams.
Yes, Toki’s motivations were all very altruistic. They were all for the sake of other people. That’s what she told herself.
But maybe, just maybe, there was something selfish in her determination to fight him. Maybe there was also a tiny part of her that remembered a crumbling building, rubble raining on heroes, a furious roar. A tiny part of her that yelled it shouldn’t have happened, that it was unfair and cruel. A tiny part of her that flickered with anger, even eleven years later. More than a decade had passed and still this little ember of righteous rage (unless it was terror, or horror, or all three at the same time) had never been extinguished. Anger was good. Anger could be useful. So Toki let this little ember flicker, burn, and grow.
It would come in handy, later.
She knew what had happened in Tokyo eleven years ago wasn’t All Might’s fault. It was Meteor’s fault; it was her own fault, too. If they hadn’t been criminals, if she hadn’t told the police, if, if. There were plenty of factors besides All Might’s presence that had caused this building to collapse, those people to die, and the whole fight to happen the way it had happened. But… the rage and the pain were still here. And All Might had been smiling.
There was no word for this feeling of quiet, illogical, burning resentment. No word spoken aloud, in any case. But Toki had plenty of poems about rage.
Now when I'm face to face with death,
I'll grab his throat
and ask him, "How does it hurt?"
Toki wasn’t going to chicken out. The thought hadn’t even crossed her mind. She was pissed, and she was determined. It didn’t mean that she wasn’t fucking terrified. She had watched All Might’s fights online. The man wasn’t human! He could pulverize buildings with a kick. Sometimes his punches were so strong they altered the weather because the atmospheric pressure changed. He was so fast you could barely see him. As soon as the cheerful façade dropped and he started fighting, he was a monster, pure and simple.
But Toki wasn’t exactly normal, was she? She had Warp-Space. She was Toki the Teleporter. She had survived Meteor’s gang, his arrest, homelessness, training, her mother’s death, a heart attack, Quirklessness, surgery, villains’ fights. She was strong. All Might may be a monster but he wasn’t unbeatable. He couldn’t be. Toki knew he could be beaten. It wasn’t just because of some statistics, or because of her own inflated ego. She knew he could be beaten because she had seen in happen in canon.
So… yeah. It was scary. It was really scary. But Toki wasn’t going to give up. She didn’t know for sure she would lose. But she really wasn’t sure she could win. Because if she won, she would have to… to really go beyond, to fight with a ferocity and a desperation that she couldn’t even imagine. She would have to make him afraid, to hurt him, maim him: and Toki knew she could, her Quirk was lethal enough, but what about her mind? She had never hurt anyone like that. How far would she have to get pushed to shut down her moral reservations? What kind of pain and stress would she have to endure to get to that point? And would she be able to get to that point without tapping out?
Can you even win?
She didn’t know. She really didn’t know. The uncertainty was maybe worse than the actual fight. All she could do was prepare. And to prepare to fight All Might, it wasn’t enough to lift weights and amble on a treadmill. You had to fight villains. Strong villains.
Toki started seeking as many fights as she could. The dispatchers were asked to direct her to strong opponents in priority, even when said opponent was half a country away. After all, teleportation came in handy for long-distance travel.
Thing was… when people looked at the Icarus Agency, they usually thought Hawks was stronger, because he was higher in the ranking. His fights were more publicized. But they shouldn’t forget that Quantum was a strong hero. She didn’t seek out the spotlight as much as Hawks and she categorically refused to do any publicity spots for swimsuit or underwear or summer clothes or… well, actually, a bunch of stuff where there may be a risk to uncover her scar… So she climbed the rankings slower than he did. But she was stronger.
Or rather, more dangerous.
Because of her Quirk. Because of her speed. Because of her creativity. But also because she was good at heroics. And Toki was good at it because she liked it. She didn’t revel in violence but she loved the challenge, the lightning-fast actions-reactions, the satisfaction of winning and succeeding. She loved being in the heart of the fight but she also loved the meticulous planning ahead, paying attention to details, analyzing strength and weakness. It was what made her a good scientist, after all.
So Toki went looking for fights. She didn’t care about the popularity, and actively avoided cameras if she could. After all, she had analyzed All Might’s fighting style thanks to videos online, so she knew intel like that could be deadly.
For three weeks and half, she focused on hunting down and putting away the biggest and baddest Japan could throw at her. Other things weren’t less important, sure, but this, this was urgent. Patrol time, kids to escort to school, homeless guys waiting for change, lost cats, little grannies who needed help crossing the street: they would still be there in March, and in the meantime, Hawks and the sidekicks could take care of it. But this? This fight, this opportunity, this deadline? Toki couldn’t lose it.
She couldn’t afford to waste a second of preparation.
She fought a man with a gigantification Quirk, and defeated him by warping him underwater. She fought a guy who could harden his skin, and dropped a car on him. She fought a gang of villains who could control water, and blasted them thought walls. She warped and jumped and punched and kicked and threw and grappled and fought, fought, fought.
Toki had always privileged swift take-downs over drawn-out fights that caused collateral damages: but against All Might she wouldn’t get a choice, so she prepared and adapted. She trained for devastating attacks instead of precision strikes. Even if she couldn’t match his raw strength, she needed to be able to have actual strength to back-up her speed, or she would be toast.
It was strange, because for so long she had focused on being precise, fast, and polyvalent, rather than being showy and brutal. After all, the HPSC wanted its new heroes to be a model that did not incite senseless destruction. But the potential for destruction had always been there.
When she had been a teenager, Toki could warp five tons of lead. Now she was an adult, and her weight limit was nearly double that. She could fling cars and trucks at people if she wished. And when applied to air, well… air was light, so she was mostly limited by the volume she could warp and not the mass, but still, it was huge. She once teleported inside a warehouse with a huge mass of compressed air and the whole floor was pulverized, to the point where the roof had flown off and the brick walls had been razed. Warp-Space was a precision tool because Toki had cultivated it as a precision tool, but if she applied her dedication to make it destructive, then it was a destructive Quirk. There was no way around that.
So Toki trained, and fought, and hopped around the whole country looking for dangerous opponents. The HPSC pulled some strings, probably, because she never had trouble finding them. Suddenly the others heroes were just a little too late, while Toki basically stumbled upon a A-ranked opponent every other Tuesday. Was that how Genryusai had ‘made’ All Might the Number One hero? Probably. At least Toki had the privilege of anonymity: she had clearly told the President that she didn’t want distractions, and so cameras were busy elsewhere and interviews requests dried out. Oh, it was hard to avoid the spotlight, and several of Toki’s fights were filmed. But hey, Warp-Space had another advantage: Toki could grab her enemy and warp the fight away from prying eyes.
Anyway. In three weeks, Quantum’s number of cases closed nearly tripled. Since she fought more and more big fishes, she got credited with more and more solved cases, which in turn benefited to Icarus Agency, which also benefited Hawks. Not that he needed it. It was Quantum who was supposed to fight the Symbol of Peace, but Hawks was trying his hardest to climb the rankings even faster than before. He scheduled himself to the gills and still took time to train with Toki almost every day, polishing her speed and reflex, brainstorming for strategy.
If they had been allowed to fight together… All Might wouldn’t have stood a chance. They were that good. Hawks had total awareness of his surroundings and the ability to multitask, and Quantum had devastating attacks and the perfect exit strategy. Coupled with their speed, their agility, and the way they could almost read each other’s thoughts… it made for an incredible duo.
They also covered each other’s flaws. Hawks avoided taking heavy hits. Quantum had a hard time playing defense. Their style completed each other seamlessly. Yeah, if they had been able to stay together… Toki would have faced her fight with way less apprehension.
But apparently it was a solo match. Which meant that between the long-ranged fighter and the hand-to-hand specialist, well, the President had to pick one. Really, Toki was the logical choice. She knew that. Keigo knew that.
It didn’t stop him from fretting, thought.
So they trained. They debriefed after every single one of her fights. Quantum hid from cameras but she still had a bodycam, after all. All heroes were obligated to wear one, just like cops. Which was another nice thing about the future: police brutality wasn’t a big problem. How ironic, considering this society was so desensitized to brutality. Not that they were barbarians or anything, but having teenagers launch fireballs at each other at the Yūei Sport Festival was considered a friendly event. Or maybe it was because injuries weren’t such a big deal? With Quirks, most people were very durable. Besides, with modern medicine and healing Quirks, grievous injuries could be reduced to nothing in a few minutes.
But in any case, cops and heroes alike behaved, because they were worried about their image. Brutality was mostly limited to heroes VS villains fights. It became a media sensation instead of something that the made the public live in fear.
It was how the world was. Some things were better. Some things were worst. Human nature didn’t change. People could to do great, wonderful, beautiful things: they were kind, helpful, clever, and hopeful. But they were also stubborn, selfish, cruel, hateful, able to do terrible things to each other.
You couldn’t solve every single one of society’s problems. You weren’t obligated to complete this impossible task. But you weren’t free to abandon it either. You had to do your best, share as much good as you could, and hope to leave the world a better place than you had found it. Sometimes you did it by studying the stars. Sometimes you did it by arresting criminals. Sometimes you did it by walking children to school. Sometimes you did it by signing online petitions.
And sometimes you did it by accepting to fistfight Superman. That was life.
On the field, face to face with villains… or face to face with All Might… Toki would fight alone. But the road to get there didn’t have to be walked alone. People could help. And so, when you ended up somewhere without backup, you were never truly alone. You carried with you all the love and support of those who had helped you get to that point.
Once, a lifetime ago, Toki had argued with Okamoto about it. She didn’t remember what she had told him, or even how the argument had started. Probably something about how Keigo and Toki had to be more independent. Maybe Okamoto had in mind exactly this kind of situation: a fight where one of them would have to be alone, and the other couldn’t do anything but wait. Maybe he hadn’t be wrong. But the point of life wasn’t to face obstacles alone. So what if Toki would have to be the one to fight All Might? It didn’t mean she had to deprive herself from support. On the contrary, it made support even more necessary. If you believed that you could reach any level of success by yourself, you’re a bit of a narcissist. It took a village. It took finding that village, and lifting each other up.
Toki had Keigo’s help and support, and maybe it wasn’t a lot on the grand scheme of thing, but it was enough. It made her feel better. And… it probably made Keigo feels better too. If their situation were reversed, Toki would have been sick with worry, and the idea of not helping wouldn’t even have crossed her mind.
As a side-effect of their newly found preoccupation, they also took less care to hide their relationship. It wasn’t rare for them to eat lunch together or to arrive at the agency at the same time, now. Some of their sidekicks side-eyed them with amusement, but really, it was a problem for later. They had more pressing worries.
“I think we should tell Hayasa-sensei,” pointed out Keigo during one of their brainstorming sessions over lunch.
“It’s confidential. He already knows that I’m training in preparation for a tough mission, there’s no need to make him freak-out. Telling him about the match would mean telling him about why the HPCS wants All Might to get kicked in the nuts.”
Keigo perked up:
“Oooh, good plan! Are you going to do that?”
“Thought about it, decided not to.”
Keigo frowned: “What, because it’s underhanded?”
“No, because the President sent me the schematics of his suit, and there’s a protective titanium cup to protect All Might Jr.”
Yeah, the HPSC had given her all the resources she asked, and they had a lot. Even about All Might! They didn’t have all of his medical records (most of the truth about AFO and their fight must have died with Genryusai) but they had hours of footage, records of every message and email sent from his agency’s computer… Right now there was less than five people in the known about this All Might business. But if any hero tried to go rogue, Toki could guess what kind of manpower would be used to hunt them down. What kind of compromising data could be given to the police or other heroes.
Good thing Toki didn’t intent to go rogue. But well, she appreciated the subtle warning. She knew what happened to heroes who crossed the HPSC, now, and she was taking in account the fact that All Might was just going to be sabotaged and forced to retire, because the Commission was playing nice.
“Dang it,” Keigo sighed. “I would have loved to pick Hayasa-sensei’s brain for plans against the Number One. You realize this fight is going to be amazing. No, eh, don’t turn green like that! I mean, you’ll be amazing, because you’re going to take down All Might!”
“… well, at least one of us is confident,” Toki said weakly.
Her boyfriend playfully punched her arm:
“You’re not allowed to be pessimistic, Toki. Sure, he can outlast you and he’s much, much stronger. But your thing is the swift take-down. If you play it on your terms, you have a solid chance.”
Toki leaned back against her chair, thinking. Keigo wasn’t wrong. All Might was stupidly strong, but that was all he was: strong. He didn’t lack intelligence, but he had never needed to outsmart or outplay an enemy, not when simply overpowering them was much easier.
Actually, it also showed in his fighting style. He rarely used misdirection in his attacks. He didn’t feel the need for deception and tricks in his arsenal when there were very few defenses he couldn’t brute-force his way through. That meant that in hand-to-hand combat, Toki could predict him, stay ahead of him. Maybe she could use that.
“If I aim to surprise him, I could just straight up pull out a gun,” she mused out loud.
Keigo coughed, eyes alight with amusement. He probably thought the visual was hilarious.
“Let’s shelve this idea for the moment. It’s going to be a show of strength. All Might wants to prove he can punch his way out of any problem, and the Commission wants him to lose so badly he become humbled. You can probably warp with his head in a handbag, but it would take you several seconds of focus and it’s kind of difficult to come by in a middle of combat. I saw your Warp-Blasts are getting more and more powerful… but even if they get as strong as All Might’s punches, it probably won’t be enough. What can you use?”
Toki thought about it.
“Well, weapons. Knives, grenades. Traps, maybe. Buildings to blow up. Also, talking. Stalling, making him confused, making him distracted. He’s an incredible fighter: I need every edge I can get.”
“Good! So let’s focus on that. I can’t go in the arena with you, but what do you think about taking a few feathers in your sleeves? I could use them to warn you… and cut that bitch if he gets too close.”
Keigo’s tone was almost joking, but his eyes were dead serious. He was worried. Toki was, too. But it was another one of those unspoken things that letting out would have made too painfully real. She swallowed.
“I’m going to be alright.”
He didn’t look convinced. But he at least tried to crack a smile.
“Yeah. But I swear, the next fucked-up mission is for me.”
Toki tried very hard not to think about the League and Hawks’ future task as a spy. It didn’t help her feel better in the slightest. She tried to change the subject:
“I wonder if I can warp energy. Well, I know I can, but I usually warp things with the energy they carry, not the energy alone. Like, when I warp myself falling, I bring my momentum, which is kinetic energy. I wonder… what if I could warp something’s momentum or gravity and just slam that energy in All Might’s face?”
Keigo’s face did something complicated:
“You can do that?”
“Well, no,” she admitted. “But I’m thinking about it. It would probably require some twisty considerations though. Like how I had to mind-trick myself into thinking in terms of mental projection to warp air.”
“Please don’t explain to me your thought process,” he whined. “I still haven’t understood the last time you did that. Can you do your twisty mind-control stuff before fighting All Might?”
“… probably not.”
“Mmmh. Have you asked your friend Melissa?”
Toki looked at him weirdly:
“She’s smart, but I think quantum mechanics and space-time displacement of energy are a little beyond her level.”
“Not about that, you idiot. About All Might’s weaknesses. She’s his niece, right? Maybe she knows something, like, he’s deadly allergic to peanuts or something like that.”
“I don’t think I can defeat All Might by throwing peanuts at him.”
Keigo only rose an eyebrow at her non-answer, and Toki winced. She had gone to Mustafu every week-end since learning of her new assignment, but she hadn’t told a soul. Not even Melissa.
“I don’t want to put her in that position. All Might told her he was injured, but maybe he hid the details. And even if he didn’t, do you think Melissa would agree to share her uncle’s weaknesses with me, in order for him to lose a fight and be forced to retire? Sure it would make him safer, but that guy lives for heroism. Being pushed on the sidelines would destroy his dream. I don’t think Melissa has it in her to do that to him.”
Safety or happiness. Melissa knew how it felt to be forced to pick the first one and give up the second because others deemed you too fragile. And because it was her uncle who constantly tried to force this choice on to her… or maybe especially because it was her uncle… she wouldn’t do it back.
Maybe she would, actually, and it made it worse. Because Melissa could feel coerced, or because she would think it was for All Might’s own good, or because she was pissed at him, or because she trusted Toki not to hurt him too badly. None of those were good reasons. None of those would make Melissa sleep better at night when she would face the aftermath, when All Might would be angry at her betrayal. And Melissa would blame herself so much afterward… yeah, no. Better not to place her in a position where she didn’t have to sell out her own family. Toki was the adult in this situation, and she already had the advantage of canon to tell her how badly All Might was injured. She didn’t need to bring a teenager, especially a teenager who trusted her, into this.
(Toki knew how it felt to betray your family for a good cause. She knew how much you hated it after all, how much it clung to your skin like mold, like rot, like poison. No, she wouldn’t force Melissa in that position. She wouldn’t let her make that choice.)
(She wished there could have been someone to stop her from making that choice, too.)
“Fine,” Keigo sighed, looking put-off. “But you better have a plan.”
“… Yeah. I think I have one.”
oOoOoOo
The day of the match came. It would happen in Jedha, a ghost city that had been too damaged by villains’ attacks and consequently abandoned by its inhabitants, who had moved elsewhere. Ghost neighborhoods were teared down and rebuilt, but a ghost city had its own use. Jedha had been abandoned for nearly five years. Since then, it was serving as the HPSC’s (and several heroes schools’) occasional training ground. It was also a good place for villains fights and violent sparring. Squatters were regularly kicked out. In a few years, the place would be too ravaged to be of use: the buildings would be teared down and the land sold, maybe to build another city. But in the meantime, it was a good playground.
And the perfect place to hide a secret duel.
Toki was to come by car: at midday, the President came to fetch her herself in a limo. Not directly from Fukuoka (they had a minimum of discretion), but from a meeting point near Musutafu. It was a way to avoid tiring herself out, sure, but it was also a way to have some last-minute briefing. They sat, face to face… and the President started talking. Her voice was calm and concise, but she held herself so straight, knuckles almost white, that it wasn’t hard to see she was almost as nervous as Toki herself.
The duel would happen in the late afternoon, to leave Toki time to trap the place. All Might would meet them at Jedha. He had been offered a car ride, too, but it was expected he would refuse. The point was to try and make him tired before the match. The whole month, just as Toki had been directed towards strong opponents with regularity, All Might had been literally buried into work. The HPSC had pulled some strings… and the dispatchers had directed a ton of SOS his way, so he had barely a moment of rest. It didn’t matter than his opponents weren’t all super-strong, the point was that they were too many. He had fled from one fight to another for nearly four weeks, his phone blowing up with calls even at night.
It had allowed the HPSC to tire him out, but also to observe him under more scrutiny than before. They had a rotating team monitoring all of his appearances, timing them, judging his performance. They had determined his strength hadn’t decreased, but his endurance likely had. He didn’t do more than seven hours of hero-work a day before vanishing. And in the last week, after running ragged for nearly a month, his max had been six hours a day.
By scrutinizing his bank account, the HPSC had also guessed he had a special diet, which he didn’t before. He was on lot of food supplements and vitamins. He didn’t eat a bunch of rich foods (hamburger, fries, and so on) that had been known to be his favorites a few years ago. The HPSC couldn’t quite access his medical records… but they found enough to guess he had a massive surgery and was still recovering from it.
The President coldly concluded that, with this evidence, Toki should try and aim for his stomach. She had already planned on it, but she honestly appreciated the vote of confidence.
It still felt surreal.
She was going to fight All Might. Not just for show, but with the goal of defeating him. Even without the sheep-mentality of the masses who believed All Might invincible, Toki felt her stomach drop at how daunting the task was. She felt sick with anxiety, but also empty and cold, as if still in shock.
And the embers of her angers were still flickering, brightening, burning, smoldering.
When faced with something that scared her, Toki’s first reflex had been to freeze, before. Hayasa-sensei had beaten the habit out of her. Now Toki fought or flew. It wasn’t hard anymore. And… well. When she had decided to fight, it wasn’t hard to get worked up about it. To get brazen, fierce, emotional. To get angry. Especially since Toki had a lot of complicated feelings about her opponent, and a willingness to work herself up in a snit.
Anyway. Jedha’s hospital was one of the only parts of town still running, along with the control rooms where watchers monitored the town. The President showed her where it was so Toki could memorize the place. The staff was minimal but still… They had expensive equipment, a dozen nurses, two surgeons, an anesthetist, and freaking Recovery Girl.
There was a big crate filled with ice cubes in the middle of the main room, right next to the operating room. On the side of the crate was written “TRANSPLANT” in blood-red letters. It made Toki’s heart skip a beat.
Nobody spokes of the ice-filled crate. Toki didn’t, either.
She knew what it was for.
After the hospital, Toki was given a map, and three hours to explore this city. She needed to know the lay of the land to have an edge in this fight. So she explored, by foot, by car (the President’s driver had been given orders to be her personal chauffeur), and of course, by Warp-Space. She found the best rooftops, and located the darkest basements under abandoned buildings. She found a place with a lot of rubble to use, and another with rusty abandoned cars.
There was also a crew at her orders to place traps, so Toki did just that. Knifes, smoke-grenades and flash-bangs were hidden around the place so she could grab them as needed. Ticking bombs were placed in basements, and support beams or load-bearing walls were carefully damaged, so she could make a building collapse with a press of a switch, and make it look like an accident. There was no electricity in the city, but several generators were activated to power-up a few high-tension lines that crisscrossed like a spiderweb right above a leaky fire hydrant.
If she had to fight All Might, she would fight him with the whole place on her side.
Then it was time. They got back in the car and drove until they reached the place where the fight would start. It was a big area full of ruins, as if several blocks had been teared down. Ground zero after the collapse of several buildings, Toki could guess. It made her feel uneasy. That was the amount of destruction their fight was expected to cause… and even if Toki could wreck cars and create huge blasts of compressed air, she knew she wasn’t the one who was expected to raze buildings.
She had seen him do it before, after all. Meteor had been the one controlling the rubble, but All Might was the one who had teared through the building like a wrecking ball. She clenched her jaw. She was scared, yeah. But she wasn’t a little girl anymore. This time, she could fight back.
They stopped next to a tiny house, where three other cars were already parked. A few guys were waiting around, looking serious. The President didn’t open the door right away, though. She checked her phone for message, nodded, then turned to Toki.
“All Might has already been active for almost six hours today. There was a massive prison break this afternoon halfway across the country, which is fortunate. But he still has about half an hour of full power left before getting tired. Probably more. We have no certainty about his limits. You can either play cat and mouse until he run out of power and has to forfeit, or you can try and take him down.”
Taking down All Might. Sure. Easy. Toki let out a nervous, bitter laugh:
“You seem confident.”
“I know you can do it,” the President replied, unflappable. “You have the speed to avoid hits and the raw power to hit back. But most of all, you have motivation. He’s the one who arrested your father.”
Toki tensed. They never talked about that. Nobody talked about Meteor, nobody talked about All Might’s involvement. Even when Toki had been brought to her mother’s funeral, there’d been not a word about it.
“So?” she retorted.
“So most people only see All Might as the legend, someone more than human because he can do no wrong. It blinds them. It did blind us, too, or else we would have noticed his… decreased efficiency. But you don’t. You have your own issues with All Might, but hero-worship isn’t one of them. I don’t know if you hate him, or resent him, or simply do not care. It’s not the point. The point is… you won’t be fighting half-heartedly, expecting to lose. You will fight like he’s a man you owe nothing to, and that we asked you to beat. That’s all.”
She wasn’t wrong, Toki had to admit. There were maybe five people in Japan who didn’t look at All Might as if he was half-god. Well, five people who were not villains. Shigaraki and All For One didn’t count.
Suddenly Toki’s head snapped up, looking through the window just in time to see something growing in the sky. Not a bird, not a plane. It was him.
She got out of the car in a second. The President followed suit, but if she gave some last-minute advice, Toki didn’t hear it. Her whole attention was focused on the man who was landing in the rubble, making the ground shake, and standing up with a million-watts smile. His cape rippled behind him. He stood tall and proud, and he had the gall to strut toward them arrogantly, as if pleased by his grand entrance. Toki felt a wave of annoyance mixed with anxiety.
All Might.
He still looked the same as the day he had arrested Meteor. His costume had changed, but he had the same hair, the same smile. When his gaze passed on Toki, there was no recognition. He just smiled, this fake, plastic smile that grated on her nerves.
“Mrs. President, hero-san!” All Might boomed cheerfully. “Sorry for the delay!”
“All Might,” Genmei-san bowed politely. “This is Quantum. She will be your opponent for this test.”
All Might bowed, grinning. Toki did, too, although she didn’t smile. The President threw her a short glance, before turning back to All Might. Her voice lowered almost to a whisper.
“I am sorry it’s come to this, All Might. However, your refusal to prepare the future could endanger the whole country. We agreed to your terms: one fight to prove your fitness as Number One. But it’s not too late to back out. Are you sure you still want to do this?”
All Might shook his head.
“The world still needs a Symbol. I will not step down as long as people needs to be saved.”
“The world may need a Symbol, but you cannot be it much longer. You’re slowing down. Even if you refuse to take better care of your health, consider that will be worse for Japan if your collapse is public. We still have time to prepare a peaceful transition and keep order. Your refusal only delays the inevitable.”
“I will not step down,” he repeated.
The President inclined her head, then stepped back.
“Fine. Then… The terms are as agreed. A duel between the two of you, until evident loss or surrender. If you win, the Commission will stop pressing you for retirement. If you lose, you will start preparing the world to go on without you, and retire in the next two years. As a retired hero, you’ll be free to continue using your license to fight, however the Number One spot will pass on. You will also disclose your medical issues to at least one trusted doctor to deal with the problems you mentioned during our last conversation.”
“That wasn’t in the terms.”
“You implied you were dying, All Might. Not taking it in account would make me guilty of failure to assist a person in danger. It’s non-negotiable.”
All Might crossed his arms. “Fine. As you wish, Mrs. President.”
He didn’t believe he was going to lose. A little cocky, wasn’t he?
The President told them to wait until the bell to start, so her men could clear the area. Then she climbed back in her car, a few guys in suits emerged from the shadows and climbed in the others three vehicles parked there, and everyone left.
There were only the two of them, face to face. All Might and Quantum. The Number One hero and the Commission’s rising star.
The man who arrested Meteor, and Meteor’s daughter.
“Nice to meet you, Quantum,” All Might smiled brightly. “Though I wish it would have been under better circumstances.”
Toki narrowed her eyes. It’s not the first time we’ve met, she wanted to bit out. She didn’t even know why she was so angry he didn’t remember. It shouldn’t matter. But she could feel the embers of that old rage flickering, burning up.
“You made your choice and I made mine,” she replied curtly.
It wasn’t the answer he expected. All Might blinked owlishly:
“Yes, I supposed we did.” There was an awkward pause, and he tried: “Um, did by chance Mrs. President explain to you the reason for this match?”
Toki shrugged, as casually dismissive as she could manage:
“You’re going to get killed and she want to avoid it because it would be a massive blow to the public’s morale. But you refuse to collaborate. Maybe you’re delusional, maybe the idea of living without the public’s blind adoration frightens you, I have no idea. Maybe you think that when you get killed, society will stop being your problem, and if they can’t shower you in praise, people don’t deserve to be saved. Anyway, the plan is to avoid that… so the President nicely asked me to step in. So I could save Japan from the catastrophe that your failure will be.”
All Might’s smile slipped from his face. For the first time, he looked taken aback: then annoyed, jaw clenching and eyes narrowed. Suddenly he seemed more threatening, and Toki felt her pulse speed up.
“… I see. Is that what they told you?”
She bared her teeth: “They didn’t need to. I can read between the lines.”
“Then you’re mistaken,” he insisted. “People need-”
“They need help, I get it,” she cut him off. “But they also need to work together, to take their fate in their own hands, to prepare for the future. You’re stopping that. Like some kind of placebo that stop people from seeing the disease and treating it.”
“You don’t think people deserve to be saved?”
“I don’t think people deserve to be lied to,” she replied coldly. “Especially when their safety is on the line.”
“I’m keeping them safe,” All Might retorted, voice a little colder and no smile on his face.
“You’re doing a piss-poor job of it,” Toki snapped back, heart thundering in her chest. “You’re stopping them from building a future. You’re extoling violence and discrimination and not even noticing, not even caring, because that’s all you know. You’re refusing to allow for change. Why? Because it makes you feel good to be indispensable?! You’re just a fucking liar, acting as if your simple presence solves every problem even when you actively make them worse! And you even smile, as if all that pain and suffering is some joke to you!”
She stopped, breath ragged, eyes wild. Her heart was beating like a drum, and she could feel the power of her Quirk alive in her chest, like a storm begging to be released. For a second, there was silence. They looked at each other, All Might immobile and an upset frown on his face, and Toki poised to strike, eyes murderous.
The bell rang.
They didn’t move immediately. They stayed there, assessing each other. Toki knew All Might wouldn’t resist the need to argue back, to make his point, to prove he was the good guy. He was, after all, a people pleaser. She saw him open his mouth and hesitate, probably dying to argue back…
She leaped away while warping a massive blast of air between them, and the resulting explosion cut off any protest the Symbol of Peace wanted to make.
Game on.
All Might jumped through her blast as if it was nothing, and immediately tried to pummel her to death. He was good, fast and strong and vicious, but not swinging wildly. He hit like someone with training, favoring punches, keeping his balance, using his upper-body strength and his mass to his advantage. Toki couldn’t afford a single instant of distraction. Warp-Space allowed her to slip and dodge better than anyone else, but this man knew how to fight and was apparently very keen on either caving in her ribcage or tear her head off. It felt like playing whack-a-mole except she was the mole, and this man was nearly eight feet tall, a mountain of muscles with dark eyes and white teeth bared.
Some part of Toki knew, intellectually, that he wasn’t trying to kill her: he was one of the Good Guys and she had just pissed him off. But some other, more primitive part of her brain didn’t think about it at all when facing a snarling giant who was delivering punches so fast, she could barely see it.
Especially when said giant let out a roar that reminded the squishy ape in Toki’s brain that she was really soft and not very high on the food chain. For a split second she felt very small and very stupid, trying to take this monster head-on.
Then her higher cognitive functions took back the wheel. He was big, but she was faster.
He crowded her, making her step back, dodge, desperately keeping just out of his reach. She somersaulted away and threw another warp-blast, bigger, displacing enough air to fill a house, and the resounding explosion nearly took off her tympans even if she teleported on a nearby building to avoid it. But All Might barely staggered back: he saw where she’d run, and jumped to chase her, like a freaking missile.
Flash! Toki meet him halfway, trying to jump him from above mid-air, kicking his back with her steel-reinforced boots with enough strength to feel it up to her thighs. A normal person would have been snapped in half. But hitting All Might was like hitting a wall: he barely grunted, already twisting mid-hair to punch her; and even if she slipped through his grasp with Warp-Space, she still felt a rush of displaced air not unlike the one you felt when a rushing car skimmed past you.
Holy fuck, and Toki was supposed to fight that? She was supposed to beat that?!
She rained down kicks and punches on him but it was like he didn’t even feel it. She grabbed him, warped high in the sky then dropped him, hoping the crash would stun him: but he punched the air and the resulting shockwave was enough to cushion his fall. Toki went back close and personal, taking her knives from their hidden pouches in her sleeves and trying to stab him. She was good in close combat, she was excellent even, but it just didn’t matter. Knives or not, he was stronger, faster. Besides, his muscles were so dense it was like trying to stab Kevlar: the knife didn’t sink in, it only nicked his skin. And he deflected almost all of her blows!
It wasn’t just insane, it was fucking terrifying.
He nearly took her head off twice in less than ten seconds. His attacks were precise, practiced, with elbows tucked in, vicious swipes at her legs to try and make her fall, and unrelenting attacks to not let her have time to breathe. Toki had fought villains with super-strength Quirk, people with speed Quirk, and people with hand-to-hand training, but this was on a whole other level.
But she was keeping up. He hadn’t hit her yet, even if there’d been a few close calls. Toki darted under his punches, teleported away from his attacks, tried to hit him in the back or the head, disappearing right before he could hit back. It was like a danse with a frenzied tempo, not a second to breathe: dodging, twisting, avoiding, warping, attacking, retreating. All Might’s attacks were like cannonballs, cracking the pavement on impact, creating a rush of displaced air. Toki had to avoid every single one: she couldn’t afford to let a single hit even brush her, or she would be pulverized. It would be like being hit by a locomotive at terminal velocity.
“IS THAT ALL YOU’VE GOT?” All Might yelled, grinning fiercely.
Why the hell did he ever think that smiling was reassuring?! When someone try to kill you, their smile is not something comforting at all. It made the Symbol of Peace look like a deranged serial killer!
“I’m just getting started!” Toki roared back, trying not to let her voice slip into high-pitched hysteria.
The next time she warped away, she grabbed a massive bloc of cement among the rubble, maybe the size of a car, and warped in front All Might to launch her projectile straight at his stupid face.
She’d added plenty of momentum to her move and with the adrenaline pumping, Warp-Space was at full power. All Might took the boulder in the face and went flying backward, hitting and rolling on the ground with a massive cloud of dust. He ended up ass over kettle, with his cape falling in his face. It was wildly satisfying. Toki smirked triumphantly.
Then he got back up, and her mood turned sour. That hit could have killed someone, and he was just shrugging it off?! What the hell was that man eating for breakfast, bricks?!
“Ah!” laughed All Might, getting up. “You’ll have to do better than th-”
The next boulder was twice the size of the previous one, and followed by a massive warp-blast that made it explode on impact. No hesitation. This time, when All Might got up, he wasn’t laughing anymore.
They were done playing.
oOoOoOo
This fight was the most intense of Toki’s life.
The more it progressed and the less she fought like Quantum, the queen of swift take-down with precise strikes and incredible speed. The less she fought like Hoshizora, too, with trickery and close-combat. No, she fought like a Taiyōme, she fought like Meteor, using her power as massively and destructively as she could because fuck, that wasn’t an enemy that could be brought down by a surgical strike. Yes, sometimes you could do miracles with a scalpel: but sometimes you needed a chainsaw. Or a wrecking ball.
All Might was like a natural disaster: huge, overpowering, unstoppable. He crashed thought walls, he punched buildings… he laid the ghost city to waste like a freaking hurricane. He was fast, too: oh, so fucking fast! But Toki was faster. It was her saving grace. If All Might’s opponent had been Keigo, he would have already crushed him in his fist like an empty soda-can. Toki was staying ahead: just barely, but she was. She was disheveled, covered in cement dust and dirt, with road burns on her hands and back after a few rough landings, but she was alive, and not losing. She wasn’t losing yet.
All Might wasn’t indestructible. This fight was a nightmare, but he wasn’t indestructible. She had injured him several times, either with knives or with rubble. None of those wounds were enough to stop him, but he was bound to feel the pain. It was only a matter of seeing who would outlast the other. Especially now that they weren’t holding back.
They were like wild animals trying to rip each other in pieces. Toki tossed cars, boulders and twisted poles of metals like javelins. She buried him into rubble, grabbed him and tossed him into buildings. All Might punched with enough strength to create shockwaves, tossed trucks and massive rocks, destroyed everything in his path, tried to grab her with frightening nimbleness. If he touched her she was dead: but he hadn’t touched her yet, and Toki was far from done. She teleported him in a trapped basement to toss him in a wall, activating a trap and making the building crumble on him while she escaped with her Quirk. She pelleted him with flashbangs and smoke bombs, and in the resulting chaos she came at him with knives. She managed to stab him twice, one of those wound of his side, and she was sure that it had made him cough up blood.
Toki was trembling with exhaustion, her mind and body pushed at her limits by rage and terror and desperation, but she was still staying ahead, just enough to make it count.
They had wrecked at least five blocks of the ghost city. Maybe more. Toki didn’t have the time to look around and assess the damage. There was smoke billowing and clouds of dust rising everywhere, reducing visibility. Toki clenched her jaw, eyes wide, chest heaving. She was drenched in sweat. Her heart was beating so loudly she could feel it in her head, her breathing hurt, her throat was dry with how hard she was panting… but she couldn’t slow down.
If she slowed down, she could collapse, and if she collapsed she would die.
She wasn’t winning, she knew it. She wasn’t winning because no matter how much damage she was dishing out, he continued advancing. She wasn’t winning: but she wasn’t losing either, and she wouldn’t fucking lose.
Toki had always been a fighter, but she had never been a savage. Or at least she had never considered herself as one. But you never know who you are until you’re pushed to your limits. And Toki’s limits were here: blood roaring in her ears and occulting all sounds, bleeding, not thinking about anything besides this second then the next, the fight, the fucking fight, the urgency, the action, the reaction, everything happening almost too fast, her body acting and her brain following. Toki had thought herself composed and logical… but when you scrape away what’s kind and civilized, you always find the animal beneath.
Everybody screams and swears, eyes wild and brain locked in fight mode, when you push them far enough.
All Might didn’t swear and look like an enraged animal, at least. But he was fighting tooth and nail, too: grunting, hitting, his famous smile turned silent snarl. He was covered in dirt and dust like Toki, but there was blood, too, and a lot more than what was sullying Toki’s suit. He was covered in red stains where she had managed to injure him with her projectiles. A particularly large patch of blood was drenching his whole right side where Toki had managed to stab him, even if she hadn’t managed to sink the blade more than an inch. But he wasn’t slowing down. He was pursuing his rampage with frightening single-mindedness, trying to grab Toki, crush her, beat her, and she couldn’t let that happen.
How long had they been fighting? It seemed like it was hours: it also seemed to be barely a few minutes. Time had no meaning. Toki was starting to warp further and further away each time, making him chase her just so she could stop and breathe for a few second. She felt like her lungs were on fire, like her heart was going to explode.
She was starting to felt little stabs of pain in her chest, too. Nothing too extreme, but it was a chilling reminder that her state-of-the-art artificial heart wasn’t immune to Quirk overuse. She couldn’t sustain this neck-breaking speed forever.
And the worst was when All Might insisted on talking. As if she was villain to be reasoned with. As if he could make her change her mind and surrender. It was infuriating.
“Come on!” he yelled at her, deflecting the car she had launched at him from above. “The longer we stay here the more we’re missing out. Villains are escaping right now. People crying for help. Instead of playing this stupid game, we could be making a difference today in someone’s life!”
He jumped straight at her, and Toki warped ten meters away, landing in the rubble to grab something that may have been part of a broken support beam.
“I’m making a difference in someone’s life!” she bit back. “I making a difference in the lives of all the people who won’t have to live in a word where the Symbol of Peace collapse on live television with no system in place to keep order afterward!”
She teleported right behind him, swinging the metal pole like a giant bat, but he blocked. She evaded his next strike, and they traded more blows, makings walls collapse and dust fly everywhere. In the end Toki disengaged first, like always, warping a few meters back to catch her breath. Her legs were shaking. She couldn’t carry on for much longer. How long could she go on? Five minutes? Ten? How much times had already passed? She didn’t know. She couldn’t think.
“I will not fail society,” All Might insisted. “I will not fail the people counting on me.”
Toki barred her teeth: “You will. You’re only human.”
All Might frowned.
“Is that why you hate me?”
What? Toki almost took a step back, eyes widening, completely taken aback. All Might leaned forward, not attacking yet, but eyes fixed on her.
“I’m not stupid,” he said. “I can see that it’s deeply personal for you. You resent me, and not for some perceived weakness.”
What the hell?! Toki balled her fists, and spat:
“Even if I was, that’s none of your business!”
“Of course it is,” he said patiently, as if she was unreasonable, and Toki’s blood boiled even more. “You’re not a villain. You’re a hero like me, and your hatred is hurting you. I always aim to help anyone in pain.”
Was he joking? Toki let out a burst of crazed laughter, feeling incredulous and faintly hysterical. Maybe he’d hit his head.
“So what, if I was a villain, I wouldn’t be worth helping? How practical. People pushed to villainy by desperation and powerlessness deserve to be Texas-smashed in the sky because they shouldn’t have been born in the wrong place, is that it?”
All Might gently shook his head. “It isn’t what I meant, and you know it. I was asking about you.”
“And I said it’s NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!”
She launched another piece of rubble at him, and body-slammed him in the weakened wall of a building a second later. The wall collapsed, but All Might managed jump away from most of the rubble. How could he still be so fast?! Wasn’t he as exhausted as her?!
The next time he launched himself at her, Toki grabbed him and warped them high in the air in a specific spot, increasingly desperate to end this fight. But she was too slow, maybe, or the fatigue was getting to her: she didn’t get away in time.
As they were in free-fall, she felt his giant fist close on her arm and… snap!
Toki screamed.
He jerked, as if surprised by his success, or maybe by her scream… But she was already teleporting, blinded by a wave of white-hot pain.
She awkwardly landed near the leaky fire hydrant, blood roaring in her ears, head spinning, close to passing out or throw up. Holy shit, it hurt! She didn’t look at her arm, she didn’t want to see, she couldn’t. Through blurred eyes she watched All Might land into the spiderweb of high-tension lines, and she kicked the fire hydrant hard enough to break it, liberating a high-pressured stream of water directly on her trap.
It short-circuited in a blinding flash of light.
Electricity crackled and screamed, light flashed, sparks flew everywhere. Toki hastily teleported in an intact building a few dozen meters away. The screech of the short-circuit make her ears ring, and there was so much electricity in the air she could feel it in her teeth. Holy shit, there was a real possibility it could kill him.
But it was all drowned by the pain. Oh gods, her arm. She barely looked at it, and she had to turn her face away, heaving. Shit. She could see the bone. He had snapped it like a fucking twig.
This was game over. Please, please, All Might had to be knocked out now. Toki couldn’t fight much more. Taking small shallow breaths, she peeled off her sweater vest, assessing the damage. It was bad. Tears of pain were burning her eyes; she had to bite her lips almost to blood to not make a sound. She used the vest to make a makeshift brace with a short plank on the ground. It would be enough to stop her arm from moving, but… oh, man, it hurt so bad.
But it wasn’t over.
Suddenly she heard a loud crack, then a thump: the sound of someone tearing himself free from the lines and landing on the ground. Her heart sank. She wanted to cry. This trap had been her last resort. She still had two sabotaged buildings to collapse on him, a few stashes of smoke-bombs and knives… but the high-tensions lines had been her trump card. If that didn’t knock him out, what would?
“QUANTUM!”
Toki straightened, holding her breath, her heart pounding. All Might had paused. He was probably listening, trying to hear her. But soon enough, he started calling out again. His voice was rougher, scratchier. Maybe he was nearing his limits. Gods, Toki hoped so. She was so tired, so frazzled and drained. She just wanted it to stop.
“Can’t you see this fight is pointless? We’re both heroes, there’s no sense in us opposing. We should be working together and do what’s best for the people we’re protecting. Please. You cannot win. Forfeit this fight and allow us to return to our real mission. I have people to save, and I’m sure you do, too!”
Toki didn’t move. She needed to think. Her brain was turning like a crazy hamster in a wheel, desperate for a solution. Maybe she could use one of the high-tension lines to strangle him… no, she couldn’t be sure they weren’t powered anymore. Maybe continuing tossing projectiles… but she didn’t know how long she had to held out. A stray piece of wreckage had damaged the corner of her HUD in that last clash: it didn’t display the time anymore.
Swallowing back a grunt of rage, she teared the visor off her face, and pressed a hand against her eyes, blinking back tears of exhaustion and frustration. She wanted to cry. She felt it climbing her throat, dry heaving sobs of terror and rage and despair and just plain exhaustion.
No more, please, no more, she wanted it to stop, please, just stop-
“Quantum, we are not enemies,” eagerly insisted All Might outside. “We don’t need to fight! Forfeit! It’ll be for the best.”
Couldn’t he keep his monologue to himself?! Toki screwed her eyes closed, willing him to just fucking shut up. She felt like a raw nerve, or a live wire. She was trembling. A single spark would be enough to make everything explode. She had no calm or hindsight left: she was backed in a corner, exhausted, furious, desperate. She wanted to yell and break something. It was so unfair! She had done her best, she wanted to win, and nothing worked! She wanted it to stop, she wanted it to end, please, stop, she couldn’t take it anymore. She had enough, she had had enough for so long, she was so tired and angry and it was unfair! She deserved to win! He deserved to lose, just this once, to teach him a lesson, to make him feel as powerless as Toki had felt when he and Meteor had fought…!
And meanwhile, that oaf just couldn’t shut up…
“You’re angry,” he called in the empty streets. “You hate me, even. I don’t know why. But I assure you, there’s no reason to. If you would just forfeit, we could talk it out.”
Talk it out? Talk it out?! There was no talking out. Toki wanted him to stop, to lose, to fall, to die: in that instant she didn’t care, she just hated him. Him and his hypocrisy. There had been no talking out for Meteor. There had been no talking out for Sayuri. There had been no talking out for her, Toki Taiyōme, the frightened child who had run away from the destruction her home. Because she had no home, she had destroyed it, she had let All Might destroy it, and he had smiled when doing it. The only language that man understood was violence, and now he wanted to talk it out?!
“Come on, forfeit!” he continued, louder. “Or come fight me! Unless you’re scared?”
That was the last straw. Toki’s patience, or maybe her sanity, snapped like an elastic pulled too taut.
With a snarl, she grabbed the wall next to her (the whole wall, bigger than anything she had ever teleported before) and warped right above All Might, reappearing with the wall broken down in dozens of projectiles that ran on the Symbol of Peace like a destructive meteor shower. The wreckage shot down on him like cannonballs, the roar of destruction deafening her, a huge cloud of dust exploding in the street.
All Might rose from the rubble, but already Toki had jumped to a block of flats, grabbed a corner, and warped with the last four stories of the building. Hundreds of tons of wreckage bombarded the Symbol of Peace, drowning the whole streets in rubble and dust, like something straight from Toki’s memories about Meteor’s arrest.
But she didn’t see her old nightmare. She was here, now, and she was furious. She was the one raining down chaos and destruction, and it felt good. It felt righteous, it felt like justice. Blood was pounding in her skull, roaring in her ears, she felt like her heart was going to burst. It hurt like a stitch, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to pull another move like that: but it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the rage. Lips pulled back on a snarl, she roared:
“DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHY I HATE YOU?! DO YOU?!”
A distant part of her mind was freaking out because she had warped part of building. Oh, it was always easier to teleport part of stuff when that part was enormous, easy to visualize. But she had warped a building. She had never imagined being able to do that: it was way above the maximal volume she could usually carry.
She didn’t need a mirror to know her eyes were blazing like embers, as bright as the sun, as murderous as Meteor’s.
“You want to know why I hate you?” she screamed. “You’re right, it’s not because you’re weakening. It would be noble to hate you for it, for this betrayal, but in order to feel betrayed, I would have to expect something out of you, wouldn’t I? But I don’t. I never have, because NOBODY SAVED ME. I had to save myself! I had to make the decision to hurt the only people in the world who loved me, I had to do it alone, and I was eight, I deserves better! I deserved to be saved!”
She advanced on him, eyes blazing. All Might was half-imbedded in a pile of debris, blood covering part of his face from a new wound, looking stunned, eyes wide. He didn’t make a move to attack while Toki raged.
It was almost an out-of-body experience: advancing on the Symbol of Peace, screaming until her throat was sore, spit flying, eyes blazing, her Quirk running so wild she could see shimmers of light sputtering on her whole body. Now that she had started yelling, she couldn’t stop. The words keep pouring out, a torrent of venom that had been festering for the last ten years, bottled up until explosion.
“I saved myself, you hear me?! But even that, you managed to ruin. I worked out how to make it as quiet and painless as possible, and you RUINED IT. You had to go there and wreck the place and collapse the building, because leaving the job to two snipers with some sleeping gas wouldn’t have been enough! All those deaths that day, all the people Meteor killed, they’re on you! And then you had the gall… you had the gall to smile and said everything was alright! Everything was fine, because you were here! BUT NOTHING ABOUT IT IS FINE! I was a child, I deserved to be safe! I deserved to save my mom, my brother, my dad! I deserved not to have to make that choice! I deserved not have to watch you destroy my home smiling! I deserved it, and it didn’t happen, and IT’S NOT FINE! How dare you pretend it was!”
She stood there, panting, out of breath, feeling scrapped raw. In the thunderous silence that descended, Toki slowly became aware she was shaking violently. Her arm hurt, her throat hurt, everything hurt, and she was so exhausted her head was almost spinning.
Did… did she felt better? She didn’t know. She felt exhausted. Stunned, dazed. Hollowed out and almost dizzy with it.
All Might hadn’t moved. He looked almost as rattled as her, eyes wide, mouth gaping like a fish. For several second, neither of them blinked. In the unnatural silence of the ghost town, you could only hear their harsh panting.
“You are the child,” All Might finally breathed out, like a revelation. “Meteor’s child, the one who sent the notebook to Mirai…”
Mirai? Toki blinked, then sluggishly realized it was probably Sir Nighteye’s name. Oh. So All Might had been aware of her existence, then. He knew who she was. She hadn’t expected him to, and she didn’t know if it made her feel relieved, angry, or just bitter. Her head felt so empty. In the end, she just nodded.
All Might slowly moved, extricating himself from the rubble, but not standing. Maybe he was too exhausted to do it. He seemed suddenly very weary, looking at her with a newfound exhaustion.
“I’m sorry,” he said a least, lowering his head. “I’m sorry I didn’t save you.”
Toki swallowed. What was she supposed to say? She ought to be happy to hear it. Or maybe angry, because all the apologies in the world wouldn’t fix her awful past. Had she even wanted an apology in the first place, however irrational it was? She couldn’t remember.
“It’s a little late.” Her voice was rough because of her screaming. Or maybe the dust. Toki blamed the dust.
“I know. Can you still accept my apology? I don’t wish to fight you.”
No. He didn’t wish that, did he? He sounded genuinely sorry, too. But he hadn’t forfeited, either.
Toki blinked, and realized the match wasn’t over.
It felt like being hit in the face with a bucket of cold water. He was just here, barely a few meters away, and now he was standing up, and why the hell had she ever thought that blow up would mean that their fight was done?!
She had said her piece, she was exhausted, but the fight wasn’t over yet. It had just stopped because… because instead of arguing about the hundreds good reasons she had to resent All Might (the lies, the fact he encouraged violence in the name of heroism, the way he avoided taking a stance against any social issue and in doing so silently endorsed discrimination and hero-mania, the way he treated Melissa…), she had blurted out the most stupid, illogical reason she had to him, which was that the world wasn’t fair. She had thrown a tantrum, and now he felt bad about it. Toki’s stomach suddenly burned with shame.
But he had stopped. He had stopped, he had paused. In a real fight you should never do that, because it meant that Toki could use it, could breathe and think and center herself before attacking. All Might was feeling bad, and gods, she had to use it: it would be her only chance, he was too goddamn strong.
Gods, she wanted this fight to finally end. Please, let it end.
She sank in a squat, sitting on her heels to make herself smaller, lowering her head to hide her eyes, the picture of exhaustion. She didn’t even have to fake it. Her hands were trembling, her whole body really, and she felt almost sick. From the fight, from the rollercoaster of emotions, from the horrifying feeling of vulnerability after barring her best kept secret to her enemy. From the pain, too, that radiated from her broken arm like something alive.
But it worked, at least, because All Might didn’t try to approach. He stood there, five meters away, unmoving, hands limps at his sides instead of balled into fists. Toki kept her eyes locked on his hands, and forced herself to think. She had to focus.
“… Me neither,” she finally said, voice low. “But I don’t think the Commission wants a tie.”
She saw his hands twitch, like startle. He had probably forgotten that the Commission was waiting for a winner. Then he said, as kindly as he could:
“You could forfeit.”
Toki didn’t move from her squat, but she shook her head, once. Her gaze didn’t leave his arms, looking for the moment his muscles would tense. Her heart was still beating rabbit-fast. She couldn’t let her vigilance falter, she had to focus. Visualize. Prepare. Because he was going to strike, soon, and she would have to… she was going to…
“No,” she whispered. “I can’t.”
You made your choice and I made mine. She swallowed, and closed her eyes for a second, focusing. When she opened them, she was ready.
“No, she repeated. Her voice shook but didn’t break. “Things needs to change. I have to see this through. I’m sorry.”
All Might sighed, regretful. She saw him close his fists, contract his muscles, take a ready stance. He wavered, because she was still crouched down, probably looking as bone-tired as she felt. Toki took a trembling breath, then staggered to her feet. Her face was wet. Was she crying? She didn’t know. Her head was swimming. Gods, she was so ready for this to end.
Her eyes didn’t stray from All Might’s arms. His bend elbows, his clenched fists, his bulging muscles. Toki didn’t move. He had probably expected her to resume their wild game of cat and mouse. Hitting a sitting target probably didn’t feel right to him, but she could see the moment he decided to attack. To end this stupid duel once and for all. She saw the way his arms stiffened, and she lowered her stance, ready to jump…
“Well, you leave me no choice, then.”
He moved: slower than before, telegraphing his attack to leave her time to escape. He shouldn’t have. He had left her almost a full minute to focus. And Toki’s focus, when driven by fear and desperation and ferocity, was a scary thing to behold.
She rushed to meet him, grabbed both his wrists even if the pain of her injured arm made her want to throw up: and she teleported.
(The thing was: when warping fractions of big things like the air around her, Toki didn’t really have to focus very much. It required strength, but not a lot of thought. Warping part of a building had been crazy, she had never done something like this, but it was her power that had surprised her, not the possibility. Warping part of smaller things was trickier. The human brain had no trouble cutting up big objects into more manageable volumes: you couldn’t truly visualize the length of a blue whale, but you could imagine three school bus lined up behind each other. Mentally cutting up small things was harder. Your brain wasn’t hardwired to do so. Toki had to use her knowledge of cognitive science to make her brain works in the way she wanted it to work. It was hard. For her Warp-Blasts, it had become second nature. But to warp a precise section of something, it required several seconds of focus.)
(But if she had that time, she could visualize the part she wanted to remove as a completely separate object; and in doing so, use Warp-Space on it. She could use it to tear off a door from its hinges, cut the top-half of a car, or, as Keigo had once joked, warp someone’s head in handbag. Someone’s head… or someone’s arms.)
(She had asked for surgeons to be ready in the hospital, after all. When Toki had made that request, she hadn’t intended to be the one who would end up on the operating table.)
His arms neatly sectioned at the elbows, All Might staggered back with a chocked off scream.
Flash! Toki appeared in the hospital dropped the… the things she had in her hands, and no, she wasn’t looking… in the big crate filled with ice cubes. Then, before the startled medical staff had time to scream, flash! she was gone again.
She materialized in front of All Might. He didn’t have any arms. There was blood everywhere. When the man locked eyes with her, his face was gray with horror, eyes almost budging out in shock, his mouth open to yell. Toki didn’t let him any time to understand what was happening. She armed her shoulder and delivered the most violent uppercut she could, making his head snap back.
All Might collapsed, knocked out cold.
Toki stood there, panting. It was done. It was over.
There was a burst of steam around his unconscious body. Instead of an incredibly muscular guy, All Might was suddenly a tall, lanky blond man, not quite skeletal but definitely unhealthily thin, with hollow cheeks and sunken eyes. With his pallid skin and the pool of blood he was laying in, he looked dead. He didn’t look like the Symbol of Peace anymore: just like some guy, injured and weak, laying in the ground with both arms missing.
Toki’s head was spinning. She felt like her brain was filled with static. Stumbling, she sank to her knees, and put a hand on All Might’s chest. Flash! In a blink, they reappeared in the hospital, on the floor of the room.
In the three seconds where Toki had been gone, it was like lightning had struck the place. Everyone was yelling, rushing to put on scrubs, packing medical equipment. The crate full of ice was already being wheeled toward a door labelled “OPERATING BLOCK”. Two nurses pushed Toki away, grabbing All Might to lift him on a cot and push it toward the operating block. They were screaming about his blood type and calling the anesthetist.
In seconds, the surgeons and the nurses were all gone with their patient. There was only a puddle of blood on the ground and an upturned chair to attest of the frenzy that had occurred here.
Recovery Girl, the only person left in the room, tutted reproachingly. Then she hobbled towards Toki, leaning heavily on her cane.
“Oh, child,” she sighed. “This was a cruel way to end the fight. I didn’t believe little Asahi when she said she needed staff qualified for a double arm transplant, and yet… Come on, come on, lay down on the couch. Let me see your arm.”
Toki had jumped through a whole city, tore down buildings, rained destruction on entire streets, destroyed almost five city blocks, and beaten the Symbol of Peace: but somehow, standing up and limping to the couch may be the most difficult thing she had done this day. Everything hurt so badly. She was so tired. Toki collapsed on the cushions, trying not to jostle her injury, and closed her eyes.
She let Recovery Girl unwrap her arm, and start ranting against ‘the violence these days’, or ‘little Asahi’s stupid idea’. Everything blurred up. The heroic nurse realigned Toki’s bones, even thought it hurt like a bitch. Then Recovery Girl offered her a lollipop, for being such a good patient.
“I’m going to use my Quirk to heal you,” Recovery Girl told her gently. “You’ll fall unconscious immediately, because your body need to recharge. But tomorrow, you’ll be right as rain.”
Toki nodded. The President was probably rushing here to debrief, but she could wait until tomorrow. Everything could wait until tomorrow, actually. She was so exhausted. But there was something very important she had to know before. Toki breathed out, and asked weakly:
“I won, right?”
“Yes, child,” Recovery said, looking very tired. “You won. You did well.”
Toki closed her eyes with a faint smile. She had won, hadn’t she? Eleven years later, she had beaten her old nightmare. She was safe, she didn’t need to run, she could stop fleeing that stupid irrational fear that had clung to her since age eight.
She could rest, now.
Notes:
Ahahahaha.
My chapters are usually 23 pages Word long. This one is 25 pages and i had to fight to not make it longuer. There's SO MUCH HAPPENING. Writing fighting scenes is hard. Holy shit i am glad it's done.
Don't mind me i will be lying on my couch to process stuff i guess x)
(Kudos to Does_This_Make_Sense who guessed that Recovery Girl would be there !)
(Also i bet that everyone saw the crate marked "TRANSPLANT" and thought about Toki's heart, ahahahaha. Yeah, the crate was 100% a trap and also 100% Chekhov cocking his gun xD)
And i'll see you in a little over two weeks for the aftermath! In two weeks i will be in the middle of my big annual LARP event so i won't have any internet access (too busy swinging a staff and magic spells at orcs) but i'll try to update on Monday 18th =)
I hope you liked it ! This chapter is the climax of this arc so please don't hesitate to leave me a comment if you found it good or fucked up or if you want to yell at me x)
Chapter 27: Behind the mask
Summary:
Toki woke to a feeling of inexplicable dread, one that was explained immediately when she cracked her eyes and saw her beloved boyfriend leaning over her with murder in his eyes. She shut them again hastily, hoping he wouldn’t notice. She heard his sigh.
“Open your eyes, Toki,” he said sternly. She groaned.
“Can’t. I’m unconscious. Come back later.”
Notes:
I'm baaaack!
I had loads of fun at my LARP. I fought. I ran. I investigated stuff. I met people. I didn't get any sunburns, wich is a small miracle as the heat was suffocating. Anyway, i loved it, and i'm beat. I'm going to spend the next 24h as a slug.But in the meantime, here is the chapter!
Toki has defeated All Might, and passed out from exaustion. Now the big question is: what next?
Also i'm going to clarify that point immediatly : there was a prison break mentionned in the previous chapter, but it wasn't Meteor's prison ! He's still very much in jail x) But can i just say, I freaking LOVE the massive shadow that Meteor casts on this story?! We haven't seen him in the last twenty chapters and still, he has such an impactful presence. I love it.
Anywayyyyyy ! If you notice that there are less spelling mistakes in this chapter, it's thanks to Akuma, my new Beta ! It's thanks to them that you eyes don't bleed reading my stories now x)
Don't hesitate to tell me about the spelling mistakes in the already posted chapters, so i can come back at them and correct them !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
BEHIND THE MASK
When Toki woke up the next morning, she felt bone-tired, but leagues better than yesterday. Her arms didn’t pain her at all, nor did her scrapes and bruises from the fight. She was in a large, comfortable hospital bed, with curtains pulled around it to cut her out from the rest of the room. Not that there was any need to: it was very quiet.
She still woke to a feeling of inexplicable dread, one that was explained immediately when she cracked her eyes and saw her beloved boyfriend leaning over her with murder in his eyes. She shut them again hastily, hoping he wouldn’t notice. She heard his sigh.
“Open your eyes, Toki,” he said sternly. She groaned.
“Can’t. I’m unconscious. Come back later.”
“Toki.”
She turned her head, and met Keigo’s eyes. He was sitting on a chair next to her bed, arms crossed, looking very unimpressed with her.
“We have to stop meeting like this,” Toki joked.
He smacked her upside the head with his wing:
“Stop ending up in comas. Seriously. Or at least, text me before going to sleep. How do you think I felt when I got a email from the President saying that you couldn’t come back to Fukuoka because you were in the hospital?”
“… Sorry. To be fair, I only had a broken arm. I passed out because of Recovery Girl’s Quirk.”
“Yeah, she explained,” Keigo nodded, looking suddenly pleased. “She had to go back to Yūei, but she gave me a lollipop and yelled at the President for being a ‘reckless youngster’. She’s my new favorite hero.”
“Oh, I’m so relieved to hear that. Does that mean that you won’t try to hit on Endeavor when you’ll meet him?”
“Absolutely not. Recovery Girl doesn’t have massive deltoids, sorry, she loses.”
They grinned at each other. Then Toki grew serious:
“How is All Might?”
Keigo jerked a thumb behind him, and Toki realized with a jolt that he was indicating the drawn curtains behind him. All Might was probably in the same room. After all, it wasn’t a very big hospital.
“Hasn’t moved since I got here ten minutes ago.”
But Keigo brought his hands up and quickly signed ‘awake, pretending’. So All Might was only feigning sleep, apparently. Keigo seemed willing to play along, because he continued cheerfully:
“He’s hooked up to plenty of IVs with fluids and nutrients and medicine. Apparently without his Quirk he turns into a skinny guy with major health issues, so the doctors are going ballistic. The President is foaming at the mouth because it’s so much worse than what she thought. But hey, on the bright side, he’s got his arms back!”
Oh gods, his arms. She had… Holy crap, she had forgotten that. Toki must have paled, because Keigo’s smile slipped a little. He awkwardly patted her shoulder.
“Seriously, don’t worry about it. Double arms transplant has been possible since the year 2021. And that was with an arm-donor unrelated to the patient, and a years old amputation. In two centuries, medicine has progressed by leaps and bounds! The operation was barely a formality. Besides, you gave them the easiest arm transplant in the world! It was simply a matter of reattaching his own limbs that had been surgically severed less than ten second ago. No scar tissues to scrape off, no broken bones to realign, no atrophied muscles to reconnect. The surgery only lasted one hour. He won’t even need physiotherapy.”
That was a relief. Toki let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, and felt a knot of tension unwind in her shoulders.
“That’s… that’s good.”
“No kidding. I’m impressed. You cut his arms off, wow!”
Toki tried to shrug. “Well, we’re on completely different levels, so I was kind of desperate. It was either that or warp a spear through his abdomen, and fixing someone’s intestines is harder than stitching up muscles.”
“So gross,” Keigo said with fascination. “That’s not a move you practiced before…”
“No, are you kidding? It’s not heroic at all. The point of heroes is to stop villains alive. I can’t use those attacks in Fukuoka! I knew it was possible in theory because of the mechanics of my Quirk, but I’ve never tried it on a living being before. I was kind of… worried it wouldn’t work.”
“Hum. And does that super-attack have a name?”
“Disarmament,” Toki deadpanned.
Keigo burst out laughing, which had been her goal all along. More realistically, she mentally called this attack Spinching, like in Harry Potter. The reference was pretty self-explanatory.
“Still,” Keigo grinned. “I am absolutely amazed you managed to beat All Might with only a broken arm to show for it. I saw the video before the President destroyed it. It was brilliant. You threw a building at him, holy yakitori, that was impressive!”
“It barely phased him,” Toki grumbled. “He let his guard down because, after the building thing, I started yelling at him about my childhood trauma and it made him hesitate. Ugh, I won because I made my adversary feel bad. That’s pathetic.”
“You won,” he laughed, leaning forward to rest his elbows on her bed. “Who cares if you did it because he slipped up? His missteps are his fault, and they don’t diminish your victory. You won.”
She allowed herself to smile. Yeah. She had won. For a moment, they just stayed there, in comfortable silence.
Toki had slipped her hand in Keigo’s and was almost dozing off, when suddenly she heard a door open. She snatched her hand back just as Keigo righted his chair to sit a whole foot away from her bed, and a second later, the curtain was pulled, revealing Mera-san and the President. Tok brightened:
“Hey guys! What’s up?”
Mera-san waved at Toki, looking faintly amused.
“Morning, Quantum. Fancy meeting you here.”
The President glared at Keigo:
“How did you get in? You’re supposed to be in Fukuoka.”
“I was in the neighborhood,” Keigo replied, trying very hard to look innocent. “Then I thought, ‘hey, what if I went and checked on my partner who’s been radio-silent since her fight with the Symbol of Peace?’ and here I am! Security is good, by the way, but you should really guard the windows better.”
The President pinched the bridge of her nose, looking exasperated. She sighed deeply, then ostensibly decided to ignore him, and turned to Toki. Genmei-san looked tired. But when she smiled, it held a trace of genuine warmth.
“Congratulations, Quantum. It was very well-done. How are you feeling? Recovery Girl said you’ve overused your Quirk.”
“I was close,” she admitted. “But the new heart is holding up right as intended. Nothing more serious than minor chest pain. And now, I feel just fine! Yesterday I was just about to keel over and die, so it’s an improvement. Recovery Girl really worked miracles. What about All Might?”
There was a moment of hesitation, then the President pinched her lips.
“He’s… fine. Or as well as he can be. You saw what he looked like when his Quirk deactivated.” She sighed, and added reluctantly: “You were spot-on in your assessment. He suffered a grievous injury three years ago, as a result of the battle when he went missing for a month, and his health has been worsening as a result. It should have been a career-ending injury, but he continued to carry on. Well, until now.”
Toki couldn’t help but lean forward, feeling morbidly curious. When she asked, it was as much for her benefit as All Might’s, who was probably listening in:
“Who knows about this?”
“In the Commission? Yourself, Hawks since he was snooping around, the medical team, Recovery Girl, Mera-san, the five members of the Commission’s Security Council I had to inform. The video from the drone that caught the end of your fight has been deleted and the information destroyed so it can’t leak. Recovery Girl also told us that Nedzu and Sir Nighteye were aware of the issues since the beginning, as well as the medical team who operated on All Might three years ago. But there shouldn’t be anyone else.” The President frowned: “It’s a good thing you destroyed so many cameras during your fight, actually. The state of our Symbol is catastrophic. If word had gotten around, it would be way harder to manage.”
“Nobody else?” Keigo frowned. “There were a lot of people helping organize this set-up.”
“They were told it was a test designed for Quantum,” Genmei-san replied with a twitch of her lips. “Same thing for the team who investigated All Might’s shorter appearances: they were told that they were only checking a rumor… according to which the Number One hero was knowingly reducing his hours to slowly become a part-time hero. Even the hypothesis of All Might’s injury was kept under wraps.”
Wow. You had to admire the level of paranoia. The President played her cards close to her chest. Toki couldn’t help but be secretly relieved. If there had been even a rumor of All Might weakening, then AFO would have heard it, and… the butterfly effect would come and bite them in the ass.
There was a short silence while they digested that. Before, the idea of All Might faltering had been a risk, and they had prepared accordingly. Now, it was certainty, and… the idea of the public, or worse, villains finding out was suddenly way scarier.
“What’s going to happen next?” Toki suddenly asked.
Mera-san shrugged: “For you, nothing. You have a check-up with the doctor for a clean bill of health, especially concerning your heart, but afterward you can go back to Fukuoka. The Commission is in your debt, though, so if you want a jet-ski or something like that, I’m all ears.”
Keigo sniggered. Toki did, too, although she took a mental note of the offer. She didn’t want a jet-ski, but it would be useful to have such a powerful organization willing to help her out unofficially.
She could ask them to support her application if she tried to be a teacher at Yūei. The idea of teaching had been with her for a while now, but… teaching at hero school hadn’t really been in her plans. But with canon coming closer, it would be a really good back-up plan. Yeah, she was going to remember that…
“What about Mr. America-Vomited-On-Me over there?” she pointed to the side, where All Might was (probably). “You’re not going to take his license and lock him in a hospital, are you?”
“That would be hard to explain,” Keigo added. “Even if you’re tempted.”
The President frowned, but didn’t contradict him.
“I will have to speak with All Might about the details. But, in broad strokes, he agreed to become a part-time hero in a few months, then retire in a maximum of two years. That time would be spent preparing society to thrive without him as a Symbol.”
“Which is going to be something we’re going to have to figure out,” added Mera-san. “The Symbol of Peace is an institution. Changing it requires a delicate touch. The best thing would be, obviously, to not need a Symbol in the first place. Placing the burden of society on a single person’s shoulders is risky. Not only because one person can be killed, but also because this individual can fail, be corrupted, uses their status for personal gain. At least, if the burden rests on an institution, its members keep each other in check.”
Toki nodded in approval:
“Yes, exactly! Besides, instead of being held to an impossible standard, people would learn that teamwork is the key to success.”
“Someone has opinions,” Keigo gently mocked her.
“That’s because I read, bird-brain. Hey, Mera-san, your number is the same, right? Mind of I call you to rant about my ideas of a society without One-Punch Man here as keeper of peace?”
Mera-san’s eyebrows rose slowly:
“Sure.”
“Besides,” added the President, who was watching Toki intently, “if it turns out a Symbol is needed, the burden will probably fall to you. It would be better to build a system you can make work from the beginning.”
“Hey, what about Endeavor?” Keigo protested. “Or the rest of the Top Ten?”
“Numbers don’t always matter. Besides, you’ll probably be in the Top Ten next year, so in three years… One of you will probably be Number One.”
Toki pouted. It made sense, but that didn’t mean she had to like it. Being a Symbol meant becoming some kind of public property, as if your image stopped to belong to you. Thank you, but no. It was hard enough to live her life as it was, with Hoshizora and Icarus and the Discord server and Melissa and the Shinsō…
All those people she loved. All those people she wanted to protect. All of her ideas, her projects, the wonder of discovery and understanding, the beauty of the night sky, the endless fascination of the stars. Sometimes Toki wondered if she wanted too much, if she was too greedy. It felt like she could never hold everything at once in her arms. There was always something falling aside, something falling apart. She couldn’t have strength without giving up freedom, she couldn’t have freedom without giving up safety, she couldn’t have safety without giving up love.
It wasn’t even as if some evil mastermind like the HPSC was forcing her to choose. It just seemed that all of those things couldn’t coexist. Like there wasn’t enough space in her life.
“Oh yeah,” she suddenly remembered. “There’s no micro in Jedha so you probably didn’t hear, but I told All Might about who my father was. So don’t be surprised if he’s curious about you recruiting a villain’s kid.”
Mera-san facepalmed, and groaned. “Did you have to?!”
“It was in the heat of the moment! I also pulled out a Meteor Shower when I flung a building at him, so he would have guessed!”
The President sighed.
“It’s done,” she said warily. “What matters is that you won. I suppose your little revelation is what made him drop his guard for a moment. We’ll deal with it. He’s not the type to try and blackmail you, but if he does, tell me and I’ll set him straight.”
The idea of All Might blackmailing her hadn’t even crossed Toki’s mind. Clearly she wasn’t paranoid enough. And it said something about Genmei-san that she had thought of it almost immediately… Toki nodded, subdued. There was an awkward silence.
“So!” Keigo asked cheerfully after a few seconds. “When can I bring her home? Kameko-san is making me do all the paperwork. It’s a nightmare.”
Toki dramatically gasped. “You didn’t mess with my filing system, did you?”
“Oh, that was what the color-coded post-it notes were about?”
“You didn’t dare.”
The banter was easy and familiar, half-spontaneous and half-practiced for their audience. The President rolled her eyes, and waved her hand:
“I’ll send a nurse to check you, then you’re free to leave. Take it easy for a few days.”
“Of course!” Then, seeing as the President was turning towards the door, Toki added hastily: “And could you tell All Might I’m sorry, for, uhhhhh…”
“Wrecking the shit out of him,” helpfully supplied Keigo.
“Yes, that. Also maiming him. And tell him not to mope about having a deadline to retire, but rather to see it as a chance to plan for future generations. Like a father giving the family business to kids, you know?”
She knew the President would never say it quite like that. But she was hoping she would keep the image in mind. And, well, she was also hoping that All Might was listening in. He wouldn’t take kindly life-lessons from the President, a bureaucrat who was depriving him of his dream-job: but maybe he would listen better to Quantum, the hero who had beaten him.
She had beaten All Might. Wow. It still felt completely surreal.
“I’ll keep it in mind,” the President said neutrally.
She didn’t sound convinced. Probably because All Might didn’t really have a paternal instinct to speak off. He never had a student… He had one sidekick, Sir Nighteye: but they hadn’t spoken in years… and seeing how canon-All Might was a lousy teacher, the idea of delegating or simply taking things slow apparently never crossed his mind.
Did All Might have a family, even? In canon, his parents were never mentioned. He never married, didn’t have a partner… He didn’t have children… The way he treated Melissa, with kid gloves and no intention to let her in the most important parts of his life, spoke volumes about his inability to allow himself to be vulnerable with the people he loved. His role model was Nana Shimura, his mentor, but she had died within what, a year of knowing him? She couldn’t have taught him much. And after that, he’d been taught by Gran Torino, who was as warm and welcoming as a porcupine with rabies.
Yeah. Not carrying the world on his shoulders was going to be hard for All Might, because sharing responsibility, either with a superior or with a student, had never been part of his life. But he would have to learn, now.
He didn’t have a choice. Toki had won their fight.
oOoOoOo
Coming back to Fukuoka was a relief. It was like nothing had happened: patrols and paperwork resumed, business as usual. It wasn’t rare for Quantum to leave for days-long missions so her absence hadn’t raised any red flags.
Toki went back on the streets, switching sidekicks often to patrol with everyone at least once a day. She took a few assignments from Kameko. She joined Mercury for a night patrol to give a hand on one of his current cases.
She joined some of Keigo’s fights. Their synchronization and flashy moves attracting plenty of delighted bystanders, and making their popularity rise steadfastly. She loved when they patrolled together. The fight, their seamless harmony, the banter, the private jokes: but also the little things. How Keigo always lit up when she bought him coffee. How he made a beeline for shiny stuff when they passed through a commercial gallery. How he made sure to keep change, not because he needed to, but because Toki always wanted to give something to every homeless person they passed.
(She sent Mera-san about ten pages worth of ranting about society, order, what peace meant, what heroism meant, what could be done, what should be done. How All Might could step back, how he could see it as a victory and not a defeat, how the media would try to spin it, how All Might could spin it instead. Aaaaand she also sent an addendum, in bold red letter, underlined twice: ‘get him a nutritionist AND A THERAPIST’. She didn’t have much hope about that, but she had to try. Therapy had stigma, especially among heroes: but someone with as much power as All Might needed to get his head out of his ass, reservations about therapy be damned. Anyway… Mera-san didn’t judge. He never did: Toki liked that about him. He just replied that her emails had been saved and forwarded to All Might Agency’s new PR manager, which was a fancy way of saying that All Might had a new Commission’s liaison and that one would see the job done.)
Toki went back to her university classes, too, which made her even happier than being back on patrol. For the last month, since she had been training to fight against All Might, she had skipped classes. Oh, she had a fake note from a doctor, not to worry… but she still had to learn the missed lessons and keep up with the rest of her classmates. This semester they were studying mostly energy: what was energy even, how it related to time, space, and a fuckton of physics, what kind of energy sources were around. It was kind of fascinating. After all, these classes were what had given Toki the idea of teleporting gravity a few weeks ago, as she had briefly talked with Keigo. Still, it was incredibly complicated.
Energy was indissociable from matter, in the end: electricity was the transfer of electrons from one atom to the next, heat was the agitation of atoms altogether, and so on. There was an absence of energy only when there was an absence of matter. In the vacuum of space, for example. But everywhere else, there was. A rock thrown in the air had energy: from his momentum (kinetic energy), from the friction against the air (resistance), but also from the pull of the Earth (gravity). Toki had already proven she could warp something’s momentum: when she warped herself, she always carried her kinetic energy from one jump to the other, which was why she had a special technique of warping her momentum upside-down to slow down before landing, as not to spatter on the ground at terminal velocity. Momentum was just energy, in the end. So why not take some other energy?
Toki’s body was constantly subjected to several vectors of energy: the air pressing down on her, or even better, the Earth’s gravity anchoring her to the ground. Her atoms were pulled toward the center of the planet. What if she tried to warp, not herself, but only that pull? She would be weightless for a second, but her gravity could be warped elsewhere. In a punch, for example. And since Toki weighed something like sixty-five kilos (mostly muscle), it would be like slamming that weight in someone’s face.
The idea was interesting.
But yeah, making it a reality was going to be complicated. Not that Toki didn’t feel up to the challenge, but it would require several hours of studies, and quite a bit of experimentation. Besides, gravity was what anchored her to Earth. It was dangerous to play with it. The surface of the Earth at the equator moved at a speed of 460 meters per second, and the planet was also moving around the Sun at a speed of 30 kilometers per seconds. If Toki suddenly removed the vector anchoring her to this flying moving hunk of rock, she could very well be ejected into space at a speed of… hang on, she needed her calculator for that one…
“What are you doing?” enquired Sunspear, one of the sidekicks on patrol with her.
She didn’t raise her eyes from her phone, even as she teleported mid-jump to reach the next rooftop:
“Trying to calculate the force with which I could launch myself into the Sun.”
“Seriously?” incredulously asked Psyren, the other sidekick. She then blinked, her eyes flashing red, before making a face: “Never mind, I regret asking.”
There was a snicker on the coms, then came Keigo’s voice, amused:
“There’s a bar fight four kilometers North from you, and a car chase near the planetarium. I’m dealing with an attempted bank robbery so I’ll leave it to you, on the condition nobody gets launched into the Sun.”
“Killjoy,” Toki grinned. “I call dibs on the planetarium. Psyren, Sunspear, you’ll be okay with the bar fight?”
“On it, boss!” called Sunspear, already changing direction. Psyren winked and followed him, and Toki took a second to memorize the direction they were taking, before warping to the planetarium.
Business as usual.
The car chase wasn’t difficult to stop. Toki was starting to have plenty of experience with these things. She could warp with cars, yes, but it was kind of dangerous for the people inside to warp a moving vehicle in a different direction. A winning strategy was to warp into the car, remove the passengers, then let the vehicle crash into a wall. Or, alternatively, if there was no space to appear inside… drop the car in a river to stop its momentum, then warp it back on the road. Toki could stop the car by warping it midair, and play with gravity, velocity and friction until the different forces canceled each other out: but it didn’t stop the engine, so when the car was back on the street, it could start moving again.
Unless Toki warped the car back on the street without its wheels, or upside-down, but it required a bit of creative thinking. Some situations were very suited to it, some not. Toki’s approach varied. In any case, it always made for an entertaining spectacle for the crowd.
But there was something far more interesting than car chases to distract Toki. And if she was checking her phone so often, it wasn’t just for calculations.
Today was Yūei's entrance exam.
You could enter the exam either as a free candidate (which was what Izuku Midoriya would do in canon), or as a recommended student. Recommended students weren’t actually recommended by heroes but by the HPSC. So anyone within the hero industry, even if they weren’t heroes themselves, could more or less put down someone’s name as long as they were willing to pay an entrance fee.
Toki had recommended Melissa as her student, and had Kameko sign off the form a few days back. And today was the day. Either Melissa passed… or she would have to pass the normal entrance Exam next week. Or she would become a General Education student, and Toki would have to make plans for her protegee to win the Sports Festival.
She had total faith in Melissa, obviously! She was just… a little tense, that was all.
Melissa hadn’t told her uncle she was entering the exam as a recommended student. He probably thought she was going to try the free exam, and expected her to fail. But the recommended exam was (if Toki remembered canon correctly) a race. And Melissa had rocket-boots. She couldn’t go to supersonic speeds, but she was hella fast. She had a good chance to make it! Really, there was no reason to worry. Right? Right.
Gods, she felt like she was waiting on the graduation of her first child. If that was what parenting felt like, well, she would give it a hard pass. How the hell had she ended up so committed to her friend’s achievement?
Toki checked her phone again. No news. With a sigh, she pocketed it resolutely, and decided to focus on her work for the rest of her patrol. It would be ridiculous to be injured or distracted by news of something she had no control over.
Ping!
Toki launched herself at her phone so quickly she nearly dropped it on the ground.
Her heart jumped in her throat when she saw it was Melissa. She had finished her test and was already texting Toki! Well, of course. Who else would she text? Hitoshi was in class, All Might didn’t know she had taken the entrance exam, and she had no other friends. Well, besides the Discord server, true, but they didn’t know about the entrance exam either. So really, Toki was her only co-conspirator.
She opened the app, heart beating wildly… and then, she grinned.
IT WAS A RACE AND I WON
I’m shaking with nerves I can’t believe I did it
Celebratory dinner tonight at KFC?!
And Toki laughed. Yeah, that was a good plan, actually.
During the rest of her patrol, she kept a stupid grin on her face, and checked her phone every five minutes. Hitoshi had been told about Melissa’s success, as well as the Discord server.
________________
> Moxie: guess who’s been accepted into the Hero Course at Yūei?
> Megamind: You rule ✊
> EndeavorSucks: for real?! Congrats!
> PinkIsPunkRock: YUEI REPRESENTS
> PinkIsPunkRock: but for serious, CONGRATS MOXIE!
< Antares: I’m so proud holy shit
< Antares: I knew you could do it but it doesn’t make it any less awesome!
> PikaPika: Wait aren’t you quirkless Moxie?
> NotOnFire: dude don’t be a dick
> NotOnFire: Congrats Moxie! Give them hell!
> NotOnFire: (also if you could get me Present Mic’s autograph that would be grand)
> PikaPika: I didn’t mean it like that, sorry! I’m just surprised that you went for the top of the food chain right away
> Moxie: well the recommended entrance exam is slightly less biased than the free one, so there’s that. Also, no Quirk can compete with my mechaboots
> Megamind: please don’t call them mechaboots
> Moxie: MECHABOOTS
> Moxie: I didn’t even have to use Bouncy, so it’ll make a nasty surprise for the Sports Festival
> PinkIsPunkRock: ‘bouncy’?
> Moxie: metal frisbee to toss into baddies’ faces bounce-bounce-smash style
> PinkIsPunkRock: …. i see
> NotOnFire: I don’t and I very happy about it
> PikaPika: xDDDD
- Brace yourselves! SpicyWings has joined the chatroom! -
> SpicyWings: Hello everyone! It is I, the coolest bird in the world
> SpicyWings: I’ve been informed congratulations are in order, so: congrats Moxie!
> PinkIsPunkRock: CHICKEN
> NotOnFire: Chicken?!
> EndeavorSucks: CHICKEN!
> PikaPika: Chicken?!?!
> SpicyWings: that is, indeed, my name
> Megamind: … is that…?
< Antares: yep that’s him
> Megamind: holy crap
> Megamind: i mean, nice to meet you mr hawks
> SpicyWings: please i beg you don’t call me that, i’ve just aged two decades just reading those words and i think i’m dying inside
> EndeavorSucks: Mister Chicken
> NotOnFire: Gentleman Of Poultry
> PikaPika: Our Lord And Savior
< Antares: Amen
> Moxie: xDDDDDDDDDDD
> Moxie: Thank you sir
> SpicyWings: THAT’S EVEN WORSE
< Antares: be nice to him everyone
< Antares: today is about Moxie being AWESOME, not about him
> PikaPika: fine, but it’s not the end of it Chicken.
> EndeavorSucks: I hope you’re back for good!
> PinkIsPunkRock: hey, totally unrelated question, but: can we bring new members in the discord now that we have two celebrities out like that?
> PinkIsPunkRock: I mean this discord server doesn’t really have a theme but it started out as a hero analysis /quirk analysis / open forum about societal issues. We do a lot of others things (mainly fuck around) but we still do these things, and I was thinking of inviting someone. But if there’s a risk of slipping about Stars and Chicken…
> PikaPika: not necessarily. We can create a private salon for us to talk about it, and leave the rest of the server open
> Moxie: that would be great, because if you do quirk analysis, there’s a few people from an online forum I know that could be super interested!
> EndeavorSucks: I totally agree
> EndeavorSucks: we’ll call the private salon #StarsChickenConspiracy
< Antares: that’s lame
> SpicyWings: no that’s great
> SpicyWings: it makes us sound like complete lunatics, it’s totally on brand
> Megamind: he’s got a point xD
> PinkIsPunkRock: let the hero of the hours decide! *Moxie what do you say?
> Moxie: I’m totally in favor
> Moxie: also *SpicyWings you’re invited to my celebratory dinner at KFC if you want! It’s in musutafu with *Antares and *Megamind
> SpicyWings: say no more
> SpicyWings: you had me at ‘KFC’
________________
And that’s how, quite unexpectedly, Toki finally introduced her boyfriend to Melissa, Hitoshi, and Mihoko-san.
She had offered to introduce him to Mihoko a while ago, for New Years… gods, it was only three months ago, actually. Keigo hadn’t been ready yet. Or maybe it was simply the context that had been off-putting: having New Year’s Eve dinner with the Shinsō sounded a bit intimidating, when you thought about it. Sitting face to face with your girlfriend’s friend/mother figure for a whole meal, being grilled about what you did in life, wasn’t Keigo’s idea of a good time. It wasn’t Toki’s either, actually. But swinging by while picking up Hitoshi for a dinner at a fast food place to celebrate a friend’s success? That was way more bearable.
So Toki and Keigo both put on their civilian disguises. Toki went as Hoshizora with golden eyes and ribbons in her hair, and Keigo went as someone who wore a cap low on his eyes, and didn’t have wings but carried a large backpack filled with feathers. After their patrol, Toki warped them to Musutafu via a series of quick jumps in the sky. Then they picked up Melissa from her boxing club, and then they went to the Shinsō to pick up Hitoshi… and say hello to Mihoko-san, of course.
To no one’s surprise, Keigo was charming. He had Melissa wrapped around his little finger in thirty seconds. And he pulled all the stops with Mihoko-san, too, complimenting her hair, saying he had heard so many good things about her, and easily chatting about rollerblading even though he had never touched an inline skate in his life.
Go figure. Toki could slip on a social mask if she had too, sure, it wasn’t difficult. But Keigo was just like that, naturally good with people. So easy to like. So easy to love.
It was… strange, but nice. Seeing Keigo, Hawks, so at ease with the Shinsō family and with Melissa, too! Two facets of Toki’s life, that she had thought to be completely separated, suddenly existing together in the same room. It left her feeling slightly out-of-balance, but pleased, too. So many of the people who were precious to her existed on separate planes of existence. Seeing Sachiko in the same room as Kameko-san would be laughable, for example. So Toki would always have to make a choice, to pick someone over someone else: she couldn’t have it all. But they were here, together. And they were getting along!
Well, of course they were getting along. Keigo was very likable. He could make himself completely insufferable, sure, but he could also be utterly charming when he wanted to. And right now, he wanted to. It made Toki’s heart swell like it was going to explode with love and warmth, because Keigo had no real reason to care and to try so hard, except for her. Because he knew she liked those people, and he wanted them to like him too.
Not that it was surprising, really. If Keigo had a family like that, of course Toki would have done everything she could to be accepted by them. She would have changed her hair, her clothes, her speech, anything so they wouldn’t be disappointed, anything that could make Keigo happy about letting her in in such an important part of his life.
But Keigo didn’t have anyone like that, did he? He wasn’t like Toki, who had scattered little pieces of herself in different worlds. He wasn’t like Toki, who was Quantum and Hoshisora and Antares all at once. Keigo was Hawks, only Hawks. The heroic world was his life. It made Toki feel a little scared, sometimes, because heroism was both wonderful and rewarding and… dangerous. She would have felt better if Keigo had something else to come home to.
Well, he had her. But maybe it wouldn’t be enough. Gods knew he deserved so much more. Not that Toki felt inadequate in any way, it was just… It was just sad, that she had so many people who loved her for being Toki and not Quantum, and Keigo only had her. He deserved more.
Maybe it was why Toki was sharing those people with him. So they could see him, and love him too. As a person, not just as a hero. The hero was part of him, but it wasn’t all of him, after all.
But enough with the depressing thoughts. Today was a day of celebration after all. So they chatted with Mihoko-san, they promised to bring Hitoshi back before midnight (Toki even cracked a joke about him turning into a pumpkin), and they left to gorge themselves on fast-food, like giddy teenagers tasting freedom and success for the first time. It was true for Melissa, at least, and her joy was infectious.
It was great. During their meal, Melissa got an email confirming she was accepted into Yūei. They gorged themselves on fries and nuggets, and spammed the Discord with stupid selfies and dumb jokes. The atmosphere was euphoric. Hitoshi and Melissa were slightly starstruck by Hawks at the beginning… Well, of course. They were impressed by meeting a ‘real hero’. For them, Toki had been Toki (the Quirkless girl, the friend, the equal) before being Quantum. For Hawks, it was the exact opposite. But Hawks was just as human as Quantum was! So Toki and Keigo quickly brought them back to Earth by being their usual ridiculous selves and telling hilarious anecdotes about their childhood. Such as the time when Keigo had gotten stuck in a tree! Hard to be impressed by a guy after that.
(Still. Toki had no problem being Toki with Melissa and Hitoshi. But for Keigo, slipping on a civilian mask was harder. Toki hadn’t missed the fact that he hadn’t introduced himself as Keigo, but as Hawks. Nobody called him by his first name but her. At this point, it was like Hawks was his first name, and Keigo was a secret nickname that existed exclusively for her.)
There were still a few weeks before the end of the school year, or Melissa’s entrance at Yūei. They made plans to meet and train. And Melissa promised to talk to her uncle. That was one conversation Toki worried over a little. She hadn’t told Melissa she had fought All Might: if her student told her uncle that Quantum had trained her for months, even years, well… All Might would possibly freak out.
“You’ll have to break the news to him gently,” she cautioned Melissa.
“Why?” wondered Hitoshi, yawning. “Because you’re a bad influence?”
“Well, adults tend to be kind of tense when they learn about their kids hanging out with another adult behind their back. But also because I’ve met your uncle recently and uuuuuuh I didn’t make a good impression.”
Keigo snorted behind his hand. Melissa blinked, then narrowed her eyes:
“When was that? You didn’t tell me!”
“It was last week. And it was confidential.”
“Oh yeah, your uncle is a hero,” Hitoshi suddenly remembered. “Were you on a team-up or something?”
Melissa and Toki had a whole silent conversation just with one look. All Might didn’t do team-ups. He didn’t hang out with other heroes at all these days: his time was too precious.
“Confidential,” Toki repeated. “Let’s just say, and I won’t tell anything else, that I saw him… at his worst. And he’s probably very annoyed at me.”
Melissa paled a little bit. Then she covered her face with her hands, hiding nervous laughter. Toki could understand why. All Might had been so sure his weak form was a secret, but… What was the point of hiding it from his best friend and his niece, who loved him and wanted to help, if he couldn’t manage to keep it a secret from random people?
“Well this is awkward,” said Keigo to break the silence. “Honestly, did you have to put it like that, Toki? In the middle of dinner, even!”
“Well I couldn’t have started with that! I didn’t want to make you super uncomfortable right off the bat, and, honestly, I wasn’t sure how to, you know, broach the subject. We need a secret handshake. Or a code phrase. The monkey has the parsnips.”
Melissa sniggered at their antics, so, goal accomplished.
“I don’t get it,” frowned Hitoshi, looking from one to the other. “Is that code? Just say so if you want to exclude me from this little conversation.”
“It’s confidential!” Toki singsonged. “You’ll know in due time.”
Hitoshi raised an eyebrow. Keigo, too. But Toki didn’t go back on her words. Soon enough, the truth would be out. It had never been a question of hiding All Might’s condition forever. It was only a question of managing the fallout when it happens. If it was after All Might’s death in battle, or if it was after All Might’s forced retirement after Kamino, or if it was after All Might’s peaceful retirement with a strong line of defense to uphold peace: it didn’t matter, it would happen. The truth always had a way to come back and bite you in the ass.
They parted way late in the night, as the KFC was closing: Hitoshi almost sleepwalking, Melissa giddy and exhausted, Toki and Keigo holding hands and grinning like idiots. It was great.
Was this a normal teenage experience? Hanging out all evening eating fried food, chatting about your successes and your anxieties, making big plans for the future? Damn it, Toki had missed out. Oh, well, better late than never.
For tonight, they were allowed to eat, drink, laugh, and be as carefree as they wanted, like the children they never really got a chance to be. They had earned it.
oOoOoOo
Afterwards, time seemed to speed up. Patrols, and fights, and classes, and homework. Spring crashed on them almost unexpectedly, with warmer weather, end-of-terms exams, and a lot of annoyed rants from Melissa because her teachers had ‘let it slip’ that she was going to Yūei… and now, plenty of classmates were approaching her, either to ask her how she had cheated, or to try and win her good graces because now she wasn’t a useless failure, apparently.
Quirklessness was considered a disability. Quirkless people were often unemployed, mocked, rejected. Teachers didn’t take them seriously, classmates barely needed an opportunity to ostracize them, and even sports clubs would fumble excuses to not have to deal with fragile kids. They were discouraged from having kids: in some cases, they were even strong-armed into being sterilized. For the good of the gene pool, apparently. People pitied them, but with a sneer, and a careful, mocking distance. Poor, fragile Quirkless people. Kept at arms length because they were so embarrassing. Better not to associate with them, in case their sickness was catching, after all, right?
There were no Quirkless politicians. No Quirkless athletes. No Quirkless actors, either. But even if there had been, would it matter? Politicians, athletes and actors didn’t have the same visibility as heroes. When you’re different, you desperately want to belong and you look all around for people like you: in books, in TV shows, in evening news, in casual conversation. But all these things talked about heroes and Quirks. For a Quirkless person, it was like the world pretended you didn’t exist: because you existed, but you didn’t matter. It was so destructive, to exist and not be acknowledged.
But now… Melissa was going to be a hero. There were probably plenty of Quirkless people who had wanted the same: but Melissa had been handed this opportunity, and she had taken it. She would prove the world wrong: she would prove Quirkless people mattered. They were still people, just as capable, just as worthy of respect as anyone else.
It was a little too early to celebrate representation, to hope for the disappearance of Quirkless discrimination, to think about protective laws, to imagine speeches and interviews. But all that stuff wouldn’t even be a possibility in canon, because in canon there had never been a Quirkless hero, and… the concept, the hypothesis of a change that big, a transformation that good… wasn’t it mind-blowing? Toki thought it was mind-blowing. She was mind-blown.
Anyways. Life went on. Melissa actually fessed up and told her uncle about Yūei and her training. They had a loud argument then a long, tearful and frankly overdue reconciliation, where he apparently apologized and still managed to tell her it was too dangerous. But hey, saying ‘I have reservations but I won’t stop you because I’ve accepted you’re stronger than I thought’ was a step up from ‘you’re delusional’, so Melissa wasn’t complaining.
And soon after, All Might passed through Fukuoka.
It wasn’t exactly odd. All Might went pretty much everywhere. He was Japan’s hero after all: he popped up all over the place, all year long, chasing villains wherever they appeared. Or wherever they didn’t appear, actually: he had a fondness for Shizuoka’s prefecture even though it was one of the safest areas in Japan, with very few villains thanks to the double protection of Yūei and Endeavor. So it wasn’t out-of-character for him to go to Fukuoka. He had passed through the prefecture multiple times, and he had been the local protector after Shirayuki’s death, years ago. But… he hadn’t been there since Toki and Keigo had become heroes. And since criminality was an all-time low in the city, he didn’t really have a reason to.
Kameko-san commented that it would bring good press to the city, and maybe they could make an All Might-Icarus team-up if they happened to join forces for a villain attack during his stay here. Hayasa-sensei wondered if maybe All Might was tracking down one villain in particular. The sidekicks excitingly reworked their schedule to patrol as many areas as possible, so they could cross paths with the Number One and ask for an autograph.
Hawks and Quantum made eye contact, and carefully abstained from commenting one way or another. They had no doubt about it: All Might wasn’t here for a villain. He was here for Quantum.
“Well, I did corrupt his niece on the path to heroism,” Toki reasoned. “He’s probably going to give me the shovel talk.”
“You also kicked his ass,” Keigo replied, idly typing his report on a burglary from this morning. “He’s probably thinking you’re the next Number One, and wants to take your measure.”
Toki raised her head, alarmed: “Wait, you think so?”
“I definitely think so,” Keigo pointed a feather at her, looking faintly amused, “and if you’d taken five minutes to think about it, you would too. I mean, how would you feel if you were the top of your field in astrophysics for twenty years, then some young hotshot crashes in, absolutely obliterates your research, dumps their family drama on your lap because it turned out you arrested their father ten years ago, forces you to give up your seat as the top researcher of the country, then leaves and apparently completely forget about you?”
“Well, when you put it like that…”
She almost wondered why All Might hadn’t just asked for Icarus agency’s phone number, then scowled. This was the man who had feigned to be asleep so he could avoid dealing with the aftermath of his defeat. Also, from what she remembered from canon, All Might pretended to be tough and all with reporters, but in real life conversations, with students, teachers, or just random people interacting with him outside of heroism… he was painfully awkward. Engineering a ‘chance meeting’ by strolling into her city instead of calling her office was totally the kind of thing he would do.
Crap. Toki sighed, and took a lemon candy to distract herself, munching it pensively to take time to organize her thoughts.
Maybe he was pissed. Maybe he was desperate. Maybe he was in denial. Toki didn’t know if she felt anger (because why the hell hadn’t he stepped down before she forced his hand, and what right did he have to complain?!), anxiety (because what if he yelled accusations at her? She had exhausted all of her resentment, she didn’t have it in her to believe he was the bad guy in this scenario, she was the bad guy!), or compassion (it sucked so badly to have your agency removed from you, and oh, she knew it better than anyone, now). But… she knew that he probably wanted closure after that disaster. Toki had hers, she owed him that, at least.
She sighed, and stood up. Keigo smiled, leaning on his hand and watching her with affection: “Want me to come with you?”
“No,” Toki sighed with regret. She would have loved having him with her. Keigo’s presence always eased her nerves when facing an enemy, but… “If he’s here for me, he won’t come if I have company.”
He nodded, accepting her point. “Well, good luck, then. And you have nothing to worry about! After all, he’s harmless.”
It took Toki by surprise and she sniggered. Keigo beamed, and added cheerfully:
“Just call me if you need a hand.”
“Very funny.”
“I doubt you’ll need me! He wouldn’t dare to yell at someone so disarming.”
“Are you done?”
Keigo grinned, but stopped with the puns. “Alright, alright. I’ll take Psyren with me on the next patrol, to try and not have a telepath in the area when you have your heart-to-heart with All Might.”
Good thinking. Toki smiled in thanks, then moved to the balcony so she could be seen leaving the building for patrol. In passing, she reached for Keigo’s hand and he reached back, just for a brief touch, like a reassurance. There you are. I’ll see you soon. His golden eyes softened.
They didn’t kiss in public, because secrecy and all that, but it wasn’t hard to sneak a fleeting touch, here and there. When Toki left the building, jumping from the balcony and disappearing in a flash of light mid-fall, she had a bright smile on her face.
All Might could come. She wasn’t scared of him.
She started her patrol, staying in the same neighborhood to make herself easily found (which wasn’t an easy endeavor when your favored way of traveling was teleporting). She stayed at rooftop level, as usual, but she waved to bystanders, and didn’t hesitate to get down to help old ladies cross the street, take some selfies with teenagers, help an overwhelmed mom load her car with groceries without losing track of her children, and so on. All the while, she kept an eye out in case All Might happened to pass by.
She didn’t really want to see him. No, screw that: she didn’t want to see him, period. And no, Toki wasn’t mad anymore, she was just- it was complicated. Even if yelling had done her a lot of good, she still felt a twinge of resentment for what had happened. Because All Might had been there, but it had been too little, too late: because she had been a child, a hurt and angry child, and that grudge had been part of her for so long that even after clearing the air, annoyance lingered. And she also felt guilty for yelling. And for injuring him.
And in addition to that, she felt… anxious, embarrassed almost, because what the hell was she supposed to say to him? Not just about the Meteor issue, about the fight, about the injuries: but also about the impact of that fight, the consequences. Toki had beaten him. For her, it was done, but for All Might… it meant accepting he wasn’t strong enough to carry on. It meant accepting to step down, and it was something that he had absolutely refused to do until the very end in canon, even when he was dying, because the simple idea of faltering terrified him. And now the President was forcing him to do it. Because Toki had beaten him.
She still had trouble wrapping her head around it. Not only had she beaten All Might, and survived, but that fight was now precipitating a massive change from canon. It could be for the better or for the worse. It all depended on how people in charge would handle it, how the public would react, how All Might himself would act. There were too many variables. But still, it was a change. It meant that what had happened… what would happen in Kamino, and after… it wasn’t inevitable anymore. Or rather, it was more easily evitable than before.
Toki could mentally pat herself on the back for that one. Shame that no one could know why she felt so pleased about her success.
She was jolted from her thoughts when someone in the streets exclaimed All Might had been seen not far from here. Toki smirked. So she was getting close, then. She continued her patrol, slowing down as much as she could… and, on the next rooftop, she suddenly found herself face to face with Mr. America-Vomited-On-Me, in the flesh.
Well, in the flesh for about two seconds, because he immediately deflated like a balloon in a great explosion of white smoke, leaving behind a tall man with emaciated cheeks and sunken eyes. All Might, or well, ‘Small Might’, smiled awkwardly. Toki stared. He was still toweringly tall, but without his muscles, and his costume hanging from his thin frame, he was way less intimidating than in her memories.
“Good morning, Quantum. I was hoping to have a word?”
Toki felt a little thrown off by his politeness, and shrugged. “Morning. Well, sure, why not. But you could have called Icarus instead of strolling in my city.”
All Might looked a little sheepish. “Well, yes. But I was hoping not to attract attention. It’s sometimes… difficult.”
You don’t say. Toki nodded, and, after a brief hesitation, offered:
“Well, welcome to Fukuoka. Want to sit down? Rooftops are actually a great place to chat. I used to hang out on a lot of roofs when I was a kid.” Why was she rambling? Quick, time to change the subject. “Anyway, there’s a great view and a lot of privacy.”
She sat down on the roof’s edge and shut her mouth. After a second, All Might joined her, sitting carefully an arm’s length away. He looked at her briefly, then lowered his eyes, looking… strangely melancholic.
“I am sorry. About your family. I learned what happened to them, afterwards. I’m sorry I didn’t save them too.”
Toki hadn’t expected that in any form or shape. She swallowed, her throat tight. He was right, wasn’t he? She hadn’t just been grieving the fact that she had a crappy childhood. She had been grieving her family, too. The fact that, despite everything, she had loved them, and she had lost them Anyways.
She had lost them, and it had been her fault. She’d been the one to send the notebook, she’d been the one to start this domino fall that would lead to their arrest. It was her responsibility more than it was All Might’s. Because All Might had just been doing his job. Toki had betrayed her own people.
“My family was broken long before you came along,” she finally said, voice low, looking at her feet. “It wasn’t your fault. We did it to ourselves. You were only the final nail in the coffin.”
“Still. No child should have to go through that.”
“… It wasn’t that bad,” Toki admitted, reluctantly. “I wasn’t happy with them, but they loved me. Plenty of people have it worse. And, well, I ended up in a good place because of it.”
All Might blinked. He looked a little sad, all of sudden.
“You became a hero… because heroes failed you?”
Toki frowned. It made sense, as far as leaps of logic did. But it wasn’t what had happened. She hadn’t become a hero to fix her own past, after all.
“That’s a cynical way to see it. And kind of self-centered, too. I certainly didn’t pick that path because of you.” All Might spluttered, but Toki kept her tone light, making clear it was a joke. Then she sighed: “I didn’t even consider becoming a hero until the Commission offered it to me. They found me, when I was living on the streets. They have a program to sponsor gifted kids and turn them away from villainy. Anyway, I signed up. I didn’t do it because I felt heroic. I mostly did it because I was alone, scared, and they were giving me a way out. If I hadn’t… well, maybe I would have ended up another statistic in child-trafficking. Or maybe I would have been adopted, have a family, study brilliantly, and got my PhD before finishing high-school. Maybe I would have had a normal school experience, no health problems, no injuries or rough training.”
She imagined it, for a moment. Being adopted by the Shinsō family, growing up with Hitoshi. Never having to be berated by Okamoto, never having to be beaten black and blue by Hobo-san, never pushing herself past her limits for Hayasa-sensei. Never having broken bones, never throwing up after training. Being able to go shopping, to buy stupid and frivolous stuff. Going to high-school and not frantically trying to get ahead, but instead taking her time, making friends. Forming meaningful friendships, instead of always hiding who she was with colored contacts and elaborate hairstyles and fake backstories and a studied disinterest for heroics. Maybe she would have been happy. Yes, maybe she would have liked that… but she knew there would have always been something hollow in her chest.
She loved being Quantum. Being with Keigo, competing with him, doing good, helping people. The thrill of car-chases, the exhilaration and terror of big fights, the elation of meeting a challenge. The satisfaction of watching her actions have a meaningful impact on society.
“But I would have been lonely,” she sighed. “Here, as a hero, I’ve met and loved people who understand what I’ve been through, who understand why it’s unthinkable for me to just sit back and do nothing when so much has been lost. Being a hero is both loving and hating this society, the good and the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, and it’s complicated. It’s something you can’t articulate. But I’m glad I ended up here. I’m glad I’ve met these people.”
She realized she had said too much, and shut her mouth. She studied the ground, carefully avoiding All Might’s eyes: she didn’t want to look at him and see what face he was making.
“Anyway,” she continued after an awkward pause, trying for a casual tone. “Meteor probably doesn’t rate your top three of fucked-up missions. Did you really come here to say you’re sorry?”
All Might cleared his throat. For a second, he looked like he didn’t know what to say.
“Well, he’s certainly in the top ten. But even though I am sorry, I also came here because… well, I suppose because you beat me.”
Oh gods, Keigo had been right. Toki turned towards the Symbol of Peace, brow furrowed, immediately on the defensive.
“If you want a rematch, the answer is no.”
“No, no, of course!” All Might laughed, looking slightly uncomfortable. “I am simply… ah. You’ll be number One in a few years, and I just wanted to know you a little better.”
Well, that was new. Toki blinked. She wasn’t completely taken aback, but the idea was still ridiculous, and she didn’t hesitate to say so.
“Me? Number One? Absolutely not.”
All Might looked flabbergasted.
“What?”
“I’ve no interest in being number One,” Toki repeated firmly, “or a Symbol or whatever propaganda stunt the Commission is going to cook. If I’m even getting close to the Top Three, I’m changing my status to underground hero.”
“B-But you don’t think rallying the people is important?”
“… do you think that’s what being the Symbol means?”
They looked at each other with equal puzzlement and incomprehension. Two generations staring at each other above a gulf of cultural difference. All Might was the first to come to his senses.
“Of course!” he exclaimed. “Having a Symbol of Peace means that people feel safe. They know they will always be saved. Villains are frightened and don’t take action. The country isn’t in chaos, at war with criminals and murderers: the country is safe, at peace, and the Symbol is the defender of that peace, shining brightly and giving hope to everyone.”
That sounds optimistic to the point of delusion, and very removed from the current context, Toki carefully didn’t say. I mean, thirty, forty years ago, maybe, but now? Reality was different. All Might couldn't not know that. Or maybe he knew it but didn't ponder the nuance of it? Or maybe t was just that his definition of peace was a relic of the past, too, Toki guessed with dawning realization.
Shit. She hadn’t prepared a speech coming here, and she scrambled for something articulate to answer. She had so many things to argue about. The instability of this status quo, the toxic mindset it gave young heroes, the role of the public, how it didn’t address the root of villainy… Damn it, she should have saved all of her rants to Sachiko on Discord: that would have come in handy right about now.
“Yeah,” she said slowly, “I can see how a Symbol would be useful as a rallying point in time of war. But in time of peace? This time of peace? It’s not the deterrent you imagine it to be. Because… because…” she groaned and massaged her temples. “Alright, let’s not talk about the unrealistic standards given to heroes, how self-sacrifice is encouraged, how justice is getting increasingly turned into a spectacle for the masses, or how punishment never solves problems as efficiently and as humanely as prevention. That’s… that’s a topic for later. Let’s talk about peace.”
She opened her mouth, closed it, and let out a frustrated growl. All Might’s eyebrows raised almost to his hairline.
“I didn’t realize it was such a complicated topic.”
“I have a lot of stuff to say about it,” Toki defended herself. “I’m trying to give you the two-minutes summary and not the six-hours rant. Alright, here it goes,” she took a big breath and tried to organize her thoughts.
“I think you see peace as people united in victory. That’s why you want them rallying. But that is not peace, that’s triumph. It’s great, but it isn’t supposed to be a permanent state. Peace is trust, collaboration, compromise, shared resources. It’s people acknowledging there are problems and working together to find non-violent, productive solutions. Peace is people drafting treaties, crossing borders, finding common ground, building something. Peace is not the overwhelming threat of being pounded into dust if you step out of line. That is not peace, that’s fear. And YES,” she raised her voice, seeing him opening his mouth in protest, “people who are afraid of disturbing the peace can have nefarious purposes, and yes, it’s good that people who want to hurt others are afraid of doing so. But you know what it brings, if the systematic answer to any problem is violence? People start to think that’s normal. A shoplifter who steals because he’s hungry is going to be beaten bloody exactly like a rapist caught in the act. Someone with a mutation or a so-called villainous Quirk who lashes out against bullies is going to be treated like a criminal for defending himself. The lessons people learn from this, the lessons people are learning right now, is that peace means beating the other guy too hard for him to rise up again. But we are not at war. The ones that people want to beat to feel victorious, to justify peace, are not S-class villains. They are just people. The shoplifter who steals to eat, he could have been given a meal, a support system, a way out: but society isn’t interested in that, society is interested in making him fight, because it makes people happy to see the bad guy bleed. Because you taught them it was peace.”
She fell silent, catching her breath and feeling slightly winded. She hadn’t expected to be so passionate about it. All Might looked stricken.
“That… that’s… It was never my intention! And even if it’s true… Villains need to be stopped! Non-violence is all well and good but it can’t always be the solution!”
“I know that now,” Toki grimaced. “And I don’t mean you shouldn’t do anything. It’s good to have warriors when there’s a fight. The problem is when at least two generations become obsessed with becoming warriors when precisely what makes people human should be their capability to resist going into violence. Even when it becomes a necessity, there is no need to glorify it more than it has to be. And when it’s not a necessity, well… thousands of warriors let loose are going to look for a fight. And if they don’t find one, they’ll make one.”
“Heroes don’t make trouble,” he protested, but it was weak.
“Some of them do,” Toki said, and she was thinking about Endeavor beating his family, about Death Arms berating little Midoriya, about a thousand cruel human actions, done by people in power to powerless ones. “But more importantly, they maintain a status quo that hurts people. A status quo that pushes people who don’t feel listened to -mutant-type, people with mental conditions, the rejects, the freaks, people who don’t fit- towards villainy. It’s easy for bad people to recruit villains and groom them into weapons, when it’s the very people who were supposed to save them who ignored them in the first place.”
Tomura Shigaraki’s story had started with AFO. It had begun in the Shimura family home, at the hands of his father. Just as Dabi’s story had started in the Todoroki household. Just like Spinner had embraced Stain’s ideas because society pushed him down, and Himiko Toga had been rejected by her parents because she creeped them out. Villains didn’t appear in a vacuum. They made their choices, true, but sometimes there were people giving them little nudges in the wrong direction.
All For One, yes. But all the evil in this world could not solely be blamed on him. There were also all the bystanders. All the people who could have helped, and hadn’t been interested, because their version of heroism was punitive rather than preventive.
“People shouldn’t aim to be stronger,” Toki said, slowly, as if testing out the words. “Strength is good, but as a society, it’s not individual strength that will make things better. People should aim to be kinder. And you… you inspire them to fight. It’s not a bad thing. But you don’t inspire them to reach out to each other.”
There was a long silence. Then All Might sighed, a long, exhausted sigh that rattled his thin frame and made his shoulders sag. He looked… he looked like an old man whose life’s work had suddenly turned to ashes. Tired, and old, and sad.
Toki hastily avoided his eyes, embarrassed.
“That’s what you meant,” All Might said lowly, voice unsteady. “When we fought, you said… you said I was extoling violence and discrimination, that I stopped people from building a future. That’s what you meant.”
It was entirely possible. To be honest, Toki didn’t remember exactly what she had said that day, it was all… muddy. Too much adrenaline. It made her feel even more ashamed, because clearly All Might remembered it. It had hurt him. He had always done his best and devoted his life to helping people, and all Toki had wanted to do was to attack him with the most painful truths she could find.
“Sorry,” she said, voice small. “I don’t mean to disparage all the work you did. I’m only saying… It’s not a bad thing you’re stepping down. It’s not a bad thing for people to live out of your shadow. It’s good you protected them, but they have to learn to protect each other, too.”
All Might chuckled weakly.
“Thank you. You’re very different from what I imagined.”
Toki frowned a little: “What did you imagine me to be?”
All Might smiled, then. Not the fake, blinding smile he brandished in front of cameras, but something smaller, more fragile and more genuine. It made him seem younger, suddenly.
“I didn’t know, and it drove me up the wall. You were righteous, angry, and dismissive, but also compassionate, protective, passionate. I couldn’t work out what motivated you. It wasn’t glory, or fame, or revenge for your parents, but you were still so determined- I couldn’t understand how you could be who you are now. As Melissa’s teacher, but also as Meteor’s daughter, as Fukuoka’s hero. But I think I understand you a little better now. I always believed that I needed to do everything myself, especially saving people. But now, the urgency isn’t the same, and… I can also save people by making sure they know how to save themselves.”
Toki brightened.
“That’s the spirit! There’s so many things you could do to help people without having to jump around and punch villains. You could speak out against discrimination. Appear at charities, give them money. Join protests! Ostensibly support mutant rights, or decriminalize Quirk use in public, or the popularization of support items as aids for people with disabilities instead of tools reserved for heroes! Uuuuuuuuuuuh if you want to, of course, I didn’t mean to sound so bossy…”
But All Might only laughed. A boisterous laughter, All Might’s laughter, but when it didn’t come from the speakers of her TV, it didn’t sound so grating. It sounded genially amused.
“My niece said something similar,” he smiled, his emaciated face softening. “She holds you in very high esteem, you know.”
Toki rubbed her nape, a little embarrassed:
“Yeah, about that. I didn’t mean to train her behind your back or anything. I actually didn’t know who she was when we met…”
“I know. She told me. It was good of you to support her, when I didn’t. She needed someone in her corner.” He took a big breath. “And thank you for not involving her in our fight, either. I know it would have guaranteed you a cleaner victory.”
Cleaner? Toki wasn’t sure about that. Sure, there would have been less blood, if she had managed to knock him out or force him to make a mistake. But if Melissa had been involved, if Toki had started using personal stuff in that fight, stuff about Melissa, about Quirklessness, about All Might’s own issues and insecurities…
… she wasn’t sure the victory would have been cleaner. Not for her. She felt dirty enough after yelling true accusations. She didn’t think she would have been able to sleep well, afterwards, if she had spat out things with the sole intent to hurt.
“It wouldn’t have been right,” she said, lowly.
“I know,” All Might let out a brief laugh. “But thank you anyway.”
And from there the conversation started… well, not exactly flowing, but almost. It was easy to speak about Melissa and her inventions, her training, her progress. From there they talked about support items, and Toki went on a tangent about how support companies hoarded their knowledge to build stuff for heroes, refusing to share most of their engineering with hospitals to build prosthetics because ‘support items were weapons’. She was very aware of that fact, since her artificial heart was basically a support item instead of just a replacement organ.
Well, the fact that it classified as a support item also allowed the medical staff to blur the lines a little about cloned body parts, since cloning was prohibited: but that was a whole other issue.
Basically, they spent almost an hour talking, starting slow and slowly getting more animated. All Might was bad at talking about himself. Not because he was boasting or anything, the opposite actually: because he had almost nothing personal to say. When asked about his hobbies, or his passions, or even his friends, he floundered. He finally mentioned a detective named Tsukauchi, and of course David Shield, but that was it. It was… kinda sad, actually.
But he was burning with the need to act and help and protect people, even if it destroyed him. All Might was a warrior, but behind the armor he was just a desperately hopeful man. It made Toki feel strangely lost, the last of her preconceptions falling apart all at once.
She hadn’t expected to find a man under the mask. She hadn’t expected to find someone so kind, so fragile, so human.
She especially hadn’t expected to like him, however tentatively.
All Might had a reckless streak in him, a willingness to burn with righteous indignation at the slightest injustice, and Toki was a bit surprised to find that it reminded her of Sachiko. PinkIsPunkRock, social justice warrior. He also violently reminded him of Melissa, with his cheerful optimism. And even Keigo, too, with his self-sacrificing streak. So, of course she couldn’t dislike him. Gods, he never made her life simple, did he?
“I have to go back on patrol,” All Might finally said after a while. “I hadn’t planned to stay here very long.
He was right. They had been there an hour, that was an eternity for a hero. He stood up, standing up and offering her a hand she accepted gratefully.
“Yeah, me too,” Toki admitted while he pulled her to her feet. “But it was nice to catch a break. Maybe I’ll see you next time I’m in Musutafu. Not as All Might, but as…”
She gestured to his skinny form. He looked down, then laughed, as if having forgotten he wasn’t currently in his hero form. When he looked back up at her, he was grinning.
“Toshinori Yagi,” he introduced himself, extending a hand just like Melissa had done a few months earlier when meeting Toki for the first time. “Enchanted to meet you.”
Toki took his hand. She could have introduced herself as Quantum, or as Hoshizora. She could even use Antares, since it was how she had met Melissa, and it was as valid as any of her other identities.
But instead, she smiled and used her true name, the one she had never dared to utter out loud to anyone before. Then one that, eleven years later, she was finally ready to start reclaiming.
“Nice to meet you too. I’m Toki Taiyōme.”
Notes:
Toki absolutely NEVER introduced herself as Toki Taiyome to anyone in the whole fic, so i found it fitting that the first time she does so, it's to the litteral embodiment of heroism.
This chapter raises a few questions, so here they are...
Is AFO going to learn about the fight and All Might's defeat ?
Nope. The HPSC is going to keep a tight lid over this story. As the President said, they were worried about revealing even a hint of the Symbol's vulnerability.Is Nedzu going to learn about it ?
Or more exactly: is All Might going to tell the truth to anyone? Not sure. He will tell Nedzu he was forced to retire by the HPSC, but probably won't tell him how. Nedzu will probably guess there was a fight, of course. But he won't reach the conclusion that All Might was beaten: only that he was impressed.
All Might won't call Nighteye to tell him. However, once he retires, Nighteye is probably going to call him, all huffy and "well FINALLY you're listening to ME, now let's talk about who I think you should give your Quirk to" and All Might is going to hang up on him. Yeah, Nighteye strikes me as a the type to cover vulnerability with agressivity and arrogance, and All Might isn't in the right headspace to take that shit.Did the President ever doubt the outcome of the fight ?
Yes. So much. Like, she knew Quantum was strong. And Toki had told her about her special move, “the splinching”. But to imagine that she was stronger than All Might? Doubtful. That's why the President stacked the deck against All Might (depriving him from rest, spying on him, giving Toki weapons, letting her set traps, etc.). And it's also why she goaded Toki about him, too, right before the match.
The President know exactly how dangerous Toki's new ability is. But she also know that Toki doesn't have the guts to main or kill someone in cold blood. She needed a little incentive.Did the President know about Toki ressenting All Might?
Not for sure. But she knew Toki disliked All Might and that she had issues with what happened to her family, so it wasn't a hard leap of logic to make.Why did All Might remember "Meteor's child" after all those years ?
Because All Might was aware that Meteor's arrest was handled badly (although he thinks it's because he didn't win immediatly, instead of thinking that his use of brute force was the problem). He admits it, it's in his top ten of fuck-ups. But not just because the death toll: because the whole operation was made possible by an anonymous source, a child... and he left them. More than that, it was a child that reached out to Nighteye, and that he failed to save. They never found the kid. And imagine how important that was for Nigheye, discreet sidekick overshadowed by his boss, to be asked personnally for help! Imagine how much he talked about it, how dear it was to him, how gut-wrenching it was for him to fail! Imagine what Nighteye thought afterward, about that child out of the heroes' reach, becoming either a villain or dying in the streets. And now... imagine how All Might felt, with his savior complex: knowing that a kid had given him every tools to succeed, and all he had to show for it was a crumbled building, seventy body bags, and a missing child report.
So yeah, All Might remember Meteor's child.
Was All Might going all out against Toki during their fight ?
No. If he had gone all out like Toki did, she would be dead. There's no question about it.
All Might was holding back because he didn't want to hurt her. He's VERY AWARE that he could snap her spine like a toothpick. But he was being pushed a lot, and so, he was straining. That's why he constantly tried to make her forfeit, pressing her to end the match. He could feel he was on the verge of deflating like a sad balloon animal!
And being pushed, pushed, pushed... he slipped when he broke her arm. It wasn't intentionnal: he wasn't thinking, just reacting. That's why he let go so quickly, afterward. He was startled by her scream (All Might isn't used to hurt young girlS, so it's an understandable reaction) but also by the fact that he had used more force than he thought.
He also didn't hesitate to pause the fight and lower his guard when Toki started yelling, because he really needed a breather. So congrats on Toki for pushing All Might further than anyone since AFO probably!
Also, did you guess ? This arc isn't called "the All Might arc" because Toki fights him. It's called "the All Might arc" because she befriends him.
See you in two weeks for the next chapter !
Chapter 28: Melissa's Sports Festival
Summary:
As soon as Melissa had started her classes, Toki had given her a special assignment: watch all of her classmates, befriend them, find out all she could about their Quirks, and prepare to beat them. Melissa’s Quirklessness hadn’t been publicly revealed outside of Yūei, yet… but people talked. There were already rumors of someone undeserving in the hero course. Someone with no Quirk, taking the righteous place of a Quirked person. This needed to be answered right now, before it got out of hand. The Sports Festival was how young students proved themselves to the world: if Melissa’s performance was anything less than perfect, it would be used against her. She had no choice but to be awesome.
Ideally, she would take first place. It was the goal. But Toki would settle for second or third. As long as Melissa secured a place on the podium, as long as she crushed all the other hero students (and the one hundred and sixty other Quirked students who would compete too), then it would be enough to prove she deserved her spot.
Hopefully.
Notes:
This chapter was originally titled "Yūei's Sport Festival", but since there had been Toki's Sports Festival already, and later there will be Midoriya's Sports Festival... better to make a clear distinction xD
Anywaaay! Let's go ! =D
EDIT 15/08/2022
The chapter 11 and 12 were updated ! That mean they were fully rewritten, and are both completely different! That's why you have an alert for an update on the 15th ^^ Please go check those out ! =)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
MELISSA'S SPORTS FESTIVAL
One morning, Toki and Keigo entered their office after patrol to find Kameko already here. By itself, it wasn’t surprising. The catch was that she was standing up on Toki’s desk. Like, shoes and all, tablet in her hands, standing up right between the computer and the candy bowl. They stopped in her tracks, and Toki blinked incredulously:
“What are you doing?”
“I work here, you know,” Kameko replied with great dignity. “I can stand wherever I want.”
There was a beat of silence. They looked at her. She looked at them. Then Keigo grinned.
“Alright. Where’s the spider?”
Kameko’s regal confidence crumbled immediately.
“It’s on the couch. Please get it for me, please.”
Being a hero also meant being a human shield against arachnids, apparently. Sniggering, Keigo took a plastic cup from the water fountain, a sheet of paper, and captured the beast. Toki made a face. It was a big, hairy thing, and she shuddered when her boyfriend tossed it by the window.
“My hero,” smiled Kameko, gracefully sliding to the floor. “Please don’t tell Hayasa-san, he would never let me live it down.”
“Not to worry, this is prime blackmail material. I’m not sharing it with anyone.”
Kameko stuck her tongue at him.
“Aren’t cats supposed to eat spiders?” Toki asked curiously.
“What?! No, gross! I’m human, I wouldn’t eat that!”
“It wouldn’t be that weird, even for a human person. I read that there’s a popular dish in Cambodia with grilled spiders.”
“Eww,” she shuddered. “Why would you tell me that?”
“I heard that if you do it well, the little hairs on their legs are caramelized.”
“Please stop.”
“Crunch crunch,” Toki said mercilessly.
Yeah, a normal morning at the Icarus Agency. They were all professionals and good at their jobs, but they were also young. Hayasa-sensei was the only stick in the mud here, and even he didn’t try to restrain their antics.
You could bet anything that someone was going to find spider-themed candies very soon, to leave them conspicuously in the breakroom. Probably this very day, if the way Keigo was sniggering was anything to go by.
“Anyway,” Kameko began once the disgusting topic of caramelized spiders had been abandoned. “Did you look at the CVs I sent? We’re going to need two more sidekicks, maybe three. With the rate we’re progressing, we’ll be in the Top Ten at the next Billboard Chart announcement.”
“Do you want someone to guard the agency against spiders?” Toki asked innocently.
Kameko ignored the jab. Keigo snorted, and sat at his desk, spinning twice in his chair before leaning back dramatically and waving at Kameko’s tablet.
“Come on, show us the sidekicks. Let’s get it over with. Do we have someone who can fly? That would be awesome.”
Toki lit up: “Oh, yes! We could patrol so much faster!”
Kameko raised her eyebrows, looking smug.
“I considered it. But Hayasa-san said that we didn’t need, and I quote ‘someone else to enable your unnecessary acrobatics’. Actually, he specifically said that we needed people with experience, ideally middle-aged, to counterbalance the youthful enthusiasm of this agency.”
Well, that was pure nonsense. Toki gasped indignantly, and Keigo clutched his hands to his chest, looking betrayed.
“Hayasa-sensei said that?!”
“You have to admit he has a point,” said Kameko.
“He does not!” Toki exclaimed hotly.
“Last week you and Ocelot found a large puddle in a parking lot. To determine if it was water or gasoline, you snatched a cigarette from the mouth of some unsuspecting passerby and tossed in.”
“Well, in my defense, the fire was a big clue pointing towards gasoline.”
“There were more ways to tell, Quantum. And you,” she turned towards Keigo, who was cackling like a deranged witch and immediately straightened when the cat-lady rounded on him, “how did you get banned from the local Scrabble club? You’re not even a member!”
“Uh… I invoke the right to remain silent?”
Toki grinned from ear to ear and threw him under the bus: “We joined a game last week. But I’m better a English than he is, so of course he was gonna lose. The added theatrics were just for fun.”
Kameko looked like she was already regretting asking, but curiosity was too strong.
“What added theatrics?”
Toki’s grin widened. “Oh, you know. Someone put ‘A’ down to spell ‘A’. Then Hawks put down his ‘T’ to spell ‘AT’. Then I added to his ‘AT’ to spell ‘BIOSTRATIGRAPHIC’…”
“… and then I flipped the board,” admitted Keigo with a grin.
Kameko hid her face in her hands, sighing as if exasperated. But Toki could see her shoulders shake with repressed laughter.
Icarus was famous for its success and speed, true, but also because its heroes were fun. They helped people and escorted kids to school, but they also had a good laugh when they could. Nothing that would cause disturbances or property damage, obviously, because they were responsible… but yeah, they would never have a goody two-shoes public image. It was their brand. Hawks was the carefree jester, and Quantum the playful optimist.
“Well your new sidekicks need to be a calming influence, so you better be ready,” Kameko snorted, shaking her head with amusement. “Here is the list…”
She sent it to their computers, and Toki sat down to scroll down the various CVs. They had interesting Quirks. Most of them also had plenty of experience. They came from coalition-style agencies, mostly, but some had worked for more typical agencies, under other heroes, which had probably given them a more solid experience.
None of them could fly. Too bad. Toki discreetly made a note to look into flying heroes in need of a job. Sure, now they needed a middle-aged sidekick, but they would need to hire more eventually. Pretty soon, actually: considering how fast Icarus was rising, they needed more hands. They were already technically understaffed! The only reason they managed was because Hawks and Quantum did overtime, and Hayasa-sensei basically lived here full-time.
Speaking of which, they should move Hayasa-sensei from a sidekick position to a secondary hero position. Firstly because he deserved the bump in pay. Secondly because that would allow him to have his own sidekicks. He already did a hero’s job, with the number of hours he patrolled. And since he dealt with the underground side of things, he faced more dangerous villains… Toki would feel better if he had some support.
While Kameko continued chatting about sidekicks, with Keigo teasing her about spiders from time to time, Toki let her mind drift, absentmindedly watching the cherry blossoms drift in the streets below.
Almost two months had passed since Toki and All Might’s encounter. It was now the end of April. Time flew.
And in a few days, it would be the Yūei Sports Festival.
Melissa’s Sports Festival. Just thinking about it, Toki felt jittery and over-excited at once. It was almost as nerve-wracking as her own Sports Festival. Although her goal had been to not be noticed, and Melissa’s goal was the exact opposite.
Melissa was in class 1-A. Just as Toki had expected, her teacher was Shota Aizawa. Melissa didn’t know it was Eraserhead (of course, he wasn’t a well-known hero) but Toki knew, and it made her grin like a lunatic. Obviously Aizawa was as fond of mind-games as he was in canon, because he had expelled four people within the first week. Melissa wasn’t among that number, fortunately. She had gone to Yūei prepared to face asshole teachers, after all, with plenty of support items hidden on her person, the syllabus almost completely memorized, months of training under her belt, and balls of steel. When Aizawa had tried to push her around, she had met him head on, staying calm and collected but telling him to his face that she had plenty of experience with teachers who wanted her dead, and that in this aspect, she was better prepared than most of her classmates.
Apparently, it had made Aizawa uncomfortable. Maybe he would calm down. He… probably hadn’t expected a student to so openly distrust him. From what Toki remembered from canon, Aizawa was an asshole teacher (and yeah, Toki had opinions about that!), but he really wanted to protect the kids, and to have their trust. To have a child under his protection take his tests as a sign of real hostility had probably been a big red flag. In any case, he was still a harsh teacher, but he hadn’t singled Melissa out even once since that conversation.
Also Nedzu was probably investigating Melissa’s middle school. Ah ah. Toki hoped he would find plenty of dirt and show these assholes some karma.
Anyways. The Sports Festival was just around the corner, and Toki dearly hoped her preparations would be enough. As soon as Melissa had started her classes, Toki had given her a special assignment: watch all of her classmates, befriend them, find out all she could about their Quirks, and prepare to beat them. Melissa’s Quirklessness hadn’t been publicly revealed outside of Yūei, yet… but people talked. There were already rumors of someone undeserving in the hero course. Someone with no Quirk, taking the righteous place of a Quirked person. This needed to be answered right now, before it got out of hand. The Sports Festival was how young students proved themselves to the world: if Melissa’s performance was anything less than perfect, it would be used against her. She had no choice but to be awesome.
Ideally, she would take first place. It was the goal. But Toki would settle for second or third. As long as Melissa secured a place on the podium, as long as she crushed all the other hero students (and the one hundred and sixty other Quirked students who would compete too), then it would be enough to prove she deserved her spot.
Hopefully.
Anyway, Toki had spent every week-end coaching Melissa on Quirk analysis. She hadn’t analyzed the Quirks herself, sadly. She didn’t want to do the work for her student, and she shouldn’t, either: it was Melissa’s trial, and she had to do the job by herself. Otherwise, it would be cheating. But well, just as Quirked students accepted support items for pro, Quantum was fully entitled to give support advice to her little kōhai.
Anyway… The Sports Festival started soon. Melissa was as prepared as she could be. She had plans, contingency plans, secret weapons, and an artillery with enough fire-power to level a small country. She had friends, too. There was a girl with an electric Quirk and a boy who could turn into smoke, and a few others she was on good terms with…. So yeah, she was far from isolated.
Really, Toki needed to relax. She wouldn’t be able to attend the show, anyway: she had too much work to do in Fukuoka.
Well, she didn’t have more work than usual. It was just that she had started working on her Master’s degree, and it was hard. Toki was pretty sure one of her teachers had it out for her. He made a point to constantly ignore her in class and it pissed her off. It had only been a month, but his disdain was already obvious. Damn it, it had been a long time since Toki had to deal with a dickhead for a teacher. Frankly, she could have done without it.
But well, besides this little hiccup… Not much had happened in the last weeks. Toki hadn’t really kept in touch with All Might… or rather, Toshinori Yagi… but not because she avoided him. They were both really busy heroes. Even with the Commission making sure he didn’t exhaust himself, All Might had a very busy schedule.
He was still chasing villains all day long, but now he had slowed down, using part of his time to show up at fundraisers or charities, and give interviews. He had also (or rather, his new HPSC manager) taken an interest in his agency. He hadn’t hired any new sidekicks but there was a load of secretaries, administrators and the like. They coordinated appearances, managed his social media, and were getting in touch with other heroes to share intel or offer advice. Nobody dared to say no to the Number One, after all. Using All Might’s halo of glory, his agency was slowly easing others into the idea of cooperating. And not just in the field. If All Might quietly asked Best Jeanist to please keep an eye on a designer who spewed Quirkist rhetoric, well, it wasn’t a villain fight, only a withdrawal of public support and few pointed comments on social media… but it was enough.
Of course Toki didn’t operate under any illusion that all this was All Might’s idea. He probably had been saddled with a very good public relation’s manager. She wondered who it was. The HPSC was a large organization, but not that large when you took in account the number of heroes they managed. And there weren’t a lot of people with the skills to prepare All Might’s retirement.
Anyways.
It was strange to… not hate All Might anymore. To not hate anyone anymore, really. Meteor, All Might, society in general. Toki had made her peace with all the people and events that had hurt her in the past. When she had been a child, she had thought that resentment was a core part of herself. It didn’t fester like a wound, but it was still here, cold and hard, something to lean on when she needed an extra-motivation to move forwards. Because what had happened was unfair. It made her angry. She was right to be angry, damn it. She had worked hard for this anger, to love herself and value herself enough to be furious on her own behalf.
And in the span of a few months, it had all been smoothed over. She had forgotten her rage, and when she had remembered it, it was gone. Meteor, in prison but being consulted because he was valuable, that was unfair, wasn’t it? It had pissed her off. And still, months later, she had just… moved on. It mattered, she still had feelings about it: but it didn’t matter enough to make her linger. And All Might… She had forgiven All Might. She had screamed at him, hurt him. But her anger had been hollow, in the end.
She had blamed him because she had needed someone to blame. But what had happened couldn’t be put on one man’s shoulders. It was Toki who had given the Crew’s location, it was Meteor who had killed people, Sayuri who had helped him, the Crew who had followed him, the cops who had failed to arrest him, the heroes who had come charging instead of using sleeping gas. So many things had gone wrong, but it wasn’t All Might’s fault.
Blaming him has been a convenient way to avoid thinking about how much Toki herself was to blame for that disaster, too. Stopping the Crew had been the right thing, she knew that. But she had loved those people. She had wanted to stop them but she hadn’t wanted to hurt them, and when she had sent that notebook, she hadn’t… she hadn’t thought it through. She hadn’t weighed the consequences; she hadn’t imagined how bad she would feel.
Years later, it still haunted her. She had stopped counting the poems she had written about it. Horror at her own actions. Despair about what they’d brought. A cry for forgiveness she didn’t fully think she deserved.
Mother,
i have pasts inside me
i did not bury properly.
Some nights
your daughter tears herself apart
yet heals in the morning.
It had been right to want to stop them. But… it had been awful to hurt them. And Toki knew she would do it all over again, and still, she was… she was so ashamed. Her mom was dead, her dad in prison, her family destroyed, and she had done that. It had been her fault. Guilt and shame and horror burned like acid in her stomach.
She had been afraid of being found out by her father or his allies, when she’d been in Yūei. Maybe part of that fear had been guilt. She understood why they couldn’t forgive her. She wasn’t sure she would ever forgive herself.
When she had been younger, Toki had written so many poems about feeling helpless. About feeling weak. About wanting to yell at the world. About being angry. It had never gone away, this unarticulated frustration about the state of things. That was why she was a hero, in part. Because there were messes that needed to be cleaned up.
She still wanted to do good in the world, of course. But it had taken her years to realize that looking for a guilty party didn’t really solve anything. The only way was forward. There was a kind of nameless anger in that, too. Something she couldn’t quite put into words.
At the trial of god we will ask
why did you allow all this?
And the answer
will be an echo:
Why did you allow all this?
There was no convenient scapegoat. It would have been simpler. But no, the anger that Toki had thought crystalized had turned into smoke once she realized it was directionless. It should have been good. It was good, in a way. She felt lighter. But she also missed it, a little.
Not the rage, not really. But the vindication, the righteousness. The feeling of a burning fire in her heart. She still had many causes to fight for, but none of them were as personal as her own resentment.
But that resentment had died, like embers going out. It left something hollow in its place. Shame, regret, shock. Sadness. But having experienced grief and loss before, Toki knew it would pass. She would find something better to fill her heart with. Friendship, and passion, and curiosity. She was a Ravenclaw after all, and going after new subjects of interest was kind of her thing.
She would survive this. Somehow she always did.
oOoOoOo
Patrolling while watching the Sports Festival was actually harder than Toki would have thought. But hey, Present Mic gave good commentary, so Toki could follow the action with it, and only glance at her screen from time to time.
Three events. One big elimination round, then a team battle, and then a tournament. Toki had coached Melissa as well as she could. But now, she could only wait and hope it would be fine. After all, it wasn’t the Sports Festival from the canon-story (it was three years too early) so she had no idea what Yūei had in store for their poor students.
So here Toki was, patrolling with Psyren and Tyto, with a live-commentary of the event in her ear.
It was beginning.
“AAAAAAAAND NOW FOR THE RULES!” yelled Present Mic in her earpiece, and hearing his excited commentary threw Toki back to her own time in Yūei. “Everyone has a ball, everyone has a target on their chest. You can guess where it’s going… It’s gonna be a FREE FOR ALL TAG BATTLE! YEAH! And oh boy it’s gonna be intense! No second chance here: if your target is hit, then YOU’RE OUT! The goal is to stay in the game as long as you can! As long as you’re still in, you’ll continue to earn points every second! GOT IT? But if you get tagged, little listeners, you can still add to the challenge… Just because you’re out doesn’t mean you can’t keep having fun! It’s a FREE FOR ALL! Battle royale style, one of the best hits this season! So keep tagging your opponents, there’s no rest for the wicked! The time limit is thirty minutes!”
Toki snuck a glance at her phone’s screen. She was following one of the channels broadcasting the event, and the camera zoomed in the students, who all had little circular targets, bright green and faintly luminous, fixed to their chests. Everyone also had a small foam ball in hand, just as Present Mic had said.
Toki couldn’t see Melissa in the crowd. Damn it. She put her phone away.
“BEGIN!”
In her earpiece, she heard a buzz… and immediately after a cacophony of yells, shrieks, explosions, and all the noises accompanying a battle between Quirked students eager to prove themselves.
Present Mic continued his commentary, enthusiastically calling out the students who had started with massive attacks. Oh, someone could control snow, apparently. Toki tuned him out. Her police communicator crackled to life to report a robbery downtown, and she redirected her patrol accordingly, warping there to deal with the thieves before getting back to her sidekicks. During that time, about half the competitors had already been eliminated, and Present Mic was chattering a mile a minute, absolutely delighted with the overpowered moves the kids were showing.
It was now ten minutes into the first event, and there was no word about Melissa yet. Toki got back to her team, then snuck another look at her phone. She thought she saw a glimpse of her, alternating between launching her shield like a frisbee to knock around her opponents, and hiding behind it. Like a Captain America with long blond hair, a purple shield, and huge mechanical boots.
“What are you watching, Quantum?” Psyren inquired curiously.
“Oh, nothing! It’s just Yūei Sports Festival.”
“Right, it’s today,” the young woman realized. “Looking for a future sidekick?”
“Of sort,” easily admitted Toki. “There’s an engineering genius in the hero course this year, and I really want to see her support items in action.”
“Oh? What’s her Quirk?”
It wasn’t an illogical question when inquiring about a hero student and future sidekick. But it was still annoying.
“Nothing that would help her win the tournament,” Toki evaded. “It’ll all boil down to her inventions and how good they are. And really, what better place to test support items than against hundreds of people using their Quirk at full power?”
Behind them, Tyto nodded gravely without a word. Psyren looked thoughtful:
“Because even in real life, you would rarely face off with hundred opponents with different Quirks… yes, I can see your point. It’s a simulation of a really complicated villain fight, in a way. If her support items beat that, they can beat anything.” She paused, then frowned. “But neither you or Hawks really use support items.”
“True,” Toki acknowledged. “We’re both versatile enough to not really need it. That doesn’t mean it’s something we should discard. And if not for us, maybe for other heroes.”
“Like, for team-up?”
“Maybe. I was mostly thinking in terms of individual ameliorations. Most heroes have one thing they’re good at, and they’re not very adaptable. It’s like…” Toki frowned, searching for the right words. “Alright, do you know about something called Quirk Fixation?”
Psyren shook her head. Tyto, who was older and more experienced, didn’t. Go figures. It wasn’t exactly into the manual ‘Heroic 101’.
“It’s when people, well, heroes, get so fixated on how to use their Quirk to solve a problem in a way they’re good at, that it doesn’t cross their mind to try another way. So heroes won’t engage with situations where their Quirk doesn’t apply.” Like the canon fight where the Sludge villain had taken Bakugo hostage, and the heroes had just stood by and whined that they didn’t know what to do. But well, that hadn’t happened yet, so Toki racked her brain for another example. “Like… Hmm… That fight between Endeavor and the spiky villain last month, you know the one, where Endeavor waited outside until the villain exited the gas station to start the fight? Well, that’s an example of Quirk fixation. Endeavor is two hundred kilos of muscles, and the spiky villain, gasoline or not, was like seventy pounds soaking wet. He should have turned off his flames, walked in, and slammed the guy’s head into a wall. The problem would have been solved in two minutes, instead of having to wait, with hostages, and the accomplice nearly getting away. But it didn’t cross his mind, because people don’t always remember there’s Quirkless solutions to Quirked problems.”
To be fair, it wasn’t a problem exclusive to heroes. It was wired into the human brain. When people had a hammer, then they went looking for a nail. If they found a screw, then they didn’t know what to do with it.
“And that’s why lots of heroes fail to adapt to situations outside their own specialized wheelhouse,” she continued. “Having support items means having more options, and it helps thinking outside the box.”
“So you’re hoping this engineering genius can makes support items for the heroes you team-up with, so they become more versatile?” Psyren thought out loud.
Toki paused.
“Well. Yes. But also, I want to see a hundred hero students flounder when someone beats them up with nothing but support items. It would be a lesson in humility… and also very funny.”
In her ear, Present Mic continued his commentary, yelling about such or such student’s particularly audacious attacks. One of them had created an avalanche of snow. Another seemed to be able to repel opponents. There was a guy with a fire-whip, somehow. A girl who had apparently made a crater in the arena, although it was unclear how. A boy with some sort of telekinesis and a totally ruthless streak, who was rampaging across the arena like a bull. The students had spectacular Quirks, as expected. Still no mention of Melissa. It has now been fifteen, no, nearly twenty minutes. Not much time left. Then suddenly Toki caught a few words and immediately increased the volume of her earpiece, snatching her phone back to try and look at the screen…
“… ganging up against her, but she managed to take them all out with that SPECTACULAR MANOEUVER, yes, it seems her shield is as good at defending as it is at attacking! It’s Melissa Shield from class 1-A who FINALLY managed to take down Kinzoku and her magnetism-controlled ball! Nice going! Look how she’s controlling that thing, how is she doing that?”
And yes, that was Melissa on screen. The video repeated the scene a little slower, showing Melissa attacked by four people at once, but taking them out like skittles in a bowling alley: her shield bounced from one another with perfect accuracy, its last hit sending it right into Melissa’s waiting hand. It looked almost like telekinesis. But Toki knew it was actually just calculations and geometry, like when playing pool.
Melissa’s target, fixed to her chest, was still green. Almost all the others had red targets, meaning they were eliminated. The losers were banding together to attack the powerhouses and drag them down. Melissa had noticed: Toki saw her slip away, avoiding the fighting and fading in the chaos. It wasn’t very hard. The arena was in complete disarray, with people running and hitting and screaming, lots of smoke, and hunks of rocks, ice, snow and goo everywhere.
Present Mic roared that there were only ten minutes left before enthusiastically pointing out that a mud-manipulating girl was now facing the snow-controlling guy, and gleefully commentating the play by play of their fight. There were less than fifty participants remaining un-eliminated.
“You seem confident she’s going to win,” Psyren noticed with a smirk. “But isn’t it a risky bet, if your engineer doesn’t have a combat-related Quirk?”
“You don’t have a combat-related Quirk, technically. And Tyto either.” Toki replied a little sharply.
Psyren looked taken aback, then sheepish. But well, she wasn’t wrong. Toki forced herself to loosen her shoulders and continue in an even tone:
“She can handle it, considering her opponents’ level. It’s true for real life, too. Most villains we run into are somebody with an extra limb or too many eyes, and you don’t need a flashy Quirk to deal with that. It’s only once you start getting into the top twenty or so that you’re dealing with the supervillains, and even then… as big a stink as the news likes to make about it when one shows up, there aren’t that many.”
Toki had been in the Top Twenty heroes for a while now (well, since the last Billboard Chart half a year ago) and she hadn’t really fought any supervillains.
Psyren shrugged, conceding the point, and patrol continued. Soon enough, Toki’s attention wandered back to her phone… and Present Mic announced the end of the festival’s first event. Quickly, Toki glanced at her screen. The names and pictures of the students who would make it to the next round were displayed, one by one. There were only thirty-four ‘surviving’ competitors after the game of tag, so the higher scorers among the losing ones were selected too, making it forty students moving to the next event.
With a wince, Toki noted that Melissa was among them. She had passed, but by the skin of her teeth.
Well at least she was still in the running. Toki increased the volume in her earpiece to listen to Present Mic’s exuberant announcement:
“And now the Second Event! It’s going to be… KING OF THE HILL! But with a twist!”
Well apparently children’s games were this year’s theme. Toki glanced at her screen. Cementos had stepped into the arena and was building four structures, at equal distance from each other. Each about three meters high, supporting a platform barely large enough for four people to stand together.
“The game is simple! There are four hills. To win, YOU NEED TO BE ON ONE OF THEM WHEN THE GAME ENDS! You’re allowed to push, shove, toss and eject your competitors away from the hill anyway you see fit, but careful! You can’t damage the structure or you’ll lose points! But, and HERE IS THE TWIST…. It’s also a TEAM EVENT! Yes, little listeners, you’ll have teams of three to four people. Your goal is to have YOUR WHOLE TEAM above ground when the game ends! Is that clear? GOOD! Now, little listeners, your team will be randomly selected in five minutes, so please head to the center of the arena. Once you’re given your team, you’ll have five minutes to confer before STARTING THE GAME!”
Toki tried to see Melissa, but the camera was panning out and showing the arena rather than the kids. Too bad. She frowned at her phone before shoving it in her pocket to resume her patrol.
They were still traveling through rooftops but Toki caught a sudden move in the street below, warped there in a flash, grabbed a purse-snatcher by the collar and slammed him into the sidewalk, rescued the purse her attack had sent flying, then politely gave back the bag to its grateful owner before handlng the purse-snatcher to two police officers who were running towards her. Then she warped back on the roof, catching up effortlessly with her sidekicks. It had been less than thirty seconds.
“Why don’t you go there?”
It was Tyto, with his hushed voice that sounded like an owl’s hoot. He rarely spoke, and both Psyren and Toki blinked in surprise.
“To see the Festival in person?” Toki clarified. Tyto nodded, and the young woman frowned pensively. “Well, I still have to finish patrolling.”
“We’re almost done, and you can warp anyway,” Psyren chirped in, “so it’s not like you have to book a four hour long plane flight!”
“Well, it’s true, but… a hero’s work is never really done, you know!”
“Aw, come on! Each day is precious, but that doesn’t mean each day has to be productive, boss. Go watch the Festival!”
Toki snorted, and when they jumped on the next rooftop, she did a backflip just for the hell of it. Down the street, somebody cheered, and she couldn’t help but smile.
“Nah, I’m fine where I am. Besides, I went to a Festival a few years ago, and it was kind of underwhelming. At least the cameras focus only on the good parts.”
It wouldn’t mean anything for Melissa if Toki went to Musutafu or not, because no matter where she was, Toki was already watching, already cheering for her. Actually, not going to Musutafu was a sign of trust: a sign that Quantum believed her student to be able to handle herself on her own. And there were already people cheering for Melissa in the bleachers. The Shinsō family had come especially for her.
Toki also didn’t want to show her hand too early. Neither Quantum or Hawks were the kind of heroes to seek out students or scrutinize the competition: they had an image to maintain, of young and carefree jesters who succeeded at everything without any hardship. Going to the Festival would mean showing investment. It was still a little too early for that. Their position at the top had to be unshakable before they started broadening their horizons.
You can’t do anything without having a solid base under your feet. You can’t build a spaceship on shaky ground, and you can’t propel a rocket from an unsteady launching pad. The same went for heroics. You can’t change society without a voice to be heard. You can’t protect the vulnerable without strength to shield them: and you can’t help the vulnerable become strong without giving them a safe, protected place to grow first. It was simple logic.
Toki didn’t consider herself an angry person. She had her moments of rage, like everyone, but she wasn’t resentful. Hell, she had nursed a grudge against All Might for years and even then she had been perfectly conscious it was a hollow feeling, nursed by a childish anguish more than real hatred. But the indifference about Quirkless people… it made her so mad.
Even if she had only been Quirkless for a year. Even if she hadn’t been really impacted by Quirkless discrimination, not in the violent or dismissive way a lot of Quirkless people were. Even then, it burned. Maybe because for months she had chatted and argued and loved an online community who had hundreds of thousands of stories about being mistreated because of that stupid prejudice; a community with hundreds of thousand suicide notes, and more dead members than living ones. But out of the many injustices of the world, Toki felt that one the most keenly. It burned her tongue like fire and her heart like acid, and she wanted to yell at people, to break things, to hurt people so it would finally stop.
There. Even if she had let go of her rage against Meteor, against All Might, against the system in general, it didn’t mean Toki had ceased to be a spiteful little thing after all. It made a little flame of satisfaction curl up and burn in her chest. She could forgive those who had wronged her, and still refuse to be satisfied with how the world was. It was what had made her turn on Meteor the first time around. She would be right to not forget it.
“Patrol is nearly done,” she said lightly. “Want to go and watch the rest of the Festival in the breakroom?”
“Really?” Psyren brightened. “Sure!
In Toki’s earpiece, Present Mic announced the start of the second event. Toki didn’t need to glance at her screen to guess, from the roar of battle, how chaos had descended in Yūei's arena.
It would be very interesting to watch.
True to her word, Toki wrapped up the rest of their patrol (fortunately, no big villain reared their ugly head, so it stayed fairly uneventful), and they all went back to the agency. Most people had the same idea as them, actually. Hayasa-sensei was working, and so were Kameko and the secretaries, but a few sidekicks had congregated in the break room and avidly watched the show on their huge TV screen. Ocelot was sprawled on the couch like a big cat, which was fitting for a tiger-man, while Sunspear was almost bouncing on his chair. Someone had made popcorn, and Zero was sharing the bowl with one of the secretaries. The newcomers took the few remaining places on bean bags.
On the screen, it was total pandemonium. About a dozen teams were fighting to win the four hills. Smoke, mud, fire, snow and rubble were flying everywhere. Each hill was, of course, occupied by one team who was trying its hardest to defend against invaders. They had to restrain themselves to not damage the structure, so there weren’t any large-scale attacks: but it didn’t make the fight less impressive. The teams were fairly balanced. They were at least one powerhouse per team, so the ‘random selection’ probably wasn’t so random. Melissa was with the fire-whip guy, for example. If the powerhouses had banded together, it would have been easy to create four stronger teams who could hog the victory without issue. But now, well… each powerhouse had to fight their equals, but also defend their weaker teammates. And rely on them, too.
Anyways. The camera was focusing on the most epic fights, of course. Melissa’s team got a hill, was dethroned, and miraculously recovered one hill (by kicking the stuffing out of the snow-controlling guy!) barely a few seconds before the end of the game. Just as the bell was ringing, Toki couldn’t help but hide a huge grin behind her bowl of pop-corn.
Sweaty, covered in dirt, and her blond hair looking like a rat’s nest, Melissa was grinning fiercely at the camera. After so many trials… that was it.
She was in the finals.
oOoOoOo
The tournament part of Yūei Sports Festival was the best part. Individual matches allowed for more focus on the students. It was a shame that matches were so short. In canon, each fight had lasted a full episode at least, but in reality, well… fights usually went on for one minute, four minutes max. The students went all out, but they were also tired, so the time for stamina and endurance was over. It was now a sprint to the finishing line, not a marathon.
First match was between the fire-whip guy (who actually used a magma whip coming from his palm) and Melissa’s friend, the girl with the electric Quirk. Both were long-ranged fighters. It was close… But in the end, Fire-whip advanced to the next round, while Electric-Quirk lost the match.
Second match was between the mud-controlling girl and the one who made craters by… releasing huge waves of golden energy, apparently. When Present Mich called her name, Toki nearly did a spit-take, because that was Nejire Hado. And yep, with that shade of blue hair and that bounce in her step, it was probably the Nejire Hado from the canon. Crap, that meant that the other two guys from the Big Three were here! Toki hadn’t realized Melissa would be at school at the same time as them. Talk about a coincidence!
Damnit, Toki should re-watch the Sports Festival later, to try and spot them. It never hurt to know what the future main players looked like.
Anyways. Nejire Hado won. No big surprise here. Third match was between two guys with mutation Quirks, one feline and one canine. Toki didn’t pay much attention to them, besides noting with exasperation that apparently neither of them had hand-to-hand training, even though they were both close-combat specialists and should have trained for it in consequence. Then there was a match between a girl who could repel people and a boy who… didn’t even have time to use his Quirk before being ejected from the ring. Okay, that one was a little funny, albeit short. The fifth match was between two guys with enhancing Quirks who immediately started brawling, and it dragged on for almost five minutes before one of them was knocked out.
And then it was Melissa’s fight.
Toki tried not to learn forward a little too eagerly, but judging by Psyren knowing smile, her sidekick had already guessed who Quantum was rooting for. Oh, whatever. It didn’t really matter. Melissa’s adversary was a tall boy who could scream at super-high or super-low frequencies, apparently. Melissa plugged her ears before entering the ring, but even then, when the guy started screeching… everyone winced, the TV’s speakers whining and scratching like nails on chalkboard.
Melisa almost fell to her knees immediately. But she stayed upward, faltered, then ran straight at her enemy and launched her shield at his face. He avoided it, smirking confidently… then the shield came back like a boomerang, violently hitting him on the back of the head and stopping his screeching instantly.
It hadn’t been enough to knock him out, but it didn’t matter. As soon as he stopped making that awful sound, Melissa was on him. Her balance was still a little affected (maybe the scream disturbed the inner ear?) and she was swaying a little, but not enough to stop her. In five second flat, she had that guy gagged and cuffed with restraints pulled from her utility belt.
“Woah, is having that much support items allowed?” blinked Ocelot.
“It is,” Toki smirked. “If the students build the stuff themselves or need it to use their Quirk, they can have the school authorization.”
“Well I’m rooting for the little engineer now!” claimed Psyren, shivering. “That screaming was awful. And we only got the TV’s sound rendition! I would have started bleeding from my ears if I’d been there.”
“Hey, hey, not so fast,” Sunspear protested, turning sideways on his chair to look at her. “Support items or not, she just has a magnetic Quirk or something, right? She won’t make the cut when facing the powerhouses in the second round!”
“I agree,” nodded Zero. “She’s going to get eaten like a lamb.”
Toki raised her eyebrows, and said mildly:
“Don’t be so sure. She seems tough.”
“Come on! She looks like a barbie doll. A few gadgets won’t cut it. She looks so naïve and innocent, it’s making me feel bad for her.”
“What, really? It doesn’t mean anything,” Toki riposted. “I look innocent too.”
This time her sidekicks looked straight-up incredulous, and Sunspear actually snorted.
“Yeah, as innocent as one of those mountains which year after year do nothing very much but smoke a little, and then one day end up causing a whole civilization to become an art installation.”
“Oh, shush it.”
The next match was between a guy with chameleon-like camouflage, and the guy who used some sort of telekinesis. In the first event, he was the one who had done the most damage, rampaging like a bull across the whole arena, and in the second event he had managed to keep his hill for the whole time: he was the most dangerous one, no doubt about it. His Quirk was very strong, and he was absolutely ruthless. He brutally tossed his opponent around until the chameleon finally yielded. The fight was short, but brutal.
Then there was the last match, between a girl who performed a real feat of agility, with plenty of spins and jumps and acrobatic attacks, and a guy who could… make people fall asleep by touching them. Not that it was obvious at first glance, because they spent the whole match dancing around each other, trying to grab the other without being grabbed. Finally he touched her just as she kicked him in the face, and the girl won only by virtue of waking up when she fell down, while the boy stayed dazzled on the ground.
Then it was time for the second round.
Zero and Ocelot had to go on patrol, so they left just as Hayasa-sensei sneaked inside the break room, a pile of files in one hand and a coffee in the other. He quietly sat down next to Toki, offloading some of his paperwork on her at the same time. Then it was Keigo who came back from his own patrol, climbing by the window before sprawling on a bean bag.
“What’s up? Ooooh, are we watching teenagers kicking each other’s asses? Nice. And we have pop-corn! Can I have some? Thanks, Tyto. So, fill me in, who’s winning so far?”
“It’s just the first round, it’s too early to say,” Toki smiled, sinking more comfortably in her seat. “Leave them a little time!”
Keigo grinned, knowing perfectly well where Toki’s bet was, and passed her his pop-corn. Soon enough, the second round was starting, and everyone focused on the TV.
First match was between Nejire Hado and the guy with the canine Quirk. He was a tall boy with a lot of fur, who didn’t wear a jacket and was incredibly fast. It should have ended in Hado’s favor, simply because she had long-ranged attacks… but her opponent, even if his hand-to-hand sucked, was better at close combat than she was. The issue of the fight seemed uncertain right until the end. But finally the canine guy managed to immobilize her, and was declared the winner.
It was surprising. In Toki’s memories from canon, Nejire could fly, couldn’t she? But come to think of it… she was only fifteen, now. Maybe she hadn’t learned it yet. Her two friends (Togata and Amajiki, wasn’t it?) hadn’t made it to the tournament, even if they were the future ‘Big Three’. Maybe Toki was overestimating them. They were still kids, barely starting their hero training.
They didn’t have several years of intense physical and tactical training like Toki had. Or, at a lesser degree, like Melissa had…
Anyways. Second match was between the telekinetic guy and the girl who could repel people. Apparently she could also attract them, too, so it gave her some sort of telekinesis if you thought about it. It quickly became a tug-of-war, each pushing the other from a distance while trying to stay inside the arena. Basically, it was a match to see whose Quirk was strongest, with no room for improvisation. It lasted for almost five minutes, with a few near-misses, lots of hair-pulling and clothes almost being ripped off, until the guy managed to push the girl enough to make her step over the white line.
Third match was between the agility girl and the fire-whip guy. It was very entertaining to watch, because the girl really managed to jump and spin around the whip as if predicting its moves, and sometimes she only managed to stay ahead by a split-second. Unfortunately for her, whips moved at the speed of sound, so… one lucky hit was enough to drop her mid-flight. Afterward, fire-whip guy jumped her, and with his fire-whip right above her face, the girl had no choice but surrender.
Fourth and last match was Melissa against the guy with an enhancing Quirk. He apparently had super-strength in his arms. Not a bad match-up, technically. He was stronger but with her mecha-boots, she could fly and stay ahead. Not that it helped much, because this guy was strong, and quickly started tearing pieces of the ground to toss rubble at her head. He pelted her with massive pieces of cement and rock, never running out of ammo, while Melissa had to dodge and counter attack with her shield. It was an incredible fight, and Present Mic was screaming himself hoarse commentating it. Sparks flew when the metal hit rock, rubble flew everywhere, Melissa was zapping around at an impressive speed. They were both trying their hardest to hit the other, but they were also showing off, and the public was going wild.
Then suddenly Melissa changed trajectory, going close and personal, and obviously when the guy started boxing she was reduced to staying on the defensive, but…
“She’s going to win,” suddenly said Keigo.
“How do you know?” wondered Hayasa-sensei.
“She’s baiting him.”
“Yeah,” grinned Toki who had seen it too. “Look how strongly he hits, he’s putting his whole body into it, and she’s blocking his view with her shield!”
And true to her prediction, Melissa ducked the last blow by going low and sweeping her opponent’s leg, making him fall and roll forward… right on the white line. He was out of bounds, and Melissa advanced to the next round.
“Are you going to offer an internship to one of them?” innocently asked Hayasa-sensei. “Because if you do, that girl has a lot of potential.”
Had he guessed that she was Toki’s student? Toki had never mentioned Melissa’s surname to him… but she had told him her age, her first name, and the fact that she was going to Yūei. It wouldn’t take a genius to put the clues together. Toki grinned sheepishly:
“Yeah, probably.”
“She can fly,” Keigo added cheerfully. “She’s got my vote!”
The sidekicks made various noises of approbation, and Toki tried not to let the smile slip from her face. They were all okay with it, but none of them knew Melissa was Quirkless, yet. Thanks to her tricks with her shield, the public could suppose she had a magnetic Quirk, but that was all. Present Mic had, so far, avoided telling anything about her Quirk. He evaded the topic with such ease he had to know about it. He constantly commended her control over the shield, he praised her determination, commented about her support items, excitedly told that she had built everything herself, and even joked that the Support Course had been trying to poach her since day one… but he hadn’t outed her yet.
It would get out, obviously. Melissa hadn’t intended to hide. But Toki couldn’t help but worry about the public’s reaction.
Anyways. Time for the third round, the semi-finale. Now things were getting serious. Most of the kids were starting to suffer from Quirk overuse, and they were all tired.
First match was between canine-guy and telekinetic guy… and the second was between fire-whip and Melissa. It was easy to see that the selection wasn’t random. The goal was to have fire-whip and telekinesis in the final, for the most epic showdown of the whole Festival. Damn it. Toki forced herself to breathe. Well, even if Melissa lost, she could still hope for third place. And she could still win! There was no reason to panic.
First match began. The canine-guy was fast, apparently fast enough to… not get grabbed by the telekinesis of his opponent right away, or something. Toki squinted, trying to work out how his telekinesis worked exactly. The guy had manipulated people before, right? And rubble? And his power was strong, but not strong enough to tear pieces of rocks out of the ground, so… he needed a certain amount of ammo to pull with enough strength, maybe…
Wait, had he grabbed people or grabbed their clothes?! During his match with the repelling girl, he had almost torn down her jacket. What if he could only control non-organic matter? And the strength of his grip directly correlated with the mass he was able to grasp.
That would explain why he was having a harder time grabbing canine-guy, who didn’t wear a jacket!
In any case, his telekinesis was still powerful. The canine-guy tried to circle him and make him back off, but as soon as he got close enough, telekinesis-guy grabbed him by his boots, swinging him back and forth twice on the hard concrete before launching him out of the arena. Telekinetic guy advanced to the next round with a cocky smile, while the public roared in approval.
“That’s a strong Quirk right there,” Psyren approved. “I bet he’s going to be the Festival’s winner. He’s basically unbeatable.”
Toki scowled. It pained her to admit it, but Psyren wasn’t wrong. Telekinesis was a bitch to fight. Especially when it was a strong one, in the hands of a ruthless fighter. No matter how powerful you were, if telekinesis grabbed you, you were defenseless.
Then it was time for Melissa’s match against fire-whip guy.
Present Mic roared an enthusiastic introduction, but Toki was barely listening. Fire-whip and Melissa nodded politely to one another for each side of the arena, but they were both scowling, looking determined. And when the bell rang, signaling the beginning of the fight… They both jumped straight on the offensive.
Whip snapped and barreled down, but Melissa’s shield could bear the heat. Wlam! Bang! They started trying to pummel each other to death, one with a magma whip and the other with a metal shield that could fly. Each missed attack cracked the ground, and soon enough Melissa started using it, kicking dust in her opponent’s eyes, and using rubble as projectiles. Yes, because apparently she had a hidden crossbow in her belt?!
And then, once she got close enough… she pulled out a miniature fire extinguisher and doused her opponent’s hand, making his fire-whip fall off like a limp noodle. The public went crazy. Fire-whip guy immediately started regrowing a new one, but before his whip could stretch to its full length, Melissa had already closed the remaining distance between them and jumped at him feet first, her mecha-boot turned into miniature rockets. She tackled him like a cannonball, making him fly right off the arena.
There was a beat while Present Mic was (presumably) picking his jaw up off the floor… then the stadium erupted in thunderous applause.
Toki couldn’t help but laugh, too. It was a fantastic win, alright. But what the hell Melissa! There was such a thing as overkill! How many gadgets did she have?
“Well that was a surprise!” Present Mic yelled.
Toki rolled her eyes: oh, so they weren’t even bothering to pretend they had set it up so the two powerhouses would face down in the final? Classic. But hey, it was a surprise.
“I can see what you meant Quantum,” Psysen whistled with admiration. “Those support items are crazy. She took out someone with a Quirk wayyyyyyyy more powerful than her! That kind of engineering is hero-level already.”
“And there was some quick thinking, too,” pointed Hayasa-sensei. “Having all the gadgets in the world is useless without a brain to know when and how to act. Taking down a stronger opponent with your wits and some foam is no easy feat.”
“Yeah, the sting with the fire-extinguisher was ballsy,” Sunspear whole-heartedly approved. “It’s making me wonder how much stuff she has in that utility belt. She can’t possibly have that many things, right? This fire extinguisher is the size of her head, where was she hiding it?!”
“There’s probably a miniaturizing technology of some kind,” Toki frowned. “There’s something like that in development on I-Island…”
“Quiet! The finale is going to start!”
And indeed, Present Mic was already yelling the two finalists’ introduction. Cementos had smoothed over the arena, making it as good as new and ready for the final fight. The telekinesis guy was waving at the crowd, confident. He had shrugged off his jacket, showing off athletic shoulders. And Melissa was…
… Melissa was still at the entrance, casually putting down her utility belt. Then she removed her boots. Then her arm braces for her shield. Then the shield itself. Then her jacket, leaving her in just a sports brassiere.
Then her shoes. Then her socks.
“… What the hell is she doing?” Toki muttered.
Melissa didn’t look scared. Actually, with her resolute frown and her blue eyes narrowed like that, she looked weirdly like All Might. She put her jacket over the rest of her stuff, then ripped her pants at knee-height and rolled the edges to mid-tights. Finally, she pulled out a long strip of cloth from a pocket, and started walking toward the arena at a steady pace. In doing so, she started wrapping her hands with the ease that came with long practice.
Toki understood with a startled breath.
Telekinetic-guy could control non-organic matter. So she was limiting his ammo. Even if it means renouncing her own weapons. If telekinetic-guy had nothing to use with his telekinesis, it would end up in a simple fist fight.
A Quirkless fight.
The two opponents faced each other. The bell rang… and it was on.
Melissa rushed to her enemy. He threw his hands towards her, trying to grasp her clothes and use them to toss her around like his previous opponents: but unlike them, Melissa has shrugged off her vest and most of her pants, so his grip was weak. Melissa slowed down but not enough to stop. In a few seconds, she was on him and punched hard.
Thing was: people with powerful Quirks rarely learned hand-to-hand. This guy, muscular shoulders or not, was no exception. He was about a head taller than Melissa and had shoulders twice as large, a good balance, and a confident gait: but he hadn’t learned to fight Quirkless. He had never needed to. He had raised his fists in a defensive stance, but… he was no boxer. Melissa was. Melissa had learned boxing and martial arts and self-defense, and she had worked hard at it: she wasn’t messing around.
When she punched her enemy’s stomach, he folded in half, eyes bulging out, and immediately puked.
Relentless, Melissa continued pummeling him. Punching, kicking, hitting, kneeing, punching again, making him cede ground step after step. The guy tried to use his telekinesis to escape, grabbing his own jacket and flying away, but Melissa gave chase, not letting him room to breathe. She was here to win, no holds barred. The crowd roared, yelled, booed and screamed encouragements, going absolutely ballistic.
Only when the telekinetic-guy ended up right at the line, Melissa relented. The guy wasn’t quite out of bounds yet, and the silence that fell on the stadium was deafening. She was giving him a chance to fight back. It would have been almost chivalrous if the previous beating hadn’t been so hella brutal.
Because yeah, let’s be honest: what had just happened? It hadn’t been a fight. It had been a beating, plain and simple.
And the telekinetic guy knew it. He snarled, face bloody and all, swaying on his feet. The camera zoomed in, showing he had a broken nose, the beginning of a black eye, and blood all over his chin like he had spat out a full mouthful of blood. He squared his shoulders and tried to get one punch in… but he only got an uppercut for his trouble. His eyes had trouble focusing.
Melissa’s next punch sent him exactly one step out of bounds.
There was a short silence… Then Present Mic started yelling, and the public exploded in savage cheers.
Toki grinned. The guy with the most powerful Quirk this year, getting his ass handed to him by a Quirkless girl. That was schadenfreude at its finest.
“And our winner is MELISSA SHIELD!” screamed Present Mic. “Can you believe it? In a completely unexpected turn of events, the underdog defeated the most powerful students of the hero course AND WON FIRST PLACE! Eraserhead, what are you FEEDING THOSE KIDS?! Everyone, please give a round of ovation for our champion, MELISSA SHIELD! That girl is going places!”
oOoOoOo
Melissa had won the Sports Festival. Toki couldn’t stop beaming. Melissa had won! Holy crap, Melissa had won the Sports Festival!
In canon, there had been a short ceremony where All Might had given their medals to the three champions, then it had been the end of it. But the shortness of the post-festival party maybe had to do with the canon-events (the threat of the League, the fact that Bakugo was wearing a muzzle, the fact that All Might was short on time, all that jazz), because here, it lasted way longer. And, more importantly… journalists asked questions.
Immediately after the match, students went to get healed while the TV replayed the highlights of the fight, with Present Mic’s enthusiastic commentary. Then came the medal ceremony, with Nedzu awarding medals to the top three students. Fire-whip guy accepted bronze with dignity, but telekinetic guy was glaring daggers when accepting silver. He still had a swollen eye.
Melissa was beaming, radiating incredulous joy, eyes shining and smiling so hard that her jaw had to hurt. She looked like she had been crying recently.
Journalists took pictures, and then they swarmed the students, raising microphones and asking enthusiastic questions. Toki was in the process of sending her internship offer to Yūei (that email had been typed out and ready to send months ago, but it needed some editing now that Melissa wasn’t just ‘a hero student’ but ‘the Sports Festival winner’). She hastily raised her head and avidly listened. She hadn’t moved from the breakroom, and everyone was excitingly commenting on the students’ performance, while simultaneously shushing each other to try and listen to the TV too.
“Shield-san, Shield-san! How does it feel to win the Sports Festival?”
“Shield-san, Present Mic said that you’re from America originally, are you related to the support engineer David Shield who designed All Might’s costume?”
“Kazan-san, Mukibutsu-san, how do you feel about going this far in the Sports Festival?”
“Mukibutsu-san, are you proud of having won silver?”
“Shield-san! A few words for our viewers here!”
“Kazan-san! Kazan-san, can you tell us about your Quirk! Is it fire or magma?”
“Shield-san!”
They all answered a few questions, saying they were all very proud, they had worked their best, they hoped to be good heroes. Toki had sent her email, but she didn’t dare to move from her spot. Like everyone else in the breakroom, she had her eyes glued to the screen. She wasn’t even on that podium and still she had stage fright, because she could feel it, she could see it in Melissa’s eyes: it was the moment. She was going to say it.
Then finally, finally, someone shoved a mic in Melissa’s face and asked:
“Shield-san, what is your Quirk?”
Melissa didn’t falter. She didn’t stop smiling. On the contrary, she leaned towards the journalist, and answered with far more confidence than Toki would have been able to muster in the same circumstances.
“I don’t have one, actually. I’m Quirkless.”
The journalist froze.
The rest of the crowd froze.
In the breakroom, everyone froze, too. Hayasa-sensei and Keigo stayed carefully relaxed, but everyone else just stopped in their tracks, looking at the TV with huge, incredulous eyes. Toki didn’t dare to move.
You don’t realize how loud a crowd is when holding its breath until you find yourself in the middle of a group of loud people who suddenly fall silent.
Undeterred, Melissa continued smiling. Toki felt her respect for her student grow exponentially. Staying cold-headed when revealing something that big to a crowd of strangers was hard.
“I am Quirkless,” she repeated, voice even and confident. “I’m still going to be a hero. Because heroism is not a matter of winning the genetic lottery. It’s a matter of hard work, of training, and willingness to do the right thing. A hero is not one who never falls. They’re the one who gets up, again and again, never losing sight of their dreams. I was born without a Quirk, but I still have the power to shape my own destiny.”
She stopped, took a breath, and continued with a confident smile:
“Winning this Festival is a great honor. It’s the culmination of years of hard work. I’m very proud of it, and very thankful to the people who believed in me. I promise I won’t let you down, and I’ll be a hero you can be proud of!”
There was a short, heavy silence. Incredulous. Baffled. Toki couldn’t breathe. A few journalists looked lost, and a few others were smiling as if sensing how great of a scoop it was… but there were also people who looked annoyed, indignant, as if this reveal had cheated them of a rightful winner somehow. Melissa’s smile didn’t waver, but Toki could still see it in her eyes, how she was bracing herself for impact. She was hoping for the best, but she was also prepared for the worst.
Then, slowly, someone clapped.
The sound was very loud, and so unexpected that several people jumped. Out of sight, someone gasped audibly… Then the camera panned out and turned around quickly, the motion blurry with speed, before focusing on the stadium. On the stairs, right in the middle of the bleachers, was standing a lone and colossal figure, cape fluttering behind him.
All Might, smiling his terrific smile that showed too much teeth, was staring at Melissa and clapping. He looked incredibly proud, and absolutely not the kind of guy you wanted to piss off by disparaging a teenage girl.
Melissa beamed and waved at him enthusiastically.
(And a few hundred kilometers away, Toki discreetly sighed in relief. Yeah, All Might had his flaws, and he sometimes had trouble reading a room. He also had been a pretty unsupportive uncle, so far. But this, right there? That had been the right call to make. Not making the moment about him, but silently giving support, making it known which side he supported: that was how you did it right.)
After that, absolutely no one dared and tell the Sports Festival champion to ‘be realistic’. All Might’s appearance effectively distracted the journalists, who hastily abandoned the students to mob the Number One hero. Present Mic laughed nervously, then he expertly changed the subject by starting his end-of-festival-speech. The three medaled champions quietly exited the stage, going back inside. And that was it: that was the end of this year’s Sports Festival.
In the breakroom, Hayasa-sensei turned off the TV. You could have heard a pin drop.
Everyone looked… stunned. They were all looking at the TV as if it was going to magically turn itself on and Present Mic was going to exclaim ‘ah ah, you fell for it!’. Except Keigo who was watching Toki, Toki who was watching the sidekicks, and Hayasa-sensei who was looking at them both.
Then Toki clapped her hands, noting with satisfaction that everyone jumped, and exclaimed:
“Well! That was great! I call dibs!”
“B-but Quantum,” stammered Sunspear, looking embarrassed. “She’s…”
“The Sports Festival Champion,” Toki interrupted with a big, threatening smile. “She is competent and has proven it. I don’t think paying attention to bigots is really worth letting such a promising student slip through my fingers.”
Psyren let out a nervous chuckle: “Besides, you already knew. Right?”
Well, the cat was out of the bag. Toki shrugged, and admitted easily:
“I already knew. Don’t tell this to the press, but I’ve known Melissa Shield for years. It’s always been my intention to recruit her.”
“… Oh.”
And that was it. No more questions or contestations. Hayasa-sensei and Keigo both made very clear which side they were on, and well, after complimenting Melissa’s performance, Sunspear and Psyren didn’t really have room to criticize, did they? Tyto, quiet as usual, refrained from making any comment. And later on, when Toki crossed paths with Ocelot and Zero, neither of them tried to talk her out of it.
Kameko was grinning like a cat who’s eaten the canary. She had always known about Toki’s goals of social justice and Quirkless equality, but Toki was starting to suspect that the cat-lady just loved basking in chaos. Besides, if there was one person who knew what it was like to be functionally Quirkless, it was Kameko. Her own Quirk worked once a day and not even on herself!
So. The big reveal had happened. Of course, it had thrown the public off a loop. It had already made the local news in Musutafu, with people analyzing Melissa’s fight, and a medical expert explaining on TV, with obvious discomfort, that Quirkless people weren’t chronically medically weaker. Half of the forums Toki was lurking on were blowing up with debates, comments, indignation, admiration, accusations.
People never really talked about Quirklessness, so everything was really appearing from nowhere. It was like a sports champion suddenly revealing they were missing a limb: everyone was floundering, because what, really? But that wasn’t supposed to happen. Disabled people were so rare in a non-disabled world. And so weak! Maybe all the other competitors had been weak? Or maybe the support items had given her an unfair advantage? But the event’s footage was proof that it wasn’t what had happened. Melissa had fought fair and square. She had won her last match without support items, even! She was just good. And it was wild for people to wrap their heads around it, because the existence of Quirkless people was already something that the public didn’t really consider, so a Quirkless person who wasn’t ashamed of it and who was strong enough to stand against a Quirked one? It was such a wild leap of logic!
Toki knew there would be vitriol, hatred and anger. Little bullies who thought they deserved the world because they were lucky enough to be born with a strong Quirk, and who would feel threatened by someone achieving greatness without this advantage. Pretentious assholes who built their whole sense of worth on their power, and would feel personally wronged by the idea of being equal to someone who couldn’t breathe fire or some shit. Human beings weren’t very kind. But… the whole point of Melissa coming forward was to show those people they were wrong. Bigotry only flourished in ignorance.
It had to start somewhere. It started here, with online forums blowing up in shock, indignation, and outrage, but also in delight, incredulity, excitement, and encouragement. Not everyone was a bigoted piece of garbage. A lot of people were glad for Melissa. If someone with no Quirk could win the Sports Festival, then it was a message of hope for all the people who had been disparaged against because of their own power, after all. And there were also plenty of people who didn’t need this message of hope, who didn’t need Melissa to fight for them, but who were still happy because they were sharing her joy.
Like on the Discord server.
________________
> PikaPika: MOXIE!!!!!!
> PinkIsPunkRock: [pterodactyl screeching]
> EndeavorSucks: HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT
> NotOnFire: did you see that?! Did you see it?!?!
< Antares: omfg she totally OWNED him
> SpicyWings: just so you know, someone is getting an internship at Icarus =)
> PinkIsPunkRock: it was amazing!
> Megamind: I was there, I’m still shaking
> Megamind: I can’t believe I’ve seen it happen
> Moxie: hi
< Antares: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
> PinkIsPunkRock: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
> NotOnFire: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
> PikaPika: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH
> EndeavorSucks: IT WAS AMAZING! CONGRATS MOXIE!
> EndeavorSucks: also word of advice delete all of your social media and start a brand new account because you’re going to be hounded by the public
> Moxie: Already done when I joined Yūei 😉
< Antares: yep I did the same when I made my civiliansona
> SpicyWings: aghfgkagkh please stop calling it your civiliansona
> PinkIsPunkRock: Moxie you’re my hero
> Moxie: ah ah thank you, I’m still shaking a little, but I’m on cloud nine
> Moxie: I was blessed today. My soul has been revived. My faith in humanity has been restored. My crops are watered. My depression is cleared. My hotel is trivago.
> Antares: I’m so fucking PROUD
> PikaPika: congrats again Moxie, it was incredible!!!!!
> PikaPika: free non-alcoholic drinks on me if you swing by my bar one day :D
________________
Yeah. Things were pretty good. Melissa’s victory wasn’t just her victory, it was a victory for all the unseen people who were suddenly seen. All those like her who hadn’t mattered, but suddenly did. It hadn’t taken much. Only a teenager being brilliant on national television. But every journey starts with a single step and, this… this was Melissa’s beginning.
You don’t get into heroics unless you see something wrong in the world you want to fix. What could it be if not empathy for mankind? To care so much about people you’ve never met that you would put your life on the line so that they don’t have to suffer like you did? That’s how Toki had started her journey, and Keigo, and maybe even All Might. It made her feel so proud, and so humbled, to watch someone else embark on that path.
And she couldn’t help but feel optimistic for what was coming next.
Notes:
So it it was brought to my attention that you guys liked author notes? Like, me dumping info into my end of chapter notes instead of putting those tiddibits of intel in the chapter proper? But i love doing that too!!! So here we go!
Will All Might offer OFA to Melissa ?
Yes ! He actually did, right after the Sports Festival. Melissa said no.
I mean, she was tempted, but she wants to be a Quirkless hero. Not "a hero like All Might". She aims for something smaller, or maybe bigger: be someone that All Might cannot be, the champion of the rejects and the powerless. So she turned him down. Melissa is determined to continue on the same path.Will All Might offert OFA to Toki ?
Nope. But he considered it! When All Might went to meet her in the previous chapter, he wanted to see if she was The One, if he should offer it to her. Because if he wanted a sign that it was time to step back and entrust OFA to someone, well, getting his ass kicked was a pretty clear one!
He was prepared to offer OFA to Toki. However when they talked, he realized that she didn't wish to become a Symbol, that she didn't have the drive he looked for. Maybe she would have accepted OFA, and maybe she would have been brillant with it! But the thing is: All Might didn't think she was the right person to inherit it. And he was kind of relieved, too. He didn't want strenght to be the deciding factor about who should succeed him.What is Aizawa's relationship with Melissa like?
Aizawa doesn't dislike her: he treats her just like he treats other students. He may sometimes be harsher, because he KNOWS how dangerous heroism is without a strong Quirk. But mostly he feels a little guilty. He's aware that he completely burned his bridges with her.
Aizawa likes to take students down a peg. He finds it necessary, sure, but he legitimatly enjoys it and feels righteous when he slams those brats into a cold wall of reality. He may be vaguely projecting on them his issues with all the heroic students who where gatekeeping heroics when he was a Gen Ed student.
But with Melissa, it backfired. His little speech "brrrr brrr i'm very mean and impossible to please" didn't phase her: instead she said "cool, then i'll never come to you with my problems and will consider you a threat and a bigot" and Aizawa was like "wait no" and he hasn't managed to correct course since! Considering his lack of tact, he may never be able to. So basically he let Present Mic handle Melissa (be the nice teacher, be the one she ask for help) because he's aware that he fucked up.
He didn't use the occasion to do some self-reflection and wonder if his methods were too harsh, though. Not at all. He's still completely persuaded that the best approch to kids is to threaten them first x)
TODAY'S FIC REC:
"Heroics and Other Things That Don't Require Superpowers" by TheNarator.
Very long, very delicious. Sir Nighteye is a dick but that was expected. And Midoriya kicking ass WITHOUT A QUIRK ALL ALONG?! I love this. This fic is 50% of my reasons for introducing Melissa in the Wisdom-verse to have her become a Quirkless hero!
Also you may find in the Wisdom-verse some headcanons that i adopted from TheNarator, like how Kaminari's Quirk actually work x)And here is the link to a google.doc with all of Toki's poems !
https://docs.google.com/document/d/141zcvVwp_pdYqHMHZPfwADYyiGb2FINH/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=107192468725481074747&rtpof=true&sd=true
EDIT : sooooo after having adopted a new plot-bunny thanks to LadyRavenJadethe2nd and several other people... i posted a bonus about Midoriya's POV! It's called "wisdom grows (in quiet places)" and it's part 3 of the Wisdom-verse series.Second EDIT : I'v just been told that Present Mic's annoncement of the rules for the first event is basically borrowed from another fic. Not impossible, because i write parts of my story in a big doc word with disjointed quotes, poetry, guidelines, references, headcanon... and it's a complete mess. But i usually use color-coded text to separate what i write from what i should use as reference/inspiration (most of it from Tumblr, not gonna lie). I think i screwed up on that one.
Anyway. I fixed it. But it's still embarassing. Sorry.By the way i took the idea of the free for all as the first event from "What it Means to be a Hero" by DeusVerve !
Chapter 29: In The Top Ten
Summary:
All Might sighed, looking grave. “As we have reached a new era, my duty to this country has changed. I’ll keep defending Japan against enemies, but it can’t be my only goal anymore. I’m a Symbol of Peace, and peace isn’t an ongoing fight. Peace is people drafting treaties, crossing borders, finding common ground, and building things together.”
Toki felt her heart jump in her chest, and smiled incredulously. Holy crap, had All Might just quoted her?
(a.k.a: All Might steps down, and Icarus steps up.)
Notes:
I'm back !
I hope you liked the new work in this series, "widsom grows (in quiet places)" with Midoriya's POV of Melissa's victory. If you haven't read it yet, go check it out !
It's here - > https://archiveofourown.org/works/41120937Anyway, here is a new chapter !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
IN THE TOP TEN
Hitoshi was getting better with his capture weapons. Now they had to train his Quirk. Toki also needed to analyze it, but it was easier said than done. Quirk use in public space was illegal. So Hitoshi didn’t have many opportunities to practice. Their training sessions were reserved to physical conditioning. They didn’t use a private training ground, so Quirk use was actually forbidden. Toki had to make room in her schedule to go to the Shinsō’s, and ask Hitoshi to brainwash her, and since lately her focus had been on Melissa (and Yūei Sports Festival)… well, Hitoshi’s training had taken the back seat. She felt a little guilty about that. Having two students who needed different things was actually harder to manage than she would have thought.
She still had drafted a plan, of course. She had to see the extent of his abilities. How much could Brainwash control a person? Could it be used to interrogate someone? To plant subliminal messages in the subconscious? Could it pass through radio waves and the like? How long did it last? How strong was the compulsion? Did it need a verbal, articulated answer to activate, or would a grunt or a sigh suffice? Could Hitoshi maintain control while doing something else? Could he control several people simultaneously? How many?
She also needed a place to do that. Well, they could use Mihoko’s place, it would be simpler… But Mihoko didn’t like Brainwash. At all. She loved her son, she really did, but Toki didn’t want to… overcomplicate things… by conducting experiments on a hated Quirk in her home. Especially if she needed Hitoshi to brainwash her, or a third person, to observe the Quirk’s effects. Mihoko wouldn’t say anything bad, of course, but Hitoshi was perceptive. If his mother was uncomfortable, he would feel it, and become defensive. Better to avoid that clusterfuck all together and train somewhere else.
Preferably at Icarus, actually. They had a big gym, it was private property, and plenty of people would be delighted to meet Toki’s ducklings. Or rather, her fledglings.
So. When the time for internship arrived, at the end of May, Toki also offered to invite Hitoshi on the week-end. They would train in the evening, after the agency closed.
Melissa had received almost five hundred offers for her internship. One of them was from All Might’s agency, even. It was great, considering she had been afraid of receiving none. But it was also bitter, because the silver and bronze medalists had more than a thousand offers each. But hey, Melissa had also received hundreds of interview offers, as well as plenty of fanmail.
There was hatemail, too. But Yūei was taking care of it.
(Also Toki had looked up the future ‘Big Three’. As she had supposed, Togata and Amajiki had been eliminated in the second round. From Present Mic’s commentary, Toki learned that Togata was in class 1-B. Nejire Hado and Amajiki were in class 1-A, though. They didn’t hang out with Melissa and her friends, but Hado was apparently bubbly enough, and Amajiki shy enough, to be on good terms with everyone… Anyway, Hado had made a good showing at the Festival. Toki made a mental note to offer her an internship next year, if Melissa didn’t mind. It wouldn’t hurt to cultivate a connection with someone tied to the plot, even as loosely as Hado was. And besides, her powers could be used to fly!)
Anyway: internship and training. That’s how Toki ended up bringing Hitoshi and Melissa to one of Icarus’ training rooms one late Sunday afternoon. Hitoshi had come by train, with his mom and dad who had planned a romantic week-end in Fukuoka. Melissa would start her internship Monday, but hey, nothing forbade her of being a little early. The agency was almost deserted, and they bantered like old friends.
“Alright, next question: who is your favorite character in Fullmetal Alchemist?” Melissa challenged them. “And what would be their Quirk if they had one?”
Some mangas fell into oblivion. Some got four cartoon adaptations and a whole-ass movie with two remakes, and managed to stay alive even after two hundred years. Guess in which category was Fullmetal Alchemist?
“Ed,” immediately said Hitoshi. “His Quirk would be to make everyone fly off in blind rage by opening his mouth.”
“Yeah, you would know about it, Megamind.”
“My favorite character is Ling Yao,” countered Toki. “Although I like Roy Mustang too. Anyway, his Quirk would be ‘Luck’. Like, a crazy and unreasonable amount of luck, all the time.”
The two teenagers paused to consider it.
“… Why not,” Melissa pondered. “He’s repeatedly been in situations that if it wasn’t the right place and time he would have screwed entirely, fully and completely up. Like, he was very in jail when a serial murderer just so happened to pass by, and he convinced him to not only to let him out but also not murder him! And that’s just one of the examples. His entire ‘plan’ is to make an incredibly rash decision and then roll nat twenties through the entire encounter until the event is over for him, and it works pretty much every time. It’s amazing.”
Toki nodded gravely.
“Exactly. Dude straight up arrives in a foreign country with no plan, no money, no food and no sense. When he passes out in an abandoned alley, instead of being eaten by rats like any respectable member of society, he gets literally plucked up by not one, but two alchemists that just so happen to be two thirds of the total number of living people that know the secret of a philosopher’s stone and aren’t in on the massive government conspiracy to murder everyone. Seriously. From the second he entered canon he was already bending the laws of reality to his will while face down in the dirt. We should all aspire to be Ling Yao.”
Just as she was saying those deep parole of wisdom, Toki reached the gym door. The agency was almost completely empty, and she had reserved the place for the evening, so she was sure no sidekicks would come in and gaggle at her students: but still, she checked that the little panel next to the door indicated ‘reserved’. It was useful for warning people that if they wanted a work-out, they should use the other gym. This one wasn’t reserved often, but it happened when someone with a bothersome Quirk needed the room: like when Sunspear had worked on his newest attack with quick flashes in succession.
Not that Sunspear would bother them tonight: he didn’t work on Sunday. Most sidekicks didn’t, actually. Those who did had already gone home for the night. But Hayasa-sensei was still here, and so was Kameko… Hum. They were probably holed up in their office.
Or, Toki realized when she opened the door, they were here waiting to ambush her. Because just as she pushed the doors open, she heard Keigo’s laughter, and Hayasa-sensei’s weary sigh:
“Please, Sabira-san, we all know you’re bad at darts.”
“Pfff,” Kameko grinned, “you call it really bad at darts, I call it freestyle acupuncture. Hawks, back me up.”
“You’re bad at darts.”
“Slander!”
Yes, those were the very serious, very professional leaders of Icarus Agency. Toki snorted. She beckoned her two wary students forwards, and strolled toward the commotion.
“What are you doing?”
There was a dartboard on the wall, with darts stuck in… various places. Some were even stuck in the wall. Kameko had several darts in hand, as did Keigo, who was blindfolded and smirking. Hayasa-sensei was sitting a prudent distance away, chin on his hand, looking at those two idiots with fondness. When Toki announced her presence, they all turned, grinning, and Keigo waved without removing his blindfold:
“We’re testing our accuracy. Hi, Quantum’s fledglings! Wanna join?”
“Can we do teams?” Kameko pleaded. “He’s wiping the floor with me.”
“Or you could admit you’ve lost,” Keigo pointed out with a grin.
They started bickering. Hayasa-sensei snorted, then got up, and walked to the newcomers to politely introduce himself.
“Welcome to Icarus. I’m Mercury. We were actually waiting for you: Sabira-san and myself were very curious to meet you. Quantum speaks very highly of her students.”
The two teenagers puffed up, looking flattered. Yes, even surly little Hitoshi. Toki grinned proudly:
“Mercury is Icarus’ one and only underground hero! And he’s also my old teacher from when I was training in an undisclosed location before going to Yūei. I learned lots with him! I asked him to stay a little to talk about your training, I hope you don’t mind. Kameko-san and Hawks are just here because they’re nosy.”
“Hey!” Keigo protested.
“No, no, she has a point,” Kameko hummed. She put away the darts and sauntered towards the newcomers, looking delighted. “I’m nosy, but it’s worth it! Welcome! I’ve heard a lot about you, but everything was frustratingly vague! Quantum is very protective of her little ducklings. I only learned your name when I sent the recommendation to Yūei, Shield-san! Oh, by the way, do you both have hero names picked out? Yes, even you, little purple guy: as soon as you start training in Icarus’ care, you’re under the Heroic Identity Protection Act.”
Melissa and Hitoshi looked at each other, then the girl laughed nervously.
“Well, I guess that I’ll use Moxie for now. I’ve another name picked out but it’s not… I’m not ready for it yet.”
“Oh?” Kameko smiled, curiosity picked. “Interesting. And you, purple-san?”
Toki had the sudden realization that Kameko had once held Hitoshi in her arms, when he had been very small, right before Toki teleported back into a sinking car to save Mihoko-san. She wondered if Kameko remembered, if she was going to make the connection, realize that Toki had kept in touch with the Shinsō. Probably not. Still, it was a strange thought, to see them meet again fourteen years after.
Hitoshi hummed pensively, scratching his nape. He looked a little uncertain.
“Um, I guess I’ll use… Cheshire.”
“Ooooh like the Cheshire Cat?” Toki appreciated it. “That’s a good one! Wait, is it because it’s a purple cat?”
Hitoshi grinned. A long, unsettling grin with way too much teeth, and… oh, yeah, Toki could see it now. She started laughing, a little manically. That name fit like a glove!
“So, what were you planning to do?” Keigo asked. He had removed his blindfold and was idly making it spin around his finger.
Toki shrugged:
“Giving Meli- Moxie the tour, obviously, then testing Cheshire’s Quirk. It’s a mental one, so I want to test duration, precision, and activation parameters.”
“You already know the activation parameters,” Hitoshi frowned. “I have to ask a question, my target has to answer, and then I have to take control.”
“Yes, yes,” Toki waved a hand, “triple-switch, awfully complicated, I know. That’s why I’m hoping to find shortcuts. Does it have to be a verbal answer, for example? Can you get them if they simply laugh or grunt, or even nod their head? Is your Quirk triggered by the sound, or the acknowledgement? Also, do you have to ask a real question, or can it be implicit? Like, if you let a sentence trail off, like ‘oh, and your name is…’: it’s not a question, but they still give you an answer. And would your Quirk work then? That’s what I want to test. And later, I also want to try how long you can keep someone under, how many people you can catch at once, how complex of a task you can give them, and so on!”
Hitoshi looked vaguely stunned. Studying his Quirk like that had never crossed his mind? That was a serious oversight. Brainwash was such a complicated Quirk! And you couldn’t start pushing your limits until you understood where those limits stood… Really, it was a good thing Toki was here to pick up the slack!
“It seems you have things well in hand, Quantum,” Hayasa-sensei smiled.
Toki affected casualness, and shrugged. Internally, though, she was beaming with pride. That kind of praise, coming from her old teacher, was huge.
Hayasa-sensei had mellowed a lot after leaving Naruto Labs. He hadn’t been a bad teacher then (in fact, he had been an excellent one) but he had been rigid, unwavering. Now he was kinder and more encouraging. Somehow that made Toki bask in his praises even more.
“Well, I picked up some things. And,” she reached into her jacket, and triumphantly pulled out a small notepad filled with color-coded notes, “I even prepared spreadsheets!”
Keigo sniggered, remembering like her the many, many spreadsheets Hayasa-sensei used to have back at Naruto Labs, and they exchanged a grin.
“Let’s begin, shall we?”
They did. Kameko pestered Melissa and Hitoshi with questions, for starters, because she was a nosy cat and wanted to know everything about Icarus’ future sidekicks. It was nothing really personal. Nothing about their names, their age, their parents, how they had met Toki. The questions were more along the line of what were their ambitions, had they ever encountered a villain, did they have family in heroics, what were their views on heroism in general. Then Toki booted Kameko out to focus on Hitoshi’s training, so the cat-lady decided to give Melissa the tour, while Hayasa-sensei, Toki, Keigo and Hitoshi stayed to try and test Brainwash’s limits.
Firstly, Toki asked him to brainwash her and make her walk around, to see what it felt like. The answer was: like nothing. She just answered him and bam, she opened her eyes five minutes later with no recognition of what had happened. Like sleeping. Or rather, sleepwalking. Yes, that was an accurate comparison, wasn’t it? Her mind was turned off, but her body moved. Toki made a mental note to have a brain-scan of a brainwashed test-dummy done, to see what exactly was happening. Maybe it was like and REM cycle, leaving the mind very open to suggestion? And pain wasn’t actually breaking the brainwashing, but rather waking up the subject… Hum. Food for thought.
Then came the fun part: having Hitoshi brainwash Hayasa-sensei and Keigo, and test what they could and could not do. Toki grabbed her spreadsheets, and started filling them out.
First point: how did his Quirk activate exactly? They tried approaching from different angles. Hitoshi could brainwash someone when he asked a question and they answered him. Simple enough. But what qualified as a question? What qualified as an answer? They varied experiments. A statement, a question, an open-ended interrogation, an affirmation… a brief answer, a long circumvoluted one, a non-verbal one…
The results were very satisfying, and even Hitoshi seemed impressed by their discoveries. His Quirk didn’t need a question, just an open-ended sentence, as long as the target answered. It could be as simple as calling someone’s name: if they answered it, that was enough. It also worked when someone other than the intended subject responded in their place: as soon as they said something, the trap snapped shut. The answer still needed to be verbal, though. A yell, a laugh or a loud groan were enough. A nod or a discreet sigh were insufficient. But maybe it was because Hitoshi needed to hear the feedback? A sigh was a vocal sound, after all. The only difference between it and a laugh was that it was inaudible. So they made Hitoshi try and brainwash someone while wearing noise-canceling headphones, and surprise! Even if the subject answered him clearly, Hitoshi couldn’t put them under. He could feel his Quirk activating but the control slipped between his fingers like water. Hearing the subject’s answer was what locked his Quirk, not the answer but itself.
Somewhere in the middle of testing, Kameko and Melissa came back. They started by quietly watching the tests, but quickly enough, they joined the guinea pigs. The more the merrier, after all. While one person was being brainwashed, the others put their heads together, trying to find new angles to tackle the problem. What if the target was deaf, for example? What if they didn’t hear the question, but still realized there was one, and answered with a grunt?
They tested it with Melissa wearing noise-canceling headphones. The answer was: yes, it worked. And Hitoshi didn’t even have to speak with words. Well, he had to use words because that’s how he activated his Quirk, because he had never learned differently: but using sign language at the same time to make Melissa answer verbally was just as effective. Imagine that! If words were only necessarily because Hitoshi used them as a crutch… he could learn to use his corporeal language to activate his Quirk! Sign language, sure, but also a nod, a smile, an offered hand, eye contact!
Brainwash’s activation parameters were way more subtle than it first appeared. It wasn’t about just asking a question and having it answered. It was about establishing communication. Hitoshi had to start the communication, and he had to receive confirmation that his offer was accepted. Hayasa-sensei compared it to casting a net. First you tossed it, then you reeled it with the prey in it. The metaphor was pretty apt.
Next was testing what Brainwash could do exactly. Hitoshi couldn’t make Toki lick her elbow, for example: she tried her best (Keigo had it on camera and found it hilarious) but it was just physically impossible. But Hitoshi could make someone push their body’s limit way beyond their usual. For example, he made Keigo do a full split or touch his toes with his forehead, even though it wasn’t the kind of gymnastics Keigo was used to.
But as much as Brainwash could push people’s bodies, it couldn’t touch their conscious mind. Hitoshi could make Hayasa-sensei write ‘Mercury’ in fancy calligraphy, but if he asked him to write his hero name, Hayasa-sensei would just stare vacantly into space. The order didn’t compute. Same thing when asking about information. Oh, the subjects could evidently memorize orders. Hitoshi could order Toki walk, jump, pick up a bag, come back, and do a handstand, and she would do it in this exact order. But anything requiring a complicated thought-process from the subject was out of the question. They couldn’t talk, write, share information in any way, or even retain suggestions. Even ordering someone to repeat a phrase was difficult: the order was obeyed, but people had a tendency to mumble. Like the subject had forgotten how to enunciate words clearly! The body manipulated by Brainwash simply couldn’t access higher brain functions.
But all good things had to end, and after a quick glance at the clock, Toki realized it was pretty late. Mihoko-san was going to be worried. With a sigh, Toki resolved to end the festivities.
They would test range and duration later. Toki wanted to clear a full week-end for this one. Maybe Hitoshi could keep her under Brainwash for a full day. Maybe it would stop once he fell asleep. Or maybe he would get exhausted before? They had just trained three full hours without him showing any sign of fatigue, though, so she wouldn’t bet on it.
“Well, that’s fantastic progress, but let’s call it a night, okay?”
“Good idea!” Melissa chirped. “I’m sooooo hungry!”
Keigo grinned from ear to ear:
“Let’s go to KFC!”
“I have to bring Cheshire to his mom first, or she’ll scalp me,” Toki tempered. “But I’m game. Kameko, sensei, you want greasy fast-food chicken?”
Hayasa-sensei politely declined, but Kameko was all for an easy meal. They started tidying the room, putting away bags and training mats, and soon enough Hayasa-sensei left them, then Toki brought Hitoshi back to his parent’s hotel.
It was nice. Toki changed out of her costume and put on civilian clothes, then while the rest of the group left for fast-food, she took Hitoshi home. She used the occasion to tease him by carrying him bridal-style: Hitoshi screeched like a banshee as they teleported high in the sky, but when they landed his eyes were shining with delight.
Toki hadn’t warped them right away in the hotel, mostly because she had never been there. They landed in an alley not very far and walked the rest of the way, eagerly chatting about their little experiment. Hitoshi was very intrigued by her idea of Brainwash being an induced hyper-ERM state, and they bounced ideas back and forth. A brain scan would be easy to get, since Hitoshi’s dad was a surgeon with access to hospital equipment. They could also test Brainwash on heavy or light sleepers, to see if the shock needed to wake them up for Brainwash varied in strength.
They talked about this and that, how Hitoshi was handling his capture weapons, or if he had talked about his training with any classmates. It was also a roundabout way to ask him if he had made any friends. He was still in the same middle school as his bullies from last year, but he had changed classes, so hopefully it was better.
And yeah, it was better. Hitoshi had gained in confidence, and he knew how to fight now, so it helped. But changing classes had also been a big help. People in his new class were nicer. They still sprouted the usual jokes about his ‘villainous Quirk’ but without a ringleader to start pushing them to ostracize him, they were happy enough to leave him be. Besides, he wasn’t the only kid with a ‘villainous Quirk’, and there was an unspoken solidarity between them.
“And there’s also a boy who has a copying Quirk,” Hitoshi continued animatedly. “He’s kind of a loudmouth, but he’s alright. He says he wants to be a hero, too, so we strated having lunch together to talk. Oh, and he has a cat, too.”
A copy Quirk? Toki blinked. That was a fascinating power. Individually weak, but growing exponentially stronger the more the user surrounded himself with allies. In a way, it was a nice metaphor for society’s need to adapt to the new age of teamwork. Also, how the hell would a mimicry Quirk work? By sight, touch, hearing? Could you cultivate someone else’s Quirk the way you could hone your own power? Damn. Really, she would love to analyze it.
“That’s great! Do you know who’s his favorite hero?”
“Not you,” Hitoshi smirked. “He’s a fan of Edgeshot. His favorite is a sidekick I’ve never heard of, though, someone called Thunder Thief…”
“Oh, him,” Toki realized. “He’s not that old, actually, in his late thirties I think. He’s one of the sidekicks Kameko wants us to hire. We need someone middle-aged to balance our youthfulness, whatever that means.”
“Really?! That would be cool! This guy is pretty strong, from what Monoma tells me.”
Toki blinked. Wait a second… No way. A guy named Monoma who had a copy Quirk?! Who was the same age as Hitoshi Shinsō?! That was a hell of a coincidence. Just to be sure, she checked:
“So his name’s Monoma?”
“Neito Monoma,” Hitoshi confirmed.
Holy crap, that was him. Another canon-character! And he had met Hitoshi! Befriended him, even! Toki allowed herself a second of incredulous freak-out. Had that happened in canon?! Surely not! Then what had changed?
Oh, who was she kidding, a fuckton of things had changed. Maybe Monoma’s parents had moved because of a villain that should have been arrested but hadn’t. Maybe Hitoshi had been placed in that class because his mom had yelled at the school’s principal to get him away from bullies, while in canon she hadn’t. Hell, maybe in canon Hitoshi hadn’t even gone to that nice posh school… because in canon, it was very likely that he’d been an orphan following a car accident when he’d been a baby.
“Well Thunder Thief is pretty strong,” she said to give herself some time to think. “He can reflect people’s attacks back at them, so it’s handy in villains fight. He’s also not a stick in the mud, which is a definite plus. My only reservation is that he’s apparently an annoying loudmouth. Hey, maybe he’s related to your Monoma!”
Hitoshi made a face: “God, I hope not. He would be unbearable.”
Toki snorted with amusement. Then she softened.
“It’s good you’re making friends.”
“Whatever,” muttered Hitoshi, looking at the ground.
“Really,” Toki insisted. “I didn’t have a lot of friends when I was your age. You’ve only got one childhood. You should focus on being as happy as you can.”
Hitoshi muttered something about her turning really sappy in her old age. But he looked distinctly pleased. Toki smiled, and didn’t insist.
They were at the hotel, so she paused, letting Hitoshi text his parents to let them know they were here. Apparently they were waiting for him to arrive, before looking for a restaurant. Mihoko and her husband Hajime quickly appeared in the lobby, dressed warmly and looking delighted.
They exchanged pleasantries and Mihoko invited Toki to join them, but she had to decline. She had already promised to join Keigo and the others. Not to disparage the restaurant’s food, but sometimes nothing made your mouth water like the idea of French fries with some crispy nuggets and a fat burger.
She swore it was only a raincheck and she would go and eat with them later. Maybe even at their home! She was due for a swing by Musutafu, anyway. Mihoko laughed and told her that she better remember she would always be welcome. Then they bid each other goodbye, and Toki warped back into the sky, diving towards the fast-food she knew Keigo favored.
In free-fall above her city, though, she couldn’t help but grin from ear to ear. Friends, promises, potential, amusing coincidences, a future full of possibilities… Yeah. No matter what a rough start she had, sometimes she thought she had been born under some lucky stars.
It was a feeling that bubbled in her belly, her chest, her throat, too full of life and emotion to be put into words. Wonderment, delight, thankfulness, exhilaration. She was Toki Taiyōme the genius, Quantum the fighter, Hoshizora the explorer, Antares the builder: she was a daughter, a friend, an ally, a lover, a protector, a mentor: she was so much, she had been given so much, and sometimes it made her feel like her heart could burst.
Oh, wasn’t it worth all the pain, all the fear, all the anger? She had lived so much already, and she had dearly paid to get there in her life. But Toki had won. She had a place here, a family, a soulmate, two students, countless friends, a whole city that was hers. It made her feel so fierce and elated, like nothing could ever stop her.
There is nothing you have to fear
that should not fear you a thousand times more.
Your heart is a galaxy,
and your soul is lined in stars.
You are something extraordinary, my dear
— so do extraordinary things.
Yes, Toki could be proud of where she was in life. No star had even whispered her name, there had never been a predestined place in the great story to fit in: she had made her place, pulled at her fate with her own hands and molded it like clay, leaving dirty smudges and imperfections behind her. But her failures and her triumphs were her own. And now, at the top of world, she was looking behind her and beaming, because… it was something to be proud of.
And she was only getting started.
oOoOoOo
Melissa’s internship came and went without a fuss. Apparently getting caught in city-wide attacks or stumbling across a serial-killer was something reserved for the Protagonist. Well, good for him. Toki definitely wasn’t complaining.
They patrolled the city, they met fans, Toki signed autographs and took selfies. Twice, a douchebag tried to make some snide comment about a Quirkless hero: the first time Quantum stepped in and coldly made the guy apologize, and the second time Melissa handled it herself like a pro. Toki was so proud of her student!
Melissa was great with civilians. She was kind and understanding, but also professional. She carried herself well in the spotlight, and never floundered in front of journalists. It was something that Toki had never really considered, because in some way she had always seen Melissa as a young and fierce teenager, but her protegee had charisma. She was energetic, smiling and hopeful, with a candor and an eagerness that even the most cold-hearted journalists couldn’t defend themselves against. She didn’t have All Might’s bluntness or his self-assurance (which was a good thing, because All Might’s confidence was bordering on oppressing), but she had a presence like him. Something softer, kinder, more empathic… but at its core, it was the same brightness that attracted the eye.
She also took to heroics like a duck to water. As an engineer, Melissa was already very organized, so it wasn’t hard to introduce her to paperwork and filing systems. She memorized Hayasa-sensei’s spreadsheets about ongoing cases and villains encounters, which immediately endeared her to the underground hero. She offered to tinker with their support gear, which was awesome, and fixed both Ocelot’s communicator and Tyto’s grappling hook in one afternoon. Melissa also got involved in one minor villain fight, or rather she happened to be with Toki during a patrol with some excitement: she didn’t panic, and she even requested permission before knocking down the guy who was trying to grab a hostage.
And yes, screeching “In range for bounce!” counted as asking permission. She had waited until Toki yelled for her to go ahead, after all. Yeah, she didn’t have a permit, but she had had special authorization from her mentor who had one, so… as Keigo would say: boo-yah.
The highlight of the week was when a middle-aged woman shyly asked Melissa if she really was Quirkless: and, upon hearing a circumspect yes, lit up like a Christmas tree and asked her for an autograph for her son, who was Quirkless too. She said that hearing the doctor’s diagnosis had crushed him, but seeing someone like him win the Sports Festival had given him hope again, and Moxie was his inspiration!
Melissa didn’t cry, but her smile was definitely wobbly with emotion, afterward.
Anyway, the week passed. Melissa went back to Musutafu, to school. And life went on at Icarus Agency.
On the Discord Server, Melissa and Sachiko invited more people, and new members trickled there one by one. PikaPika created a private chatroom for the StarsChickenConspiracy (ah ah, very funny), but the main chat suddenly filled with Quirk analysis, social criticism, new theories, movie debates. The server began to be way more active. Some news members were fans of Hawks and Quantum, which was hilarious. They even made fanart. Toki resolved to create another account with her hero name, to one day drop by and see them screech while trying to hide their art. That would be hilarious.
Moving on! Shortly after Melissa’s departure, Icarus received a partnership offer from a support company. Not any support company, but the TechnoBurst Company, the one who employed David Shield. They had headquarters in the USA, but also in I-Island, and Japan. They were notoriously very picky in which heroes they supported. Anyone could buy from them, sure, but a partnership? That was something else. It means constant upgrades, lower prices, personalized advice, and so on. Until then, the only Japanese hero they had ever partnered with was All Might.
Toki couldn’t help but think that David Shield had something to do with that. And now, he had something to do with this, too.
Of course, Icarus accepted. It gave them a huge boost in popularity. There was no doubt about it, they would be in the Top Ten Hero by the next Billboard Chart announcement, in November. And not at the bottom of it, either! Kameko was absolutely elated, almost purring like a real cat. Their support items were great. And with that quality for that price, they also gave a raise to everyone at the agency, and hired more people.
One of their new recruits was Thunder Thief. They hired two more sidekicks, too, and a few more assistants and dispatchers. And they also made Hayasa-sensei a secondary hero, instead of a sidekick. So now Icarus had three heroes, fifteen sidekicks, and ten administrative assistants. Frankly, they had more than doubled in size in the span of one year! And if all went well, they would double that before the end of the year!
Anyway, back to Thunder Thief. He was a good hero, competent and smart while also being fun to be around. Great teamwork, too, which was a welcome surprise. He worked well solo, but he never complained about playing second-fiddle to another hero. He seemed glad, even, to be part of a team and help prop others up. He was a loudmouth, though. He boasted, held grudges, preened like a peacock when complimented by fans, and he also couldn’t stop flirting with people. I mean, really, it was constant. On patrol, on the phone at the agency…
Well, at least he was a perfect gentleman. He never overstepped or anything that could make his target uncomfortable. He was actually quite suave for a guy clearly trying to get laid. But he did get laid, and quite a lot apparently. That man had a whole separate phone for his booty calls!
Kameko found it hilarious. Hayasa-sensei was quietly disapproving. The sidekicks were in equal part scandalized, awkward, and envious. They were all pretty young after all, and Thunder Thief, all slut that he was, was also a charismatic older guy who had immediately befriended them: so they couldn’t quite bring themselves to condemn him.
In the end, since Keigo didn’t give a flying fuck about it as long as everyone was happy with his work… Toki based her attitude on his, and that was it.
Also, having Thunder Thief on patrol with Sunspear or Psyren was hilarious. Toki just turned on her com and listened to their chatter. It was like live comedy to hear them squabble all day long, right until the moment when they snapped in hero-mode and did some hero-stuff, then went right back to bickering as they resumed patrol.
And… the more she hung out with him and the more she started to wonder if he and Neito Monoma weren’t actually related. Sometimes they really acted similar. And they both had purple eyes! I mean, it could be nothing: lots of people had purple eyes in this crazy world. But still. Toki’s inner conspiracy theorist was ready to dig.
“So, Thunder Thief,” she innocently asked one day. “Do you have kids?”
She heard Keigo guffaw in her ear, but since it was on their private channel, none of the sidekicks could hear him. Thunder Thief still missed a step and nearly fell from the roof:
“What is that kind of question?!”
“Well, it’s a yes or no one,” she answered airily. “Considering your age and your tendency to leave, let’s say it politely, a trail of broken heart in your wake… it’s not illogical.”
Sunspear, who was patrolling with them, snorted. Thunder Thief raised an eyebrow in his direction, as if to redirect the question. Sunspear was in his mid twenties, so yeah, he could have been a dad, too. But Toki already knew he wasn’t. Most of the staff at Icarus Agency kept their hero-persona and their civilian-persona separate, but they still chatted about their lives. Toki and Keigo also took care to know everyone’s birthdays and things like that. Of all the sidekicks, only Zero was married, and he had a daughter on the way but she wasn’t even born yet.
“I do,” reluctantly admitted Thunder Thief. “We’re not in touch, though. What about you, Quantum?”
“I don’t have time for kids,” she shrugged. “Maybe in a decade or so.”
Sunspear looked surprised:
“Really?
“What?” Toki said, faintly indignant. “I would be a great mom. I would teach my kid all about how time is an illusion, money is fake, and society is a construct. But I would also teach them that bedtime is very, very real. Parenting at its best.”
Having children wasn’t one of her life-goals, sure. But she wasn’t opposed to the idea. It would be… nice, to take care of someone, help them grow, love them unconditionally. Toki liked raising kids. Not that she had raised Melissa or Hitoshi, but… she had liked being the older figure in their lives they could rely on. So yeah, maybe one day, she would settle down with Keigo and… be a mom. Maybe.
“I didn’t mean it like that!” Sunspear backpedaled. “You’re just so one-hundred-percent in the action, it would be weird for you to retire and take care of kids.”
“Hey, nobody says anything about retiring. I could be an active mom. And even if I did retire to take care of my kid, there wouldn’t be anything weird about it. I would still be badass. I would only wear mom jeans and an apron instead of a bodysuit.”
“Obviously,” Thunder Thief approved. “Women are queens whether they wear high heels, combat boots or fuzzy slippers.”
Toki offered her fist to bump and he obliged with a grin, probably to see Sunspear splutter helplessly that he didn’t mean it, he was a feminist too, really, before awkwardly trying to change the subject.
“Why are you not in touch with your kids, Thunder? You don’t have to answer, of course, but I’m just surprised.”
“I’m not a widower or divorced, if that’s what you’re wondering. It’s only that… Well. I am a man of many skills,” Thunder Thief said drily. “Adequate birth control is not one of them.”
Well, Toki’s crazy conspiracy theory could work, after all! Now, if she could just get an DNA sample… wait, no that was getting out of hand. She snorted in amusement at her own crazy ideas, and shook her head:
“Well, nobody’s perfect. Look at me, I’m great at everything except for cooking.”
“I think burning noodles and forgetting a condom have very different long-term repercussions,” Thunder Thief laughed, “but I appreciate the sentiment.”
Then the police called for heroes because there was a rogue villain on the freeway, Toki grabbed her two sidekicks by the shoulders, and off they were to deal with some guy trying to start car accidents. Life as usual.
The conversation stayed with Toki, though. Or rather, the part about her having kids kept coming back in her thoughts, even as time passed.
She didn’t not want to have kids. It wasn’t something she wished dearly, not right now. But it wasn’t something that repulsed her. Far from it! She just… hadn’t thought much about it. But now, well, it made her feel kind of wishful.
It would be nice. Sure, she had never been the type to coo at babies. Small human beings didn’t trigger her maternal instincts. But… she tried to imagine a little boy, or a little girl, looking at her with a big toothless smile; a little kid with Keigo’s golden eyes and her own dark hair… and she couldn’t help but feel hopelessly enamored with the idea. It filled her with a faint sense of wonderment. A child who would laugh just like her, and who would grin just like Keigo, and that they would raise together, with love and care, teaching them to crawl and walk and run and fly. Didn’t it seem incredible?
How weird. It seemed that just like yesterday, she’d been a child herself, lost and angry and so desperate for hope. Or maybe a teenager, confused and awkward, afraid and longing. And now she was nearly twenty, an adult, a hero, with a Master’s degree nearly completed, someone competent and in charge, and she was thinking about kids. What a world.
She wanted kids, one day. She wanted kids with Keigo, kids that they would cherish and spoil like their own parents should have done.
It didn’t even occur to her to have children without Keigo in the picture, actually. They were in for the long game. She didn’t just want to be a mother, she wanted to be a family, and that included him. It absolutely included him. He wasn’t just her boyfriend after all, he was the most important person in her life. Her family, her best friend. And wasn’t it just the highest form of tenderness? Having a best friend was the epitome of choosing someone over and over, maybe even subconsciously, because you just knew, on some unspeakable level, that your lives were supposed to be entwined, that the connection between you was fatefully, significant and necessary.
Truth was, Toki could say a lot of things to justify where she was in life. A lot of things to motivate her choice to become a hero, to undergo heart surgery, to work towards the goal of making Fukuoka safer. Many of her motivations would be noble and altruistic. But the truth was: Toki was a hero because it was the cause Keigo believed in. She was here because that was where he was. Maybe it was selfish and un-feminist of her, but who cared?
Anyways. The question of kids, or rather biological kids, was very firmly off-the-table for now. But real kids were kinda everywhere. There was Hitoshi, who Toki brought to Icarus a few more times in the following months to continue training. There was Melissa, who continued training with her in Musutafu. There was Toki’s quiet and amused investigation of Thunder Thief to see if he was really Monoma’s father. Keigo found it hilarious, and had bet money it was true: the worrying thing was, Toki was beginning to think he was right, and what had started out as a joke was probably going to end up real!
And, at the end of July, another kid entered the picture.
“Naruto Labs has a new protegee,” Hayasa-sensei bluntly announced one morning. “They want me to go back for a few days to organize her training.”
There was a silence. Toki and Keigo exchanged a short glance. They hadn’t thought about Naruto Labs in a while. And while it wasn’t unpleasant memories, it was still… a little disorienting to think that another kid was there, living how they had lived.
“Sure,” easily said Keigo after a few seconds. “We’ll cover your shifts. When do you want to go?”
“Tomorrow, ideally. I should be gone for a week at the longest.”
“Do you want me to drop you off?” Toki grinned. “That would save you a few hours of train and car. Also, I’m curious about their new kid. Do you know how young they are? How they ended up at Naruto?”
“Don’t stick your nose into Naruto’s business, Quantum. They did well enough with you two without Inferno or Shirayuki butting in, didn’t they?”
“Fine, fine. I’ll keep my distance. But I expect a lot of gossip when you’ll be back. Oh, do you already know what their Quirk is?”
Turned out that Naruto Labs had sent a short file to Hayasa-sensei, and he didn’t protest when Keigo’s feathers snatched his phone to bring it to him, Toki plonking her head on his shoulder to read at the same time. It was a girl aged sixteen, just a year older than Melissa. Apparently she was able to create incredibly detailed illusions via psychedelic venom. Her codename was Sumire, which wasn’t very original but pretty enough. There was a photo, too. She had a mutation, which was kind of surprising for a hand-picked hero student… but maybe not so much for a kid in danger of turning to villainy. Her mutation was pretty tame, giving her snake fangs, and big yellow eyes with slit pupils: but even if she was, overall, pretty cute, the snake-vibe she had going on was still a bit unsettling.
Toki quickly scanned the rest of the file. No name or surname, and nothing about her circumstances. But, interestingly enough, in the mail Hayasa-sensei had been sent, the handler was asking a bunch of questions about how to get the girl to open up… and if maybe getting her a playmate her age would be better for her ‘intellectual development’, since she was going to be homeschooled alone at Naruto Labs for a year.
If Sumire had joined the program earlier, she would have been homeschooled for a while then sent to the local high-school. But since she had joined the program late, the Commission would probably try to keep her homeschooled for a year before letting her go to a normal high-school. The sponsored kids had to train a lot.
It made sense, but Toki was also aware that… in the meantime, Naruto Labs could get lonely.
Hayasa-sensei had already sent an answer saying he couldn’t recommend enough to find her peers to bond with. It wouldn’t even be hard to do so. Didn’t any of the scientists at Naruto Labs have kids? Or maybe there was another child who hadn’t quite made the cut for the training program (not a powerful enough Quirk, not villainous enough parents, not a bad enough foster family…) and who could be given another chance. Point was: kids thrived with companionship. It was scientifically proven.
Hayasa-sensei had ended his mail by saying he would come by and was more than ready to make training plans for two kids or more, and Toki bit back a smile. That was exactly what she would have said. Little Sumire was in good hands.
“Will you go back there to train her regularly?” Keigo wondered. “You used to live at Naruto Labs, before.”
“I was retired then,” Hayasa-sensei pointed out. “She’ll have her own trainer, I’m just there to give some advice. Besides, if I went back, who would keep you in line?”
“I’m sure Thunder Thief would do a great job,” smirked Toki.
Hayasa-sensei scoffed. Yeah, Thunder Thief was competent, but he still didn’t like him and his ‘depraved ways’. He thought this guy was a bad influence. Especially since Keigo and Toki were acting more friendly with fans. Now that there was a huge flirt going around and impacting people’s views of Icarus, people thought that the heroes were becoming flirty.
“I still don’t like him.”
“You should try to get to know him a little! It’s been months. And he’s very nice under all that veneer of casualness!”
“Oh, I don’t doubt he’s a nice guy. What bothers me is that he doesn’t have the brains God gave a fiddler crab. Also, because of him, you hit on garbage men and old little ladies now!”
“So what? They deserve appreciation too.”
“It’s making us relatable,” loyally added Keigo.
Hayasa-sensei groaned theatrically.
“I don’t want to know. Behave while I’m gone, alright?”
“Yes, sir!”
They even saluted as he passed. Hayasa-sensei pretended to roll his eyes at their antics, but Toki could see his fond smile. It was like nothing had changed from the time they were all at Naruto Labs.
Anyways. Hayasa-sensei left to whip the next Naruto trainer into shape and assess the new kid. Kameko handled the management on her own. And Toki and Keigo split up Mercury’s patrol time.
Doing underground work wasn’t exactly their favorite, but they were both fairly good at it. It was mostly investigation and recon, anyway. When there was a fight, the priority was to avoid attracting attention or making collateral damage… which was basically the opposite of what limelight heroes did, but they handled it fairly easily.
The only issue was that their Quirks and costumes were both very recognizable. Hawks and Quantum weren’t discreet. So the very first day, they both donned new costumes. Keigo switched his brown pants and jacket for black ones, and Toki wore all black. Disguising their Quirk was trickier. Keigo dealt with it by shredding all his feathers and carrying them in his sleeves or a backpack, but Toki mostly tried to not use her Quirk. Or, well, she did, but she only used the one variation that didn’t emit light, and that she had never used on her limelight job… The “Switch”. The art of warping something from one point on her body to another point on her body, without teleporting herself. Not very useful for big fights, but very adaptable for hand-to-hand combat!
Without his wings, and with an outfit that looked almost civilian, Hawks didn’t need to do more to hide his identity. Besides, since he still used feathers, he couldn’t really try to pass himself for a different hero. He tried to stick to espionage, then. His feathers were dead useful for that. Toki was the one who went looking for trouble. Since she had a new costume and new attacks that looked like a totally different Quirk, it was easier to disguise herself.
Being an underground hero was… meh. There were some cool parts, like the fact that they didn’t have to cater to fans, or the fact that there was wayyyy less fighting. Toki investigated, she sneaked around… she didn’t get fawned over, or have her picture taken. If she had to speak with some shady drug dealer or a passing homeless guy to get info, she lowered her hoodie to obscure her face, and spoke in a gruff tone that didn’t invite small talk.
Basically, Toki channeled her inner Eraserhead.
For a week, she went out every night, sometimes with Keigo and sometimes alone, to patrol Fukuoka’s streets, stalk well-known thugs, and do recon for Icarus. She sometimes got into scrapes and fights, of course, but less than she did as Quantum. She mostly sneaked around. But if she found a fight, oh, she dived right in. Switch was less impressive than her wrap-blast or her teleportation, but it still made her a very dangerous opponent.
Still, when Hayasa-sensei came back, she was glad to leave this underground gig behind her.
She would rather stick to limelight heroics. Yeah, she didn’t like how merchandized heroes were, but she liked the light. She liked creating dialogue with fans, she liked dealing with straightforward villains rather than dirty drug-dealing rings. She liked being heard when she talked about an issue. She liked that her presence reassured people, she liked being known.
It made her sheepishly think of a time, not so far away, when she had felt so disdainful of limelight heroes and their pointless race to celebrity. She had said to All Might that she refused to be a Top hero, but really, now that she had tasted what it would be to be underground… it felt so hypocritical of her.
It wasn’t useless to be known. It made people feel safer. Yes, being high in the ranking meant more responsibility, more accountability, and it may be inconvenient compared to the relative peace Toki actually had as a lowly twentieth ranked hero. But with great power came great responsibility after all.
Toki didn’t feel the urge to change the world. She didn’t have a cause, a grand calling. But she still longed for change anyway. Stagnation revolted her. She needed action, traction, emotion, evolution: and those were things that limelight heroics could give her. That a high ranking could give her, too.
And besides… soon enough, the ranking would become even more important than before. Toki couldn’t forget it.
Because this year, All Might was going to announce he was stepping back.
oOoOoOo
Weeks passed. October went. Melissa turned sixteen, and Toki turned twenty. Then, in November, came the new Billboard Chart. Everyone at Icarus had been waiting for it with bated breath. Kameko had even a pool with some colleagues from the HPSC, trying to guess the agency’s ranking ahead of time. But funnily enough, it wasn’t what made this year’s Billboard Chart so special.
For all the other Billboard Chart announcements, it had been done online, while the heroes stayed in their respective cities. Only the most ardent fans (and the heroes worried about their ranking) followed the announcement live on TV. Said announcement was always very short, fifteen minutes max, and never said more than what was revealed online when the rankings were released, so there wasn’t really a point. But this year… a lot more people would be watching. The Billboard’s staff had announced that All Might would be present for this year’s announcement, and he had his own declaration to make.
And, twenty-four hours before the start of the show, every single hero in the Top Twenty had received a message from the HPSC. ‘Keep order, no matter what All Might says’.
Yeah. It was time.
So the main staff of Icarus Agency found themselves in the breakroom, eagerly waiting for the show to start. Hayasa-sensei was pretending to make coffee without paying attention to the TV, Kameko was bouncing on her seat like a cat ready to pounce on its prey, the few sidekicks here weren’t even attempting to be discreet… and Toki and Keigo were mentally bracing for impact. When the jingle of the Billboard Chart started, Toki was starting to chew her nails.
“Aaaaand welcome to the hero rankings of the year 2228!” cheerfully exclaimed the anchor, a young woman with bright pink antennas on her head. “This year has seen the start of new and promising heroes, the rise of some older ones, the fall of some others. There’s been a lot of change! With no further ado… Here are the new rankings, released online as we speak!”
On the screen, a large chart appeared, with ten horizontal slots piled on top of each other, with what looked like stylized silhouettes of heroes. The tenth lit up, green, revealing the name of a man with black hair streaked with white. A well-known hero, already in the Top Ten for a while…
“And the number Ten is the ninja hero: Edgeshot!” announced the anchor, beaming. “Previously number Nine, he drops a place, but stays strong! Congratulations! Taking his spot by a hair, and finally making it to the Top Ten on his birthday, even, is…” the next slot of the billboard lit up, brown this time, revealing a hero with a mane like lion, “Shishido, the Lion Hero! A strong win for him! Next at number Eight is the oldest of our top heroes. It’s Yoroi Musha!”
The billboard lit up, purple-black this time (apparently it was color-coded by heroes), revealing the picture of an old samurai-themed hero. Then Toki saw that the next picture, on the slot above Yoroi, looked like it had wings. Her heart jumped in her throat. Keigo, eyes fixed on the screen, blindly reached for her hand. Their fingers interlaced and gripped tight.
“Our number Seven is the youngest! He’s not yet twenty, and started his agency less than two years ago. After a fulgurant ascension, he’s finally in the Top Ten. And he doesn’t show signs of slowing down. Here he is… The Wing Hero, HAWKS!”
The picture lit up in red, revealing Hawks in all of his winged glory. In the breakroom, everyone bursts into applause.
Toki turned towards him, grinning from ear to ear… but the anchor wasn’t done. Suddenly the whole room quieted, every single spectator glued to the screen, and to the next slot where a silhouette looked like it had twin buns on its head…
“But as high as Hawks reaches, there is one person who’s been faster, and who has put away a record number of high-ranked villains this year. She’s the only woman of this top Ten, and a young prodigy whose talent and speed outshines all others! The number Six hero is… QUANTUM!”
The picture lit up, bright gold. This time, it was like a bomb had gone off in the breakroom. People screamed, applauded, and jumped. Someone threw confetti. Someone else opened a bottle of champagne even though it wasn’t yet noon! Toki fell into Keigo’s arms and they hugged, laughing and grinning like madmen, almost dancing, before getting separated, slapped on the back and congratulated by all of their sidekicks. Kameko couldn’t stop smiling, looking so delighted she could barely stay in place. Even Hayasa-sensei, so calm and professional, was beaming and letting himself be hugged.
Toki couldn’t believe she had placed higher than Keigo. Apparently her month of chasing high-ranked villains to train for All Might had really paid off! She was under no illusions that it was this month-long winning streak that had granted her the few points necessary to surpass Hawks. Their stats were very similar, but he had always been more popular than her.
They barely listened to the rest of the ranking announcement. It was nothing new, anyway. Best Jeanist was number Three, and the anchor speculated that his team-up with Gang Orca had played a role in that. After all, Gang Orca had also shot up a few ranks in the Top Twenty. Then, to no-one’s surprise, Endeavor was number Two… and All Might still number One. Still, it left the Icarus staff a few minutes to calm down. They were still grinning like lunatics but they had mostly cooled down when the ranking’s announcement ended.
Just in time for Kameko-san to increase the volume, so they could hear than anchor’s cheerful voice continues:
“And we have a special guest this morning! The number One hero himself! There’s no fear to have…”
“… for I AM HERE!” exclaimed All Might, appearing on stage with his usual loud baritone and terrifying smile.
Toki’s smile froze a little on her face. The rest of the team, blissfully unaware, cheered and clapped for All Might’s appearance. The Symbol of Peace and the anchor bowed, the poor announcer looking a little star-struck.
“Welcome, All Might! It’s a pleasure to have you here! But it’s also a surprise. In the twenty-seven years you’ve been Number One, you’ve never used the Billboard Chart announcement as a platform to give a statement to the public. What changed? And… As I’m sure all our viewers are curious: what do you wish to say?”
“Nothing dire!” exclaimed All Might with a booming laugh. “So maybe I should preface my announcement with this one: I am not retiring! I still have years of heroics to look forward to.” Then his smile faded slightly, and his tone grew serious. “When I became a hero, it was with the single-minded goal of rallying the people to a goal. A goal of peace. And now I look around me, and to my surprise, here we are! Peace. Victory, even. Triumph over villainy. Criminality has never been so low in all of Japan’s history. The main kingpins are all dead or behind bars. S-ranked villains don’t roam cities anymore. I’m proud to say that my goal, my gift to Japan, has been realized. But it’d also made me think about this question… what next?”
He sighed, looking grave. “As we have reached a new era, my duty to this country has changed. I’ll keep defending Japan against enemies, but it can’t be my only goal anymore. I’m a Symbol of Peace, and peace isn’t an ongoing fight. Peace is people drafting treaties, crossing borders, finding common ground, and building things together.”
Toki felt her heart jump in her chest, and smiled incredulously. Holy crap, had All Might just quoted her?
“It is not something I can do on my own. It’s something that can only be possible if everyone, heroes and civilians alike, step up and start working together. We need stronger heroes, stronger than me even, in spirit but also in number. And those heroes need room to grow! Which is why this year is my last one as Number One. Starting next week, I’ll only be a part-time hero, which means I’ll be excluded from the rankings.”
In the breakroom, everyone looked stunned. The poor anchor apparently hadn’t expected this announcement at all, because she had paled quite a bit. She fumbled with her microphone, and sputtered some facts, probably to give herself time to digest the news:
“Yes, ah, uh… For those of you who don’t know, part-time heroes… that is, heroes who work less than twenty-five hours a week… they aren’t eligible for ranking. Which is why there are about three thousand heroes in Japan, but heroes are only ranked from number one to number nine-hundred and ninety-nine. But, but, most part-time heroes are only part-time because they have a main job, as a civilian, that keeps them from heroism full-time! Do you… intend to get a job, All Might?”
She immediately cringed at her own audacity. It was obvious she was struggling to remain professional: this announcement had completely flipped the script, and now she was grasping at straws. But All Might calmly answered:
“Not as such! I intend to spend time with my family. I also want to use that time to educate myself a little better, work as a consultant, and pass my teaching license to maybe take on some students in a few years. But not to worry! I’ll still be here!”
“Wouldn’t it embolden villains to know you’ll spend less time fighting?” fretted the anchor.
“Absolutely not!” All Might laughed. “In the last two years, I slowly decreased my patrol time. I’m already below the average full-time hero, and it’s only by courtesy that the Hero Public Safety Commission allowed me to stay in the ranking this year. But villainy is still at its lowest, because of so many fine heroes keeping the public safe! So don’t worry, Miss. It’ll be fine. I wouldn’t leave if I wasn’t sure the situation was handled!”
The anchor still seemed a bit shell-shocked. All Might smiled reassuringly, then turned towards the camera. His face turned serious, his piercing blue eyes seemingly staring straight at Toki.
“I’m not abandoning you. But I am stepping down to let other heroes prove themselves. Be strong. Be kind. Work together. Create the kind of future you want to live in. I am here. And… I’m counting on you.”
The program ended. The anchor stuttered a short goodbye speech, the credits rolled.
In the silent breakroom, Toki and Keigo exchanged a glance. Now was the moment to set the tone. They couldn’t let people freak out about this. Slouching on her seat, Toki cleared her throat and drawled arrogantly:
“Well. Think we could make it to number One, now that he’s stepping down?”
At least it broke the stunned silence that had fallen in the room, because everyone started talking at the same time.
All Might had masterfully handled this announcement, and Toki was one hundred percent sure he hadn’t been the one to write it beforehand. Still, of course, it made waves. In the following days, it was all people could talk about.
They talked about on radio shows, on TV, online. The forums were abuzz with heated debates. The Discord server was on fire, too. Every single person in the #StarsChickenConspiracy salon had asked Toki and Keigo if they knew it was coming… to which the answer was: yes, but only vaguely. The President had wanted All Might to retire. Being part-time was probably a compromise between retirement and continuity.
But the point was: All Might wouldn’t be Number One anymore.
Online, on the streets, on TV, in interviews, everywhere Toki went it seemed that people were always talking about it. What did it mean for them? What did it mean for All Might? How was it impacting the other heroes? Obviously, thanks to the HPCS’s late warning, most heroes had acted cool and reassured the public, saying that they trusted All Might and that they were fully able to keep the peace. But a few heroes had had less than stellar reactions. Some young ones had screamed in betrayal. Others had panicked. A guy had retired, even. Fortunately the press had played the angle of ‘this was the last straw for this tired middle-aged man’ instead of seeing it as a sign of panic.
And, of course, there was the number Two hero, future Number One even… Endeavor. He had been furious. Oh, there had been no press release, no interview. But rumors had it that he had yelled in fury and destroyed his agency’s gym, because he’d seen All Might stepping down as a personal slight.
It didn’t look good for him, true. But the fact that he was absolutely not worried about keeping up the work had, somehow, reassured people. At least something good had come out of his temper tantrum.
So everyone was floundering in the wake of All Might’s revelation. And everyone was asking the same question: what next?
What should they do? What would All Might do?
Geez, if getting their first taste of independence was this scary, Toki was very glad that All Might was still here as a security net. People were as jittery as a young kid being asked to go to the grocery store on their own, looking pleadingly at their mom for help because the cashier was an Intimidating Adult. Come on guys, you’ve been living in a world of superheroes and supervillains for decades! Time to grow up!
Of course, since All Might’s agency had worked together with the HPSC for this announcement, Toki wasn’t surprised to see the Commission step up. In the following days, they announced new guidelines for heroes. How to be more reassuring, what kind of mission to prioritize, etc.
They updated patrol schedules for every agency, even if nothing really changed, to assure them that they were aware of their work and All Might was aware too. They also started a trend on a few social media, #whatwouldAllMightdo, inviting people (even civilians, or maybe especially civilians) to give their best advice. Don’t start fights. Defend people weaker than yourself. Be nice to each other. Encourage your local heroes.
All Might made a show of continuing to work, arresting villains, helping with rescue efforts when there was a flood, and staying cheerful and optimistic. But since he had seven hours in his muscular form, and now only worked five hours max, he also started granting interviews again, or going to visit hospitals.
Part-time heroes didn’t have agencies, so All Might’s agency officially announced its dissolution. Since they had accumulated a formidable amount of resources, everything was distributed between charities, struggling heroes agencies, hospitals, and so on. It was cleverly done. In the months following Toki and All Might’s fight, All Might’s agency had hired plenty of qualified people, and started balancing their assets. Now, there were about a hundred qualified professionals with All Might’s reference on their CVs. The HPSC could merrily dispatch them into various heroes’ agencies, and the money was already counted and ready to go. It was for sure the work of a good PR manager.
Icarus Agency was doing well. In the wake of All Might’s announcement, the top heroes had shot up in popularity. People looked up to them, more than ever. They had to live up to their expectations.
Since Icarus was so admired… Toki was slowly trying to do more work on social issues. Like Quirk discrimination for example. Ranting about it on the Discord server helped but it wasn’t enough. It was about raising awareness, you know? With All Might as a model, of course everybody revered flashy Quirks, but as Toki had said before: if strength rose to the top, then utility was pushed to the bottom. The issue was still very present, even now that All Might had left the stage to make other heroes figure themselves out. It was an issue that had existed since… well, the dawn of Quirks, basically. But it was rarely, if ever, addressed.
Come on, a little backstory:
When Quirks appeared, so did ‘villains’. There weren’t heroes, yet, since people couldn’t have a permit to use their Quirk. There were only vigilantes. The system of heroism as a profession had been created when vigilantes had been given permits, salaries, and so on. But part of this system’s success was the choice of which vigilantes were elevated to ‘hero’. Quirks were feared back then, even though a majority of the population had one. But with its evocation of a classic, noble hero gifted with amazing powers, the pro-hero system helped to rebrand Quirks as something positive. Having a Quirk had been a source of fear, shame and hatred for two generations by then. The new hero system tried to make it seem admirable, enviable even. With this in mind, specific vigilantes were selected as eligible for the pro-hero systems according to their good deeds and lawful personalities, but most of all, for their Quirks. Governments wanted Quirks that appealed to the ‘superhero’ image of old held by the masses: the more flashy and impressive the Quirk, the better.
The other vigilantes, the ones with destructive quirks, or invasive or mutation types, or any that just didn’t have public appeal, well… They didn’t get a permit. They were labeled as criminals, with their former allies and comrades soon sent to hunt them down. And so, they became society’s first supervillains.
What an inspiring tale, uh?
So Toki sprinkled a little social justice in her interviews. She also tried to make other heroes speak up about it, but… it wasn’t that easy. More heroes were happy to give money to charities, visit hospitals, and so on. They were happy to help: but only if the help was obviously and unambiguously good, with no messy debate to have. Good or bad was trickier to deal with when it was about ideas to defend, and not concrete relief to give to poor little victims.
Anyways. Calling out jerks in the streets, or kicking the butt of little bullies after school wasn’t hard: it was just a question of being there at the right time. Quantum got a reputation of sticking up for the little man, which wasn’t bad.
All Might stepping down meant that plenty of people whined about being abandoned, but a lot of others felt empowered. They felt proud of being trusted by the Symbol of Peace.
Of course, not everyone could go and punch villains. But everyone wanted to feel like they did something. Sometimes it was just cleaning an overflowing trash can. Sometimes it was helping find a lost cat. Sometimes it was speaking up when a classmate was being bullied. And… it didn’t seem like much… but compared to how things had been last year, or the year before that, people seemed to really make an effort, you know?
It seemed that everybody was studently eager for change. TV debates were overflowing with new ideas. Some were good, like creating a fund for poor kids, or softening sanctions against non-violent acts of villainy. Others were alarming, like offering villains with cool Quirks an opportunity to redeem themselves by fighting against others villains.
It was like no one had ever watched Suicide Squad, really!
Anyways. Ideas were all over the place and it was wayyyyyyy too soon for anything concrete to get out of it: but Toki still noticed stuff from canon. Stain’s ideals about heroes being ‘fake’ were starting to appear on social media. Some surviving yakuzas re-started gangs to offer protection to their neighborhood. And… the Meta-Liberation Army’s doctrine was making a comeback, although it was still subdued.
Yeah, even though All Might wouldn’t factually work less than he actually did, his announcement had still blown a wind of change, and villains knew it. They were getting their bearings.
Thankfully, there was no huge threat like the League of Villains going around and causing trouble. If the canon-timeline was to be trusted, they wouldn’t appear until… maybe two years from now. Toki supposed that AFO was still recovering (even in canon, he had been on life-support!). And with AFO still benched, Shigaraki wasn’t yet ready to make his debut.
Anyways. Toki kept an eye on this stuff. Especially the Meta-Liberation one. Keigo and her both, actually, and for pretty much the same reason: it was a villainous group, but their reasons were surprisingly sensible. Free Quirk use wasn’t a new idea. Several groups pushed for more freedom in Quirk use, some more extreme than others, and they all had different justifications, of course: they weren’t all Meta-Liberation supporters. Still, Keigo had bought and read Destro’s autobiography… and had let Toki borrow it… and it wasn’t hard to see that a few of those groups pulled their arguments straight from their leader’s book.
The worst thing was that she agreed with some of it. The problem was separating their ideal of freedom from the garbage Quirkist ideology.
This idea of ‘Quirk use shouldn’t be restricted to heroism’ was something she totally agreed with, but it was actually more of Keigo’s banner call. Thinking someone like him wouldn’t be allowed to fly if they didn’t get a license never failed to get him all fired up. It was funny, in a way: in canon, Hawks would have infiltrated the MLA and pretended to share their beliefs. But maybe he hadn’t faked that much. While Toki was an ardent advocate for anti-discrimination, Keigo became passionate when speaking about freedom. Birds aren’t meant to be caged, he joked, but his eyes were serious.
It made Toki fall in love with him all over again, sometimes. Keigo inspired her. He was brave, and selfless, and funny, and charming… but more than that, too. He was so bright, so passionate, so driven. He loved photoshoots and fashion shows like Toki loved books and analysis, and he loved heroism in the same way she loved the stars, but he wasn’t a cosmetic hero just in for the publicity. He had values, determination, passion. He wanted to fight for the weak. He hated rigid rules. He wanted to go higher, get freer, and delighted in the idea that people would walk this path with him, would have the chance to be just as strong, just as free. Keigo wasn’t the kind of person to ferociously guard his place at the top: he wanted people to reach his level. He wanted to share this strength and freedom with them, to give them safety and opportunities.
Oh, Keigo had always shone so brightly. He loved his fellow man just as much as Toki, or maybe even more. He was just better at hiding it beneath a veneer of superficiality.
So he liked the idea of free Quirk use. Toki and him liked to dissect Destro’s book, demolishing his eugenic ideas and nitpicking at the cultist atmosphere while also thinking about how to use the good stuff to make society better, kinder, more tolerant and accessible.
They weren’t the only ones. There was a frenzy of new ideas, new debates. The Symbol was stepping down, still descending on villains with all his might but letting room for heroes to grow, extolling them to change, to be strong, and to be kind. What did that mean? What could they do? It was like suddenly, people had opened their eyes, realized the next big change was in their hands, and now ideas were bubbling all over the place.
Things would change. Things were changing.
Of course, maybe Toki had nothing to do with it. Maybe it was only All Might’s orders that had finally pushed people to move their big butts. But hey, that was a very cynical outlook on the situation. All Might had maybe given the push, but Toki had already been doing the work, and so had Keigo, and so had their sidekicks. Maybe leading by example wasn’t enough, but it had helped. Or at least, Toki liked to think so.
The results were the same: the world was changing. From now on, there was no going back. The Symbol of Peace had stepped down. The future was full of endless possibilities.
It was a good thing that Toki was an adventurer, right?
Notes:
Hope you liked it !
Is Hitoshi's friend Monoma, THE Monoma ?
Yup! I really like his character (mostly because i love how he has the same inferiority complex as Bakugou but without his cruelty). And Hitoshi needs friends xD So here, i gave him one !... Is Thunder Thief Monoma's dad?!
Maybe. At the begining he was supposed to be his divorced father, but i changed the plot in the meantime and i'm not sure i will make them confront it. Or that thay know. Or even if it's true! I just find the idea of Toki having a conspiracy theory, Shouto-style, too hilarious to pass.
The headcanon about heroism being born from vigilantes with marketable Quirks isn't mine. I'm not sure where i read it but i think it was a fic with a Bleach crossover. It made a lot of sense and it tied very nicely with my other headcanon about WHY popularity was so important in the rankings, meaning that heroic actions are meaningless without public approval.
I'll soon update "Snapshots of Wisdom" with pictures of Melissa in her hero costume, but also Thunder Thief the new sidekick, and even Sumire the new HPSC's protegée !
Next chapter will be in two weeks, so the 16th or the 17th. I have a MAJOR SUPER IMPORTANT EXAM on the 13th about succession law on the 13th. I already messed up once, so this is the re-take exam, and my whole future career depends on it. No pressure.
Chapter 30: Roads not taken
Summary:
"Fine," Kameko said. "Endeavor will have his spot as number One, and you can give him a reality check at the next Billboard chart by dethroning him. Everyone is happy.”
“Except Endeavor.”
“Fuck Endeavor.”
Keigo grinned.
“Aw, come on. Don’t be crass. I would at least buy him a drink first.”
“… get out of my office.”
Notes:
Here is the new chapter ! There's action, there's emotion, there's medling. There's also a great plot-twist at the end =)
So i passed my exam, and it sucked ass, and i don't know if the good stuff will balance the bad, so i'm... waiting for the results, i guess. I have an oral presentation on the 3rd that may compensate my bad grade and not make it a failing one, but that's another story. For now i'm just braced for the landing.
I've also strated getting out of the MHA fandom a little because waiting for the new scans is killing me, what the fuck is Deku doing, getting a Starbuck?
So i've been reading good self-inserts into A Song Of Ice And Fire, and let me tel you, it gave me plenty of ideas of a Rhaenys Targaryen SI that survive the sack of King's Landing and then grow up as a pawn in other's people games. Tiny Rhaenys wouldn't be a mastermind, but revealing her "visions" to a mastermind like Doran or Olenna or heck, even a wildcard like Oberyn, that would bring colossal changes.
Meh. I'm shelving that idea for later.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
ROADS NOT TAKEN
Heroes were usually ranked individually. But there was a tiny, not very used clause that allowed them to be ranked as a team. The popularity, money and statistics of the two heroes teaming up permanently would be merged and their rank would be based on the sum of their statistics. For example, instead of having four members that would individually stand in the low two hundred rankings, the Wild Wild Pussycat’s team was ranked as a whole. It made them rank in the fifties instead.
It had its pros, like bigger paychecks. But it had its cons, like the fact that team ranking depended on the popularity of all its members, so if one person screwed up, the four went down, and so on.
Anyways. That clause wasn’t well-known but barely a month after being ranked number Sixth and Seventh respectively, Keigo and Toki were informed of it by Kameko-san. Or rather, Kameko-san had been asked by the HPSC to bring it to their attention. There were plenty famous already. But if they merged their statistics… Well. They had a real chance to become number One in the next Billboard Chart.
So Toki’s answer was obviously: hell no. Even if she had started appreciating the limelight heroics, that didn’t mean she was ready to shoot up to the top of the charts, and she said so plainly to Kameko.
“It’s a lot of pressure! Especially so soon after All Might’s announcement, people are going to have a lot of expectations. Transition isn’t an easy period.”
“Come on,” grinned Keigo, looking vastly entertained. “Can you imagine stealing the spot right from under Endeavor’s nose?”
Imagining the Flame Hero’s face was pretty funny. He would look soooooo constipated. He may even self-combust out of sheer outrage. Toki swallowed back an uncharitable snigger, then shook her head. She knew Keigo didn’t want to be Number One either. He was just trying to rile her up.
“It’s not worth it. Besides, wouldn’t it make you sad to rob Endeavor of his dream of the Number One spot?”
“Nah. Standing above him is kind of hot, if you know what I mean. Also, if I’m at the top, I’ll have his full and undivided attention.”
Keigo wagged his eyebrows. His cockiness was such an integral part of his Hawks persona that Toki would have been surprised if he hadn’t been already thinking about it. She snorted and punched him in the shoulder:
“We’re both going to climb the rankings anyway. Imagine being number two! You’ll end up right behind him, even breathing on his neck for the first place. How is that?”
Keigo’s eyes sparked mischievously.
“Very good,” he purred. “It sounds to me like a completely valid strategy.”
Kameko-san, who had hidden her face in her hands, groaned loudly:
“So I guess I won’t be submitting Icarus’ name as a team to be ranked on its own? You know the President has been breathing down my neck about it. And not in a sexy way.”
Keigo laughed: “I should hope not, the witch is way too old for you!”
Kameko thew him an incredulous look between her fingers:
“Like you have room to talk, Hawks. How old is Endeavor, remind me?”
He grinned, wide and lazy, and not ashamed in the least.
“Well, what can I say? Experience can be attractive. Also, have you seen his pectorals?”
There was a short silence during which Kameko seemed to seriously consider the question, and Toki swallowed back a burst of laughter. In the third seat, even Hayasa-sensei seemed to ponder if, yes or no, Endeavor’s musculature made up for his whole personality. Was Toki the only person here not attracted to massive deltoids? Well, on the other hand, she was attracted to Keigo being attracted to a stupid mountain of muscles, so… yeah. She didn’t have much room to talk.
Was it weird to be attracted to her boyfriend being turned on by other things? Uh. Maybe Toki was like that stereotype about bisexuality, always down for a threesome. Not that she would want a threesome with Endeavor, where had that idea come from?!
Urgh. Quick, time to change the subject. And maybe bleach her brain.
“There’s not a lot of heroes forming teams like that anyway, right?” Toki wondered. “Even if the Commission has pushed for team-up since last year, plenty of heroes would rather continue to work solo.”
Kameko shook her head, and grabbed her tablet to scroll down her mails:
“You’re not wrong. Hero teams are the exception, not the norm. The push for team-ups had solo heroes cooperating, but there’s still very few heroes forming partnerships like that. The main impact of the Commission’s policies is elsewhere.”
“Really? Where?”
This time, it was Hayasa-sensei who answered:
“Plenty of solo heroes are forming agencies. A few solo heroes are promoting sidekicks, too, so they can have more equal partners. For example… Inferno recruited an underground hero. He’s got a very small agency, adding a full hero to his payroll must be a significant change.”
“Salamander, I bet?” Toki smiled.
“Good guess,” he blinked. “You know him?”
“We’ve met. He’s the one who made me pass my Quirk assessment before the License Exam. He’s an S-ranked hero.”
Hayasa-sensei narrowed his eyes, looking thoughtful. Kameko raised her eyebrows but didn’t comment, and powered on:
“Plenty of solo heroes are now trying to form alliances with other heroes or with sidekicks. It’s kind of a boon for coalition-stage agencies, because it means that their solo heroes are finally pulling their head out of their asses, and they take their safety more seriously. Present Mic has announced he’s taking on two sidekicks, because he’s ‘taken All Might’s advice to heart and wants to give himself the means to be even more Plus Ultra than before’, whatever that means. Mmmmmh, oh! Nighteye’s agency is recruiting, too. They used to have Sir Nighteye as their only hero, with a few sidekicks doing informant work, but no primary combatant listed. Now they have a new one, listed as a frontline hero, even! She’s called Lady Siam, apparently…”
Toki nearly choked. Oh gods, that name was familiar. She hastily tried to smooth her features, but it was too late. Keigo’s face split into a huge grin:
“Lady Siam! Isn’t that your Eternal Rival, Quantum?!”
“Wait, you know her?” Kameko blinked.
“She was at my License Exam,” Toki groaned. “She unilaterally declared me her great rival because I was supposed to be her target but I kept evading her to create chaos on the battlefield, and in the end I got my leg paralyzed and I used her as a crutch because sportsmanship forbade her from punching me in the face after the end of test. No big deal.”
“Okay, is that the same Exam that when I asked Mera-san how it went, he started laughing hysterically and refused to answer?” Kameko threw her hands up in exasperation. “What the fuck happened exactly?”
“Lots of chaos, I told you. I also screwed with the scoring system so they had to redo it entirely. But hey, at least I beat Hawks!”
They fist-bumped. Hayasa-sensei looked like he couldn’t decide between scowling or laughing. Kameko gave up:
“Fine, don’t tell me. Point is: Icarus will stay an individual agency. It’s not surprising, Idaten is staying an individual agency too, and gods know Ingenium is a sticker for teamwork… Anyways. I fully expect the President to insist a lot, so think about it for next year, okay? Endeavor will have his spot as number One, and you can give him a reality check at the next Billboard chart: everyone is happy.”
“Except Endeavor.”
“Fuck Endeavor.”
Keigo grinned.
“Aw, come on. Don’t be crass. I would at least buy him a drink first.”
“… get out of my office.”
So, life as usual. And things were going rather well: Toki didn’t have anything to complain about these days.
It was now late December. The weather was cold, but still pleasant. Toki’s heroic work was perfect. She fought villains, got into scrapes and adventures, jumped all over Fukuoka, then all over Japan. There were missions to Shizuoka, Osaka, Musutafu, Kanazawa, Fukushima, Morioka, Sendai, Hirosaki, Toyama… She worked with plenty of other heroes, with old friends and new ones. She had seen Inferno and Salamander again barely a week ago, hence her hunch that Inferno’s team-up was with his old friend.
It turned out that Salamander’s Quirk was actually called ‘Salamander’. How original. It gave him a few reptilian traits (such as claws) but most importantly, it gave him perfect fire-resistance. Basically, Inferno and him were a match made in heaven.
She also got to meet Best Jeanist during a photoshoot. Keigo introduced her to him, looking delighted. Considering how involved Jeanist was with the fashion industry, Toki had kinda expected him to be a little pretentious and talk about clothes right away. But so much for her biases: Best Jeanist was perfectly pleasant, warmly congratulating her on their rankings, and immediately launching a conversation about the latest gossip in his agency. Also, for a grown-up, he didn’t try to talk down to the ‘youngest heroes in the Top Ten’. He was kind of fun to be around, actually. He had a very dry sense of humor and used clothing-related puns all the time. And he was always ready to help if needed. No wonder Keigo liked him.
It didn’t quite make up for how weird his long neck was, though.
It also allowed Toki to see Keigo interact with other heroes, heroes he was on good terms with. He kind of turned his Hawks persona to eleven then. He was still friendly and constantly smiling with ease, but he was also… kind of an asshole. He always said what was (seemingly) on his mind, and he was cocky and flamboyant when doing it, perhaps even striving to make a show out of it. A few heroes had already said that Hawks was obnoxious, easy-going, a know-it-all, but they had all fallen in Keigo’s trap. By thinking him so over-confident and naïve, they clearly underestimated him.
Maybe Toki should try to up Quantum’s over-confidence, too. She was the more serious one of their duo, but pushing people’s buttons to make them underestimate her could be useful.
Anyway! Toki’s university classes were going well, too. She still had a jackass for a teacher, and she was starting to suspect him of actually not liking her because she was supposedly Quirkless (what a joke!) but he didn’t actively sabotage her. He just ignored her, and Toki had good grades and plenty of prospects. In a few months now, she would have completed her Master’s degree and could start looking for an internship for her PhD. A PhD in astrophysics, isn’t that wonderful?
Now there was the problem of getting an internship to work on said PhD. Considering her double-life, it wouldn’t be easy. She also needed to pick a thesis’ subject… hum.
She started drafting a motivational letter for several labs. If they accepted letting her work remotely, or part-time, it would be great. Toki had a main advantage over other candidates: since she was rich thanks to her job, she didn’t ask for a big salary. Actually, she asked for the bare minimum. And an almost-unpaid intern with a Master’s degree? It was rare.
They were in Japan, after all, in the twenty-third century. Bad work conditions with no pay were a thing of the past.
So! Preparing her PhD. She wrote to several labs, but her first choice was the JAXA (the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, their equivalent to the USA’s NASA). Pro: it was big, it was famous, it offered a lot of opportunities. Cons: the headquarters were in Tokyo, and Toki hadn’t set a foot there since Meteor’s arrest. Oh well, the JAXA had three other agencies in the country, so she could maybe go to one of them. She would do most of her work remotely, anyway.
Her second choice was to work in a lab in Hamaoka, not far from Musutafu. She actually had her eyes on it since she was something like twelve. It was the only place in Japan to have an Ion Drive: an electromagnetic field generator that pulled electrons from its surroundings to create an endless energy source. Sure, it was a research lab that wasn’t particularly turned toward space exploration. But they mostly studied energy sources, and with an Ion Drive at their disposal… It was the best possible place to start researching how to create a next-generation spaceship.
But well. One thing at a time. It wasn’t even Christmas yet!
The days passed almost too quickly. This year, they were going to the heroes’ gala. Those kinds of parties weren’t really Toki’s cup of tea, but Keigo wanted to go. Apparently he had a great time last year. Toki hadn’t been difficult to convince.
Endeavor wouldn’t be there, and neither would All Might, but most of the up-and-coming heroes would attend. Mostly limelight, but a few underground ones also came to exchange gossip and have a good time. Sherazade would be there, for example. And so would Inferno and Salamander. And Ingenium! And Present Mic!
(It would be absolutely hilarious to go to the gala as Quantum and see if Present Mic recognized her as Hoshizora. He was duty-bound to keep her secret identity, well, secret, so the idea didn’t present any risk. But he probably wouldn’t recognize her in the first place. Hoshizora always wore extravagant bright yellow hairclips, and she’d been fluent in English, but that wasn’t enough to make a pro-hero remember a Quirkless Gen Ed kid. But if Present Mic did recognize her, or at least got weirded out by how familiar she was, it would be hysterical.)
Anyways. It had been a month since All Might’s announcement. The Symbol of Peace had given a few interviews, here and there, staying vague but reassuring. He had wholeheartedly encouraged the frenzy of ideas for reform, charities, and other ways to keep peace without relying on a Symbol.
Toki had also exchanged a few emails with him, to check in. They weren’t friends: but she still felt concerned for him. He was nice. And she was one of the very few who knew his secret, so she felt obligated to reach out. She had a duty to not let him stew in melancholy, especially considering it was partially her fault that he was stepping down.
All Might was doing… fine. He still lived his hero job at one hundred-percent, but he limited himself to five, sometimes just four hours a day. It made him a little bitter. He loved hero work. But he had apparently found some joy in being just Toshinori Yagi, and it helped. Oh, not all the time. It was very hard some days for him to step back, to willingly end his patrol without having reached his limit. But he did.
He didn’t do it out of care for his health, though: he did it for society, to allow Japan to grow. He forced himself to deactivate his Quirk after five hours, and tried to be useful in other ways. He was volunteering at several soup kitchens and two different homeless shelters, apparently. Even if he didn’t overuse his Quirk, he still felt the need to work as much as he could.
It showed a concerning lack of self-preservation.
Toki probably wasn’t the only one who thought so, because when she enquired about his days, All Might (or rather Yagi-san) always talked about plenty of people visiting him. There was Melissa, who didn’t need him to be a hero to be a good, doting uncle. There was Recovery Girl, who usually came to bully him into taking meditation classes, and gossiped about Yūei's students. There was Nedzu, who was trying to cajole him into becoming a teacher at Yūei. And there was his friend Tsuki-something, the detective, who was taking a well-deserved vacation to spend time with him.
Also, Tsuki-something was smart, because he had tried to introduce Yagi-san to various hobbies to give him something to do outside of heroics. Good move. And apparently Yagi-san had fallen in love with knitting, like an old grandma! Toki wanted to snigger. But he had knitted mittens for Melissa, and well, after seeing her little kōhai so delighted by her ugly pink gloves, Toki had to grudgingly admit that maybe it wasn’t a bad hobby.
Christmas came.
All Might left for I-Island with Melissa in town, to see his friend David Shield. It would do him well to catch a break. In the meantime, Toki had a gala to attend. Keigo and her booked a hotel in Kyoto near the congress center where the party would happen, and spent the whole afternoon getting pampered by masseurs, designers, and hairdressers.
Although, when Keigo went to get her for the party, Toki had to admit they both cleaned up very nicely.
“Nice tie,” she grinned at Keigo. “Very subtle.”
In true Hawks’ fashion, his jacket and tie were gold-patterned. He was apparently allergic to plain and boring suits. The tie had red feathers on it, too. He snorted, and gallantly offered her his arm:
“Thanks. Your hair is nice.”
Toki beamed. It was a fashion designer who had picked her dress (something elegant and discreet with a distinct Chinese inspiration), but Toki had picked her hairdo. She had kept her iconic buns, but with marigold flowers in it. A little odd in the middle of winter, but hey, Quantum was known for being exuberant, after all, so bright flowers wouldn’t shock anyone.
Also, their outfits matched. Red and gold for Hawks, copper and gold for Quantum. Toki had also put on dark brown colored contacts, hiding her glowing eyes.
“It’s in the main hall of Kyoto’s congress center, right? I’ll warp us there.”
She had already gone yesterday to check out the place. In a blink, she warped them directly on the red carpet, right in front of the entrance. Journalists screamed and started calling, snapping pictures in a flurry of flashes. Toki waved, Keigo smiled and posed, and then they quickly disappeared inside.
And well, you could say what you wanted about the heroic industry, but at least they weren’t cheap when throwing a party.
The room was huge, with crystal chandeliers that reflected light, soft ballroom music, and plenty of Christmas decorations lining the windows. The place was filled with the brouhaha of conversation, soft giggles, high-pitched laughter, lively exclamations. And there were so many people! Heroes, sponsors, sidekicks, journalists, representatives: everyone in fancy suits or beautiful dresses, idly chatting with each other, drinking champagne and eating hors d’oeuvres. There were plenty of familiar faces, too. Toki kept her casual smile while quickly taking in the crowd. Inferno was talking with a guy in a suit, and oh, here was the hero with metal control that Toki had fought before the License exam! And here was Titania, the oldest frontline heroine still active! And Gang Orca, talking with Mera-san. And wait, was this woman in the orange dress Sherazade?!
Keigo dragged Toki with him and cheerfully introduced her to plenty of heroes he had met during solo mission. Gecko, a muscular guy with a regeneration Quirk… Ingenium (yes, the one and only!), who was here with a few sidekicks from Idaten Agency… Melter, a hero who could melt anything into goo, but was also a famous musician…
Then they stumbled on Mirko, the Rabbit Heroine, and one of Keigo’s friends that he had been dying to introduce to her. And wow, she was a lot. Technically, she was a few centimeters shorter than Toki, but she had shoulders like an Olympic swimmer and such a raucous energy that she seemed to fill the entire room.
“Here she is!” she exclaimed, slapping Toki so energetically on the back that she nearly faceplanted in her drink. “Hawks talks a lot about you, firecracker.”
“He does?” Toki grinned. “It better be good things.”
“He mostly complained about you hogging the agency’s showers after patrol. Apparently it would kill you not to take forty minutes long showers.”
“Well. Physically? No. Emotionally? The toll would be catastrophic.”
Mirko guffawed, slapping her thigh in delight. Then she slung an arm around Toki shoulders:
“Anyway, congrats on beating Hawks’ ass in the rankings! You’re the youngest hero to ever hold sixth place, you know?”
“Yup!” Keigo cheerfully added. “But Endeavor reached the Number Two spot at our age, so, you know, there’s still room for progress.”
“Who knows, pretty boy?” Mirko smirked. “Maybe next year you’ll be Number Two.”
“Or Number One,” Toki grinned. “We can probably unseat Endeavor even before he gets the first place. By the way, is he here?”
“Nah, Endeavor never comes to the Christmas gala,” Mirko waved a dismissive hand.
“Why?” Keigo said plaintively. “He looks so good in a suit! Even if he would look even better without it, you have to admit.”
Toki snorted with laughter, almost inhaling half her glass. Mirko grinned from ear to ear:
“Maybe. But he’s always taking this shift. Better bonuses. Also, the Christmas gala is pretty big, and All Might sometimes swings by. All the journalists at the entrance are hoping he’s gonna make an appearance.”
They would wait a long time. All Might was off-duty for the week, while Yagi-san was spending holidays with his niece and his best friend on a far-away island. Toki snorted. Mirko sent her a knowing look:
“Not an All Might fan, I heard?”
Well, Keigo had been chatty, apparently. Toki tried to evade the question:
“I’m ambivalent. What about you?”
“I always admire someone who packs that much of a punch,” Mirko shrugged, “but the moral lessons aren’t my cup of tea. I’m in heroics to kick ass, not talk shit. I would rather go straight for the action!”
Well, she had a raw brand of honesty that was almost refreshing. And she radiated such barely contained energy that Toki had no problem believing her about her ‘living in the moment’ mentality. Hell, Keigo was a little like her, too: always in a hurry, unable to sit still, his brain always maintaining hundreds of trains of thought at the same time.
Then Toki suddenly gripped Keigo’s arm, eyes going wide:
“Holy crap, is that Sherazade right there? Quick, somebody give me a piece of paper to get her autograph, Hitoshi’s gonna love it.”
“Let me introduce you,” Keigo brightened. “Mirko, wants to come with?”
“Nah, I’ve got to find Best Jeanist. I have a hundred yen on getting him to call his suit a juxedo. Hey, who wants to do shots afterwards? I bet you can’t hold your liquor!”
“I’m not a lightweight!” protested Keigo, affronted. “I’ll take those shots!”
Turned out he was a lightweight. Toki made fun of him for weeks afterward. But hey, she couldn’t hold her liquor much better, so they could call it even.
And besides, it was a good night. Toki saw Present Mic again but, as expected, he absolutely didn’t recognize her. Mirko won her bet about getting Best Jeanist smashed enough that he called his denim tux a juxedo, and then she enthusiastically became the heart of the party once it became a little wilder… and much inebriated.
Yeah. It was pretty good to be a famous limelight hero sometimes.
Merry Christmas.
oOoOoOo
In January 2229, two major events happened. The first one was that Endeavor arrested a major villain in Tokyo, right under Ingenium’s nose. He then managed to disband a whole human trafficking ring connected to that villain, in the very same week.
The second was that Quantum met Sir Nighteye.
Endeavor’s string of arrests made the news. It had been masterfully played. Toki, even if she didn’t really like Endeavor, couldn’t help but be slightly in awe of this accomplishment. Not just because of the raw firepower he had demonstrated when demolishing these villains (and they were at least a dozen in addition to the overpowered ring-leader!), but also because the sheer scale of the illegal operation uncovered.
And not only that, but Endeavor had known about how big it was, and had managed to not leave any loose ties! It had probably needed a crazy amount of investigation. As a hero herself, Toki knew how complicated it could be to investigate this kind of thing. Inside sources were rare. High-level criminals were often well-organized, with back-up plans, sleeper agents, and the whole nine yards. Cornering them was slow, tedious, frustrating… and often stomach-dropping dangerous.
Also Endeavor credited the arrest to his collaboration with others. The police force, one underground hero, and even an unnamed ‘consultant’ (so, basically: a villain or a vigilante). It was surprisingly humble of him. Toki had to give him points for that.
Had this human trafficking ring been found out and disbanded in canon? Toki didn’t know. She didn’t think so, mostly because of how huge it was. People actually compared this to All Might’s debut. Which begged the question of what had happened in canon. Had All Might’s announcement pushed Endeavor to be more efficient? Was it a move from villains throwing each other under the bus? But maybe this human trafficking ring had been disbanded in the original story. Maybe All Might had done it in canon, while working himself to exhaustion in his muscled form instead of being Toshinori Yagi and volunteering at soup kitchens. Or maybe Endeavor had done it, and just had less publicity. Who knew?
The answer didn’t really matter in the end. What mattered was Endeavor’s success.
And, even if Toki didn’t know it yet, who exactly had helped him. But that would come later.
The second event of importance was Quantum’s meeting Sir Nighteye. Or rather, Icarus Agency joining forces with Nighteye Agency.
It started, as many things did, with a mission from the HSPC. Some yakuza were starting to try and regroup. Sounded familiar… But hey, it wasn’t the Eight Precepts, for which Toki was pretty glad. Overhaul would be a massive pain to fight. No, this yakuza band was totally different. The Singapore, they were called. They were the remnants of a small yakuza family who ran drugs (ecstasy, cocaine, the classic stuff) with a side-job of extortion business. They were actually becoming more of a threat these days because they had the brilliant idea to combine their usual business, diminished and mostly flying under the radar, with villainy. They had recruited a few thugs with powerful Quirks. The boss’ boyfriend was apparently behind this: he was a speedster who was suspected of murder, assault, and various robberies.
Anyways. Sir Nighteye had found them but since his agency only had one front-line fighter (Lady Siam), they pitched a request for help at the HPSC. They needed heroes with a lot of speed, since it was this gang’s big advantage; but also good fighters. Hawks, Quantum and Mercury were all sent in, leaving their sidekicks to hold the fort. They weren’t the only heroes, either: Ingenium went with two sidekicks, as did Edgeshot, and even Kamui Woods.
Everyone went to Edgeshot’s agency in Saitama, since he was considered the senior frontline hero. They introduced themselves, even though most of them had already met: then, they started talking strategy. Where were the villains, how to encircle them, how to draw them out, if they had hostages, if they had weapons. Speed was the essence. All the villains had powerful Quirks, and they had always evaded capture by banking on their rapidity. One could teleport, even: that one was Toki’s mark.
Whatever. Toki hadn’t really had an opinion on Sir Nighteye prior to this.
He had seemed kind of a jackass in the canon-story. What was up with taking Midoriya as a student to bully him out of heroism? And taking Togata as an intern so he could groom him as the next All For One holder? Toki had always found that shady. Maybe Togata hadn’t wanted to have another Quirk. Sir Nighteye hadn’t asked. What had been the plan here? What the fuck, dude. Not cool.
But he was the man she had sent her notebook to as a kid, so in a way she kind of owed him for that. He had also (according to All Might) taken her disappearance really hard. He had wanted to save her, wanted to save Toki Taiyōme, and… just for that, Toki felt a strange gratefulness for him.
Sir Nighteye was also the guy who had apparently been a loving mentor to Togata, a good friend to All Might, and a competent hero for all Japan. He thought the sun shone out of All Might’s ass, but that didn’t make him a bad guy. In canon he’d been a dick to the main character because he played favorites with his own protégé. Whatever, Toki wasn’t going to judge: she would play favorites too if the choice came between Hitoshi and some random kid. So yeah, she was neutral on Sir Nighteye, and kind of curious about who he was as a person.
The answer was: sharp, unbending, haughty, weirdly funny in a deadpan way, and incredibly controlling.
They strategized and planned alright. Sir Nighteye’s intel was good, he had a keen eye for detail. He also managed to drop puns when you least expected it, and it never failed to make at least one person chuckle. But he was also so authoritarian! He needed to micromanage the slightest detail. When Keigo mentioned he could chase his target toward the streets, Sir Nighteye had to make everyone calculate the time of the possible chase, and plan their own action accordingly. And yes, he knew that even the best laid plans never survived first contact with the enemy, but he still insisted for everyone to prepare everything in advance, and checked it so he could have more data to extrapolate from. And of course, if someone offered an alternative to one of his plans, he shot it down nine times out of ten.
Sure he was smart, and his plans were good, but damn, the man was not used to criticism. His haughtiness was also kind of grating. In some unpleasant way, he reminded Toki of Okamoto.
But they were professional, so they worked. Hayasa-sensei and Ingenium were side-eyeing one another but hadn’t said anything about their parentage. Blind to the tension, Lady Siam was positively bouncing with energy. It didn’t take her long to start trading quips with Toki, who never turned down an opportunity to be a brat, with Keigo in the background adding fuel to the fire. Lady Siam was also, surprisingly, the only person to whom Sir Nighteye begrudgingly conceded his leadership. She really must be good, if he was willing to tone down his prickliness for her.
Anyways. They hatched a plan, they decided a time and place for their assault, and the meeting ended on a positive note. There was some fuss about who would be the one to arrest the yakuza’s boss and his boyfriend. Sir Nighteye had actually designed his whole plan around the fact that Lady Siam would be the one to take them out. Toki personally thought that herself would have been a better fit (she was the powerhouse of their group after all), but whatever. Sir Night’s plan would work just as well, and leave Toki to face an actual teleporter, so maybe it was just as good.
They concluded the meeting in high spirits, pumped up about their imminent battle. They would attack tomorrow, early in the morning, and everyone was ordered to get a good night’s rest.
“Oh, Quantum, could I have a word please?” Sir Nighteye asked politely.
She blinked in surprise, a sudden knot of tension in her shoulders. Unbiddenly, her mind went back to the notebook sent to him when she was eight. He couldn’t possibly know about that… Could he?
“Sure,” she smiled, not letting a single trace of worry show on her face. “Hawks, Mercury, I’ll be there in a second.”
“You better,” Keigo grinned. “You’re our taxi.”
But he left without protest, as did Hayasa-sensei and the rest of the heroes. Even Lady Siam left. Soon there was only Toki and Sir Nighteye in the room. He seemed to hesitate a second.
“You had Melissa Shield as an intern, correct?”
Of all the questions Toki had expected, that one was a surprise.
“I did,” she answered carefully. “Why?”
He pushed his glasses up on his nose, and Toki had the weird feeling he was actually weighing his words.
“I offered her an internship too,” he finally said slowly. “I admit being… curious about her. Is she really Quirkless?”
Toki frowned, immediately annoyed.
“Well I can’t imagine why she would lie on national TV about being part of a group whose leading cause of death is suicide,” she replied testily.
“I don’t mean to disparage her declaration,” Sir Nighteye amended. “I only mean… All Might himself supported her when she won the festival. It’s unusual for him to single out someone like that. It makes Shield-san… interesting. I can’t help but wonder if her proclaimed Quirklessness is a means to hide a late and uncontrolled Quirk activation. It would explain All Might’s support, as he was a late bloomer himself.”
It clicked. Oh my gods he thought that All Might had given his Quirk to Melissa.
After all, she had blond hair and blue eyes and the same charisma as the Symbol of Peace, and she was also very lovable: so yeah, of course Sir Nighteye would see her as a potential candidate, just as he’d seen Mirio Togata as one in canon. Which of course made Toki pause, because wait, wasn’t Togata in the same promotion as Melissa? Had he been overshadowed by her?
Did that mean that Sir Nighteye hadn’t offered him an internship? And did that mean that canon had been fucked again?
Wait. Sir Nighteye hadn’t offered an internship to Togata. But he had hired Lady Siam instead. Lady Siam, who was also blonde, blue eyed, incredibly athletic and energetic, with a blinding smile and a lot of charisma. Was he making her his new champion?! Wait, what the hell? Did that mean that in this universe, Sir Nighteye had apparently decided that the next OFA holder was going to be a girl, and so only examined potential female candidates?! Where had that come from?!
“Melissa Shield doesn’t have a Quirk,” Toki said abruptly. “She would even refuse one if it was offered to her” Sir Nighteye looked up sharply at that, but Toki didn’t even pause, “because it’s important for her to reach her goal on her own, to show the world that a Quirkless person can be a hero. All Might’s show of support was because of her own merit, not because of some… hidden relation.”
“You can’t know that,” Sir Nighteye frowned. “Especially considering they actually know each other. You know she’s related to David Shield, don’t you? All Might was very close to her father.”
Melissa’s parentage had been on the news following Melissa’s victory in the Festival. David Shield was a famous engineer after all. But since David Shield hadn’t seen All Might in years (at least officially), people hadn’t put two and two together. Some people had speculated that Melissa and All Might had met in the past, but her identity as All the Symbol of Peace’s niece was still safe.
Which was why Toki didn’t appreciate Sir Nighteye poking at this secret, even in a roundabout way, in front of someone who wasn’t supposed to know. That was so irresponsible! This man was supposed to be a hero specialized in handling sensitive information, and he was leaving clues about a hero civilian’s identity like some amateur?! Was he really that careless?
“I know a lot more than that,” she sneered. “And considering the Heroic Identity Protection Act, you should be more careful about fishing for information about who Melissa Shield, who is still a civilian, is in relation to All Might. If you can’t be bothered to do so out of respect for Melissa, then do it for the ex-number One at least.”
Sir Nighteye narrowed his eyes, looking annoyed. Aaaaah, yes, he was a die-hard fanboy. Toki had been banking on that to push his buttons. All Might’s fans online were always pissed when someone called their hero ‘the ex-number one’.
But Sir Nighteye let it slide, and focused on the first half of Toki’s answer. He looked oddly calculating.
“What do you mean, you know a lot more than that? What did Shield tell you about All Might?”
Crap. Toki suddenly realized that Sir Nighteye hadn’t been careless with his questions. On the contrary, he had been baiting her to see how close she was to Melissa. And Toki had fallen for it hook, line and sinker. Damnit. He was smart.
Quick, time to switch gears. Toki was going to bait him right back. She shrugged, cheerful and disdainful all at once, like she couldn’t be bothered to take this seriously.
“Yeah, she told me about her dear uncle. But chill, man: All Might doesn’t mind. We had a chat about it once. He’s surprisingly reasonable sometimes, you know? I actually didn’t expect All Might to be intelligent, weirdly enough.”
If calling All Might ‘ex-number one’ wasn’t enough to piss off a fan, calling him dumb usually did the trick. Toki could see Sir Nighteye almost give a full-body twitch of annoyance. Her disregard towards the Symbol of Peace must have hit a nerve. Toki immediately wondered how much she could push without him self-combusting in righteousness-fueled indignation.
“Obviously he’s intelligent. He’s the number One hero!” he snarled back. He looked so offended on All Might’s behalf. “When did you talk about it, anyway?!”
“He passed through Fukuoka,” Toki drawled. “We spoke about Melissa, about the future, about how obsolete he was, and so on. Anyway, it was no big deal. He’s kind of a dorky loser when you think about it.”
Sir Nighteye grinded his teeth so hard she could almost hear it. Oh, it was good. He looked straight-up pissed now. She totally got why Keigo could be so annoying. It was really enjoyable to press people’s buttons for shits and giggles!
“Is that all you wanted to know?” she added, raising an eyebrow.
“Yes,” he gritted. “That was all.”
“Great! See you tomorrow for the operation. You should get your head in the game instead of daydreaming about All Might.”
That was uncalled for, but seeing Sir Nighteye looking like he’d bitten a lemon made it worth it. Toki cheerfully waved to him as she left, smiling cockily like Hawks during an interview. She didn’t bother closing the door behind her: if he wanted to brood, Sir Nighteye would have to get up and close it himself.
“Come on, let’s go!” she grinned at Keigo and Hayasa-sensei.
“What did he want?” wondered Keigo.
“To know if little Moxie was a liar who was faking Quirklessness for public attention in general and All Might’s attention in particular, apparently.”
Keigo’s brows rose almost to his forehead, because yeah, that was kind of a messed-up thing to ask. Hayasa-sensei shook his head sadly, and didn’t bother lowering his voice.
“Some people have no decency anymore.”
Toki gave him a thin smile, vindicated. She hoped that Sir Nighteye was hearing it and feeling a little ashamed of his words. Seriously! If he wanted to know about All Might’s decision, he should ask the man himself (not that All Might’s choice was any of his business in the first place), instead of insulting Melissa to Toki’s face.
“Let’s go home,” decided Hayasa-sensei. “We can be in time for the evening patrol.”
“Aw, so unfair sensei!” Keigo whined. “We have a massive operation planned tomorrow. We could all use a rest.”
“That’s no excuse, Hawks!”
Then they went back home, bickering, and since Hayasa-sensei usually won, they all went to patrol. Even though it was uneventful, it didn’t take long for Toki to push this unpleasant conversation with Sir Nighteye out of her mind.
This little bump in the road was left unmentioned when the different heroes reunited the next day for the mission. Sir Nighteye was aloof and composed, like always. He stopped being pushy towards Toki, though, and by extension Keigo and Hayasa-sensei. He wasn’t unprofessional enough to ignore them outright, but he didn’t try to micromanage them like the others, keeping a polite distance. Eh, maybe he was feeling slightly remorseful over his bluntness yesterday? Toki could only hope.
Anyways. It was time to focus on the mission. It was Toki’s first time joining such a big operation between high-ranked heroes, and she didn’t want to screw it up. They deployed, encircled the villains, and attacked.
It went… not bad, but definitely more violently than Toki had expected.
The fight wasn’t the most intense she had ever joined, that honor went to her duel with All Might: but boy did the villains give them a run for their money. They were all deadly and trained, and they worked together, which made them especially dangerous. The heroes always fought to subdue, and those guys fought to kill. It was rare. Most villains aimed for a show, for damage, for a quick escape. Rarely heroes fought real killers: not just murderers but people who made a living by killing, who trained for it, who were good at it. Toki never had, in any case.
In the end, she still won, but… the experience was chilling. How they came after her, who they assessed coldly then attacked, how they didn’t even hesitate, how skilled they were.
Not all of them had speed-based Quirks, but they all were plenty dangerous. Some nutcase could materialize razor-sharp cards and used them to slit the throat of his opponents: even against heavily-armored Ingenium, it made for a deadly game of cat-and-mouse and nobody came out of it unscathed. Another guy had an automated machine gun coming out of his mouth, a weapon of war, and if Keigo’s feathers hadn’t been here to disable him, so many people would have died.
Toki’s own target was a low-range teleporter. But he was a fast one too… and ruthless. He also had a gun, and no qualms about using it. Toki had never fought someone who was good with firearms before, someone who could aim and shoot quickly, who deliberately aimed for bystanders, who knew how to use coverage and high point of views to his advantage. Suffice to say that she hated it. The gunfire made her break into a cold sweat.
The teleporter reminded her of Fujio in a distant, abstract way, with how assessing his eyes were, how desensitized he was to the screams and the gunfire and the blood.
Yeah, the fucking blood. Because the heroes won, but ten people were injured. Two policemen were in critical condition. And one of the yakuza, a gangly teenager who had tried to stand by his boss’ side, had been used as a hostage and then shot in the head.
Toki hadn’t seen it. She was already running after her target at this moment. But she had seen the body bag afterward, and it was enough to make her feel almost sick. It could have been her, it could have been Keigo, it could have been anyone. Those people had been so dangerous. And the worst was how they hadn’t even cared. Toki had fought villains but none of them had looked at her like that: like she wasn’t human, like she was just something to cut down, like her life didn’t matter. Like the yakuza kid hadn’t mattered, in the end: he had been there, nothing more, nothing less, and that’d been enough. He had been used as a meat-shield and then discarded like garbage. Shot like an animal.
(Had Meteor been this brutal? Had Sayuri? Toki didn’t want to think about it. She knew the answer already. It wasn’t easier to accept now than it had been when she was eight.)
They won, because that’s what heroes do, right? Sir Nighteye’s planning paid off. The fight was brutal and scary, and none of their victories were quick or easy. Toki had lost count of the times where her heart dropped to her stomach seeing the enemy teleporter aim his gun (at her, at a guy in the hall, at other heroes). She had almost taken a few bullets, too. To disable him, Toki had to resort to brute force and basically wreck the place. She had gotten… a little panicked, at the end, the closer he got to the exit. She hadn’t splinched him, but she had been close. Her victory had ended with the guy pinned under a destroyed staircase.
He had been… covered in blood when he had been taken to the ambulance.
Toki had seen people grievously injured before. Hell, she had even seen dead people. It was inevitable with her line of work. Car accidents, collateral damage, villain attacks… it wasn’t pretty. But this… it was different, somehow. It hadn’t been an accident, a tragedy. It had been deliberate.
In the post-mission briefing, everyone was subdued. Even Keigo and Lady Siam, the most exuberant ones of the lot, were grave and silent. Almost all heroes were injured. Keigo and Sir Nighteye were the only ones unharmed. Hayasa-sensei had a busted knee, Ingenium was covered in thin cuts all over his arms and hands, Edgeshot had a black eye and a dislocated shoulder…. Lady Siam held herself gingerly, probably suffering from a broken rib. And Toki had been clipped by a bullet on the thigh. It hurt like a motherfucker, holy shit, who allowed anyone to have guns?! Those things weren’t just dangerous, they were painful as hell!
(And Toki was well-aware of how lucky she’d been to just be grazed by a bullet instead of literally shot. It still freaked her out a little. Keigo had been freaked out too: even then, he was hovering protectively near her and Hayasa-sensei. Toki couldn’t blame him. If they hadn’t had an audience, she would have felt a lot better holding his hand for reassurance. She could use a little comfort right now.)
Anyways. They debriefed. There had been a few minor hiccups, like how Toki’s enemy had gotten far closer to the exit than she would have liked, or how Ingenium’s adversary had nearly gouged his eyes out, or how some yakuza had managed to wound policemen… or the fact that there was a dead teenage boy in the morgue. Even though he was from the yakuza, that kid had been no villain. His death shouldn’t have happened. They went over what had gone wrong, what could have gone better, but in the end, it didn’t change the fact. People had died, and this victory felt bitter.
But it was a victory all the same. Nobody was too badly injured among the heroes, the casualties among policemen were few, and all the villains were apprehended. They should be happy with it. Even though everyone was exhausted and in a somber mood after seeing all that bloodshed, they should take the win.
“Thank all of you for your help today,” Sir Nighteye concluded the briefing. “Without you, arresting those villains wouldn’t have been possible. I hope we’ll work together again in the future… but I also hope it won’t happen soon.”
The attempt at humor made some heroes smile. Yeah, this battle had been tough, and they weren’t eager to get into another one in the near future.
Everyone started getting up and leaving. Sir Nighteye himself was quickly ushered to the side by a guy in a suit, which Toki would bet money on being his ‘Commission’s guy’, filling the same role Kameko had at Icarus. Good: Toki didn’t want to talk to him more than she had to.
“Quantum, do you have a second?” Lady Siam asked loudly, appearing right next to her.
Toki nearly jumped a foot in the air. When she wasn’t laughing and joking, the feline hero was as quiet as a cat, even with broken ribs.
“I won’t keep you long,” Lady Siam grinned, before becoming grave again. “I simply wanted to apologize on Sir’s behalf for yesterday.”
Toki’s eyebrows raised incredulously. “He told you?”
“Not really,” Lady Siam smiled apologetically. “He only mentioned being ‘thoughtless’, which coming from him is basically admitting he put his foot in his mouth. I know he can be very terse. He may even have… provoked you a little, since you’re my Great Rival.”
You could hear the majuscules in her voice. Toki inwardly groaned. That title was going to stick. At least it wasn’t ‘Eternal Rival’.
“You don’t need him to fight your battles,” she retorted.
“Of course not!” Lady Siam bristled indignantly. “But I talked a little about you before, and… he’s abrupt, but he means well. He has great aspirations for me, so he isn’t as impartial as he pretends to be.”
He has great aspirations for me. Toki’s heart clenched. Aspirations for the Number One spot, maybe? She could see it. Lady Siam was incredibly strong and charismatic, with the same joyful energy as the Symbol of Peace, without any of his raw self-destructive tendencies. She was young and still influenceable, but she had a core of strength, of honor and determination. She had passed the License exam late because she was a self-made hero, which gave her a good origin story… Her Quirk enhanced her abilities like a cat but also gave her incredible strength. She was perfect. And maybe Toki was just jumping at shadows, maybe she was imagining things, but… She couldn’t help but remember how close they were to the canon-timeline. How suspicious the timing was.
“It’s alright,” Toki forced herself to smile. “He was a douche, but hey, high-stakes missions kind of do that to people sometimes. No hard feelings, Siam.”
The cat-lady looked relieved. They parted way on good terms, but while she was walking back to Hawks and Mercury to bring them home, Toki couldn’t shake a creeping feeling of anxiety.
How long had Sir Nighteye wanted a new All Might before he’d grown impatient and decided to make one?
oOoOoOo
Really, Toki shouldn’t be thinking this hard about Sir Nighteye, about Lady Siam, about Togata, about All Might’s Quirk, and All Might himself. It wasn’t her business. She sneered at Sir Nighteye because he meddled with Toshinori’s decision about his Quirk, something that was deeply personal: it would be hypocritical of her to meddle just the same, right?
Except it wasn’t really about All Might’s bodily autonomy, it was about the Symbol of Peace and the stability of Japan. Making All Might step down had been a promising first step. But the plan was to remove the Symbol of Peace entirely, not create a new one. And… that was what Sir Nighteye wanted, wasn’t it? Create a new Symbol. At least, maybe he had understood that the next number One couldn’t be a carbon copy of All Might, and that was why he had chosen Lady Siam and not Togata. But the core problem was still the same. He wanted to create a new Symbol, leading a war against villains. Which, alright, wasn’t a bad thing to have. But it would be a bad thing if a warrior became the next generation’s inspiration. The whole media-frenzy about All Might had already made this society unkind, aggressive and discriminatory: they didn’t need a repeat.
Sir Nighteye wanted a warrior to have One For All. Toki didn’t. And now she was trying to justify to herself a way to stop that, because really, what right did she have to dictate who All Might should give his Quirk to?
None. But she decided that Sir Nighteye was a douche who had even less of that right, so Toki was totally within her boundaries to stop him from pressuring Toshinori Yagi. Right? Toki didn’t want him to give his Quirk to anyone in particular, at least.
Anyways. Now how to broach the subject? Toki had no idea. Had All Might already met Midoriya? It was now spring. In canon All Might met Midorya ten months before Yūei's entrance exam, and the entrance exam was in February, so… They had met in April. It was now late March. Toki still had time. Time for what, she had no idea, though. It was the very first time she was considering knowingly messing with canon, and she didn’t even know what her end-goal was, or even if she had one!
Whatever. March was a busy month. Toki finished her Master’s degree, which was actually quite a feat by itself. She was only twenty-one! On paper, it looked like she had completed her Bachelor’s degree in one year, at nineteen, and her Master’s degree in one year too. It wasn’t inexact, per say. But since she had followed plenty of classes in high-school, it had given her an edge.
Still impressive. Bachelor’s degree and Master’s degree, one after the other, usually took five full years of schooling to be completed. Toki had the right to feel proud.
But the important part was that now, she could start her PhD. And boy, was it a daunting process! She ended up sending applications to the three JAXA labs, and to Hamaoka’s lab. She sent several CV. In one of them, destined to JAXA, she wrote she was Quirkless. In the others, she left that space blank, since it wasn’t information she had to disclose before employment.
Without surprise, her Quirkless CV was rejected. All others were accepted. This result wasn’t unexpected, but it left Toki strangely bitter.
When she picked Hamaoka’ labs, she told herself it was for the Ion Dive, and not because JAXA was full of Quirkist assholes.
And the next time Kameko-san suggested Icarus to support a charity, Toki demanded a list of organizations supporting Quirkless people.
“Are you sure?” Kameko frowned. “It’s not a popular topic. It’s one of the most accepted biases out there. People can accept it’s wrong to spit on people with ugly Quirks, but they can’t accept it’s wrong to see Quirkless people as lesser.”
“I know,” Toki replied darkly. “That’s why there isn’t any reform about Quirkless people, right? Even now?”
Since All Might’s semi-retirement, Japan has been in a frenzy of reforms. Firstly in heroics, with all the team-ups and stuff. Heroes were starting to be actually better organized. People within the HPSC must be crying in relief. It looked more and more like heroes were coordinating, instead of being a bunch of individual clowns each in their own circus.
(And the tiny, cynical part in Toki’s mind couldn’t help but notice how much easier it would be to turn the heroes in an army, now that they had formations, and codes, and cooperation, and unity.)
But there were also changes at the civilian level. People wanted to change society according to the wishes of their beloved Symbol of Peace who had asked them to make this world a kinder place. There were more laws put in place to protect people with ‘bad’ Quirk, or mutations. Financial aids were given to poor families. Several education programs were put in place. New rehabilitation programs for villains were created. The government started fueling money into crime prevention (education, food, safety) instead of repression. And just like Kameko-san had predicted a while ago… the definition of ‘illegal Quirk use’ was also heavily debated.
In the past, it had been any kind of Quirk use in a public space, but now people wanted to narrow it to Quirk use that disturbs the peace or something like that. Like it wasn’t illegal to own a hammer, but it was illegal to use it to hit people or destroy stuff in the streets. It would help a lot of people to use their powers to find jobs, or care for their family, or even defend themselves. The only thing that was slowing down the reform was the fact that politicians were taking it extremely carefully, worried about derives and misuses by fanatics like the Meta Liberation Army. Which wasn’t illogical!
But hey, once this reform passed, the MLA would lose a lot of its push. Its members wouldn’t have the same motivation, after all. If they were granted more freedom in Quirk use, what the hell would they have to liberate? It would neatly solve in advance one of the biggest canon plot-points.
But even if everyone and their mothers were working hard to make the world kinder and more stable… there was not a single word about Quirkless people. All those moves made to help disabled people, people with bad Quirks, people who were poor, people who had made mistakes… and nothing for people born without a Quirk. But they suffered, too. And someone had to help.
“Yes,” Kameko winced. “All Might has started giving money to Quirkless charities, and it raised some awareness. But it’s still seen as a very low-priority problem.”
What, because they were expected to die off? Toki scoffed. The leading cause of death in Quirkless people was suicide, not murder, but that didn’t make society less guilty. So what if it wasn’t some easily identifiable bad guy who did the damage? The damage was still done. Murderers were not always creeping around with knives in dark alleyways. Most of them killed you from the inside out.
“Like Quirkless people don’t matter as much as normal people,” Toki said darkly.
Kameko looked sheepish: “Yeah. Sorry.”
“Well it’s not true, and it sucks. And I want Icarus to say it. And since a show of support to one charity probably won’t be enough, I want to do more. Can I, I don’t know, drop some lines in my next interview?”
“Your next interview is with that magazine about wildlife protection, it will be hard to sell.” Toki grinned, because yeah, she was going to talk about dolphins, and no matter how much humanity sucked, dolphins were still awesome. Then Kameko scrolled down her planning, and brightened: “You have an interview request from a manga studio next month, maybe you’ll have a better target audience?”
“Alright, sign me up. It won’t end discrimination overnight, but I have to start somewhere.”
Quirkless discrimination was one of the rare topics that still felt really, cruelly personal. Even if she hadn’t really suffered from it. She had been part of the Ordinary Community for months, she had seen all those depressing text post, all the cries for help, all the suicide notes. It made her blood boil, because she had been there, and she had been powerless. She had gotten out, but the problem was still here.
So. Toki had already implicitly supported Quirkless people. Not making Quirkist jokes (yeah, the bar was that low), helping Melissa, shutting down bullies if she caught them in the act. But it was time to become a little more proactive. After all, the world was changing: if she wanted to add in her two cents, it was now or never.
That was what being a hero was about. Not the blaze of glory, but the quiet determination. That internal fire in Toki’s chest she had trouble putting into words. The need to do good. There was a quote about it: “What we do for ourselves dies with us. What we do for others and the world remains and is immortal.” It felt a little like that. She could write entire poems about it, about this feeling of balance, of righteousness, of rage and kindness and abnegation, all wrapped and twisted together.
Do not think that my kindness
makes me anything but unsurmountable.
I did not unzip my chest to every kind of hurt
and stagger back, wounded and alive,
just to hear you calling me weak for trying.
Quirkless discrimination wasn’t always as extreme as what Midoriya had gone through in canon, at the hands of Bakugou who beat him and teared him down, or at the hands of classmates and teachers who sneered at him and ignored him. Actually, it was rarely that violent. But it was violent still. It was hard to be different, to have everyone know you were different, and to be seen as lesser for it. Quirkless people didn’t have a Quirk, but they weren’t dumber, more sensitive, more fragile than anyone else. They just had some quirky features that most humans had lost to centuries of evolution, like an extra toe joint. What was the big deal? Some people had wisdom teeth in this day and age, and they weren’t treated like glass or like trash for it!
As a (temporarily) Quirkless person, Toki had had it good, because she had been rich, well-connected, confident, talented, and had avoided making waves. She had had the implicit respect of her class’s top dogs, which meant no one had pushed a trend of ostracizing her. But even then, she had to fight for this little show of human decency. She had to fistfight a hero student and save Kurogumo’s ass in order for him to decide she wasn’t a bug! And yeah, he had been a funny guy, but Toki was well-aware that he also had been an asshole.
So Toki had had it good. Melissa, too: her money, her family name, and her father’s love had kept her protected. But for many others… almost all the others… there was no protection. They had to face the world’s ugliness and disdain on their own, whether they were young kids whose faith in humanity wasn’t shattered yet, teenagers that soaked up self-hatred like sponges, adults who were struggling to move forwards with their lives, middle-aged people who drifted alone, or old grand-parents who tried not to show how much their children’s and grand-children’s disdain wounded them.
They didn’t have anyone fighting for them. Sure, heroes were supposed to fight for everyone, but… none of them were Quirkless. None of them knew, none of them understood. Most of them didn’t even think about Quirkless people, because they were so few, they were basically irrelevant. Hell, some heroes, when asked about it during interviews, even laughed to be provocative. Because what was the harm? Quirkless people were just a statistic. They didn’t really impact their lives, and so, they didn’t… really matter.
Well. Toki fully intended to change that. It would be a long battle: but it wasn’t going to scare her. Besides, she wasn’t alone. She had Icarus at her back.
And it was also very easy to speak about it with Sachiko, and send her old friend on the warpath for a new cause.
(Toki was starting to suspect Sachiko of being a vigilante in her spare time. No, she was never injured or anything like that: but the way she was so well-informed, so enraged by injustice, and so quick to pick a fight with bullies? Well. It was kind of the perfect set-up. Toki had tried really hard to not think about it when she had been in high-school, but now she was a hero, and it was difficult to not notice stuff like that. Oh well, as long as Sachiko didn’t get caught, Toki was going to pretend to be blind. She didn’t even have proof. Maybe she was inventing things.)
But anyways. Life went on.
Toki started patrolling a little more in Musutafu. She met a few more heroes, seamlessly joined patrols, did her part to encourage unity and team-ups. Hell, she even joined a fight with Present Mic, and later that week, a patrol with Midnight! It wasn’t long, just five minutes, at most. They said hello, exchanged pleasantries, complimented each other on a job well-done, and went on their way.
Neither of the Yūei teachers seemed to recognize her as Hoshizora the Quirkless student, either. Good.
In all her time in Musutafu, Toki didn’t stumble upon All Might. It was just as good: she didn’t really know how to broach the subject. She had his phone number, of course, and she texted him sometimes, but… it was a conversation that shouldn’t happen on the phone. Besides, what would she say. ‘Hey, I met your ex-sidekick, he’s a douche, and also don’t give your Quirk to Lady Siam’?
Ah. That would go over so well. Toki wasn’t even supposed to know about All Might’s Quirk.
And she still, honestly, wasn’t sure what she should do. She didn’t know what she wanted All Might to do. Giving One For All to Midoriya was the less worse option, but really, the real problem in all that was the existence of One For All and the existence of a Symbol of Peace. And, if you wanted to go further, the existence of All For One and his evil potato face. So really, nothing Toki could solve on her own.
She tried to put it out of her mind. That conversation would happen when it would happen. Seriously, she had a lot going on already. She had started her new job part-time at Hamaoka’s lab. It was mostly done remotely, from a computer, so it wasn’t hard. But she also had to go there once a week, and it was the perfect occasion to gush about spaceships and the Ion Dive’s vast potential. Her dream of going to space was one step closer!
Of course, since everything was going so well in Toki’s life… The universe chose that moment to give her a reality-check.
The President texted Quantum to go to her office.
That hadn’t happened before. The only time Toki had been here had been when Keigo and her had talked with the President about their loan for Icarus, and Toki had then inadvertently revealed that All Might was dying. Not a great memory. Toki had no clue about why she was called there again. It must be serious. But Keigo was as baffled as she was. Kameko and Hayasa-sensei had no more information.
So. Toki went. She teleported there, knocked at the door, and entered when called. She hadn’t even passed the threshold that she already had a bad feeling.
“Hi, Genmei-san!” she said with faux-cheer, closing the door behind her. “What’s so urgent and so confidential that it can’t be said over the phone?”
The President didn’t smile.
“Quantum. Thank you for coming so quickly. Please, sit down. It’s… about your father.”
Toki hadn’t expected that. She felt the bottom of her stomach drop out.
“Is he dead?” she said in a hollow voice. “What happened?”
The President shook her head: “Sit down, Quantum.”
Toki sat. For a second, there was silence. Genmei-san was visibly steeling herself, and it made Toki even more scared of what she was going to say.
“You read the file I gave you after founding Icarus,” the President finally said. “Your father was incarcerated in Tartarus, but signed up for rehabilitation. He also worked as a consultant. Following his model behavior, as the law allows it, he’s been transferred to a medium-security prison, and continued helping heroes and police with information. That was almost three years ago. Do you know why most rehabilitation programs for violent villains fail?”
Toki scrambled for an answer and found none. Her mind was blank. It didn’t matter, and the President continued as if the question had been purely rhetorical:
“Rehabilitation is about paying back the harm done, often with community service. It’s difficult since murderers aren’t allowed to clean garbage or stack up libraries. In consequence, their community service often translates into informant work… and to quantify how much they must do to repay for their crime is often tricky. Basically, their work must be critical to save twice as many lives as they have destroyed. As it’s difficult to say if it was thanks to their intel that a life was saved, and since heroes and policemen aren’t eager to credit convicted killers for their good deeds, the math never quite adds up. Villains with blood on their hands rarely get out of prison before the end of their sentence.”
Toki didn’t move. Her shock was slowly morphing into dread.
“What happened?” she repeated.
The President looked her in the eyes, unflinching.
“Meteor has been collaborating with the police as a consultant for years. He’s charismatic and very well-informed, and he apparently became very sought after. It usually isn’t enough for one consultant to be considered as actually saving lives… but three years ago, Endeavor was just starting to pool together resources to arrest a massive human trafficking ring. They met. Meteor must have made an impression. Endeavor had him transferred to a lower-security prison, and made him a key-source in that case. And, a few days ago, his mission succeeded. The human trafficking ring was dismantled in its entirety- in no small part thanks to Meteor.”
Toki felt sick. She had seen that on the news. Those arrests, how massive that operation had been, how the media compared it to All Might’s debut. Toki herself had been impressed. She had thought to herself that it had probably needed a crazy amount of investigation, and months and months of work, and good sources. And Endeavor, even though he was still abrupt and bordering on rude, had credited his collaboration with underground heroes, with a consultant…
“Meteor was convicted of several charges of manslaughter,” the President continued calmly. “There were also people injured… Well. I don’t need to remind you of the numbers.”
Toki knew. Meteor had killed about twenty people when Toki had first looked him up online, at age six. His body count had reached the thirties by the time he was arrested, with his last victims in the bank robbery where Toki had been an unwilling mule for their stolen money.
But then, there had been the arrest itself. The fight. The building collapsing. In the end, between the heroes murdered, the victims crushed, and the people who had died from their wounds… There had been about seventy people killed that day. If you added his previous victims… Meteor had a body count in the triple digits. And even more people had been injured.
“But he had been an exemplary inmate, to the point of being transferred out of Tartarus, which is extremely rare,” Genmei-san continued. “He respected the terms of his rehabilitation program to the letter. He actively collaborated with heroes and the police. He made himself a key element to Endeavor’s case. And more important: Endeavor acknowledged his input as fundamental to his success. It’s my understanding that in the years they have worked together, he came to respect Endeavor and Endeavor came to respect him.”
Toki felt a sudden burst of hatred towards Endeavor. That piece of human garbage! Of course he would become all buddy-buddy with Meteor. Did they bond over their disregard for human lives? Their ambition of creating a child with the perfect Quirk? Their fondness for emotional abuse? How ungrateful their masterpiece was?!
Fuck, she had never imagined it was even a possibility. But she should have. She should have. Endeavor was renowned for working with the police. Most heroes got their intel from other heroes, or the HSPC, but Endeavor scorned the Commission and preferred to work with the people who actually got their hands dirty. He wanted to rise, he wanted success, and he was ruthless: he would totally grab a useful tool like a ‘redeemed’ S-rank villain willing to talk about his life work.
And of course Meteor would be perfect. He had been so well-connected. And then, after meeting Endeavor, proving himself useful… of course Meteor would charm him. He knew how to talk to people, he knew how to make them see his way, he knew how to make them think he was nice, and noble, and strong, and trustworthy, and how they owed him something. He had that intensity about him. Like Endeavor himself. Of course they would get along, and, now… and now…!
“He helped Endeavor to shut down that trafficking ring,” Toki breathed.
“Yes. And it must have been a good job, because Endeavor is not going to turn his back on him afterward. He’s honoring his part of the deal: crediting Meteor for his intel.”
The President’s mouth twisted. Toki shared the sentiment. Endeavor was extremely rigid about his honor. If Meteor played an important role in that success, then Endeavor would feel like he owed him. And he hated to be indebted to someone, so he would even the score, pay him back.
Toki had always seen that as one of Endeavor’s few redeeming qualities, but now… oh gods. Now, it meant…
“Endeavor filled the necessary paperwork to credit Meteor for his success,” continued the President. “And, as I said… If Meteor saves twice as many people as he killed, maimed, or injured… Meteor becomes eligible for continuing his consultant work in conditional liberty, with an ankle monitor and a hero’s supervision. All he needs is a judge’s approval.”
Toki closed her eyes. It was impossible. She wanted to laugh, but she knew it wouldn’t be a happy sound.
“How many people is Meteor supposed to save to make up for his crimes? Double the number of the people he killed or injured, I know. But how many is that?”
“Three-hundred and sixty-six.”
“And how many people did Endeavor’s mission save?”
The president gave a humorless smile: “In total? Three-hundred and sixty-nine.”
Toki breathed in, then breathed out. The reality didn’t change. It was really happening. She gripped the edges of her seat.
“He’s getting out, isn’t he?”
It wasn’t really a question. When the President nodded, there was a grim understanding in her eyes. She probably wasn’t any more pleased by this than Toki herself. Meteor was dangerous: the importance he had in Toki’s life was dangerous. But it didn’t change the facts.
“The Commission is nitpicking to slow down the process by a few weeks- and to give us the time to classify your record, mostly. But it’s inevitable. He has the law on his side, and Endeavor fighting in his corner. I’m sorry, Quantum. But Meteor is getting out.”
Notes:
AHAHAHA YOU DIDN'T SEE IT COMING, DID YOU?!
Anyway ! In two weeks, you won't get a new chapter, but you'll get the first chapter of the fic about Meteor !
It'll be called (I am) the wisdom of the fallen and it's going to be written from Meteor's and Endeavor's POV. Also, the chapters are HUGE. Seriously. The chapters in Wisdom are usually 23 pages long, so about 12k or 13k words. The chapters in the Meteor spin-off are never under 19k long. Sometimes 20k. This fic is a monster. It's fantastic. Full of grammar mistakes probably (by the way, i'm still looking for a Beta!), but fantastic. I had a great time!
Anyway, the story will start with their first meeting... seven years ago. Yeah, you read that right. Oh boy it's going to be a wild ride.But anyway !
FIC REC OF THE DAY !
"Subject: A Comprehensive Report" by BonesOfBirdWings. The Plot: Izuku decides early on that heroics is not the only path to heroim. As such, his analyzis draws Sir Nighteye's attention, and he quietly becomes EVERYONE'S problem child.
It's one of those fics where Sir Nighteye is a good and caring mentor figure! And it's one of my favorites =) This fic takes the form of emails, text messages, news articles and so on, like an epistolary novel. There's lot of worldbuilding, and i mean, A LOT. Especially about the dawn of Quirks and how heroism came to be. I love it. I feel like a tiger munching ice cubes out of a carved pumpkin, this is peak Enrichment In My Enclosure.
Let's move on !
And let's talk about Sir Nighteye !
I have mixed feelings about Sir Nighteye. All the others characters say how smart Sir Nighteye is, how kind, how supportive. It must be true. And i like stories where Sir Nighteye live up to his reputation ! But we aren't shown that in canon. We're shown a man who's angry and taking his frustrations on the main character. An adult in a position of power bullying a cowering kid is always bad. But when that kid is trying so hard to please him... it's straight-up cringy.
So i'm sure Sir Nighteye's good and heroic side exists, he just doesn't show it to people he isn't trying to please. People who aren't "his", people who are against him. Like James Potter in 'Harry Potter' : so many characters said he was wonderful, but the only scene where he appears, we're shown a bully delighting into hurting the class' pariah.
I headcanon Sir Nighteye as pretty similar to him, althought in a more subdued way. He's on the side of the Good Guys, he's fighting the good fight, but he has an over-inflated ego so he doesn't think to question his own attitude, especially towards the people who don't matter to him. That incules villains but also fellow heroes who crossed him (like Toki, who unknowingly did this by snatching Melissa from him!).
He's an adult so he's smart enough to not push too far, of course. He's not going to humiliate someone for a laugh. But he's dismissive, rude and bossy. Bordering on cruel, sometimes, too, althought it's more thoughtless than calculated. But his weight as a hero and as All Might's ex-sidekick is enough to make people willing to overlook his faults.
And now, a few questions !Does Sir Nighteye actually think that All Might's successor is going to be a girl?
Yup. I imagine that when All Might retired, Sir Nighteye contacted him all huffy to say 'finally you're listening to me, now let me pick who will inherit your Quirk', because arrogance seems to be his default defense mecanism. They argued. Maybe Sir Nighteye mentionned 'picking a boy' or something not completely gender-neutral about his successor... and All Might may have retorted that the next Number One would be a girl. Because he was thinking about Quantum (who had just whooped his ass).
But Nighteye thought 'oh yes, he wants a girl because HIS mentor was a woman, of course, All Might is all about gender equality' and then he strated looking for girls successors. He didn't find what he wanted in Yūei but Lady Siam was right here, looking and acting like a genderbent younger Toshinori Yagi, so she was an obvious choice !Why did Endeavor free Meteor?!
Spoilers! Read the spin-off to know !Could he have done it if there hadn't been that frenzy of reforms about helping people, being kinder, giving second chances?
The rehabilitation program (and the option of being a consultant) already existed. But yeah, this new frenzy gave it a second breath. I love how Toki was super-proud of having helped the world change, of making people start thinking about reforms and take an interest into rehabilitation and stuff like that... without thinking for a single second that her father would use it.
Anyway. Hope you enjoyed the chap! And the ramblings! And the fic rec! Please let me know in the comments ! =D
Chapter 31: Unholy alliance
Summary:
“It’s been twelve years,” Keigo said softly. “And people change.”
“He doesn’t,” Toki spat. “Even if he’s my dad, it doesn’t change what he did, and… He shouldn’t be allowed to change, it’s not fair. If he’s changed, if he’s sorry, that doesn’t make everything magically go away.”
“No it doesn’t,” her boyfriend agreed. “You’re still allowed to be angry with him. But it’s like you want him to be angry with you.”
“I do not!”
Then she paused, considered, and reluctantly backtracked:
“Yeah, maybe I do. He should be angry. If he’s still the same, if he’s still angry, that… that should mean I’m allowed to be angry right back, somehow.”
_Or : Toki, and infuriating ordeal of being denied the catharsis of punishment.
Notes:
I'm posting the chapter two days ahead of schedule, aren't you proud? x)
I kind of needed the distraction because this week has been complicated. I still hav'nt got my result for my final exam, and i'm just a tiny bit stressed out because it's, like, THE CONCLUSION OF EIGHT YEARS OF STUDY.
Also transporters are on strike in my country, so there's a penury of oil, and since i have 30m commute... i strated remote working again. Which is weird. I'm having 2020 flashbacks.
And then, on top of that, one of my fanfictions was plagiarized. It's a SI in Naruto's universe, an Uchiha who try to survive the Massacre. For those of you who read French, it's "Tsunami Uchiha" on fanfiction. net.
Anyway, the guy loved my story, apparently, so he translated it in english, cut some parts to have shorter chapters, changed the names of the various OCs, and claimed it was his. I feel disgusted and so pissed off. I poured all my heart in that story. It's about 300k, i wrote it for more than two years. It's mine, and it's just so unfair to see it treated like it's cheap, like it's disposable, like all my work doesn't matter. I reported the fic, and warned the thief, but there's not much i can do.Sigh.
Anyway ! Here have a chapter =) Meteor is going to be released, but how is Toki taking it ?
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
UNHOLY ALLIANCE
Toki thought about a hundred plans to stop it. She could break into the prison, or the judge’s office, and mess with the paperwork. A form error could totally screw a procedure. But then Endeavor would try and correct it. When he wanted something to succeed, he didn’t get stopped by form errors: that wasn’t the kind of person he was.
Well, if Endeavor was the driving force behind this scheme, maybe Toki would target him. Bribe him? No, that wouldn’t work. Persuade him? Yeah, no way in hell.
Blackmail him?
Honestly, Toki really considered it. She could blackmail him. It wouldn’t be hard. Endeavor had many skeletons in his closet. His family. His wife. His masterpiece. And Touya, of course. Touya would be such a horrifying piece of blackmail, because Endeavor thought him dead, just like Meteor thought Toki was dead: but if Touya turned out to be alive, and a villain, and consumed by hatred… well, wouldn’t that be a perfect distraction? Endeavor would run to chase his wayward son. And Meteor would rot in prison. Yeah, Toki really considered it; that, and several other plans, anything to stop this thing before it became too late.
The only person she talked to about it was Keigo. She needed his help to see clearer in that mess. He would be the only one to understand. He had faced the same problem, after all… when he had to wonder if his mother had changed. And in the end, it was him who convinced her.
“I don’t want him to come back in my life,” she told him. “And at the same time, I can’t help but wonder… what if? He’s my dad. He loved me once. Part of me still loves him. What if he has changed, and I threw it all away by sabotaging him? And… and what if he hadn’t changed, and he got out anyway? I don’t know what’s worse.”
Keigo was silent for a second. They were home, in the quiet comfort of their penthouse, with the sunset lighting the room pink and red. It wasn’t night yet, but Toki already felt exhausted.
“I think it’s been twelve years,” he said softly. “And people change.”
“He doesn’t,” Toki spat. “Even if he’s my dad, it doesn’t change what he did, and… He shouldn’t be allowed to change, it’s not fair. If he’s changed, if he’s sorry, that doesn’t make everything magically go away.”
“No it doesn’t,” her boyfriend agreed. “You’re still allowed to be angry with him. But it’s like you want him to be angry with you.”
“I do not!”
Then she paused, considered, and reluctantly backtracked:
“Yeah, maybe I do. He should be angry. If he’s still the same, if he’s still angry, that… that should mean I’m allowed to be angry right back, somehow. It’s such a mess, Keigo. We hurt each other so badly. It terrifies me to think he’ll get out, because… if he’s changed, if he isn’t… I don’t know what scares me more. That he’s forgiven me, or that he hasn’t. I won’t forgive him for what he’s done to the hundreds of random strangers he killed or injured, so why would he forgive me for what I’ve done to him? To his family? To my mom?”
Sayuri was dead. Hikari was dead. Homura was dead, Fujio and Nono had turned their back on the crew. There was nothing left of their little family, and Toki had done that. How could Meteor not be furious? Toki was. She was so horrified, so ashamed and angry, even years later, by the cruelty and the injustice of it all, and it had been her fault. It had been their fault, at all of them: for robbing banks, for killing people, for lying, for allowing this anger and helplessness to fester… but it was Toki who had brought it all down. It was her actions that had been the final nail in the coffin.
She hated herself a little for that. And she couldn’t fathom a world where her father would forgive her for something she couldn’t even forgive herself.
“Maybe it’s not about forgiveness,” Keigo said after a moment. “Maybe it’s just about letting someone choose to be good, even after they’ve chosen not to be.”
Toki let herself fall on the bed, looking at the ceiling without really seeing it. She let out a mirthless laugh.
“I can’t imagine Meteor being good.”
“Can’t you?” Keigo said softly. “He was good to you.”
She closed her eyes as if it could block out his words, because it was true. Her dad wasn’t like Keigo’s father, who had beaten him, insulted him, hurt him, hated him. Meteor had been a murderer, true… but he had also been kind, and smart, and funny. He had been a loving husband, a doting father. He had never been incapable of being good or caring about other people. He had just chosen not to. And now, he was… he was choosing differently, and it made Toki angry, because if he had that potential all along, why hadn’t he done that before?
Why hadn’t she been enough?!
“I know,” she whispered. She blinked back tears, feeling stupidly emotional. “Sometimes I think it’s easier to imagine he’s furious, because the alternative would be so much crueler.”
What if her father didn’t hate her? What if he thought she was dead? What if he grieved her, like he grieved Sayuri? Toki Taiyōme had disappeared for twelve years now. Missing children rarely lived that long. Maybe Meteor had been angry at her betrayal, but maybe he had also cried for her. Oh gods, Toki didn’t want to think about it: it felt like a knife to the heart. I’m so sorry dad, I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to.
But it was done now. Toki couldn’t go back. Perhaps Meteor should be allowed to grieve his daughter in peace: Toki certainly didn’t deserve to go and reopen old wounds.
“I don’t know what to do,” she sighed. “He wasn’t supposed to get out. He was supposed to stay in prison, and I shouldn’t have to think about him anymore. But he’s getting out.”
Keigo raised an eyebrow: “Wait, does that mean you changed your mind about sabotaging him?”
It did. Reluctantly, Toki realized she wouldn’t have the guts to go through with it. Blackmailing Endeavor wouldn’t be hard, and it wouldn’t trouble her sleep. But keeping her father locked up knowing that he might have changed… knowing she had ruined the one good thing he could have, his only chance at redemption… could she live with that? He wasn’t getting out to continue robbing banks. He was getting out with an ankle monitor and Endeavor holding his leash, to continue his work as a consultant. To help save people.
And oh, some part of Toki desperately wanted her father to have become a good person. It terrified her, but she wanted him to… not be bad. She wanted him to get that forgiveness she couldn’t grant herself.
Besides, he couldn’t escape. A S-ranked villain getting out wasn’t unheard of (plenty of villains had earned redemption through history), but the HPSC pulled all the stops to ensure they were kept on a tight leash. There was a GPS implant and a sedative implant at the very least. And of course, heroic supervision. Endeavor may be a douchebag, but he was very good at his job. He was also a strong enough hero to beat Meteor in a fight… and he wouldn’t be softened by a sob story about having a change of heart, because if Meteor fucked up, it would be on him and his agency. If Toki could rely on Endeavor for one thing, it was to be an inflexible dickhead obsessed about his success.
“I guess. Do you think I’m wrong? You cut off your mom because it was the right thing to do, even if she had a slim chance of having changed: but I’m here chickening out even though there’s a big chance my father has changed. It’s ridiculous.”
“It’s actually not,” Keigo replied firmly, shrugging. “My mom hadn’t changed, I knew it. But she wanted to crawl back in my life anyway. She wanted to use me. The heroic thing to do would have been to put my feelings aside and help her… but in letting her in, I opened myself to her manipulations. I wouldn’t have minded, she’s my mom, I owed her: but it also meant she could have gotten to you, maybe. And you were- sort of vulnerable. It scared me. So I shut her out. I was selfish. Yeah, it was a good call, but that’s not a decision I’m proud of. I abandoned her.”
Toki opened her mouth indignantly, because on the contrary, she felt like he should be proud of it. There was no shame in self-preservation. But suddenly, it hit her: Keigo didn’t view it like that, did he? His sense of worth as Hawks was tied to his ability to help people, to serve others. Running from a fight, not even trying to confront what scared him, refusing to help others (even when they didn’t deserve it)… it wasn’t him. It made him seethe. Of course he would resent his choice to cut off his mom: he saw it not as self-preservation, but as cowardice.
Keigo didn’t give her time to speak, anyway.
“With your father, it’s a totally different thing. He’s not getting back in your life; he’s going to be Endeavor’s problem. Not yours. Letting him out isn’t stopping you from putting yourself first. And, all fanboying aside, Endeavor is fantastically reliable as a hero. Him deciding that Meteor would be more useful out is actually a big clue that your dad actually changed: maybe he didn’t become a good guy… but he certainly became someone Endeavor is willing to let out, and that’s saying a lot. So there’s that, too.”
Toki made a face. “I still have my doubts.”
“You’re allowed.” He paused, then added with a grin: “Of course, if you freak out about it, then your worth as a high-ranked hero outweighs Meteor’s worth as an informant, changed person or not. You can be sure the HPSC is going to throw its weight behind you if you want to put him back behind bars. No matter how they claim they don’t do dirty work, you could always use the favor they owe you for maiming All Might, and order them to falsify paperwork! They liked having Meteor in prison, you know.”
Yeah, she would bet. Meteor was a wild card, not only as his own person but also in how Toki herself would react. Besides, having Meteor in a cage would have been a good pressure tactic if they ever needed to blackmail Toki. Now their hostage was in Endeavor’s hand, and Endeavor was chummy with the police, not the Commission.
Toki dragged her hands over her face with a tired sigh.
“What a mess. So you think I should just let it happen?”
“I think you should do what makes you happiest and safest,” Keigo corrected. “If it was me, I would let it happen, because it’s a chance to help Meteor… and to help all the other people he could protect with Endeavor. But I’m not you. It’s your decision.”
Yes, it was. And Keigo was right: Meteor was certainly a changed man, and Toki could still live her life with him out there. She wasn’t a terrified kid anymore. She was Quantum, she was Hoshizora: she had changed so much that nothing connected her to Meteor anymore. The people who knew her name was actually Taiyōme could be counted on one hand, and none of them were eager to betray her secret: especially not to a S-ranked villain.
And in the end, she… didn’t do anything.
She let it happen.
She didn’t tell Kameko about Meteor getting out, but she knew that the cat-lady knew. After all, she was one of the rare people to be aware of her real name and her past, and since she was actually quite high in the Commission’s hierarchical ladder, she was probably in the loop. But she was the only one at Icarus. Hayasa-sensei didn’t know, and neither did the sidekicks, or Melissa, or even the Shinsō. Kameko side-eyed Toki for a while, but she refused any probing questions.
She didn’t want to talk about it. Sharing it with Keigo had been exhausting enough.
At least she could count on him to give good advice. No matter what, they had each other. It was an unwavering comfort when Toki felt like life sucked.
She was so lucky to have him. Sometimes she had trouble believing she was allowed to have that one good thing in her life: that she was allowed to love him and have him, and be loved back.
Keigo’s eyes always softened when he looked at her, and he had a little smile, smaller and more genuine than his bright grins. It made Toki’s heart jump in her chest, and she couldn’t help but beam at him in return. Because even if it was nothing new, now, there was always this little jump in her chest, the wonder of this realization. I love him, and he loves me back. It was the kind of thing that made it okay if there were villains to fight, or if the future was full of uncertainties. Nothing would ever be hopeless as long as they had each other.
If Keigo was here, Toki was already a little less scared of Meteor getting out of prison.
Time flew.
In the heroic world, things moved rapidly. Several young heroes created agencies. The HPSC announced that the standards for Heroic Licenses would be raised, looking for quality over quantity. It created quite a frenzy among hero schools. More heroes signed up to get their teaching license, including Keigo (who hadn’t seen the point before). It was good for marketing their brand.
Some heroes retired, but very few. The most notable one was Titania, the oldest frontline hero still active. She was probably was old as Gran Torino, a relic from the Silver Age, but nobody doubted her strength. She still had a dedicated fanbase. Toki briefly wondered what she was going to do, now that she was retired. She couldn’t imagine herself ever stopping moving, fighting, helping people, even if she stopped being a hero.
Maybe she could become a part-time hero once she retired? She had never been interested in the ranking anyway. Which was a good thing, considering how screwed up they were. Popularity accounted for over half of your ranking, it was bonkers.
The rankings were the biggest cause of disillusion for young heroes. If they saved a hundred people from a mountain slide, but the mountain was off the grid and no one could tweet about it, then it’s considered worthless. You would have the victims’ gratitude, you would have a pay raise, but you would have no public recognition. In the worst case, people could even accuse you of lying for attention! Imagine that, being a young and idealist hero, and saving a hundred of people all by yourself, nearly dying in the process… and being called an attention-seeking nobody for it.
And in the meantime, the opposite could also happen. That was what ‘cosmetic heroes’ did. They only did things for the spotlight. It became a trend, maybe a meme, and they shoot up in the rankings, making more money, getting job offers from publicists, being showered with praise. Sure, it was harmless. They made money, they raised awareness to the hero profession, they made the public happy, and they did hero work! They were (sometimes) good people who work hard! But they liked the spotlight too much: it made them complacent. And this show managed to eclipse the heroes who actually do good work, so it wasn’t that innocuous, either.
Anywayyyyys. She had gotten away from her point, again.
The school year ended, and a new term began. Melissa passed into class 2-A and, as a second year, was allowed to have a work-study for three months during summer. Toki filled out the paperwork and sent it out the next day. She also innocently inquired about Melissa’s classmates, but apparently none of them had a work-studies lined up. Not even Togata. Toki wondered if Sir Nighteye would bother with him, now that he had Lady Siam trained as the next number One. Damn, what would happen to him, then? He had such potential, it was a shame to let him waste it because the only one who was supposed to see it had his eyes on another prize.
Toki resolved to recommend Togata to some other heroes she knew. Best Jeanist, maybe. Ingenium, too. Maybe Mirko. Or even Sherazade. Or Salamander… Togata would need someone skilled with analysis, but also unafraid of fighting. Yes, Salamander would be a good pick, especially since he worked with Inferno. Maybe it wouldn’t help Togata as much as his canon-apprenticeship, but at least Toki would have tried to point him in the right direction.
Whatever. Toki started patrolling a little around Hitoshi’s middle-school, but not much. It gave her an excuse to check on him, although they always saw each other at Mihoko’s house, or for training. Hitoshi was… doing pretty well, considering. He was still in the same class as Neito Monoma. They were thick as thieves. Hitoshi hadn’t told his friend about training with Quantum, though. It was a secret that he tried to keep close to his chest. But they had made plenty of plans to get into Yūei together, and maybe form their own partnership later, which was adorable. Toki totally shipped them.
His training (and Melissa’s) was coming along nicely. Melissa really had some incredible moves. And Hitoshi could now swing from one balcony to another with his capture weapons, it was super-badass. He looked like Spiderman!
Of course, it had its drawbacks. It needed a lot of practice, it was risky… and this kind of fighting style with his capture weapons wouldn’t work outside of a city with tall buildings and a lot of ledges. But hell, heroes picked their styles in accordance to their environment, right? How well would Batman’s ‘I am the night’ routine work if he was operating out of a normal city where people actually lived, rather than a perpetually twilit urban hellscape that looked like the Art Deco movement had a one-night stand with Soviet Brutalism in a wrought-iron-and-gargoyle factory?
(Toki was really proud of that comparison: it made Mihoko laugh for five minutes straight when she told her.)
Neither Melissa or the Shinsō were told about Meteor. Toki was keeping a tight lid on that secret. Maybe she would tell them once he was out. The process would still take a few weeks, and in the meantime, she didn’t want them to worry. She was already worried enough herself. Endeavor Agency was in Shizuoka, right next to Musutafu, less than an hour away. Endeavor usually didn’t patrol Musutafu itself (the city already had its share of heroes) but still… he had been known to swing by. Toki would have to carefully coordinate her patrol to not cross paths with him or any of his sidekicks. Or she could stop patrolling here altogether, too. That was a solid plan, that. But she would need to explain herself to Melissa and Hitoshi, and she was not looking forward to that.
Toki’s only comfort was that Meteor surely thought her dead. He wasn’t looking for her, he wouldn’t even look for clues. So she could simply avoid him and… let the issue settle. Let him make his life. Pretend the past was dead. It would have been a whole different can of worms if her missing person case had still been open, and Meteor hellbent on finding his wayward daughter.
Some tiny, selfish part of Toki illogically wished for that, though. For someone to still be looking for her. For someone to want her child-self to be found, for someone to want to save her. It wouldn’t fix anything, it wouldn’t change the past, but… Toki had wanted so badly for someone to save her when she was a kid. She had gone and saved herself, in the end, but the price had been too great. There would never be closure for what had happened, no matter how strong she was as Quantum, no matter how many people she helped, how much power and popularity she gained.
The problem with becoming the kind of hero you needed yourself, is that it doesn’t change the fact that nobody came for you.
Damn, she had made herself sad again. Really, she needed to stop that. Wasn’t her life good? She had a job she liked, she had found an internship for her PhD, she was going to go and poke at a real Ion Dive, she had friends, she had students, she had a whole bright future ahead of her. She needed to let go of the past, seriously. Some scars would never fade, some close would never be granted, some pain would never disappear: so what? Toki felt downright ungrateful to be stuck on that while she had been so lucky.
“Hey, Quantum!”
She got her head back in the game. She was actually patrolling near Osaka today, and so she wasn’t surprised to see a familiar face. She brightened:
“Inferno, what’s up?”
A quick teleportation brought her to street level, where Inferno was patrolling. Several bystanders took pictures, and Toki waved at them. But since both Quantum and Inferno were well-established heroes who regularly patrolled here, they weren’t swarmed by curious onlookers, and resumed their patrol.
“Nothing much,” her senpai said with an easy grin. “It’s rare to see you here, though. You’re usually around Musutafu, I heard.”
“I wanted a change of scenery,” Toki answered evasively.
Inferno didn’t look like he believed her, but he easily changed the subject. “You recommended a student to Salamander? He told me about it.”
Toki shrugged. “His Quirk is interesting, but underexploited. I would love to analyze him in detail, but I already swore to take on another student. So I thought of Salamander, and well, you. You’re both smart and analytical. But if you aren’t available, it’s no big deal.”
“Maybe,” Inferno said noncommittally. “The work-study isn’t until summer, we still have time.” He paused. “And on a totally unrelated note, I got some gossip from Endeavor’s agency.”
Toki’s stomach twisted. She tried to keep her tone light.
“About his new pet project, I bet?”
Inferno looked briefly around, and lowered his voice:
“I wasn’t sure. You never told me your parents’ names. But I saw you without your visor, and well, your eyes…”
“They’re a dead giveaway, I know,” she sighed. “But as long as I keep my visor and stay clear of him, he won’t recognize me. My Quirk changed too much. He… he thinks I’m dead, I’m pretty sure of it.”
Inferno nodded silently. They continued walking without a word, and Toki couldn’t help but side-eye him anxiously. What did he think, now that he knew she was the daughter of a S-ranked villain? It was kind of awkward.
Just as she was working herself in a twist over it, Inferno briefly looked at her, and said abruptly:
“I told you my father was a runaway villain, didn’t I?”
Toki frowned: “Yeah, but…”
“It was Hellmaker,” he cut her off. “You know, the villain who burned down Fukuoka, murdered the Commission’s rising star, and was killed by Endeavor? That guy.”
Toki’s eyes widened. Wow, fuck. Talk about some baggage. Inferno had been handpicked by the Commission, raised, trained: and then his father had killed Shirayuki, the HPSC’s precious protégé.
“Wait,” she suddenly remembered, “didn’t you have a job at Endeavor’s agency? Even after he…?”
Inferno shrugged.
“Yeah. Us fire types have to stick together, you know? Endeavor was the only guy with a fire Quirk to breach the Top Fifty heroes, nevermind the Top Ten. Before he came along, fire Quirks were considered villainous, too dangerous for hero work. So I admired him for a long time… even since I was a kid. But yeah, I was working for him when he killed dear old dad. I wasn’t there, of course: but I anonymously bought him a fruit basket afterwards.”
… Just when Toki thought that she was messed up with her family issues, there was someone worse dropped on her lap. Jesus-Christ, what a mess.
“Anyway,” Inferno looked at her with a small smile. “Don’t worry too much about Meteor. And don’t let him chase you away from Musutafu either. He’s getting out, and yes, that sucks. But better for you to stand your ground. Whatever happens should be on your terms, not his.”
Toki took a long breath, then released it. She doubted that Inferno’s relationship with his father was anything like hers and Meteor’s, but his idea had merit. And she appreciated the support, at least. It made her feel strangely reassured, to know that people had her back.
“You’re right. I’ll be careful, but… you’re right. I can’t let him chase me away. I still have stuff to do there.”
Canon was going to start very soon. Hitoshi was now thirteen, going on fourteen. In a little more than a year, canon would start. Actually, it should start… probably this month, April of the year 2229, when All Might would meet Midoriya.
Hum. Maybe Toki should start upping the frequency of her patrols in Musutafu. Just saying.
If something was going to happen, it would happen there… and soon.
oOoOoOo
Meteor was going to be released at the end of April. The Commission was really dragging its feet and double-checking everything. The local heroes and the top heroes were also warned of Meteor’s conditional liberation, each of them being provided a file about the criminal and the security measures taken upon his release. If Icarus’ file was more substantial than the others, nobody noticed.
Toki was really glad to have a visor as part of her hero costume. With the bright orange glass, it was hard to tell what color her eyes were. Hard to realize her eyes were faintly luminous, too. Because really, even if Meteor’s eyes were more striking than hers, with slit pupils and a more intense glow, they were still very distinctive. Fortunately Toki’s other features were more similar to her mother’s: she had her round cheeks, her nose, her chin. Her hair was lighter than Meteor’s, and without any of its reddish accent. Even looking at two pictures of Quantum and Meteor side-by-side, the resemblance was faint at best. Toki was really banking on that.
When Toki took off her visor (for interviews and for galas, usually: she kept it when she shot commercials), she used brown-colored contacts, too. So there was no photo floating around of Quantum with Meteor’s eyes.
Kameko said that they should warn the sidekicks. Toki refused to. Really, she could handle it. It wasn’t as if Meteor was looking for her, anyways. She trusted her sidekicks, but that was something deeply personal.
The only person who could find out the truth was, maybe, Psyren. She was a telepath, she couldn’t stop herself from sensing emotion-ridden thoughts: and no matter how calm and collected Toki willed herself to be, Meteor always made her feel conflicted. But no, Toki refused to just come out and flat out say it to Psyren. The young woman had taken an oath of confidentiality: if she found out (and it was a big if: Psyren could sense thoughts, not always decipher them with clarity), then she would keep quiet. Toki really didn’t want to attract any attention to the situation.
She busied herself by triple-checking how Endeavor’s agency was going to handle the case. Apparently Meteor would always be directly supervised, either by Endeavor directly, or by at least two sidekicks. He would carry a GPS implant, and a sleeping implant that his handlers could trigger from a distance, in case he tried to escape. He would also wear electric cuffs almost all the time. They were programmed to deliver an electric shock if he activated his Quirk.
Like a fucking shock collar.
Toki had felt sick, reading that. It was one thing to be cautious of Meteor, but that… that was just barbaric. And yet the note talked about it like it was a perfectly acceptable thing, so put on someone a torture device like that.
Because, apparently, it was a downgrade from what he had worn in Tartarus. There, S-ranked villains always wore an actual shock collar to prevent them from attacking the guards. Like they were rabid animals or something. Fuck, Meteor must have hated it, and he would have been right. Just for this, Toki was actually glad that he was out.
The cuffs would be regularly removed at Endeavor’s behest, so there was that. Meteor would be allowed to use his Quirk to assist heroes. He didn’t have more autonomy than a baby hero student during their internship, but he could help save civilians and stop villains. The irony was almost painful. But it was all perfectly legal.
After all, when you get an S-ranked villain on the good side, it would be criminally stupid to only use them for their brains. The reason why S-ranked villains were so dangerous was usually their Quirk. Their powerful, awesome, flashy Quirk.
Did you know that about 5% of heroes were vigilantes or straight-up villains in the past? Granted, most of them were non-violent vigilantes or villains, and after their arrest, it made rehabilitation easier. But when it was a violent villain who was considered for a rehabilitation program… blocking them from using their Quirk was seen as detrimental. Because no matter the progress made since All Might’s quasi-retirement, and all those bright ideas to make society kinder, the truth was still the same: society wanted heroes who beat villains. Peace was upheld by the threat of overwhelming violence. A powerful Quirk was a powerful weapon, if a redeemed villain had one, well, society would rather make him use it on the bad guys than make him hide it.
It also didn’t hurt that Meteor had a very ‘heroic’ Quirk. Psychokinesis was cool. If he had something like Brainwashing, he would have never gotten that authorization. Hell, he wouldn’t even have been rehabilitated. But Meteor had a cool Quirk, he was a charismatic man, and he was charming enough to make you forget how scary his ember-like eyes were, so: the system helped him, instead of crushing him down.
Systemic discrimination, yay!
But whatever. The days passed. Toki refused to get scared away from Musutafu and continued to patrol there. She took great pains to avoid crossing paths with anyone from Endeavor’s agency… and she also looked for All Might. She hadn’t forgotten about Sir Nighteye, Lady Siam, and all that stuff.
All Might was still all over Japan, but he stayed in the prefecture more often than not. He had commitments there as Toshinori Yagi, after all: his volunteer work, his knitting group (it was called ‘Snitch and Bitch’ because people used it to gossip, and Toki found it hilarious), his niece Melissa, his friend Tsuki-stuff (damnit, what was his name? It had been too long now, Toki couldn’t ask without looking like an idiot!)…
Anyways. Soon enough, Toki managed to run into All Might on patrol. She was basically minding her own business when he suddenly dropped beside her on a roof, and she nearly had a heart attack.
“Gods, how can you be so quiet?” she gasped after jumping a foot in the air. “You’re a mountain of muscles!”
All Might let out a booming laugh. Then, quickly checking there were no witnesses around, he let go of his Quirk. When the smoke dissipated, Toki almost took a step back, and then frowned. While he wasn’t quite emaciated, he still definitely looked unhealthy thin, almost gaunt. She would have thought that he would get a little fatter after retiring.
“Did you get thinner?”
All Might’s smile dropped. He rubbed his nape, looking uncomfortable:
“Not by much. But I’m still missing a lung and a stomach, and it turns out that using my Quirk puts a strain on my body, so…”
Toki boggled. If that was how he looked when he wasn’t pushing himself to its limit, she shuddered to think about how he would look like if he had kept on going like in canon, using his Quirk to its limit every day. Probably just skin on bones.
The manga had always shown him as cartoonishly thin, but maybe that, down the line, Yagi would actually end up as a skeleton.
“You look like you’re maybe two steps from dying,” she blurted out tactlessly. “Maybe you should slow down a little more…”
“No,” he retorted immediately. “I already limit myself to five hours of work when I could go up to seven or maybe eight, you can’t possibly ask me to abandon even more of my work. It’s hard enough already.”
“Even if it’s for a good cause?” she pleaded.
“Stopping at five hours a day is for a good cause. It’s to allow other heroes to grow and rise. It’s for the betterment of society as a whole. Working less wouldn’t be for a good cause, it would be for me. And for what? I won’t ever get better. A missing organ doesn’t grow back.”
“Your health is a good cause!”
“It’s also my business,” he said in a final tone. “Don’t push it, Quantum.”
She pinched her lips, but let it go. For now. Instead, she tried another angle:
“You know, missing organs can actually be replaced. I got a new heart. It takes time to make an artificial organ, and they need samples and stuff, but maybe you could get… well, the stomach is a lost cause, but maybe they could clone your surviving lung?”
All Might seemed to accept the change of subject, and sighed:
“The President offered it. An artificial lung is being cloned for me right now. But for the actual transplant, there will be several surgeries, and… I would like to wait a little. At least until the next Billboard Chart, announcing Endeavor as number One. Even if I work less, I’m still expected to show up every day, and I don’t want to attract attention to my absence.”
Man, he had never taken a sick day in his life? Toki shook her head, a little impressed. A little worried, too. All Might was so careless, so reckless with his health, it was a scary thing to experience.
“So, how’s life?” she asked lightly to change the subject.
He laughed.
“Life is good. I feel like I’m always running around, but there’s less villains and more interviews. I’m going to get my teaching license in a few weeks. I’m keeping busy. What about you, how’s life?”
Toki hesitated, and smiled uneasily:
“Complicated.”
All Might immediately frowned: “Can I help?”
He was so earnest. She shook her head, faintly baffled. For years she had felt resentful and bitter towards him, thinking him stupid, selfish, blind, cold, even cruel. And yeah, he was kind of obvious, and he could be ruthless, but… he was so different from her preconceived ideas that she sometimes had trouble reconciling them with reality.
“I don’t think so. My main problem is that… well, Meteor joined a rehabilitation program. Under Endeavor’s supervision, actually, and he… he helped him with his last mission, the one that saved hundreds of people. So he’s going to get out.”
All Might digested that. He didn’t look any more pleased by that prospect than the President. Thinking that a villain was going to walk free probably left a bitter taste in his mouth.
“Maybe he’s changed,” he finally said, without much conviction.
“Yeah. Probably. Which is why I’m not calling favors left and right to sabotage him, or to blackmail Endeavor into letting him rot. I’m removing myself from the situation like a mature person. He thinks I’m dead, anyways.”
She tried to sound nonchalant about it. She had to. But considering the sharp glance All Might shoot her, she wasn’t all that successful.
“Really? How did that happen?”
“Oh yeah, you don’t know,” she realized. “Mmmmh, I don’t go by Taiyōme anymore? I had a new identity since I was fourteen. I’m known as Toki Hoshizora now. My missing person case was closed when I joined the Commission’s program. Officially, Toki Taiyōme has disappeared. And- well, you’re a hero, you know the odds of survival for missing children with a desirable Quirk.”
All Might’s face darkened, and he nodded. After the twenty-four hours mark, finding a missing child became incredibly difficult. Toki Taiyōme had last been seen sneaking into her mother’s hospital room, and confessed to a policeman about running from something: and then, she had vanished, never to be seen again. No wonder the police had easily closed her case afterward.
She wondered who had broken the news to her dad. She wondered how he had taken it. If he had refused to believe it, at first. How long it had taken him to grieve. If he still thought about her. If his daughter’s memory made him feel sad and bitter all at once, like Toki felt when she thought about her mom: about how messy it had been, about how unfair, about how they would never have a chance to reconcile.
Sayuri had deserved better. Meteor had deserved better, too. They had been bad parents, but Toki had been a bad daughter.
None of them were innocents in this.
Toki sighed, and sat down on the roof’s ledge. Thinking about it made her feel awfully depressed. And she didn’t want to go and pour her heart out to All Might, of all people. She had been looking for him for something else in the first place!
“But enough about him. I have something else I wanted to talk to you about. It’s… well, I met Sir Nighteye on a mission.”
All Might looked surprised:
“You did?” Then he frowned: “Did he recognize you? He took your disappearance pretty hard, when we arrested Meteor.”
Toki did a double-take. “He did?”
“You were a child reaching out to him for help,” All Might said. He looked a little sad. “The very first person to do so, actually. It was his first year at my agency, he wasn’t known at all by the public: and yet your letter was addressed to him personally. He wanted to save you so very badly. When you weren’t found, and the police took over… It was his first big failure. He took it hard.”
Toki had no idea. She contemplated that for a few seconds. It was hard to imagine prickly, condescending Sir Nighteye as a young hero taking Toki’s disappearance to heart.
“Nope,” she said slowly. “He didn’t recognize me, I’m safe on that front. But he was an absolute ass, just for the record. He also got a very low opinion of Melissa, so if you’re ever tempted to introduce them: don’t.”
All Might looked angry, then annoyed, then resigned. With a heavy sigh, he sat down next to Toki. Even without all the muscles, he was still incredibly tall. Like, she had to crane her neck to look him in the eyes. His emaciated appearance only made it more unsettling.
“He showed a lot of interest in Melissa after the Festival,” he finally said. “He offered her an internship. I spoke to him on the phone a few times, and he always insisted on meeting her. He thinks I’m keeping him away from my chosen successor… and he didn’t believe me when I told him she was Quirkless. He calmed down recently.” All Might frowned, and muttered to himself: “I guess that’s because you confirmed to him that Melissa did not secretly ambition to become the next number One.”
Toki scowled. Really, that was awfully entitled of Sir Nighteye. What right did he have to get the next AFO holder as his student? He had left All Might, cut all ties, refused to be part of his fight anymore. Now he considered himself scorned because All Might didn’t give him the next holder of One For All on a silver platter?
“He really wants to bask in being the man behind the Symbol of Peace, I guess,” she scoffed.
All Might opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked tired.
“He used to be so kind,” he said plaintively. “I don’t know when he turned so callous. I hoped that stepping down would help mend bridges, since he’d insisted on me retiring ever since my injuries, but… Well, to be truthful, he’s been hounding me about retiring more than ever, and about… passing the torch onto a new Symbol. He vehemently disagrees with your idea of not having a Symbol of Peace. For him, that power must be passed onto a worthy successor.” He smiled humorlessly: “Maybe he thinks that, this way, even when Toshinori Yagi has gone and died in a secret hole somewhere so he would stop bothering him, there would still a be something of All Might to remind him of the good old days.”
Toki stared at him:
“Man. That’s so morbid.”
“Ah, excuse me, Quantum. Sir Nighteye has been increasingly insistent these last months, talking about my death like it was an imminent thing, casually insulting every single person I enjoy spending time with… Sometimes he acts as if I’m already dead, and my refusal to disappear is an inconvenience. I’m afraid it’s made me a little bitter.”
“No kidding,” Toki muttered.
Maybe it was a defense mechanism. Fake it until you made it: pretend something didn’t bother you, even when it bothered you very much, and hope that one day your indifference became real. Maybe Sir Nighteye acted like the prospect of All Might’s death made him angry and condescending as a way to armor himself against the pain, because thinking about All Might’s death made him feel raw and hurt and terrified. Toki could empathize.
Still. That was no excuse for being a jackass and hurting his friend’s feelings. All Might was the one who was dying! Sir Nighteye really shouldn’t be punishing him for his fear about it.
“I hope he wasn’t too insulting,” All Might frowned.
Toki waved away the argument:
“Don’t worry about it. Besides, yes, I did meet him at his most insufferable. But he also met me, and I can be a real pain in the ass.”
“I hope you didn’t throw a building at him.”
Toki burst out laughing. “No, but I was tempted!”
It made All Might smile, and for a few seconds they shared a comfortable silence. Then Toki remembered she hadn’t talked about her main point. She cleared her throat, and said lightly:
“Well, maybe he’s going to leave you a little breathing room. Did you know he’s got a new hero at his agency? It’s Lady Siam, my… urgh, I can’t believe I’m saying that, but she’s my great rival. And that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Sir Nigheye wants to make her a top hero.”
“He does?” All Might said rigidly.
“Yep!” Toki intentionally kept her tone light. “He basically orchestrated our whole mission so she could arrest the main villain. And I think he’s still nostalgic of working with you, because Lady Siam is basically you as a girl. Blond, blue-eyed, super-energetic, a lot of charisma, very strong Quirk. If she was ten years older I would be afraid of him playing matchmaker so he could make you pass on your Quirk to a bunch of blond babies. Now, I think he wants to groom her as the next number One. Did he talk to you about it? Because that’s how it felt to me, but I think Lady Siam has no idea.”
All Might frowned. Toki held her breath, worried she had landed too thick. Especially the bit about passing on his Quirk. She couldn’t be much clearer while playing dumb about OFA. But thankfully, the Symbol of Peace only harrumphed, looking displeased.
“I’ve already decided who I will pass my teachings to. And it won’t be someone groomed for it. That’s how my mentor chose me, after all, and I’ll do the same.”
Holy crap did that mean he had already met Midoriya?! Toki hadn’t seen the Sludge villains on the news. Or maybe it hadn’t been on the news. In Fukuoka, there was no point in speaking about a Musutafu-based, insignificant, easily thwarted villain. There were about a dozen of those everywhere.
Oh man, canon was really here, wasn’t it? It has begun. That was huge!
Toki would really, really like to be in that OFA conspiracy. But she wasn’t. So she only blinked innocently:
“Awesome! But I didn’t imagine you really had secret teachings to pass on. Is it a training regimen?”
All Might suddenly seemed to realize that Toki didn’t know about his Quirk, and turned a little pale, laughing loudly:
“Ah aha ha yes exactly, a training regimen, nothing more, ah ah!”
Toki snorted in amusement, then patted his boney shoulder:
“Whatever. If you need a hand, for training or anything, just call me. I’m always just a few warp-jumps away, and I have your back.”
All Might smiled. He looked sincerely touched.
“I’ll keep it in mind, Quantum. And… if you need help with Meteor, I have your back, too.”
It’s a little late for that, Toki thought. But it would have been cruel to say it to All Might, who only wanted to help. So she just smiled, and thanked him for his sincerity.
She doubted his help would be needed, anyway.
oOoOoOo
So. Afterward, Toki went to do some digging to understand what had happened with Midoriya. And to her surprise, she found nothing about the Sludge Villain attacking Bakugo… or anyone, really. Police records indeed showed that All Might had arrested a villain with a Sludge Quirk, but it had been for theft and assault, not for a violent fight with attempted murder. More importantly, the villain had been subdued without any of it being recorded. So… The villain had attacked Midoriya, and been captured then? No escape later, no attack on Bakugo?
Hum. That meant Midoriya hadn’t tried to hijack a ride and made the bottle fall, then. Which meant Midoriya was different! How? Why?
And was Midoriya even All Might’s successor, if they hadn’t had this little heard-to-heart on a rooftop? Wait, maybe the heart-to-heart had happened, but under the bridge… ugh. It sucked to not know anything. Toki seriously envied Keigo’s Quirk sometimes. He never had any problem snooping around, at least!
Oh, whatever. She would wait and see. In the meantime…
The end of April came. Meteor was released.
It was a quiet affair. The media was kept out of the loop. Endeavor slightly changed his schedule, patrolling a little less to focus on investigations. Toki stalked his agency’s social media, but it was in a fan’s candid shot around Shizuoka that she finally found proof of Meteor’s presence.
She didn’t recognize him, at first. He was just a guy with sunglasses, fading in the background. She hadn’t seen his face in so long, she wasn’t even sure it was him. He wore his hair up now, in a neat ponytail. It made him look more put-together than in Toki’s memories. But the hair color was the same, dark brown with reddish accents. That’s how she knew it was him. And afterward, scrutinizing the picture, yes: she recognized him. His square jaw. His severe eyebrows. His frown.
And… in the pictures… just below the cuffs of his shirt, Toki could see metal shining. Electric cuffs. Large and flat, clearly not decorative, but also thin enough to be hidden under long sleeves and not attract too much attention. Did it hurt? His wrists didn’t seem red. She hoped they weren’t. She hoped nothing hurt, that he wasn’t in pain or angry. She hoped…
She didn’t know what she hoped for, anyway.
Toki continued scrolling, looking for more pictures from the same amateur photograph. After a while, she found another that showed Meteor, this time from the side, and oh, there it was. She could see his eyes behind the sunglasses. They were even more vivid than in her memories. Toki’s eyes only glowed when she used her Quirk to its maximum, but Meteor’s blazed almost all the time, she remembered. Sometimes it was low and soft, like embers smoldering, and sometimes they burned like incandescent pits. Even with the poor quality of this picture, she could see it.
She absentmindedly touched his face on the screen. He had bigger eyebags, a tenser jaw. He was paler, too. With his new haircut, it made his features seem sharper somehow. Maybe he had lost a few pounds. He was still very clean-shaved, appearing more youthful than his actual age. Gods, how old was he now? Probably in his mid-forties.
In the picture, he was frowning, looking vaguely condescending. Even freshly released from prison, he still had the same arrogance. Toki clearly remembered his playful smirk, his shark-like grin, the amusement glinting in his eyes. In her memories, Meteor had always seemed like a pleased big cat. It was in the leonine grace of his moves and the sharpness of his gaze. Something downright predatorial but always vaguely mischievous.
He seemed just as cocky now as he had been them. But there was something darker in his expression now. An edge there hadn’t been before. Meteor had always been effortlessly charming, but a decade in prison had taken its toll.
I’m sorry Dad. I didn’t mean to. I just wanted to stop you.
She sighed and closed the app on her phone. What was done, was done. There was no going back. Her father was going to get a fresh start and she would… live with it.
But damnit, this thing was stressing her out. The anxiety was nothing new, with her heroic job, and Toki usually worked well under pressure. But these days, she woke up with her stomach in knots. She felt queasy during meals. This stress was getting to her, it couldn’t be healthy. And she was turning into a stress-eater, too. The candies in her office were disappearing at an alarming rate.
Thankfully, there was something to distract her from her dark thoughts. She heard the balcony’s door open and looked up in time to see Keigo enter, hair faintly wet. It was starting to rain outside.
“Good patrol?” she enquired lightly.
“Boring. But at least I got the good weather. They’re announcing plenty of rain this afternoon for your patrol, maybe even some wind.”
Toki made a face:
“I hope it doesn’t turn into a storm, or we’ll both be grounded.”
Sauntering on rooftops was all fun and games until the weather turned bad and you ended up as an impromptu lightning rod. When there were storms, Hawks or Quantum rarely patrolled.
“So, is today the big day?” Keigo said lightly, sitting on the edge of her desk. “I didn’t see anything online.”
“Oh, he’s out. And already hanging out at Endeavor’s lair. Here, I found a picture from a fan.”
Toki reopened her browser and showed him her phone. Keigo let out an impressed whistle:
“That’s him? I can see where your good looks come from. He’s smoking hot.”
Toki gagged. Hot?! Please, that was her dad! Keigo laughed, delighted by her disgust, then hopped off her desk and circled it to come poke her in the forehead:
“Aw, don’t make that face. He’s moderately attractive, how’s that?”
“Awful,” Toki grimaced, batting his hand away. “I love you, but I’m gonna rip your vocal cords out and garrote you with them if you dare suggest that again. Oh gods, I need to bleach my brain.”
She closed the browser with a shiver. Sniggering, Keigo leaned against the desk. His smile slowly faded, and for a few seconds, there was silence.
“Here is what I don’t get,” he finally said. “How the hell did he convince Endeavor to give him the time of the day?”
“Wasn’t he essential to that trafficking case?” Toki frowned.
Keigo waved his hand:
“I don’t doubt that. But still, he’s been consulting for Endeavor for three years now. They weren’t focusing on a single case. And now, Endeavor is getting him out of prison and bringing him as a consultant for his agency. Sure, it’s his right, but it’s still a use of resources. He’s got to reorganize his schedule, and his sidekicks’ schedules too. It’s a big deal to take responsibility for a prisoner. Conditional liberty or not, Endeavor has to hold the leash: Meteor is going to have to follow him everywhere. And Endeavor is not the type of person to do that for anyone no matter how helpful they are.”
“… what are you saying?”
He leaned forward, his golden eyes almost glittering with intensity. With his wings half-open and looming, he looked like a bird of prey, now more than ever.
“I’m saying it’s going far beyond a debt repaid or a promise kept. They’re teaming up. Endeavor didn’t get Meteor out to repay him, he got him out to prepare for something.”
“Preparing for something?” Toki parroted, taken aback. “But what?”
Keigo opened his arms wide in a gesture of ignorance, and grinned:
“No idea, but the possibilities are endless! Your dad was a big fish. Maybe they made an alliance to take down one of his enemies.”
“Endeavor is Number One, though, now. He doesn’t need the popularity boost.”
“He’s not a hero because of the popularity of it! He’s a hero to fight. To protect people by destroying villains. What if Meteor was the key to destroying a big villain?”
“There’s not a lot of those rating Meteor’s assistance…”
“Ahah, that’s where you’re wrong. You’re thinking like a limelight hero. What about the underground villains?”
Toki’s eyes widened. Oh, clever! Most limelight heroes never crossed paths with, or even learned of the existence of boogeymen like War Dog or Switchblade. But if someone informed them… then a big hero like Endeavor would be horrified to learn monsters like that were roaming around Japan. Serial killers like Kuma or Stain were thriving, but until they made some noises and attracted attention, they flew under the radar.
“Endeavor would want to take on unseen threats to prove he’s earned the number One rank,” she realized. “All Might pulverized all the S-ranked limelight villains… It’s not incoherent for Endeavor to set his sights on the next threat: underground villains. But wouldn’t he already have informants with the police?”
“The police know about most of those villains, true, but not all of them. And they definitely don’t have the means to face them, jeez, can you imagine? But Meteor has internal knowledge of them. He also has firepower… and the kind of shady deal that would allow him to fight dirty if Endeavor turns a blind eye.”
Yeah. Endeavor was more ruthless and flexible than the Commission would be, which was often the case when a person handled a mission, as opposed to an organization with several supervisors and neat little boxes to fill out in triplicate before doing anything. He was also not very moral, as a person, so Toki could totally imagine him agreeing to that kind of business. Endeavor drew the line at conniving with villains, because he had an image to maintain. But Meteor was a redeemed villain, and an ally who wouldn’t rat him out (presumably) if he did shady stuff. The perfect accomplice.
“But what does Meteor get out of the deal?” Toki wondered. “He isn’t particularly attached to Endeavor’s ranking, and he doesn’t have beef with underground villains.”
“You sure?” Keigo checked.
But Toki shook her head:
“He was kind of the king of the jungle. He was out all the time to make connections, I think he was also an info broker. He had plenty of contacts, good relations with minor gangs, and people in the neighborhood respected him. Kind of a mob boss, except he never looked to expand his territory or step on any toes. He had a ‘live and let live’ policy, I suppose.”
She fell silent, remembering. The neighborhood had been poor, rowdy, but Toki had never witnessed actual violence. There was always some unspoken order. Maybe it had nothing to do with Meteor at all, but she doubted it. Maybe the threat of his wrath was enough to ensure that no fight broke out and risked attracting heroes.
“I guess we’ll figure it out,” she finally said.
In all probability, Keigo would probably guess it first. Toki could analyze patterns and predict someone’s actions by knowing their goal, but Keigo had an instinct for such things. He could do the same process backward, watch someone’s actions and guess their motivations.
But for now, they had other priorities.
“I’ll keep an eye on that,” Keigo assured her. “By the way, speaking of criminal overlords, there’s a new yakuza gang who’s starting to think they can strut around unchallenged south of Kyushu. It’s nothing big yet, but it’s on our island, so better to nip that in the bud.”
“Alright, tell me what you know,” Toki decided.
And just like that, they were back to work.
There were missions, and patrols, and all the usual jazz. Toki did a photoshoot for a shampoo brand. Keigo did a TV spot for a brand of perfume. They did interviews, they chatted with fans, they arrested villains. There was a minor earthquake and they handled the rescue effort.
Toki was slowly trying to make her statistics decrease. She liked being at the top with Keigo: but having Meteor free freaked her out a little, and she would rather not be in the Top Ten (with her face plastered everywhere) at the next Billboard Chart announcement.
Icarus was now strong enough to stay high even if Toki laid low, of course: their agency was thriving. But Keigo needed to continue to aim higher, while Toki would rather fade in the shadows, and… considering they were an indissociable duo, it was a delicate balancing act.
The HPSC had classified Toki’s file. She checked it, just to be sure. When Toki had been a kid, her missing person file had been ‘closed’ and nothing much. Her identity as Toki Taiyōme in official documents and in the Quirk registry had stayed untouched, ready to be used again.
But now, everything was noted as ‘classified’. Her missing person file, but also her personal file in the national database. Status? Classified. She could be dead, she could be alive, she could be missing: nobody was allowed to know. Quirk? Classified, too. It could be Teleportation, it could be something else. Judicial file? Classified. She could be a serial killer and it wouldn’t show. Address? Classified. Filiation? Classified. Marital status? Classified. Eye color? Classified. There were so many blacked out spaces on her file that it looked like a CIA report. It was hilarious.
If someone started looking for Toki Taiyōme, they would see straight away she was involved in some serious bullshit. That much red tape wasn’t discreet. But hey, there was a time for blending in the décor and playing dead: and there was a time when you needed to hide in a motherfucking bunker. Neither the HPSC nor Toki had the time, the patience or the creativity to play a game of hide-and-seek with Meteor if he started investigating with the backing of Endeavor’s agency, so better to block him straight away.
Maybe it was overly cautious. There was little chance for meteor to look at the file of his missing daughter, twelve years after the fact. But it didn’t hurt to be careful.
Anyways. Time passed.
The Sports Festival came and went. Melissa didn’t win the Second Years Sports Festival, but she came in a respectable third place. Silver went to the guy who could make snow, and gold went to Nejire Hado, the girl who made energy waves. It was a good Festival, with more emphasis on teamwork than last year: close-knitted groups really had a chance to shine, there. For once, Toki really enjoyed watching it. Even if her protegee didn’t win first place!
And afterwards, Melissa and Hitoshi both logged into the Discord server and spend hours dissecting everybody’s Quirks. Toki was so proud. In the beginning, neither Hitoshi nor Melissa had the slightest interest in analysis. But now they were both pretty good at it!
They didn’t have the same passion Toki had for it, though. She loved studying how Quirks worked. Observing, looking for clues, aligning new elements with old information, digging into her knowledge of physics or anatomy to find concepts that would help fill the blanks, theorizing about such and such possibilities… It was such a thrill.
The kids’ training continued. Honestly, looking back, Toki was impressed by their progress. Melissa’s, especially. At the beginning, she had been awkward, almost clumsy. Now, barely two years had passed, but she moved like she was born with her equipment. Her boots, jetpack and shield were all cumbersome and heavy, but you wouldn’t guess it just looking at her. Her fighting style was incredibly fluid: astonishingly so, even, when you realized she was basically wearing a tank. But Melissa was no delicate ballerina. Her main fighting style was boxing. Oh, sure, she used her shield, her rockets, grenades and smoke-bombs, grappling hooks and plenty of gadgets… but if an enemy made the mistake of thinking she favored long-distance fighting because she was weak at close-combat, boy, they were in for a nasty surprise.
Melissa’s fighting style was graceful up until the moment of impact: then it became comparable to a hammer falling on an anvil. Toki was self-aware enough to recognize herself in her student’s style: dancing out of reach then striking, falling from the sky like a hundred-ton meteor to pulverize your enemy under your blows. Except Toki rarely allowed herself to be hit, even when she attacked. She made projectiles and adversaries dance around her, and she used their own momentum against them. Melissa didn’t bother. She had raw blunt force, several pounds of metal, and apparently a lot of pent-up rage to let loose. She was like a battering ram. Unlike Toki who sidestepped attacks and preferred swift take-downs, Melissa didn’t fear getting close and personal.
Surprisingly, most adversaries didn’t seem to expect that from a blonde teenage girl dressed in pink.
And they expected it even less from a Quirkless girl.
It’s been years now, but Toki still wanted to laugh manically when she thought about it. Melissa was going to be a Quirkless hero! The first one, and maybe not the last. Melissa would become a hero first and foremost because she wanted to help people, but she was just as aware as Toki that simply existing as a Quirkless hero would be a statement. Even if she didn’t want to make one, it would be taken as such. It was too upsetting to people’s assumptions. People would judge Melissa for her Quirklessness: by becoming a hero, she was already rising to the challenge, and it would be a fight during her whole career. It was daunting.
And yet, Melissa had never given up. Toki was so proud.
Anyways. Melissa’s fighting style was direct and brutal. Like the statement her existence would be taken as. And it was perfect.
Hitoshi was the complete opposite. He rarely went for a frontal confrontation. Of course, with his Quirk, he had to train his mind just as much as his body: he needed to be good at mind-games, on-the-fly behavior analysis, and anything that could give him an edge to make people talk to him. Getting a word out of his adversary was basically a guaranteed win. So when Hitoshi trained for physical combat, he never really saw the point of going straight for violence. He circled the enemy, probed for weaknesses, retreated, planted traps, observed, evaded. He also avoided close combat because he couldn’t afford to take a serious punch. What if he was hit in the chest or the throat, had his breath taken away? That was his main weapon down.
(Toki had demonstrated that quite thoughtfully one afternoon, trashing him again and again by constantly taking his breath away. Slamming him on the ground, hitting his throat, even throwing a fistful of dust at his mouth when he inhaled to make him choke. At the end, Hitoshi had been so pissed he had nearly left training early. But well, lesson learned. Just because his Quirk was an instant victory-switch didn’t mean he had the luxury of becoming complacent.)
Hitoshi rarely used his capture weapons in fights, though. It required too much coordination and he was still just beginning to be really good at hand-to-hand: it was too soon to bring a weapon into the mix. What his capture-tape was good at was at helping him move across the city. He could swing from one rooftop to the other, but his weapon could be more than a glorified robe. Hitoshi didn’t lack creativity, at least. He used his weapon like a whip, like a swinging rope, like a slingshot. He was also working on making it act like tendrils, to extend his grip and grasp various things. But it required quite a lot of precision. With enough training, Hitoshi wanted to be able to snatch things out from people’s hands: but he was still far from this goal. One time out three, he missed his mark.
Toki was hunting down Eraserhead’s footage to find ideas of movements, attacks or even exercises. But it was incredibly hard to find. The man was basically Musutafu’s local cryptic. Were cameras allergic to him or something?
Melissa offered to kidnap him from Yūei, but Toki vetoed that plan. She wasn’t suicidal.
The days went by and Toki continued going on with her life. Patrol, training, research. Her part-time job at Hamaoka’s lab was more challenging than she had expected. She still was at the bottom of the hierarchical ladder though, so she didn’t have access to the Ion Drive, which was a shame. At least she had access to the blueprints. In her (rare) spare time, she puzzled over it to try and model her ideal spaceship, but it was a work in progress.
She started to brainstorm with Keigo, sometimes. He didn’t know a thing about engineering but he had a good head for logistics. They bounced ideas back and forth, and sometimes, a useful concept emerged from their banter. It was… nice.
Things were nice.
So, of course, it couldn’t last.
On a sunny Wednesday morning, Toki’s Quirk stopped working.
Notes:
ENJOY THAT CLIFFHANGER!
Mwahahaha i'm so evil.
-
Anyway ! On a more cheerful topic...
Fic rec of the day : "For Fools and Utopias" by jinlinli. The Plot : Izuku never made it to Yūei and as such never kickstarted Shoto's acceptance of his fire. Ten years later, they met. Some things are beyond fixing, but Shouto gets drop-kicked into Character Development anyway.
This fic isn't complete yet, and i'm vibrating with impatience because there's SO MANY vaguely-alluded things that i want to have anwsers to. Like who is the new HSPC's President. How did Endeavor lose his Number One Spot, since it was made pretty clear that nobody knows about his abuse. Who was Fuyumi's husband? Is Dabi a Todoroki in this universe, and if so, is Natsuo acting so shifty because he knows? What the fuck happened to Hawks that made him retire? It's a great fic with a fascinating take on fire Quirks as a whole, but also trauma, society's way to cope with villains, and rehabilitation.(It's from that fic that i took the idea of Endeavor being the exemple all fire-types aspire to be, because he proved fire wasn't inherently villainous!)
-
Some food for thoughts....
Is the fact that Meteor is after underground villains so obvious?
Nope! Keigo notices it because he has a very peculiar field in heroism. Remember, he may be a high-ranked hero but his big speciality is espionnage. He's extremely well-informed.
Also, the Icarus Agency has a cheat-code: Hayasa-sensei. He's an underground hero and he loves mysterious and difficult cases. In the chapter "New Beginnings", it was mentionned that Hayasa-sensei started investigating urban legends like AFO or Kuma almost right away. So Toki and Keigo know of the underground villains, and they know about Meteor's liberation, and they know about his personality, and they know about the fact that he already helped Endeavor with the Vicious case. With all those clues, they can piece things together.
But limelight heroes, or underground villains, don't have that intel. They may have ONE, or maybe TWO of those clues: but not all of them.All Might met Midoriya already?!
Yup! I'm actually pondering writing their meeting in the Wisdom-verse. That would be a wild ride, because tiny-Midoriya own a flamethrower now, and i'm just CACKLING at the thought of how different his encounter with the Sludge Villain would be.WHY TOKI'S QUIRK DOESN'T WORK?! WHAT HAPPENED TO HER?!
Mwahahahahahahaha!
You'll have to wait until the next chapter to know that! But you're welcome to guess x) Two people read this chapter ahead (one of them being my beta) and they didn't have a clue xD Which is great, because i was afraid it was too obvious!
_
So. I hope you enjoyed the chap!
Since in two weeks i'll post the next chapter of "wisdom of the fallen", you'll know what's up with Toki in a month!
... or a little less if i got too impatient to share it with you guys x)Also, "Snapshots of wisdom" was updated with a fanart of Meteor ! =)
VERY IMPORTANT EDIT
I made a discord server!
Come and join me!.
Chapter 32: The element of surprise
Summary:
Toki really didn’t like hospitals, and all those questions didn’t help her relax at all. She was becoming more and more nervous as time went by and it became obvious that this line of questioning led nowhere. Thankfully, her bloodwork came back quickly. The doctor started checking it, then suddenly did a double take.
Toki’s stomach dropped. That was the face of a man who suddenly realized he had missed something big.
Oh, fuck.
(or: Well, if it isn't my old Nemesis, the consequences of my own actions!)
Notes:
THIS FC NOW HAS A DISCORD SERVER ! Come and join me to make crazy theories, hear me rant at characters sabotaging my plotline, see exclusive fanarts, share fic rec, and more !
The link is here ! Come and join me!
So this is the chapter where the story takes a sharp turn in an unexpected direction. Something is going to happen in this chapter that i hadn't anticipated writing at all. I had the idea months ago. I thought "yeah it doesn't fit with what i'm writing", but i put the words on paper anyway, in case i wanted to make a short spin-off. A bonus. An omake? Whatever, you get me.
But then i was writing, and somehow this idea came back to haunt me, and... it was perfect, to give Toki the opportunity to avoid Meteor, but also to force her to take a step back and THINK about how in over her head she is when it comes to her personnal life.So. I hope you're prepared. And i know it's a not a direction that most SI-OC fanfiction takes, but i wanted to explore it anyway, so... here goes nothing x)
And a huge, HUGE thank you to dreamofdreaming, who corrected the chapter and my many, many spelling mistakes! =)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE
Toki was so, so thankful it hadn’t happened during a villain chase. Or fifty meters up in the air. Or while she was jumping off rooftops. Just thinking about it made her break into a cold sweat. No, Warp-Space’s malfunction only happened as Toki was preparing to teleport from one room to another, in her own home. She felt a resistance, a lag, a glitch: but she still contracted this invisible muscle in her chest, because that’s how it worked, the thought of her Quirk not working had never crossed her mind… and when she teleported to the kitchen, a stabbing pain erupted in her chest.
She collapsed, gasping. Keigo freaked the fuck out. He almost flew her to the hospital himself.
It passed in less than a minute, but it left her shaken. She had fallen on her knees, breath taken away… it reminded her of those first stiches she had during Quirk evaluation with Hayasa-sensei, just before her heart attack. She had fallen down too, paralyzed by shock and pain, unable to move or even call for help. It was the same kind of pain. And it was so sudden. There had been no aches, no difficulties, no warning signs. She had her usual medical check-up three months ago (it was mandatory for all heroes, and even more so for a hero like her who was a very large investment for the HPSC) and her heart was fine then.
What the hell was happening?!
Her mandatory medical check-up was supposed to happen in a week. But one phone call to Kameko later, said check-up was quietly moved up, and Toki’s other appointments cancelled for the day. She couldn’t go to work, obviously: she didn’t want to cause panic at her agency. Kameko would pretend her check-up had simply been moved up for external reasons, and… hopefully, they could solve this quickly.
“I have to go hold the fort,” Keigo fretted. “But do you want me to send someone for moral support? Hayasa-sensei or Kameko?”
Toki shook her head and tried to smile reassuringly. The pain had completely passed, but the memory of it was enough to leave her unsettled.
“They’re both needed at Icarus today. I’ll call as soon as I have news, alright? Don’t worry.”
But he would worry. Hell, Toki was very worried herself. It was her fricking heart, for gods’ sake. That stabbing pain was supposed to be a thing of the past. And oh, hell, if she had this level of pain with her new heart, that meant the strain would have probably straight up stopped her old heart. She could have died. Maybe she was dramatizing, but holy yakitori, she was allowed to freak out, alright? The only thing forcing her to stay calm was the need for Keigo to not freak out. If one of them started losing their shit, the other would follow immediately.
They were both too codependent for their own good.
So. They didn’t tell anyone besides Kameko. Toki didn’t call Dr Shinsō, either. Instead, she put on a civilian disguise (some make-up, brown colored contacts, hair pulled in a simple ponytail), then she took a taxi and went to the local heroic hospital. It was a place she knew well, since it was where everyone at the Icarus agency had their medical check-up. The staff was used to treating heroes, and bound by non-disclosure agreements more secure than Tartarus. They were also liaising with Musutafu’s hospital, so if something fishy was going on with Toki’s new heart, they could get a team of experts together very quickly.
Anyways. The doctor had been briefed beforehand, because as soon as Toki sat down, he whipped out an exhaustive list of things to check, starting with her heartbeat. Everything was back to normal, apparently. Then he checked her blood pressure, took blood samples, checked her alimentation, talked with her about her stress levels, how she slept, if there had been any pain beforehand, if she was on any medication…
Toki really didn’t like hospitals, and all those questions didn’t help her relax at all. She was becoming more and more nervous as time went by and it became obvious that this line of questioning led nowhere. Thankfully, her bloodwork came back quickly. The doctor started checking it, then suddenly did a double take.
Toki’s stomach dropped. That was the face of a man who suddenly realized he had missed something big.
“Quantum-san, is there any chance that you’re pregnant?”
Toki opened her mouth to laugh it off, then stopped, mute. Oh, fuck.
“My partner had the birth control injection years ago,” she finally squeaked out.
“The injection only lasts seven to eight years. How long ago was it?”
Keigo had been thirteen, if she remembered correctly… and now, they were both nearly twenty-one. Toki’s stomach dropped out. Oh, gods.
“Almost eight years.”
The doctor nodded, looking a little relived:
“We’re going to run another test on your blood sample just to be sure, of course. But those tests are ninety-nine percent accurate. There’s a very high chance you’re pregnant. Do you think it could be what’s interfering with your Quirk?”
Toki bobbed her head, feeling numb. Her head was filled with static.
“My mother… she was a teleporter. Her Quirk stopped working during pregnancy.”
“Well, it’s probably that, then. Congratulations. I’m going to send an obstetrician to you, alright?”
He left, and soon enough was replaced by another doctor. A hero doctor, actually: it was a young woman in her mid-twenties, with dark skin, black hair in dreadlocks, a costume looking like a medical blouse, and fluorescent green eyes. She introduced herself as Erika, Quirk: Perfect Diagnostic. She was a part-time support hero, part-time intern at the hospital. She was very nice, and it was obvious she was trying to make Toki feel more comfortable.
Unfortunately, Toki felt so shell-shocked that comfort was as out of her reach as the fucking moon.
They did more tests. Toki’s mind was both running too fast and feeling too slow. Holy shit, she had gained weight. Was it because of that and not the candies? And her uneasy stomach, was it because of that, too, and not the stress? She had even thrown up once. She had chalked it up to her anxiety about Meteor getting out, because she felt frayed and on edge, but… Oh man. And a few times during those last weeks, she had felt very tired after patrol, as if using her Quirk had been more draining than usual. Could that be it? Holy cow, had she missed a whole pregnancy?
Apparently, she had. Erika calmly explained that pregnant women could still have fake periods, with blood and everything. Hormonal unbalance was easily missed if you had a stressful job. In the first trimester, there was almost no weight gain: especially for athletic women with a very active life.
Results came. Toki was pregnant. Fourteen weeks pregnant, so three months and a half. The high levels of estrogen were already apparent in her blood tests at her last medical check-up, actually! But since the doctor had been focused on her heart, and everything had been fine, and Toki herself had insisted on getting it over with as soon as possible because she didn’t like hospitals… nobody had thought to check it. It had gone undetected. And now the pregnancy was well on its way and starting to interfere with her Quirk.
(At this point Toki had to get up from the chair and sit down on the floor. She felt like passing out. This couldn’t be happening. This could not be happening.)
She had texts on her phone from Keigo, asking if everything was going well. She had texts from Kameko telling to keep her updated and asking if she was ok. She couldn’t answer any of them. She felt almost physically sick.
It got worse, somehow, when the obstetrician gently explained her options.
“Heroines have it rougher than male heroes in that aspect,” Erika said lightly. “A pregnancy is complicated. Raising a child even more so. You can decide it’s not for you. It’s clear that it wasn’t in your plans. Your priorities must be what you choose they are, alright? Maybe it’s your job, maybe it’s your freedom, maybe it’s your partner, and maybe it’s something else. But you have no obligation to give up anything for this pregnancy. If you carry it to term, it must be a choice, not something you’re forced to do. It’s your health and your body, after all.”
“So I could…”
Toki didn’t finish her sentence. Her mind felt blank and empty.
“You have three choices,” Erika explained. “You can carry on with your pregnancy and have the child. You can carry on but feel like you’re not ready to be a mother, or that you don’t want to: in that case, you can give up the child for adoption at birth. You can even have a say in their future family. Finally, you can terminate the pregnancy.”
Abortion in Japan was a… complex topic. It was technically illegal, but exceptions to the law were so broad that it was widely accepted and practiced. Basically, you could abort up to the sixth month of pregnancy, and sometimes even later, as long as you had a justification: traumatizing circumstances, endangerment of the mother’s health, economic hardship… It was even covered by healthcare.
Culturally, though, it was more complicated than that. Japan had a low birth rate. Yes, women had to put their own needs first, but there was still a strong underlying stigma about it. Judgment, shame. Especially if the parents had good Quirks. Because it was bad to deprive the world of a child with so much potential. And yes, Toki knew it was Quirkist propaganda, alright? But that didn’t mean she was immune to it. She had grown up in this culture, and the idea of aborting a child (fetus, it was only a fetus!) made her uneasy.
Not because it was alive! It wasn’t a person, at this point, just a ball of cells smaller than a cancerous tumor. But it could be alive. She could decide to give it life. If she wanted. Or she could choose not to, and… and…
And she wasn’t sure she even wanted to do that.
Her first reflex had been ‘hell no’ and ‘I need things to get back to normal’: panic, shock, horror. But now a good hour had passed since getting the news, time spent talking with a calm and rational person who helped her keep her cool, and… now, she didn’t know. It didn’t seem so crazy anymore. But it was still… it was still…
I can’t raise a child, Toki thought wildly. And then she thought about Meteor getting out, about canon getting closer, and it turned into it’s really not the right time to have one anyway. But she suddenly remembered the war to come, her canon knowledge of crushed cities, mobs in the streets, villains everywhere, and wondered: is there ever a right time to have a kid?
A child. A baby. A small living human being. Tiny, like her brother’s coffin when they had lowered it next to Sayuri’s. But alive, like how Hitoshi had been after being saved: warm, heavy, and screaming, then babbling happily, with a huge toothless smile. A real child. Maybe they would have Keigo’s golden eyes, Toki’s dark hair, and maybe they would have Sayuri’s dimples and Meteor’s grin… Toki’s heart lurched in her chest, and she slammed the door on that train of thought. She couldn’t start imagining that fetus as a person: the enormity of it was terrifying.
“You don’t have to make this decision right now,” Erika said reassuringly. “You can go home and think about it. Talk with your partner. With your family. With your friends.”
“Yeah,” Toki nodded, her throat tight. “I think I’m going to do just that.”
Because oh gods she was pregnant.
She went home. Then she texted Kameko that she was taking the day off. The problem with her Quirk had been found, she was fine, but she needed to decide what to do about it, and could Kameko please send Hawks home early? Then she agonized a full hour about what to text Keigo, because ‘we need to talk’ seemed ominous as hell, but she really had no idea what else to send without telling him. And really, this wasn’t the kind of thing she wanted to say over the phone. In the end, she just texted him she was fine and would see him at home. There. Short, to the point, and absolutely not panic inducing.
One of them would need to be calm, after all.
Her mind was still reeling. She got up and started pacing. Oh, why was she even considering this?!
It wasn’t the right moment. She didn’t know a thing about babies. She wasn’t even twenty-one yet, barely out of adolescence, had a demanding job, she wasn’t ready. And still, still… the idea had taken root in her mind, and now she couldn’t help but think about it.
Toki had never been against the idea of having children. Quite the opposite. She hadn’t ardently wanted them, but she hadn’t hated the idea either. It was just a possibility, then, not even a concrete one. It had always made her feel wishful rather than repulsed. Yeah, Toki had always thought that being a mother would be an option for her, and why not? But she hadn’t imagined it right now. She hadn’t even really imagined it, at all.
Children… parenthood… It had always been an abstract, distant thought. A baby would be cute, adorable, and she would love them with all her heart. But being a mother was different. It was lifetime job, a real one with weight and consequences and oh, Toki also had to work out her issues about her own upbringing. Her parents had been so selfish. They had loved her, but they had loved themselves more, and Toki was terrified of turning out just like them. She should have sorted out her issues with them before even entertaining the idea of the possibility of having children. But no!
She had been careless. Keigo had been careless. And now it was happening, and Toki felt like she was losing control.
And what was Keigo’s stance on this? Because in every scenario where Toki had imagined herself a mother, he had been there. She hadn’t thought about having a random baby, she had thought about starting a family with the man she loved. It was two very different things. What if Keigo didn’t want that? Wouldn’t it better to terminate the pregnancy? Or maybe to give up the kid, find them a loving family?
She considered getting a drink, because they had beer in the fridge and this situation definitely required alcohol to be dealt with. Then she realized that alcohol wasn’t supposed to mix with pregnancy. Then she wondered if the question was even relevant because she hadn’t decided to keep it, for gods’ sake. It was still in the air. She could very well decide to abort, and then, nobody would care about a glass of beer. Right?
In the end, she didn’t take a beer. She opened a soda instead and tried to not think about what it revealed about her state of mind. Fuck her life.
When Keigo tumbled in their living room, looking frazzled and his hair wind-swept in a way that mean he had flown at top speed to get there, Toki felt less jittery. She had been so shocked and stressed and dumbfounded that she had circled right back into calm.
So. She told him.
He had the exact same reaction she had, which was to freeze, sit down, and try not to pass out. It made her feel a little better about her initial freak-out. He also apologized professedly about the contraceptive failure. The irony was that his next injection was scheduled to happen during his next medical check-up, in two months. When they would be calmer, they would have a good laugh about the timing.
And then, of course, they had to decide what to do.
“Do you want to keep it?” he asked hesitantly.
“Wait, do you realize how impractical it would be?” Toki blurted out. “It would be incredibly dangerous. And we both have careers I can’t imagine slowing down. We’re both Top Ten heroes! Well, I can imagine slowing down, just to fly a little under the radar: but for a year, maybe, not eighteen, and raising a kid is a ton of work, we can’t possibly do that in addition to heroism, and we’re still too young, I wouldn’t have any idea about what to do…!”
Keigo snorted. His laughter was slightly high pitched, almost hysterical, but seeing Toki freak-out seemed to help him stay grounded.
“You’re getting too far ahead, Toki. Don’t worry about that. First, tell me: do you want to keep it or not?”
She started at him, her throat tight. Finally, she breathed out:
“I don’t know. Do you?”
“I’m not the one who’s pregnant,” he blinked.
Toki shook her head.
“No, but… if I keep it… I never imagined having a family without you. So if you’re not on board, that’s it. And even if you are, I’m not sure! But if you aren’t, well, I’m definitively not keeping it.”
Keigo’s eyes turned soft, and Toki avoided his gaze. I’ll follow you until there’s no road left. That was all there was to it, in the end, wasn’t it? The sponsorship program, heroism, it had always been Keigo chasing his dreams and Toki blindly chasing him. She had come to want the same things as him, the thrill of adventure, the righteousness of the job… but in the end her goal had always been, first and foremost, to be by his side.
So yeah. In this like in everything else… Toki wouldn’t take this road, if she couldn’t walk by his side.
A hand touched hers. Keigo kneeled by her side, and smiled softly. His golden eyes shone in the light. He was so handsome, so kind, so perfect, and here, here with her. Toki’s heart capsized like a ship in a storm. No matter how many years passed, she still couldn’t help but fall in love all over again.
“I’ll be with you whatever you choose,” he whispered. “I know we’re very young, and I don’t know much more about kids than you: but if I’m lucky enough to have a family, I want it to be with you. So… Whatever you choose, I’ll be there. Whether you choose to not have children right now, or to never have. Whether you chose to keep this one or not, whether you chose to raise them or not. I’ll follow you until there’s no road left, too. Remember?”
She blinked back tears. Overwhelmed, she let her head fall forward, her forehead lightly knocking on his shoulder, and stayed there.
“I want to keep it, then,” she muttered, her voice muffled by his jacket. “It’s stupid, I don’t have a plan, I don’t know if it’s even possible, but that’s what I want. I know we should have waited until we slowed down or retired, but…”
“Oh please,” Keigo laughed. “Like either of us would have ever willingly slowed down. We would never have made time for this. Now, we have to make the time, and it’s just as well. Rolling with the punches is more our thing than drawn out planning, after all.”
Toki snorted: “You’re not wrong.”
“I’m never wrong, you should know that.”
His arms closed around her shoulders in a hug, and he put his chin on the top of her head. There was shifting of feathers, and Toki didn’t have to open her eyes to know his wings were half folded around them, hiding them from the world. It was strangely comforting. For a few seconds, there was silence, and Toki slowly relaxed.
“Wanna get married?” Keigo suddenly blurted out.
It was so unexpected; she couldn’t help but let out a startled giggle.
“Are you really proposing to me right now?”
“It seems as good of a moment as any to bring it up!” he defended himself. “Besides, you can’t possibly be surprised. I’ve been planning on proposing since we were fourteen. At the risk of being sappy and lame, I want to wake up with you every day for the rest of our lives.” Then he paused, and amended: “Wait, I forgot, you always wake up at an ungodly hour like five in the morning. I’m not setting my alarm at five in the morning, no way in hell. So it’s more like I want to see you at some point every day for the rest of our lives.”
Still hiding her face against his jacket, Toki grinned helplessly.
“Yeah, I wanna get married. But I’m keeping my surname.”
She was just starting to reconcile with it, after all. No reason to ditch it now. Besides, Taiyōme was pretty cool, as names went.
“No problem with me,” Keigo answered easily. “I’m actually thinking of taking yours.”
“What? Are you sure?”
“Yes,” he said, and his voice had rarely been so serious. “There are some secrets I will take to my grave. But I don’t want loving you to be one of them.”
What could she possibly answer to that? Toki let out a mirthless chuckle, eyes closed, and let her head rest against his chest. His heart was beating almost as fast as hers, and she couldn’t bite back a soft smile. What a nerve-wracking conversation.
“Besides, my surname sucks,” Keigo added cheerfully to lighten the atmosphere. “But it’s going to be super-awkward, if I ever get to meet my father-in-law and have to introduce myself.”
“You’re never meeting your father-in-law if I can help it.”
“Oh, no, come on, think of the comedic potential!”
“There would a homicide within the hour, and you would deserve it.”
He burst out laughing, which was the goal, and Toki laughed with him. A knot she hadn’t even realized was there was slowly unfolding in her stomach. But she stayed right there tucked in Keigo’s arms.
They had decided to keep it. Gods, they had really decided it. She closed her eyes, and tried to look at the future, the possibilities, the way fate would branch out, the roads she could take, the risks. Some part of her mind was already doing the math: weighing the risks, analyzing data, categorizing options. Slowly, the enormity of her decision dawned on her. Its dangers, too.
“If we’re doing this,” she said lowly, “then there’s something we have to get first.”
“What’s that?”
She steeled herself.
“My mother’s medical records.”
oOoOoOo
The Heroic Identity Protection Act had its perks. One of them was the absolute confidentiality of any health-related issues of heroes. Long-term illness, broken bones, or pregnancy: if a hero wished to keep their health private, everything was slapped with a seal of secrecy and hidden under prefabricated stories. Just like All Might had the full backing of the HPSC to cover his tracks after his injuries, any heroes who wanted to lick their wounds in private were allowed to do so… and would have a cover story offered. Paparazzi and private investigators were both faced with brutal legal repercussions if they tried to pry into the heroes’ personal business.
So, Toki called Kameko and within the hour, Quantum was officially given a long-term secret mission underground. It was something highly classified, that would last between six months and a year. With full pay, of course. Unofficially, she was simply on maternity leave.
That was one problem solved, at least.
There were just a billion other issues to address.
The first thing Toki and Keigo did afterward, of course… was to prepare Icarus to go on without her for months. For the public and most of their staff, Quantum would be on a secret mission: but a select few were told the truth. Kameko, Hayasa-sensei, and the sidekicks Toki was closest to: Psyren, Thunder Thief, and Sunspear. If someone tried to dig holes in her cover story, they were to protect her and keep up the charade. They all immediately agreed. Thunder Thief offered his congratulation with a grin. Sunspear joked about her wearing slippers and mom jeans.
Hayasa-sensei pretended to be unaffected, but he was the very first to offer a hug. He was allowed to be emotional. After all, he had basically raised her, and Keigo, too. He would be more of a grandfather to this unborn child than Meteor would.
And Kameko… well, she was kind of an eccentric, feline fairy godmother, when you thought about it. At least she took the news well. A little too well, actually. She was in turn elated, overexcited, panicked, and squealing in glee. She had even slipped once and called Toki’s future spawn ‘the kitten’. Okay, it was kind of funny. Toki was so tense it made her break down into almost hysterical laughter.
(Toki also implied that the baby would be given up for adoption. She didn’t say anything definitive, but she had to plant the idea in their heads now. A little corner of her mind was already busy creating false trails and double bluffs, because that child, her child, would be utterly defenseless, and nobody could be allowed to know of that weakness. Especially not the HPSC.)
A few other people were told. At the HPSC, Kameko had to inform the President. Toki told Inferno, mostly because if she went ‘missing’ so soon after Meteor’s release, she knew he would think the worst. If their situations were reversed, she would.
Then, after getting her medical leave, and putting her cover story in place, Toki did the next thing on her checklist…
She eloped.
Keigo and her put on their best civilian disguises and took the train to Fukutusu, a nearby city which had a beautiful shintô temple. Keigo had patrolled there a few times and loved this place. So they went and got married in a quiet ceremony with a crowd of five priests, with Mirko as their only witness. Keigo had asked her to swing by and the Rabbit Heroine had been both delighted and completely taken aback by the impromptu ceremony.
They exchanged vows. They gave each other wedding rings. They signed a piece of paper. And that was it, they were married. Keigo took the Taiyōme name, just like that.
If Mirko recognized either of their surnames when signing the koseki as their witness, she didn’t say a word about it.
Then they went back to Fukuoka. Toki spent about a week shut in the penthouse, googling things like ‘mortality rate in young mothers’ or ‘how to raise a child as a full-time hero’ or ‘statistics of abuse in foster care’. It was educational. It absolutely didn’t help at all in decreasing her anxiety levels. Gods, what was she doing? What was she doing?! She didn’t want to get rid of the baby but what kind of life was she going to give it?! She didn’t know. She didn’t have a plan; she was flying blind towards an ever-approaching date of birth. She didn’t know what to do.
Then there were her mother’s medical records.
They weren’t hard to get. The very next day, Toki requested them from Genmei-san herself, using her most secure email address. The President gave her Sayuri’s medical records without a fight. Toki opened the file with her heart in her throat and read. More than ten years after the fact, she learned how her mother had died.
It wasn’t from the childbirth itself.
It had been a heart attack.
The birth by itself had been traumatic, of course. Toki already knew that. Maybe Sayuri would have died anyways. They would never know. Because as soon as Hikari had been delivered, Sayuri had tried to escape again. Bleeding, exhausted, but free from the baby that made her Quirkless. So, too fast for anyone to react, she had switched places with a doctor, then with a guard on the other side of the door, then another patient, then a nurse in another corridor…
And then her heart had stopped.
Two more teleports and Sayuri could have been out of the door. But she wouldn’t have gone far, anyway. She had been bleeding out already. Her heart had stopped, and she had fallen down a corridor. By the time the panicked medical staff and prison guards managed to find her, it had been too late.
And that’s how Aratani Sayuri had died. Betrayed by her daughter, not knowing where her husband was, not even having the time to hold her stillborn son. Angry, scared, exhausted, alone… and just short of reaching her freedom.
It’s my fault, Toki thought. She felt sick. If I hadn’t tried to stop the crew, if I hadn’t told the police, she would have lived. And so would the victims killed in Meteor’s arrest.
And yes, maybe Meteor would have kept killing people; but maybe he wouldn’t have, maybe he would have had a change of heart, or maybe he wouldn’t have felt the need to chase after more money. And even if he had… Toki wouldn’t have known those people. They were strangers, they should have been nothing to her. What was their survival worth, weighed against Sayuri’s life and Meteor’s freedom?
Nothing, a cynical part of Toki wanted to say. But that wasn’t true. When she had been eight, horrified and indignant, it had seemed like everything. She had been willing to pay any price to save those strangers, to make the threat stop.
The price had been too high. She hadn’t been ready. She had been a stupid child, in over her head with adult consequences to her actions. No, she hadn’t been ready for the price, but it had been too late when she had understood it; she had paid it all the same.
She had destroyed her parents, and now she was going to be a parent herself. Living a life almost as dangerous as her own mother’s and father’s, loving it just as they did, and as utterly unprepared for parenthood as they had been. Ah. Somehow, somewhere, if there was a god, he was probably laughing his ass off.
It was… a long week.
And fuck, once the shock had worn off, Toki was blinded by a sudden and bitter epiphany: her mother hadn’t died from heart attack but from Quirk overuse. And nobody had ever realized it.
Sayuri’s death had surprised the doctors. They hadn’t known she had a weak heart. Only, it wasn’t a weak heart, was it? No more than Toki’s heart had been weak. It wasn’t as much as a heart condition as it was Quirk limitation. Sayuri had had to use her power sparingly. Swap-Space tired her, because the energy source of her Quirk wasn’t mental focus but her cardiac muscle. Just like Toki. Fuck, she also had a range limitation of one hundred kilometers, right?! The exact same as her daughter’s. Because Toki got her Quirk from her mom, including its power source, including its weakness.
Sayuri had the same heart condition as her daughter. Her heart hadn’t been as damaged as Toki’s by intense training, but it had still been fragile. Unsuited from long and deep effort. Unable to sustain the strain of that last, desperate bid for freedom.
Had Sayuri known about this? About this weakness, about this limitation? She must have. Why hadn’t she told Toki, then? After all, they had the same power, they were both teleporters. Sayuri had been so fascinated by Toki’s Quirk when she had been a child: surely, she had noticed that they both used their heart to use their Quirks! She should have noticed and told her daughter! Even if it was only to enjoin her to be careful! Then maybe Toki could have told the doctors, could have warned them, prevented it…
Why, Mom? Why were you always so secretive? Why did you never tell me anything. Why did you never listen to me? Why did you discard me?
Did you even love me?
Toki had no answers. She would never have one. Sayuri was dead, and she had taken all her secrets to the grave.
Days passed. Toki’s anxiety didn’t abate.
Staying alone while Keigo did hero work was a special kind of torture. Toki burned to do something, too. She went out, walked the streets, but soon enough she realized she was unconsciously looking for villains to stop or accidents to prevent. Even when she wasn’t, she couldn’t shake the nagging worry that someone would recognize her. Fukuoka was Quantum’s city. Hoshizora had a limited place here.
Especially now that she was Quirkless… no, worse than Quirkless: fragile. Vulnerable. Even after her heart attack at fourteen, Toki had been unafraid of fighting: but now she felt jittery and paranoid at the very idea. And of course, her general state of anxiety about the pregnancy didn’t help. Keigo came home early every night, to hang out and talk and even freak out with her, but he wasn’t much help. They were both young and completely unprepared for this. They needed help. Advice. What they really needed was a functional family to turn to.
So… after several days in denial, Toki called the Shinsōs.
Hajime Shinsō was her doctor, so she needed to inform him for medical reasons. But mostly, they were the closest thing Toki had to parents. She had to tell them she was married, for gods’ sake. Also… she wanted to list the Shinsō family as next-of-kin, in case something happened to her and Keigo couldn’t raise the kid for whatever reason.
That was not a fun conversation to have. Toki almost broke down in tears twice, and in the end, Mihoko all but ordered her to move to Musutafu for the duration of her pregnancy.
“Are you going to stay shut inside your appartement for months?” she had said, indignant. “You need air, someone to take care of you, a shoulder to cry on, and a willing ear to listen to your freak-outs. Your husband -and congratulations, by the way- is just as young and panicked as you are, and he works full-time: not matter how much you think the sun shines out of his ass, he isn’t going to be a great help. Come back to Musutafu. I’ll prepare the guest room. This is going to be long, stressful, and emotionally draining, but at least I can make it a little easier for you. Take the next train. I’m warning you: if you don’t, I’m going there.”
She was right. Toki knew she was right. But still, she felt foolish to need support. And fuck, she didn’t want to stop working! She loved being Quantum with Hawks. Damn it… she felt terrible dumping the whole of Icarus on his shoulders. They were still tied by the same debt to the Commission: for their agency, but also for Toki’s surgery.
Although a third of that gigantic debt was already paid. The heroics industry, especially the upper levels of the rankings, really made a fuckton of money.
Keigo actually approved wholeheartedly of Mihoko’s suggestion. Not that he liked the idea of her leaving, but… she was Quirkless. Fragile. It was not the time to be a hero: and in Fukuoka, Toki had no place to exist outside of heroics. If she stayed, what would she do? She didn’t know anyone outside of Keigo and work relations. Stripped of her identity as Quantum, Toki was… no one, really. And Keigo couldn’t drop Icarus to devote himself to her.
He wouldn’t, anyways. Heroics took priority. It always did.
“I’ll call every day,” he tried to reassure her. “And you’ll visit. It’s just a temporary measure for your safety.”
Toki’s mouth twisted wryly. “That kind of things tends to happen to me. Once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence… I sure as hell hope not to see a pattern.”
Keigo shrugged helplessly.
“You have to admit the circumstances are similar. No Quirk… Vulnerable…”
The last time, Toki had been less vulnerable than she was this time around. At least she knew she had the HPSC to watch over her: they had invested a lot of money in her, they needed her. And she could still fight. She had been itching for it, actually: restless, frustrated, jittery, dearly wishing for someone to toss an insult her way and give her an excuse to turn her anxiety into anger.
Now, things were different. That buddle of unresolved issues festering in her chest had faded. Toki wasn’t itching for an outlet anymore. Maybe it was for the best, too, because she felt petrified at the thought of fighting. What if she fell, what if she was kicked or stabbed? What if she died; what if the child died?
She didn’t love it yet, or at least she didn’t think so. It wasn’t a real person, just an idea, a concept: something great and wonderful and absolutely terrifying all at once, like a live grenade nested in her insides. Its existence scared her, but the idea of losing it almost scared her even more.
“I hate this,” she confessed miserably.
“You think I don’t? I hate that you’re leaving,” Keigo blurted out, eyes wide. “We weren’t supposed to be separated again. Never. It’s driving me up the wall to think, what if you need me and I’m not there?! But… I’m no use to you. I have no idea what the hell I’m doing. The only thing I’m good at is heroics. At least Mihoko knows: she had a kid and she’s fine, and her husband is a freaking doctor, and you have friends who can take the time to support you…”
“As opposed to you,” Toki couldn’t help but said spitefully.
Keigo opened his mouth, then closed it. Toki immediately felt bad. She knew he couldn’t take time off. He had to continue working as a hero: twice as hard, now that she was on leave. He had to, he had to because it was their purpose here. Slowing down was unimaginable. Not just because of the HPSC, but also because it was how Keigo was. Who they were, Quantum and Hawks both.
They had been raised for it. Because if they weren’t the best, if they weren’t helping as many people as they could… then… weren’t they worthless?
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, taking one of his hands in hers. “I know why you can’t. I’m sorry I’m letting you down.”
“You’re not…!”
“I kind of am, though.”
“I have at least fifty percent responsibility for that,” Keigo snorted.
True enough. Toki sniggered. She hadn’t made that baby on her own, they had both been very enthusiastic participants.
“Go,” Keigo said softly. “You’ll be miserable here if you can’t be Quantum. At least in Musutafu you have your other identity. I’ll keep an eye on things here.”
Toki twisted her mouth. When her own mother had been pregnant, she had left her husband and the job she loved, too: she had hidden away to raise her daughter, out of sight, not knowing how to reconcile the child she had brought into the world with the world she wanted to live in. Sayuri hadn’t been a good mom, in the end… but during those first years, Toki had adored her. Maybe that was why the revelation, the betrayal, had hurt so much.
Toki didn’t want to become like her mother. She didn’t want to have a kid and raise it outside of her own word, like a part-time project. But, did she want to bring a child into her current world, the world of a full-time hero? Wouldn’t it be kinder to find them a civilian family?
Wouldn’t it be more dangerous, too? She still remembered the tale of how Shimura Nana, All Might’s teacher, had tried to protect her son that way… and how horribly it had backfired. Shigaraki Tomura was proof of it. Oh, All For One probably wouldn’t have any interest in Toki’s kid, but he wasn’t the only villain around.
And there was also the HPCS. A child with a desirable Quirk, lost in foster care, would be such tempting bait for them. No matter how kind they had been at the Naruto Labs, Toki didn’t want her child to grow up like she had. They deserved better.
“What about the Commission? What if they try to give you a hard time?”
“They won’t,” he replied confidently. “I’m too great of an asset, especially now that they’re down a warper.”
Toki frowned: “I suppose now, the cat is out of the bag about well, us. Even if they don’t find out about the wedding.”
“Yeah. The President could pretend to not know we were living together, but platonic roommates don’t usually end up with a pregnancy. I mean, if it was me who was pregnant, maybe the old witch would give me the benefit of the doubt, since apparently the tabloids think I’m a slut; but the chances of you sleeping around like Thunder Thief are pretty low.”
“I should have flirted more with little old ladies and garbage men,” Toki sighed dramatically.
Keigo sniggered, but even as they both tried to joke about it, they knew the stakes were serious. The HPSC and them were on the same side, the side of Justice, Rightfulness, Order In A Peaceful Society, and all that jazz. But neither Toki nor Keigo could let themselves forget that they weren’t equal. There was a power imbalance here, and it was not in their favor.
The HPSC still held their leash, no matter how long it was.
That was why it was important for them to have friends and allies in heroics. That was why they both had secret bank accounts they didn’t tell the other about. That was why they had to be careful about never revealing any vulnerability. The fact that they cared about one another was already a huge, glaring admission of weakness… and now they have just handed another one to the HPSC on a silver platter.
“We’ll be fine,” Keigo squeezed her hand reassuringly. “One problem at a time, alright? First, not letting you drown in anxiety.”
“Second, figure out if I’m going to die in childbirth,” Toki added dryly. “Then third, figuring out what to do with the spawn.”
“Spawn,” Keigo repeated, grinning. “Seriously? Well, fourth: maybe think of a better name than ‘spawn’. I pick the name if it’s a boy, and you pick if it’s a girl, alright?”
“… We’re not calling it Enji.”
“Damnit.”
So Toki went back to Musutafu.
Leaving still made her anxious. But Mihoko was right. Hadn’t Toki thought the same, during that week shut up in her penthouse? Fukuoka was Quantum’s city. Without her Quirk, she didn’t feel like she belonged here. All her ‘civilians’ friends were in Musutafu.
Coming back there, coming back there to stay, was almost a shock. The Shinsō family was overjoyed to welcome her. Mihoko had refused to entertain the thought of Toki settling in a hotel or renting an apartment. And, well, Toki had to admit she was secretly relieved. Being pregnant was already freaking her out, so having friends with her would be a huge comfort.
Mihoko had indeed prepared her room. The apartment hadn’t really changed since Toki’s high school days. It was like stepping into the past. And if Toki broke down and wept a little bit in Mihoko’s arms upon her arrival, nobody needed to know.
The days passed, crawling.
Sachiko, Melissa, even Hitoshi were fascinated by the idea that she, Toki the rebellious little shit, was going to be a mother. And they were right! Toki herself felt a little dumbfounded. Oh well, they were supportive, so she didn’t have anything to complain. They showered her with gifts and attention. She didn’t risk getting bored here, that was for sure. Also, Musutafu was closer to Hamaoka’s labs, too, which was a good thing. Toki still had her part-time remote job here. What? She was a workaholic, and she needed to do something, or she would go insane.
Just a few days ago she had been an active hero. Now she had literally fled Fukuoka like a thief, hiding her hero costume at the bottom of a suitcase. She wouldn’t see active duty for almost a year. She missed Icarus Agency, she missed the thrill of her job, she missed Keigo. Gods, she had thought they would never be separated again. They weren’t supposed to be separated again. It was so unfair. Everything was happening too fast.
But life went on, as it always did.
Toki went to doctor’s appointments; she read books about pregnancy and baby care. She nose-dived into her online work. She once took a train to visit Hamaoka’s lab in person, which made for a nice outing. She worked on her PhD, writing pages and pages of her thesis. She took up origami. She tried not to look up the Hero Network too much. She went on a spa day with Sachiko. She helped Hitoshi with his homework.
She was introduced to his friend Monoma Neito, briefly, and had confirmation it was the boy from canon. He had blond hair, violet eyes, and megalomanic laughter. He also had the same eye color and disdainful air as Thunder Thief, and now Toki was about ninety percent sure they were actually related. She had to physically stop herself from prying.
Toki was now more than four months pregnant, so Mihoko brought back from storage a lot of baby stuff. There were clothes, toys, blankets, plushies, and even a cot. There were… a lot of things, in all shapes and colors. Most of it seemed to be a decade old, but a few plushies looked more recent.
“Did Hitoshi really have all that?” Toki wondered, sorting through the plushies.
Mihoko took a second to answer, focused on unfolding bedsheets.
“About half of it was his, yes. The rest is from the siblings he didn’t have.”
The siblings he didn’t have. Toki straightened, slowly. Her understanding slowly shifted.
Hitoshi never had brothers or sisters, but Mihoko loved kids. She had always been fussing over her son, she had almost immediately adopted Toki herself. She had a big appartement, too big almost, especially for a single mom with an only child. There were two spare rooms at least.
It felt obvious, suddenly, that Mihoko Shinsō had wanted a big family.
“I didn’t know,” Toki say slowly.
“You couldn’t have. I wanted more kids, but it- it wasn’t to be. There were several miscarriages. Two of them happened pretty late, in the third trimester. But I kept trying. A year before I found you again, I- I almost managed to have a daughter. She was born premature and died within the day, in intensive care. I stopped trying after that.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know,” Toki repeated, softer. “You… you never talk about it. Hitoshi either.”
Mihoko smiled comfortingly:
“It’s alright. It’s just… I love my son. I would have loved giving him brothers and sisters, and I’m sorry I couldn’t. But we got you, in a way. And I’m not telling you about those miscarriages to scare you. I want you to know that even if you feel unprepared, of if you need a break, or if you want to go back to full-time heroics and you need to find a full-time caretaker… I’m here. I will take care of you and your baby as if you were my own.”
Toki lowered her gaze, feeling suddenly emotional.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to,” Mihoko simply said. “You are like a daughter to me, you know.”
Toki nodded, slowly, her throat tight. It was something she had never dared to speak out loud, afraid it would break an unspoken rule, afraid it would make the magic vanish. But she loved the Shinsō like family, too.
“I wish,” she whispered, “that you could have been my mother. I would have been so much happier if you had been my mother.”
But then she wouldn’t have been Toki Taiyōme. She wouldn’t have arrested Meteor, she wouldn’t have met Keigo, she wouldn’t have become Quantum.
It was a weird feeling she didn’t know how to put into words. Maye regret, maybe melancholy. Sayuri and Meteor had hurt her, and she had hurt them in turn, but that hurt had been part of her for so long. It was now deep in the foundations of her being, and she didn’t dislike how those foundations had turned out. She didn’t hate who she was, the good and bad.
I suppose I love my scars
because they have stayed with me
longer than most people have.
Sayuri was dead and Meteor had moved on, but their legacy would never really leave Toki. She was their daughter. She had spent less than ten percent of her life with them both, but they had still shaped so much of who she was. Who she was striving to become, who she fought not to be.
(Did it make her a bad daughter, to miss her parents even if she had hurt them so much, even if they had wounded her so deeply? Would it make her a bad mother, too?)
oOoOoOo
Days passed.
Two weeks after her arrival in Musutafu, she felt the baby kick for the first time. It made the whole thing brutally real, in some way. That was a human being inside her body. It was alive and kicking. Holy shit.
But the pregnancy was very real. Her back hurt sometimes and her feet were swollen. She suddenly craved red meat with a fervor that was bordering on absurdity. Especially since red meat had been banned from her diet after her heart transplant. It was so frustrating.
And she was horny all the time. Nobody had told her about that side effect! Ugh. And she was only four months pregnant! Was it going to be an additional five months of this? Fuck. Hormones. They were terrible.
She tried to kill time when she could, diving into her Hoshizora work with frenzied energy. She picked up other hobbies; she hung out with Sachiko or Melissa or Mihoko. She managed. But it was hard not to do hero work anymore. She missed it, she missed everything about it. The thrill, the action, the stakes, the company, the sense of fulfilment. Keigo.
In Mihoko’s appartement, Toki dug up old poems and vague theories she had cooked up during high school. Surprisingly, she also found an old letter addressed to Yūei, ready to be posted but forgotten for years.
And then, she remembered. Once upon a time… when she had discovered Yūei… she had been disappointed by their heroics curriculum. She had found it lacking. She hadn’t wanted to say anything, thinking she wouldn’t be listened to. And she hadn’t said anything, not really, but… her criticisms had never really been forgotten.
Why had she written that letter again? Ah, yes. Mihoko-san had told her to. If your insight is valuable, then you should try and share it. Maybe you can become a teacher, later, if you still have this cause in your heart. So Toki had put her thoughts to paper, and… waited to see if anything would come of it. Of her ideas, but also of Mihoko’s suggestion. It had stuck with her all those years, after all.
She knew how ideas worked. Sometimes you just had to let them grow in the corner of your mind, pretending to not notice them, like a skittish stray cat.
________________
< Antares: So I’ve been digging through my old stuff
< Antares: and I found a letter I wanted to send to my high school principal at age fifteen. I feel old.
> PikaPika: is that how you’re spending time in your secret mission?
> NotOnFire: you are on a secret mission?
< Antares: SHHHHH
< Antares: Let’s just say Quantum is staying out of the public eye for a while
< Antares: And I don’t want to hear a word about what I’m doing while Quantum is on a mission. You don’t know and you’re not supposed to know, and there’s no relation with what I’m doing, because we allllllll know I’m not Quantum.
> EndeavorSucks: XD
> EndeavorSucks: how are you coping Chicken?
> SpicyWings: I manage. I put a pillow on her chair to keep me company when I do paperwork.
> SpciyWing: [image-attached]
<Antares: … is that an Endeavor dakimakura in my chair
> PinkIsPunkRock: at least he’s clothed xD
> SpicyWing: you didn’t see the back 😁
< Antares: WHAT
< Antares: when I get back there’ll be hell to pay
> PinkIsPunkRock: get back to that letter. What about it?
> Megamind: Was it that letter roasting Nedzu about how much better than him you would be as a teacher?
< Antares: It was constructive criticism!
> PikaPika: still kinda arrogant to give lessons to a teacher at fifteen
< Antares: I was a bitchy kid
> SpicyWings: ‘was’ ?
< Antares: ANYWAY
< Antares: what’s up guys? It’s been a while since I logged in.
> PinkIsPunkRock: NotOnFire got a new job!
> NotOnFire: yeah, I graduated but being an artist doesn’t pay the bills. So I’m a paper-pusher in a boring office
> NotOnFire: I hate it
> NotOnFire: especially when the weather sucks, it’s even more depressing to work
> EndeavorSucks: nobody likes to works when it’s gray and rainy anyway
> NotOnFire: yeah
> NotOnFire: That’s one of the things I resent most about being Animal Brain Apex Predator trapped in Maximum Productivity Society is that I have to work when the weather is gross, instead of following my natural instinct to burrow myself into something dry and soft and sleep until Optimal Foraging Conditions
> NotOnFire: It is dark and cold and wet and miserable and I have a warm dark quiet hideaway full of food and drinking water that is safe from interlopers and for some ungodly reason instead of holing up there to conserve my energy, I am standing up in a brightly lit beige room for several hours.
> NotOnFire: A possum wouldn't put up with this shit. I'm going to bite someone.
> Moxie: xDDDDDD
< Antares: 😂 😂 😂
> Megamind: I feel you, bro. I would rather be training than sitting in class.
> Megamind: Correction: I would rather be sleeping.
< Antares: you would ALWAYS rather be sleeping, even when training
> Megamind: can’t imagine why. It can’t be because my sadistic mentor is putting me through the grinder each time. Even when she’s not chasing me through a city.
< Antares: Enjoy the break. It won’t last.
< Antares: SO
< Antares: I was thinking
< Antares: someone once told me I could become a teacher. Now I’m in the middle of a sort of existential crisis, and I’m thinking about it
< Antares: NOT leaving my job, which I love, but you know
< Antares: being a heroic teacher, part-time. Terrorizing children. Teaching them how not to die. That sorta thing.
> SpicyWings: you would be great at it.
< Antares: Seriously?
> SpicyWings: Absolutely. You’ve been teaching @Moxie and @Megamind for years now, and you’re great at it. Right guys?
> Moxie: he’s right! I won the Sports Festival thanks to you!
> SpicyWings: Besides, I always knew you’ll end up a professor and me your trophy husband.
< Antares: aw, that’s so sweet <3
> PinkIsPunkRock: trophy husband xDDDDD
> PikaPika: you would have to get married first
< Antares: yeah, we’ve done that.
> PinkIsPunkRock: YOU’RE WHAT?!
________________
Of course, Toki wasn’t going to submit her CV to Nedzu out of the blue. She liked having a safety net. First, she wrote to Mera-san, carefully probing about what was the stance of the HPSC on heroes being teachers, and more specifically teachers at Yūei. Just, you know, in case the HPSC wanted someone to keep an eye on things there.
Then she realized she was an idiot, because she knew someone who was going to get hired at Yūei. Better than that, she knew where this person was, at this exact moment of the timeline!
So, the next time she went for a walk with Hitoshi under the guise of training, she took him to Dagobah Beach.
Training Hitoshi (and Melissa on the weekends) while being Quirkless and unable to fight was… weird. Most of her teaching was theoretical, now. How to spot someone shoplifting. How to tail a suspect without being seen. What you could do to escape pursuers if they cornered you in an alley. What to do if you needed help. What names to drop if you wanted to get listened to in a police precinct.
And of course: how to tie up someone with their own necktie. Good times.
It was perfect for Hitoshi’s fighting style. When he had to fight hand-to-hand, he went for the kill immediately while avoiding getting locked in a contest of strength. Which meant that he fought dirty. Stalking the prey, attacking from behind, aiming for the eyes and the joints, disengaging each time the other guy was trying to make it a straight fight. Toki was teaching him all the nasty little tricks she had learned from Hobo-san, a lifetime ago. She had learned a lot from him: it had almost been worth the pain of his lessons.
She also made Hitoshi and Melissa find lost cats, give money to beggars, threaten bullies behind their middle school, and empty overflowing trashcans. Toki firmly believed those little acts of service were never wasted. So, when she brought Hitoshi to Dagobah Beach, telling him she planned to clean up the place, the boy was understandably dismayed at the colossal task… but he didn’t find Toki’s idea overly surprising. Especially when she cheerfully informed him that she was also using it as an excuse to look for an acquaintance who was in the neighborhood.
Ideally, she would have brought Melissa, too, as a buffer. But Melissa was working on upgrading her mecha-boots this weekend. She had even reserved a lab at Yūei, with the supervision of Power Loader. Besides, these days, Melissa needed less training with Toki, since she already had teachers at Yūei.
Anyway, that’s how Toki and Hitoshi found themselves wandering the beach, each holding a trash bag and idly filling it with small garbage. It took them almost a full morning of searching to happen upon All Might and Midoriya. They were hidden in the deepest part of this dump to drag old cars on the sand. If you weren’t looking for them, you couldn’t find them. But you could certainly hear them. All Might’s booming voice carried far, even when in his skinny form, and Midoriya tended to yell, grunt and scream.
That was the kind of thing that didn’t encourage visitors.
So neither All Might nor Midoriya had expected interlopers. All Might (or rather, Toshinori Yagi) jumped about a foot in the air when Toki and Hitoshi appeared, and the boy who could only be Midoriya lost his footing and fell flat on his face. The massive fridge he had been trying to drag away oscillated, then sagged onto the sand. There was a beat of silence.
“Yagi-san!” Toki greeted him. “Hello! Sorry to barge in, but it sounded like someone was getting murdered.”
Midoriya turned pale, then crimson. Hitoshi muffled an uncharitable snigger.
“Ah, Hoshizora-san!” All Might jumped on his feet, a large smile on his face. “What a coincidence! I didn’t know you were in Musutafu! Official business?”
He didn’t look any thinner than the last time she had seen him. Well, he still looked like a stick, but it hadn’t gotten any worse. Toki beamed, feeling a little reassured.
“No, I’m on medical leave.”
“Nothing serious I hope!”
“Pregnancy,” she informed him, deadpan.
He gaped a second, then lit up like a kid:
“Congratulations, then! I admit, I was almost worried by your sudden disappearance!”
Hitoshi and Midoriya’s eyes were jumping from All Might to Toki with the same suspicious uncertainty. Who is this guy and what does he know about my mentor’s secret identity? It was almost comical. But Hitoshi looked more like a mistrustful cat, while Midoriya had eyes like a spooked labrador. Toki swallowed back a grin. Seeing All Might’s eyes stray to the purple-haired boy at her side, she cheerfully clapped Hitoshi’s shoulder:
“This is my student, Hitoshi Shinsō. Hitoshi, this is Toshinori Yagi, we know each other from work. He used to be employed by All Might’s agency.”
Midoriya made a strangled noise that sounded like an aborted cough. To his credit, Yagi stayed completely straight faced at this introduction. He even added, very seriously:
“I’m stronger than I look. I used to carry massive boxes of paperwork.”
This time it was Toki who had to choke down laughter. Above the kids’ heads, the adults exchanged a rare, complicit smile.
“What brings you here?” All Might asked cheerfully.
Toki shrugged: “Well… I can’t spar with him in my condition, so I’m imparting my wisdom while doing some community service. I guess you’re doing something similar?”
“Indeed!” All Might grinned. “This is Midoriya Izuku, who will join Yūei next year!”
“Nice to meet you,” Midoriya bowed weakly.
Toki couldn’t help but scrutinize him. He was… fairly underwhelming. Green hair, green eyes, freckles. A round face and big worried eyes. And he was short! Hitoshi was almost a head taller than him.
“Nice to meet you too,” Toki and Hitoshi chorused politely.
“Young Midoriya, this is Toki Hoshizora,” All Might introduced her. “She is… hum…”
“I work part-time for the Hero Public Safety Commission,” Toki smoothly took over.
That wasn’t even a lie. All heroes worked for the Hero Public Safety Commission at one point. At the very least, they took missions from them. Midoriya’s eyes widened in understanding, darting from All Might to Toki, and the young woman wondered what kind of scenario he was imagining filling in the blanks. Maybe he would ask All Might afterward. In that case, maybe Toki and him should work on a cover story. Not that Toki didn’t trust the man to protect her secret identity, but… he was really bad at coming up with good lies.
Toki looked at the fridge Midoriya had been in the process of hauling away. Then she looked at Hitoshi and raised an eyebrow meaningfully. Her purple-haired student groaned. When he turned to Midoriya, it was with all the reluctance of a man walking to the gallows.
“Do you need help with that?” he asked with an utter lack of enthusiasm.
“I can do it!” Midoriya protested.
“You can do it faster and better with help,” Toki pointed out. “And Hitoshi could use some musculature right now.”
“I’m plenty muscled.”
“At your age I could bench press my boyfriend.”
“Your boyfriend has hollow bones,” Hitoshi grumbled.
But still, he rolled up his sleeves, shoved his trash bag into Toki’s hand, and went to help Midoriya. The green-haired boy threw an uncertain look at his mentor, but when All Might smiled encouragingly, he seemed relieved and accepted Hitoshi’s help without any fuss.
Toki leaned back against a half-buried car to watch them work. After a few seconds, All Might joined her. They watched the boys grunt and push, silent for a few seconds. Then Toki admitted, keeping her voice low:
“I admit, I was kind of looking for you.”
“I assumed as much. This place is supposed to be a good hiding spot. Is something happening? Is it Meteor?”
Toki smiled weakly: “Not really. I’m going through some difficulties, and… It’s just nice to see a friendly face.”
Yagi’s face softened. “Anything I can help with?”
He was so eager to help. Toki shook her head, a little bemused. For so long she had resented him, thought him uncaring and selfish. It felt weird to be confronted by the reality, to see how genuinely nice he was.
“Nah. I’m just… alright, I’m currently Quirkless. I can’t use Warp-Space at all when I’m pregnant.. So I’m just here for commiseration and distraction, I guess.”
All Might had looked slightly disturbed by her admission of Quirklessness, as if she had admitted to being made of glass and on the verge of breaking apart.
“Shouldn’t you be with your…” he seemed to fumble for the adequate terms to describe what Keigo was to her, and settled lamely for: “… partner?”
“He’s working thirteen hours a day at the very least. I would go mad sitting in our apartment waiting for him to freak out with me. I’ll visit him next week, but in the meantime, well… Here, I have friends who know me outside of Quantum, at least, you know?”
All Might nodded gravely. Toki suddenly realized that yes, actually, he knew. Outside of Musutafu, nobody knew him as Toshinori Yagi. He was All Might, and only All Might. When he ran out of time with his Quirk, he may as well cease to exist altogether. Just like Toki stopped having any value as a hero when Quantum was benched.
“So!” she said cheerfully. “What’s up, man? Is that your chosen student who is going to inherit your master’s training regimen? Where did you find him?”
“Fighting a villain with hairspray as a makeshift flamethrower, if you can believe it. He has the heart of a true hero!”
Holy shit. What?
“That sound like a story,” Toki said with undisguised curiosity.
But All Might only smiled secretively.
“It is,” he admitted with a quiet sort of pride. “But it’s not my story to tell.”
Message received. Toki wouldn’t get answers today. She briefly wondered how canon events had changed so dramatically. First the Sludge Villain didn’t attack Bakugo, and now, apparently, Midoriya had defeated it with hairspray…
“I saw his face when I implied you were a secretary,” she changed the subject. “Does he know who you are?”
“Ah, yes,” All Might admitted sheepishly. “I ran out of time right in front of him. I would rather not talk about it. By the way, it’s a nice cover story. I’ll probably use it myself.”
“Happy to help. By the way, my cover is that I’m a starving astrophysicist student, and that I work part-time for the HPSC as a Quirk analyst to finance my PhD. If I need to say more, then Mera-san is my very distant cousin, and I have a sad backstory to discourage people from digging too much.”
All Might looked reluctantly amused. “That’s a very developed cover story.”
“And it’s close to the truth so I don’t get caught in too many lies. Classic. Didn’t you do any undercover work?” She was honestly curious.
“No,” Yagi shook his head. “I’m too distinctive. Also, I have a tendency to… not be subtle at all.”
He looked almost sheepish when admitting it. Toki couldn’t say she was surprised.
“Should we have a cover story for how we met?” she frowned. “I didn’t say much to Hitoshi, but he’ll probably be curious.”
They collectively decided on a credible story where Yagi the secretary had met Hoshizora the analyst while managing the fallout of All Might’s pre-retirement. Toki would have liked something closer to the truth, like, they had met through Melissa, but All Might told her that he hadn’t introduced Midoriya to Melissa and didn’t intend to for several months. He insisted it was essential for Midoriya to build some confidence and lose some bias he had about her but didn’t elaborate.
Toki wondered what it could mean. Melissa was Quirkless and out. Shouldn’t Midoriya like her just for that? Maybe she should innocently ask him some questions of her own. If Midoriya had somehow got into his head that Melissa was faking Quirklessness or anything like that, like Sir Nighteye had, then Toki would… give him a stern talking to.
Anyways.
They made idle chit-chat about their respective students, what kind of training they did. Then Toki hesitantly mentioned she was thinking about teaching one day, maybe soon, just as an option. She expected All Might to congratulate her or maybe deflect, but instead, he immediately told her that he was planning on teaching at Yūei next year. From there Toki started grilling him about the requirement for teaching. To her dismay, All Might didn’t even know them! He sheepishly admitted he had gotten the offer from Nedzu, and that had been enough. Nepotism had saved him from passing the usual battery of tests.
All Might still gamely answered as many questions as he could, like: what was the salary? What was the schedule? What was he expected to do? How much free reign did he have over his classes? And so on. Most of it was pretty good, Toki had to admit. Or maybe All Might just had a privileged post? In any case, the pay was good, the schedule flexible, and Toki decided to note this possible career as a solid backup plan if she had to step down from heroics a little.
“Do you want me to put in a good word for you?” All Might offered.
Toki waved her hand: “Absolutely not. I’m in a very vulnerable position, I really don’t want to attract any attention, even Yūei's. Besides, just to keep our cards close to our chest, it’s better to pretend we don’t know each other outside of work. Extra layer of protection if either of our secret identities got out.”
“That’s very paranoid of you,” All Might nodded. “I approve. A lot of young heroes tend to blur the line, but the point of having a secret identity is to keep it secret so it stays safe from villains.”
“There are a lot of heroes who don’t,” Toki felt compelled to point out. “Like Endeavor. His surname isn’t common knowledge, but it’s not really a secret either.”
All Might shrugged, a little helplessly. For a while they stayed in companionable silence, watching their students pick up garbage. The air smelled like the sea and rusted metal. It was quite a peaceful place, if you forgot about what a dump it was. Toki briefly closed her eyes.
“By the way, will you come back here next month?” All Might hesitantly asked her.
“Sure. I’m planning on swinging by more frequently than that, even. Why?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s just… I would like to introduce you to my friend Naomasa Tsukauchi. I think you could help him for one of his cases.”
That didn’t sound ominous at all.
Notes:
So. There it is.
What do you think ? I hope it surprised you a little! Because that SunWings Baby wasn't exactly planned xD Neither by Toki or by me!
I had half a mind to make Toki abort, because she's worried about Meteor, she's overly focused on her mission, yadda yadda. People who wants kids can also want to abort, because it's not the right moment or the right circonstances! Also, obligatory precision: i am very very much pro-choice.
However, Toki is also aware that if she let that chance slip through her fingers, she doesn't know if she'll get a second. Like Keigo say: she won't ever slow down, she won't stop and plan for a baby because there will always be something more urgent to do. That doesn't negate her wish for a family. Having children is something Toki wanted. Maybe it's a little too early, but it's not undesired.
And so : bam, SunWings baby.Also the timing isn't so bad, because it gives Toki an excuse to make Quantum go to ground for almost a year; and it's a good idea, to avoid being noticed by Meteor (or Endeavor).
Anyway !
Some food for thoughts:
Did Mihoko "adopt" Toki so easily because she couldn't have more kids?
Partly, yes. Bear in mind that when Mihoko met Toki, Mihoko wasn't aware that she wouldn't have more children (Hitoshi was just a baby), and yet she still felt protective of little Toki. It's later on that Mihoko realized she wouldn't have any more kids. And when she reconnected with Toki, years later, she had a lot of love to give, maybe even desperatly so.
But her attachement to Toki predate her infertility isssues. As you can guess, Mihoko planned to name her daughter (the one she lost very late in the pregnancy) after Toki =)Toki told ALL MIGHT?!
As far as last lines of defense go, he's pretty much the top xD Also, i like the idea of Toki just casually dropping that bombshell on him, and All Might feeling old xDWhy does Toki's Quirk stop working with pregnancy?
Like her mom's, Toki's Quirk is powered by her heartbeat. Basically the 'warping' is like a pulse, expanding with each beat. Problem: when there is a second heartbeat, it fucks up the pulse. Like an echo on the exact same wavelenght? The Quirk glitches, because it doesn't know which pulse is supposed to activate it! For the Quirk to work correctly, it requires a lot more effort, as it must be 'loud' enough to completly drow the other pulse. So basically: the strain is so hard on the user's heart that it hurts, and if you force that hurt, you can go into cardiac arrest.
Sayuri's Quirk stopped working as soon as her fetus got a strong enough heartbeat, so within 7 weeks or so. But since Toki has a behemoth of a heart, she could go on longer. Three months and half! It was just harder and harder. She mentionned getting really tired but without being able to know why.
But because her new heart was so powerful, it was also less sensitive to those little aches and pains that she should have felt as a warning signs! So she didn't felt anything until she reached the threshold of danger.
Also congrats to typeset who not only guessed WHY Toki's Quirk wasn't working, but also HOW. I mean, that was some spot on analysis.
Mmmmmmmmmh i wonder why TSUKAUCHI would be involved =)
So mysterious =)
It's not like he already appeared in this story before, after all =)
Anyway ! I hope you liked this chapter, with all the reveals just PILING UP xDDDD
EDIT : apparently the link to the poems doesn't work!
Here is the new one!See you in two weeks ! Or sooner if you happen to join the Discord =) The link is here!
Chapter 33: Hitoshi's first test
Summary:
There was no age restriction to sign up as a participant. You only needed a HPSC recommendation. The youngest person to have passed that exam had been twelve, according to the Wikipedia page. It wouldn’t be a stretch to sign up a middle-schooler for it…
“Me?” Hitoshi repeated, faintly incredulous. “Pass the provisional exam?”
“He’s only fourteen!” Mihoko-san exclaimed with alarm.
-
Hitoshi tests his skills, and Toki has an unpleasant revelation.
Notes:
Hi, i'm back ! =)
I hope you appreciate that i got up at 7 in the morning on a Saturday to post this xD No, i'm kidding, i had an appointment. But still!
Not a lot of action in this chapter, but there is a huge reveal at the end that i've been dying to make for months. It wasn't even planned, it just jumped at me halfway through the narration, and it tied a lot of loose ends very nicely! So 'im excited to share this chapter with you guys.
I hope you'll like it ! =)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
HITOSHI'S FIRST TEST
Toki went back to Musutafu to visit Keigo the next week. She felt like a thief, wearing her Hoshizora disguise and sneaking into the penthouse by the back entrance of the building. She could count on one hand the number of times she had to use the door. Usually, she just teleported!
But whatever. She was back. Keigo had taken the whole day off, and they spent it shut away in their house, chatting as if they hadn’t seen each other in months rather than in three weeks. Keigo told her about the Icarus agency, the latest gossip, how Mercury had teamed up with Ariel the Trickster just last week, how Sunspear had put a fake spider on Kameko’s desk and made her shriek. Toki recounted how she had been fussed over by the Shinsō family, and her encounters with All Might. Plural, because Toki and Hitoshi had gone back several times to Dagobah Beach. Hitoshi ended up helping Midoriya, while Toki chatted with Yagi.
“He’s actually nice,” Toki confessed. “I feel like an ass for being so mean to him before.”
“Mean? You nearly fought to the death! And your death was a bigger risk than his!”
“Yeah, the whole thing was an enormous mess that I started in the first place. At some point I wanted to fight him, I wanted to hurt him. Now, I would feel bad. It would be like kicking a puppy. Do you know he asked Nedzu what were the actual requirements for a heroic teacher who wouldn’t relying on nepotism, and he gave me the list the next time we met?”
“That’s thoughtful.”
“Yeah. And he also has a sense of humor, if you can believe it. Like, we actually got along very well.”
“Toki,” Keigo said very seriously. “I’m going to be jealous.”
“Oh, you’re going to be jealous? I’m the one who’s been replaced with a body pillow of Endeavor, if I recall!”
They stared at each other then broke down sniggering. It was good to be back, and to banter as if nothing had changed.
“How are you really?” Keigo finally asked.
“I miss you,” Toki answered truthfully. “I miss working, I miss fighting, I miss using my Quirk, I miss Icarus. I have weird dreams almost every night. I’m craving red meat and fatty food all the time. Strong smells make me queasy. And I’m starting to have a belly. I had to buy new pants. I really don’t fancy the idea of looking like a whale in five months.”
“Sorry,” Keigo said, contrite. “I can’t help you with that.”
Toki levelled her best poker-face at him: “I’m also horny all the time.”
“… That, I can help you with.”
(Toki went back to Musutafu in much higher spirits.)
She didn’t risk seeing Hayasa-sensei, Kameko-san, or even one of her sidekicks. They would have to deal with her absence. She was supposed to be deep undercover, after all: visiting, or even writing a polite email, would be suspicious. If they wanted to see her, they would have to visit her in Musutafu.
Not that they knew where to visit. Toki had rented a cheap hotel room with her HPSC-created bank account, as to leave a paper-trail if the Commission started freaking out about her location, but she hadn’t told them where she was actually living. It wasn’t their business. If they started digging, they would probably find the Shinsō family without much difficulty; but as long as they didn’t start digging, as long as Toki didn’t give them a reason to, then Toki Hoshizora and Quantum remained completely separate.
Well. As much as she could, at least.
One good thing about Quantum’s impromptu disappearance from heroics was that she wouldn’t be on the next Billboard Chart. She was too new on the scene; she didn’t have a strong enough fanbase to keep her in the Top Ten during her absence. She would drop in ranking between eleventh and fourteenth, probably. It would help her slip below Meteor’s radar. Or, well, she hoped. In the grand scheme of things, not being a Top Ten hero wouldn’t save her if Meteor looked for her in a hero’s face. The point was to not make it too easy.
Because even if he looked… what were the chance that he would recognize her? In his memories, Toki was a unsocialized little girl with the friendliness of a feral raccoon, and a total unwillingness to use her Quirk (a simple teleportation Quirk) for others. As Quantum, not only was Toki witty, sociable and charming, but she was also a warper with a Quirk so heavily tied to light that it was basically her signature.
So Toki Hoshizora continued to live her life. She tried to think of names for her child. She thought of how she would raise them. What kind of life she could offer them. She didn’t want to give her baby the name of someone she knew, saddling them with an unwanted legacy. Her child would have all the freedom Sayuri had denied her daughter. Maybe the spawn would become a famous scientist, or maybe a hero, or maybe a brilliant doctor: maybe a baker, a writer, a teacher, an actor, a farmer, a mechanic. They would become whatever they wanted to be.
Except a bank robber. Toki drew the line there.
She made a point to schedule twice monthly visits to Fukuoka, but otherwise, she tried to focus on Musutafu. She worked harder at her PhD. She had longer hours and completed twice as many tasks as before for her online job. She was even afforded a three days long stay in Hamaoka’s labs to finalize one of her projects. It was an incredible opportunity to study closely the Ion Dive they had. And indeed, Toki spent her time wisely: analyzing all she could about the machine, studying its requirement, its proportions, its sustainability.
When she left, she had about fifteen pages of notes, and could probably turn that into about sixty pages of theories, schematics and proposals for space travel in her growing thesis.
She continued signing petitions, donating money to charitable causes, researching current events. She had good timing. The law allowing Quirk use in public, as long as it did not disturb the peace, had been voted and approved.
Finally.
That was something that had absolutely never happened in canon, that hadn’t even been envisaged, for who would think to question the system as long as the Symbol of Peace was holding the status quo? But in this universe, it was different. All Might had encouraged change.
He had encouraged people to give each other more space, more tolerance. And here, now, on the 1st of June of the year 2229, Quirk use ceased to be restricted to heroic use. Now people could use their Quirk on the streets without being fined or arrested, as long as they didn’t disturb the peace. What a time to be alive!
Although Toki strictly had nothing to do with this legal victory, she couldn’t help but feel proud all the same. Hadn’t she supported this idea from the very beginning? Hadn’t she given it her voice for years, since she had become Quantum? Hadn’t she spread the word around?
The law passed, yes, and Toki couldn’t help but rub her hands gleefully. Oh, it wasn’t an absolute victory. There were many restrictions. Surely the Meta-Liberation Army would find a way to whine about it, rally discontents, and use it to their benefit. But their words wouldn’t have the same traction as they had in canon.
Before, only licensed heroes were authorized to use quirks in public. It was a society oppressive to the majority. You needed a license to use your powers like you would need one to own a gun. And yes, it made sense to need a permit to use something dangerous, of course! But while licenses made sense with regards to vehicles and arms, it didn’t make sense for Quirks because, one, nearly everyone has them, and second, it wasn’t a choice to obtain one. That was just how you were born. But… to use your Quirk you needed a permit, and to obtain it you needed to be a hero: which mean that for civilians, there was no viable path to certified Quirk usage, even if for most people, it would be their greatest asset.
But now, this new law changed things. Imagine having an incredible transformation Quirk, like that purse snatcher with the gigantification Quirk that had briefly appeared in the beginning of the canon story. That was a good Quirk: strong, versatile, useful. Before, your only option was either to become a hero, or to never use it at all. And yes, being a hero was a highly desirable profession, just like a doctor or lawyer or engineer, but different people wanted different things out of life. Not everyone desired to be a hero. Not everyone could be, either, considering how hard the curriculum was and how expensive the schools were!
But now? That guy with the transformation Quirk could use it on the street to walk faster. He could use it to help get his cat out of tree, or to retrieve a ball lost by his children on the roof, without fear of being arrested and fined. Hell, maybe he could use his Quirk when looking for a job. Someone who could become bigger and stronger could find work in construction without an issue. And that was only one example!
Of course, in the grand scheme of things, this legal progress could be cosmically insignificant. It wouldn’t stop extremists looking for something to hate. It would slow them down, but not much. It certainly wouldn’t stop AFO, or Shigaraki.
But pffff. The whole concept of 'cosmically significant' was so funny, when you thought about it. Nothing was cosmically significant. The sun was small and tiny compared to most stars, and even stars were small next to the gravitational pull of supermassive black holes: and even then it didn’t matter because the universe was both infinite and a vast expanse so why would one black hole matter? Which meant, in the end, that everything mattered, for the universe was a sum of its parts, and all parts were so stupidly small to the universe. They all mattered, and a little law would allow a few million people to be happier with their lot in life. Wasn’t it nice?
So what of it wasn’t enough to stop the Meta-Liberation Army? Toki was still allowed to feel delighted by this small victory. There were so many fucked-up things in this world, she was allowed to savor the good ones.
Anyways. Back to the point.
Toki wasn’t fifteen anymore, jumping from one righteous cause to another, itching for a cause to defend and a reason to fight. That was more Sachiko’s thing. Toki was now more… pragmatic.
What required most of Toki’s attention was still tied to Quantum, or rather, to heroics. The canon timeline wasn’t very far, now. She considered becoming a teacher more and more seriously. Not all the time, no: she longed too much for Fukuoka, Icarus, and Hawks. But as a part-time teacher… maybe it would relieve part of All Might’s burden. Surely it would allow her to keep a close eye on what was going on in that damn school. And she could probably find a good way to swing it to the Commission. The President was a well-intentioned witch, sure, but she was still a scheming bastard. Having someone know what the hell was going on in Nedzu’s territory would probably please her.
Aaaaand it would give Toki an excuse to spend time in Musutafu, where the Shinsō family lived… and where her baby would stay.
Toki hadn’t exactly made plans for it. She hadn’t found the right moment to tell Keigo, either. But the more she thought about it, the more it seemed like a good idea. She couldn’t raise her child as a full-time hero, and she didn’t want to stop working or to give up her baby to the foster system. But Mihoko could watch over the kid. Hell, she would probably raise it better than Toki and Keigo would on their own.
And if shit went south at the Icarus Agency, or if Hawks and Quantum ran into trouble with heroics… then the baby would be far away from danger.
Another thing that required a lot of Toki’s attention: Hitoshi’s training. He was progressing by leaps and bounds. Unlike Midoriya who was almost exclusively training to build muscle by hauling heavy things in a dump, Hitoshi already had strength, flexibility and technique. When Toki swung by the beach twice a week to chat with All Might and to make Hitoshi train with Midoriya, it was more to keep an eye on the former Number One (and his pupil) than for her student’s benefit. The thing Hitoshi really needed was experience.
Except Toki didn’t have a Quirk and couldn’t spar seriously. Her physical activity was mostly limited to yoga these days. She didn’t dare try boxing, break dancing, or some of her favorite acrobatics.
If she had still been able to warp around, she would have brought Hitoshi to Fukuoka to have him shadow her sidekicks, or to spar with Keigo or Hayasa-sensei. As things were, Fukuoka was now four hours away and it wasn’t a journey Hitoshi could do every weekend. He had other activities to attend to: his parkour club, his theatre club, his training with Melissa, spending time with his friend Neito, spending time with his family too. Not everyone was as devoted to training at Toki had been. And, as she had to remind herself, that was a good thing.
She had trouble finding a way to exist outside heroics. Even astrophysics was more of a side thing, these days. She didn’t regret it, because Keigo was right there with her: but still, she was aware it wasn’t a merciful life. Hitoshi shouldn’t be pushed into it. He was only fourteen, he had plenty of time to enjoy the rest of his childhood.
Still. He needed experience.
The solution to that particular problem appeared to her quite simply a few days later, when she scrolled through her emails and saw the HPSC’s usual reminder that the Provisional Hero License Exam was at the end of the month. All interested heroes could assist with the event as a way to gauge the skills of the heroic students.
There was no age restriction to sign up as a participant. You only needed a HPSC recommendation. The youngest person to have passed that exam had been twelve, according to the Wikipedia page. It wouldn’t be a stretch to sign up a middle-schooler for it…
… but actually passing the exam would be an arduous task. So when Toki submitted her offer to Hitoshi, she made it clear that he was one hundred percent allowed to refuse.
“Me?” Hitoshi repeated, faintly incredulous. “Pass the provisional exam?”
“He’s only fourteen!” Mihoko-san exclaimed with alarm.
“Nearly fifteen,” Hitoshi frowned.
“Still younger than first-year students in a heroic high school, and even those schools don’t make their students try out for the license exam before the second year.”
Not all of them. Yūei would change that policy soon. Toki abstained from saying it. That wouldn’t have reassured Mihoko-san… or Hitoshi.
“Are you worried about not being ready?” she asked seriously. “Or about getting hurt?”
“Both!” exclaimed Mihoko.
Hitoshi darted a quick look at her, then shook his head, eyes locked with Toki. He looked weirdly hesitant.
“I’m not worried about that. It’s only an exercise, so I won’t be facing actual villains, and I’m good enough to take care of myself. You wouldn’t throw me to the wolves. But… but I worry if it would be a wasted effort. I can’t enter on my own, you have to vouch for me, right?”
“Technically, Icarus vouches for you and pays your admittance ticket.”
“That’s even worse! What if I’m pathetic out there? Not only you would have wasted money, but also credibility. If a student has to represent Icarus, shouldn’t it be someone cool, like Melissa?”
Toki narrowed her eyes. She didn’t like this defeatist talk.
“If someone represents Icarus, who better than someone I trust?” she fired back. “You’re just as cool as Melissa. Also, you’ll be allowed all your support items. Think of how good you are with them, now!”
Hitoshi wavered. But he still looked anxious. Mihoko, too. Toki softened her voice.
“If you enter, you don’t have to pass. I actually expect you not to. I want you to enter, not to join me on patrol, but to test yourself against other opponents. Whether you win or lose, you could still gain valuable experience just by entering the exam.” Here, she paused, and looked meaningfully at Mihoko. “And as you said, it’s just an exercise. You won’t be facing actual villains. It’s actually a good test of your abilities in a high stake setting with low risks.”
Mihoko looked a little reassured at that.
“But it’ll be difficult,” Hitoshi said lowly. “Won’t it?”
“True,” Toki had to admit. “Yes, it will be hard: but I honestly think it would be good because it will be hard. The test is very physical, and the context puts pressure on you. Plenty of people will fail. You’ll face opponents with varied Quirks, but you’ll also have to strategize, plan ahead and think instead of just reacting to adversity. If there’s a rescue scenario, you’ll have to keep your cool while surrounded by panicked people, in a stressful situation. That’s not something I can teach you. That’s something you have to experience. So… yeah, I think it would be good. Pass or fail, you will have experienced what is asked of heroes. But if you don’t feel ready, then don’t do it. We can enter you in the September exam, or wait for next year, or even not enter you at all. I don’t want you to join the exam half-heartedly, because you think I expect you to. You have to want it. If it’s too fast paced, tell me, I’ll back off. I think you can do it… but it’s your gut feeling that matters the most.”
Hitoshi considered the question for several seconds.
“Melissa is going to enter the exam this year, too.”
“Probably. She’s in her second year. She needs her provisional license to do her work study with Icarus… or with any agency she chooses, really.”
“Why wouldn’t she pick you?” Hitoshi blinked in surprise. “You’re the best.”
“Aw, that’s sweet!”
But inwardly, she wasn’t as certain as Hitoshi was. Melissa hadn’t yet submitted paperwork for her work study. Oh, Toki didn’t doubt Melissa loved Icarus, wanted to work with them, but… she wanted to be a symbol, to reach even those that All Might’s light couldn’t touch. Hawks and Quantum had their own agenda. No matter how much philanthropism they sprinkled on their agency, with charities and money and a few words in the right interviews, they both aimed for efficiency over righteousness.
Maybe Melissa would want to work with a higher ranked agency, one that would help her make contacts on the main island, like Best Jeanist. Or maybe she would want to join an agency famed for its activism work, like Gang Orca. Or maybe she would want to intern with a smaller, more discreet agency, to see how to handle real life without the enormous resources the Commission threw at Icarus. She had a lot of possibilities. She was still in training, after all: if she wanted to diversify her experiences, it was now or never.
Also, for the next few months, Icarus would be Quantum-less. And no matter how much Toki valued her agency, she knew Melissa had picked Icarus for her first internship because of Quantum and nothing else. Because Quantum had faith in her. Hawks, Mercury, everyone else: they liked her just fine, but it was Quantum who had offered to make her a hero even when nobody else believed in her.
“But Yūei favors the September exam if I remember correctly,” Toki added thoughtfully. “If you enter in June, you probably won’t share the exam with her. Sure, you can’t ally with her…”
“… but I don’t have to fight her either,” Hitoshi finished.
“Yep. Although it would be a good test of your skills.”
“What, are you encouraging me to fight Melissa Shield now?!”
Toki’s eyebrows rose:
“What? No! Don’t you have any survival instincts?!”
Because, let’s be honest. Even if Hitoshi was good… he had a great Quirk, he was athletic and agile, he had amazing support items… even then, about fifty percent of his efficiency came from his unpredictability. His Quirk relied on surprise, his moves were designed to evade attacks and avoid a contest of strength. Against an opponent who knew him, who had fought him, who had been present when Toki had analyzed his Quirk… well. Hitoshi was going to have a seriously tough time.
Or rather: Melissa would bulldoze him like a missile through a pile of pancakes. She had a gun, for gods’ sake.
“So?” she grinned. “What do you say about the exam?”
Hitoshi took a big breath, the let it out.
“If I don’t enter, I will never get to test myself against people with heroic Quirks, anyway.”
“Well, you could try to enter an underground fighting ring. I heard Mirko did that when she was younger.”
“Let’s not,” Mihoko said evenly.
“Let’s not,” echoed Hitoshi, grinning. “Alright. Let’s try the exam.”
Mihoko sighed, then affectionally ruffled her son’s hair. She didn’t fret and hover anxiously around her son in the same way mama-Midoriya would, in canon, but she still worried. Especially when Hitoshi took risks. There was a tacit agreement between Toki and her students to never show Mihoko-san their best parkour moves. Oh, Mihoko would probably clap and congratulate them, but they all saw the way her lips thinned and she glanced nervously at the heights.
Just like Mihoko hated her Quirk but loved that Hitoshi chose to use it for heroism, she disliked the dangers of his training but loved that Hitoshi excelled in it. It was a strange dichotomy. Toki wasn’t sure she really understood it. Maybe that was how parents were supposed to feel about their children following a risky path.
Not that Toki could really compare. Her own parents had a very permissive attitude. Meteor usually let Toki wander unsupervised in their bad neighborhood for hours, when she was eight and had a predilection for hanging out on the roofs of very tall buildings. She had a level of freedom usually associated with Pokemon trainers. At the time, she took it as a sign that her parents were confident in her abilities, but…
Well, there was no point in dwelling on the past anymore. Her mom was dead, and her dad… he probably didn’t even remember her little adventures on rooftops, anyway.
“You’ll do great,” Mihoko said with so much confidence Toki had to admire it.
Hitoshi shrugged:
“I’ll try. The worst that can happen is that I lose one afternoon by getting my ass pointlessly kicked.”
“I wouldn’t call it pointless!” Toki protested. “That’s the good thing with life lessons like this. Either you win, or you learn.”
“Fine. The worst that can happen is that I lose one afternoon by getting my ass educationally kicked.”
“That’s the spirit!”
oOoOoOo
The Provisional Hero License Exam brought back plenty of memories. It was weird to go in the stadium incognito, not even as Quantum or Hoshizora. Toki had to use a guest pass proving that a hero (in this case: Hawks) had allowed her access to observe from afar. She could have used her own pass, or even asked a higher-up, but… she really wanted to preserve the secrecy of her pregnancy.
It was bad enough that the President knew. At least she hadn’t offered any congratulations on the pregnancy. Toki would have totally freaked out. If Kameko was an eccentric godmother who was a few sandwiches short of a picnic, the President was kind of a stereotypical Disney witch. Not always evil, but… best left alone, for fear she would turn into a dragon or curse you to fistfight Superman. When you asked a favor of her, like a Fae, you had a fifty percent chance of being bitten in the ass. Such was the danger of dealing with supernatural creatures… I mean, the administration.
So. Anonymity it was. And what a head trip! Toki had pulled all the stops to be unrecognizable: she wore heavy makeup to make her face look rounder, complete with fake eyelashes, eyeshadow and lipstick. She had purple-colored contacts, her hair loose instead of up in buns… and she had dyed her hair almost black. It would wash out in two weeks with daily shampoo, but right now the color was still very dark and the effect was rather striking.
Keigo might be better than her at spying, with all his sensitive feathers to snoop around, but Toki had always been better with disguises.
Anyways. Toki stayed away from the HPSC staff during the exam. She had recognized Mera-san from afar, as well as the guy who had organized her License exam and whose scoring system she had completely screwed up. She was happy enough to stay put in the bleachers with a pair of binoculars. Heroes could observe from the control towers, with screens displaying footage from hidden cameras and surveillance drones: but Toki couldn’t very well walk in as Quantum when Quantum was missing, could she? Especially seeing as she was pregnant. Her changing figure could be dissimulated, but her lack of powers couldn’t.
So, here she was, watching from the bleachers like a tourist. It was a nice change. She had brought snacks and everything. Toki had offered Melissa to enter her into this exam, too, but the girl had refused. She wanted to pass it with her classmates. Kudos for her loyalty. Besides, since she was a Yūei student, she didn’t need experience like Hitoshi did: she already had teachers taking care of that.
“Welcome everyone,” droned the familiar voice of Mera-san through the speakers.
Toki’s focus sharpened. It was starting!
She couldn’t see the candidates: like in canon, they were in a huge cubic structure in the center of the arena. The arena was hidden from them. So until the very last moment, they wouldn’t see the fake destroyed city, the different landscapes.
“As a reminder, every one of the one thousand and forty-one candidates here will have to pass through two tests. The first is a free-for-all exercise. Those of you who succeed will receive your provisional license and join the life of pro-heroes. A life where everything is going so fast it makes private citizens dizzy. If you can’t keep up with that speed, then you’ll have it rough… So you’ll be tested on your speed. In this exercise, only the top three hundred scorers will pass.”
Wow, there was more than a thousand competitors? That was a lot. Toki frowned, trying to remember her own exam. There had been about five hundred or six hundred candidates, then. But well, she had directly passed the Licensing Exam without bothering with the provisional one, so it made sense that the competition had already been thinned. And in her own exam, only a fifth of the candidates had passed. Here, they would allow about a third of them.
“Now, for the requirements,” Mera-san’s voice continued. “You will all have three targets fixed to your body on an exposed area. You’ll be given six balls…”
Toki listened with mounting incredulity. Wait, that was… that was really familiar… Oh. Was it the exercise that class 1-A would have to do in canon? But the exams were supposed to change from year to year. Each exam was unique. That mean that this exercise was happening one year in advance!
Or rather, she realized, it was happening in perfect harmony with the timeline. It was the first Provisional License Exam held since All Might’s semi-retirement. In consequence it was also the first exam where the HPSC was starting to look for quality over quantity. Ouch. If that exam was supposed to happen like the canon exam… then indeed, Hitoshi was in for a rough time!
The walls of the giant box holding the candidates fell apart. People started distributing balls and targets to them. In the crowd of rookies, she had no trouble picking up Hitoshi: not only was he one of the shortest ones here, but he was also staying on the sidelines, wary. Good for him.
Then, with a blaring sound, the exercise started.
Immediately, it was pandemonium. People were running everywhere; balls were raining down like hailstones. There was screaming, yelling, barked orders and directions, indignant screeching. Someone collapsed the earth in a giant ravine, someone else created a roaring flood. Two guys with fire Quirks began a raging duel with deafening explosions.
Toki grinned. She leaned comfortably on her chair, opened her popcorn, and decided to enjoy the show.
She lost Hitoshi in the crowd. She was almost sure he had used his capture tape to swing in the arena’s urban area, using the cover and vantage points of tall buildings: but she couldn’t find him again. That was alright. She wasn’t overly worried. Her binoculars in hands and munching cheerfully on her popcorn, she scrutinized the rest of the fights. There were a bunch of hero students but also young adults, probably self-taught like Lady Siam had been… and a few older guys, probably taking the test as a reassessment of their skills after a long period out of heroics. Still, teenagers made the majority. They were enthusiastic, but few displayed the kind of exceptional skills Toki and Keigo had at their age.
There was a girl who could make force-fields. Toki made a mental note to check the exam’s results later: if that girl was looking for a job as a sidekick, Toki would gladly hire her. Then there was an older guy who made frost… a boy with a motorcycle helmet who punched boulders… and then there was a girl with incredible agility who somehow blindsided all her opponents, apparently?
Toki squinted behind her binoculars. The girl had dark green hair and a flashy blue costume: and still, Toki had nearly missed her. She was so fast. And she took down opponents so quickly, too, striking like a viper and rearing back to avoid any retribution, pinwheeling from one end of the battlefield to the other. She had good moves. Familiar moves, actually. Toki narrowed her eyes. There were definitely martial arts in there, but this grace, the way she spun around and landed her jumps with perfect balance… she fought like Keigo, or Toki.
Then Toki caught a glimpse of her face. She wore a mask, of course, but you could still see her eyes: big, with a yellow sclera, emerald green iris, and slit pupils. Snake’s eyes. She was grinning, too, and you would have to be blind to miss the gleaming fangs in her mouth. With a sharp inhale, Toki recognized her.
It had been a while since Toki had thought about Naruto Labs’ newest protegee. But she was about seventeen, now, wasn’t she?
Well. In any case… Hello, Sumire.
Fascinated, Toki followed her prowess attentively. Sumire had an illusion Quirk, Toki knew. But she was apparently trying to pass while barely using it. And she was pulling it off! She probably had some reptilian characteristics, too. Her nimbleness, the way she climbed buildings with barely any grip at all, the heights she could jump, the ways she could twist around… It made Toki think of a snake, bending like a living rope, coiled like a spring ready to jump.
It was odd. When Toki had learnt about Sumire’s existence, she had felt both curiosity and kindship with the girl. She had wanted to help, to be involved. But she hadn’t pushed to be allowed to make contact, had she? There had been other things to do, other priorities, and it had just… slipped her mind. She felt a little guilty now. Had Sumire been allowed to have a friend, like Toki and Keigo? Or had she lived in isolation? Naruto Labs could get pretty lonely. Especially since her main teacher must have been Okamoto. Brrrr.
Toki wondered if Hayasa-sensei had news about her progress. Maybe she could start by asking him.
With a blaring sound, suddenly, the exercise ended.
Sumire graciously somersaulted away, grinning insolently. Toki snorted. She couldn’t help but be reminded of her own Licensing Exam and how cheeky she had been. Mera-san’s voice flatly announced that the three hundred winners were to gather on the sidelines. People who hadn’t tagged enough targets or who had been eliminated were asked to leave the arena.
Toki gripped her binoculars tighter and looked around for her student. Where in seven hells was Hitoshi? She had lost him in the urban area, but he had never emerged from there. Damn, maybe she should have tried to get into the control tower after all.
There! He was making his way towards the spectators’ stands, looking dejected. Oh, no… Toki’s heart squeezed.
Hitoshi hadn’t passed.
She still forced herself to smile, waving at him until he spotted her and made his way up the bleachers. He looked as if he had passed through the grinder. His hero outfit (baggy pants and a sleek, long-sleeved, compressive black shirt, all in black) were all dusty, even torn in places. He had also lost a boot.
His socks were cat themed. It was absurdly funny.
When he joined her, Toki offered him some popcorn. With a deep sigh, he plonked himself on the bench next to hair, and shoved a gigantic handful of popcorn into his mouth. It gave him cheeks like a hamster. Toki charitably refrained from laughing.
“Better luck next time,” she offered.
Hitoshi swallowed his popcorn, then said mulishly: “At least it was an educational ass-kicking.”
“I couldn’t see it,” Toki apologized. “You were in the urban area; it blocked my view.”
“Meh. Maybe that’s for the best. I lasted almost the whole test, but then I got caught like an idiot by a team that cornered me from three directions at once.” He scowled. “They saw me use my Quirk on someone and they took issue with it.”
Toki hissed between her teeth. Yeah, bigots could pass the exam too. In canon, hadn’t there been a Shiketsu student with a fondness for arrogant speeches and a hard-on for the hero killer’s ideology?
You couldn’t really reason with those guys. You couldn’t even complain. After all, if you couldn’t take it, it just proved that you were too weak for heroics. So the only option… it was to ignore them and prove them wrong by winning.
“They’ll regret it once you’re a hero,” she promised darkly.
Hitoshi shrugged. He looked in the distance, face grave.
“I know. That’s why it’s so important that I become one, too. I can’t stay on the sidelines, with a Quirk like mine.”
“You Quirk is a tool,” Toki frowned. “Like anyone else’s.”
But Hitoshi shook his head:
“Some tools are versatile, but others are only meant for pain. My Quirk… it can only hurt. I completely suppress your will and impose my own, taking over your body and mind non-consensually. It is violating on the deepest level imaginable and then some. That’s what I do. It’s the only thing I can do.”
Toki set her jaw. “That’s not all you are.”
“I know. But even if it’s easy to say it’s a tool, and I appreciate you for saying it… it’s not. Complete suppression of will and violation of body and mind is not neutral. It’s a cop out to say it is. It’s not neutral, and that means I have a greater responsibility. I mean, becoming a hero is my dream, but I also feel like it’s a duty. I need to do it.”
Toki chewed over the words. She didn’t like it. She didn’t like the idea of Hitoshi feeling bad because of his Quirk, feeling like he had to atone for it. But as much as it rankled, yeah, Toki could see his point. Great power meant great responsibility. Someone who could take over the mind of anyone had a far greater responsibility than everyone else.
Kind of like someone with a warping Quirk or telekinetic wings would have.
Hitoshi snorted, then nudged her shoulder:
“Don’t look so glum. Those guys were assholes but even if they hadn’t been, they would have taken me out anyway. They were warned about my Quirk, and I couldn’t fight against so many people at once.” He paused, considering. “The hero students had an advantage actually, since they worked in teams.”
Toki frowned, thoughtful. “Did they, now?”
In her own exam… in her own work as a hero in general… she didn’t need a team. She liked having support but she was fully capable of doing things on her own. Sometimes, it was even faster that way. However, that wasn’t how most heroes operated. Especially beginning their careers. Hero students had a massive advantage over Hitoshi in that exam, because they already had pre-established bonds and alliances.
And in the real world, where heroic team-ups were becoming increasingly necessary, wasn’t it a disadvantage to enter a battlefield as a lone wolf? Even if Toki herself didn’t need a team, she still worked more often than not with others. With Keigo for huge battles, of course, but also with her sidekicks for patrol, with Hayasa-sensei for investigations, even with the Commission when following tips from shady informants. She had a network. For years now, she had trained Hitoshi for the physical part of hero work, and had taken for granted the fact that her network would become his later: but in doing so, hadn’t she lost a precious chance to help him create his own alliances?
Hm.
“Well, at least you tested yourself against real opponents,” she said consolingly. “And it will give you an edge for next time!”
“In September, then.”
“You sure? We can wait until next year. I wanted you to fight other people using their Quirks and you did just that. We can stop there if you want.”
“September,” Hitoshi repeated stubbornly.
Toki hid a smile. Yeah, that was her student all right. Defeat only made him more resolute to chase his goals.
She almost insisted for him to take a longer break. He had clearly been roughed up in this exercise. But she breathed in, breathed out. Remembered how harsh Hayasa-sensei’s or Hobo-san’s training had been. She could almost hear what they would say if they heard her dithering because poor little Hitoshi had a few ouchies.
Do not mistake your aversion to seeing him in pain as a sign that he cannot endure the pain when he must.
Yeah, her teachers had been rough, and her training painful. Hobo-san, especially. Fuck, even thinking about it now made her wince. It had been so fucking brutal. No kid should have to go through that. But Toki had become a stronger hero for it, hadn’t she? It hadn’t been in vain.
If she could, she would always let Hitoshi take the easy way out: but if he asked for it, why would she refuse him facing reality, even if it was painful? Pain was a good teacher. Toki had endured plenty of pain, and she had turned out alright, after all.
“September, then. Hey, you’ll be a hot commodity if you ally with Melissa, then. None of her classmates have ever passed this test before.”
Hitoshi seemed a little heartened by the idea. When the second part of the test began, he looked almost eager.
The second part of the test was a rescue operation, just as it had been in canon, although Toki noted a few key differences. The disaster used was an earthquake, not a terrorist attack. There were crushed buildings, and a wailing siren warning of a tsunami risk. No fake-villains attacked, but there was a countdown to respect, just like after a real earthquake when a tsunami was approaching. It was a very realistic simulation. There were multiple locations to evacuate, and several moral dilemmas the heroes were asked to solve. Which to evacuate first? To where? A hospital was on the verge of collapse, but so was a prison, a school, a community center, and apartment building.
Several actors were also playing the part of looters using the chaos to rob stores, and Toki saw a bunch of hero students all but abandoning the evacuation effort to throw themselves in fights. She mentally deducted points. Yes, fighting looters was all well and good, but those young heroes had just demonstrated that they were chasing after the thrill of battle more than after actual heroic results. Prioritizing the glory of victory over the safety of civilians was something only cosmetic heroes did.
She pointed it out to Hitoshi, and soon enough ended up making a live commentary of what was going on. Some kids had established a chain of command and organized their tasks. Other candidate worked on their own, but even then, they kept in contact with the others. A few had established a perimeter. The girl with the force fields was working with Sumire, both evacuating the prison almost all on their own. When a fake-prisoner made a run for it, Sumire knocked him out cold effortlessly, and Toki had to repress a huge grin. They didn’t make them soft, in Naruto Labs!
“You’ve met her?” Hitoshi asked when the test ended. “She’s the only one you know by name.”
Toki dithered a second. Naruto Labs wasn’t exactly a secret, but the sponsoring program was very hush-hush. The Shinsō family knew about the HPSC, but they didn’t know all the details. Had Toki ever mentioned the Labs to them? She didn’t remember.
In the end, she compromised:
“I didn’t meet her, but she trained like I did. Hayasa-sensei helped design her training program a few years ago, when she was fifteen or sixteen. I’m not sure Sumire is still her hero name, actually.”
Codenames weren’t definitive. You could always change them. Toki made a mental note to ask Hayasa-sensei. For all she knew, Sumire had outgrown her codename and picked something a little more original.
The list of candidates who had a passing grade was displayed on a big screen. It was their names, which surprised Toki a little: at her licensing exam, only the candidates’ hero names had been displayed. But well, it had been the definitive exam, while this one was only provisional. Maybe it was related?
Anyways. Toki quickly browsed the list. Here, among the top-scorers, was someone named Sumire Midorihebi. The first name was in kanji but the surname in katakana, which was odd by itself. And Midorihebi translated literally to green snake. Maybe it wasn’t her, but… it was a little on-the-nose. Toki remembered how much the fake-ID guy had enjoyed his wordplays when making her fake names. It wasn’t proof, but still, with that first name, Toki would lay good odds on it.
“Want to try and says hello?” Hitoshi offered.
Toki considered it for a second. She was curious, of course. But in the end, she shook her head.
“Better not. Remember, I’m a random civilian right now. I actually suggest we hightail out of here before anyone from the Commission start scrutinizing the bleachers and recognize my face. Not that they would blab, but… the fewer people are in the know, the better.”
“A little paranoid, aren’t you?” Hitoshi snorted.
Toki pondered her answer for a second.
“I’m a high-profile hero who’s currently Quirkless and in a very vulnerable position, and that’s even without taking in account my father, so… no, not really.”
She had never mentioned her family before, and Hitoshi’s gaze suddenly sharpened. The slip hadn’t been accidental.
“What about your father?”
“I’ll tell you when you’re older.”
She didn’t want to tell him, exactly, but she would need to. One day Hitoshi would have a hero License. He would do heroic things, and it raised the probabilities that he would hear about the Number Two Hero’s new pet project. And about Quantum’s weird hang up about not patrolling in Tokyo… or in Shizuoka where Endeavor had his agency. If he had to be told, Toki wanted it to be on her terms.
Hitoshi tried to badger her, but she deflected his questions easily. They left the stadium bickering like usual. No matter how this exam had ended up for Hitoshi, it had just been an exercise, in the end. If he didn’t pass, well, nothing was really lost.
The future was still bright and filled to the brim with possibilities.
oOoOoOo
On the way to Dagobah Beach, Toki frowned at her phone.
She was trying to lay off the hero work, but still, she kept watch over a few forums to help gather information, just in case she found promising leads that she could forward to Icarus. It helped Toki feel useful. She kept in touch with Keigo, of course, but… Fuck, she missed hero work. Oh, she liked being Toki Hoshizora. She liked focusing on her PhD, she liked spending time with the Shinsō family, she liked being a civilian. But in small doses. Her true identity, at this point, was more Quantum than Hoshizora.
(And she missed Keigo so much. They saw each other twice a month now. Toki usually went to Fukuoka, sometimes swung by the hospital for her checkup with the Medical Heroine Erika, then went back to the penthouse to spent the whole day with Keigo. They talked, they laughed, they watched stupid movies and they fell asleep holding each other for reassurance. They had sex, too, because some days they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. It was great, it was always great. Like feeling whole once again. When they spoke sometimes they were of one mind, and it was always a special kind of elation to be so completely understood: and sometimes they were not, and they argued, and they joked, and they made each other laugh and… Toki never felt as happy as she was then. Keigo wasn’t just her husband, because gods knew she would never get used to that word. He was her best friend, her better half. But then… the weekend ended. Toki had to leave, she always had to leave, and she hated it.)
Anyways. She was Toki Hoshizora for now, but she couldn’t… she didn’t know how to get out of heroics. So she kept watch online, if she couldn’t patrol. It wasn’t as fulfilling, but it was something.
The latest gossip was about Musutafu, which made it all the more interesting. Or rather, all the more alarming.
There had been more arson cases lately. It wasn’t a new thing. Ever since All Might’s semi-retirement, trouble had been stirring up. Less robberies but more mugging, violence dropping in the countryside but rising in some cities… poverty decreasing, but uncertainty rising… Things were shifting. There was an increase in vigilantism, too. But the arson thing had really picked up in the last months. It pointed towards a single individual, or at least a united group, lighting fires with a clear goal in mind: creating fear. At the beginning, the buildings being lit had been old and abandoned. But now the criminal was getting bolder. He had torched a half-abandoned, but still used residential building. Two people had been injured.
But that wasn’t what had grabbed Toki’s attention. It was the fact that… lately, the beginning of different fires had been caught on camera. You couldn’t see anyone, of course. Just how a building burst into flames suddenly.
Blue flames.
It quickly turned into the color of normal fire as it spread. Red, orange, yellow, nothing out of the ordinary. But this flash of blue at the beginning… it had made Toki’s stomach drop out.
Fucking blue fire.
In canon, Dabi had never made a move against Endeavor until being recruited by the League of Villains. And why would he? By his own admission, in canon, his plan had been to wait until his brother Shouto graduated, then murder him to reduce Endeavor’s legacy to ashes. Even joining the League of Villains had probably been unexpected for him. He had needed the Hero Killer as an inspiration to decide to act. Otherwise he had only been waiting.
But… now… those fires… theses blue flames… It could be him. So much had changed from canon. Toki shouldn’t have assumed Dabi’s plans had stayed unaffected. Endeavor would be the Number One at the Next Billboard chart, after all. Wasn’t that a good reason for Dabi to start acting on his revenge? Arson was totally his style. Showing how destructive fire was… how dangerous… and how the new Number One was incapable of dousing this fire. Yes, that would totally be his style.
And now, Dabi was in Musutafu. Probably because it was close enough to Shizuoka to send a message to Endeavor while also remaining just outside of his usual patrol range. But Toki lived in Mustafu, and she really didn’t like this at all. Dabi was dangerous. Too dangerous. She remembered all to clearly how, in canon, he would nearly kill Keigo. It would be so close. Just thinking about it make her sick.
She took a breath, and quickly typed an email to Mera-san requesting authorization to investigate those cases of arson during her leave. If she started snooping around as a Quirkless civilian, she would need the HPSC to cover her ass. Also, maybe if she investigated those fires, the HPSC would notice that something was fishy about it and do something.
Let’s be honest. Toki empathized with Touya Todoroki’s pain. It was hard to be cast aside by your parents. But the guy was also a murderous psychopath, whose ambition was to plunge Japan into terror and despair so his father would feel guilty about it. That was deeply fucked up. Even if he had a tragic past, he was a menace to society. In canon, he would maim Keigo and try to burn him alive! The sooner Dabi would be behind bars, the better.
“Uh?” Hitoshi blinked as they turned around the last pile of garbage. “There’s someone else with them today.”
Toki’s mind went back to the present. They were at Dagobah Beach. Indeed, there was an unassuming man with black hair chatting with All Might, while Midoriya was already busy collecting trash. Toki shrugged, pocketing her phone:
“It’s alright. Yagi-san wants to introduce him to me.”
About a month had gone by since her first encounter with All Might on Dagobah Beach. Which mean that Toki was finally going to meet All Might’s friend, the detective, Tsukauchi (and finally Toki had his name, instead of calling him Tsuki-something!). She was a little curious about the case she was supposed to help with, too. And… nervous, also.
In canon, All Might had a detective friend who could detect lies. This was probably the same guy. Gods, she hoped he wouldn’t ask for details about her life, or even her identity. If she had to introduce herself and it pinged the detective’s lie-detector, that would make him hella suspicious. What a fun conversation to have in perspective!
Well, at least little Midoriya wouldn’t be eavesdropping. As soon as Hitoshi would mention the Provisional Hero License Exam, Midoriya would be totally focused on him. And indeed, when Hitoshi joined the green-haired boy and started chatting, Toki could see Midoriya’s face light up in excitement. She repressed a smile and joined the two men at the edge of the ever growing clearing in the middle of this forest of trash.
She waved and opened her mouth to salute them, but before she could get a word out, All Might jumped in:
“Thank you for coming. This is my friend Naomasa Tsukauchi. He has taken over a case that Endeavor’s agency wants reopened. Apparently, Meteor wants to find out what happened to his daughter.”
Toki’s smile slipped from her face.
“That son of a bitch.”
The detective appeared downright scandalized, thought whether it was by Toki’s swearing or by All Might casually handing out confidential information, she didn’t know. He looked rather ordinary: black hair, dark eyes, casual clothes, a plain and forgettable face. And right now, straight-up pissed.
“Why would you say that?” he hissed furiously to Yagi.
“I told you, I trust her with my life,” All Might said solemnly. His eyes came back to Toki’s and held them. “The detective in charge of this case has long retired. Tsukauchi has taken over this particular case because, at the time, while he was a junior officer, he was assigned to it. He was also the last one to officially see the young girl.”
Toki narrowed her eyes in perplexity… then suddenly, it dawned on her. She scrutinized Tsukauchi with new eyes. Could it be….?
She didn’t really remember the cop that had been waiting in her mom’s hospital room, but he had black hair and eyes, and a kind voice, too. What had been his name? He had given her his card, but she had tossed it away at Naruto Labs less than a month later, without a second glance. She was drawing a blank.
“He told me about it recently,” All Might continued. There was something like repressed hilarity in his voice. “What really stood up to me was that even at eight, she already called me Mister America-Vomited-On-Me.”
Oh, man. Toki groaned, and slapped a hand on her face in embarrassment.
“I never called you that to your face.”
“I still heard it!”
Toki felt more than she saw Tsukauchi abruptly straighten, pulling the clues together and staring at her with some sort of horrified realization. She sighed. Her shoulders dropped, part-resignation, part-lassitude.
“You think that I should trust this man with my life and the life of my unborn child?” she asked All Might.
From the corner of her eyes, she saw Tsukauchi do a double take.
“I do,” gravely answered the Symbol of Peace. “But I didn’t tell him your name or anything else. You can still walk away.”
All Might had jumped in before Toki could introduce herself. Smart. Begrudgingly, Toki had to approve. She sighed and turned towards Tsukauchi.
He looked… flabbergasted, true, but also pondering. He was getting over his shock and coldly watching her from top to bottom, carefully trying to fit together the new pieces of the puzzle that had been handled to him.
“You’re… Toki Taiyōme.” He said slowly.
“I don’t remember you,” she offered. “But you were the man in my mother’s hospital room.”
He nodded, slowly. “You were running from someone, then.”
“I was. As you can see, they didn’t get me.”
“Who was it?”
Toki shrugged and crossed her arms. Careful, she thought to herself while choosing her words. This man can detect lies. And there was no way she was going to give more of her secrets to a stranger. All Might trusted him, yes, and she was going to need him to bar Endeavor from investigating her case, yes, but that didn’t mean he had earned her trust.
“It doesn’t matter. A few days we after we met, I helped someone, and was helped in turn. Some people gave me safety, protection, education. I got a new name. I graduated from a reputable high school. I made friends. I got married.”
There was a silence while Tsukauchi waited for her to elaborate and, when it didn’t come, he frowned. None of what she had say was a lie, but he probably wanted more.
“Your whole file is classified, now.”
And wow, that had to be very annoying, for a detective to come back to an unsolved mystery and find the whole thing classified, reeking of red tape and administrative cover-up. Toki allowed herself a shit-eating grin.
“Yep.”
“What did you do?”
“Needed protection, because Meteor was getting out.”
Tsukauchi narrowed his eyes and changed his angle. “How did you meet All Might?”
Toki raised her eyebrows. Smart, but not enough.
“You mean besides the day when he and my father destroyed a building and killed seventy people?”
The detective looked a little sour at the reminder. All Might groaned:
“He can help. You don’t have to tell him everything, but… he would understand if you told him your name.”
Yes. And then he would draw his conclusions and understand a great deal more than Toki would like. She didn’t know this dude. No matter how nice and approachable he seemed in canon, he was All Might’s friend, no hers.
But then… if she told him, he wouldn’t know more than the HPSC. And if he was going to be her ally, then… allowances had to be made.
Toki gritted her teeth. Fine. With a great show of reluctance, she messed her bangs, then took off her colored contacts. When her bright, sun-like orange eyes meet Tsukauchi’s, she saw him straighten unconsciously.
“I’m the pro-hero Quantum. The reason my file is classified is because it’s protected by the Heroic Identity Protection Act.”
The way Tsukauchi’s eyes widened, there was some serious recalculations being made. Ah. She wasn’t what he had expected a villain’s daughter to become, was she?
Because of course. Who would expect Toki Taiyōme to be Quantum? Toki Taiyōme had been a young, feral, unfriendly child. She had been selfish, scared, and totally isolated. Her Quirk was a weak teleportation one and her most notable features were her sun-like eyes. Quantum, on the other hand, was cool, approachable, friendly, intelligent and sociable. It was no secret she had been Hawks’ childhood friend, and she took care of younger kids like a devoted older sister. The top-half of her face was covered with a visor and if fans speculated on the color of her eyes, they usually went with plain brown. She had a warping Quirk or a light Quirk or maybe both, and it was very powerful. If someone were to compare it with a ‘weak teleportation Quirk’, that person would be laughed off.
“I see,” Tsukauchi said slowly. His eyes jumped briefly to All Might, and then he straightened. “Then of course I understand how important it is for your missing person case to never make it in the hands of Meteor. Although he’s in rehabilitation, he’s still a convicted criminal, and people can become irrational when family is concerned. Still, I’m… surprised you came to become a hero after being basically kidnapped.”
“I wasn’t,” Toki frowned.
Tsukauchi shrugged, but his eyes stayed intent on her.
“That’s the legal term. No tribunal ever took a decision to withdraw custody from your parents. As such, they stayed your legal guardians until your majority, criminals or not.” Toki opened her mouth to protest, and Tsukauchi raised a hand placatingly: “Plenty of children who are removed from abusive households by friends or extended family members could be considered kidnapped, I know. Sometimes it’s for the best. I’m simply saying it’s a good thing you found your way back to legality.”
What the hell was she supposed to say after that?!
“Yes, I agree,” Toki answered calmly.
She then changed the subject to something less hazardous, like the weather and the hero rankings. Soon enough, Tsukauchi took his leave. Unlike All Might and Toki herself, he had still plenty of work to do. When he left, All Might thankfully let the subject rest, but Toki couldn’t help but think back on the detective’s words.
There had been a judgement removing her custody from her parents’, right? There must have been. Then, once Toki was legally in foster care, the HPSC has gotten custody. Right?
Or… since the HPSC had found her, then she had gone straight to Naruto Labs… maybe they had skipped this step. Maybe the HPSC had taken over her custody, because it would have been too messy to drop the whole thing on a judge’s lap and hope he didn’t place her anywhere else. After all, once they had her, they probably hadn’t wanted to give her back. A judgement took time. There was also an element of uncertainty, as the judges were supposedly impartial, and the Commission’s sponsoring program was used too sparingly for the HPCS to spend money cultivating alliances with a bribed judge. But if there had been no judgement, ever, then that would mean… was Tsukauchi right?
Had the Hero Safety Public Commission kidnapped her?
They wouldn’t have. Would they? Toki forced herself to take a step back, emotionally. Hayasa-sensei wouldn’t have stood for it, but Hayasa-sensei had only been their trainer, he had no say and probably no knowledge of the legality of her arrival at Naruto Labs. Who had? Mera-san, then. And of course, the President, who was then only Vice-President… and old Genryusai-sama.
Okay, that was three. Four, maybe, with Kameko-san: but Kameko had only been nineteen, so even if she had known, she wouldn’t have any real power. And if she had known, she would still have been so proud of catching Toki, and it would have been so much simpler and nicer for everybody to just forget about the judge… that of course, she wouldn’t have said a word to anyone. Especially not to Toki. Kameko was very nice and of course she loved Toki very much, there was no doubt about it: but she was Chaotic Neutral, not Lawfully Good.
Alright. So: Genmei-san, Mera-san, and old Genryusai-sama. Would they have done it?
Genmei-san would have been reluctant. She disliked loose ends. But if it didn’t leave any traces and removed the risk of losing a precious asset, then she would have done it without a blink. Mera-san… he wasn’t as cold as her, sure. But he would have done it because it would have been fast, easy, and more importantly, painless compared to other options. And finally, there was old Genryusai. Him… he wouldn’t have thought about easiness or cleanliness. Not at all. But he would have done it, wouldn’t have even considered doing otherwise, because once he got his hands on a weapon he wouldn’t let anyone take it away.
Shit. Maybe they had kidnapped her.
Notes:
That new law about "oh Quirk use is now legal" is 100% self-indulgence on my part. I have so many issues with the BNHA-universe, it feels NICE to fix one thing without a whole subplot dedicated to it. Also, people can really come together when they are inspired, and so... yeah, it made sense.
Also it's going to completely destroy the main MLA selling argument ahahaha. I just pulverized a canon plot-point. Wheep.Anyway, here is your quick reminder that this fic has a discord!
Now, some food for thought !
Is Toki going to find and fight Dabi?
Well, not while pregnant xD But yeah, she is now gunning for him. She didn't actively try to look for Stain or Shigaraki or AFO, but Dabi is something else because for Toki, the threat is much more personal.Was Toki kidnapped?!?
I've been sitting on this reveal for MONTHS now, and i'm cackling like a witch. YES SHE WAS. If you're reading Meteor's spin-off, you'll remember that when he was in Tartarus, two guys in suits tried to have his signature forfeiting his parental rights, but they didn't get it! THEY DIDN'T GET IT! And so, they had no right to keep Toki without a judge's approval... and you can bet that old Genryusai didn't want to lose time with little details like that.Anyway you can understand why Meteor is worried sick, althought Toki doesn't know that =)
See you next week for an update on "Wisdom of the fallen", back to Meteor's POV ! =D
Chapter 34: Like ripples in a pond
Summary:
They started talking about names. Jesus freaking Christ on a cracker. She was going to be mom in less than three months. It seemed so unreal.
-
(In which Toki deals with, in no particular order: imminent motherhood, her students shattering canon on accident, the revelation about the HPSC's betrayal, and All Might's guilt complex.)
Notes:
Welcome back!
This chapter is un-betaed because my beta has internet problems and couldn't send me the chap in time. But i'll come back to it and fix the spelling mistakes one day!
Anyway, we're coming back to Toki. Quick recap: she just learned that the HPSC never got legal custody of her, even though that was the whole reason she joined them in the first place. She. is. pissed.
Enjoy!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
LIKE RIPPLES IN A POND
Toki quietly investigated the terrible suspicion Tsukauchi had put in her head. And, surprise, surprise! Yep, the HPSC had never gotten a judge’s accord to have Toki’s custody. Goddamnit.
They hadn’t had one for Keigo, either. But from a legal standpoint, it hadn’t been kidnapping because his mother had signed away all of her parental rights and effectively entrusted his care to the HPCS. Of course, the whole thing became rather shifty when you knew Keigo’s mom had only signed that piece of paper in exchange for money. If this red flag was any bigger it would be a blanket.
But bottom line was: legally, Toki had actually been kidnapped. The HPSC had had no legal right for a custody. At the beginning, they probably hadn’t given this case to a judge for fear of Toki being turned over to a loving foster family, away from training (especially since, having denounced Meteor to the police, she was not ‘at risk of becoming a villain’ which was after all the basis used to give them custody of children!). But months had passed, then years, then a full decade. They had never regularized the situation. And why would they? They had Toki where they wanted her. Better to not attract attention to the technicalities.
Toki was fuming. Because, what the heck? No, she didn’t regret how she had ended up, and no, she hadn’t wanted to be in foster care in the first place (that had been the reason for her life as a runaway!). But the whole point of joining the HPSC had been the legality of it. They were supposed to make things right, and they hadn’t. The whole point of joining them was that they would be in the right, that they would have a legal responsibility towards her, a duty; and they hadn’t! And what about her heart attack? They could have made her disappear instead of healing her. They had no duty to care about her health.
They had lied to her, for years! Fuck. They should have told her. She had deserved it, at least! She was especially pissed at Kameko. The cat-lady was her friend. And still, she had knowingly hidden the truth from Toki.
But in the end, once Toki had ranted and raged for a while… well, what was she supposed to do? She was an adult now. And even if she was pissed at the Commission, they were allies. She still relied on them. She couldn’t even take legal action. Firstly because it would feel like a betrayal, they were like family; and secondly because… if she ever tried to bring them down, they would absolutely take her down too. She was still Toki Taiyōme, daughter of Meteor, and they would hold that secret over her head until she died.
So, in the end, it changed nothing, except that the breach of trust would leave a scar. And Toki was fucking mad.
The HPSC had loaned her money. She was in debt up to her ears to them, when in fact they should be begging her on their knees to take their money as an apology. Oh, right now Toki wasn’t going to say anything. Not right now, pregnant and Quirkless. But as soon as she could be Quantum again, she was going to pick up her phone, and calmy inform the President that she expected her whole debt to be recalled. Actually, she would also order the payments already done to be restituted.
Like hell Toki would be financially indebted to them. The President was already on thin ice. The Commission was lucky they were on the same side. If they weren’t, Toki would have burned them to the ground. It was a cold, freezing rage, and Toki knew that this kind of anger would never pass with time. Resentment and betrayal would crystalize in a cold slab of distrust in her heart. There were allies, but that was an unforgivable breach of trust.
The Commission would have to win her forgiveness, and they would have to work for it. So they could forget trying to even hold her on a leach. Toki was pissed enough to rip it right off their hand. And the President would take it, bow gratefully, and thank Toki for not being meaner about it.
Fucking witch.
Anyways. Let’s focus on something else.
Days passed and turned in weeks. June ended with warm weather and long sunbath on the bleach. Toki was now six months pregnant and it was starting to really show. She didn’t just look a little thick in the waist, but really pregnant, with a belly and everything. Her hair had never been so thick and lustrous, her nails were healthier than ever, she was beautiful, radiant, and round like a whale. When she visited Keigo that month, he had spent the whole day complimenting her.
They had started talking about names. Toki was musing about kanjis and hidden meanings. She wanted to give her child a good name, a hopeful name. Keigo had a bunch of ideas for a boy. Masao with the kanji for truth, help, and mankind, a good name for a trustworthy boy… Kaito with the kanjis for freedom and flying, for a life free of shackles… Takahito with the kanjis for sky and benevolence, for a child filled with a higher purpose… Akeru with the kanjis for dawn and light, to bring down a happier future… or maybe Hinata, with the kanji for sun and direction, perfect to give a child a strong sense of self and determination.
Toki liked them all. She had a special fondness for Hinata. But the spawn had only a fifty percent chance to be a boy, after all. If it was a girl… maybe something like Akari, with the kanjis for star and light. A pretty name, but strong. Or something with a similar meaning, like Hoshimi, Seika, or Kiho. Or Seiya, which meant starry night. Beautiful, mysterious, unyielding. Or maybe a longer and more poetic name, like Kohaku, with the combinations of kanjis meaning wings bringing luck… Besides, Hinata could be a feminine name, couldn’t it? Maybe if Toki changed a few kanji. She liked the sonority of it, at least. Hinako, Hinami, Hinawa, Hinayo maybe?
And Hina could also mean little chick, which was plain adorable. Little Hina-chan…!
It made the child more real, somehow. Before, it had only been a ‘it’: the kid, the baby, the child, the spawn, the offspring. Now it was shaping up to be a person, with their own identity, their name. A boy or a girl, maybe with Keigo’s honey-bright eyes. Maybe with Toki’s dimples. Maybe with something of Meteor or Sayuri, too. A real, tiny person, that Toki would hold and rock in her arms, that Keigo could kiss on the forehead, that Mihoko could hold and sing to, that Hitoshi could help learn to walk, that Melissa could chatter with.
Jesus freaking Christ on a cracker. She was going to be mom in less than three months. It seemed so unreal.
Not everything was bright and perfect of course. She had some acid reflux because the baby was now pushing her stomach. Normal, but not glamourous. She also had to change the size of her bras because her breasts were huge and tender, and buy new pants again because she was becoming enormous. Her back hurt when she sat. Her joints were swollen and for the first time in her life, she had carpal tunnel. No one had told her that being pregnant could make her wrist hurt, but after googling it, it turned out to be… not as uncommon as she would have though.
Also, the baby kicked with more regularity now. Sometimes it felt like it had extra-limbs and was testing how sturdy her ribs were. During her last visit to Fukuoka clinic, Toki had had an ultrasound with Erika, the Medical Heroine. It was too soon to be certain, but indeed, there was a strong possibility that the child would have tiny wings. If those appendages twitched just like arms and legs, then Toki was bound to be kicked more often.
“Maybe we should pick a name with the kanji for wings,” Toki mused. She was sprawled out on the sofa, leaning against Keigo while browsing online for inspiration. “It has a pretty sound and it evokes freedom.”
“It sounds a little weird if the kid doesn’t have wings,” pointed Keigo.
“We won’t call him ‘wing’ like some dish at KFC, dumbass. I mean as a component for a longer name.”
“If it’s a kid born with wings, then, alright. Besides, you’re the poet, not me.”
“I don’t know,” Toki grinned. “Sometimes you have a way with words while I’m left tongue-tied.”
Like when they had confessed their love for each other on a rooftop under a beautiful sunset, or when she had needed reassurance about keeping the baby. Keigo laughed it off, but Toki only smiled fondly.
He was more talented with words that he gave himself credit for. It came with being a well-read smooth talker, she supposed. Especially when you were so… so… bigger than life. Keigo was all casualness, mischief and drive, but then he stopped and suddenly he was the kind of creature that poets wrote ballads about, something great and terrible and sad and fiercely joyful all at once. How could Toki not find him extraordinary?
A peaceful silence descended on the room. Keigo was playing with her hair, softly massaging her scalp in a way that could lull her to sleep if she let herself relax anymore. Toki closed the research tabs on her phone, letting the matter of the baby’s name to rest. For a while, neither of them spoke.
“I was thinking about how we’re going to raise it,” she said hesitantly. “The baby, I mean. What we can give it and… what we can’t, in term of… normality.”
Keigo hummed pensively. He was still playing distractedly with her hair.
“Because we’re both full-time heroes.”
“Yeah. We’re full time but also- heroes live dangerous lives. We’re stronger than most, so we’re not really in danger of getting gutted during patrol, but… You know.”
In ten months, maybe less, the Commission would ask Keigo to go spy on the League of Villains. Before the end of that year, in canon, Dabi would have found his mother to pry out all of Hawks’ secrets out of her. That made Toki break out in a cold sweat. Because if Keigo become a spy in this timeline, then Dabi’s first stop to find out more about him wouldn’t be his mom’s house, it would be theirs. He wouldn’t need to ask questions to a third party if he could get his hand on their child and threaten to burn them alive: Toki and Keigo would tell him everything if he had a hostage. Because the danger would be real. Dabi would one hundred percent kill their kid if he found them. He had been willing to torch baby Shouto in his mother’s arms, it wasn’t his conscience that going to stop him from turning a hostage to ashes, no matter how young.
She couldn’t take that risk. That was why she had looked up adoption in those first days after learning of her pregnancy: because her baby would be a target, and it terrified her.
“So I was thinking,” Toki hesitated, “about leaving the baby in Musutafu. With the Shinsō. Mihoko loves kids, she always wanted more children, she told me she would love this baby like her own and I thought… I thought…”
“… that she could be a parent, and not us.”
Toki couldn’t guess what Keigo thought, with how low his voice was. She was a little afraid of looking at his face, so instead, she closed her eyes and just nodded.
“I’m not proposing to abandon it. I don’t want to! But we can’t be normal parents, and… I don’t want to half-ass this. If we raise it, it’s going to be a target. We may not be at the same level as All Might or Endeavor, with a record number of villains put behind bars, but we have enemies. We’re visible. That’s the point of being flashy heroes, after all. Draw the bad guys to us, not to the vulnerable civilians.”
“Yeah,” Keigo said softly. I know.”
Toki swallowed. When she continued, her voice was lower, and more hesitant.
“Of course, one of us could… stop being a hero, and focus on the kid. But you won’t. And I won’t, either. It’s the same for the both of us. It doesn’t matter how much we love this kid, there will always be things that come first.”
She paused. Keigo didn’t say anything. Toki whispered: “That makes me a pretty horrible mother, I know.”
Because what kind of mother would rationalize giving away their child? A child they loved, a child they had wanted; and still, a child they would send away. But of course Toki had to rationalize it. She couldn’t be emotional about something like that. Love was the death of duty, and she knew Keigo understood.
Neither Toki or Keigo were emotional persons. Or rather, they were emotional, but they were also highly rational. They had emotions, of course. They felt them every second of every day, but they never acted on them without thought. They knew how to process them, how to set them to the side if need be. Having emotions was good, healthy, necessary. But you had to know how to control them and not let them control you. It had been part of Okamoto’s lessons, back at Naruto Labs, although he had never put it so plainly: heroes had to know how to approach their most immediate feelings and overcome the first impulse they created.
You could hate something or someone with all of your heart but that wasn’t a problem unless you acted on that hatred. You could be disgusted, but you could not let it show. You could be afraid, but you could not run. You could love, but you could not prioritize.
You could never prioritize.
Keigo let out a mirthless snort of laughter. “Yeah, well I would probably be a terrible dad too, because I’m thinking the same thing.”
Toki’s shoulders dropped. Relief or disappointment, she didn’t know.
“Really?”
This time, Keigo took a longer time to answer. So long that Toki raised herself in a proper sitting position so she could turn around and look at him. He looked… sad. Frustrated, too. Bitter. But mostly sad.
“I never imagined being a dad, you know?” he said softly. “I never considered it. When the hell would I even have the time? But then you told me, and… time passed, the idea took root, and… I want that kid, Toki. I want to see them grow, and smile, and laugh. I want to teach them to fly. I want to protect them from everything, the idea of letting anything happen to them drive me crazy. They’re not even born and I love them. And I know I can’t be there for them. Even if we found a way to remove the danger, to have a body-guard or to keep it an absolute secret, I would still be worried sick. And even then, we still wouldn’t be able to care for a baby like we should! A full-time hero doesn’t have the time, can’t prioritize family over work, and…” He sighed, shook his head desperately. “It would kill me to drop heroism. It would kill me. And I feel so shitty to think that how little I value my own child, that I would pick my own selfish desires over them: but what if either of us drop heroism to raise the kid, and end up resenting them for it? Feeling like this kid is a shackle, a burden? That scares me almost more. My father hated my guts because of that. I’m terrified of turning like him.”
“You won’t,” Toki said determinedly.
He smiled sadly.
“I hope. But that doesn’t change anything, does it? We’re already seeking a way to prevent the situation from forming. To protect the kid from heroism.” A bitter smile twisted his lips. “And to not let heroism be taken from us.”
They stayed silent a few second. Then Toki quietly confessed:
“When I learned I was pregnant, one of the first thing I did was look up adoption. I want that kid to be safe, above everything, but I also want them to be loved.”
“And giving them up to the Shinsō is the better option,” Keigo sighed dryly. “You don’t have to make a speech to convince me. I know that as two full times heroes, raising openly a child would draw a gigantic target on their crib. I know.”
Toki swallowed.
“So you agree? About this… idea?”
“I don’t like it,” Keigo admitted frankly. “You can teleport whenever you want but for me, Musutafu is four hours away. I won’t be able to visit on my own. And no offense, but Mihoko is your family, not mine. I like her, I trust her, but I don’t really know her.”
“Oh. I mean… if you have another idea…”
“No. It’s the best plan, actually. The kid should grow up normally, like a civilian with a loving family. The alternative would be to have someone in Fukuoka to watch other them when we work, and I can’t think of anyone trustworthy. Maybe someone from the HPSC, but…” Toki made a face, and Keigo grinned. “Yeah, that. Exactly.”
“That’s not a way to raise children.”
“We didn’t fare too badly. You never complained before.”
“Of course there is ground to complain. The training wasn’t unreasonable, but it was still harsh. Also, may I remind you: they fucking kidnapped me.”
Keigo frowned.
“I thought about it, actually. They didn’t get a judge’s decision, but did you check if your mom or dad signed something, like mine did?”
Toki paused, because no, she hadn’t. Her father wouldn’t have signed that, since the HPSC had gone to great lengths to hide Toki’s survival from him. But her mom… Well, her mom hadn’t been interested in money like Keigo’s, but she had more than enough reasons to negotiate with the HPSC. For better conditions, for the safety of her unborn child, for a chance to see her husband… or to get rid of her traitorous daughter.
Had Sayuri hated Toki, in the end? She didn’t know. She would never know. Or rather, sometimes she felt like she did, but it was a thought she didn’t want to face.
“If they did, it would be in my file, like yours,” she finally said. “And even if they have that, they still lied to me for years!”
“That doesn’t erase their competency.”
“No, but it seriously reduces their trustworthiness.”
They had already talked about it… multiple times, actually… and they always ended up disagreeing. Yes, it was bad they had lied, yes, it was bad they had kept Toki without any legal right. Rules existed for a reason. That was why heroes needed a license and why vigilantes were technically criminals. Even if you did something good, with the best intentions, you still had to give people a way to make you accountable for your actions. Parameters, rules, settings to respect.
But Keigo thought Toki was rocking the boat too much. He didn’t want Toki to confront the President about it. Mostly about the money. Toki wanted to have the Commission erase their debt and make amend. Keigo thought it was a bad idea to make their cordial relationship turn sour. One of Icarus’ main advantages was how privileged they were by the Commission: they had better intel, better commercials, better missions, better deals all around. But just as easily as the Commission had favored them, they could sabotage them.
And not just to make their ranking plumet. They could also send them on dangerous missions. Block them from hiring the sidekicks they wanted. Insist their partnership was broken off. The Commission had many, many ways to make their life unpleasant. It was in Keigo’s nature to avoid that.
Toki had no such qualm. The Commission was in the wrong and, with her kidnapping, Toki had massive leverage over them. And if the Commission tried to mess with their agency, Quantum was willing to take them down with her.
“At least keep it in mind as an option,” Keigo sighed. “We are allies in this.”
“I don’t want our kid raised by allies honoring a transaction. What if they feel the wind change and decide our alliance isn’t worth it? I want our kid raised by people who will love them, who will protect them with their life is needed.”
Keigo conceded the point. It had been good to be raised by allies to become heroes, but that wasn’t the path they wanted for their child. The spawn wasn’t destined to be a hero. The spawn was actually destined to nothing, because they would grow up free to choose their own path, and if the HPSC dared to interfere Toki would kick their asses.
They would totally deserve it, anyways.
“So!” Keigo exclaimed to break the silence. “You know what, I feel like I should get to know Mihoko-san a little better. I should visit Musutafu next time.”
Toki perked up: “Great idea! We could see Melissa too!”
It had been a while since they had hung out. Melissa sometimes joined Hitoshi’s training, but it wasn’t as often as Toki would have liked. She was very busy with school. Shame. Toki missed their rapid-fire conversations and their heated Quirk-debates.
“Alright,” Keigo smirked. “There’s just the tiny problem of my secret identity. I have giant wings and a very distinctive face. Slipping on a disguise is a little complicated for me.”
“Aw, come one, don’t be like that! I’ll help you.”
Toki was great with disguises. Colored contacts and temporary hair-dyes were her best friends. She also knew her way around make-up, enough to contours her face and change the shapes of her features for an untrained eye. Both Toki and Keigo knew how to put on a wig, how to change her speech patterns and her way to move: but Toki had been the only one to use these skills in the last five years.
“I could use some pointers,” Keigo admitted. Then he grinned. “There’s a concert I want to go next week. Think you can make me innocuous enough to sneak in?”
“You know you could have a better place as Hawks.”
“Yeah, but the sneaking around is half the fun!”
“Fine, fine!” Toki laughed. “I’ll help you with your civiliansona.”
“… please don’t call it my civiliansona.”
“Too late!”
oOoOoOo
So. Time went on. Toki had another appointment with Erika, the Medical Heroine, who assured her that her baby was perfectly healthy. Toki’s terms would be mid-September, and she would be fit to get back to her duty in November. Of course she could stay on maternity leave longer, but… if she didn’t stay to raise her child, what was the point?
Anyways. Keigo came to Musutafu the next week-end, in July. His civiliansona was dressed like a hipster, with big glasses and a medical mask. He also lacked Hawks’s cockiness, pretending to be shy and polite, which was actually as much part of his disguise as the absence of his large wings. He had discarded his feathers and carried them in a big messenger bag. While Toki went to hang out with Hitoshi and Melissa, Keigo went shopping for baby stuff with Mihoko. Their bonding time looked like a cross-interrogation with a hint of a shovel talk mixed in. It was kind of funny to watch.
It had been a while since Toki had had both her students with her. She longed for a good training session, a wild chase through abandoned buildings, or even some parkour! But now her belly was weighting her down, she felt fat and clumsy, and she was tired ridiculously easily. Instead of training, they all went to a history museum. It had been ages since Toki had set foot in a museum, an she couldn’t help but feel a helpless pan of longing for those expositions she went to with her mom, when she was a little kid. It seemed almost like another life.
They visited the museum. They talked. They bitched about heroic theories or the future rankings. Melissa bombarded her with questions about the baby, about what name they were going to pick, about what kind of Quirk they thought the kid would get. When Toki let her put her hands on her belly to feel the spawn kick, Melissa’s face light up with childish wonder.
“I want kids later,” Melissa confided her later. “When I was little the doctors always said it was a bad ideas because I may pass my Quirklessness to them, but… it’s not a disease.”
“And they will grow up in a kinder word, thanks to you.”
Melissa smiled softly.
“Yeah. That’s part of why I want to become a hero, you know? Our society has kind of written off Quirkless people as an insignificant minority that will eventually die out, but both my parents are fourth generation Quirk users and I still ended up Quirkless. Quirkless children are still being born, and as long as they are, then the world needs to have a place for them. I want to make sure they have someone to look up to, even when it seems like the whole world is against them.”
“I already look up to you,” Toki told her honestly. “I wish I was as clever and as brave as you are.”
“Aw, sempai, I wouldn’t be there if you hadn’t inspired me. Actually, I…” Melissa took a big breath. “I wanted to change my hero name to Polaris.”
Toki blinked. “The North star?”
“Your old name when we met was Antares,” Melissa admitted. “You are extraordinary, as Toki or as Quantum. But Antares is the one who saved me. And I want… I want a name that pay tribute to that.”
Toki blushed, feeling absurdly flattered.
“Oh. Well. It’s… a good name. I would be honored.”
Melissa beamed at her. For a second, they stayed silent, Toki’s mind reeling a little. She felt flattered and humbled at once. Gods, she hadn’t imagined Melissa held her in such high esteem.
Then, in the background, Hitoshi rolled his eyes.
“Yes, yes, you’re both amazing. Can we get ice cream now?”
“… Please read the room, Hitoshi.”
So. Life went on.
Toki kept investigating her HPSC’s file without finding any trace of any decision transferring her legal custody to the Commission. Apparently there should have been a document signed by her mom transferring parental rights, just like what Keigo’s mom had signed when she had given (or rather: sold) her son to the Commission. But there was no trace of this piece of paper anywhere. Toki personally thought that the document had never been signed, and the Genryusai-sama had simply carried on as usual. He probably thought that, since no one was looking for Toki, with her father in jail and her missing person case closed, then no one would discover their crime.
Well, Toki was looking, now. Thank you, Tsukauchi. Without this chance meeting, and this casual remark, Toki would have never guessed how much the Commission had shat the bed. And she would have lived her whole life thinking she was indebted to them, when in fact they had been taking advantage of her.
As a side-project Toki was also collecting clues about Dabi. Well, nobody knew it was Dabi, it was just an unnamed arsonist. But since she really suspected it was him, Toki was digging through online theories, crappy surveillance tapes, and blurred photos, sorting clues and building her case. She wanted an arrest warrant out for that guy. No way she was letting him even breathe near Keigo or their child.
It was funny. Toki knew of plenty of villains from the canon storyline. Overhaul, Shigaraki, All For One, they were all dangerous and she knew it on an intellectual degree. She feared them without having to meet them. But Dabi? Dabi was the only one she disliked. She feared him, too, but she understood him, and that was worse, because it made her hate his guts.
He was the most dangerous one, because… in some way, he was the Hero Killer’s spiritual heir. And in canon, he had accomplished his goals.
In canon… Dabi had understood the power to change society far more than Stain ever did. Stain ideas hadn’t gained notoriety on their own; it was the media coverage afterwards that made him the talk of the nation. That hadn’t happened in this universe (thankfully): even if his ideology was out there, it was his macabre life story that would have helped bring fame and new recruits to the league.
In canon, Dabi had realized it far sooner than the rest of the League. And he had used it, replicating the same strategy with a freaking broadcast. It was the last scans that past-Toki had read before being reincarnated, and it was what she remembered the best: Touya’s backstory, with the birth of his deranged mindset… and how he retold it. The way he had played with the public’s emotions, drawing them with a show of vulnerability about his scarred body, while stoking their morbid curiosity in serial killers and madmen. Violence got good rating, but empathy really sold things. And the cherry on the top had been his timing. Just as the country was plunged in a war the heroes hadn’t warned them about, when a rampaging villain had devastated cities, when people were terrified and angry… the news of Endeavor’s evil deeds had been utterly shattering.
Oh, heroism had its flaws. Toki was aware of them. Just because heroes rose to be pillars of order, did not mean that they still should be. Heroes were riddled with flaws, and their very presence warped the public’s morality. It made people willfully blind. Heroes were so praised, they were deemed flawless. And so, criticizing them was unthinkable. People weren’t judged by their action anymore, but by their essence. If whatever wore the label of hero must be good, then anything opposing them must be a villain, and thus, bad.
It warped people’s values and morality. Bag-snatcher were called the essence of evil by heroes who arrest them. Were they war criminals? No, they simply existed in opposition to heroes, and any semblance to objectivity was immediately lost. And if you can’t have objectivity, you can’t have justice.
But if you threw heroism out of the window? Then it would be chaos. You couldn’t destroy the main force keeping order in a society and expect it to still stand. You had to fix things from the inside, or accept their collapse. For Toki, collapse was out of the question, because it meant casualties, victims, people hurt, people scared. But for Dabi, collapse was the goal. He didn’t want to fix the problem. He wanted it to become a bomb, and use it to make Japan implode. He wanted things to burn, so he could dance in the ashes.
Yeah. Dabi was the main threat. He had the destructive tendencies of Shigaraki, who wanted to see the word burn and society crumble, and the sociopathic intelligence of All For One, with a dose of mad idealism like Overhaul. And unlike them, he accomplished his goals. All For One was patient, Shigaraki and Overhaul made mistakes, and Stain was directionless. But Dabi? Dabi had the skills, the ruthlessness, the drive, but most importantly he was aiming at the public. He didn’t want to kill a Nemesis, he didn’t strive towards an ideal. He wanted to destroy the Heroic Institution as a whole.
And that was unacceptable.
So Toki continued digging. Minor clues and blurred photos piled up in the little file she was building. She almost two pictures that were almost good, even if both of them were blurred. You could see Dabi’s scars in one, and part of his blue eyes in another. If she could find a few other photos, she could start using a facial recognition software…or maybe draw him, and ‘randomly’ notice a resemblance to Endeavor, maybe?
Anyways. Days passed. There were more arson cases, but they were further away from Musutafu. Dabi was expanding his playing ground. Still, he hadn’t made another move against Endeavor. Small mercies.
In the heroic word, nothing much happened. Some villains were arrested, some interviews were given. Several heroes whined about the new law authorizing Quirk use for everyone, saying it made it harder to distinguish how was a villain and how wasn’t. There was a debate about it. In Fukuoka, the Icarus Agency was going strong. Polls were predicting that Hawks would be the Number Two hero at the next Billboard Chart, in November.
Some people still wondered where was Quantum, who had been glued to Hawks’ side for years and had suddenly disappeared. But it had been months already, and most of the public’s curiosity had shifted to other topics. Still, Toki itched to go back. To patrol! To fight! To fly!
Gods she missed flying.
But well. She kept busy. Her PhD was progressing. She picked a thesis supervisor among her teachers, and he was impressed with her reports. Well, mostly she had picked him because he wasn’t too nosy. When her research about the Ion Dive became really technical, he was lost. Which was scary, because Toki had to progress on her own; but also exhilarating, because she was the expert there. She had visited the Ion Dive again, and she had a lot to say about the possibilities of using an Ion Dive powered space-ship. The good thing about her pregnancy was that, once forced out of heroics, she had a lot of free time to write.
She even once joked that maybe she would finish this PhD in one year and half instead of three years. Some days it didn’t even seems impossible.
She wrote poetry, too. It had been a while, but… when she let herself breathe, take a step back, and contemplate her place in life… somehow she never had trouble to make the words flow. It still felt so strange to prepare being a mother. It was so wonderful and so terrifying at the same time.
She had loved many people. Her mother, her father, even the crew. Mihoko-san, Hitoshi, even Dr Shinsō. Melissa. Hayasa-sensei. Kameko-san. Sachiko and the rest of the Disocrd server. All her friends. And Keigo, most of all. But she had loved them because she knew them. This child… she didn’t even know them, they were just a concept, unborn thing that kicked her ribs too hard and made her back hurt. And still, Toki realized she loved them.
There are all types of love in this world
but never
the same love twice.
She loved them fiercely, ferociously. Maybe they would have wings, maybe not, maybe they would have a Quirk, maybe not. And still Toki already cherished them with an intensity that brought burning tears to her eyes, and a tenderness that broke her heart to pieces.
Had Sayuri loved Toki like that? Did it felt like it would give her the strength to tear apart an enemy bare-handed? Did it felt like her throat tightened with the fear of not being good enough? Did she felt elated and filled to the brim with hope and uncertainty, too? Toki wondered. Had her mother loved her like Toki loved her own child? Had Meteor?
And if they had… when did they stop?
Toki hadn’t found it in her file, but there had been mention of a paper transferring Sayuri’s parental rights to the Commission. It had never been signed, never been scanned and archived, but there should have been one. Maybe the Commission had hoped to bypass a judge by having Sayuri sell them her daughter. But to make such a decision, they had to know Sayuri would be open to the idea. They had probably talked about it with her. It gnawed at Toki. Had her mother been ready to give up her daughter?
It shouldn’t weight on her so much. Sayuri would have been within her rights. Toki had betrayed their family. She had been a bad daughter. She hadn’t deserved any loyalty from them.
But it would never happen to her own child. Toki would never stop loving them, ever. Even if they turned out to be a spoiled brat. Even if they turned to villainy. Even if they hurt her or betrayed her. She would always love them. Even if the first step to this was to give them up to Mihoko-san. Toki would still love them, cherish them, protect them. She would listen to them. She would never hurt them.
She didn’t know how her own parents had grown up, if their less-than-stellar parenting skills came from their own childhood. But if it was the case, then the cycle would stop with Toki. She would make sure her baby would grow safe, and happy, and loved.
She swore it.
I almost thanked you for teaching me
something about survival back there,
but then
I remembered:
the ocean never gave me the gift of swimming.
I gave it to myself.
oOoOoOo
In mid-July, Hitoshi and Midoriya met Katsuki Bakugo. It went as badly as you could imagine. Canon-characters were popping everywhere, apparently.
Toki hadn’t been there, which was a shame. Hitoshi and Midoriya had been hanging out on a Friday, learning some parkour moves after school. They had walked straight into Bakugo when coming home from their training. Apparently Bakugo had started spitting threats and insults, and then, when Hitoshi had coldly told him to piss off, he had attacked them. First Hitoshi, who had fortunately dodged, then Midoriya. Hitoshi had stopped him, and afterward…
Well afterwards, Hitoshi wasn’t really sure about what he should do. Apparently Bakugo had said some concerning things. Like how Midoriya was a Quirkless piece of shit or how he should remember his lesson about being blown up, or how Bakugo was going to rip out his eyeballs or something graphic like that.
And more importantly, when Bakugo had attacked, Midoriya hadn’t even fought back! It was just mind-blowing to Hitoshi. He had seen Midoriya carry a fridge as big as himself. He couldn’t fantom why Bakugo’s threat had paralyzed him like that. So… he was concerned. He was drawing conclusions. Probably not incorrect ones. Especially since Midoriya was a nervous wreck about the whole thing.
So the next day, which was Saturday and thus collect-trash-at-Dagobah day, Toki went the beach almost vibrating with nerves. Because that had the potential to be canon-shattering.
When she had been younger, she had naively thought about swooping in and stopping Midoriya’s bullying. She had been a little kid then, dreaming of fixing every wrong in the world, and the bullying had always seemed like a closer, more familiar evil than big names villains she wasn’t equipped to handle. But then years had passed and… Toki had done nothing to help little Midoriya.
It made her ashamed. There had always been other thing to do, others priorities. She had… she had just plain forgotten him. Not just once, but trice. First when she had joined Naruto Labs. Then later when she had started patrolling around schools in Musutafu to try and look for him, years ago. Within a few months she had ended up distracted by Hitoshi’s and Melissa’s training, and she hadn’t even given poor Midoriya a second thought. And then, finally, when she had meet Midoriya at this very beach with All Might… she had been so focused on herself, on her pregnancy, on her plans for teaching… that she had completely forgotten about Midoriya’s backstory.
So yeah, Quantum was good hero, in general. But for Midoriya? She had been a very useless one.
But now, Hitoshi was shaking things up. Hitoshi had seen, Hitoshi had acted. So maybe, if Toki could add her weight to his actions, maybe… maybe she could make things better, somehow. Push Midoriya to change schools? Maybe pretend to be shocked, and ask someone to investigate his teachers and classmates? She didn’t know. She was just… very aware that this was a potential turning point. She couldn’t let it slip.
“So, what’s this about you kicking the ass of Midoriya’s bully?” Toki exclaimed loudly when they met up, as subtle as a sledgehammer.
“Your what now?” All Might sputtered, spitting out blood.
Midoriya looked like a deer in headlights. Apparently he hadn’t wanted to tell anything to his mentor.
“NOTHING!”
“It wasn’t nothing,” Toki pointed out. “Apparently Hitoshi used his Quirk, so I would like the full story to know if he didn’t use excessive force.”
She turned to her student, expectantly. Hitoshi threw a worried look to Midoriya, but obediently started recounting the tale, exactly like he had told it to Toki less than ten hours ago. Bakugo barging in, yelling, then attacking. It didn’t pain a good picture.
Listening to Hitoshi, Midoriya was very pale. Twice, he tried to interrupt him, looking both frightened and tense. Yagi, for his part, didn’t seem to like what he was hearing. At all. He was frowning heavily, and his usual smile was nowhere to be seen.
“… And then that asshat tried to explode Midoriya’s face, yelling insults and threats all the way, so I Brainwashed him,” Hitoshi concluded. “I made him go stand in a corner and think about what he’d done.”
Toki cackled evilly, then presented her hand for a high-five. Her student obliged, looking pleased with himself.
Midoriya was standing very still, pretending to be invisible. It didn’t help. Slowly, All Might turned to him. He looked increasingly worried.
“Young Midoriya,” Yagi said slowly. “Are you bullied?”
“… No?”
“Well that guy is a bully for sure,” Hitoshi snorted angrily. “He wanted to hurt you. He used his Quirk on you! And you froze. You just went blank and let him attack. Why does he think you’re Quirkless anyway? I thought your Quirk was super-strength?”
If possible, Midoriya went even paler. Yagi clapped him on the shoulder, smiling nervously:
“Ah ah, young Midoriya here is a very late bloomer!”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with being Quirkless,” Toki tackled on.
“Of course!” Hitoshi looked a little indignant.
Midoriya breathed a little easier. When he smiled, it was shaky. The Quirkless thing was probably a sensitive subject.
“Young Midoriya,” All Might said again, softly. “I won’t think any less of you if you have problems at school. In fact, I would feel better if you trusted me with it.”
“It’s fine!” the green-haired boy insisted, wide-eyed and nervous. “I’m handling it!”
Then he cringed, apparently realizing that it didn’t sound very reassuring. All Might’s frowned, looking troubled.
“I know very well how cruel children can be about Quirklessness. Does the boy harass you? Do… do the teachers let it happen?”
Toki blinked, surprised by All Might’s intuition about the teachers. Then she suddenly remembered Melissa. She had trouble with her teachers too. And she had told her uncle. He apparently hadn’t forgotten the lesson.
“P-please, don’t do anything,” begged Midoriya. “I don’t… I-I don’t want to cause trouble. Kacchan is… He’s so strong, and he’s wanted to be a hero his whole life, and I don’t… I don’t want to take that away from him.”
All Might opened his mouth, then closed it, looking torn. Toki almost offered to patrol around the school, do something herself, then she suddenly remembered she wasn’t Quantum right now, and Midoriya didn’t know. She bit her lip.
To her surprise, it was Hitoshi who spoke. He looked fairly pissed.
“Who do you think you’re helping?”
“W-What?” Midoriya sputtered. “I don’t…”
“For whose benefit are you saying that?”
“K-Kacchan. We were friends, and… He could be a great hero, he could save a lot of people, I know it!”
“Do you know what the purpose of a hero is?” Hitoshi snapped at him.
“To… save people?” Midoriya looked at All Might almost pleadingly.
Ah. That was Hitoshi’s angle. The Symbol of Peace had noticed, for he only nodded to Hitoshi approvingly. Emboldened, the purple-haired boy powered on:
“It’s to fight for those who can’t fight for themselves. To save those weaker than ourselves. That’s the entire job description. Your Kacchan sees you as weaker than himself, and he chooses to treat you like this. He wanted to hurt you. He tried to hurt you, with no regret, and he was gleeful about the pain he was dishing out! Do you think you’re doing future victims any favors, by crusading to give a bully a license to use his Quirk freely?”
“I…”
“Why do you think he’ll treat others any differently than he has treated you?!”
“It’s different for me,” Midoriya said in a small voice. “And he can change! He can be amazing. He has it in him, I know it. He just needs a chance.”
“He will never get that chance if he isn’t taught that cruelty is wrong!”
Hitoshi looked incensed. Without having to deal with something of Bakugo-magnitude, he had faced bullies in school, too. He had gotten better since he had befriended Neito Monoma, but for a time, it had been rough. Kids could be cruel and prejudiced.
Midoriya seemed torn. But finally, he gave a tiny nod. Maybe more to appease Hitoshi than to really bow to his arguments. But then, he turned to his mentor, and asked pleadingly:
“It’s not Kacchan’s fault. It’s just that nobody ever says no to him, and he has so much potential, the teachers don’t want to get in his way. I’m handling it.”
“You shouldn’t have to,” All Might frowned.
“I don’t want things to be blown out of proportions!”
He glanced worriedly at Toki and Hitoshi. Ah. He meant that All Might’s intervention into his school’s business would blow things out of proportion. Which… okay, fair. Toki frowned, racking her brain for a solution.
“It doesn’t have to be,” she said. “Yagi-san and myself both have connections. We don’t have to be involved directly. We can just ask our respective friends to point the authorities towards the school and say there seems to be a discrimination problem. It will make the teachers behave, and in turn they will make their students behave.”
“Those things take time,” All Might frowned. “If would be faster if I reported it myself.”
“You? By yourself? Yes, you could, and the poor teachers would shit themselves. Can you imagine?”
She sniggered and, after a second, Yagi joined her. It did paint a rather amusing picture. Hitoshi’s eyes narrowed in annoyance:
“Is that a joke? Are you known or something?”
“He did a shampoo commercial once,” Toki said, totally straight faced.
Midoriya let out a high-pitched noise of nervous laughter, and it set off All Might again. In the end, they were all laughing, except Hitoshi who was complaining about being left out of the loop.
Afterwards, while Hitoshi and Midoriya were sent to clean the beach, Toki and Yagi sat down in the sand to watch over them. Toki had brought a portable chair. She was feeling faintly defensive about it, but seriously, her back hurt. She felt like a little old lady.
They watched their respective students struggle against a rusted car for a few minutes. Then All Might let out a long sigh.
“Melissa’s teachers were unfair to her, too. I should have considered young Midoriya to face the same problem.”
“At least you acknowledged it,” Toki tried to comfort him. “There’s plenty of adults who don’t even consider what kind of stress kids face at school.”
He smiled ruefully. “I was part of that demographic until Melissa got through me. It took her time. I… I wasn’t very supportive at first. At least now, I can be.”
“You’re never done learning,” Toki grinned.
All Might chuckled. Then his gaze found Midoriya, who was gesturing animatedly while explaining to Hitoshi something about the car they had to move, and his eyes softened a little. Toki followed his gaze. Little Midoriya had really started to put on muscles. How long had he been at this, four months now? He looked like a nerdy bodybuilder. He was so geeky and short but also so ridiculously strong. You looked at him and it was all curly hair and bambi eyes, and he really was a very sweet person, and then he just ripped a door off its hinges. It was amazing.
“I will follow him home for a few days to make sure he’s alright,” All Might said. “Maybe it’s unnecessarily but I would feel… a little less guilty about not knowing about the bullying in the first place.”
Well, one thing was sure: when Katsuki Bakugo would be at Yūei, All Might would not be as well-disposed towards him as he had been in canon. The very fact that he was ready to walk Midoriya back home was proof of how rattled he had been.
In canon, All Might had seen Bakugo as Midoriya’s friend and rival, because of course, he had every faith in his successor, so why would he think that a little explosive boy was any threat to him? But now, well, it was different. The word bullying had been said. And most importantly, it had been heard, since in this universe All Might had gotten a lecture on the subject from Melissa.
“I actually don’t know how to tell local authorities to investigate a school,” Toki confessed. “As Quantum, I made a habit of patrolling near schools but when I happened upon kids harassing a classmate, I usually just gave them a warning. When I had to take things further, I just made a report at my agency. It was Kameko who transmitted it.”
“Oh, it’s actually sent to the police, and they launch an investigation. I could ask Tsukauchi to do it, I suppose. I will ask him to say it was an anonymous tip, and that way my name won’t be associated with the investigation. I’m not sure how to… not blow things out of proportions.”
oOoOoOo
That should have been the end of it. But as it happened, five days later, just as summer holidays were about to start, Bakugo took his revenge.
Toki hadn’t been there, of course, and Hitoshi hadn’t either. They got the story later, from Yagi, who spoke in clipped tones and seemed incredibly frustrated with himself.
Apparently Bakugo had cornered Midoriya in an alley and attacked him. Midoriya defended himself, but still got trashed. And of course: muscles or not, Midoriya had no combat training, no Quirk, and he was facing a human bomb. It was a small wonder he had only received second degree burn and a broken arm.
The fight had barely lasted two minutes, anyways. All Might had been making good on his promise, and was ‘coincidently in the neighborhood’. He had stopped the fight and brought Midoriya to the hospital.
As for Bakugo, well… Honestly All Might hadn’t really been thinking about him at the moment (he had been freaking out about his student looking like a burned toast), so he had fallen back on reflexes. Meaning: he had handcuffed him and left him there to be picked up by the police. Little Bakugo could have easily slipped the cuffs, Toki privately thought. But maybe he had been too stunned to think of it? Because apparently, the boy had been picked up by the police like a common thug a few minutes later.
Yagi was… not dealing well. It was one thing to know about Quirkless discrimination if you learned it from a speech delivered your well-educated, strong, privileged niece who could handle her crap. It was something else to see a younger kid being violently assaulted for it. Especially when you cared for that kid. Midoriya had begged All Might and his mother to not press any charges, and so they hadn’t. But like all heroes, All Might didn’t fare well when told to just drop something. Especially when it was an injustice.
“Young Midoriya will change school after the summer holidays,” he told Toki. “I will pay for it if needed. Maybe I should speak with his mother about it…”
“You haven’t met his mother?” Toki sputtered. “You’ve been training him for months now. Didn’t she give her permission? I mean, no offense but if a stretchy guy start hanging out around her son, she may get a bit worried!”
Hitoshi was cleaning the beach alone today. Midoriya was healed (thank gods for Quirk-healing!), but he was at home, with his mother fretting over him. Still, Yagi had gone to the beach as usual to meet with Toki. He was probably kind of lonely, actually.
“I don’t know how I can explain it to her,” Yagi admitted sheepishly. “Maybe I will use your cover story and say I was All Might’s secretary.”
“My cover story is great, thank you. Did you point the police towards the school?”
All Might frowned darkly. “Yes. And I didn’t ask Tsukauchi to pretend it was an anonymous tip either. I did it under my own name. I actually insisted on it.”
“… what happened to not blowing things out of proportion?”
“I think letting them know I was personally dissatisfied was very proportionate to the level of harm done.”
Well. Aldera Middle School was in deep trouble, now. Toki considered that for a few seconds, then decided it wasn’t her problem. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Let the assholes teachers stew in their anxiety. They probably deserved it.
“Isn’t Midoriya worried about changing schools?” she changed the subject.
Yagi frowned.
“A little, I suppose. He didn’t speak of it. He hurried to accept if that meant I wouldn’t take any action against the classmate that assaulted him.”
Toki raised an eyebrow: “You do realize that if Midoriya become a hero, he will face way worse than a middle-school bully, right?”
It’s not that she was encouraging him to get beaten up, but… Midoriya would get hurt. All heroes got hurt. If All Might freaked out that much about the bullying, maybe he had a softer heart that Toki had believed. Toki herself had been hurt prey badly during training, and she had grown stronger for it.
“I know. But Young Midoriya had such a faith and admiration in that classmate, and was so adamant in his defense! It’s just heartbreaking to see his love repaid with such hatred. He said…” All Might briefly hesitated. “He said that this Bakugo was a big fan of mine. That I am his inspiration, and he is training to be hero just like me. I can’t fathom how I could, somehow, inspire someone to hurt people. It’s just- so sad.”
He sighed. It rattled his whole frame like a tall wader in the wind. Toki reached out, and hesitantly patted his shoulder.
“Sometimes the people who admire us are not people we would admire ourselves. I mean, at least it’s just an overzealous middle-schooler, and not a serial killer?”
Because holy crap, the canon hadn’t really gone in depth about All Might’s feelings concerning the Hero Killer’s obvious worship, but that wouldn’t be easy to stomach either.
For a while, they both stayed silent. Then Yagi said quietly:
“I wanted to ask you what school your student went to. Maybe it would help Young Midoriya to have at least one friend there, to help him forget his classmate.”
“Good idea. Hitoshi goes to Tatooin Middle School. I can show you on a map. It’s on the other side of the city, though. You should try something like Nabu Middle School, it’s closer. And probably cheaper. There’s also Musutafu Private Middle School. They’re more expensive, but they have a super-strict non-bullying policy. I know, I patrolled there.”
“I will ask him. I don’t want to sound as if I’m trying to force him,” All Might admitted. “He’s already brokenhearted about how I went about the whole affair.”
“You did your job! Remove the threat, protect the victim. You didn’t even punch Bakugo in the face, even if you were tempted, I bet.”
“Ah, yes… but being arrested mean that Young Bakugo will have a police file with a mark for assault, even if there was only a warning. It will harm his chance to join Yūei. He will need to have a completely clean records otherwise, and impress them at the entrance exam. He may also have to pass an interview.”
That was unexpected. Bakugo, not joining Yūei? That was such a weird thing to imagine that Toki had a moment of cognitive dissonance. Where the hell would Bakugo go, if not Yūei? Shiketsu? Oh, man. Toki inwardly cringed, imagining his anger. No, she couldn’t imagine him elsewhere. Bakugo would spitefully manage to have the cleanest record he could, climb his way in Yūei, and… probably blew up when he saw Midoriya there too. It would be ten times worse than in canon. Toki really hoped that saving Midoriya from one year of bullying didn’t mean that his high-school years would become worse…
Bakugo was going to be sooooo mad. If his canon-relationship with Midoriya had been bad, well, now it was shaping up to be a nightmare filled with enraged resentment. After all, he would probably blame his arrest on Midoriya.
What a shock it must be for the kid, though. Katsuki Bakugo, arrested by All Might. Well, alright, arrested was a big word since he was a minor and had been released immediately, but still. It was kind of surreal. That certainly hadn’t happened in canon.
Toki would have imagined that she would feel gleeful when Bakugo got caught and punished. She would have imagined it would feel good, cathartic even. Like she felt guilty for not saving little Midoriya when he was an abused middle-schooler, so now she would get revenge on his behalf.
But she didn’t feel relieved. She just felt like it was a waste and things were spiraling out of control.
Maybe it was for the best that she didn’t feel happy about it. Because, if she had… If she had felt happy about, it would have been selfish. It wouldn’t have been for Midoriya, who had still been hurt. It wouldn’t have been for Bakugo, who would still deserve to be helped and to grow up. It wouldn’t even have been for Hitoshi and Melissa, who had both been bullied, and whose bullies had not been Bakugo. No, it would have been selfish: a way for her to give the universe the finger, to make her feel less guilty for her failure to act.
Hitoshi had acted, stepping in between Midoriya and Bakugo. All Might had acted, stopping a fight, saving his student. Even Midoriya had acted and tried to fight back. The only one who had done nothing, who had stayed passive and useless because she couldn’t find the right course of action, was Toki herself.
Gods, she was really losing her edge as a hero.
“You know a lot about Yūei’s procedures now,” she noticed. “A few months earlier you didn’t even know the qualification needed to become a teacher…”
He smiled brightly, and Toki was inwardly relived that she had managed to distract him from his dark thoughts.
“I’ve been educating myself! I use some of my free time to research how to be a better teacher. I’ve been making lessons plans, even.”
“Oh? What kind? And what did you plan on doing before thinking about lessons plans?”
“Ah ah, I was thinking of just throwing them in a battle simulation. Nothing like a fight to get the measure of someone! But I read this book about how dangerous Quirks can be when used by untrained teenagers, and so I thought I would make at least a few lessons in self-defense, target practice, how to restrain an opponent. Then I can let them loose.”
Toki had the weird feeling that, in canon, All Might hadn’t researched anything about teaching before his first day. Maybe it was a blessing that he was semi-retired now. At least he was putting in an actual effort to prepare. In canon, he had actually gone forwards with his Battle Simulation plan, hadn’t he?
“It sounds so interesting,” she groaned. “I envy you, you have no idea. It would be awesome to be a teacher.”
“I could ask if they have an opening, you know…”
“They don’t, and even if they did, I don’t want you to put your neck on the line for me. Hell, with the agency, maybe I won’t even have the time.”
“And the baby,” All Might rightfully pointed out.
Toki’s smile fell.
“I won’t… It’s too risky for two full-time heroes to raise a kid, especially so high in the ranking. Someone else will raise the baby. I will visit, but… yeah.”
“Oh, shit.” All Might immediately seemed horrified at having sworn in front of her, “I didn’t know. It’s very brave of you, of course.” He hesitated, then offered. “My own teacher did something similar to protect her family.”
Toki shook her head. It didn’t feel brave, not really. And even if she appreciated his confession about his teachers, which was a big show of trust, she didn’t feel comforted by it at all. She knew what had happened to the Shimura family.
“Let’s speak about something else.”
So they talked about school, about training plans, about other stuff. Then they went their separate ways. A few days later, when Midoriya came back with his arm in a cast and a subdued expression on his face, they all carefully avoided the subject of his fight.
Toki wondered what kind of ripples this would cause.
Oh, canon was well and truly gone. It had been fucked since the moment Toki had been born. Still, Midoriya’s fate could have been relatively unchanged. The catalysis in his life had never been Toki’s existence. It had been his relationship with All Might, his faith in heroes… and his bond with Kacchan. Bully or not, Bakugo had had a major importance in Midoriya’s character arc. Their hostility turned rivalry turned alliance had been extremely important in the manga.
Now that it was altered… everything was up in the air. Maybe it would make thing worse? Resentment and hostility would fester. Bakugo may feel revengeful. Hell, maybe he would be very hostile to teachers from now on. And his hero-worship of All Might would be shot. He would become way more bitter than in canon.
But then, maybe being to separate school, having a little distance, would make things better? Maybe it would force them to grow up. They both needed it. Bakugo had his issues, of course, but Midoriya did, too.
Toki liked Midoriya well enough. He was nice and clever. But she also found him too timid. His lack of confidence, his mumbling, his stubbornness, there were plenty of thing that were annoying about him. Not enough to dislike him, gods, he was just a kid, Toki wouldn’t do that to a kid! But it was enough for her to know that, in a classroom, she would probably find other students more interesting. A least Hitoshi had some sass.
Midoriya would be a great hero and she was very curious about how he would be in the fields. But he was also a kid, and… sometimes… he was both naïve and selectively blind. It was something she could understand but not really empathize with. How to put it? Ah, there it was: Midoriya was an idealist with tunnel vision. For example, he knew of the underground world and occasionally gushed over fascinating quirks like Erasure but he kept his focus firmly in the light, ignoring or rationalizing away the less appealing sides of heroics. Or at least, the ones he even knew about. Moreover, he had tunnel vision about society in general, too. Somehow he just glossed over the horrific prejudices others showed towards him. That kind of mindset wasn’t good. He didn’t mean it, but he ended up making light of similar injustices faced by other groups because if he could handle being treated like a second-class citizen then they should be able to handle it too. It was a very human flaw. Oh, Midoriya was brave, clever, devoted, noble and ferocious. But he was also reckless, self-sacrificing to a fault and willfully oblivious, his perspective twisted by internalized bigotry and hopelessness.
Bakugo’s problem was different. He didn’t suffer from a lack of self-esteem but an over-abundance of it: and the fear of losing this sense of self-importance that was so central to his identity. Well, at least Toki supposed so. She had never met the boy. All she knew about it came from her canon-knowledge, and the second-hand tales from Hitoshi, Midoriya, and All Might.
But from what she knew… Bakugo was a victim of his own talent and upbringing. He had lived his entire life believing he was special, and he was constantly praised for everything he did. It wasn’t until he met others who were just as strong, if not stronger than him, that this idea was shaken. And then everything collapsed for him. He was no longer special. He was no longer the strongest or the best. And since the entirety if his self-worth was centered around it, then even the slightest reality-check could feel like a shattering blow. Because if he wasn’t the Best, then… wasn’t he worthless?
Poor kid. His ego was stroked and stroked and stroked, and then it popped in the worst way possible. Being arrested by his idol must have been a terrible kick in the teeth.
Toki almost considered hanging out around Aldera Middle School after the holidays to try and see him, but… what would be the point? Bakugo didn’t need her help. The useful thing would be to slip a pamphlet about therapy in his mailbox, and even then, would it help? He would set it on fire, surely. No, Toki had no place interfering. And certainly no place near Aldera Middle School. She would just be a creepy adult sneaking off to observe kids that she had no business surveilling.
In the end, she would simply go on. The Midoriya-Bakugo case had started, exploded, and been resolved without any input or intervention on her part. Maybe she just wasn’t destined to meddle in.
Maybe she simply had other things to focus on.
(And maybe, somehow, it would come back to bite her in the ass.)
Notes:
Sooooo you remember, not so long ago, when i was thinking about fucking up Bakugo's future? Well, there it is. And i enjoyed every bit of it.
I like the fact that Toki didn't do a thing. It was all other people making the decisions. Sure, they were put in a position to make those choice because of Toki's interference, but even that interference was involontary. Toki wasn't a driving force here: everybody else was acting of their own volition, and reaping the consequences.
ANYWAY ! Yup the HPSC kidnapped Toki, and yup, it will have CONSEQUENCES. Also the moment where Meteor align the clues, the President's lifespan is going to be dramatically reduced, eheheheh.
-
Fic rec of the day !
"We Didn't Start the Fire" by ohmytheon, theonlymoosewhoeatssalad. The Plot: when Touya ran away from home at sixteen, he didn't turn to villainy. Instead, after a brief string of homelessness, he became a Quirk conselor at Yūei.
Touya's issues without the murder are great to read! I especially love the focus he has on teaching students that self-destruction and martyrdom are NOT things to aim for, and how pissed he is at All Might for not realizing the kind of message he send to those influencable kids x) Also, the reunion with the Todoroki siblings had me on the edge of my seat!-
I'm just realizing right now how radically different Wisdom is from my first draft. Or rather, from the idea i had of my first draf when i strated writing it. Holy shit it's absolutely not the same story anymore.
One thought provoking another,
I was thinking about heroes and villains and characters who are foils to each other. And it struck me that in canon, each character usually has two foils, or more.
Like, in canon Hawks has Dabi (the outcast, rejected by family, became the opposite of his father, manipulative, a liar) but also Twice (selfless, loyalty-motivated, very alone). He kills the later and the former nearly destroy him, and it's a metaphor for how Hawks is self-destructing. He killed his humanity and his duty will kill him.
Dabi's foils are Hawks but also Shouto, the Masterpiece. Shouto has Dabi but also Midoriya (the other legacy kid of the Number One). Midoriya has Shigaraki, but also Bakugo; and so on. That's what makes the story so rich and makes it feel so real. It's never the story of two dudes absorbed with a one-on-one fight, there's always interpersonnal connections, motivations connected to other people, and so on.Anyway, it got me thinking about the foils for my own characters?
I created Toki as a foil for Hawks in my first draft. And maybe her Quirk was a foil for Kurogiri. And then the fact that she's the hero daughter of a villain could also work into making her a foil for Dabi.
However at this point in the story, she's a foil for Hawks and Shigaraki, of all people. I know, i didn't expect it either.
She is Hawks, it makes sense. But Shigaraki? That took me by surprise. Except, not really? The "descendant of a hero became a villain" (or vice-versa), the "i was the one who reduced my family to dust and ashes", the "taken in by a powerful organization that stood opposite in morals to your family"... The "ran way in horror after seeing the consequence of destroying your house", and "somehow, hoped for punishement, and got reward instead." It's a mirror.
And this quote from Shigaraki that hit me right in the feels: "this house that my father build, kindly rejected everything i was". Holy shit if that's not Toki's whole childhood issues.Also, in a way, with her "super-power that came at the cost of her internal organs" and "goes on at an unsustainable pace" and "frankly overpowered" and "is going to face the biggest baddest threat ".... then isn't she also a foil for ALL MIGHT?!
As for Meteor, he's a foil to Toki and to Endeavor! Yes, that was kind of obvious. He's Toki's origin story and also Endeavor's dark reflection.
Anyway, that's just some of my reflexions today while posting this chap! x)
Chapter 35: Sunshine and storm's clouds
Summary:
Toki has her baby, turn 21, and immediatly after goes onto declaring war with the HPSC. And people still think Hawks is the one going too fast.
Notes:
MERRY CHRISTMAS EVERYONE !!!!
Here is a little Christmas present ! Enjoy !
Anyway! I just worke up from a looong car ride, my shoulder hurts, i have nothing to wear and i have to go to a party in 2h, but what i am doing? Posting this chapter x)
I have my priorities straight.
The theory that Mirio's Quirk isn't "permeation" but "quantum tunneling" comes from a fic i read a while ago, but i don't remember the title of. It was a conversation between Sir Nighteye and Midoriya, i think? No clue about the context. I read too many fics xDAnyway i was fascinated by that take so i screenshoted it, and now this headcanon is adopted xD
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
SUNSHINE AND STORM'S CLOUDS
August crawled by. It was too hot to do heavy lifting at the beach. Toki and Hitoshi started spacing out their visits. Nothing personal, they simply had other things to work on. Besides, things were a little tense between Hitoshi and Midoriya. They were still cordial, but there was something cold and stilted in their interactions now. A loss of trust.
Hitoshi had done the best he could, but not all victims were thankful to the heroes who stepped in to save them. The essence of a hero was, after all, to meddle in someone else’s business. Even if they had the best intentions. Toki tried to put herself in Midoriya’s shoes. Maybe he felt humiliated. Or angry. Or, most likely, sad. His friendship with Bakugo was definitively going down the drain. And the fact that everyone around him (his mother, All Might, Hitoshi…) openly disliked Bakugo, whom Midoriya still probably admired… well, that was a whole other can of worms.
Hitoshi didn’t regret intervening, and his unapologetic attitude certainly didn’t help things. He was almost aggressive about it, as if daring Midoriya to argue that he had been wrong.
For example, he had set as Midoriya’s profile picture on his phone as a picture of a sandy blond pomeranian with its head tilted back as it yowled. He’d photoshopped red laser eyes onto it and a caption that read DEKUUUUU. It was cringe as fuck. And hilarious, also: but maybe Midoriya wasn’t in a great place to appreciate the humor.
So it was simpler to let things time to cool down. Hitoshi didn’t need to build muscle mass like Midoriya anyway, and it was only logical to space out their visits to the beach. Toki still kept in touch with All Might, though. He was really bad at texting, but he always picked up on the first ring if called.
Toki was a little bored. August was hot and dry, and there wasn’t much to do besides reading (she had gotten a bunch of parenting books to peruse), writing (her PhD was progressing well), and getting into online arguments on the Discord server. Also, she was good at keeping secrets but… with her friends, it was harder than usual to not let anything slip. Sometimes she really yearned to share with the whole world the fact that she was going to be a mother.
At least Sachiko knew.
Weirdly, Toki also wanted to tell her other civilian-friend, the one she had lost contact with after graduation: the prickly, hot-tempered Sawayomi. Maybe it was nostalgia for the simpler days of high school? In any case, Toki half-heartedly started looking for Sawayomi online. Her friend had gone to Osaka after graduation, so maybe she could swing by and see her. It would be very awkward if she also met Inferno or Salamander there, but hey, it was risk she was willing to take.
About Inferno and Salamander, actually, Toki looked them up online and was pleasantly surprised to see that Mirio Togata appeared in several pictures on their agency’s social media. Not only had he secured an internship there last year, when Melissa had been at Icarus, but he also had a summer job there too. It boded well for his place in Inferno’s Agency, in any case. Toki would bet anything that, come September, Mirio would resume his work-study in Osaka.
Yūei students would have their work-study from September to November. Icarus had already planned on offering a spot to Nejire Hadō, a girl in Melissa’s class who had an energy Quirk. It was Toki’s idea. In canon, Hadō could fly. Toki wanted to see that in action. It was a shame that she would still be on maternity leaves. Keigo didn’t exactly have the patience to teach someone… although, maybe he would make an exception for a girl who could fly.
Melissa had already decided that she wouldn’t go back to Icarus.
“It’s not against you! But I want to meet other heroes. I need to learn how to work with people who favor firepower over speed, also. If I don’t, Togata is going to beat me in the finals. We’re already tied in the ranking.”
“Mirio Togata?” Toki brightened. What a coincidence! “Inferno’s intern?”
“He’s more Salamander’s intern, but yes. He’s… well, he’s my rival. The top students of classes 2-A and 2-B. His Quirk is nearly unbeatable, so I have to work on my polyvalence.”
Toki had had a lot of time lately. And one of her main hobbies had always been Quirk analysis. It was only logical to focus on the Quirk of characters… or rather, people… who would soon become relevant. She had analyzed Togata’s, but also Sir Nighteye’s, Endeavor’s… and she had dug in her memories to pre-analyze the Quirk of the future class 1-A. Really, at this point, she was almost over-prepared.
Should she tell Melissa, or would it be unfair? Oh, why the hell not.
“Don’t throw the towel too quickly. I think I know how to beat his Quirk.”
“WHAT?!” Melissa grabbed Toki’s shirt, almost shaking her in her eagerness. “Tell me, tell me!”
“Fine, fine,” Toki snorted. “He’s the boy who can phase through stuff, isn’t he? I re-watched the footage from your Sports Festival.”
“Yeah, his Quirk is Permeation…”
“Exactly. He isn’t ‘phasing’ through objects. His particles aren’t moving at a speed that can move through a wall. That doesn’t actually work. When he turns impermeable, he’s probably quantum tunneling.” Seeing Melissa’s blank stare, Toki waved a hand: “Basically, it means it’s a wave function with amplitude and wavelength. The easiest way to stop him would be to affect the wave function somehow. I won’t give you a whole speech about what quantum even is, but… Basically, if his Quirk is quantum tunneling, the whole thing is a house of cards: if you start messing with variables something is going to change. It’s not exactly easy to affect the wavelength, so it would be easiest to affect the amplitude by inputting energy. Anyone with a Quirk that generates energy could do it, whether through light, sound, heat, fire, or electricity.” She shrugged. “You would have to find the exact input needed to disrupt him, so it will require a lot of testing. And probably special equipment. But it can be done.”
Melissa just stared, open-mouthed. Toki frowned and tried to think back if she had left any holes in her reasoning, but no, everything was quite sound. It had been a while since she had the chance to poke at quantum theory, and she had really enjoyed analyzing Togata’s Quirk to find what made it tick.
Melissa finally recovered, and managed to speak.
“You know, sometimes I’m so blinded by the fact you’re Quantum, Kickass Superhero, that I forget you’re a nerdy Ravenclaw first and foremost.”
“Aw, thank you! So, do you know which agency you will go to?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe someplace where the main hero has a fire or an electrical Quirk, to learn how those kinds of heroes minimize damage in urban areas. I’m also tempted to go with Gang Orca, because his agency is very involved in anti-discrimination campaigns. I guess I’ll see who accepts me.”
“I’m benched until November, but if you need a push, you can write to Kameko and she can get in touch with whomever the HPSC’s agent is at the agency of your choosing.”
“Couldn’t you call Kameko directly? It would be faster.”
Toki paused for a second, weighing her words.
“No. I have… things to clear up with the HPSC, before, and I don’t want your work-study to be tangled with that.”
Melissa narrowed her eyes: “Meaning?”
“Legal stuff. About my parents. Don’t worry about it. Besides, I’m pretty sure it’s confidential.”
Melissa dropped it, but Toki could see in her eyes that she wouldn’t forget this conversation. Sooner or later, it would be brought back to the table.
Time went by, slowly. Next year Hitoshi would join Yūei, so he was preparing for that. He also wanted Toki to train Monoma with him. She told him she would think about it. She had met Monoma as Toki Hoshizora, after all, and maybe she shouldn’t have. If she was to meet him as Quantum, either as Hitoshi’s mentor or as a teacher at Yūei, she didn’t want him to connect the dots and realize Quantum was Hoshizora.
At least she had met him before she started showing, so Monoma had no idea the pro-hero Quantum was going to have a baby. There was that, at least.
She had to admit, she was curious about training with Monoma. She was about ninety-percent sure he was the son of Thunder Thief, her sidekick back at Icarus. They had similar personalities, didn’t they? Thunder Thief was funny, clever, observant… kind of a douche sometimes, and of course he hit on anything with a pulse… but he was also a good teammate. From what Toki had observed, Monoma was very much the same. Also, he was Hitoshi’s friend, so that was another point in his favor. Toki loved Hitoshi like the little brother she never had: if he saw something in Monoma, then the boy had to be worth knowing.
Besides, Monoma’s Quirk was Copy, wasn’t it? Toki could help him with analysis, to better understand how people’s Quirk worked so he could copy them better… but also, she kind of wanted him to copy her Quirk.
It would be so tremendous to train with another warper. Her type of Quirk was so rare. Toki had cultivated her fighting style around her mobility, and… she couldn’t help but feel giddy at the thought that, maybe, she could try to pass it on. Especially to someone who wouldn’t just have something similar, but who would use a perfect copy of her power!
Melissa told Toki, laughingly, that she was starting to acquire a pack of students. Toki told her to mind her own business and that she hadn’t made her decision. Judging by Melissa’s and Hitoshi’s huge, mocking smiles, they had no trouble guessing what her decision was going to be.
Toki was a bit transparent in her enthusiasm about having a warper to train with…
Anyways. In the last days of August, Toki was starting to be as round as a balloon. Her delivery date was drawing near. She paid a last visit to Erika the Medical Heroine, who assured her everything was fine. The baby was in perfect health. The echography showed nubs on their back, which mean that the baby would almost certainly have wings later.
Toki was nervous. It was going to be… soon. Less than a month to go. Mid-September had said Erika, but then, she could be wrong. Perfect Diagnostic was, well, perfect, but variables could change. It was so close now. And so scary.
Toki knew that her mother hadn’t died of birthing her little brother, but she could have. She could have, so easily. Toki had read and watched videos about women giving birth, and it was a bloody, messy process, with screams and pain and bodily fluids everywhere. She wasn’t queasy around blood, she couldn’t be, not with her work: but the idea of giving birth still scared the crap out of her.
Toki wrote her will. She wasn’t proud of it, it seemed like an admission of weakness, but she wrote it anyway. If she died, she still wanted someone to at least threaten the Commission of making her kidnapping public so they would set Keigo free. Maybe he didn’t want to take the risk on his own, but… the main thing the Commission held against Toki was her identity. If she died, then, well, she didn’t really care if her father learned her fate.
She also wanted the Shinsō to be her child’s legal guardian if Keigo couldn’t take care of them. He probably wouldn’t, if he stayed a full-time hero. Of course, Keigo had already agreed on that plan with her, but… it was better to have it written, just in case the HPSC decided to mess with them again.
And finally, if she died, she left a letter to All Might with all the information she remembered about the League of Villains, All For One, his goal, the Hero Killer, Tomura Shigaraki’s identity: every scrap if intel that could help in the coming war. If she died, well, nobody could ask her how she had learned those things… and she didn’t want her knowledge to die with her.
She almost wrote a letter of goodbye to Keigo. But in the end, she didn’t. Last words were for fools who hadn’t told enough. If she died, Keigo wouldn’t need a letter. If he really written words to remember her by, then he would only have to open her poetry notebook to see her soul barred on the pages.
Metaphors about death
are for the poets
who think ghosts care about sound.
When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.
Toki didn’t want to die. She was so afraid to die. She was afraid of the pain, of the uncertainty, of the loss, of leaving everything and everyone she loved. But at least she knew if she didn’t survive this, then she would die without regret.
Oh, there were things she wished she could take back. What if she had denounced her parents to the police differently, or not denounced them at all. What if she had investigated the HPSC’s custody of her sooner. What if she had told the doctor about her chest pains early on. What if she had insisted on her mother getting better care at the hospital. What if she had been more careful with birth control. What if, what if, what if. But in the end, she wasn’t sad about how she had ended up. She liked the path she had walked so far. The only thing she felt sorry about was how her death would probably deprive her father of ever getting closure, but maybe it was useless to wonder about it: maybe he had made his peace with her disappearance long ago. And besides that…
She didn’t regret becoming a hero. She didn’t regret meeting Keigo. She didn’t regret having this baby, either, whether it would a Hinata or a Hinako or a Hinawa.
She had been happy. Didn’t she have a right to be happy?
Summer ended, and September began. It was hot and heavy, and slowly, Toki’s due date was approaching. Two more weeks. Her appointment to the hospital had been made. Toki’s room in Mihoko’s apartment had slowly been converted into a nursery. Diapers and plushies and baby’s clothing had been prepared. It felt very close, and very real, now.
But it hadn’t happened yet, and Toki distracted herself the best she could. The kids started school again. Hitoshi went back to Tatooin Middle School. Midoriya was transferred to Nabu Middle School. And, of course, there was the next Provisional Hero License Exam. It was set for the 3rd of September. Hitoshi had been signed up, as a freelance candidate sponsored by a hero. He was very determined to pass, this time.
Also, he had gotten his mother to agree to adopt a cat after the exam. There was a lovely little calico in Hitoshi’s favorite cat café who was looking for a new home, and Hitoshi had his eyes set on her for months now. Her name was Missy.
(It was short for Missile Launcher. Toki didn’t know who had picked that name, but it was brilliant.)
Toki had seen her often: when Hitoshi dragged her to this cat café, Missy always jumped on his knees to purr and beg for pats. She was adorable. And she had the exact same coloring as Kameko-san! It was hilarious. The same shade of black, white, and orange, with the same patches on her ears, even.
Toki was almost tempted to take a picture of Missy to text it to Kameko. She was sure that the cat-lady would have replied something like ‘am I a joke to you?’ with a string of crying emojis.
But Toki was still mad about the kidnapping stuff, so she kept the joke to herself.
Anyways. The exam was now very close by. Toki wanted to accompany Hitoshi there and watch the test, like last time… but Keigo called her the day before, telling her she would better stay at home.
Apparently Inferno had contacted him and told him that Endeavor would, somehow, participate in the exercise. Endeavor and some members of his agency. Of course, the exam by itself was very confidential so Inferno didn’t know exactly who would participate but considering Meteor was supposed to stay within ten feet of Endeavor at all times, his presence was non-negligeable.
He may even participate.
“Who the hell in their right mind would let Meteor run around a bunch of children?!” Toki fretted.
“He’s not going to attack them, jeez,” snorted Keigo on the phone, “the Commission and Endeavor wouldn’t let him set foot there if they weren’t sure he’s going to behave. Besides, it’s not such a crazy idea.”
“It’s not?!”
“It’s been something like five months now since he joined Endeavor’s agency. He’s been shadowing him, helping him, but he doesn’t have a Hero License. Maybe letting him participate in this exam is a test, to see if he could obtain one in the future.”
“Meteor with a license? That’s fucking bonkers. Do you hear yourself?! He has a body-count in the triple digits!”
“And he has been in a rehabilitation program for the last ten years. He has helped take down a human trafficking ring with Endeavor. He’s not a villain anymore. He’s Endeavor’s ally and he has a very powerful Quirk. It’s not illogical.”
“What about all the people he killed?”
“What about all the people he saved?” Keigo fired back. “That’s the whole point of rehabilitation. He gave enough to society that society is willing to give him a second chance no matter his past deeds. You can’t advocate for more rehabilitation and then balk when one of the rehabilitated criminals make you uncomfortable.”
Toki tried to picture her father as a hero, and slammed against a mental wall. Her father, the last time she had seen him, had been levitating above a crushed building, eyes blazing, long hair floating behind him like a dark banner. There had been smoke and dust billowing everywhere, rubble raining down on heroes, and the screaming…!
Even a decade later Toki could close her eyes and felt like it had only happened yesterday.
Meteor was wild, dangerous. Devoted and loving, yes, but also violent and merciless. He had always been like that. You can love a monster, and it can even love you back; but it doesn’t change its nature. Meteor was a killer. He would always be a killer. She could barely imagine him out of jail, even if it was under Endeavor’s constant surveillance. But to imagine him free? And not only free, but given power and legitimacy by a hero license?! It seemed so impossible. It wasn’t the Ryūsei Taiyōme that Toki knew.
But then… it had been so long. Did she even know him anymore?
Meteor had always been loyalty-driven. Loyalty to himself first and foremost, true: his comfort, his freedom, and his wealth. But loyalty to his family, too. His wife, his friends. Now he had lost all of that, and Toki didn’t know what motivated him. Comfort, freedom, wealth, like before? What was the point for him, when he couldn’t share it with the people he loved?
But then, maybe Toki was projecting. She was the one who was incapable of living alone, and couldn’t let go of her attachments.
“Even if the Commission accepted to give him a Provisional License- which they won’t- then what would be the point to make him compete against teenagers?”
“Well, there’s two tests, right? A combat test and a rescue test. With young students. Meaning they’ll have him face clumsy, inexperienced opponents, to try and see if he can put on some kiddy gloves. And then there’s the rescue exercise to see if he can manage this side of heroics. After all, any telekinesis Quirk is a boon in a rescue situation. The Commission wouldn’t let him join a real rescue, so why not use a test?”
Toki bit her lip. It made sense, indeed. But still, the thought of Meteor so close, in the same exam as children, as Hitoshi and Melissa… It made her tension skyrocket.
Yūei would go through the exam whether Meteor was here or not. And it was too late to withdraw Hitoshi’s candidacy without looking suspicious. Damn it. Should Toki tell him?
“I don’t like it.”
“I figured you wouldn’t. But you decided to let him get out of prison and start a new, redeeming life. That? That is part of it.”
“I still don’t like it.”
“Honey, I don’t know what to tell you. You opened this can of worms. Now lie in it.”
She snorted. “I’m not sure that’s how the saying goes, but thank you for the image.”
So Toki stayed home when Hitoshi went to pass his exam. He would team up with Melissa and her friends from class 2-A, since Yūei would send all of its second-year students to pass this exam. Hopefully that would be enough to help him pass through the combat-oriented test. Hitoshi was well-trained, well-armed, and he had a strong Quirk. But his powers weren’t geared towards frontal assault, not like all those heroes students with flashy emitter Quirk.
She had wondered if she should tell him about Meteor. But in the end, she decided against it. What good would it do, to distract him before the test? She had promised to tell him if he passed his provisional license, not before. And besides, he would tell Melissa immediately, and… well. Instead of one distracted student, Toki would have two. Hell, maybe Melissa would even try to approach Meteor and fight him in the middle of the exercise!
In the end, Toki worried for nothing. Both her students texted her afterward. They had done well. Melissa had passed the exam and gotten her provisional hero license. Hitoshi hadn’t passed, but he had managed to last the whole test this time. He had fought against plenty of people, which had been the goal in the first place… and he had fought with plenty of other hero students, which was an added benefit. New experiences were always useful.
Hitoshi also whined that half of class 2-A thought he was Melissa’s little brother, and she had done nothing to disabuse them of this notion. That was pretty funny.
Toki would have hoped that Hitoshi would use this chance to approach Eraserhead, but her student had kept his distance. Not that Toki could blame him. In canon Eraserhead had taken a shine to Hitoshi and mentored him, igniting something of a hero-worship in the teenager: but in this universe, Hitoshi didn’t need Eraserhead. He already had a mentor figure in Toki… and moreover, he already knew of the homeroom teacher of Melissa’s class from Melissa herself, and he wasn’t impressed. Melissa painted Eraserhead as a gruff, unfriendly guy who taught his students by putting them down any chance he got, and who may even be a little of a bigot. Really, the man had completely messed-up his first impression.
Who knew, maybe Eraserhead would make a better impression on Hitoshi when he would be in his class.
But that was a problem for a later time. Now, she had to focus on congratulating her students. Soon enough, they would be heroes in training, with Toki to guide them. Well. Once she would go back to hero-ing… when her baby would be born. It wouldn’t be long, now, and Toki didn’t know if she felt more elated or more terrified.
Two days later, she went into labor.
oOoOoOo
Giving birth was a long, messy process. Even with a peridural, there was sweat, blood, and tears. Nobody liked to speak about all the bodily fluids, the hot flashes, the dizziness, the panic, the racing heartbeat, the fact that you shat the bed mid-way into the procedure, the contractions that rearranged your organs, the time it took. Toki had contractions for nearly ten hours and then she spent six hours in the delivery room, screaming and swearing and having the worst time of her life, ever. But hey, on the plus side, this long time meant that Keigo had time to fly all the way from Fukuoka to Musutafu. The birth was five days earlier than expected, so he dropped everything and flew all the way there in a panic, like… well, like any first-time parent being called to the hospital by his very nervous pseudo-stepmother.
He managed to get there after flying for three hours at full speed. Mihoko-san grabbed him and pushed him into a closet so he could change in his civilansona’s clothes, because Hawks could not be seen with Toki for fear of giving away her identity. Later, when they would recount the whole thing to Toki, she would laugh until her belly hurt. Hawks, the Number Two hero, frenetically stripping down in a broom closet and shoving his feathers in a duffel bag!
But anyway. He was here in time to hold her hand through the worst of it. Toki almost broke his finger bones.
“Push, Miss, push!” encouraged a midwife.
“WHAT DO YOU THINK I’M DOING, BRAIDING MY HAIR?!”
“I can see the head!”
“Oh god,” squeaked Keigo.
“About fucking time,” groaned Toki.
“One, two, three… Push!”
Yeah, apparently her politeness had fled out of the window with each contraction. She yelled and pushed some more.
She was so scared to die. The baby hurt, and she was terrified it was tearing her apart, just like Hikari had butchered their mother. But even if that was the case, she wanted the baby to live. She would fight for it, fight tooth and nail and never let go.
But she didn’t die.
She didn’t die, and after nearly seven long and painful hours of labor, her daughter slipped in the world on September 10th: healthy, red-faced and screaming, with a few turfs of blond hair, and two naked little wings on her back.
Toki cried when she held her daughter. It was part-relief and part-exhaustion. The baby was so light, so little. She was so warm, too, and Toki immediately loved her, loved her like her heart was going to burst. Maybe it would. She felt like a nerve rubbed raw, and she was so exhausted she could barely see straight. Keigo’s cheeks were wet. It was the first time Toki saw him cry. He seemed stunned, handling the baby as if it was a live bomb, or a crystal sculpture that could fall into pieces at the slightest shock.
“Have you picked a name?” a nurse enquired.
Their daughter opened her eyes then, and Toki nearly gasped. Bright orange eyes with specks of gold, fire-colored, like glowing embers. Meteor’s eyes. Her eyes.
“Hinawa,” Keigo answered for her.
Hinawa Taiyōme. With the kanji for wings at the end, just as they had talked about. A perfect name for a baby with sun eyes, little wings, and two heroes for parents.
Welcome to the world, Hinawa Taiyōme.
Afterward, well, Toki slept a lot. She had strange, feverish dreams. It had happened a few times during pregnancy, but never with this intensity. She dreamt of her own mother, mostly. Of being alone, feeling trapped and anxious: then suddenly realizing with stomach-dropping dread that it wasn’t her mother who was missing, it was her daughter. Then she woke up in cold sweat.
Dreams like this chased her anytime she went to sleep, the first days. And she slept often. She felt exhausted and sore everywhere. She had read a lot about what it was like to give birth so she could prepare but well, it was rough. Her emotions were all over the place in a way they hadn’t been during pregnancy. Everything hurt downstairs, since delivering a baby the size of a watermelon was no small thing. She took painkillers and used a cold pack. Keigo stayed with her for a full day and even slept in the cot prepared in her room, but the next day, he had to leave to fly back to Fukuoka. He couldn’t disappear on Icarus any longer.
After he left, Toki was well enough to be sent home with her daughter. They went back to the Shinsō’s apartment. Hitoshi held the baby, marveling at how small she was. Melissa visited, as did Sachiko. They all gushed about little Hinawa and showered her with gifts. Even the cat, Missy (a soft, fat, fluffy ball of adorableness) was fascinated by the baby. The kitty often tried to climb into Hina-chan’s crib to sleep with her, purring like an engine.
Toki had a hard time letting her daughter out of her sight. She still felt clumsy, frightened of doing anything wrong, but… she had been afraid of not loving her daughter enough, once she was born. She had read it was common with post-partum. But she loved her baby, there was no issue about that. She felt protective and ferocious, and it was good thing that Mihoko never tried to hog Hinawa to herself: the thought that she was going to give away her daughter made Toki feel like something in her chest was being ripped apart.
Hinawa was just so tiny. So fragile. So sweet, and soft, and miraculous. She slept a lot, as all babies did, but when she was awake she kept babbling and chirping and gurgling like a little chatterbox. She was too young to recognize people yet, but she was smart. She looked around her in never-ending curiosity. When she cried, which was fairly often, it was in Toki’s arms that she calmed down the quickest.
And she was so pretty, too. She had Toki’s eyes, like amber and copper and gold, but a shade lighter. Toki had always liked her eyes, even when they had been an unwelcome reminder of her father: it was her most striking feature after all. But on a baby, on her baby, it was different. Hinawa really deserved the name sun eyes. And she had Keigo’s hair, too, blond and fluffy, going in every direction like sunrays around her little face.
Toki devoured her with her eyes, as much as she could. She tried to remember how she fit in her arms, how she sounded when she squealed or mewled, how she smelt. How bright and almost golden her eyes were. How fluffy and soft her hair was. Toki still couldn’t believe it sometimes. She had made this.
She read books about parenting. About being a parent without a child, too: how to go on when you left your baby behind, whether it was adoption or… something more sinister.
Toki didn’t want to grieve. She had no reason to grieve, Hina-chan would be fine, really, and Toki could visit whenever. But she was abandoning her chance to raise her daughter herself, to embrace her family. Wasn’t it something to grieve, too? It sure felt like it. Or was it the post-pregnancy hormones that made her feel too on edge? She felt restless, alternating between tenderness, anxiety, and frustration. Frustration towards herself mostly. She hated being this sensitive, feeling so inadequate.
She hated that she had decided to give up her daughter to Mihoko-san, and she hated being so attached already. She hated being so afraid of messing things up, she hated that her parents had set such a bad example. She hated being too soft and exhausted to go back straight to hero work, and at the same time, she felt relieved for having an excuse to spend time with her daughter.
She prepared a training schedule. No Quirk use until at least the end of the month, then progressive training until she got back to top form by the end of October. As for the physical training, she started with yoga stretches and tai-chi katas, some light running after a week, then progressively harder and harder tasks until she could go back to her usual form. Her muscles had shrunk. She was still agile and flexible, thanks to her daily stretches, but there was no way she could bench-press Keigo now. And she wouldn’t get back her muscle mass before November. It made her feel faintly disgusted by her own body and its weaknesses. She was used to being in total control of her physical abilities. And all right, allowances had to be made for pregnancy, but she wasn’t pregnant anymore, was she? So why was she so fat and weak? It took too long to get back to normal!
Toki made a weaning schedule too. She couldn’t let… she couldn’t let her body become used to caring for a baby, after all.
Toki liked being organized, liked having schedules and neat little calendars. But writing down that one gave her a strange feeling of incredulity. Like some part of her was dissociating. She knew it was for the best. Hina-chan wouldn’t even be very far, she could visit. Toki planned on visiting often, so her daughter would never ignore who her parents were! But Toki and Keigo… they were both giving up their right to raise the baby as her own child.
Toki was giving up Hina-chan’s first babbling, her first time crawling, her first words, her first steps, her first discoveries.
She had to hold her daughter close and cherish the time they had together, because it wouldn’t be for long.
Keigo stayed in Fukuoka for a little over a week, before finding a window of opportunity and slipping away back to Musutafu. Usually when he came to visit Toki, they went out, disguised in their civiliansonas: they both liked open space too much to confine themselves inside a building. But this time, they stayed in Mihoko’s apartment all day. Melissa visited briefly. So did Sachiko, and it was the occasion for Toki to finally introduce her husband to her oldest civilian friend…
But other than that, they just stayed there. Sprawled on the bed, feathers everywhere, alternating between staring at baby Hina-chan as if she was going to disappear, and talking a mile a minute about all their plans for the future. Keigo was mesmerized by the baby, almost as much as Missy the cat. They made for a strange tableau: the calico cat and the winged man, both lying on their bellies on the rug, watching a sleeping baby with fascination. It was straight up adorable.
(Toki snapped a few pictures, for posterity.)
Time went by. October came and Melissa celebrated her birthday with a bunch of friends from her class at Yūei. Toki went back to Dagobah Beach with Hitoshi, to help Midoriya clean up and catch up with All Might. To her delight and great embarrassment, he had prepared a package for her, with Quantum-themed and Hawks-themed plushies, pajamas, and soft baby blankets.
He knew Toki was going to give her daughter to someone else, so he didn’t push. But he inquired about her daughter’s name, her health, if she had everything she needed. It was remarkably thoughtful of him. It was clear he never had children, but… he knew what it was to push away those you loved to protect them. He knew what it meant to give away the chance of a peaceful, normal life, and mourn it, but still make the choice.
He had done the same with Melissa, Toki remembered. And maybe with Melissa’s father, David Shield. All Might loved them, he really loved them, but they were just… normal people. Toki wouldn’t deal them the insult of calling them civilians, not when David Shield had spent his youth chasing villains by All Might’s side and when Melissa was a hero in training herself: but compared to the massive force of nature that was All Might, the Symbol of Peace, unmatched in strength and raw power… they were very small. Normal. Fragile, even.
It made sense that All Might had pushed them away. It made sense that he was terrified to drag them down to his word. Heroism wasn’t pretty, when you started digging deep enough. It was blood, sweat and tears, and the constant stomach-churning fear of putting a target on the people close to you. No baby deserved to grow up like that.
All Might understands me, she thought, unbiddenly. In this, he understands me probably better than Melissa, Sachiko, Inferno, Mirko, Hitoshi or even Mihoko-san. He knew what it is to push away what you love because everything you drag down with you will die; and he know what it is to love them anyway, to keep on smiling, to keep on hoping. We’re not so different.
Oh gods, Toki suddenly realized. She was friends with All Might.
She hadn’t seen it coming. It had just happened so quickly. One moment she was nursing a ten-years-old grudge and trying to bash his skull in with part of a residential building… and the next they were hanging out on a dump, watching their respective students struggle against garbage, chatting about their heroic adventure and debating about their favorite books. It was a very odd friendship, Toki had to admit. They didn’t have many personal things in common: different pastimes, different values, and even different friends. But in the end, they fought for the same thing, didn’t they? And they have given up so much to be a hero, to stay a hero.
They shared that, at least: this silent understanding, this quiet grief, this unyielding resolution.
Maybe that’s why she told him.
“Remember when Tsukauchi-san said I was kidnapped?”
She had checked that Hitoshi and Midoriya were far enough to not eavesdrop. The two boys were still a little terse around each other, but it seemed to get better. Oh, they certainly both held a grudge, but they managed to work well together. Good. That was a good experience to have for a hero. You don’t have to like someone to work with them. Sometimes you didn’t even need to trust them.
“You said you weren’t,” All Might frowned.
“Yeah. About that. I checked and I think the Commission forgot to get legal custody of me. I don’t have proof, but… apparently no judge ever examined my case. I’m planning on confronting the President when I’m back on my feet. If it goes South, well… you should know.”
The Symbol of Peace narrowed his eyes. Toki could guess what he was thinking. She kicked him in the shin:
“Don’t. I don’t need your help or your interference. It’s my business and I can handle it.”
“Kidnapping is a crime!”
“And as a hero, I’m handling it,” she retorted a little sharply.
“If you go against the Commission…”
“I’m not going against them, I’m not stupid. Besides, they are what hold heroism together. If I declared war on the President, I may be able to take them down but society as a whole would be collateral damage. You know that some situations require a delicate touch. I can’t tear down the whole institution, and I don’t want to, but I need to know what has been happening… and stop it from ever happening again if my suspicions are proven true.”
Toki had never thought the sponsoring program was a bad thing before. On the contrary, she had loved the concept. Saving kids from their villainous parents, what a great idea! But now she wasn’t so sure. There was too much room for abuse in this system. Of course she knew of plenty of people who had gone through this training and now led happy lives. But how many had been unhappy at Naruto Labs? Toki thought about Shirayuki’s coldness, Inferno’s careful eyes, or Recovery Girl’s resignation with the President’s schemes, and she couldn’t help but wonder.
Did the end really justify the means?
Toki and Keigo hadn’t disliked Naruto Labs. They had been challenged and taught and raised higher than their peers. Couldn’t they have all that elsewhere? In a normal family, a normal school. They could have had a private trainer if they wanted, but they wouldn’t have been so isolated from their peers, so drilled with exercises that Toki had collapsed from a heart attack at age fourteen. Those scars would never go away.
No, the end didn’t justify the means; because the means were all you got to keep. That’s how Toki was left with betrayal, bitterness, scars, and unanswered questions.
Maybe… Maybe the sponsoring program had been a good idea, maybe it had once been born of good intentions. But it was also going too far now. Like many good plans that, after simmering a while in the hands of politicians, ended up corrupted. If the Commission was that worried about young children being influenced by villains, they should push for adoption into nice, loving families. And then, later, let the kids make their own choice. Freely. Toki had chosen heroism, sure, but she intellectually knew that she had been raised for it. Without going as far as calling it grooming, she had… she had interiorized a lot of expectations, during her years in Naruto Labs.
“If you need help…” All Might let his sentence trail off.
“I don’t. I can take care of myself.”
He shook his head, gently.
“I know you’re strong. But just because you don’t need help doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have any. It’s not a weakness. It is not something to be ashamed of.”
Toki shrugged, feeling a little defensive. He was right, of course, but… this subject hit too close to home for her to be as professional about it. Having support as a hero was different from needing support about her childhood issues.
“Fine. You’re right. I’ll keep it in mind.” Then, after a pause: “Thank you.”
They stayed silent for a few seconds. Then Yagi side-eyed her:
“Did it… Did it play a role in your decision about your child?”
Toki hadn’t expected that question. She wasn’t certain what the answer was. Then she shook herself because…
“Yes, actually. Even before, I knew I wouldn’t raise Hina-chan myself but, after realizing that maybe my strongest allies were untrustworthy… well, it made me a tiny bit paranoid.”
“I thought so,” All Might sighed. “I told you my teacher gave up her child to the foster system to hide him, didn’t I? But she trusted the administration to find him a loving home. She trusted the system. I was thinking that you have fewer reasons to do so. But you found someplace hidden?”
“Hidden?” Toki tilted her head. “Not really. It’s not obvious, of course. But I didn’t erase her identity or ship her to a remote island. And the people who will raise her are my friends, so I’ll manage to stay in her life.”
“Is it safe?” All Might hesitated. “I realize it’s not my business, but the point of having a secret identity is to keep things, well, secret.”
Toki thought about her file, so blacked-out and confidential it looked like a CIA report. She wondered if Endeavor had looked into it. She wondered if Meteor knew.
She wondered if she could take him in a fight, if he tried to come for vengeance.
“Sometimes there’s safety in ignorance. And sometimes ignorance isn’t enough. I would rather keep a way to become her last line of defense, if it comes to that.”
oOoOoOo
At the end of October, Toki had nearly recovered her athletic figure. She had started Quirk training again and snuck away on weekends to spar with Hitoshi and Melissa. One time, during the week, she also enrolled All Might in a crazy chase across a ghost neighborhood. Not a fight, gods no, they would have destroyed the city: just a game of cat and mouse to work on her speed and reflexes. Warper or not, Toki knew of only two people who could match her in speed, and one of them was in Fukuoka.
Keigo had visited almost every week, true enough: but when he came, they never trained. They usually just hung out with little Hinawa. They talked, they joked. Keigo told her about patrol, the agency’s gossip, new tricks he had learned, the music he listened to. It was nice. Almost like a vacation.
But vacations didn’t last forever, did they? Soon enough, Toki was itching to get back to work. It would be heartbreaking to leave Hina-chan, but she felt like a caged lion in Musutafu, while Icarus was soaring in the rankings. She needed to get back in the action.
Quantum was set to make her return in mid-November. But before that, she had something very important to do: confront the President.
What a daunting task. Just thinking about it made her stomach roll with anxiety. She dreaded the confrontation (the cold stare of that old witch was very unnerving) but she dreaded the answers she would get even more. What if there was a judge’s decision, and Toki had been doubting the Commission for nothing? Did that mean that her loyalty to the hero world, that her friendship with Mera-san, Kameko and Hayasa-sensei was as shallow as this? And… if it turned out that there wasn’t a judge’s decision… did that mean that everything had been a lie? Why had the Commission done it?!
They had no problem securing the care of other kids. And what about having the parents sign away their parental rights, like Keigo’s mother had done? Maybe Sayuri wouldn’t have wanted it, out of spite, but Meteor surely couldn’t wait to get rid of his traitorous daughter. Damn it! If they hadn’t had the chance to negotiate with him during his first years of prison, when he was mad with rage, they could have at least made him sign it when he had entered the rehabilitation program.
Why, why, why?! Toki couldn’t understand it. And worse, she wondered who had known, all this time. Mera-san? Kameko-san? Hayasa-sensei? That asshole Okamoto? Who had known at Naruto Labs? Who had smiled and patted her head among the researchers, knowing she wasn’t a precious pupil, but something picked up on the side of the road?
She had been supposed to be safe there. That was why there were laws and rules about children, so their caretakers had to protect them. So there was someone responsible. But if during all the time, the Commission hadn’t been responsible… if they had stolen her… everything she remembered was suddenly painted in such a grim and scary light.
When she had nearly died, they could have left her on the side of the road like garbage. There had been no legal ties between them and Toki Taiyōme after all. Everything she had believed secure, like her place at Keigo’s side, could always have been taken on a whim. She had never been safe. She had never belonged.
It made her paranoid. Because if the HPSC had lied about that… was there any point in their whole acquaintance where they had told the truth?
So. On the last day of October, Toki turned twenty-one. She celebrated with Hitoshi, Mihoko-san, Dr Shinsō, and baby Hinawa. Then, in the evening, she put on her hero costume, and steeled herself.
In a few jumps, she had warped herself in the Commission’s headquarters. She had manners, so she didn’t appear inside the President’s office, but she did materialize right in front of her secretary and nearly made him shat himself.
“Is Mrs. President available? Actually, I don’t care. Tell her I’m here, and not happy.”
The secretary relayed the message, wide-eyed. The President’s door opened within a minute. Good. Sometimes Genmei-san liked to make people wait, just because she could: but Toki was not in the mood to play that sort of game.
She entered with a spring in her step and a smile that had a little too many teeth in it to be friendly, before letting herself sprawl on the chair facing the President. She hadn’t bothered closing the door behind her, and she saw the witch’s eyebrow twitch. Good.
“Good evening, Quantum,” the witch said rather coldly. “Glad to see you’re ready to resume your duties. What brings you here… unannounced?”
The Genmei-san didn’t ask about the baby, which was for the best. Toki may have thrown the whole desk to her face if she had.
“Glad you asked!” Toki chirped with false cheerfulness. “I’m looking for something. But since it seems well-hidden, I thought maybe it was confidential, so I would better come and harass you in person.”
The President looked wary. “What is it?”
“Oh, nothing terribly compromising. Only the judge’s decision about my placement here.” She paused, watching the President for any reaction. “Or the document signed by my mother ceding custody to the Commission. Or any other legal documentation giving the Commission custody of me, really.”
There was silence. It went on for several seconds. Then the President got up and went to close the door herself.
Toki didn’t move from her seat.
“If you don’t say anything,” Toki announced very calmly, “I’m going to think there isn’t one.”
The President went back to her chair. Her face looked carved into marble. It was, in a way, all the confirmation Toki had needed. Damn it.
“Why did you come here, Quantum?”
Because I wanted you to look me in the face and tell me I was wrong, she thought. But apparently you can’t even manage that.
She leaned back in her chair, instead, and said with false cheer:
“See, I had a rather odd conversation with someone, recently. About hoops that need to be jumped through when giving away the custody of a child.”
There, a little misdirection tossed in. Just in case the President started getting ideas about looking for Hinawa. Better to get in her head now that the baby was already lost in the foster system.
“Without that documentation,” Toki continued, “an adult taking the care of a child in their own hands could be charged with kidnapping. And did you know that the judge always has to speak in person with the child in question, if the kid is older than five? But then, I had no memories of ever meeting a judge. So I checked my file. I even dug a little and checked Naruto Labs’ files.” She paused, then continued, lower: “There was no judge’s decision. You never even opened a file with the foster system. You never had custody of me, did you?”
The old witch didn’t even blink. But she didn’t deny it, either.
“What is your point?”
Toki gritted her teeth. No, she had to stay calm. “I want to know why. Then I’ll make a decision.”
She didn’t make the President the insult of telling her what the decision would be about. Genmei-san knew as well as Toki did that what was at stake was much higher than Quantum’s trust in the Commission. This secret could make many things fall like a house of cards.
Like the trust in a heroic society, for example. State-sanctioned Quirk-trafficking was way worse than an abusive father with a Quirk marriage, and that had been enough to topple the public’s trust in hero society in canon.
“Very well.” The President took a long breath, an unexpected sign of gravity. Then she began:
“The Commission can take custody of a child if their current guardians are unable to take care of them. But the child must first be placed in foster care: an orphanage, a group home, or a foster family. It is only if foster care is deemed unsuitable that the child is removed. It sounds reasonable on paper. Unfortunately, proving foster care inadequate requires one to pass a trial period: usually about four months. For some risky cases, it’s too long. In several instances, some children sponsored by the Commission just… vanished.”
“They ran away,” Toki guessed.
“In some cases, yes. In some other, they were kidnapped.”
Toki’s heart missed a beat. If it was true, then… then it was maybe (probably, even) All For One. The foster system was overflowing with kids whose guardians didn’t want them, and who had powerful, undesirable or unsuitable Quirks.
That was the whole reason why Toki had been afraid of being sent there in the first place, after all. Her whole reason for joining the sponsorship program.
“This system worked,” the President continued, “but it wasn’t secure enough for some of our candidates. Children who were under the influence of older siblings, or such. Young kids with highly desirable Quirk, easy prey for Quirk trafficking rings. Or… flight risks.”
Yes, Toki had been the poster child for flight risk. And Keigo had been, well, exactly what a Quirk trafficking ring would have looked for: a pretty face, a beautiful Quirk, barely a legal name, and no tie to any real family.
“In those rare cases, there was a shortcut.” The President said lowly. “For the parents to sign away their parental rights and directly appoint the Commission as the child’s guardian. Then, there is no need to pass in front of a judge, unless a third party decides to challenge the parent’s decision. But since it rarely happens, drafting a contract with the parents is the preferred option.”
“You did it with Hawks. With Inferno, too.”
“Them and a dozen others. Probably just as much as we had from foster care, like Recovery Girl, Shirayuki, or our latest student, young Serpentine.”
Serpentine? Ah. Toki took a second to understand, but it must have been Sumire’s new hero name. The girl with serpentine grace, yellow eyes, a sharp smile and gleaming fangs, that she had seen in Hitoshi’s first License Exam. Well, it was a little on-the-nose, but pretty enough.
Toki breathed out, slowly.
“You tried to draft a contract with my mother, didn’t you.”
“Yes. It would have been irresponsible to give you up to foster care when you had agreed to come with us of your own free will. With Hawks for company, there were fewer chances that you would run.”
Toki understood with an internal jolt that even that had been planned. Because of course it was. Her friendship with Keigo, the first thing she really had for herself only, had still been something to use for the Commission. How else the HPSC was supposed to lock up a warper, besides giving her an incentive to stay?
“A contract was drafted and presented to your mother. I went there myself, after meeting you for the first time. Unfortunately, your mother didn’t accept our terms.”
“What?! What does that mean? What did she say?”
“At first she simply refused to sign. Then your role in your father’s arrest was revealed, and she wavered. She renegotiated the contract several times, always pushing back the signature date. Each time we changed the contract, she found something else to disagree with. She was trying to gain time. We negotiated for weeks. Then it turned into months…”
“And then she died.” Toki said evenly. She felt like she was very far away. Her mom hadn’t sold her out. Her mom had refused to sell her out, and she had held on until her death. And then…
“And it was too late to put the case to a judge,” Toki realized out loud. “Because it would mean admitting that you had me for months, that you had even made the police close the missing person case… without any legal right.”
The President didn’t even try to deny it.
“In truth,” Genmei-san sighed, “it had been too late to put the case before a judge since the moment you stepped inside Mera’s car. Genryusai-sama expressly forbade to turn to a judge now, the timing being even more damning. Instead, we tried to approach your father.”
Toki’s stomach dropped out. “He knows?”
“No. He had been told nothing before. And he was told nothing, then, as soon as he became apparent that he wasn’t open to negotiating.”
That… wasn’t what Toki had been expecting.
“What?”
“He refused the idea of ceding his parental rights to anyone. He had just been told of your mother’s death. He was furious and… extremely possessive. Even pointing out that you were behind his arrest didn’t sway him. The mere suggestion of giving up your custody made him fly off the handle. We stopped the negotiations immediately, so as to not leave any clues to our identity, or your presence with us. It was clear that Meteor would not be an ally. In his own words… You were his daughter and he would not give you up, not to any villain, hero, or well-intended soul.”
Toki tried to swallow around the lump in her throat. Suddenly, her eyes burned. Oh no, she couldn’t start crying there. She wouldn’t cry here. And still she felt it like a wave climbing, climbing, cresting up, ready to break and crash. There was an unarticulated scream lodged somewhere in her throat and fighting its way out.
My father wanted me. He didn’t hate me. He didn’t want to get rid of me. He forgave me. Mom had just died, he was in prison, and still, he loved me…
Dad…!
“And you couldn’t accept that,” Toki said lowly instead of screaming, roaring, or shattering in a thousand pieces.
“Weren’t you happy with the Commission? Didn’t we take good care of you?”
Toki laughed. It was a sound so devoid of joy that she didn’t recognize her own voice.
My Dad loved me. I let him rot in jail and he loved me, while everyone I knew and trusted around me was lying. They were never my friends. I was never safe. Everything was a lie.
“Yes, such a good care. I trained so intensively that I damaged my health irreparably before turning fifteen. Then you made me pay for my medical care, putting me in your debt for years. But we all got what we wanted in the end, so it was worth it, wasn’t it? You got your masterpieces, capable of defeating the Symbol of Peace. The future Number One and Number Two heroes at your beck and call, unable to refuse or even negotiate anything you asked. Oh, I bet you were happy then.”
Her voice almost broke then. But she swallowed back the sob, or maybe the scream, that wanted to tear itself out. Instead, she spat:
“And what did I get, besides scars?! I suppose I got a job, except this job exists to pay a debt that I shouldn’t even have in the first place. Oh, and I got a new identity to protect me from my father, but you carefully refrained to tell me he wasn’t out for my blood! I erased who I was for nothing!”
The President didn’t move. She looked like she was carved from stone.
“You could always quit being a hero.”
“That’s where my life is,” Toki hissed. “You made damn sure of that. I can no more walk away from the consequences of your lies than you!”
There was a silence. Toki gritted her teeth, thinking that maybe now the old witch would say she was sorry. Or maybe she would argue that she wasn’t to blame. Genmei-san could be so convincing. Maybe Toki could even believe her. Towards whom would she shift the blame? Maybe towards Mera-san, who had brought Toki to Naruto Labs and not to the closest police station. Or Kameko, who convinced Toki to come in the first place. Or Sayuri, for refusing to sell her parental rights. Or maybe the fault laid with Genryusai-sama, the one who had given the orders? That would be convenient.
“The system isn’t perfect,” Genmei-san finally said. “Assumptions were made about your parents, and they mislead us. Afterward, it was too late to regularize your situation and…” The President pinched her lips, then admitted rigidly: “and so nothing was done. It was a mistake. Several people played a part. There is no need to look for a scapegoat. What’s done is done.”
“And you never thought about the consequences.”
There was a pause. Then the President breathed in, slowly. “No. I didn’t think anyone would find out. But since you have… You should remember. People do not have to like each other to fight a common enemy. They don’t even have to trust each other.”
“No, but they have to know they can rely on each other to do their part. And you failed that. Even if you don’t care about human decency or about the trust I had in you as a person, then you should remember that I’m a hero, and you committed a crime and then covered it up.”
The President gritted her teeth and said nothing. There was no possible answer to that. Toki shook her head, feeling disgusted.
“Who knew?” she asked abruptly. “Hayasa-sensei? Mera-san? Kameko-san? Okamoto?”
“… Okamoto was the one who made the police close the case, so he knew. And… It’s not impossible that Mera started suspecting it a few years later; it would explain why he felt responsible, and insisted on being your guardian in Musutafu. But no one else knows.”
Toki closed her eyes and inhaled slowly, trying to slow her raging heartbeat. She wanted to scream. She wanted to hit something. She wanted to burst into tears, and she wanted to do anything but that. She felt dirty, furious, betrayed. She felt horrified; she felt guilty.
Her father had been a murderer. She hated that. Maybe she had hated him, once upon a time. It had been too long, she didn’t remember. But he had also been her father, so attentive and caring. Half the act of loving someone was the realization that you were loved back, and even before leaving, running, fleeing, betraying, Toki had known it would tear her heart in two.
Can you hate someone for what they have done, but still love them for whom they had been?
It applied to her father, but to the Commission, also. It was so unfair. She had trusted them. She had liked them. Loved them, sometimes, maybe. They were her family, the only family she had. But that wasn’t true, was it? Her dad… He was dangerous, but he hadn’t hated her. Even at the lowest point of his life, he hadn’t hated her, and she hadn’t known. She had forsaken him and he… he had never forsaken her, never.
Seconds ticked by. Toki just breathed. There was fear in her. Anger, too, and shame, and rage, and a whirlwind of screaming and confused feelings she would probably never untangle. But there was a strange sort of calm, too, slowly descending on her.
For the first time in her life, maybe, she was the one who held all the right cards. She was the one to decide.
Freedom is what you do
with what has been
done to you .
Well, now Toki was free. She saw her shackles and her chains while she had been blind to them before; and more importantly, she had the key. She was the one in a position of power. The Commission had messed up, deeply messed up: and now Toki held them by the throat.
They should be grateful, really, that she had loved them so much, for more than a decade. If she hadn’t, maybe her anger would have been much more merciless.
“I heard you,” she finally said. “So here’s my decision. You wronged me. You wronged all the people trusting you organization to uphold heroic ideals and hold the heroes accountable, when you couldn’t even do that yourself. But you also wronged me, personally, and you know there is no possible escape from that. So you’ll have to make amends.”
The President narrowed her eyes. Toki smiled grimly:
“We’ll start with the money. The huge amount of money that I owe you, for my new heart. And for the agency, too. All of that debt is to be recalled. The payments Icarus already made are to be restituted to our agency.”
The President clenched her jaw, but retorted in a soft tone:
“I didn’t realize your trust was so easily bargained.”
“My trust? No, Mrs. President. The money is only to stop your wrongdoings, and my completely justified anger, from getting any worse. You’ll have to work a lot harder than that to regain my trust.”
The President didn’t seem to like that very much. “Half the debt belongs to Hawks, not you.”
Toki only shrugged.
“What’s mine is his and what’s his is mine. For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health: you know how it goes.”
Genmei-san didn’t show any surprise. Toki hadn’t expected her to. Eloping had felt like freedom, but the secret couldn’t stay one very long, not with who they were.
“It’s quite a lot of money,” the President finally said.
Toki clenched her jaw. Her voice took a threatening tone.
“Maybe I wasn’t clear. You kidnapped me. You kidnapped me, lied to me, made me pay you back for the money you spend hiding your crime, and told me I should be grateful for it. Paying me back is the very least you owe me. So you’ll do it, and be very thankful that I’m willing to not take your head instead.”
“… Is that a threat, Quantum?”
Toki scoffed:
“I don’t need to lower myself to that. We both know why it’s better to settle this in silence. I’ll keep working with you; maybe I’ll even trust you again in the future. But only if you prove to me that what happened was a mistake that you want to correct.” She narrowed her eyes. “It’s a kindness that I’m doing you, really. In this… mutually assured destruction… you’re the one who would never get back up if word got out. So don’t. Test. Me.”
The President stayed unmovable for a few seconds. Then she inclined her head slowly, like it was painful. It didn’t seem as much as a bow as an admission of defeat.
“Very well.”
“Good,” Toki snapped, standing up. “I’m far from done, just so you know. Especially about the sponsorship program.”
“This program saved you,” the President said flatly. “You would have refused to join foster care if we hadn’t offered it as an alternative.”
“So? Does that make up for the fact that you abused it?”
“You can’t have it both way, Quantum.”
“You can’t either!” Toki exploded. She swallowed back her rage, trying not to raise her voice. “You can say it’s a tool to help poor little kids and then use it to lock them up and seal the exits, it’s wrong. So yes, we’ll be speaking about the sponsorship program again, when I don’t want to punch something and we both had a little time to think about how to salvage the mess you made of what this program was supposed to be; because you proved yourself unworthy of the trust I gave you when I joined it.”
The President’s eyes flashed briefly with fury. But she couldn’t very well refuse Toki’s affirmation, could she? Instead, the witch only pursed her lips.
“The money will… take a while to be gathered. You may unbalance heroic economics altogether. And so close to the Billboard Chart too…”
Was she trying to win time? Or to make her waver? Or to find a way to hide that blunder from the HPSC’s accountants? Well, in any case, it was too bad for her. Toki was out of patience. She barred her teeth.
“Good. Your predecessor never learned his lesson about turning heroes into his personal assassins until one of them killed him. Maybe you’ll learn your lesson sooner about preying on little kids.”
Genmei-san reared back as if slapped in the face. Toki didn’t wait for her reply. She crossed the room in four long strides, threw open the door, and warped away. She took care to warp with the maximum of air around her, just so the flash of her disappearance was extra-bright.
It was only after fourteen jumps, taking her as far away from the Commission’s headquarters as she could without leaving the city altogether, that Toki stopped. She sat on a rooftop and closed her eyes as hard as she could to stop tears from spilling over. Blindly, she reached into her pocket and pressed the small button on the side of her phone.
It stopped recording.
Well. Now, I know.
Notes:
I hope you liked it !
Toki getting some ammo against the HPSC. I'm so proud. I'm not sure yet if this will ever be used but i just love the idea of Toki having the President admitting a crime on tape.
Also, did i name the SunWings baby, litterally "SunWings" (Hina meaning Sun, and Wa meaning Wings)? Yes, i did x)
This is the best moment to start reading Meteor's story, by the way! The link is here!
"Snapshots of wisdom" is updated with new fanarts!!!
Chapter 36: The third student
Summary:
Damnit, she had really adopted another kid. First Melissa, then Hitoshi, then him. Two was a coincidence, but three was a pattern.
(a.k.a. Toki adopts another kid. She can't even claim she didn't mean to.)
Notes:
Welcome back !
Wow, it's been almost a month since i updated this fic... but let's get back to it !
For those who follow Wisdom of the fallen, we're going to catch up to Meteor's story and go further. Mention of the hero killer will be made. But of course Toki doesn't know what *you* know about what really happened in Okayama... x)
Anyway ! Without further ado, here it is !
Enjoy !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
THE THIRD STUDENT
Quantum returned to hero work in early November. It was almost a week earlier than expected, but she made of point of saying she was going stir-crazy back there and that the doctor had given her the all-clear. It was enough for people to start thinking she had been in a fight recently, and from them, they had no trouble believing she was only back from a long undercover mission. Her reluctance to change in the agency’s dressing room, claiming she had some scars, only cemented this idea.
Toki had no new scars, of course. Only a few extra pounds and some stretch marks. But you know, misdirection was an art.
It felt weird to leave Hina-chan behind. To leave Musutafu behind; her daughter, but also her friends, and the Shinsō family. Even All Might! Getting Icarus back was bittersweet, in a way. Toki could never have it all. If she had freedom she had to give up safety if she had safety she had to give up power, and if she had power she had to give up love. She had to choose, she always had to choose, and just pray her choice wasn’t the wrong one.
This choice wasn’t so bad, she hoped. She could sneak some short visits to Hinawa. And she kept with her what she loved the most: her job as a hero, her astrophysical studies, her agency, and Keigo.
She had seen Keigo a lot during her leave of absence, so it wasn’t like they were reunited after months of separation. But still. She loved patrolling with him again, bickering all day, doing paperwork together, sharing glances and brief touches, understanding each other with a single look in the middle of a villain chase. Living together, sharing meals, and complaining about chores. Sleeping together. Just existing side by side, leaning on each other for comfort or reassurance any time they wished… it was worth more than gold. They had been dating for years now and been in love for nearly a decade and it still took Toki’s breath away. He loves me, he loves me back, and he’s here. It was still so extraordinary, and so wonderful in the fact that it was ordinary, now.
Home wasn’t the place where you’re from, but the place where you’re wanted. And Toki never felt at home anywhere else than by Keigo’s side. It felt like a small part of her heart that had shriveled up like an unwatered plant was suddenly blooming again.
Anyways. Quantum was back. Her agency was overjoyed. Life resumed as usual. It was as if nothing had changed. But it had. In many, subtle ways, nothing would ever be the same as before.
The agency had hired two more sidekicks and three secretaries to help Hawks shoulder the workload in Toki’s absence, so Toki meet everyone, shook hands, and scheduled patrols to see how they would work out together. They could keep all the sidekicks and use that additional manpower (now that Quantum was back) to extend their patrol. Icarus Agency already dominated the whole prefecture, but now they could probably dominate the whole island.
Icarus’ budget shot through the roof when their monthly payments to the HPSC stopped. They also had a large influx of money coming in, with the Commission giving back the money already paid. Well, part of it, anyway. It was a lot of money, and even the mighty HPSC didn’t have that kind of cash lying around. Still, Icarus ended about three times richer than usual, and their accountant was delighted. He’d thought it was the secret bounty of an S-ranked villain or something. Everyone got a raise.
And afterward, Toki had a couple of difficult conversations to have.
First, there was the touchy subject of the Commission. She had already told Keigo (because of course she had told Keigo, who else was she supposed to pour her heart to?), but there were still two more people who needed to be in the known. So she convoked Hayasa-sensei and Kameko in her office and told them flat-out about her discussion with the President. The fact she had actually been kidnapped, how the President had known and covered it up, how she had found out. It… made an impression.
Hayasa-sensei took it the hardest. He looked mad enough to spit nails. He had always been a little too straight-laced, a sucker for rules. He trusted the system and he loved that the Commission was safe and above board, honest, maybe that was why this betrayal hit him so hard.
Kameko wasn’t as angry. She was dismayed and shocked, but not angry. Or, well, maybe a little, on Toki’s behalf. But mostly she was anxious about being an accessory to kidnapping and worried about the repercussions. Typical. Kameko had never been a great fan of rules anyway. She was a selfish person, ambitious and chaotic, both doting and ruthless, as capricious as a cat. It was no real surprise that, without openly condoning the President’s action, she didn’t really see what the big deal was.
But it was a big deal. How would you feel if you learned that the people who had raised you had actually kidnapped you? Even if they weren’t your parents, you still had entrusted your safety to them. You have given them your confidence, your affection, your trust. You had been shaped by them, and you had allowed it because you thought they only had your best interests in mind. But if everything was built on a lie? On a crime? Toki felt as if the very foundations of her word had been shaken.
She didn’t know where to begin to fix it.
Because she had to fix it. She couldn’t turn on them or run away as she had with Meteor’s crew. She was a hero. She was Quantum. Her life was here. There were so many parts of her existence (her job, her income, her passion, her friends, her husband) that were so intertwined with the HPSC; she could never make a clean cut. She had to save this mess, or let it destroy her. Those were the only two options, and there wasn’t really a choice at all.
So there was the second difficult conversation: the one with the President. Last time Toki had stormed out of her office without stating any terms or establishing boundaries, because… well because she had to leave before she lost her temper and said something she would regret, mostly. But this situation had to be talked about. They couldn’t be at each other’s throats, they had to work together. And so, they had to talk.
Damn.
This time Toki didn’t storm in. The President’s secretary called her office to schedule an appointment. There was a lot of groveling involved. It was a bit below Genmei-san’s dignity to bow and apologize, but she had no problem sending her secretary to do it. Anyway, when Toki went to their peace talks, she found the building almost deserted. The vast meeting room was empty save for the President… and Mera-san.
Toki suspected Genmei-san to have brought him in as a mediator of some sort. After all, Mera had a soft spot for her. Toki remembered what the President had said, that unthought admission that had escaped her just a few days ago. Mera-san had suspected the truth. He hadn’t said anything, and part of Toki resented him for that, but at least he had tried to find out what had happened.
Still, Mera-san looked very uncomfortable in that meeting.
“For obvious reasons, the meeting is confidential,” He coughed. “The goal is to reach today a compromise to restore Quantum’s trust in our organization. As it is too late to rectify the… grave oversight that severed this trust in the first place, the only thing we can do now is offer compensation and work together to find a way for those wrongs to never be repeated.”
Toki gave a terse nod. The President, as stone face and inscrutable as ever, said flatly, “Would it help if I offered my resignation?”
“Not really,” Toki snorted. “I don’t think you’re capable of walking away from power. Besides, resigning is giving up. You have to mop up your mess, not run away from it.”
The President didn’t twitch or blink or show any reaction. Toki had often wondered how she would look angry, resentful, regretful, or sad. Genmei-san wasn’t inexpressive. Toki had known her for almost fourteen years now, and she had seen her annoyed, kind, and thoughtful. But she had never seen the President so inscrutable, and she realized that it was because she had never seen her on the defensive. It made Toki wary.
“Well,” Mera-san cleared his throat. “The first step is this: seeing where it went wrong, and how we can stop it from happening again.”
Toki set her jaw.
“It went wrong when you failed to secure custody from my parents and decided to cover it up instead of making things right. But we can go a little further and say it went wrong when bypassing the judge’s approval entirely became an option. Or maybe it went wrong when picking children for training became something you were cool with.”
“Would you have preferred we left you there?” Mera-san said softly.
“I was a kid,” Toki fired back. “I didn’t know any better. But… You have to realize the potential for abuse in the system! You have a secret training facility geared towards children. If this red flag was any bigger it would be a blanket.”
“The facility was supposed to welcome teenagers,” Genmei-san pointed out rigidly. “Hawks and you were the exceptions.”
“Were we? We weren’t the first little kids you sponsored, and we won’t be the last. The problem with exceptions is that they start becoming the norm after a while. And that can’t be allowed.”
Mera-san blinked. “You aren’t opposed to the sponsorship program?”
“Of course not. The alternative would be to let kids fend for themselves or to shuffle them into foster care where they will deal with way worse than some muscled training. Sure, maybe they won’t be abused. Maybe they would be happier being left alone. But if they grow up poor and with powerful Quirks, it will be easier for them to become villains than anything heroes or than even normal citizens. Teenagers don’t always make the best decisions.”
It was what had happened with Meteor. It was what had happened with Sayuri, too. When Toki had been very young, pleading for her mom to tell her why she couldn’t just stop being a villain, Sayuri had helplessly shrugged and said it was just what she was used to.
Meteor, Sayuri, the whole crew, they could have changed. They weren’t evil. They could have saved themselves. But they had been used to this life. They had liked it; they had grown comfortable with it. And that’s how it had ended up with dozens of people dead. Because somewhere, somehow, it had been easier for them to take the road of villainy because no one had offered a hand in help.
“So, what do you propose?”
Oh, they were trying to turn the argument back on her. Toki leaned back on her chair, unimpressed. She was the wounded party here; she wasn’t the one who had to defend her ideas.
“It depends on what you’re offering.”
Mera-san and the President exchanged a lightning-quick glance. Toki had the sneaky suspicion they had expected her to raise a bigger fuss, maybe oppose the sponsorship program completely. Which was ridiculous, of course.
It may have its issues, and Toki may be angry, but the sponsorship program had been her home. She had met Keigo there. It would break her heart to see it gone.
(Although the program had broken her heart once. Pun intended.)
“Well,” Mera-san said slowly, “there should be an age limit on the sponsorship program. No child younger than eleven would start training in Naruto Labs, for example. And a new system should be put in place for younger children. Some alternatives to foster care. Or simply a group home liaising with the Commission, and willing to deal with difficult cases.”
“The age limit should be twelve,” Toki said testily, prodding for how much they were willing to give.
“Twelve, then,” Mera-san graciously accepted.
Not even a token protestation. They were serious about this, then. She narrowed her eyes, considering.
“And for the younger kids, Quirk counseling only. They can practice a sport if they want, but no Quirk training, no jumping through hoops and pushing their limits until they keel over.”
“That is reasonable,” Mera-san acquiesced. “It’s how it was supposed to be, at least. Hawks and you were exceptions.”
“Good. Then I’ll add this: no exception. And no kidnapping, either. Not like it happened with me, or with Hawks, either. I know his mother signed her parental rights over, but she did so in exchange for a fat load of cash.” She allowed a hint of a threat to lace her voice. “State-sanctioned or not, it’s basically Quirk-trafficking.”
To their credit, they took the slap with dignity. Mera-san lowered his eyes and rummaged through his papers, very uncomfortable. Genmei-san only clenched her jaw and inclined her head, accepting the reproach.
“Then there’s the question of oversight,” Toki continued.
“Oversight?”
“Well, how else can I be sure you’ll keep your word? Besides, it only makes sense. You watch over heroes, so they don’t break the laws they’re supposed to protect. Someone has to do the same for you.”
They took this second slap with more annoyance than the first, but they took it all the same. No arguments, no clever comebacks, no protestations. Mera-san even looked a little relieved.
Hm. Maybe it would go well, in the end.
They spend the next three hours hashing out details. Planning how to change the sponsorship program wasn’t an easy task. They had to plan for multiple hypotheses and prepare for contingencies. The sponsorship program usually worked through scholarships and the like, so when the HPSC got custody of a kid, it was that something was already going wrong, and they had to keep it from getting worse. It happened maybe once every two or three years. The last sponsored kid in Naruto Labs was Serpentine, and the girl would graduate next March. After that, there was no one lined up. And of course, no one could predict when a kid would come along and be enrolled! By definition, this process was already exceptional, and each case was unique.
As the President said, when a child was brought to Naruto Labs, it means that other options were exhausted, and so there were necessary shortcuts.
And truly, Toki could see where the President was coming from. Getting custody of a kid was never a smooth process or a fast one. Sometimes they had villains after them. Sometimes they were flight risks and would run away at the first appearance of a cop. Sometimes time was of the essence. Sometimes the situation was on the verge of explosion and Naruto Labs was their gateway to a safe haven. But still. Being ushered there secretly, being bought, shouldn’t be the only option. And if it was, then, there should be a measure of control; a way to make sure no one abused the situation, and that the child could go elsewhere if needed.
The President argued about cost, time, about availability. Toki argued about oversight, control, and safety. Mera-san tempered them both. But still, the list of points to abord and check was seemingly endless.
If the HPSC had to pass through a judge instead of buying the kid from their parents (and Toki refused to budge about that), then maybe it was in the Commission’s best interest to pour money into child protection services so the procedures could be faster. Also, if a child had to be placed in foster care before being placed with them, then maybe the HPSC should develop a small cell in the foster care system. Maybe some staff members would be interested in opening a group home or working in an orphanage.
Instead of stealing kids from the system, the HPSC would have to get a foot in the door and play by the system’s rules. If they had, when Toki had come to them… well, she would have balked at the idea of seeing a judge on the first day, of course. But there was an easy way around that! As soon as a kid was taken in, the judge and the police were to be notified that said the kid was in ‘protective custody’, and from there, the HPSC could keep them for a few weeks (but no longer than a few months!), until the runaway kid had been soothed enough to face a judge without running for the hills. And then, well… if they were older than twelve, they could start to train. If they were younger, they would go to a loving, careful, and normal foster family.
Young kids with dangerous backgrounds and powerful Quirks were also possible prey for villains. That was why Toki had fled from the foster care system in the first place. It was a harvesting ground for big bosses like AFO. So the kids the HPSC wanted to keep an eye on would have to be more protected. But there were solutions to that, too. Maybe retired heroes could be offered a home in the neighborhood, or maybe the foster family could be encouraged to move to a secure place.
The question of oversight was, strangely enough, the quickest to be settled. The HPSC kept heroes in check; it seemed only fair that the heroes kept the HPCS in check, too. Firstly, the sponsorship program would not be under the President’s direct command anymore. It made Genmei-san grumble and grind her teeth, but she had lost this battle even before it began, and she knew it. The program would be supervised by a distinct and new branch of the HPSC, one that would also oversee their relationship with the foster care system. The President wouldn’t be in direct control anymore. And additionally, all heroes who had gone through the sponsorship program would be informed if a new kid was taken in. They would also be allowed to randomly check Naruto Labs, and to visit the sponsored foster families.
Toki also wanted the sponsorship program to be subjected to review once a year by the Top Ten Heroes, but that was apparently pushing it too far. She was outvoted. The President also pointed out that maybe it would be unwise to let Endeavor have a say in the sponsorship program now that he had befriended Meteor. So Toki let the matter drop.
For now, at least.
Anyways. Toki made peace with the Commission. Their relationship would be strained for a long time, but at least they had moved on from open hostility, and that was good.
With canon approaching, they couldn’t afford infighting.
oOoOoOo
At the end of November, things settled a little. There were no more secrets with the HPSC. Baby Hina-chan was growing stronger every day. She was starting to have more hair (still blond, still fluffy, just like her dad), and a small fuzz on her wings. Her feathers weren’t red, but a soft, golden brown. Like a hawk. Well, for now, her wings mostly resembled that of a baby pigeon. They were so small and fragile that they could easily stay folded on her back, hidden inside her clothes.
She was so small and cute. Toki and Keigo sneaked a few visits, cooing over her, holding her, telling her about their day, but they wouldn’t go there more than once a week. Baby Hinawa seemed to grow so fast. She was three months old now; she could roll on her belly, giggle, and grin, move her arms and legs with energy, and even grip things. She was fascinated by her reflection in the mirror and by Missy the cat. And she had the most wonderful laugh. A pretty, musical sound that made you grin in shared delight.
Toki wished she could visit more often. As it was, she could only sneak a few visits. Besides, when she was in Musutafu, she didn’t spend all of her time with Hinawa. She had to train Hitoshi, hang out with Melissa and Sachiko, that kind of thing. She did try to bring Keigo as much as she could, but… his schedule was even more packed than hers.
Anyway, while she was out with her two students, Melissa casually mentioned filling out paperwork for the end of her work-study, and Toki belatedly remembered it.
“Oh, yeah, who have you been interning with?”
“Endeavor’s agency.”
“WHAT?!”
(Really, was Toki never going to catch a fucking break?)
Apparently, Melissa had seen Meteor in the Provisional License Exam. She had been intrigued. Since she had been looking for an agency with a lot of firepower, she had naturally started looking at Endeavor’s agency. Endeavor rarely took interns, but Melissa sent her application anyway… and it was accepted. Granted, once hired at Endeavor’s agency, Melissa had mostly been coached by sidekicks (the great Endeavor had no time to waste with interns), but she was in either way!
And… she had used that opportunity to observe Meteor. And tried to look into his file. And asked questions about him. A lot.
Toki briefly wondered if she could have a heart attack with her new, state-of-the-art artificial heart.
And so there was a third difficult conversation to have. With both Melissa and Hitoshi, actually. Toki told them an abridged version of her family’s story. Her parents, the villainy, the arrest, the deal with the Commission. She didn’t mention the kidnapping business; she knew they would riot, and even if it was very touching, Toki had no desire to unleash two pissed-off teenagers against the Commission. They wouldn’t be able to do much, and they would make enemies they couldn’t afford to have.
“It’s such a dramatic story,” Hitoshi said with fascination. “And he doesn’t know?!”
“No, and he won’t find out,” Toki answered categorically. “People can change, but Meteor had always been prone to lashing out. And I really don’t want him crashing into my life.”
She wasn’t sure it was the truth anymore, actually. But one thing was for certain: a reunion would be messy and greatly complicate things for both her and her agency. Also, Meteor hated heroes, so he would absolutely disapprove of Keigo.
And if Toki had to choose between Keigo and her father, she knew which one she would pick any day.
“He didn’t seem too bad at Endeavor’s agency,” Melissa mused pensively.
“You talked to him?!”
“I barely spoke to him twice, and one of those times was to ask him how to use that stupid photocopier. But he said hello, he didn’t seem to have rabies or to plan on snapping my neck and drinking my blood, he seemed… very correct. A little arrogant, true, but he wasn’t mean or anything.” She paused, then amended, “Well, he was a bit of an asshole. But never towards me.”
Toki smiled, a little sadly. It had been so long now since she had seen her father, she couldn’t remember the sound of his voice. But she remembered his easy grins, his playfulness when they sparred, when they argued and when they joked. Her father could be an asshole, but he had also been so nice, sometimes.
“How did he look?” Toki asked impulsively before she could lose her nerve. She swallowed. “I mean, did he look like he was-”
She didn’t know how to end that sentence. Like he was eating enough? Sleeping well? Like what she had done to him, done to her mother, didn’t give him nightmares? Like he was making friends? Or did he look like he was seething in anger? Sad?
Happy?
“-alright?” She finished lamely.
Melissa and Hitoshi exchanged a lightning-quick glance, and Toki wondered if she had let a note of longing in her voice.
“I didn’t pay much attention,” Melissa said hesitantly. “But he looked fine. He got along with the rest of the staff. He mostly hung out with Endeavor, but he chatted with the secretary sometimes, and I heard them laugh.”
He laughed. He wasn’t miserable, he was fine, he was out of prison, and he was better. He deserved to get better. Toki felt like a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She nodded, looking away to blink back sudden tears.
It was stupid. She should be angry at him, and some part of her still was but all she wanted at that moment, desperately, was for her dad to be okay. For him to be okay, to smile and laugh and built something. For him to not suffer anymore because of her stupid decisions. She had already taken so much from him. They had hurt each other so deeply.
I’m so sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean to - I didn’t want to -
“Good,” she said in an almost even voice. “That’s good.”
When she turned back to Melissa and Hitoshi, her face was once again smooth and relaxed, her smile as casual as usual, and the mask of her Quantum persona firmly in place.
“Don’t you miss him?” Hitoshi wondered, peering at her intensely.
“He didn’t raise me much,” Toki evaded.
“So? My dad barely swings by my house twice a month. He’s still my dad, and I would miss him. And you spend a lot of time with him before you ran away, didn’t you?”
How nicely said, ‘before you ran away.’ As if it had been Toki’s decision. As if what had scattered their family hadn’t been the arrest, the fight, the defeat, the betrayal.
But yeah, Hitoshi was right. In that year Toki had spent with the crew, between the ages of seven and eight, she had spent a lot of time with Meteor. More than she had spent with her mother, actually. She had loved him, she remembered. He had been unsettling, frustrating, fascinating, and frightening, but he had also been kind and Toki had loved him. In a way, she had never stopped, even when she had destroyed his life.
“Maybe I do. But it’s been so long, now. It doesn’t really matter.” She must have looked melancholic when she said it because she saw Melissa and Hitoshi exchange a quick glance.
Then Hitoshi spoke loudly, “So, moving on! Did you think more about training Neito?”
“Neito Monoma?” Toki repeated curiously.
“Yeah, it’s been nearly a year now since you met him. You said you would make your decision once you were back to heroism, and you are, sooo…”
Melissa frowned. “You met him as Hoshizora? Wouldn’t he recognize you?”
“I met him very briefly,” Toki clarified. “I was four months pregnant then, and swaddled in a giant parka, so it didn’t show. He probably only remembers me as the weird girl who came to pick up Hitoshi one time… if he remembers me at all.”
“So you’ll do it?” Hitoshi bounced on the balls of his feet, a manic grin on his face.
Toki considered it. She didn’t know Monoma enough to guess if he could be trusted with the secret of her civiliansona. And if she trained him, maybe he would guess. But… he seemed like a good kid. A good kid with a complicated Quirk and a desperate wish to prove himself. He was Hitoshi’s best friend. All very good reasons to accept.
He was, also, a potential warper; and Toki wanted to train a warper. That was a good reason to accept, too, even if it was a selfish one.
“Alright,” She finally answered, “You can organize a meeting.”
Hitoshi punched the air in an uncharacteristic display of glee, “YES!”
It made Melissa grin, too, “That means he will be my kōhai!”
Hitoshi refused to call her senpai because, technically, he had been training with Toki for longer than she had. It was an old subject of bickering between the two of them and made Melissa pout endlessly. Toki snorted in amusement, then grinned evilly.
“Enough chit-chat! Let’s race to the top of that building over there. It’ll be good parkour training!”
Twin groans of protest answered her, and Toki laughed.
Nobody had ever quite filled the hole left by her parents; the good, the bad, the complicated stuff in between. But in the meantime, she had still managed to find a found family of her own.
There were only a few months left before the beginning of canon. Well, canon had started when Midoriya had met All Might if you wanted to be technical about it. But the plot, the real beginning of the story, all would start with Yūei.
It was there that the League of Villains would strike at All Might, it was there that many plot twists and storylines would tangle, and it was there that Izuku Midoriya would go from awkward doe-eyed child to real hero. And he would bring in his wake all the people whose stories had bushed against him: his teachers, his classmates, his friends, and their friends, everyone. Because of All Might, the Hero Commission, AFO, and of OFA… so many people, even Hawks, would be pulled into his orbit without even having met him.
Izuku Midoriya was the protagonist. His story would wash on Japan like a tsunami. They should all brace themselves and prepare to hold on for dear life.
And, as strange as it sounded… Toki wasn’t afraid.
you were not born of stardust, darling,
stardust was born from you,
it’s why the stars feel your sorrow and aching heart,
they are the fragments of your lost soul,
scattered across an endless galaxy,
but don’t be afraid, darling,
maybe life has broken you,
but it can never destroy you.
She wished she had better words to tell how she felt, but she wasn’t afraid. She was Quantum, this was her home, and no villains could frighten her out of it. She was strong. She knew her worth; she had paid dearly for every ounce of it. She wouldn’t let All for One touch her. She wouldn’t let any of his underlings harm a single hair on her head, or on the head of the people she loved.
They could come. She was waiting.
Staying away from the plot was no guarantee of safety. A war was coming, and in a war… well, with the exception of a few members of the brass, every single person caught in it was an innocent bystander. Not being involved in the Plot didn’t mean that the Plot wouldn’t come knocking. That was why the essence of a hero’s job was to meddle, to get involved, because ignorance was not safety. Ignorance was negligence, ignorance was cowardice.
That was why Keigo would be the HPSC’s spy in the League of Villains. No matter how much things had changed, no matter the fact that the Commission’s hold on him wasn’t the same (Toki’s little stunt with the kidnapping business meant that the President would be very wary, in the future, about coercing either Quantum or Hawks), he would get involved. Because he was a hero, he was good at snooping around, and it was in his nature.
That was why Toki had to get involved, too.
And why it was so important, for her, to get a foot in the door at Yūei.
So she started laying the groundwork. She quietly passed the few certifications she didn’t yet have to be a heroic teacher. Since she already had a teaching license, she only had to follow a few hours of formation to learn how to corral kids and other stuff like that. Then she started investigating some teachers at Yūei; what were their hours, how did they manage, how close to the school did they live, and so on.
Toki also dropped a few hints to the HPSC. Well, to Kameko and Mera-san, mostly. About how glad she would be to be a teacher. How she could keep an eye on some things. How she would really enjoy spending more time in Musutafu.
The funny thing was, the President didn’t even know that All Might had planned on being a teacher next year. It was a personal choice, not something subject to the HPSC’s approval. So she didn’t know what Toki wanted to keep an eye on at Yūei. It was probably driving her nuts. When All Might would reveal his intention of being a teacher, Genmei-san would feel pretty dumb.
Also, it would boost the reputation of Quantum’s investigation skills. Hawks was the best at snooping around, but it wouldn’t hurt for Toki to show off that she could discover big secrets, too!
It would be a good incentive for the Commission to try and stay in her good graces, too. She still had the recording of their conversation about her kidnapping. Oh, she hadn’t told them, of course. She was keeping this incredible piece of blackmail material in her sleeve. If… or rather, when things would implode, then Toki needed to have her own parachute.
She gave a copy to Keigo, too. He knew everything, anyways.
“You realize I won’t ever use it?” he had said, a little sadly.
“Because using it would hit society pretty hard?”
“Well, yeah. I don’t believe the system is garbage. Call me an irredeemable optimist, but I believe there’s still good in the hero system… and in the Commission.” He frowned. “Although I admit that what they did was a little messed up.”
“You can say that again,” she muttered.
“But I meant,” he said loudly, “that I won’t use it because if it gets to a point where I have to use it, I won’t be in a position to act. If you get burned, I get burned too. If anyone leaks your relationship with Meteor to the press, or anything about Naruto Labs, I will be on the line of fire, just like you.”
You’re more forgivable than me, she didn’t say. You didn’t sell out your family. You didn’t hurt the Symbol of Peace. You didn’t strain against the reins and piss off the Commission. You’re so much smarter than me, so much more personable. So much more lovable.
“Keep it anyways. Who knows, it may come in handy.”
“How?”
She thought of the threat Dabi posed and the lump in her throat when she let her mind wander in that direction. She thought about the dangers of spying, of the lethal game of pretending Keigo would have to play with psychopaths and murderers, of how they would want proof of his allegiance. A trap. A dead body. Something, anything to gain their trust.
She shrugged and kept her tone light.
“Not sure. But keep it anyways.”
The subject was laid to rest, and life went on.
Canon approached, and so was the next school year. Only a few months left! Toki had to brush up on her knowledge of heroic courses, and their inside workings. She went to snoop around the life of a few pro-heroes who had family attending a heroic high school. She usually asked a few innocent questions and went on her way, nothing big, she didn’t want to pry. But she wanted to know what people were expecting of a heroic high school. What they learned from their family, what kind of skillset they prepared, and so on.
When she had been in Yūei's general course, she had found the heroic courses disappointing. If she had the opportunity to fix it, well… she wouldn’t waste her chance!
Besides, it was an opportunity to meet plenty of interesting people. She already knew some Support Items companies and designers, for example, but she needed more relations. Like the Yaoyorozu, for example. The Honenuki Media Company, too.
She also learned that quite a few heroes that she already knew had younger siblings or cousins. For example, Gecko, a hero with a regeneration Quirk, who was based in Kyoto. He had a younger sister and, after listening to him brag about her Quirk for ten minutes, Toki suddenly realized that said little sister was almost certainly a canon character. What was the name of that girl in class 1-B who could split her body into several parts? Well, that one.
Anyways. The next Billboard Chart came out.
Endeavor was Number One, no surprise here. Keigo… or rather, Hawks… was Number Two. Best Jeanist was third, then there was Edgeshot, then a few others. Mirko had finally broken in and was Number Ten. Just above her, at Number Nine, was Ryukyu, so there were two women in this year’s rankings. Progress!
Quantum was currently ranked Number Twelve. It was very impressive when you took into consideration the fact that she had disappeared for months, and that she was still a relatively new hero. She had Icarus’ notoriety, and her own large fanbase, no thanks for that. She wasn’t displeased with this outcome, all things considered. She was still pretty high-ranked, but she wasn’t in the Top Ten and so, her face wasn’t plastered everywhere. Win-win.
But whatever. Time passed. Since Endeavor was now Number One, All Might was scheduled to have his new lung soon. He would have to stop working completely for a while, maybe a month or two, but in the end, the doctors expected him to significatively augment his time limit. It was good news.
And in December, another fun thing happened. Hitoshi finally organized a meeting and Toki meet Monoma. Not as Hoshizora this time, but as Quantum.
They had already met, briefly, when she had still in the early stage of her pregnancy. Hitoshi had introduced her as his friend Toki, nothing more, and Monoma had stayed clueless about her real identity. Now, it was time to be honest with each other.
Training with Monoma had been Hitoshi’s idea from the beginning. He wanted to progress alongside his best friend, there was nothing wrong with that. But he also thought that copying Toki’s Quirk would boost Monoma’s confidence, and… well, Toki rather liked the idea. It was actually the prospect of training with another warper, someone who could race and jump and fly like her, who had convinced her in the first place.
So. Hitoshi invited his friend to join his next training session with Toki and Melissa. They met.
“Hey Neito,” Hitoshi waved to his friend, grinning. “Glad you could make it. This is my friend, Melissa.”
“You can call me senpai!” grinned Melissa.
Hitoshi rolled his eyes and ignored her, “… and this is my mentor, Quantum.”
“You can call me sensei,” Toki said generously.
Monoma gaped. For a few seconds, there was just shock on his face, not a hint of recognition. Then there was a flash of something. Maybe he had recognized her stature, her hairstyle, and her proximity to Hitoshi. When she was with her students, Toki easily slid into Hoshizora’s mannerisms after all.
“I’m honored to meet you, Quantum-san.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Toki said easily. “Hitoshi only said good things about you.”
Monoma started sputtering in embarrassment. Toki realized that Melissa and Hitoshi were watching the scene with rapturous attention, and turned toward them:
“Well, you two can start warming up. Two laps around the building. Chop-chop!”
As a warm-up, that was a joke for kids as well-trained as them. Still, they moaned and mock-protested, but they went. They had probably guessed that she wanted to talk to Monoma alone.
As soon as Melissa and Hitoshi were gone, Monoma blurted out:
“I thank you again for this opportunity! When Hitoshi told me I could join his training, and that he knew a pro-hero… I never imagined it could be you! Your Quirk is amazing. And so versatile, too!”
Toki’s smile grew. When he was speaking loudly, gesturing with enthusiasm, and being super-expressive like that, his resemblance with Thunder Thief was striking. And he looked very much like canon-Monoma would, all dramatic speeches and over-the-top pantomimes.
“Thanks. Wanna copy it?” she offered.
It wasn’t what Monoma had been expecting. He looked momentarily thrown, his smile slipping off his face.
“…What? I mean… are you sure?”
Toki had been sure for a while now. She shrugged with an easy smile, just like Hawks did to put civilians at ease. The friendly neighborhood hero: casual, friendly, and open.
“I mean it. Your Quirk is Copy, isn’t it? You can replicate people’s Quirk. It’s pretty cool. You know, I’ve never even met another warper. I would like to train you in using your Quirk, of course. But I also would like to train you in mine if that’s cool with you.”
Monoma’s eyes widened slightly, and he nodded with enthusiasm:
“Of course! I would be honored. Your Quirk is so much better than mine.”
Well, it was true. But it was a little disheartening to hear the kid say it so earnestly. Toki frowned a little.
“What makes you say that?”
“Well… Copy allows me to replicate someone else’s Quirk for a few minutes.” Monoma winced, looking a little embarrassed. “When I’m on my own, I may as well be Quirkless. It’s a weak power. All my life, people told me… ‘You can’t be a hero with that Quirk.’ I want to prove them wrong. I know they are wrong. But I still Copy is useless on its own. It can only be used to leech off someone else’s talent. It’s a Quirk good enough for a side character in a manga, but not enough to be the protagonist.”
It was a little sad to hear the issue hidden behind his bluster. Life was a story, yes: but not a story about him. Not even his own life. That was… pretty gloomy.
“You would like to have another Quirk?” Toki wondered out loud.
Monoma smiled self-depreciatively.
“Probably. I mean, I know those people are wrong about me. I can be a hero with Copy if I work hard enough and if I’m adaptable enough. But I wish… I wish I could be the protagonist, instead of a background character used to prop someone else. That’s all.” He paused and added a little sheepishly, “Don’t tell Hitoshi.”
These metaphors about life as a story and people as characters of various importance sounded a lot like canon-Monoma when she thought about it. Well… minus the mocking and the aggressive bravado. Or maybe it sounded like him because that was who he was behind the blustering and boasting.
Monoma wouldn’t be the first kid to hide his inferiority complex behind of façade of arrogance.
“That’s surprisingly heartfelt,” Toki finally said.
Monoma scratched his nape, embarrassed.
“Well, I’m a big fan of yours. I can’t believe you were… I mean, I think we met before. Hitoshi doesn’t have many friends. And he never explained who you were, back then…”
His voice trailed off. Ah, so he had recognized her, then. Not that Toki was particularly memorable, but still, she was the only young adult to hang out around Hitoshi.
“I trust you to keep my civiliansona a secret, then,” Toki said gravely.
Monoma didn’t burst out laughing at the word ‘civiliansona’ like Keigo had, which was another point in his favor.
“Of course!”
“Good. You can call me Toki-sensei, by the way, especially when I’ll meet you out of costume. Now! Let’s talk about your Quirk.”
“Well… it’s called Copy. I can duplicate and use the Quirk of anyone I touch for about four minutes. It works with a simple brush against their skin or hair. I can hold about three different Quirks at once, but I can only use one at a time. Hm… I can’t copy mutations. And I can’t effectively use copied Quirks that require a previously stored resource. I copy only the Quirk, not the reserves its user already has.”
Not a bad analysis, but Toki would like to expand it a little. For example, did Copy require skin contact or would any DNA work? Blood transfusion, for example. Or organ transplant. Also, did Monoma copy the original Quirk or, if it had been subject to evolution the current version of it? Let’s say he copied Hitoshi’s Brainwashing. Could he take control of someone who answered him with a grunt, like Hitoshi had learned to do? Or did he have to learn to do it, too?
She hummed pensively. Maybe she could give him some exercises to test the full scope of his abilities, then. But to make him a warper…
“If I gave you a strand of hair, or a small braid to wear as a bracelet, could it work?”
Monoma gulped, looking both eager and nervous.
“It requires more focus, and the hair can’t be too old. But it works, yes.”
“Good.” Toki nodded decisively. “Now, I don’t know if I should still offer you this after learning that you aren’t confident in your Quirk, but… I intended to train you both as a copycat and as a warper. There are so few of us. I would really love for you to learn to fight and teleport like me. But I don’t want to corral you on a path that would erase who you are. I don’t want you to be me. Or at least I don’t want you to feel like you have to be me, and I worry that if I offer you this bracelet of hairs, you will feel obligated to accept.”
She let him digest that. Monoma took the time to ponder her word. He had a little pensive frown that was just like Hitoshi’s when confronted with a thorny math problem. It was adorable, and Toki was suddenly reminded that this kid was just a baby, barely fifteen, the same age as Hitoshi. Hitoshi, who was basically her little brother.
“I accept,” he finally said.
“Are you sure?” Toki insisted. “Me wanting to train you as a copycat is a given. Because it’s your Quirk, and you deserve to be good with it. Me wanting to train you as a warper is a very selfish desire and I don’t want you to feel pressured about it.”
He inclined his head, looking very serious.
“I want to accept anyway. I would love to be a warper. With Copy, I think I would have copied your Quirk anyway- with your permission of course!- because it’s so awesome. I want to become a hero with Copy, but it would be so… reassuring to have something like teleportation to fall back on when Copy turns out to be useless.”
Toki could work with that. She grinned and offered him a hand.
“Alright, Neito Monoma. Let’s begin.”
The way Monoma lit up, all childish wonder and carefree joy, broke her heart just a little: you would have thought that she had offered him the moon.
“Yes, sensei!”
Damnit, she had really adopted another kid. First Melissa, then Hitoshi, then him. Two was a coincidence, but three was a pattern.
oOoOoOo
Christmas came and went. Keigo and Toki went to the hero’s charity gala. They saw Mirko, who looked delighted to see them again. The rabbit heroine was probably the only one in their profession with enough context and clues to guess Hinawa’s existence (why else would Toki get hitched before disappearing for nearly eight months?), but she had enough discretion to not say a word about it.
Of course, there were also Toki’s sidekicks, who had helped cover her absence. Psyren, Sunspear, and Thunder Thief. But since Toki had returned to them child-free and refused to say a word about her baby, they must have drawn their own conclusions.
(Toki was still suspecting Thunder Thief to be Monoma’s father. They didn’t share any mannerisms or anything, but sometimes Monoma moved or smirked in a certain way, and… the resemblance was striking.)
Anyways. Keigo turned twenty-one. Then came the New Year, filled with celebrations and, for Toki, a strange trepidation. This was it, the year when everything would begin for real. The year Midoriya would join Yūei. The year the League of Villains would start making waves. The Hero Killer, too.
Toki didn’t remember if it had already happened in canon, but the Hero Killer had been talked about in the news recently. Only a few mentions, with no mention of his casualties, only the fact that some manic was hunting heroes, but… it was there. The Hero Killer had started being too much of a threat to ignore.
In January, there was even talk of Endeavor nearly capturing him. Like, they had actually fought. The Hero Killer had escaped (Endeavor must have been fuming), but apparently, nobody was killed or even injured. The story only came out because criminals rarely slipped through the Number One’s fingers.
But, like, they had fought. It wasn’t even in Hosu, it had been in Okayama. Toki couldn’t explain this complete change from canon. Unless it had happened in canon? But it had never been mentioned!
Was the Hero Killer more active because All Might had stepped down? Or was it Endeavor who was more proactive because he was Number One and had something to prove? Or maybe Meteor had given him good intel? Impossible to know. Besides, neither Hawks nor Quantum were on the case since the Hero Killer had his hunting grounds far away from Fukuoka.
Not that it would have stopped the Commission from giving the case to Icarus if they really wanted to. The proof of that was in how they had easily allowed Toki to join the investigation of the mysterious villain with blue flames around Musutafu. Sure, it was probably because that case was going nowhere, but still. That was a serious case. There had been casualties. People were starting to nickname the perpetrator ‘the Ghost Arsonist.’ If he had a public-given villain name, that meant he was starting to be impossible to sweep under the rug.
Endeavor must be green with rage. An Arsonist prancing around his territory, smearing his name! There was no bigger insult.
Toki was kind of stuck with that case. She hadn’t yet managed to find a picture of Dabi. She had collected some descriptions of a man with scars and blue eyes, she had combed the intel from their informants to find if someone was complaining a lot about Endeavor, and she had started looking into ‘suspicious people hanging around mental hospitals’ just in case Dabi felt some kind of responsibility towards his hospitalized mother…
But she was stuck. Even if she had plenty of clues that other investigators hadn’t (mostly because she knew who Dabi was, so that helped: to an outsider’s point of view, the hints she had collected were at best disjoined, at worst straight-up non-sensical), she still hadn’t quite enough to pin Dabi. If only she could find a clear enough picture to make a sketch, and then pretend to notice his resemblance to Endeavor…! But all the footage she managed to get was blurry or had bad angles. Dabi also often wore a hood, hiding his face. It was infuriating.
Whatever. She would find him. It was only a question of time. Endeavor was Number One, and it had pissed off Dabi enough that he had started moving. Sooner or later, he would misstep. In this world, he didn’t have the League of Villains at his back, not yet.
And if Toki played her cards right, she would arrest him before he ever did.
“Quantum!” Psyren yelled from street level. “Zero needs support! Twelve kilometers, seven o’clock from you: villain chase getting out of hand, the perp is a woman with a knife!”
“On it!”
Thunder Thief and Zero were both closer, but if the villain was female, they would need backup. Female villains had a bigger tendency to get away from male heroes. It wasn’t due to skill but because it looked really bad if a male hero was caught beating up a woman. Even if the woman is a villain! So, basically, the capture of a female villain was always left to either female heroes… or underground heroes, occasionally.
Quantum jumped in a flash high into the sky, then down to rooftop level, and hit the ground running almost directly behind the two sidekicks that were chasing the villain and yelling, but not attacking. The villain was indeed a woman. She had an elephant-like mutation, towering above the crowd, making people scream in and scatter like frightened sparrows when she charged through. She had a knife in one hand, indeed, and a cash dispenser under her free arm. A whole-ass cash dispenser! Damn, she was strong.
Quantum started by warping like a projectile on the back of the woman, making her stumble at the same time, she griped the cash dispenser and warped with it right in Zero’s arms. The last thing they needed was the thing breaking and civilians crowding the fight to try and steal some money.
“Take care of that, would you?” she said lightly, while Zero instinctively took the huge thing (and nearly fell under its weight).
Flash! She warped back to the elephant-woman. The villain had recovered her balance and turned back, looking crazed, her bloodshot eyes searching the crowd frantically.
“WHERE IS MY MONEY?!”
“You should have made her fall down!” Thunder Thief hissed, stopping next to her.
“While she had a knife in hand?” Quantum repeated incredulously. “Did you suddenly develop amnesia and forget every single rule about knife safety?”
“… good point. Carry on.”
Quantum took a step towards the crazed-looking woman, raising her hands in placating gesture, and putting on her most friendly smile:
“Miss, can you please put the knife down?”
With a furious roar, the woman charged her. Considering she was nearly three meters high and weighed as much as a small car, it was an impressive sight.
“DIIIE!”
“So unimaginative,” Quantum sighed.
Then she warped right into the woman’s personal space, ducked a slash from the knife, gripped her hand to immobilize her, and warped high in the sky.
Freefalling, the elephant-woman was way less stabby. Her roar turned into a shriek, and she started frenetically waving her arms and legs as if it could help her fly, not paying the slightest attention to the heroine still attached to her wrist. Quantum disarmed her, then teleported both of them upside-down, their momentum pushing them up instead of down… just enough time for gravity to slow their ascent to a non-lethal speed… and then she warped them both back in the street, making the elephant-woman fall from two meters high, face-down in the pavement. VLAM! The impact cracked concrete. It stunned the villain enough that Quantum could handcuff her without resistance.
The crowd exclaimed and clapped admiringly. Quantum gave a little bow, grinning, feeling like a juggler having performed a neat trick.
“Can you handle her until the police pick her up?” she asked Thunder Thief.
He looked at the two-tons woman lying on the ground, then at Zero who was awkwardly guarding his cash distributor and eyeing warily the civilians creeping closer. This neighborhood wasn’t bad, per see, but it wasn’t very classy either. No matter how thoughtfully Hawks and Quantum had cleaned Fukuoka at their beginning, you couldn’t eradicate social disparities.
“Sure. Can you handle the cash? I feel like I’m going to get mugged, and I’m not even the one holding the dispenser.”
He didn’t even bother lowering his voice, and Quantum gaped dramatically:
“What is wrong with you?!”
“Everything,” he promptly replied. “Except for the way I dress.”
Quantum sniggered, amused despite herself. When he wasn’t flirting, Thunder Thief was so blunt. Better not to let him have the chance to put his foot in his mouth even more. Quantum shook her head, and obligingly sauntered towards Zero. The sidekick wore a suit that covered him from head to toe and you couldn’t even see his face, but he still managed to look relieved when he saw her. Quantum put a hand on the cash dispenser, and lowered her voice to say:
“Nobody was hurt, so mark it down as a non-violent incident. Also, she looked haggard. Blood-shot eyes, overly aggressive, tremors in the hands. Tell to cops she may need a hospital. They should check for drugs anyway and give her a pamphlet on available rehab programs if she’s positive.”
“Sure. But you should care more about arrests and less about charity cases,” Zero answered just as lowly.
Quantum shrugged. Charity cases were the reason she was a hero in the first place, but she didn’t feel like going into a debate about it in public. Besides, for Zero and quite a lot of their sidekicks, heroism didn’t mix with social work.
“It’s my brand,” she said lightly.
Then, after a large smile to the crowd and a friendly wave that made people cheer louder, she warped away with the cash dispenser. She put it in Icarus’ evidence room, to wait until the bank came to pick it up. Yeah, there was a real procedure to handle stolen cash dispensers. Then she went back to continue her patrol. Quantum’s day was far from over.
Life as usual.
It was strange, how Toki had quickly found her footing back. She had her new routine, now, with patrol, and her free time spent in Musutafu with either her students or the Shinsō family, including her daughter. She could get used to it. She was getting used to it. She still missed Hinawa, but it wasn’t the raw and open wound it had been in the beginning, when Toki had to take upon herself to not be overly emotional. There had been days when she felt on the verge of tears at random moments during the days, days when she felt like a nerve rubbed raw. Not anymore.
She was getting used to this separation. Did that make her a bad mother?
And if that made her a bad mother… hadn’t she made the right choice, handing Hinawa to someone else? Someone who could raise her, love her? Toki still remembered the mix of love and hopelessness that Sayuri had made her feel. She had loved her mom and her mom had loved her, but Toki never wanted to turn the same as Sayuri.
In some twisted way, Meteor had been a better dad. He had never made her feel disposable, at least. But then, he hadn’t been her dad very long. They had barely spent a year together before Toki had snitched on the crew, which led to their arrest.
Meteor seemed like he was doing fine, lately. Toki tried to keep a very discreet eye on him. Endeavor kept Meteor out of the public’s sight, but he appeared regularly in candid photos of Endeavor or his sidekicks. A man in civilian’s clothing, hanging around their patrol routes; burning orange eyes hidden behind sunglasses. He was apparently trusted enough to have a certain measure of freedom.
She wondered if he had changed. It was a question that had never quite gone away. It made her ache, some days, with the need to know. To see him, to talk to him, to have closure. She had stupid fantasies of him smiling at her, as amused and kind as he had been when she had been eight.
Do you still love me, Dad?
He had wanted to save her. He had refused to sign over her custody to the HPSC even when he had been at his lowest point, at his most angry, at his most desperate. Oh, years had passed since then. Maybe he had changed his mind, maybe he had grieved her and then moved on, or maybe it was all wishful thinking on Toki’s part. But for years she had believed that nobody cared if she lived or died outside of the HPCS, she had believed that her father must have nothing but resentment for her… and suddenly she learned she had been wrong. He had cared. He hadn’t given up on her. Was it so bad to wonder what he thought of her now?
They weren’t the same people they were twelve years ago. The same hurts lingered, but they must have faded a little, right? Maybe he would be able to forgive her for turning against him.
Maybe Toki could forgive him for forcing her to make that decision.
Of course, those fantasies of meeting her dad again and starting anew never went very far. She couldn’t imagine introducing him to her new family. Well, maybe (strangely enough) to Hinawa. Meteor had always been so very family-oriented, so devoted to the idea of caring for what was his. He was a dangerous man, but he wouldn’t hurt his own granddaughter. On the contrary, he may burn to the ground anything that would even remotely threaten her.
He had that in common with his daughter. Toki would raze cities and salt the earth if someone tried to harm a hair on Hinawa’s head. Sometimes it felt suffocating, the great rush of protectiveness, possessiveness, that gripped her throat when she thought about her baby.
So Meteor would probably love Hinawa. But for the rest of Toki’s family? No way. Keigo was absolutely out of the question. Hell, even imagining him meeting the Shinsō felt straight-up surreal. And she didn’t even want to mention Hayasa-sensei, Kameko, Melissa, or even Neito now.
Not that she was quite close enough to Neito to consider him a member of her family, but… well. He was Hitoshi’s friend and she found so many similarities in their behavior, jokes, and interests that she easily bonded with him. He was also his own person, more energic and rambunctious than Hitoshi, and wilder, too, in a way that reminded Toki of herself when she had been a tiny feral child. And he was a delight to train with; a quick study; focused and attentive, and absolutely enchanted by Warp-space.
And there was also the fact that his home life wasn’t that good.
It made Neito spend as much time as he could outside, or with Hitoshi, at the local library, or the arcade; anywhere that wasn’t home. He didn’t run from it, not in the way an abused kid would, but he showed clear distaste at the idea of finishing his training early to relax at home. There was no one here waiting for him. When pressed, he reluctantly admitted that his mother was hospitalized… except the hospital’s name he gave wasn’t a hospital, but a rehab center for drug addicts in Shizuoka (not even in Musutafu!). Toki wouldn’t have known if she hadn’t made a point to redirect villains toward the rehab center rather than prison. Neito Monoma’s mother had been interned there for the last year, and she showed no sign of getting out anytime soon. Her teenage son lived on his own in their small apartment, with no other relatives to help him.
So Neito Monoma was a kid who lived on his own more or less abandoned by his junky mom. He kept a good pretense, you had to give him that. He didn’t look like a neglected teen. But he was a young kid who had been on his own for too long. It showed. He was defensive about his home life. He was cheap but tried to hide it. He was also desperate to please, self-conscious, arrogant, insecure… and so terribly lonely. It reminded Toki a little of her own solitude back then when she hung out on rooftops to avoid getting back to the crew, sick with a desperate sort of longing she couldn’t name.
Of course, it triggered every one of Toki’s protective instincts.
She had only known the kid for two months, so yeah, it was a little early to talk about him ‘joining the family,’ but… that was definitely in the cards. Besides, he got along great with Hitoshi. He did bicker a lot with Melissa, but it was always played up for laughter.
Well. Part of it, anyway. Neito liked Melissa alright: he readily called her senpai, and he admired her moves and her weapons. But he was also an insecure little brat, and Melissa was way smarter than he was.
It was something that had taken Toki aback a little. Melissa was a genius; she had known that from day one. But being a little prodigy herself, Toki hadn’t really noticed. Hitoshi wasn’t interested in physics and stuff like that, but he still had excellent grades in everything. He was the top student in his class. So basically Toki had been surrounded by little nerds with huge brains… and then there was Neito, who was normal.
He wasn’t dumb. He was a good student, with above-average grades. But he was solidly in the middle of the pack. He didn’t read about quantum science for fun like Toki, he didn’t build new alloys and tinker with explosives in a lab as a hobby like Melissa, and he didn’t memorize his classes effortlessly like Hitoshi. His hobby was reading Western comics in the library because he didn’t have the money to buy them. That was it.
He was more of a hands-on kind of guy. He was good at strategizing on the fly, observing opponents and dissecting their moves, analyzing Quirk and patterns: but in a classroom setting, he wasn’t that good… and yeah, it made him a little defensive. He was a sore loser.
And when he had Warp-Space and managed to best Melissa in a race, then he was also a sore winner.
Warp-Space. Strangely enough (or maybe, on the contrary, it made total sense), Neito seemed to only be able to copy Toki’s original Quirk. Her warping without the light. And of course, why not? The light was kind of Quantum’s signature move, but it had come with her heart transplant. It was artificial, the product of an unnatural, bioengineered enhancement.
It also meant that Neito had the same limitations Toki had at fourteen. The same weight limit, the same maximum distance, and the same danger of damaging his heart if he pushed himself. Toki took care to explain to him, in graphic details, what could happen to his heart if he pushed it too hard: how it weakened like a garment whose stitching was slowly cut, until one day it burst apart. Except it was an organ, and it would implode inside his chest. She even produced pictures of open-heart surgery to really drive the point home. Blood, graphic photos of a palpitating organ, statistics of people dying from a heart attack each year, the whole nine yards.
(Considering how green Neito looked afterward, she had managed to get her point across.)
Warp-Space was a powerful Quirk: but on its own, with its natural drawbacks, it wasn’t suited for a frontline hero. She realized that now. It was good for fleeing, for running circles around someone, for spying and escaping. It was a Quirk for a trickster: darting in and out of danger, always dancing out of reach of threats, getting away safely and quickly so you didn’t have to push yourself to the brink of exhaustion. It would be great for Neito, who could use Copy as his main weapon and Warp-Space as a getaway.
Not like Toki, who was a frontline hero. Oh, sure, she investigated and stuff, but it was kind of secondary. She bulldozed her way into fights, she jumped from huge distances so she could chase villains, she warped with heavy projectiles, and she kept using her Quirk all day, day after day, without a rest. Warp-Space wasn’t made for endurance work, and still, that was how Toki used it. Without her artificial heart, she would be long dead.
Even with her artificial heart, she wondered if her hero career would last very long. A decade, two at most? Technology could make miracles, but Toki was going beyond her natural limits every day. Even if her heart could follow the pace, maybe there would be side effects on the rest of her body, sooner or later.
Also, there may be side effects due to her heart. Her Quirk was too strong for her body, but now her heart was too strong for it, too. Toki suspected that if she stopped her intense use of her Quirk, she would probably suffer the side effects of her too-powerful heart within years. Probably hypertension, at the very least. She would probably need another heart when she left hero work. If she ever left it.
Oh, whatever. She would deal with it when the time would come. Maybe she could become a part-time hero and manage Icarus instead of Hayasa-sensei when he would retire? That way, she would still warp all around Japan! But she would have more free time. She could spend time with her daughter. Hell, little Hina-chan would be all grown up. That was a head trip! Toki had trouble picturing it. She had trouble picturing a life where she wasn’t a full-time hero, too, but with time, things should slow down. In twenty years, even Hawks would have to slow down. She would tie him to the bed if he didn’t force himself to rest.
Now, that was a good idea…
No, bad Toki. Get your mind out of the gutter. Focus.
Her body giving out on her wouldn’t be a concern for years or even decades. She had more pressing concerns. Like teaching her three little students. Patrolling, fighting, and being an all-in-one awesome hero. And also working on her thesis. She still had about two years before her deadline, but holy crap, she was over halfway there already. Almost two-thirds of the way done when she looked back on her work. Yeah, she was an overachiever, and she would finish her thesis in advance. So sue her. When your role model is Hawks, you don’t do slow. You go big or you go home.
Life was short, and she had too much to do to rest on her laurels.
The canon story was just around the corner.
Notes:
Toki : Oh Endeavor fought the hero killer ahah i bet he's pissed
Toki : i wonder how my dad is doing
Toki : *doesn't connect the dots at all*
I am plagued by alternate universes ideas, guys. It's terrible. So here i give them to you, and you can mock me for having all those brainworms taking up space in my skull:
1) the "heroes rivals AU", aka the one where everything is good and nothing hurt. Basically Meteor is picked up by the sponsorship program as a feral preteen, so he grow up to become a hero instead of a villain, and ends up way less traumatized than Wisdom!Meteor. He becomes Endeavor's great rival, jockeying for the Number Two Spot every year or so, and also having an affair on the side.
Good drama when Endeavor breaks up with him to marry Rei. Even better drama when they get back together a few years later. Meteor ends up raising Toki (that Sayuri, who was a fling, dropped into his lap when she figured out that Toki wasn't on board with villainy) with the Todoroki kids. Meteor also ends up screwing Endeavor's head on straight about his stupid eugenist plan, solving about half the Todoroki family's issues, and bringing home a bunch of kids in need of adopting... like kid Keigo and baby orphan Hitoshi.
Endeavor, Meteor and Rei all end up in a happy and very steamy threesome.2) the "Taiyome going apeshit UA", aka the one where the HPSC decides to snipe Toki. Basically after Toki confronted the President and exhorted money from her, well, Genmei-san dies somehow, and it's our old friend Okamoto who become President. And he doesn't take shit from ingrateful brats. So he locks up Toki in Tartarus, planning to execute her in a few years, but keeping her here as insurance against Hawks.
Hawks smiles, nods, then as soon as no one is looking he goes to find Meteor and they wreck Tartarus. The three Taiyome go on the run. They become unhinged vigilantes but it's also a wacky room-com.
Meanwhile, Toki's recording is going viral, the Discord Server is leading an uprising, Stain decides to go on a muder spree in the HPSC, Mera-san quits his job to work at a cat café, Kameko is gleefully climbing corpses to become the next HPSC's President, and AFO is very annoyed that someone stole his thunder.3) the "Avatar the last airbender UA". No war, but there was a war about a generation ago, and now the Four Nations don't exactly live in harmony. Air Nomads are a nation with a deep animosity against the Fire Nation; the Earth Kingdom wants to reign supreme on the continent; the Fire Nation and the Water Tribes have people on that continent and disagree. Politics! Tension! Worldbuilding!
Endeavor is a disgraced Fire Nation Admiral who made a big colony independent, so he has his little kingdom (he married Rei for an alliance with the Water Tribe), and he wants to usurp the Fire Lord. Meteor is a combustion-bender (Sparky Sparky Boom Man!) sent by the Fire Lord to hunt him down. Said Fire Lord is actually All Might, who inherited the strongest nation with the bloodiest legacy, but is actually a pacifist.
Eraserhead is a Chi Blocker. Hitoshi is a waterbender who can only bloodbend. Kameko and Hayasa-sensei are members of the White Lotus. There is no war in Ba Sing Se, but there is an Academy called Yūei. Keigo is an airbender and so is Toki... except that she just found out she can waterbend. Whoooops.
See what i'm thinking about instead of working? x)
Anyway !
I hope you liked this chapter =)
In my first draft i wasn't planning on Toki mentoring Monoma but what do you know, this idea jumped at me and... it works? and i love it?! And Toki adopted the kid so now i can't extract myself of the situation? So yeah, she got another student.(the Wise Ones on the Discord server will see the parralels with hero!Meteor. They're both like feral mama cat, bringing any orphaned animal to raise them alongside their own xD)
Here is a reminder that this fic has a Discord server !
Also, here is the link to all the poems in the fic : [LINK]
Chapter 37: And so it begins
Summary:
Upon finding out that All Might was going to be a teacher, the Commission started pushing to have additional heroes at Yūei, to make sure to maintain a higher standard of security. Yūei understood the offer for what it was, which was to have the HPSC’s cronies spying on them and watching All Might’s weakening. Nedzu told the Commission to go screw themselves. The Commission insisted. There was a passive-aggressive war of emails, each starting with ‘unless I’m mistaken,’ or ‘per my last email,’ which was polite talk for ‘I will shove this computer so far up your ass you will need to use your tonsils to write, you ugly-ass rat.’
So basically everything was going according to plan.
(The school year starts. It's a great deal of fun, until it isn't.)
Notes:
Yo! Welcome back !
Before we dive right into the chapter.... I apologize in advance for the cliffhanger x)
________________________________________
Some people wanted my chronology, but i don't want to leave it in the comments of "wisdom of the fallen" in case people read it and not the main fic, and get spoiled.
So here is the chronology for the main fic !
Year 2208 – (year 0) Toki is born on October 31st. All Might is currently 34 and has been active in Japan for almost ten years. Endeavor is 24, has been number Two for three years, married for two. Touya is about a year older than Toki; Fuyumi will be born December so two months after Toki. Keigo will also be born in December so two months after Toki.
Mirko is currently 4, Inferno is currently 14. Mera is 16 and not yet sleep-deprived. Genmei-san (the future President) is 27 and climbing the hierarchical ladder. Genryusai, the current President, is already old. Oh, and Lady Nagant is 17 and has already been recruited by the HSPC.
Year 2212 – (year 4) Her Quirk appears, happy childhood.
Year 2214 - (year 6) Keigo's father is arrested, he's recruited by the HPSC.
Year 2215 - (year 7) Toki meets Meteor. Izuku Midoriya's generation is born that year and the next.
Year 2216 – (year 8) The Last Heist at Christmas.
Year 2217 – (year 9) Her parents are arrested and she joins the HSC at the beginning of the year. Sayuri dies mid-year.
Year 2218 – (year 10) Toki meets Shirayuki. Toki meets Genryusai.
Year 2219 – (year 11) Okamoto starts teaching Toki and Keigo.
Year 2220 – (year 12) Toki start working on Warp-Blast. In canon: Touya dies at Sekoto Peak.
Year 2221 – (year 13) Toki masters the Warp-Blasts.
Year 2222 – (year 14) Lessons with Hobo-san. Shirayuki is killed in November by Hellmaker.
Year 2223 – (year 15) Training with Hobo-san until July. Heart attack a few months before her 15th birthday
Year 2224 – (year 16) Heart transplant. All Might fight AFO, disapear for a month, then come back and start limiting his hours. Lady Nagant trains Keigo for a while. Then she kills Genryusai and is arrested, which(unknowingly to Toki) create some confusion in the HPSC and thus stop them from noticing that All Might isn't back to top shape.
Year 2225 – (year 17) Toki meets Melissa online.
Year 2226 – (years 18) Toki graduates. She's a solo hero at the beginning, as is Keigo. Homura dies in a prison riot. A few months later, Meteor makes his deal with Endeavor and leaves Tartarus for a medium-security prison.
Year 2227 – (year 19) Start of the Icarus Agency. Toki passes her Bachelor’s degree.
Year 2228 – (year 20) Fight against All Might. Melissa joins Yūei at 15 (Toki is 19 and half). All Might step down. Toki passes her Master’s degree.
CANON BEGINS
Year 2229 – (year 21):
March: Melissa passes in 2nd year.
April: All Might met Midoriya (14 yo). Meteor is released at the end of month.
May: Toki is pregnant (about 3 month and half when she finds out). Wedding. Leaves Fukuoka. The law authorizing Quirk use pass.
June: Provisional Hero License Exam: Hitoshi fails.
July: Business with Bakugou.
September: Provisional License Exam, Melissa pass. Melissa has her work-study. Hinawa is born September 10th.
October: Toki turn 21.
November: Quantum reappears on the heroic scene. Billboard Chart (end of month): Endeavor n° 1, Hawks n° 2, Quantum n° 12.
December: Toki start training Monoma.Year 2230 – (year 22):
January: Meteor and Endeavor fight Stain.
February : Yūei entrance exam at the end of the month!
As for the chronology during canon, i found this great work here :
https://www.reddit.com/r/BokuNoHeroAcademia/comments/7266e0/an_unofficial_timeline_of_bnha/It covers the chronology from Midoriya meeting All Might to the Eight Precepts arc. Mostly i use it to guess where class 1-A is at because school doesn't work the same in Japan as it does in Europe where i live x)
__________________________________________________
I had to correct my chronology because i mistakenly wrote that Touya died the same year as Hellmaker torching Fukuoka (when Toki was 14) while it actually happen two years ago. Grrr. Anyway, i fixed it. I also fixed it in "Wisdom of the Fallen": Endeavor still meets Meteor very soon after Touya's death, but Hellmaker attacks only two years later.
Anyway! Let's gooooo !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
AND SO IT BEGINS
In February, All Might officially went on a trip overseas. Unofficially, he received lung surgery and was benched until he healed. Since the damage wasn’t as catastrophic as what Toki had suffered (it was only a lung, not the organ source of his Quirk), his recovery time would be shorter. But he still was on medical leave, and he sulked a lot. Melissa texted Toki about it, sending pictures of her uncle knitting a mountain of socks, or grumpily trying to cook. It was kind of funny.
But the main thing to happen that month wasn’t All Might’s brief vacation. It was that Toki finally got her hands on something she had almost given up on obtaining: a clear picture from security footage showing Dabi’s face in all his whole mutilated glory.
Fucking finally.
The picture was clear enough for Toki to make a police sketch, the kind you use for identifying criminals. Then she used the hero network to post the picture and indicate ‘suspect for arson.’ There. Heroes didn’t have to give their sources, after all. She had planted the seed: now heroes would be on the lookout for a creepy guy who looked like he had been waterboarded in a hot fryer. That was a step taken against Dabi.
Now, there was still the matter of identifying Touya, linking him with Dabi, and putting him away. So Toki downloaded software to edit pictures and had fun. It would be only natural to try to see what the dude looked like without his scars, right? And there, picture edited. Hmm, the lighting’s kind of bad. Increase the contrast, then luminosity... now his skin tone and eye color match Endeavor’s. Then she played around with his hair, making it dark red instead of black, and surprise, surprise!
You guessed it, he looked just like young Enji Todoroki.
...Minus about twenty pounds of muscle, of course.
So. Toki printed various sketches of Dabi: with and without scars, with black hair, red hair, white hair, and so on. She would use them later. Ideally, she would take out Dabi without revealing his identity as Touya. Not that she wanted to protect Endeavor. Honestly, screw that guy. But the rest of his family probably didn’t want exposure to the media. And also, she didn’t want Endeavor’s attention to turn to Quantum, especially when there was Meteor lurking around!
So yeah, ideally, she wouldn’t reveal anything about Touya. But if she had to use that angle to take down Dabi? Well, too bad for Endeavor. Keigo’s safety was a greater priority than covering up his family drama. And Touya’s identity was a huge Achilles heel for Dabi, because Touya had a past, had motivations: he could be understood, and he could be predicted.
Investigating wasn’t Toki’s best skill, but she had to give it a shot at least. There was too much riding on this.
Anyways. She started investigating Touya Todoroki. Quietly. Just finding his birth certificate, death certificate, where he’d gone to school, if he had any kind of health insurance, who his childhood doctor had been... And finding articles and news about the fire that had allegedly caused his death.
All of that was still so impersonal. Toki wanted to know who he had been, how he acted, and what he valued. She wanted to know when he had started hating his father. When he started hating his brother Shouto, and if he still loved the rest of his family. She wanted to know if he had been close to his mom, or if he had the same strange mix of love, longing, resentment, and despair that Toki felt for her own mother. What had he wanted as a child? Was it love? Validation? Pride? The thrill of victory? Or maybe just not to live in his father’s shadow? Had he enjoyed burning people already? Or had he just been begging for attention?
She couldn’t know that by looking at some decade-old articles. Toki could only learn that by talking to people who had known Touya when he was still around. Unfortunately, those people weren’t many.
Bah. She would find a way. And even if she didn’t... it wouldn’t stop her from taking down Dabi.
He was one of the biggest threats looming above her family.
Still. It would seem weird, and maybe out of character, for her to focus too much on the Ghost Arsonist. Keigo already knew she was investigating him, of course, but when he asked jokingly if she had made any progress, she usually answered that she had a good conspiracy theory about him and that she was following that lead. The fact that she hadn’t expanded on said conspiracy theory had probably clued him in that it was more serious than her light tone implied. In any case, he knew she kept coming back to that case like picking at a scab. He let her do her thing because he trusted her, but if she got too absorbed he would worry. He always did.
So. Better not to jump the gun. She continued investigating, except this time she was digging stuff on Touya Todoroki on top of the Ghost Arsonist, but she was keeping that part quiet.
It wasn’t very difficult; she had plenty of more interesting stuff going on. Hero work, training her students, making progress with her thesis, sneaking visits to Hina-chan. The usual. She dropped by Osaka to hang out with Inferno and Salamander. She also crashed Mirko’s patrol, with Keigo giddily tagging along, and they had an epic chase across town with six very well-coordinated bank robbers.
Life was good.
________________
> PikaPika: local news: today a woman called the restaurant-part of the fancy bar I work, and she booked EVERY. SINGLE. TABLE.
> PikaPika: so I thought “uuuuh weird but okay, is it for a special event?”
> PikaPika: And she said “oh yeah. I won’t come, but my husband is going to call you to reserve a table with his mistress. I want you to give him one, but to let no one else in.”
> EndeavorSucks: holy shiiiiiiit
> PinkIsPunkRock: OMG
> PinkIsPunkRock: when is it going to be?
> SpicyWings: “is it for a special event” “yes. revenge.”
< Antares: XDDD
> PikaPika: exactly
> PikaPika: so I’m like O_O and she continue: “you’re going to offer them champagne, then i’m going to burst out with our whole families, who have been told it’s going to be a marriage proposal. there will be tears and screaming. do not be alarmed. i promise nobody is going to bring weapons.”
> PikaPika: THANK YOU THIS IS NOT REASSURING?!
> PikaPika: and so I said: “ma’am since we’re talking about a full reservation AND A SHOW the price is going to be that much. you will have to pay a deposit.” And she said “of course no problem, here is also a big tip if you can slip laxative in the champagne” and I said “ma’am that is illegal I could get fired”
> PikaPika: “oh never mind that, then, I’ll make sure to make him shit his pants by sheer terror alone. keep the tip and have a good time!”
> PikaPika: so the reservation is for the 14th, on Valentine’s Day.
> PikaPika: it had forty minutes since that call and I’m still in awe
< Antares: THIS IS GOLD
> Megamind: that man is in so much trouble
> Megamind: I love it
> Megamind: (also totally unrelated question @Antares but can I invite Neito to the chat? He’s already on the general discord, as PhantomOfTheOpera, but he doesn’t have access to #StarsChickenConspiracy...)
< Antares: I’ve got no problem but it’s up to @SpicyWings, he’s the other hero unmasked here
> Megamind: he’s not really unmasked, nobody knows his name
< Antares: Point. What do you think Hawks?
> SpicyWings: sure, go nuts.
> Megamind: \o/
> Moxie: I just read the story. I’m on the floor laughing.
> Moxie: I told my uncle, he’s absolutely delighted to share it with his Snitch and Bitch
> PinkIsPunkRock: his WHAT
> Moxie: that’s the name of his knitting group
> PinkIsPunkRock: it’s FREAKING ADORABLE
> NotOnFire: Hey Pika don’t you need a hero to keep an eye on things that evening? 😉
> SpicyWings: GOOD POINT
> SpicyWings: I VOLUNTEER AS TRIBUTE
> PinkIsPunkRock: don’t you have a girlfriend you have to spend the day with?!
< Antares: nah, I don’t really care about Valentine’s Day. Except for how cheap chocolate is the next day =)
> EndeavorSucks: that’s the spirit
> Moxie: I wouldn’t have you pegged for a romantic, Pink!
> PinkIsPunkRock: fuck you, i’m a delicate flower and stuff
> PinkIsPunkRock: and I’m more romantic than @Antares!
< Antares: ...please don’t bring up our date again xD
> Megamind: wait what
> PinkIsPunkRock: it’s just that I have plans with my girlfriend, that’s all. It’s our three years anniversary soon.
> Moxie: you have a girlfriend? You never said!
> PinkIsPunkRock: I did?!?! Yeaaaaaars ago. But I keep it low-key because she isn’t out yet.
> PinkIsPunkRock: except she told one of her friends recently and now she says she feels ready to tell people at her work now! ❤️
> NotOnFire: that’s great! Congrats!
< Antares: yes, congratulations! To you, and to her!
> PinkIsPunkRock: Thanks!
> PinkIsPunkRock: she isn’t ready to tell her family yet (apparently her dad is kind of scary and her mom is obsessed with being NORMAL, and her little brother made one homophobic joke the last time she saw him so now she’s completely freaked out), but it’s still progress!
> PinkIsPunkRock: I could introduce her to you @Antares @Moxie @Megamind so she could see that I don’t only hang out with theaters nerds. but one at a time so she doesn’t get overwhelmed by how weird you all are.
> Megamind: excuse me I am a huge theater nerd
> Antares: it would be my pleasure!
> Moxie: hell yes! You could even invite her on Discord (the general channel, not the conspiracy one)!
> PinkIsPunkRock: that’s not really her style but I’ll suggest it =)
> PinkIsPunkRock: but enough about me! What’s up in YOUR romantic lives, y’all?
< Antares: the usual
> SpicyWings: same
> PinkIsPunkRock: you two don’t get a voice. You got MARRIED without telling us.
> SpicyWings: we ELOPED
> SpicyWings: it was ROMANTIC and SECRET
> PinkIsPunkRock: cool motive! still pissed.
> EndeavorSucks: don’t you need two witnesses to get married? Who did you pick?
< Antares: no, you only need one.
> SpicyWings: and it was Mirko =)
> EndeavorSucks: omg, I am simmering in jealousy right now
> EndeavorSucks: she could step on me in high heels and I would thank her
> NotOnFire: aren’t you gay?
> EndeavorSucks: I am. But I would lend her a strap-on.
> PikaPika: THERE ARE MINORS ON THIS CHANNEL, turn down the horniness or go to the #NSFW salon!
> EndeavorSucks: Sorry, my bad. ANYWAY to get back to the topic at hand, I am vaguely dating a guy I met on Grindr. We spend half our time arguing and the other half with make-up sex.
> NotOnFire: doesn’t sound very healthy...
> EndeavorSucks: that’s not the point
> EndeavorSucks: i mean i could fix him, but honestly whatever the hell is wrong with him is way funnier.
> PikaPika: you are a horrible person x)
> NotOnFire: I love it xDDDDD
> PikaPika: what about YOUR love life, Fire? Did you get pickpocketed by some other chick recently, hm?
> NotOnFire: THAT WAS ONE TIME
> NotOnFire: and no, I’m still single. Because I’m not trying to meet someone! It would be different if I tried!
> SpicyWings: yeah, tell yourself that
> PinkIsPunkRock: xDDDD
< Antares: hey Megamind didn’t you want to invite Phantom?
> Megamind: I’m waiting until the clowns are done so they don’t scare him
> PikaPika: we’re done!
> NotOnFire: yeah we’re done!
- Everyone stands up! PhantomOfTheOpera has joined the chatroom! -
> NotOnFire: ....so are we going to talk about Endy’s strap-on or...?
> Megamind: COME ON GUYS!
> Megamind: for fuck sake
< Antares: LANGUAGE!
________________
Yeah, life was good. Neito quickly integrated into the rest of the Discord, even though he seemed a little starstruck at the thought of having Quantum and Hawks reading his text posts. Toki really didn’t see what the fuss was about. She had joined a few servers dedicated to Quantum or Hawks or both, and it was always hilarious to lurk there anonymously and then retweet some of their posts using the official Icarus Twitter account. It always made everyone freak out, part delight, and part horror at the idea of their heroes seeing their NSFW fanart.
...Although some of the fanart was really good.
Anyways. Back to the point.
Yūei's entrance exam was at the end of the month. Hitoshi and Neito were both low-key freaking out. Hitoshi was scared of messing up the physical portion of the exam, and Neito was scared of failing the written one.
Toki didn’t swing by the beach anymore, not since going back to being Quantum, but she still kept contact with All Might. So she texted him to wonder how Midoriya was hanging on. The answer was: poorly. He was as anxious as Hitoshi and Neito combined. Probably more, Toki mused, since he had a lot more pressure on his shoulders. For him, the exam wasn’t just about his future, it was also about not disappointing his hero, the only person to have ever believed in him.
Oh, and also, All Might planned to introduce Melissa to Midoriya after the entrance exam. Melissa mentioned it off-handedly during training. She was kind of annoyed that it had taken ten months for her uncle to finally decided his student was worth meeting her, but she also understood that it hadn’t been ‘the right time.’ It made a little lightbulb go off in Toki’s mind. Oh. All Might hadn’t avoided introducing them because Midoriya was prejudiced against Quirklessness: he had waited until Midoriya was no longer Quirkless!
...Which could have several good reasons, actually. Maybe Midoriya hadn’t wanted to meet Melissa and lie to her about his Quirk status. Maybe All Might hadn’t wanted to introduce them because it would have been bitter for Melissa to meet someone like her, but who had the chance to toss away Quirklessness? Or maybe it was the reverse. Melissa hadn’t wanted a Quirk; she had wanted to be a Quirkless hero with her own power. Maybe All Might had offered her his Quirk, and she had turned him down! In that case, well, maybe All Might was wary of letting her meet Midoriya until he had accepted One For All because maybe Melissa would change Midoriya’s mind...
But it was all conjecture, anyway. Whatever. Toki had to focus on the important stuff.
Valentine’s Day came and went. Keigo went for a solo patrol in Tokyo, where PikaPika had his bar. He assisted with the dramatic dinner mentioned on Discord while also live tweeting it using Icarus’ official Twitter account. Then he took a selfie with PikaPika, who was... kind of a pretty guy actually. And he gave him his autograph. Meanwhile, Toki spent the day at the Shinsō household, babysitting Hitoshi and Hina-chan while Dr. Shinsō was taking Mihoko-san on a date.
Toki and Keigo didn’t really care about Valentine’s Day, but they did care about chocolate, so the very next day they both raided all the shops in Fukuoka for the most ridiculous, over-the-top chocolate box they could find. It was an implicit contest to see who could bring back the weirdest one. Keigo won. That evening, they ate chocolate until they got sick of it. Then they bundled up in covers and went to the roof to watch the nightlife and tell each other stories and stupid jokes.
Who said romance was dead? They just had their own definition of the word.
Later in the month, their patrol route led them to Kyoto. As the Number Two hero, it was important for Hawks to be seen in major cities, including the capital. And since Quantum was the only person able to match his speed, well, she volunteered to go there with him. She also warped them directly into the city, instead of having to take the train. Really, one of the best points of her Quirk was her awesomeness as a taxi service.
So, in Kyoto, they crossed the path of Gecko: The Lizard Hero.
He had a powerful regenerative Quirk and could heal from any injury. Even his limbs grew back when amputated, like a lizard’s tail. Toki had already spoken with him a little, mostly because she had wanted to find out stuff about Yūei, and Gecko just happened to have his little sister take the recommended student exam this year.
Gecko rarely left Kyoto, which made him somewhat of an oddity. Usually, heroes travel the whole country with regularity. They shouldn’t stay static. It bred complacency and ignorance. That was why Quantum and Hawks often left their prefecture. You had to go where the work was and if you didn’t know where it was, you had to go and look for it. Even heroes who had a second job in their cities, such as Present Mic or Eraserhead, had to travel a lot.
Gecko was in a special position because he was affiliated with a local hospital and lab. Turn out that his blood had regenerative properties. He gave blood transfusions fairly regularly, but most of all, he was kind of a lab rat at this particular hospital. It was very lucrative. For a hero with such a lame Quirk (his words, no Toki’s!), Gecko had managed to become very rich and pretty well-established.
“I kind of envy you and your awesome Quirks,” he laughed easily as they watched over the city from a good vantage point in a local park. “But I’m fine where I am. Also, I get to play tourist guide to the two fastest heroes around.”
“I’m actually the fastest one,” grinned Keigo.
Toki swatted his arm, laughing, “No, you’re not!”
“Don’t listen to her. She’s just jealous.”
Gecko snorted. “Yes, totally. By the way, Quantum, last time we saw each other you mentioned having students. Are you going to make them take the recommended exam in Yūei?”
“Nah, they can fend for themselves.”
Keigo let out an amused noise. He was of the opinion that all of Toki’s students had the survival instinct of a concussed lemming and that Toki’s training was the only thing that had kept them alive. Melissa builds explosives on a regular basis and her ambition was to become a Quirkless hero in a world where bad guys shoot lasers with their eyes. Hitoshi had a mind-control Quirk and still wanted to be a limelight hero, and his favorite pastime was to jump off tall buildings like Spiderman. Neito was even worse because he didn’t even have an offensive Quirk or any martial arts training, yet they were still diving headfirst into heroics! In summation, the fledglings (and yes, Keigo loved that nickname, even though Toki had used it as a joke) shared the family trait of Absolute Dumbassery and a Willful Disregard for Self-Preservation. Toki training them was forty-percent fatalism, sixty-percent Hail Mary.
And, well, also one hundred percent the fact that she was a big softy inside. So sue her.
“You have a little sister?” Keigo asked with interest.
“Yes, Setsuna-chan. She’ll start Yūei this year!”
“Maybe she’ll be in Hitoshi or Neito’s class,” Toki smiled.
Actually, if canon stayed the same, Setsuna Tokage would be in class 1-B, with Neito Monoma. Hitoshi... well Toki had no idea where he would end up if he managed to take the spot of one of the lower-scoring kids. It could be either class.
“I would be nice,” Gecko admitted. “Setsuna-chan won’t know anyone there. All of her friends interested in heroics are going to Ketsubutsu Academy because it’s nearer.”
Toki patted him on the arm. “I’ll tell my rapscallions to be chivalrous and keep an eye on her, then.”
“Would you? It would be great. You may think I’m an overbearing big brother, but I raised her all on my own, so I’m a little protective!”
“Chill!” Keigo laughed, flapping his wings lazily (and catching a purse-snatcher with a feather without even looking). “It’s Yūei. She’s going to be perfectly safe!”
If Toki’s smile became slightly fixated, nobody noticed.
oOoOoOo
The end of February came. The recommended students passed their own exam first, so Toki politely texted Gecko to enquire about his sister’s success. Gecko was delighted to inform her that Setsuna-chan had passed with flying colors. He sounded like a proud dad.
Which he was, in a way, if he raised his little sister on his own. They had something like twelve years apart, and in a world filled with villains and violent incidents, orphans weren’t a rare occurrence.
Then the normal entrance exam happened. Hitoshi and Neito both went determined and horribly stressed out. Both came back speaking a mile a minute, counting their points, fretting about their respective performances.
Neito had borrowed Toki’s Quirk for the exam, and he had about forty villain points, while Hitoshi with his capture weapons had about twenty. They had helped other examinees during the test, as Toki had not-so-subtly hinted that their attitude may be observed so they should have rescue points, too. They were both terribly anxious about their results, but Toki was pretty confident they had passed.
Then the HPSC contacted her.
Well, not her specifically. They also reached out to Hawks, Inferno, and a bunch of other heroes who had gone through or were aware of the sponsorship program. They needed a volunteer to test their latest pupil, Serpentine, so her Provisional License Exam could become irrevocable.
Apparently to get your definitive license, either you passed the exam… or (if your Provisional License was less than two years old) you could simply pass a test to confirm that you still had the skills required. The test was used mostly for hero high schoolers who passed their Provisional License Exam in their second year and simply needed an exam with their teacher to validate this license at the end of their third year. It helped declutter the real license exam.
Whatever. It was a chance to poke around Naruto Labs, ask pointed questions, and meet little Serpentine. Toki gladly signed up. Keigo didn’t, and neither did Inferno. But Salamander was required to be there as an evaluator. S-ranked heroes must be a rare commodity if they asked him every time they had to test a student. Or maybe they asked him to avoid revealing to Toki the identity of other S-ranked heroes? Toki wouldn’t put it past Genmei-san.
So, the day of the eval came. Toki went to Osaka in a few jumps so she could pick up Salamander, saving him the trouble of catching the train. It was also the chance for her to say hi to Inferno and be invited to lunch with both of them.
It was always nice to catch up with friends. Well, as much as someone as grouchy as Salamander could be called a friend. He was prickly and rude but also very observant, analytical, rational... and also caring in an aggressive sort of way. He perfectly complimented Inferno who was polite, charming, and could soothe ruffled feathers with a few jokes while also being arrogant and hot-tempered. Watching them interacting always made Toki think of an old married couple, or maybe a duo of long-time friends bickering half-sincerely and half-putting on a show. Like Quantum and Hawks, actually.
Anyways. She poked fun at them. Inferno swatted her, complaining about how she was disrespectful to her senpai. She stuck his tongue at him as proof of her maturity, before warping away with Salamander who was rolling his eyes so hard they looked about to fall out of his head.
Yeah, they were all very well-adjusted grown-ups.
They warped to Naruto Labs. It took a few jumps Toki was well-aware of her distance limit (eighty kilometers) and so she never jumped more than half that, so forty kilometers each time. In practice, it made for stomach-dropping appearances and disappearances high in the sky. The whole thing lasted less than a minute, but for people unused to it... it could be a really unsettling experience. Neito had thrown up when she had started teaching him long-distance travel. Melissa thought the whole thing was thrilling like a roller coaster, but that was because she had never experienced successive jumps for more than five consecutive seconds. If it went on longer, you could start to feel the compression and decompression of jumping through a vacuum. Paired with the cold of high altitude... it was unpleasant for some.
So, when they landed, Salamander looked a little green. And not just because of his costume. Toki patted his shoulder comfortingly.
“There, there, it’s over.”
“...I’m taking the train back. I don’t fucking care if it’s three hours.”
Toki blew a raspberry at him. What a delicate flower. Warping wasn’t for everyone!
Whatever. They had appeared in front of the labs, past the main gate. Toki craned her head to look at the buildings and raised an eyebrow. There had been some renovations. One of the buildings has a floor higher, and all of the walls were freshly repainted. The roof of the gym, almost hidden by a range of trees, was a shiny silver now, instead of a dull red. The big cherry tree behind the main building, where the path branched off to a running track, was even more massive than in her memories. Of course, it had been what, six, eight years since she had seen it? Things had changed.
Maybe that was why Keigo hadn’t wanted to come back. Unlike Toki, he remembered the labs as... well, not just a home, but also a place where he had been alone. Before her arrival, but also after, when she had left for Musutafu. This place didn’t only evoke fond memories, but also bitter ones.
She wondered what had happened to Okamoto. How high-ranked this asshole was, now? Was he bullying other kids into perfection? She really hoped not.
She shrugged it off and walked into the main building in step with Salamander. Mera-san was already here, but not alone. He was with a hero dressed in brightly colored clothing. Black, green, purple, grey. The hero wore several fabrics and sashes of various patterns and colors tied around his costume, with one of them blindfolding him. He also wore a short orange robe, more like a fashionable poncho really, and a scarlet pointy hat. It took several seconds for Toki to recognize him as a recently establish pro-hero in the mid-hundreds of the ranking.
“Hello, Mera-san. Hello... Majestic, wasn’t it?”
Majestic, the Magic Hero, bowed with a flourish. It was really weird to see a hero moving around blindfolded. How did he see?
“Indeed! I am most honored to meet you, Quantum! And...”
“Salamander,” the other man introduced himself gruffly.
“I didn’t know you were part of the sponsorship program,” Toki wondered. “I asked Mera-san who was when they recruited me, though.”
Mera-san shrugged:
“I told you about the heroes, but I didn’t know about the sidekicks yet. Remember, it was fourteen years ago. I was new to the program. Now, well... Inferno went solo ten years ago, Kesagiri Man six...” Toki tuned him out for a second because Kesagiri Man was a hero she had met, and he was in his forties, so he was really starting late as a solo hero! “... and Majestic here just left Best Jeanist’s agency last year.”
“I learned a lot from him, but our taste in fashion were incompatible,” Majestic confided.
Toki looked at his outfit, with so many colors and patterns superposed that it would make an epileptic collapse, and deadpanned:
“I can’t imagine why.”
“I think there aren’t any more heroes from Naruto Labs,” Mera-san continued, pensive. “Hawks, you, Inferno, Kesagiri, Majestic, Snatch, Recovery Girl... yeah, that’s all. Of course, there are still a few heroes who come from the sponsorship program, like Crust or Takeshita, but those got a scholarship, and never set foot in here.”
So seven heroes came from Naruto Labs. Soon, eight, with little Serpentine. It wasn’t a lot when you thought about the thousands of pro-heroes in Japan. But for a program that wasn’t supposed to exist, seven was still a big number. Especially considering they were the successful ones. For all Toki knew, there were other people who hadn’t made the cut. Maybe they had left heroics, or maybe they had just dropped off the program. That was a possibility.
“Shall we?” Mera-san raised an eyebrow.
They went.
They passed through several halls and corridors Toki remembered. In the meantime, she struck a conversation with Majestic, curious to learn about how he had ended up in this program.
Turned out, Majestic was in his early thirties. He had been scouted for this program at seventeen, had spent about a year here, and had left about six months before Toki was recruited. Keigo hadn’t lived in Naruto Labs right away, so he and Majestic had barely crossed paths. Majestic had also been an unfriendly teenager. He had lived with Inferno for three months before the young Fiery Hero graduated and left to live in Shizuoka, but even then, they had barely interacted outside training. Majestic had rebuffed his overtures of friendship, seeing himself as too cool to hang out with anyone.
“I was horrible as a teenager,” he recounted with fond nostalgia. “You wouldn’t have recognized me back then. I still dressed in monochrome. I was so dull and repressed! It’s kind of surreal to come back here and feel so much more comfortable in my own skin.”
It was hard to imagine the extravagant and cheerful Majestic as a grim and misanthropic teenager, but Toki still took it in stride.
“So you’re not nostalgic about your time here?”
“Not at all. No offense to you, Mera-san, but this place was depressing. What about you, Quantum, do you feel nostalgia?”
She thought about growing up here, of training until she fell asleep exhausted, full of bruises and aches. She thought about the crazy chases around the park with Hayasa-sensei and Keigo, about eating as much as she wanted, about laughing at bad jokes, about pestering long-suffering teachers that still gently bowed to her every demand. Of feeling carefree, young, and cared for. Even if it had been built on a lie.
“It had its moments.”
They spoke some more. Toki was keeping an eye out, trying to see if they passed familiar faces in the hallways. But even if they passed a few researchers, none of them looked familiar. She tried not to feel disappointed. It had been eight years, after all. It was normal that the staff had changed.
Anyways. Soon enough, they ended up in the running circuit that Toki knew. And here, standing up straight and bouncing slightly on the balls of her feet, was Serpentine.
She was shorter than Toki would have thought. She was, what, eighteen? Hitoshi must have almost a head on her. And she was cute, too, with a round face, big eyes, and dark blue-green hair that framed her head like the hood of a snake. Her hero outfit was clearly of Chinese inspiration, with a Mao neckline, a long, slitted tunic, and flat slippers on her feet. She was in all teal, with a jade-colored geometrical pattern (the diamond shape of the Commission, once again) and lighter accents in turquoise or viridian green. It drew attention to the vivid color of her eyes: pale yellow sclera, emerald iris, and dark slit pupils.
Toki didn’t know much about Serpentine. She had joined the Commission about two years ago now, at age sixteen. Hayasa-sensei had been contacted by Naruto Labs to design her training. About a year later, she had passed her Provisional Hero License: Toki had accidentally assisted to it because she had entered Hitoshi in it, to give him some combat experience. By then, Serpentine’s hero name had been Sumire. At the time, Toki had found it cute but not very hero-like. Serpentine had such a better vibe to it.
From what Toki remembered of her file (that she had only briefly read two years ago), Serpentine had an illusion-based Quirk. Or, rather, the public version was that she had an illusion-based Quirk. Those illusions were actually based on her very potent, psychedelic venom... which in turn originated from her snake-like mutation. Slitted pupils, heightened sensitivity to vibration, and astonishing agility were some of the perks.
“Hello,” Toki grinned. “I’m Quantum, the Starburst Hero. Nice to meet you. You can call me senpai.”
“Oh, true, you are sort of our little kōhai!” Majestic laughed, tipping his hat to her like an old-fashioned gentleman. “I was part of this program, too. I’m Majestic, the Magic Hero! Delighted to make your acquaintance.”
“And this is Salamander,” Mera-san added, waving at the reptilian hero who had stayed back, arms crossed and looking disgruntled by their enthusiasm. “He’s aware of the sponsorship program and regularly evaluates its students.”
That was a stretch, considering that before that, the only student to evaluate had been Toki. Twice didn’t mean regular. But Toki let it slide. Mera-san probably wanted to avoid Salamander introducing himself as an S-ranked hero like he had done before.
“Nice to meet you!” Serpentine beamed at her, her fangs glinting. “I heard a lot about you!”
“You did?” Toki was kind of flattered.
“Of course! I’m a close-range fighter so my training was designed after yours. I did ballet, break-dancing, and Krav Maga, too!”
Toki turned to Mera-san and declared, straight-faced: “She passes.”
“You need to actually test her, Quantum.”
So they went on with the actual test... which was, of course, a fight. It shouldn’t be the only basis on which a hero was evaluated, of course: but it was still the main one. Heroes had to hold their own. And, as much as Naruto Labs could evaluate Serpentine’s memorization of emergency codes or test her speed and endurance... to evaluate her combat abilities, they still needed to trust her in a real situation. Hence: this test.
It went a little like Toki’s own test with Inferno, except that there were two opponents, not just one. Majestic, Toki, and Serpentine were asked to spar, first without Quirk, then with them once Serpentine used hers. Of course, the goal wasn’t to squash the young girl, but to evaluate. Majestic and Toki took care to step back when the other attacked, taking the time to observe the fight, and waiting for their turn.
At hand to hand, you had to admit, Serpentine was really good. Her flexibility was downright creepy: she bent her spine in ways that looked painful, then twisted and sprang upright like a human spring. And she was physically much stronger than she appeared. She was five feet tall! She was short, small, and cute: she shouldn’t be able to pick up Majestic and threw him away like a ragdoll!
Majestic and Toki both were well-trained, so no matter how ridiculously strong Serpentine was, they held their own. Still, they had a few nasty surprises with the first hits the girl managed to land. Serpentine favored high jumps and rounded kicks to get more strength in her hits.
Toki almost didn’t notice when Serpentine started using her Quirk. But she had been warned that her illusions were related to her venom, so she had been on the lookout for said venom. A bite, a sting, an aerosol maybe. It was small, but when she felt her throat burn and her eyes water, her attentiveness ranked up a notch.
When the earth opened with a massive rumble, a giant crater splitting the training ground open right at her feet, Toki controlled the instinctive urge to stumble away (and right into Serpentine’s waiting right hook) and instead warped ten meters back.
“That’s a very complete illusion,” she remarked.
Serpentine grinned and didn’t answer. With her fangs gleaming, and the way her pupils narrowed with delight, she looked more... inhuman than before. It was kind of intimidating.
“Oh, does that mean we can use Quirks now?” Majestic asked cheerfully.
Serpentine must have blasted him with another illusion because he jolted back with a squeak. Then he grinned... and, immediately after, started flinging energy force fields from his wrist. The disks of energy were as high as him and he could apparently control them telepathically. He could probably use them to cuff people, slam them into his target, or even move stuff around like floating platforms. That was possibly one of the most versatile Quirk Toki had come across.
Then went back and forth like that for maybe a half hour. In the beginning, it wasn’t really hard to see what was real and what was not, because Toki knew those grounds. She knew the earth didn’t open up like that, she knew there wasn’t a fire pit there, and she knew there wasn’t a gigantic wild bear bursting out of the gym. All those things were sudden and frightening, but they played with general human fears more than situational fears. Maybe Serpentine’s venom targeted the amygdala, the part of the brain that dealt with spontaneous emotional responses, like fear and anxiety.
It was an incredibly powerful Quirk if that was the case. She didn’t build illusions, she made people hallucinate and guided their hallucinations! And the more time passed and the more subtle her illusions would appear. Instead of fire, heigh, or wild animals, Toki was bombarded with swarms of insects that blocked her view, for example. And the swarm wasn’t real anyway, so when she teleported away, the first two times she also teleported with the swarm, since it was a creation of her brain! It took her several tries and a real mind-trick effort to finally wrap away without the illusion.
Majestic was nearly taken down just as the bell rang, signaling the end of the test. He barely managed to catch himself and jump away. If the bell hadn’t stopped Serpentine, he would have been caught. Still, even when Serpentine stopped using her Quirk, the illusions didn’t vanish instantly. It took almost a minute, the swarm of insects glitching wildly until it finally disappeared into thin air.
Majestic looked disgruntled, even with half his face hidden behind his blindfold. Toki herself was a little worse for wear. She had scratches and dirt all over her once pristine white costume. She felt reluctantly impressed. Toki hadn’t expected Serpentine to be so badass. Was it how Inferno had felt after fighting her, when Toki had been a slip of a girl just out of medical leave, and still managed to hold her own against his fire?
“Not bad,” Salamander commented gruffly.
Serpentine was drenched in sweat, and she winced. “I didn’t manage to get Quantum, and even Majestic evaded me until the end.”
“If a teenager could get the drop on them, they wouldn’t be very good heroes,” Salamander retorted bluntly.
Toki carefully avoided mentioning all the times when Melissa’s grenades, Hitoshi’s Quirk, or Neito’s use of Warp-Space had caught her wrongfooted.
“How does your Quirk work exactly?” Toki enquired curiously. “Your illusions were very detailed but not very personalized. I would have expected fear-induced hallucination to elicit a more specific response. Unless they aren’t fear-induced hallucinations?”
Serpentine blinked owlishly.
“Not... really? I can cast illusions of whatever I want. Basically, I vaporize the venom, and when it’s inhaled the subjects become vulnerable to my mental projections. It’s easier to create illusions that target strong emotions because your brain automatically fills in the blanks, so I don’t have to figure out every detail. Fear and disgust are my go-to. But I could create more complex illusions. It only requires concentration and proximity, to keep the subject under the influence of the venom.”
So it was poison, telepathy, and empathy. Some Quirks were really wild.
“Do people build up an immunity?” wondered Majestic.
“They do,” Serpentine admitted, reluctant. “The more you are exposed to my venom the less efficient it is. You two barely needed a few drops vaporized in your faces. My usual trainer would need to inhale a full bucket or to have an open wound doused with pure venom so it could get directly into his bloodstream. Otherwise, he’s immunized, and the venom just causes mild headaches. But then, the more I know my subjects, the more I can tailor the illusions to them. Instead of just sending generic pictures, I can make them hallucinate a whole specific scene.”
They talked some more while Mera-san and Salamander got back inside to grade Serpentine’s performance. Majestic recounted dramatically a chase he had been part of with Snatch and Gecko just last week, the story complete with background noise, exaggerated hand motions, and a dramatic rendition of the bad guy’s capture. You had to give it to that guy: he was a great storyteller. A little too good, even! If there was one word to describe Majestic, it would be theatrical.
Toi didn’t have the juiciest story to top that one, so she stayed on the subject of their mutual acquaintances. Most heroes had common friends. Majestic had mentioned Gecko, so they spoke of him, and then from there they went on a full tangent about heroes with reptilian Quirks. Mutant animal-like Quirks were very common, but the mutations were usually mammalian: dogs, cats, horses, bears, mouses, and so on. Reptiles were a little sparser. Most people usually had reptilian traits, but a completely different Quirk. Like Salamander who had a few scales and big claws, but whose Quirk was heat-resistance. The rarer animalistic mutations, of course, were bird-like mutations. Especially functional wings.
(Yep, that made Keigo’s Quirk one of the rarest and perfect animalistic Quirk around. No wonder the HPSC had snatched him up as soon as they could... Just like how they would snatch away Hinawa, too, if they learned of her existence. Even if it was too soon to guess her Quirk, her pretty wings would be enough to attract greed...)
Afterward, Majestic was the first to leave, bowing extravagantly and announcing he had to go back to his agency in Hiroshima. He took Salamander with him for a ride to the nearest train station. Toki both teased them about not being able to handle warping for long distances, but they still refused to use her services.
She stayed a bit longer to chat with Serpentine. She couldn’t help it; the girl was small and cute and overly enthusiastic in a way that reminded her of Melissa. And she even called her Quantum-senpai! It was kind of endearing.
Finally, Serpentine was called away by her trainer, and Toki wandered a little.
This place brought so many memories. Some good, some bad. An alcove where she had exploded a lamp trying to figure out how to warp air. A window she’d snuck through to climb onto the roof and watch a storm approach. A hallway where Keigo and her had built a makeshift racecar with a chariot and a defective extinguisher. A corner where she had nearly thrown up by after a day of training.
In the end, she happened upon Mera-san, and he fell into step with her. For a few seconds, they walked in silence.
Mera-san had been part of the team that had brought Toki here twice over. He had helped Kameko-san with the initial approach, true, but he had also climbed the hierarchical ladder and been part of the cover-up later on.
Part of Toki wanted to be angry at him for this, but she only felt a strange lassitude. What good would it do, to rage and yell?
“When did you start suspecting that I’d been kidnapped?” she asked suddenly.
Mera-san looked taken aback. He rubbed his neck, embarrassed, looking away from her.
“Not at the start. It was a few years later. I looked back on what had happened, and I just... had a feeling. But I had no proof, and I didn’t want to confront my bosses about it. If I was right, well, I was mainly to blame, for bringing you straight-up to Naruto Labs. I would have taken the fall.”
Toki hadn’t thought of that, and she scowled. But Mera-san wasn’t done and added in a rush:
“It’s the reason why I asked to be your guardian when you had your accident a few months later. I wanted to meet you and be sure nothing was wrong.”
“And if something had been wrong?” She couldn’t help but ask.
Mera-san shrugged: “I don’t know. But if you had wanted an out, then I would have been in a position to provide it. Even if it was just by turning a blind eye if you decided to run away.”
Toki stared at him, feeling fondness and gratitude bubbling in her chest, at war with resentment and bitterness.
“Two wrongs don’t make a right,” She pointed out.
“I know,” he admitted sheepishly. “But a wrong was all I could do. Besides, you didn’t need it in the end, so it turned out for the best.”
Toki conceded the point. Two wrongs don’t make a right, yes. But even if he couldn’t make things right, Mera-san had at least tried to make them more tolerable. He didn’t have to. He had nothing to gain, and everything to lose. But he had tried, for Toki, because he thought she deserved it.
It was more than what most people had done.
Toki sighed. Mera-san had lied to her and kept on lying, for years. And yet… He was the man she trusted the most in this organization. Maybe even more than Kameko, who was nice but not good; and way more than the President, who was neither. At least his heart had been in a good place, and he had tried to look out for her. Toki would remember that.
“Is there going to be a new student, after Serpentine leaves?” She changed the subject.
He side-eyed her, maybe taken aback by the abrupt change in topic, but he went along with it anyway. “Yes.”
“So fast?” Toki hadn’t actually expected a positive answer. She frowned: “Not a kidnapped one, I hope.”
“No. It’s the opposite, actually. His parents asked us to take him on. They don’t feel capable of handling him.”
“What? Really? I didn’t know they could do that. Wait, how did they know the program existed in the first place?”
Mera-san winced.
“Basically... the kid wants to be a hero even though he has a judicial file that prevents him from joining a heroic high school, so his parents looked for alternatives. They reached out to Best Jeanist, who remembered Majestic had had special training because he had a judicial file in his youth. So Jeanist directed them to Majestic...”
“And he spilled the beans?”
“Not enough to be considered a violation of the non-disclosure agreement he signed, but yeah, he said enough. The parents came knocking, and they badgered us until we looked into their son’s case. That was why Majestic was here today, by the way. He has no fond memories of this place, but he’s in the doghouse, so he’s trying to curry favor with me.”
That actually made sense. Toki squinted. She was more interested in the story of the future sponsored hero.
“You wouldn’t have taken that new kid if he didn’t have potential.”
“True. He has a powerful Quirk and risks becoming a villain if left unchecked, so he fits within the program. Still, it will be the first time a student has been taken on without his parents giving up custody. We had to adapt the program and draft a new model of contracts. The legal team grumbled a bit. Thankfully, we were already in the process of rearranging the sponsorship program, thanks to your interference, so it wasn’t a total upheaval, but…”
“Things change, and people aren’t always comfortable with it,” Toki guessed. “Especially when it means more oversight and more accountability.”
“Something like that.”
Well. Sucked to be them. But Toki wasn’t going to complain. For once, it was a productive change that she was actually proud of.
“Hum. So, this new student, when will I meet him? What’s his hero name?”
“He’ll start in April. He’ll have a few months to settle in: then, during the summer, all former students of the sponsorship program are invited to swing by. You can meet him then. And he doesn’t have a hero name picked, yet. Maybe you can help with that, actually. His taste is atrocious.”
“I’ll do my best. Can I know his real name, then?”
Mera-san started by shaking his head, then stopped, considered it, and shrugged: “Sure, why not? His name is Katsuki Bakugo.”
Wait.
WHAT?!
oOoOoOo
You know that sensation when you miss the first step in a long flight of stairs? When you lose your balance, you feel yourself falling, and you flap your arms helplessly to try and catch yourself with your internal monologue looping, “what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck?!”
Yeah. That was how Toki’s week was going.
So apparently Bakugo had been expelled. His middle school was also being investigated for bullying, assault, discrimination, and abuse. All Might’s report had started the whole thing, but afterwards a bunch of kids and parents had come forwards with complaints. Several teachers faced criminal charges. They had expelled Bakugo back in December, when evidence of suicide-baiting had come to light, in a desperate ploy to shift the blame on him and escape scot-free.
Well, it hadn’t worked, evidently, since the school was well on its way to total annihilation. But it had made Bakugo ineligible for any heroic high school. And so, his parents looked for alternatives... and they found the HPSC. Because yeah, at its core the sponsorship program wasn’t ‘for kids with parents who are villains’ but ‘for kids who had committed crimes and had to be reformed so they could use their destructive urges for the greater good’ which was right up Bakugo’s alley.
It was kind of hilarious, and also really unsettling.
The cynical part of Toki said that at least it would free a spot in class 1-A. The rest of her was freaking out about this complete and massive change from canon. Holy hell, without Bakugo in class 1-A, maybe the Summer Camp wouldn’t even be attacked! It was insane. So many plot points had gone out the window... all because of Bakugo’s expulsion, which in turn had happened because of his arrest, which in turn had happened because of his assault on Midoriya, which happened because Hitoshi had stepped between him and his intended target.
Talk about the butterfly effect.
Toki would definitely swing by Naruto Labs. Not that she really wanted to see Bakugo. He sounded like an asshole. But, well, she felt responsible somehow. It was indirectly her meddling that had screwed up his life... or rather, her meddling that had allowed him to screw up his own life.
Also… Oh, Naruto Labs was great, and the people were competent. But they were cold. They were harsh. Toki didn’t know Bakugo very well (of, rather, at all), but she knew of him. And she wondered if coldness and harshness were really what the kid needed. He was just fifteen. Alright, he was a bully and an ass. But he was a child. He needed a reality check, but he also needed help and support. Toki didn’t want to volunteer to give it to him, but… she would feel really awful if she walked away without making sure he got it, at least.
So. Toki snooped through their file, demanded to see Bakugo’s training plans, and all in one made herself a nuisance. Good news, Bakugo would have a new trainer! The retired hero, Titania, had apparently enough of doing nothing and had taken on the job of the trainer at Naruto Labs. It was exciting because she was the ex-Number Ten hero, she was strong, and she was famous for being very Zen. Toki respected the hell out of her.
Bad news: Okamoto had apparently planned to go to Naruto Labs once a week for lessons. Sure, Okamoto’s lessons had been very useful in Quantum and Hawks’ training, but the man was just so hateful. He would start a fight within five minutes, then humiliate Bakugo for losing his temper, then blame him for feeling humiliated. He had managed it with both Keigo and Toki, who were pretty chill. With Bakugo? That was a ticking bomb waiting to happen.
Oh, well. One problem at a time. Toki made it clear that Naruto Labs should expect her arrival very soon. Mera-san flatly answered that she would be invited in the summer, like all former students, and not before. Toki told him that if they waited that long, they would beg her to come so she could save them from Okamoto. Mera-san stayed unmoved.
Too bad for him.
Anyway! Days passed. Neito and Hitoshi both received letters of acceptance into Yūei. The hologram was All Might (just fresh out of his medical leave!), proudly announcing that he would also be their teacher. And since the students were told, then the teachers at Yūei were also told... and so was the Commission.
Oh, Toki would have loved to be a little mouse and watch their face.
The HPSC was not happy. Yūei reminded them that they had total freedom to employ whoever they chose. All Might reminded them that he was only a part-time hero. The HPSC countered with the argument that All Might was still a public figure that attracted problems, and that it could make Yūei a target. To which Yūei replied with, probably, a laughing emoji: because really, who would dare to attack Yūei?! The strongest of all hero schools? With incredible heroes as its teachers? Within the territory of Endeavor, the new Number One? And with All Might, the former Number One, standing guard?
In the meantime, the President politely contacted Toki to ask her how she had discovered All Might would teach and why she hadn’t said anything. Toki innocently replied she didn’t know what she meant, and that her sources were confidential. The President nodded, impassible, and asked her if she would still like to teach at Yūei.
Toki answered that she would be delighted.
The Commission started pushing to have additional heroes at Yūei, to make sure to maintain a higher standard of security. Yūei understood the offer for what it was, which was to have the HPSC’s cronies (meaning, Quantum) spying on them and watching All Might’s weakening. Nedzu told the Commission to go screw themselves. The Commission insisted. There was a passive-aggressive war of emails, each starting with ‘unless I’m mistaken,’ or ‘per my last email,’ which was polite talk for ‘I will shove this computer so far up your ass you will need to use your tonsils to write, you ugly-ass rat.’
Yūei didn’t budge. The Commission called them careless. Yūei laughed and told them they would only take additional security measures if, somehow, the Commission could detect a flaw in their perfect defensive systems. The Commission requested authorization to analyze said systems. Yūei gleefully denied them. The email chain filled with barely veiled insults started again.
So, everything was going exactly as Toki had predicted it would, basically.
The end of the school year came. Hitoshi and Neito both graduated middle school with beaming smiles. Toki donned her Hoshizora disguise to visit Mustafu and celebrate with them. She also visited Mihoko-san and baby Hina-chan, went by to see Sachiko, and even managed to meet Toshinori Yagi at their usual beach. Midoriya wasn’t there (he had joined a judo club at his new middle school, something All Might had greatly encouraged to help him build confidence), which maybe was for the best. Toki wasn’t quite ready for Midoriya to know about her real identity, after all.
Maybe she would tell him in a few months, though.
“Just a heads up, I will probably be the Commission’s mole at Yūei one day,” Toki informed All Might cheerfully. “They are already pushing for it, and it really ruffles Nedzu’s feathers. Nedzu’s fur? Whatever, you understand me.”
The Symbol of Peace squinted: “I know we had this conversation before, wouldn’t it be simpler to simply ask for a post there?”
“So they could create one for me, and feel like they did me a favor? Nope. It’s simpler to let the Commission strong-arm them into it, then sweep in and reap the rewards. Also, it allows me to play my asshole persona to its maximum, both to annoy the Witch, and to make fun of Yūei’s staff.”
“Why would you make fun of them?” he asked, perplexed.
“… Why not? Also, isn’t it better if they’re braced for me to be annoying, and I turn out to be charming, instead of the opposite?”
“I don’t see the point in you pretending to be annoying at all. You’re not.”
She patted his arm.
“That’s sweet, but I am a little annoying. Not all the time, true. But on TV, or with colleagues I don’t know well, it helps me look cool and keep a distance with the public. It’s kind of a mask.”
“Really? I always found it more efficient to be honest. It inspires people.”
“Yeah,” Toki shrugged. “With general truths like ‘bullying is bad’ and ‘discrimination is cruel’, alright. But for the rest, the real stuff? It’s better to stay superficial. You don’t go opening your heart to every random person you met on the street, right?” She paused. “Excluding Midoriya, of course.”
All Might looked a little chagrined at being called out like this but accepted the argument. Toki changed the subject:
“So anyway! How’s the lung? Did your time limit change?”
“Ah, my lung is fine, thank you! For now, there aren’t any changes yet. I still have to pace myself. Recovery is very tiring. But within three months I should gain a whole hour of Quirk use!”
“Wow, good! And now, I suppose it reduces the strain on your body. You still look like a stick but… a little healthier.”
“I feel a little healthier,” he tells her. “More lung capacity means more oxygen, so less fatigue, less cramps, and so on. I still have to be on an almost exclusively liquid diet, which is a pain, but for the first time in six years, I can take a full breath. It’s liberating.”
They started chatting about medical stuff, but Toki’s mind still stayed stuck on how disappointed All Might had looked when she had told him that she pretended to be someone else to the public.
Having a mask, having a persona... It wasn’t weird, though. It was safe, it was normal. It was useful, too. That cocky persona was actually a great help to tell people things, without said people noticing. It was as integral to Toki and Keigo’s hero work as their costumes. They had to put people at ease. But it was sometimes hard to do when you had knowledge one level above everyone else, when there were things that only you knew about, and that you weren’t allowed to disclose. So playing the part of the peacock really helped, in many aspects.
Like making people more aware of the graveness of the situation without causing panic. Keeping the tone light, sneaking a joke or two, and pinning the spotlight on somebody else to carry on like Hawks had done with Endeavor in the canon-universe Billboard Chart.
That persona was a mix of being both confident, but not overconfident, and remaining self-aware while displaying it so flamboyantly for the public and the other pro-heroes that it made them appear overconfident, and maybe even naïve. So, basically, it was the king of go-to tools for confronting different situations involving public image. You could still be helpful to people and warn them, without really exposing how smart you actually were. Hawks actually pushed it a notch further than Quantum. So people saw them as easy-going and obnoxious for Hawks, and kind of a know-it-all for Quantum. Very rarely they guessed that those two heroes saw and knew more than they let on. In that way, it was the perfect cover-up.
Anyways. March ended. Students got a short vacation. Toki took this opportunity to continue investigating the Ghost Arsonist.
She was at a dead-end. He was moving too often, too quickly. He was still active, too, but less so in the last weeks. Gathering his strength for a new show of force, probably. But what would it be? She couldn’t guess it, and it was driving her mad. She could guess what Dabi wanted thanks to her canon-knowledge, but she couldn’t know how he would go about it if she didn’t actually understand the man. What was his plan?
Was it to go straight for Endeavor? Lull him in a sense of false security, then bait him in a trap, and kill him? It wouldn’t be illogical, but how would he pull that off? Dabi was strong, but not stronger than Endeavor. He would need allies. And in canon he had been terrible at making alliances. Drafting subordinates for Shigaraki had ended up with him burning large batches of volunteers to ashes just because he was annoyed at their yapping. Dabi worked better alone. If he needed allies, he would join a pre-established group, not create his own.
Or maybe he wanted to go after the Masterpiece, Shouto Todoroki? But in canon, he had dismissed Shouto after Endeavor became Number One. Maybe it was the same here. Or maybe it wasn’t because the situations weren’t exactly the same… In that case his target would be Yūei. Wait, would that mean that he would ally himself with Shigaraki earlier?
But maybe he was only after Endeavor’s public image, in which case the best plan would be to expose him as an abuser, like he had done in canon. But he didn’t have this idea yet. Dabi’s inspiration for using the media to turn society against heroes had clearly come from Stain, the Hero Killer: and the Hero Killer wasn’t mainstream yet. He had actually fought Endeavor and lost not so long ago, so maybe Dabi would even dismiss him out of hand.
What did Dabi want? What was he after?
Who was Dabi, really?
Detective work was so frustrating. Sometimes Toki almost wanted to track down one Todoroki or another and grill them with questions. Except that finding a Todoroki was kind of hard. The mother was interned somewhere, so even if Toki knew where gaining access to her would be difficult. The son, Natsuo, was apparently as prickly and temperamental as his father, so good luck with that. Besides, where would she even find him? Same thing for the sister, Fuyumi. Of the whole family, she would be the easiest to convince, but she stayed low, and Toki didn’t have the means nor the will to comb Musutafu to search for her.
But maybe she wouldn’t need to. Soon, too soon, things would start moving. If Dabi decided to go after Shouto, then it may very well happen at the USJ facility. And if Dabi went for a lethal attack, then, well, students could die.
Before the beginning of the school year, Toki asked Melissa to give Hitoshi and Neito a panic button. It wouldn’t display the GPS location, but at least it would tell Toki if things went wrong at school. Melissa had found it paranoid on her part, true, but she had liked the challenge anyway and gifted both Hitoshi and Neito with a blazing pink pin that they just had to press to send a signal to Toki’s phone. It reassured her a little, at least.
Anyways. The point was that she needed to stop Dabi. He wouldn’t wait forever before his first offensive.
Days passed, and soon, the school year began.
Hitoshi was in class 1-A, to Toki’s delight. He had apparently taken Bakugo’s spot. Neito, as expected, was in class 1-B. They were kind of disappointed to be separated, but it wasn’t the end of the world. They found each other easily enough on the first day at lunch and ate together. They also walked home together after class.
Toki repeatedly ordered them to make some friends, so Neito started hanging out with Setsuna Tokage (Toki had dropped her name there, as she had promised Gecko). Hitoshi hadn’t managed to make friends, yet, but he had started talking about classwork to Momo Yaoyorozu. And besides, they didn’t lack company at lunch. Melissa had enthusiastically invited them to eat with her and introduced them to all her classmates.
Toki couldn’t go to Musutafu every evening to ask for a report, anxiously waiting for some triggering events from canon. Besides, she trusted her kids to handle themselves. But the temptation was strong.
She knew stuff was going to happen. It was normal to want to be involved. Nobody liked waiting on the sidelines. It was so anxiety-inducing.
Uh, whatever. So the first day of school came and went. The second, too. They had lessons with Present Mic. They had a lesson on Heroic Foundations with All Might, who focused on target practice and moving through an urban area. So, basically, a parkour-with-lasers game.
It was supposed to be less wild that the combat exercise in canon, but it still went sideway almost immediately. Midoriya broke his arm. Todoroki froze a building. Hitoshi scored at the top of this exercise without having to use his Quirk at all, something he boasted about all evening long.
Class 1-B also had Heroic Foundations, but with them, All Might focused on self-defense and how to restrain an opponent. Neito complained a lot about always ending up with a bad Quirk match-up. He nagged Toki until she agreed to cut some of her hair (a long, thin braid that Neito could tie around his wrist as a bracelet), so he would have a backup option for the next lesson.
On the third day of class, the press invaded Yūei when a wall crumbled to dust without explanation.
(In totally unrelated news, Hitoshi was elected Class President by his classmates. Toki was still scratching her head to figure out how that had happened.)
And on the fourth day of class... the attack on the USJ facility occurred.
And it went considerably worse than in canon.
Notes:
I very much headcanon Majestic as trans. I actually didn't know he was until halfway throught this chapter, so it sneaked up on me: but now you can pry this idea out of my cold, dead hand. I almost went on a whole tengent about it? But it didn't really fit with the tone of the chapter, and Majestic had no reason to open up about that to Toki.
But, if you want some backstory...
Majestic was happy being a girl until, maybe 13 or 14-ish? Then she strated feeling awkward and unconfortable as a teen because she couldn't put his finger on what felt wrong. She didn't know she was trans yet. It only came to him (and he became a him btw) when he joined Naruto Labs! He discovered all those books about being queer (remember how Toki found the library at Naruto Labs very extensive about that stuff? Yeah, the researchers put those books there for Majestic). He strated transitioning, and he had the time and money and the social acceptance to do it!
Majestic was attracted to fashion and bright styles so after graduating, he went with the Best Jeanist Agency. And it was a perfect choice! Best Jeanist who is all about how you present to the public, and how THAT must be in touch with who you are. Majestic finally found himself. Maybe he got surgery, maybe he didn't, i don't really care. The point is: he's a man, and much more confortable in his own skin.
He didn't change either his hero name, or his hero costume, by the way. Pointy hat and orange poncho and all. Girl or Boy, he was just Like That.Also ! Yes Bakugou is going to be the new HPSC's project =DDDD
A cookie for you if you saw it coming !
If you're interested, i'll post next week Bakugo's POV and how and why he joined the HPSC =) It's called wisdom come to us (when it can no longer do any good) ^^
I'll also update "Snapshots of Wisdom" this weekend with info about Serpentine, Gecko (the OC who is Setsuna Tokage's older brother), and the sponsorship program as a whole.
And no, Serpentine's Quirk wasn't inspired by Umbrella Academy. I was actually a bit floored when i watched the show because i felt so proud of myself for coming up with Hallucinogenic Venon, and then it turned out that Netflix had had the same idea xDDDDD
Here is a reminder that this fic has a Discord server !
I'll update Bakugo's POV on the 10th, and then there will be two chapters of "wisdom of the fallen"... So the next chapter of this fic will be posted on March 3rd ! =)
Chapter 38: The Butterfly Effect
Summary:
The USJ. Fun times.
Notes:
Hi everyone ! Welcome back !
Can you believe it's been A MONTH since i updated this fic?! Granted, i posted a lot for the side-stories (did you read the new one?), but still. One month. Don't worry, the wait is over =)
So with this chapter we're strating a new arc ! The Family Arc is over and now this is the Consultant Arc. Yes, the name sucks. Deal with it please x)
A quick reminder: we ended the previous chapter on the omious fact that in this verse, the USJ went worse than in canon. So... let's dig in!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT
The manga had never been clear on the timeline… and her memories of it were over two decades old, so Toki had honestly believed that the USJ would happen during the second week of classes. Because, really, who sent students to landslides and fire tornados in their first week?
Hero schools, that’s who. Really, she should have expected it. Going straight for the hardest task was their brand. The HPSC had done pretty much the same for her training.
Fuck.
She should have planned more. She even thought about warning All Might that he shouldn’t spend too much time on patrol and focus on his classes. She had thought about innocently asking Hitoshi if his class was planning a trip. She had thought about giving Midoriya a panic button! She had thought about breaking into Yūei to trigger their alarms, have some fun, and be sure they would be on their guard. She had thought… and she hadn’t acted. Not soon enough.
And now… and now…
“Hi,” she said softly.
Hitoshi, sitting in his hospital bed, gave her a lopsided grin.
“Don’t look so horrified. It’s just cosmetic damage.”
Mihoko-san let out a wet, strangled laugh, then immediately hid her face in her hands. Hitoshi froze, not having expected his light-hearted joke to make his mother break down in tears. But he should have, Toki thought, throat tight, looking at the way bandages covered his whole torso and even climbed up his neck and right arm. I kind of want to cry, too.
The sweet and nauseating stench of burn cream was so strong that she wanted to gag. Massive third-degree burns, Mihoko had managed to tell her between sobs and stammering. And the scars they would leave… Gods, Hitoshi was only fifteen. Now he would need skin grafts on almost a quarter of his whole torso. She had never even seen a pro-hero with this amount of scaring.
Everything had gone so terribly wrong, from the very beginning. And it didn’t show any sign of fixing itself anytime soon.
That day seemed never-ending. It was now nearly midnight. The USJ had been attacked in the morning. Toki hadn’t received the alert immediately because Hitoshi hadn’t taken his panic button with him. As a result, she had only been notified by a hysteric Mihoko about three hours later, when the school had sheepishly called the parents, unable to hide any longer that police and paramedic had invaded their grounds. Most of the injured kids had been treated by Recovery Girl, but several of them had to go to the hospital. The heroes had been briefed and pursued the villains that had escaped. A few of the small fry had been caught. The ringleaders, the most dangerous ones, had slipped between their fingers. It was unknown whether classes would resume the day after. The structural damage done to the USJ was also considerable.
Not to mention that it was a crime scene, now.
Someone had been killed. Why?! How?! It was so unfair! In canon, everybody had survived, had they not?! But not here.
Here, in this universe, Thirteen had died.
Toki intellectually knew she had had little to no responsibility in the chain of events that had led here, but she still couldn’t help but feel awfully guilty. Like all heroes did, probably, when someone died; they could picture an outcome where everyone was saved. She hadn’t even really met Thirteen. But Anan Kurose was dead now. She died trying to protect the students. Several of the students had even seen it happen.
Gods, in canon the USJ had been a scary moment for the protagonist, but everyone had been fine in the end! And now… Now there was one teacher dead. Eraserhead was hospitalized along with three students, including Hitoshi. Toki felt nauseous just thinking about it. Yūei was downplaying the whole thing, trying to hide the gravity of the situation from the press and the public, but after having called All Might (who didn’t mince words), Toki knew exactly what had happened. And it was bad.
They were just children. She had been so stupid to think they would be alright. They were not. They should have been protected. The adults had failed them; Toki had failed them. All of them, but Hitoshi most of all.
Oh, Hitoshi.
He was the little brother she never had, the one she hadn’t been allowed to have, but still loved all the more terribly for it. And he was hurt. He had been hurt. Burned, as Keigo would be in canon and like Keigo still could be, if everything happened as the Commission planned. If Toki didn’t find a way to neutralize Dabi before that. It made Toki want to clench her fists and punch something. She could have protected Hitoshi, if only she had been better.
“Sorry I couldn’t visit earlier,” Toki apologized, sitting down on the last free seat. Discreetly, she put her hand on Mihoko’s, and squeezed briefly, a silent gesture of support. “I was tied up in Fukuoka. And it wasn’t easy to gain access to you as Hoshizora.”
She had put on her civiliansona. Colored contacts, bangs brushed to the side, modest purple clothes. Technically, Toki Hoshizora had no right to visit the injured Hitoshi Shinsō, since only the family was allowed to visit; but Toki had simply snuck in.
“Does it hurt?” She added, hesitantly.
“Nah. They gave me painkillers so good I can smell whole new colors.” He squinted, “Where’s Hina-chan?”
“With Hawks.”
Toki had been too frantic to stay at the Shinsō’s apartment to wait for news, but someone had to watch over Hina-chan. So she had brought her daughter to Fukuoka, to her penthouse. Keigo had been all too glad to take her off her hands. He needed something to do, too. The idea of sitting still when emotions were running high was as unfathomable to him as it was to Toki, and even if he wasn’t as personally affected by the USJ’s attack as she was, he was still rattled by the events. A hero dead, hero students injured, Yūei's sanctity breached… it wasn’t a small thing.
It had been harder than expected, to leave Hina-chan with him. Part of Toki wanted to cling to her baby and never let go.
“What happened, Hitoshi?”
He leaned back on his pillows with a groan. Most of the burns were located on the front of his torso, but they also reached his side. There were probably burns on his back, too. Toki knew that that kind of damage spread.
“He already told everything to the police,” Mihoko tells her, voice trembling, “Let him rest, Toki.”
“No,” Hitoshi blurted when Toki backed off, ready to apologize, “I don’t want to rest. And it’s thanks to Toki’s training that I’m still kicking. So it’s not her fault, Mom.”
“I never said it was, but Hitoshi…”
“It was my choice to be a hero,” he insisted. “I knew the dangers. I’m fine. I saved someone. Nobody died.”
Mihoko and Toki exchanged a lightning-quick glance. So nobody had told Hitoshi about Thirteen, then. Toki didn’t know what it said about her, but all she felt was awful relief that Hitoshi didn’t have to bear that burden.
He would learn about it soon enough.
“You’re alright and that’s the most important,” she told him, her voice soothing. “Now, can you tell me what happened? Or would you prefer to leave it until tomorrow?”
“No, I can do this now.” He took a big, long breath. “So it all started when we got to the USJ. It was supposed to be an exercise in rescue training. Thirteen was there. Aizawa-sensei came with us. All Might was supposed to be here, but Aizawa-sensei told us he was delayed and would come later. Anyway… we came out of the bus. We entered the dome. Thirteen made a speech about how useful this training could be to our career, and the kind of situations we could face in the USJ. Aizawa started putting us in groups of four so we could rotate between the different zones…”
oOoOoOo
(Fifteen hours earlier.)
Hitoshi was a little worried about this exercise. Facing raging fires or furious floods was the kind of stuff geared toward students with flashy Quirks. But then, he had expected to be thrown into the deep end right from the start. Melissa had warned him that Aizawa was a jerk with a fondness for mind games and favoritism, so Hitoshi had been braced for it. And boy, had he been right! That Quirk-apprehension test the very first day? Totally biased to favor physical Quirks. The whole time Hitoshi had kept a tally of his classmates’ scores, positive that Aizawa was going to tamper with the results. And he had! From Hitoshi’s results, it was the invisible girl that should have come last. But instead, it had been Midoriya!
Aizawa hadn’t actually expelled anyone in the end, so Hitoshi hadn’t spoken up, but he still knew the truth.
Logical ruses. What an ass. It was like, the fourth day of class, and Aizawa had already lied to them and argued it was a logical ruse five times! Any more logical ruses and Hitoshi might as well just question reality all the time. Were they really eating lunch for an hour every day, or was it a mass hallucination? Did homework exist? Maybe everything was made up and their grades didn’t even matter.
Hitoshi was also aware that Aizawa was watching him. He was the only one here with a mental Quirk, so it set him apart. Of course, he was used to scrutiny from teachers as soon as they read his file. But it still put him on edge. He knew he had to be better, smarter, and more confident because if the teachers smelled weakness… well, they wouldn’t hesitate to exploit it.
The good news was that Hitoshi was better and smarter than his classmates because he had been trained by a pro-hero. And not a pro-hero accustomed to flattening everyone in their vicinity like Endeavor, either, but a hero who knew how to fight dirty and how to exploit loopholes. That was why, during the Quirk assessment, Hitoshi had asked Yaoyorozu to make him a strip of cloth he had used like a sling to toss his ball… and later, she had offered to make him a pair of rollers-blades for the speed test.
He had no idea how he had befriended her, except maybe it was because he had booted Mineta from his seat. Honestly, Hitoshi had done it because he didn’t want to be in the front row. But considering how blatantly Mineta had been staring at Yaoyorozu’s cleavage before that, maybe she had been grateful to him for removing the pervert from her immediate vicinity. Whatever. He wasn’t complaining. Yaoyorozu was polite and helpful. Also, she had been elected class vice president, so now they had even more reason to chat.
Hitoshi was kind of surprised to have been elected class representative.
He would have thought people would pick sweet Midoriya or brash Ashido or maybe enthusiastic Kirishima. But since Hitoshi had scored remarkably high at their first exercise with All Might (no surprise there since target practice and parkour were what he was best at) and had also managed to look cool by introducing his classmates to Melissa’s friends (who were all upperclassmen, so they seemed very impressive to wide-eyed first years). He might have also shown off by weightlifting Midoriya for a laugh. It ended up being a wild success, especially with Kirishima, who thought he was very manly! So maybe it wasn’t so weird?
Whatever. The USJ. At least it would give Hitoshi a chance to show off his costume. It was pretty badass; all black and purple, with a large collar and a voice-changer. He looked like a ninja from a sci-fi movie.
So Hitoshi was watching Aizawa, not just because he had to take this exercise seriously but also because he was kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop. And thus, he saw Aizawa’s reaction to the black warp gate before seeing it in action. Their teacher had jolted, turned, and started barking orders about staying back. A crowd had started appearing from the warp gate, and Hitoshi felt his stomach drop out.
Some part of him had understood what it meant, then, a second before Aizawa coldly announced those were villains.
“Where is All Might?” The villain with what Hitoshi hoped were artificial hands all over him loudly demanded. “He was supposed to be there! After I brought this whole crowd too… Jeez. First, running away from heroics, then ditching his teaching duties? What a wimp. I wonder if he’ll show up if we kill some kids…”
Hitoshi unwillingly took a step back, chilled to his core. The school’s alarms hadn’t rung. It only took a few seconds more for the rest of his classmates to realize, like him, that this attack had been carefully planned. Aizawa-sensei jumped down the plaza to attack, while Thirteen ushered the students to the exit.
Hitoshi lagged behind his classmates. He didn’t dare tear his eyes away from the villains. The main crowd was circling Eraserhead, but four people had stayed put near the fountain, passively watching the show. The ringleader with hands all around his body idly scratched his neck. Some gross mutant type with an exposed brain, with a dead smile full of pointy teeth.
Then there was a guy all dressed in black, a hood hiding his face, who didn’t seem to look at Aizawa-sensei at all even though he was fighting ten meters away from him. No… his gaze was on them, the students. Hitoshi fought the crawling feeling under his skin that the guy was looking straight at him.
And then there was the warper who had brought them all here and who seemed to be made of shadows. Hitoshi watched him, especially. He was the more dangerous one. And if they had so carefully planned their attack, then…
The warper disappeared from the plaza. Hitoshi jumped back just as his shadows reappeared between his class and the exit. Fuck.
Think, Hitoshi, he furiously berated himself. Think! If that guy attacks and warps you fifty meters high, the whole class is dead. Can Thirteen take him? Should I take him?!
The warper was the most dangerous one, there was no doubt about that. Hitoshi knew it because he knew Toki, he had done Quirk and battle analysis for hours during their training. He knew unpredictability was always the great decider in a fight, and nothing was more unpredictable than someone who wasn’t bound by the laws of physics.
But there were other villains in the plaza who were dangerous, too.
The man with the hands who had made such a glacial chill travel down his back. There had been glee in his voice when he had talked about killing kids. And he had mentioned being the leader, planning to face All Might!
The mutant type, too, was dangerous. People so massive and with such freaky mutations were usually extraordinarily strong, deadly, and even. And his dead-eyed stare was unnerving. Expressionless, and still creepy, especially paired with this fixated smile.
And the guy in the hood. He didn’t look very muscular under his tattered cloak, but he had focused on the students right away. Not looking at Aizawa-sensei even once. Being the object of his focus made alarm bells ring in Hitoshi’s head. Toki always said to trust your guts when you were in danger, and this guy had been focused on students in a way that the others weren’t. He may not be as lethal as them, but his attention was an alarm sign on its own.
What did they want? Why were they here? Were they going to come out of the warper’s shadows, too? Hitoshi almost looked behind his shoulder to the plaza, but he was frozen in place, not daring to take his eyes off the enemy.
His heart was beating rabbit-fast. This was nothing like facing hero students in a Provisional License Exam. This was facing actual danger. His brain felt like a hamster running in a wheel, running at full speed, and still stuck in place.
“Nice to meet you,” the deep voice of the warper said, almost amiable for someone who looked like a formless void. “We are the League of Villains. We have invited ourselves into the home of heroes, Yūei high school, to see All Might take his last breath.”
What?
“I believe All Might should have been there,” he continued, unbothered by the student’s petrified silence. “Has there been some kind of change?”
Hitoshi opened his mouth to speak because that was an open-ended question, if he talked now he could engage in conversation, and catch the guy with his Quirk…! But at the very last moment, his voice died in his throat. Fear, nerves, sudden realization that he should maybe disguise his voice, he didn’t know. The words strangled themselves. He just… let out a tiny squeal, and that was it. The shadow guy’s weird eyes didn’t even stop on him. Hitoshi let his chance slip through his fingers.
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” the warper said calmly. His shape shifted, spreading like wings of darkness. “This is the part I am to play…”
With a roar, Kirishima jumped on him.
“No!” screamed Thirteen. “Get out of the way!”
Too late. The villain let Kirishima’s punch pass through him as if he was simply made of smoke, then he reformed. He didn’t have a mouth or a facial expression to speak of, and still, he seemed to smile malevolently at them.
“My job is to scatter you all… and torture you to death!”
The dark shape became a massive cloud and engulfed all of them like a roaring storm. Hitoshi turned and tried to run towards the plaza. It was no use. He barely saw Iida tackle the people in front of him to get them out of the dark cloud. Soon, too soon, the floor slipped under his feet with the familiar sensation of being teleported into the sky; and then, he was falling.
On the plaza, the guy in the hood was gone.
oOoOoOo
(Present time.)
“That’s when everybody ended up separated,” Hitoshi continued, frowning pensively. “But some people stayed to face the warper, I think? I saw Iida tackle him. I don’t know about Thirteen.”
Toki wasn’t going to be the one to tell him that Thirteen was dead, at any rate. Not right now. She put on a brave face:
“Yes, that’s right, Iida managed to save a few people. Then he ran to get help while the rest slowed down the warper. I think the frog girl, Asui, wasn’t it? She grabbed his physical body with her tongue and just yeeted him around so he couldn’t make a portal.”
That happened after Kurogiri had torn open Thirteen’s costume with her own Quirk. But there was no reason to expand on that.
“Really?” Hitoshi perked up. “Nice. You saw them, then? They’re alright?”
“Your classmates? Sorry, no, I didn’t see them. I managed to call one of the detectives, though, and he briefed me.”
A lie, again. She had called All Might and maybe yelled a little. She apologized afterward, though. It wasn’t his fault that the League of Villains was a bunch of homicidal lunatics.
“Right,” Hitoshi nodded. “The rest of us were scattered. I think Midoriya was in the mountain zone with Uraraka and Ashido. Jirō must have been with Kirishima in the collapse zone because they showed up together. Satō was with Sero and Mineta in the shipwreck zone. I don’t know about the others. And I…”
He took a breath, visibly steeling himself.
“I ended up in the zone with the ruins with Todoroki.”
He paused, looking at his hands without really seeming to see them; like lost in his own thoughts. Toki held her breath, not daring to interrupt.
“I should have done something,” he whispered. “I could have stopped everything right at the beginning. My Quirk is the perfect tool for a quick, non-violent resolution, and I knew the warper was the most dangerous one. You taught me that, Toki. And I still let my chance pass. Going to those License Exams to have some practical experience was useless. I froze. I froze like an idiot.”
Impulsively, Toki reached out and grabbed his hand. He had big hands, as big as hers, and for a second, she felt a strange dissociation, as if she had expected to grab the hands of a child. But Hitoshi wasn’t a cute eight years old anymore. He was in high school, a hero in training. At fifteen, he was even taller than her.
“There’s nothing wrong with that! It was your first battle, a battle you were unprepared for. The License Exams were high-pressure, yes, but there were also low stakes. It didn’t prepare you to face villains so soon. I wouldn’t have been prepared at your age, either.”
The last part was kind of a lie. The reflex of freezing when facing a threat had been beaten out of her by the time she was ten. But right now, Hitoshi needed reassurance more than truth. He exhaled shakily.
“Yeah. Right. It still blows that I was so… inexperienced.”
She patted his hand.
“Yeah. It’s messed up how the only way you can get experience is through experience… and the only way you can get good is through the humiliating ordeal of sucking ass at it.”
He sniggered, which had been her goal all along. For a few seconds, they didn’t say anything. Hitoshi composed himself and raised his free hand to rub at his eyes. He looked exhausted.
“You want to rest?” Toki hesitated.
“No, no, I’m good. So, I ended up in the zone with the ruins with Todoroki. He was freezing everyone in sight, and he nearly got me, too. Then he interrogated one of the guys he had frozen, and they said that the plan was to kill All Might using the… the ugly guy with a bleak, Nōmu. The hand guy had a disintegrating Quirk, and he was the mastermind. His name is Tomura Shigaraki. The warp guy is Kurogiri. Everyone else was just here to create chaos and had orders to kill students if they could.” He swallowed. “A few of them had even joined up exclusively for that, killing us. And I remember thinking… what about the guy in the hood?”
“What about him?” Toki echoed, tense as a bowstring.
Hitoshi grimaced.
“I had a feeling about him. About him being here because he wanted to hurt us. And I… I wasn’t wrong.”
oOoOoOo
(Fifteen hours earlier.)
Hitoshi and Todoroki were running towards the plaza. The streets were twisted, narrow, and crawling with villains. They made it impossible to know where they were headed, so when Hitoshi suggested going to the top of the nearest building and just… staying at that level… Todoroki had readily agreed. He made bridges out of ice, and they were running side by side toward the exit. Slower than Hitoshi would have liked, true, but since his partner wasn’t versed in parkour, he had to adapt.
The intel given by the villain was worrying. Nōmu had strength equal to All Might… The leader could disintegrate things with a touch… There were about a hundred villains scattered in the USJ, hunting students… And they were here to kill All Might, and as many students as they could. It was bad news.
“Could you use your ice to break through the USJ dome?” Hitoshi tensely asked without slowing down. “One of us needs to warn the teachers and bring back-up straight away.”
“I could,” Todoroki said, staring straight ahead. A villain with leathery wings flew at them, and he froze him without missing a beat. “But I’m not going to lose time doing that. I’m going to the plaza. That’s where their strongest are, and that’s where they need to be stopped.”
It was so unspeakably stupid that Hitoshi nearly fell flat on his face. He gaped, dumbstruck, before recovering his voice.
“Are you nuts?! If those guys are in All Might’s category, what on Earth could make you think that you can take them on? Or even slow them down?!”
Todoroki barely threw him a glance, all cool superiority and aloof composure.
“You don’t have a physical Quirk, so you are outclassed. But I am stronger than anyone else here. I may not be at All Might’s level yet, but if someone can take those guys, it’s me.”
And yeah, Hitoshi hadn’t broadcasted his Quirk, keeping a close lid on that secret as much as he could. Ideally, he would only reveal it during the Sports Festival. He was already enough at a disadvantage as it was. But Todoroki had clearly formed his own opinion and dismissed him as weak, which was completely untrue. If anything, Hitoshi’s Quirk would be better than Todoroki’s to stop villains.
And that made this idea all the craziest! What the hell, Todoroki?!
“Of all the…!” Hitoshi sputtered. “This is insane. I don’t care how fancy your snowflakes are, you can’t take on three experienced villains. That’s guaranteed failure! It’s not a game, Todoroki! Your stupid posturing will get you killed!”
Something hard passed thought Todoroki’s mismatched eyes, and in the twist of his mouth. Rage or disgust, maybe, as if Hitoshi’s words had touched a nerve.
“Do not speak of me of failure,” Todoroki bit back, eyes narrowed in anger, “or tell me it’s a game. If all you are able to do is cower and cry, the least you can do is get out of my way.”
Hitoshi stared, taken aback by the sudden hostility. Then his shock morphed into anger. What an immature asshole. No experience, no competence, just a massive ego, and he dared to look down on Hitoshi? Now, of all time?! When people could die, because apparently pandering to Todoroki’s superiority complex was more important than raising the alarm?!
“You are such a piece of shit,” He snarled. “I don’t care if you get killed, but innocent people will die because you care more about your pride than about their lives!”
Todoroki straightened, face twisting in a ferocious scowl. He opened his mouth to snap back something…
Then someone clapped.
They froze in surprise. They were on the top of a building, there was no one around. Unless… Hitoshi turned to the side, where the equipment room protruded from the roof among a mess of antenna and tangled cables. A dark shape appeared from the shadows, and he felt a jolt of fear.
It was the guy in the hood.
“What an entertaining spectacle,” the man drawled. “Purple-boy here is a naïve coward and Snowflake…. Well, an egomaniac who only cares about himself, apparently. I hadn’t expected any different, and still, I’m surprised by your lack of morals! Even baby heroes are trash, of course, but you really take the cake.”
Without pause, Todoroki threw a wall of ice at him: but the man ignited in blue flames, so sudden and powerful that the resulting explosion almost blasted the roof. The shockwave nearly made Hitoshi fall off.
Fissures cracked the cement, dust flew everywhere. The whole building creaked and groaned. The air turned scorching hot, billowing like a storm.
Todoroki had anchored himself to the ground with ice, but Hitoshi hadn’t been so lucky and had been pushed two meters back. A quick glance behind him made him pale. Just a step further and he would have plummeted in the street below, seven stories down. Not a cool way to end.
“Who are you?” Hitoshi yelled, throwing his mental net, and hoping for a response.
“What do you want with us?” snarled Todoroki, eyes scanning the dense cloud of vapor for any trace of their enemy.
Hitoshi mentally swore. If Todoroki asked a question too, then there was a chance that the villain would answer him and not Hitoshi, thus avoiding falling prey to Brainwashing. He had to ask something else, something unsuspicious but that would make him talk…
“What do I want?” the man repeated mockingly, stepping out of the cloud.
His hood had fallen back, revealing something straight from a nightmare. The man had burn scars everywhere, covering the entire lower part of his face, as well as two large spots under his eyes. That wasn’t a skin graft. That looked… like necrosed skin. The skin there was blackened, so badly burn it didn’t look human, and only held to healthier skin with large medical staples. It was horrifying, like patchwork of human’s skin.
“I want many things, little heroes. But today, I think I want you dead. Dead by fire, dead screaming while your flesh melts like wax. I’ll be kind and leave some bones for your families to cry over. And who I am, well… Isn’t that the million yens question?”
He smiled, then. Hitoshi could see light through the gaps between the staples in his jaws. It chilled him to his core. The man’s grin widened, his blue eyes flashing with something like manic glee:
“But you can call me Dabi.”
Then the villain turned to Hitoshi, and he had a mad second of hope. Maybe Dabi was going to speak, to directly answer his question instead of sidestepping it. Maybe Hitoshi would have a second chance to Brainwash him…!
Then Dabi shot a ball of flames toward him, so fast he didn’t even have time to blink.
Hitoshi felt the impact like a punch to the stomach, blistering heat spreading outward like an explosion, and he would have screamed his throat raw if he had any breath for it. The pain was all-compassing. Instead, he let out a high keening noise, gasping, stumbling back. His feet slipped over the edge of the roof…
And
he
fell.
oOoOoOo
(Present time.)
Toki stood up, unable to stay immobile any longer, and paced in the hospital room. Dabi. Dabi. Of course, it was Dabi. She had had her suspicions as soon as there had been mention of the USJ catching fire. And he had gotten away! He had hurt Hitoshi and gotten away! Toki felt so furious and powerless, she could scream. If she had been better in her investigation, Dabi would be behind bars by now, and Hitoshi would be fine!
Her rage and terror felt like ants crawling on her skin. She gripped her own nape, tightening her fist on the short hairs there to ground herself. Fuck. Fuck!
“I’m fine,” Hitoshi added, looking worried. “I mean, obviously, I’m a little crispy, but I didn’t end up splattered on the pavement, so. You know.”
Mihoko-san let out a trembling breath, and rubbed her eyes:
“Has your humor always been so dark or is it the painkillers?”
“Probably both,” Hitoshi said sheepishly.
Toki took a big breath. She was worrying them. But she felt so mad. She had been hunting Dabi for months, thinking she had more time, and now… now he had gotten the drop on her. He had attacked Yūei, and injured Hitoshi.
And why? What the hell was he after? Toki had dismissed her theory about him being after Shouto, but clearly, she had been wrong. Only, she couldn’t see his motivation. Wasn’t Endeavor his target? Why would he care about Shouto now that Endeavor didn’t need his masterpiece to be Number One? Toki had missed something. She had been wrong, and she had been late, and now Hitoshi was hurt, and, and…
Oh, she was so emotionally compromised, now. She pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to release the tension in her neck and shoulder, to calm her racing heartbeat. She was a professional. She could do this.
“Sorry.” She returned to her seat. “But the blue fire is the Ghost Arsonist’s signature. He eluded me before. Him being there, announcing himself when I’ve been running after him fruitlessly for months… It’s kind of the shit cherry on top of the disaster sundae.”
“Language,” Mihoko-san said half-heartedly. Then, after a pause, “… but I see your point.”
“I guess that’s extra motivation for me to capture his carbonized ass, then,” Toki muttered.
And grind him into dust, more likely. It had just gotten a lot more personal than before. Toki realized she was clenching her fists too tight, and forcibly relaxed them. Anger would do her no good here.
“I should hope so!” Hitoshi snorted. “It wasn’t a pleasant moment!”
Grinding to dust it was.
“I can guess.” Toki forced herself to smile. “So, what happened after? You caught yourself with your capture weapon?”
Hitoshi nodded, and Toki couldn’t help but feel both pride and a sense of belated terror. If he hadn’t had this capture weapon… If he hadn’t practiced parkour in urban areas… if he hadn’t trained so much, if Toki hadn’t trained him so much… then he would be dead. Splat, just like that.
“Yeah. I managed to grasp a balcony and swing myself in a window. It was the fifth floor, maybe? I was lucky to not slam into a wall, but it still hurt like hell. Apparently, I broke my arm. I don’t really remember, I was just… thinking about stop-drop-roll and rolling like crazy because the front of my costume was on fire.”
He looked in askance at his mom. Mihoko nodded:
“You had a broken arm and clavicle, and a twisted wrist. You must have fallen on them.”
“Not bad, for falling two stories,” Hitoshi noticed.
It could have been so much worse. So, so much worse. Toki briefly closed her eyes and tried not to think about it.
“And after, you got up?”
“I got up,” Hitoshi confirmed. “I must have been kind of out of it, or maybe the adrenaline was still kicking, because it didn’t hurt that bad. I mean, it hurt, but not as much as it did later. It just felt like I fell down during training, so… I went back on the roof. You know, to help Todoroki.” He winced a little. “I’m glad I did. I think. I think he would have died if I hadn’t gone back.”
oOoOoOo
(Fifteen hours earlier.)
Dragging himself back to the roof took more time than he would have thought. Looking for the stairs and then climbing up two stories, at the risk of finding the access door locked, would have been too long: so Hitoshi crossed the floor to the northern side of the building, and tried to climb the balconies.
Except that one of his arms didn’t work right. He couldn’t raise it enough for his usual parkour feats. Instead, he used his capture weapon to swing to the next building over, then swing back up to this building. It was awkward with just one arm, but it could be done.
The whole time, flames roared blue and gold on the roof. The ice cracked and thundered, but never overcame the fire. Instead, it turned to water or vapor with deafening hisses and screeches. The whole area was drowned in a massive cloud of steam. The air was thick with it. It felt suffocating and made Hitoshi’s eyes water.
It was hot, too. Maybe that was why he felt so dizzy. And the rumble of the battling elements drowned the rest, but he was fairly sure he was also hearing screams. Yells. Deranged laughter. It made the hairs stand up on his neck, even in this smothering heat.
Less than five minutes had passed when he managed to climb back on the roof, but it felt like hours.
There were small, scattered piles of melting ice, like the roof had once been engulfed in a glacier, then immediately blasted by blue flames. And water, hot water, was dripping everywhere. The ground was slippery. When Hitoshi put a hand on a railing to hoist himself up, he had to bite back an instinctive flinch of pain. It was burning. All this water was at boiling point. That was why the steam was so dense.
“Is that all you can do?” Dabi’s voice rang loud and clear through the overheated fog. It sounded giddy, almost manic. “Come on, I expected better. Of course, it’s too hot for your ice to form properly, right? It’s getting harder and harder for you. Sound like a bad Quirk match-up! My flames are just too strong for you to handle. Ah! Who would have thought you would be so fragile?”
“I am not fragile!” Todoroki snapped back.
His voice was hoarse and rough, and it trembled imperceptibly. There was a shock in it, and fear, and the kind of bewildered horror you felt, and you realized you’re beaten, but you were too scared to admit it yet, even to yourself. Hitoshi could hear it, even at this distance, blindly trying to sneak up on them.
This man was going to kill Todoroki, and they both knew it.
There was the thundering crack of an ice attack, again, then Dabi’s laughter rang out.
“Missed!”
A storm of blue fire erupted again. Hitoshi bit back an instinctive flinch. Good, good, they were talking, that means Hitoshi could use this. He was a decent ventriloquist but he wasn’t sure he could make a pitch-perfect impression of Todoroki’s voice. He hadn’t even had the chance to test his voice changer properly. Still, he had to try. He waited until the next rumble of ice to clear his throat. His hands were shaking.
“Come on, I’m getting tired of this game,” Dabi sighed. “I want to see the look on your face when I make it symmetrical.”
Hitoshi took a breath, then turned a small dial on his voice changer. When he spoke, it pitched his voice in a decent approximation of Todoroki’s.
“Stop talking! Just stop!”
Dabi laughed, because of course he would, he was a contrary bastard like that. Ordering him to shut up was the perfect way to provoke him into making a sound and then Hitoshi had him, clamping his mental trap shut.
Dabi’s laughter abruptly cut out. He was caught.
Hitoshi exhaled slowly, then let out a small, nervous sob. He swallowed back the rest of it. His blood was pounding in his ears.
“I have him,” he said at a normal volume, proud of how his voice barely wavered. “Todoroki, are you alright?”
There was a pause. Todoroki’s voice sounded strained.
“I can’t move, but I’m fine. Are you… are you alright?”
Keeping a firm grip on Dabi’s consciousness, Hitoshi advanced in the cloud of steam, trying to pinpoint his classmate’s location. Now that fire wasn’t being thrown around constantly, the temperature was lowering. The water on the ground wasn’t so hot anymore. Most of the steam started turning into condensation, and the fog cleared a little.
Todoroki was at the edge of the building, encased into a mess of half-melted then refrozen ice. The half of his outfit covered with fake ice (the left side) had been melted, and… Ouch. It had been plastic, apparently. Most of it formed a puddle on the ground, but some of it had… fused with the clothing underneath… and with Todoroki’s skin under that.
His costume was torn from shoulder to hip. The skin under it was red and blistered. His legs were encased in ice, so they were probably fine. But Todoroki had said he couldn’t move, so…
“Are your legs hurt?”
“No. But I’m suspended above the street, and I don’t have the control to melt the ice safely right now. I need my left side to melt the ice, and I’m… injured.”
After a second look, the half-melted ice structure was way past the edge of the roof. Dabi must have pushed Todoroki like he had done with Hitoshi, except Todoroki had anchored himself with ice… Ice that Dabi had been trying to melt, while Todoroki was desperately trying to maintain his grip on it since it was the only thing standing between him and certain death.
“Okay,” Hitoshi said. “Okay, we can do this. First, getting you back on the roof.”
He used his capture weapon. With one arm only, it was awkward, but Todoroki helped secure the length of cloth around his torso. Then he melted his ice fortress with Hitoshi dragging back to safety. The ice collapsed halfway, too sluggish to support his weight, but thanks to Hitoshi’s capture weapon, Todoroki was still hoisted back on the roof.
He collapsed on his back almost immediately. His breath came in short pants. When he swallowed, it was loud, and sounded almost like he was chocking. Hitoshi’s eyes meet his, and to his horror, he realized Todoroki’s impassive façade was starting to crack. Which Todoroki knew, if the way he jerked back to hide his face in his hand was any indication.
“No, no, no,” Hitoshi muttered nervously. “Stay chill, would you? I am only held together by spite and adrenaline at this point. If you freak out, I’ll freak out, and we’ll both look stupid. In front of Dabi! Granted, he won’t remember it, but it’s the principle of it.”
Todoroki promptly lowered his hands, scanning the roof with wide eyes:
“He’s here?”
“Yes. But he’s neutralized.”
The fog was lifting enough that they could see his shape, several meters away. He was standing straight, looking ahead with a blank stare. Having him so close made Hitoshi’s skin crawl. He gripped his mental line to Dabi’s brain more tightly.
“How…?”
“It’s my Quirk,” Hitoshi said abruptly. He had wanted to keep it a secret, but he suddenly realized that explaining things made him feel in control, and he really needed that at the moment. “It’s called Brainwashing. Right now, he’s kind of sleepwalking and totally under my control. It will break if he’s woken up, though. So, no matter how much you’re tempted, don’t throw a glacier at him.”
Todoroki watched Dabi. There was something raw and twisted in his eyes. He must have been more rattled than he wanted to admit. He had nearly died. Hitoshi remembered how the ice had crumbled under his weight, how exhausted Todoroki had seemed.
It was always scary to have a brush with death. But maybe it was scarier when you had thought yourself untouchable before.
“What me to make him do the Caramelldansen?” Hitoshi suggested.
He wanted to lighten the atmosphere, and it worked. Todoroki snorted. Some tension leaked out of his frame.
“… That reference is a little old,” he answered with a small smile. “You’re lucky I didn’t have any friends in middle school.”
“You really shouldn’t sound so proud of that.”
Sitting in the lukewarm water, Hitoshi then helped Todoroki get rid of the awful, half-melted plastic armor on his costume. Who was stupid enough to put plastic on his costume? At least the shirt underneath had been heat-resistant, so it had helped protect his skin. But there were still red angry burns all over Todoroki’s arm and the left side of his torso.
They assessed their injuries. Todoroki assured him that those red burns were only first-degree. Apparently, he was an expert on these kinds of injuries. The burns had to be rinsed with lukewarm water, so Todoroki couldn’t use his ice on it. He settled for making snow with his right hand, then melting it with his left, and pouring it over his burns.
Hitoshi was worse off. He still couldn’t move his arm correctly. Also, now that the adrenaline was fading, the pain was rearing its ugly head, and… ouch. It freaking hurt.
The burn on his chest was awful. It didn’t hurt, which was more alarming. But when Todoroki helped him peel off his jacket and shirt, and he saw how black and blistered his flesh was, he nearly threw up. That was a third-degree burn. The nerves were destroyed, that was why it wasn’t painful. Todoroki hurriedly started rinsing it with melted ice, then put pure snow on it.
“I thought you shouldn’t use ice directly?”
“No. It makes it scar. But a third-degree burn will scar anyways. You’ll need skin grafts. The danger is that the heat spreads inside your tissue and damages your organs.”
Hitoshi felt a little dizzy suddenly.
“Great,” he wheezed. “Word of advice, buddy, you should work on your bedside manner.”
“Are you going to pass out?” Todoroki enquired dispassionately, still rinsing his burns.
“I can’t. If I do, Dabi will wake up.”
Todoroki’s movements stopped briefly, then resumed. His voice was very even.
“I see. How long can you hold him?”
“As long as I focus. It’s becoming harder now because I’m-” Injured, in pain, frightened, stressed, exhausted, dazzled, dizzy, “-tired. I’m going to have to let go soon, but we should neutralize him first. Would icing him in a glacier work?” Todoroki shook his head mutely. Hitoshi swore. “Dang it.”
For a brief second, he saw Todoroki’s eyes wander to the edge of the roof. Where he could make Dabi just… jump.
He didn’t mention it. It was horrible, but he had thought about it, too. It had been a bad, reflexive thought, something coming from his animal brain and the depth of his fear. He was scared and outclassed, and he just wanted to be safe. But he couldn’t do that. Heroes saved people. Even villainous ones.
He closed his eyes.
“Okay, okay. New idea. I can make him fall asleep. Problem is that noise will wake him up, so we should leave first, then I will make him lay down and sleep. He will wake up on his own later. Sounds good?”
“… Sounds good.”
This time, when they left, Todoroki let Hitoshi take the lead without a word of protest.
oOoOoOo
(Present time.)
The hospital was quiet. In Toki’s memories, hospitals were always busy, with the clatter of nurses’ feet, the hush of whispered conversations, the machines beeping, and the occasional call for a name. But then, Toki visited hospitals during the day. Right now, it was night. The patients were sleeping.
Toki had left Mihoko to rest on the cot in Hitoshi’s bedroom and had wandered into the visitor’s area. She had texted Keigo to tell him Hitoshi was fine (and also Melissa and Neito, too, because they were probably freaking out). She had poked around the hospital and texted All Might to have an update on the health of the other students.
Anyways. Her job here was done, but Toki didn’t feel like coming home right away. She needed a moment. There was a coffee machine in the visitor room, but Toki didn’t have any money. She scowled at it. What a mess.
This whole situation was a mess.
How had the USJ played out in canon, exactly? Toki tried to organize her memories. Well, for starters, the students hadn’t been scattered to the same places with the same people. Canon-Midoriya had ended up in the shipwreck zone with Asui and Mineta, and using their Quirks they had managed to trap all the villains and escape very quickly. But here, Midoriya had ended up with Uraraka and Kaminari in the mountain zone. They had escaped unscathed, but it hadn’t been as quick.
In canon, their hasty escape allowed them to watch Aizawa’s fight… and afterward, didn’t Shigaraki try to kill Asui? Well, that hadn’t happened.
With a pang, Toki realized that it was probably why Thirteen was dead.
Apparently, upon realizing that a student had escaped, the villains had planned to withdraw quietly. But not without ‘injuring All Might’s pride.’ And since there were no students on the plaza that Shigaraki could target… Kurogiri had opened a warp gate under the feet of the students standing near the entrance. Six teenagers and the injured Thirteen had been delivered at Shigaraki’s feet.
And the students had watched, horrified, as Shigaraki reduced Thirteen to dust.
All Might had arrived almost immediately after. The students were still screaming when he had walked in. Their screams were so raw, so horrified, that for a second he believed they were being tortured. But no, they were only watching their sensei being murdered. Tsuyu Asui, Tenya Iida, Momo Yaoyorozu, Mezo Shoji, and Fumikage Tokoyami. They were the children who had witnessed Thirteen’s murder. They were the ones Yūei had failed the most.
Then All Might had come. He saved them, saved Aizawa, and fought the Nōmu. Almost got killed in the process by Kurogiri’s warp gate, at which point the students had jumped in. All of them were injured as a result. Asui had been punched by the Nōmu, and had had several broken ribs (all healed now, thanks to Recovery Girl). She was lucky her frog morphology made her flexible as anyone else would have died. Shoji had been hit by the Nōmu, too. He was out of surgery, but still in intensive care. His spine should be undamaged, but it had been close.
Yaoyorozu almost managed to trap the Nomu with quicksand, chains, and even an electrified net. But she had been stabbed by a piece of rubble aimed through Kurogiri’s portals. She had needed surgery too, because being stabbed was a shit show to heal. Especially when the wound wasn’t clean. But now, her injury had been closed and Recovery Girl used her Quirk, so Yaoyorozu was discharged. She is lucky. She probably didn’t realize how close she had been to bleeding out in the USJ.
Iida and Tokoyami, who had pinned Kurogiri and immobilized him, were targeted by Shigaraki personally. He hadn’t managed to grab them, but he did graze them, disintegrating their skin at each touch. Recovery Girl had healed them, but they would have some bad scars.
The list of injuries didn’t stop there. Apparently, Midoriya had shown up with Uraraka and Kaminari halfway to that fight and had joined in. Midoriya had gotten one good punch in and broken his arm in the process. Then Kirishima and Jirō had shown up. And then finally, Hitoshi and Todoroki. They had reached the plaza right at the end, just when All Might punched Nōmu in the stratosphere.
Eight kids had been injured. Three had needed to be hospitalized. They could have died. They all could have died.
It had gone so much worse than in canon.
In canon, there had been Bakugo there. Was it the only difference? Would Bakugo’s presence have been enough to protect everyone? He had been the one to figure out Kurogiri’s weakness. He had also been the fastest to act. Maybe if he had been there… but no, too many things had changed. There was no use thinking about it now.
Bakugo wasn’t a Yūei student. The story had to go on without him.
It hadn’t turned out too badly. The other kids were alive. They had saved themselves, and probably saved All Might’s beacon, too. Yaoyorozu had figured out Kurogiri’s weakness, and Iida had acted on it. Tokoyami had protected them. All Might had punted Nōmu in space with a final move, and then had gone on threatening Shigaraki and Kurogiri. He had reached his limit, then, but fortunately, his bluff had been enough to scare the League of Villains.
It also helped that the USJ’s wall near the zone of ruins had exploded in flames just at that moment. In the following confusion, Dabi had escaped, most likely. But the sight had been surprising enough that the villains had paused, everyone had paused, and… well. The other teachers had arrived and saved the day.
And so, no students died. Eraserhead would make a full recovery. All Might’s secret had been kept. It wasn’t all bad. It could have gone so much worse. Toki had to focus on that. It could have ended so much more tragically. How many times could the kids facing Kurogiri have died? She didn’t want to think about it. What a nightmare.
Her phone started vibrating, startling her. She exhumed it from her pocket, then scowled when she saw the caller-ID. Wicked Stepmother. That was the President.
That witch really wasted no time. It hadn’t been twenty-four hours yet.
“Quantum speaking.”
“Good evening. Do you still wish to teach?”
“You can save me the speech. I’ve been investigating the same thing as you and I’ve had a very bad day because of it. One of the villains on the scene was the fucking Ghost Arsonist.”
There was a brief pause. Apparently, that was news to Genmei-san.
“Intriguing. Do you want to give the case to someone else while you assume a teaching role, or would you rather keep it?”
“I’m keeping it.” Toki sighed deeply, then frowned when struck by a thought. “That teaching role, it better not be Thirteen’s. That would be in really bad taste.”
“No. You are not a rescue specialist after all. You will cover Heroic Foundation in partnership with All Might. Thirteen’s replacement will be chosen by Nedzu.”
“… You’re not going to put a more permanent pawn in Yūei? After that disaster, you would have the leverage for it.”
“What would be the point?” the President answered, unflappable. “I don’t intend to enter a chess match with Nedzu. Besides, as far as permanent placements go, there’s already Recovery Girl.”
Good point. Recovery Girl wasn’t a fanatic fan of the HPSC, but she was still a child of Naruto Labs. And when the President called, she came. Hell, she even called Genmei-san by her first name, not many people did that.
The President continued:
“Instead, by not using my leverage, I made myself his ally, and I secured extra privileges for the position of a security consultant. That’s your role. You’ll be allowed complete scrutiny over them and have access to all their files on their students.” She paused. “The League of Villains targeted the USJ because they had All Might’s schedule. I do not need to tell you the conclusions that can be reached.”
“You don’t.”
There was a spy. Most likely a student. And they needed to be found. Toki remembered a pretty solid fan theory from Before, about Hagakure the invisible girl being the spy, so she would start her investigation there. But it was still too soon to know if that idea held any weight.
They had been plenty of fan theories, in her past life. A lot of them were nonsensical, like how All For One was actually Midoriya’s father, or how Tomura Shigaraki and Momo Yaoyorozu were secretly related, or how Kirishima was actually a Shimura, or how Bakugo was a time-traveler. But at least one theory had been spot-on, the ‘Dabi is a Todoroki’ one, so… she wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.
“Report to my office tomorrow at eleven. I’ll give you the relevant files.” The President paused, then added stiffly: “Bring Hawks.”
Toki’s eyes narrowed. She didn’t like where this was going. For a second, she thought about reminding the President of the leverage she had against the Commission… then she relented. She was tired, angry, and frayed. It wasn’t the time to enter a pissing contest.
Also, she wasn’t recording their conversation. If blackmail had to be used, Toki wanted to be able to keep proof. You never knew when it could come in handy.
“Sure. See you tomorrow.”
“Good night, Quantum. Sleep well.”
That sounded ominous coming from the Witch.
Toki hung up and sighed. Well, she had lost all desire for coffee now. Oh, well, no great loss. She didn’t even like coffee. It was just useful to stay awake longer. Toki rubbed her eyes and decided it was time to go home.
She warped to the Shinsō’s apartment first. She had promised to take care of Missy the cat. Mihoko and Hitoshi would be back tomorrow but, in the meantime, Missy needed to be fed and her litterbox changed. Toki did just that, with the cat circling her ankles and purring like an engine. Then she warped back to Fukuoka. It took her about fifteen jumps, so maybe twenty seconds. When she reappeared in the penthouse, she was shivering and wanted nothing more than crawl into bed with Keigo.
He had been waiting for her in the living room. He was sprawled on the sofa, with baby Hinawa asleep on his chest. When he saw her, he smiled, and something in Toki’s chest suddenly softened.
“You’re back late.”
“Sorry. I got lost on the road of life.”
Keigo snorted then looked down in alarm at the Hinawa, worried about waking her. He shouldn’t have. Their daughter was dead to the world, sprawled out in a total slumber, mouth open and drooling. Her little fuzzy wings twitched in her dreams, and Toki cooed. She was so cute.
“Here, I’ll put her to bed.”
She had brought Hinawa to Fukuoka with a bag of essentials, including a foldable playpen that could be converted into a crib. It was crazy how much stuff a baby needed. The ‘bag of essentials’ was three times Hinawa’s size.
Anyways. Toki gathered her daughter in her arms, and Keigo stood up with a groan, his feathers zipping out to start putting the bed in place. They put her to bed. Toki briefly felt a pang of longing for the abstract idea of a simpler life, a time and place where it would be normal, where Hinawa would be part of their everyday routine, where Keigo could hum her lullabies and Toki kiss her forehead every night without even thinking about it.
But she thought of Hitoshi in his hospital bed, she thought of the Yūei's students injured and traumatized, she thought of Dabi lurking about, of the League of Villains making their move; she couldn’t find it in herself to regret her choice. The life she lived was a dangerous one. She couldn’t give Hinawa the time and care she deserved, but more importantly, she couldn’t guarantee her safety. Living apart was a small price to pay, to be sure her baby would be safe.
What a terrible thing, to love what death can touch.
She took a quick shower before going to bed, rinsing off the smell of hospital and burn cream. When she got out, Keigo was waiting for her in bed. He wordlessly rose a wing like a blanket so she could slip under it. His feathers were silky soft, a reassuring weight against her back. Hard to imagine that in a fight, they could also be razor-sharp.
“Are you alright?” he whispered in the darkness.
Toki closed her eyes.
“Should I be?”
“No, you should be fucked up.”
“Oh, good, I’m meeting expectations then.”
There was a long silence. Toki shifted to hide her face against his chest, and muttered:
“I feel so powerless. I want to hunt down Dabi, the dude who tried to kill Hitoshi. And I want to rip out his spine and beat him to death with it. Oh, I know it’s wrong,” she hastily added. “I probably won’t do it. It’s just, you know. I didn’t realize that’s how it felt to be emotionally compromised.”
Keigo hummed in response, wrapping an arm around her shoulder in a comforting hug.
“Well, it was bound to happen, eventually.”
True. Toki winced at the reminder. She was young. Highly rational, but young, and she had grown up… isolated. Keigo and her both. It was a side effect of their time at Naruto Labs. It had made them focus on their training, but had also created the possibility that ah, how to put it? That when faced with personal connections they would lose sight of their priorities.
Being emotionally compromised by each other was one thing. They were both strong, they trusted each other to make the right call. It was different with Hitoshi. Hell, it was different with Melissa, too, and Neito, and all the kids she was going to meet and feel protective about. Because she was protective of them.
By itself, it wasn’t an issue. It was like Okamoto had taught them: emotions weren’t the issue. Emotions did not have to be shut down or controlled; only their reaction to them…. But you couldn’t know how you would react until you faced those emotions them for the first time. Protectiveness, helplessness, anger.
Quantum’s companionship with her fellow pro heroes (yes, even Keigo) was followed with a mutual understanding that not only they could take care of themselves, but also that their jobs were supposed to come first. But her bond with the children was different.
“I’ll manage,” Toki whispered. She didn’t know if she was saying that for Keigo’s benefit or her own.
“Hm. And if you don’t, I’ll help you hide the body.”
It made Toki crack a smile at least. Then she remembered her phone call and grimaced.
“Also, the President wants to see us tomorrow at eleven. I’ll bring back Hinawa to Mihoko-san first, then I’ll pick you up and we’ll go together.”
“Both of us?” She could almost hear Keigo frown. “I suppose for you it’s about putting you in Yūei, but what the hell does she want with me?”
“Well, maybe she just wants to make you my teaching assistant. But also…”
She hesitated. Keigo didn’t press her. But she felt him shift, attentive. With his wings so close to her body, he could probably feel every single hitch in her breath, every single beat of her heart; there was no way to hide her nervousness.
“But also,” she starts hesitantly, “maybe she’s scared of this League of Villains. They are strong, so strong they could have killed All Might. They killed Thirteen. They could have killed a bunch of hero students right there in Yūei. I know that Shigaraki at least is going to be A-ranked. The warp gate is going to be S-ranked just because of his Quirk. And we know nothing about them. The only reason we even have their name is because they introduced themselves. And if they recruited a massive crowd of underlings so easily, they must have connections. We should have known they were coming, but we didn’t, and we don’t know what they intend to do next either, so...”
“You think they want me to investigate.”
She shook her head.
“If it was only about investigating, they would ask someone in Musutafu. No, I don’t think that’s it.” She touched his wings, the feathers so soft and sensitive. “I think they will ask you to spy on them.”
Spying was dirtier than investigating. It was sneaking close, listening to conversations behind closed doors, lying. Spying on villains, especially, required almost always to infiltrate them. To immerse yourself in their circle of friends, to pretend to be one of them. That was the best way to collect intel. Often, the information gathered that way could save lives.
That didn’t make the job any less unpleasant… or any less dangerous.
“You could say no,” she whispered in the silence.
Keigo didn’t say anything for several seconds. Then he sighed deeply, letting his face fall against Toki’s shoulder.
“You could have said no about fighting All Might.”
But she hadn’t, because if she had, then the task would have still needed to be done. It would have fallen to someone who didn’t have her skills, who didn’t have her odds of success. So she had taken the job because it was thankless and dangerous, but she was afraid they would ask Hawks instead. Funny, how their situations were reversed.
Toki sighed and closed her eyes.
“If she tries to coerce you into it, tell me and I’ll help you hide the body.”
She felt Keigo huff a laugh against her shoulder. Well, if it went south, at least they could still find humor in their situation.
Also, she was pretty sure neither of them was joking.
Notes:
So. Here is how the USJ went in the Wisdom-verse.
Mwahahahahaha.
Anyway, i hope you liked it ! And yes, Toki will join Yūei after this debacle as an added security measure. The next chapter is called "Quantum-sensei" and will be posted in tow weeks, on the 17th.
_____________________________
Fic rec of the day : "How to Win the Sports Festival: A Step by Step Guide" by mhwright.
The Plot: Hitoshi Shinso trains hard, trains smart, and wins the Sports Festival with blood, sweat, tears, and spite. That's it, that's the fic.It's, like, so good????! I love the humor and the snark and the suspense and everything. From how Hitoshi handles misdirection and subterfuge, to the actual fights? And how he gets googles and has a bandaid on his nose when he met Aizawa, and Aizawa nearly has a heart attack because he looks so much like Shirakumo? I love it, i love all of it. And there's even a sequel which is EXCELLENT too. Please check this out. It's gold.
______________________________
The next fic to be updated will be "wisdom of the fallen" and its AU "keep me away from the wisdom", if you're following them =)
Chapter 39: Quantum-sensei
Summary:
On Monday, Toki (or rather Quantum) warped in front of Yuei's gates. Oh, this was going to be fun.
Notes:
Welcome back !
The USJ was a disaster and now the HPSC has an opportunity to get a foot in the door, which mean Toki has an opportunity to move closer to the Plot. It's going to be fun x)
Without further ado.... the long awaited chapter !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
QUANTUM-SENSEI
Quantum and Hawks weren’t the only heroes summoned to the HPSC’s headquarters. Salamander was here. Gecko, too. Then Viridan and Nova, two underground heroes Toki only knew from their reputation (Viridan had a Quirk allowing to hear people’s voices no matter where they were, and Nova could briefly turn invisible). Sherazade was also there. And Kesagiri Man. And Takeshita. So, that was a lot.
Hawks joined them, and they were led to a conference room.
Quantum was directed to another room, where Mera-san was waiting for her. He looked like he hadn’t slept since the USJ. It probably wasn’t too far from the truth.
“Congrats, you’re now a Yūei teacher,” he told her with a grim face. “Here is your schedule. You got about four hours of class each week, so nothing crazy: but you’re allowed to hang out there as much as you want. Here is a file with the investigation of the attack. And… here is a file on the Yūei’s staff.”
Because they wouldn’t really be colleagues. Toki was there to do recon and bodyguard duty, and the teachers were assets to be studied. Toki had no doubt that she would be asked to expand that file if she discovered something interesting, even if it was unrelated to her case.
Mera-san continued.
“And here is your access key. For safety and to minimize possible leaks, Yūei doesn’t know yet who will be the security consultant we’ve assigned. I don’t doubt Nedzu will figure it out, but in the meantime, keep it as secret as you can. Classes have been suspended for three days and will resume after this weekend. I suppose you can just warp there, but since they will be a little… paranoid… about warping, please come in with All Might at eight o’clock. Any questions?”
“Yes. Did the merry crowd I left Hawks with is actually a gaggle of S-ranked heroes, here for a top-secret mission briefing about infiltrating the League of Villains?”
Mera-san closed his eyes, as if in pain.
“If I say no, will you drop it? You already have a top-secret mission to bodyguard Yūei and accessorily All Might. You absolutely cannot be involved in anything related to the League of Villains. Please. And how did you even guess that?”
Canon-foreknowledge, mostly. But it wasn’t as if she could say that. She leaned back on her seat and shrugged.
“I’m awesome.”
“I need a raise,” Mera-san muttered.
He went forward with his briefing, but Toki could tell he had a headache coming. Well, too bad for him. He shouldn’t have involved Keigo if he didn’t want Toki poking her nose in his business. It was a given. When one of them was involved, the other was, too. Even if the other wasn’t supposed to.
Especially if the other wasn’t supposed to.
Keigo had been given instructions to not tell her anything. So he didn’t. When they went back to Fukuoka, he just mentioned lightly that she had been right. Which meant he had been ordered to infiltrate the League of Villains. And of course, explicit orders to not tell a soul or not, he still managed to confirm it to Toki. They were a team after all.
But in canon, Toki vividly remembered he had been alone in that mission. Nobody else had even been in the room when the President had given him the assignment. Nobody else had known. Hawks hadn’t had any support, at all. But here… here there had been seven other heroes in here with him. Seven people were tasked with supporting him. In any case, it was a massive change. Did that mean that the HPSC was giving him a safety net?
Well, Hawks wasn’t a disposable pawn anymore, was he? He was the next Number One. In canon, the HPSC had given him the mission before All Might’s fall from grace when there had been no worries about the Symbol of Peace keeping order. Now the Symbol was gone, and Endeavor wasn’t getting any younger, which mean all their bets were on the Icarus agency. On Hawks. He wasn’t disposable. He was essential. And he was backed by Quantum, who was their most dangerous hero, both because of her Quirk and because of the blackmail material she had. Of course, Genmei-san wouldn’t even dream of sending Hawks on a suicide mission.
But Hawks was still their best hero. It made sense that he would still be given that assignment. It made sense, even if Toki hated it. Hawks was their best, and they desperately needed their best to find out what the League was after.
In canon, his intel had been invaluable. Without it, the heroes would have been blindsided by the invasion of the League of Villains. Or was it the Meta-Liberation Army? Or whatever their new name had been, after fusing their groups? Whatever. There had been an army, an invasion force, with spies everywhere in the ranks of heroes; and nobody had known. Thinking about it in terms of real-life threats gave her hives. Could you imagine the pressure? Not only do you have to take down an entire army that’s trying to destroy Japan and has connections throughout the entire country; but you have to do it from the inside out. All by yourself. Within an incredibly short amount of time; like, maybe five months? Six, from the time he made first contact to when the heroes managed to regroup enough to storm the League’s headquarters?
Seriously, Toki wasn’t sure that anyone could have pulled that off.
Keigo… or, well, canon-Hawks… had figured out the villains’ intentions within weeks, then had to figure out all the members, bosses, and lieutenants, for each unit of their army. He had gone as far as to immerse himself in the MLA’s ideology; he had in-depth discussions with the MLA's members; he even faked Best Jeanist’s death to get in! And Toki was pretty sure it had all been improvisation. The original plan had been to capture the League when they were a small group. In canon, their merging with the MLA had completely tripped up the game. So when Hawks had managed to infiltrate them, they already had an army! They were a full-blown organization! And Hawks just kinda rolled with it, and bullshitted his way through??
So yeah, Toki was kind of glad that Keigo was on this mission because she was pretty sure no one else would be able to make something that crazy work, but she was also very glad that he had a safety net to get him out because the odds of getting up close and personal with the grim face of his own mortality were pretty high.
Cool, cool, cool.
Just hypothetically, Toki suggested they work out a code. You know, in case Hawks was watched and couldn’t talk to her. She was fairly sure that at one point, in canon, the Meta-Liberation Army had stalked Hawks and put cameras on his feathers to monitor him, forcing him to use a code in a book to pass a warning to Endeavor. That sounded inconvenient.
Over the weekend, Toki and Keigo thus made a way to communicate, with Keigo’s feathers writing on a piece of paper even though he was at a distance. Then Keigo raised a sobering point.
“If I get watched to the point where I can’t talk, the people observing me would have already found out we’re living together.”
It gave Toki even more hives to think of their privacy being breached like that. She unconsciously rubbed her arms in a self-soothing gesture, feeling uncertain and defensive.
“So you’re suggesting that I… move back to my room?”
Their bedroom was actually Keigo’s. Toki’s room was her office. She used it to store her Hoshizora work, books, and disguise, but there was also a futon there, to keep up appearances in case someone visited. Not that it had ever happened, but you never knew.
“No,” Keigo said slowly, not looking at her, “I’m thinking that if they are looking for secrets, then it’s the least compromising thing they could find.”
Toki’s first instinct was to say no. But he was right. It was like double bluffing. If the villains thought they had found out Hawks’ weakness there, with Toki, then they wouldn’t dig any deeper. They wouldn’t look for Hinawa.
“Yeah,” she whispered quietly. “Yeah, that’s… that’s a good plan.”
Keigo nodded once, sharply.
“But not good enough. If they find out about us, then they could go after you. We need to make it too dangerous for them.”
“Kind of hard to predict, don’t you think?”
“Not if you made them afraid to try, which you are not doing right now,” he snapped back. “You’re ranked Twelfth, you’re holding back. I get that you don’t like the attention, but you can’t afford to enjoy the comfort of anonymity anymore. All Might is all but retired. I’m the Number Two. We need to present a strong, united front.”
She didn’t like where this was going. Toki frowned, defensive:
“We’re already plenty united.”
Keigo didn’t back down. He looked straight into her eyes and declared: “Yes. But I want you to stop digging your heels and reach my level like you’re supposed to.”
Ouch.
“That’s a big thing to ask,” Toki wavered. “What if my father finds out?”
“Then we’ll deal with that in time. Besides, he’s not who you were led to believe he was, isn’t he? He doesn’t want to hurt you. And Endeavor is keeping an eye on him.” He saw Toki bite her lips, uncertain, and his voice softened. “Please, Toki. I need you by my side for this. I know you’re scared, but this is more important.”
He was right. Toki swore softly under her breath. She was the coward in that story. She was terrified of facing her dad, but he didn’t even want to hurt her. He was just going to be disappointed in her. And maybe say some well-merited truths, like how she was a backstabbing brat with no understanding of the words love or loyalty and it was her fault her mom was dead, but it would be nothing more than what she deserved. He wouldn’t physically hit her. On the other hand, Keigo could be hurt if she continued holding back. Toki could be hurt, too, if the League of Villains targeted her! There shouldn’t even be a choice.
Between Keigo’s safety and her own emotional comfort, there had never been a choice.
“Alright.” She let out a long, deep breath. “I’ll get back in the Top Ten.”
“Thank you. I… I’m going to need you. I’ll try not to involve you, but…”
“I’ll be involved anyways. Please, let me do that for you, at least.”
They continued their patrol in silence for a while. Quantum warped in the streets twice to help old ladies cross the road or to stop a car from ignoring a red light. Hawks’ feathers zipped around, catching a cat in a tree and saving a child about to wander into traffic. Each time, they barely had to think before acting, plastering a pleasant smile on their face for the public, moving seamlessly with one another. They were a good team.
“I have a favor to ask of you as well,” Toki suddenly said.
“Anything.”
“It’s nothing bad! It’s just… can you snoop around Endeavor’s agency? Test the waters to see how my dad is doing, if he’s murderous and cranky, or if he seems to be genuinely helping? I’ll need to face him one day or another. I don’t want to go there totally blind.”
Keigo grinned:
“Honey, asking me to go snoop around Endeavor is never going to be a bother. Maybe I’ll ask him to autograph me something when I’m there.”
“As long as it’s not your underwear.”
“My flame-patterned boxers are awesome, you’re just too blind to see it!”
Toki sniggered, a knot of tension slowly unclenching in her chest.
The future was so uncertain. It was scary. The canon timeline didn’t match the reality anymore. The changes were too numerous and too blatant now. The points Toki could use as references were getting sparser. Soon enough Toki would be like everyone else, floundering in the unknown. It wasn’t a bad thing. It was just… scary.
Some things were better than in canon. All Might had been actively preparing his retirement, and the heroic world wasn’t scrambling as it would have if he had been forced to step back after Kamino. Melissa was a hero student, and people were more aware of the discrimination the minorities faced. New laws had passed to make the world a fairer place, the public was more concerned with kindness and fairness, and equality. Midoriya was less isolated since he knew Hitoshi already. Stain had all but disappeared into the background since his fight with Endeavor in January, and he hadn’t attacked anyone since. And Toki was here, here with Keigo, giving him support he hadn’t had in canon.
But some things were worse than in canon, and Toki couldn’t ignore them, either. Like how Dabi was more aggressive, how Hitoshi had been injured, and how Stain’s ideology (although it wasn’t really his ideology anymore, but more of a global phenomenon) was already on the rise. Some things could also have catastrophic consequences, like how Bakugo had been stopped from going to Yūei. Or how Thirteen had died. And Toki couldn’t forget that, either. All wasn’t well in the world.
It didn’t mean that some kind of cosmic balance was at stake. It just meant that the universe was going on its merry way. Each action strewing consequences like ripples in a pond, and people had to do their best with the cards they had been dealt with.
They would be alright. They had to. Besides, they had each other, didn’t they?
In those moments when you feel too afraid to trust love,
remember
that I have crossed a great ocean of loneliness to find you.
Mine is not a fair-weathered heart:
it was built to outlast storms.
oOoOoOo
On Monday, Toki warped in front of Yūei's backdoor.
She had cautiously considered what she knew, what the teachers knew, and what a spy could infer of her involvement. The first thing was: she should not, under any circumstance, let it be known that she was close to Toshinori Yagi. She had to project an air of arrogant confidence, be cocky Quantum and no one else.
The spy would report to the League any useful intel about All Might. That means interpersonal relationships.
Lucky for Toki, she was good at using her cocky persona like a mask. She had wanted to text Yagi that they would have to pretend their civiliansonas didn’t know each other because it would have been polite to warn him in advance, but she wasn’t supposed to inform him that she was the HPSC’s assigned security detail. Well, he had probably guessed, but the orders still stood. Oh, whatever. Yagi was smart. He was a professional. He would pick up her intent immediately.
Then she had to deal with the other teachers. Honestly, she was a little morbidly curious to see if anyone would recognize her as Hoshizora.
She already knew that Present Mic hadn’t identified her when they had met as two fellow pro-heroes at the last Christmas gala. But then, the context had been different. Maybe another teacher would be more observant. Maybe the familiar hallways would jog their memories. There was also the risk that Toki would betray herself. Quantum wasn’t supposed to know Yūei, but Toki could navigate the high school with her eyes closed, and pretending to be lost would be really annoying when she could just… warp from one classroom to another.
In the end, she decided she shouldn’t hide. She wouldn’t shout it from the rooftops, but it would be a good strategy to imply that she was Hoshizora. If she only hid one secret identity and made it easy to stumble upon, well, nobody would think that she had a second one, would they?
Also, she low-key wanted to see if Nedzu (allegedly the smartest mammal in Japan) could guess her civiliansona. Hoshizora had been unremarkable. Not only had she been a general education student, completely ignored by the teachers in favor of the hero students; but she had also been a loner. Her grades had been good but not stunning. The only remarkable fact about her had been how she had completed part of the curriculum in advance and used her free time to pursue university-level courses, but it hadn’t been in her official file. Only her teachers had been aware.
Hm. She wondered if Norogawa-sensei was still here. It would be hilarious if the pro-heroes completely missed her, but her civilian teacher recognized her.
In order to be recognized, of course, Toki had to play a careful game of show but don’t tell. She put on her colored contacts. She packed a bag of civilian clothes, including make-up, in case she had to change at Yūei. She even exhumed her old hairclips, the big yellow ones she had worn all through high school, and put them in her bag.
She texted Melissa to tell her that she would teach at Yūei. All Might was supposed to focus on the first years, but Toki would probably cross paths with the third years.
She also warned Hitoshi and Neito of the same thing. Midoriya probably wouldn’t recognize her, but if he did, then Hitoshi was tasked with karate-chopping him as soon as he started mumbling. There were things that should not be voiced out loud, and Quantum being pregnant recently was one of them. Seriously. If the spy was in class 1-A, which was very likely, if only by the Power Of Cosmic Irony In Shonen Manga, then Midoriya had to be as quiet as a tomb.
Of course, Hitoshi was absolutely thrilled to learn that Toki would be his teacher. He was probably rubbing his hands in glee like a demented raccoon at the thought of having his whole class subjected to parkour training like he had been. Little sadist. Toki was so proud.
And Neito, well, he was probably laughing maniacally at the thought of continuing his warp training during school. He had probably used Warp-Space during lessons already. Had the teachers guessed where he had found that Quirk? Oh, that would be a fun conversation, too.
Anyways. On Monday, she warped in front of Yūei's back door, so as to not trigger all their alarms. The staff had been warned of her arrival, apparently. All Might was already there, in his muscled form, with Nedzu and Present Mic. When Quantum appeared, they all jumped, an aborted reflex of people on edge. Then they recognized her.
“Oh, it’s you!” All Might said with a hint of relief.
And poof, he deflated in a cloud of smoke. Present Mic’s welcoming smile froze on his face, and his eyes widened comically behind his sunglasses, darting from All Might’s true form to Quantum’s unbothered slouch.
“Oh, Quantum is aware of your time limit?” Nedzu inquired politely.
“I am,” Toki drawled with a lazy smirk. “I already saw him deflate like a sad balloon animal a few months ago.”
“I didn’t know you were close,” the rat-bear-thing says innocently. Or, whatever passed for innocent when it was Nedzu, the vengeful God in the body of a genetically modified albino badger.
She waved dismissively: “We’re not. It wasn’t a choice on his part.”
Both Present Mic and Nedzu looked at Yagi. To his credit, he seemed to have understood her plan, because he winced sheepishly like he would if he had inadvertently revealed his weakness to another hero.
“Yes, it was, ah, an accident.”
“I see,” Nedzu said serenely. “Well in any case, welcome to Yūei! I am Principal Nedzu, and this is Present Mic. We’re very pleased to have you. And what a relief to have you here!” His smile vanished, replaced by a mournful expression. “It’s almost impossible to defend against a Warp Quirk, except with another Warp Quirk. We were unprepared to such an attack. The tragedy that occurred here cannot be allowed to happen again.”
“That’s why I’m here. I’m…” She hesitated a second because it sounded so inadequate. “I’m sorry for your loss. What happened was terrible.”
“At least the students were saved,” Present Mic said grimly. “It could have been much worse if All Might hadn’t arrived when he did.”
With the way All Might’s head bowed slightly in resignation, he didn’t share the sentiments. The kids had been wounded, after all. And he knew Toki had taken it very personally, especially considering Hitoshi had been one of the students hospitalized afterward.
“Anyway!” Nedzu piped up cheerfully. “Let’s go to the staff room to speak about your schedule!”
On the way, Present Mic started chattering about how cool it was to teach, how great the students were, how weird they could be too… He kept an uninterrupted stream of chatter, and Toki couldn’t help but wonder if that was Nedzu’s strategy. To use Present Mic’s loud personality as a shield, to distract the HPCS’s spy from both his school and All Might’s weakness.
Which could have been a valid strategy. Quantum was chatty, too, young, and enthusiastic. Her whole persona was crafted around being charming and insolent, so someone like Present Mic shouldn’t have much trouble corralling her. Toki recognized the strategy and drew her own conclusions.
They didn’t like having her here.
Her job was to bodyguard All Might (already not a pleasant thing for Yūei, who liked to keep total control of their school), but also to be the HPSC’s mole. Recovery Girl was too neutral (she didn’t broadcast her loyalties, and Toki wasn’t even sure those loyalties lay with the HPCS and not just with her oath to heal and protect) but Quantum was clearly an agent sent by the President. The teachers weren’t hostile, true, but they weren’t pleased about her presence. They wanted to keep her at arm’s length.
Yeah, good luck with that.
The staff room for hero teachers wasn’t the same as the staff room for civilian ones. Toki looked around curiously, memorizing the place. If heroes and civilians were separated, she probably wouldn’t find Norogawa-sensei around here…
Most of the heroic staff was here; Nedzu introduced her to everyone. Toki smiled and bowed, and carefully didn’t react to the fact that she had known all these people when she was in high school. There was Midnight, Snipe, Vlad King, Power Loader, Cementos, and Recovery Girl… Recovery Girl also looked from All Might to Quantum with a knowing look but didn’t say a thing about them being acquainted. Nice.
“Do you have any lesson plans?” Nedzu asked amiably.
Toki shrugged:
“More or less. I thought about brushing up the kids’ overall fitness, then starting Quirk analysis and recon training. I’m supposed to assist All Might, so I’ll take a look at his plans and change them as needed.”
Nedzu made a non-committal noise, but Toki saw the dismayed, even displeased look on Midnight and Cementos’ faces. True, she could have phrased that better. A young hotshot walking in and brazenly announcing she was going to steal and change the plans made by the Symbol of Peace sounded really rude.
Especially if they didn’t know that Toki already knew All Might and that All Might knew she was the more experienced teacher between the two of them!
“I’ll defer to your expertise,” All Might accepted politely.
“Don’t hesitate to come to us if you need advice about teaching, of course,” Midnight smiled a little rigidly.
“I probably won’t need it, but thanks for the offer.”
Well, if there were any doubts before, now they definitely thought she was a cocky little shit.
They talked a little about Yūei's security measures, and how they were going to handle the classes. The staff tried to make clear they had no expectations of Toki. She was here to snoop around, and they didn’t really expect a real involvement from her, especially not in teaching. Toki pretended to not notice.
Oh, they were all perfectly courteous, but also… kind of cold. Well, no surprise here. Quantum was showing up three days after Thirteen’s death, with the words ‘HPSC’s spy’ in neon letters practically floating above her head, and she strutted around like she owned the place. It must rub them the wrong way.
Also, Toki had kind of an obligation to ask difficult questions, and they didn’t like that either. Like: had the students been informed about Thirteen’s death? Had they been offered a chance to withdraw? Had the students who had seen the murder talked about it with someone? Was Hound Dog a certified therapist or just a school counselor? Was a real therapist going to be assigned to Yūei? Was Quantum supposed to speak with them about it?
It turned out that yep, the students had been told, and the ones who had seen Thirteen’s death had received a visit from Nedzu himself to reassure their parents, and to be cajoled into continuing their education at Yūei. As for a certified therapist, Toki was unsurprised to find out that a crisis cell had been created for students who wanted to talk about it… but said therapist would only stay for two weeks before leaving. Yūei wasn’t any fonder of psychologists than the rest of Japan and heroic society.
“Eraserhead isn’t there,” Nedzu informed her brightly. “So maybe you can cover his class this morning? It’s very short notice, I know.”
He was trying to make her flounder and admit she had no idea what she was doing, wasn’t he? But Toki wouldn’t be so easily tripped up.
“That’s fine. I already have some experience teaching anyways. Did Eraserhead leave lesson plans, or can I wing it?”
Also, Eraserhead wasn’t going to show up covered in bandages like a mummy? Wonders would never cease. Was it because Toki was here to care for his class? Or maybe in this universe, Thirteen’s death had rattled him enough that he had taken better care of his health?
“You have teaching experience?” Power Loader blinked, politely surprised.
“Of course. I actually already have students, so it’ll be nice to see what your training looks like compared to my training regimen.”
“Students?” Vlad King suddenly looked wary.
Toki grinned at him but didn’t elaborate. She didn’t really need to. If Vlad King had seen Neito use Warp-Space, he was probably putting it together. Warp Quirks were rare, after all.
“Eraserhead was supposed to have homeroom this morning,” Nedzu said, seamlessly getting back to the topic at hand. “At this time of the year, it’s usual to start preparing the students for the Sports Festival.”
Toki had known it, but she still pretended to be surprised.
“You’ll maintain it?”
“We cannot allow a villain attack to shake us. Maintaining the Sports Festival will be a show of standing strong and solid.”
“Maybe. But it will also broadcast nationwide all of your students’ Quirks, strengths, weaknesses, and civilian names. Since you have an A-ranked nutjob targeting them, that’s pretty reckless. After all, the only reason your students survived the first attack was because they had the advantage of surprise. If the villains had known all about their Quirks, things would have turned very differently.” She frowned, thoughtful. “Unless you’re baiting the villains into attacking again? It could work.”
At least three people looked downright shocked. Not Nedzu, though. Nedzu looked at her with the same placid smile, but his eyes were suddenly calculating.
“We’ll do no such thing!” Midnight snapped.
Toki held her hands out placatingly: “Well, I was just saying. Don’t expect me to be super enthusiastic about leaking compromising information on national television as a security consultant.” She paused. “Actually, this evening I would appreciate it if we could talk about how to modify the Sports Festival to make it less of a free information buffet for the villains.”
She could hear Midnight’s teeth grind. Even Present Mic’s smile was becoming slightly fixated. All Might coughed awkwardly. “But the Sports Festival is a good way to be noticed by the pros.”
“All the other high schools manage just fine. Also, Yūei’s alumni have the highest rate of villain encounters after graduation, and I’m sure part of it is because of their superior education, but part of it may also be linked to the fact that the villains have easy access to footage of their abilities.”
She continued smiling, pretending to not notice the death glare Midnight and quite a few others were sending her way. She had been blunt, but hey, truth hurt. And it was high time to give the school a reality check.
Of course, Nedzu stayed completely unflappable.
“We can meet in my office at lunch if you wish. I would be happy to hear your suggestions.”
“Great! See you soon then.” She pretended to check a watch on her wrist (there wasn’t one), although the HUD in the corner of her visor already displayed the time and she was perfectly aware of her timing. “Now, I’m off to see Eraser’s class. They’re the 1-A, right?”
“They are,” Nedzu said amiably. “Do you want me to walk you there?”
“Nah, don’t bother! I’ll just warp there.”
Nedzu’s eyes narrowed infinitesimally, but flash! Toki was already gone.
She had had two missions when introducing herself to the staff: establish herself as arrogant so they would underestimate her and try to see if any of them brought up the subject of a spy. So far, the first objective was a resounding success. She was fairly sure even Snipe had been glaring at her behind his mask. Her mix of casually dismissive and cheerful cockiness never failed to make people react.
And although she had been there for nearly thirty minutes and had brought up security, intel, and information leaks plenty of times, nobody mentioned a spy.
This meant that either Yūei was blind and stupid… or that they were already investigating on their own and didn’t want her to meddle. And if they didn’t want her to meddle, they should have a good reason. For example: being wary of what the HPSC would do.
Which, in turn, told her one crucial information: they probably suspected a student.
oOoOoOo
Toki appeared in front of the class’s door. Nice, they hadn’t changed the location of class 1-A. It was the same as it had been when she was a student. She shrugged, waited five seconds for her HUD to display nine o’clock exactly, then slammed the door open.
“Hello, class!”
The kids gasped incredulously. One of them even screamed. Midoriya nearly fell from his chair and started muttering a mile a minute, eyes huge. Hitoshi was grinning without a word, but all the others were whispering or exclaiming excitedly.
“It’s Quantum!”
“The Number Twelve hero!”
“The Starburst hero!”
Toki smiled cheerfully, waving. She crossed the distance to the teacher’s desk and hopped onto it, legs dangling. A boy who had to be Tenya Iida looked like he was having a heart attack, seeing someone put their butt so irreverently on Aizawa’s furniture.
“Nice you all! So, yes, I’m Quantum, the Starburst hero. Today I’ll substitute for your homeroom teacher, but you’ll see me regularly since I’ll be one of your teachers.”
Yaoyorozu’s hand shot up. “Sensei! Will you teach an entirely new class and, if so, what will be its purpose?”
“I’ll be a security consultant, and I’ll be technically sharing my hours with All Might,” Toki answered easily. “So most of the time, it’ll be regular heroic training. But I’ll also teach you stuff your regular classes won’t cover, like…” she racked her brain for terms a little clearer than ‘what that asshole Okamoto used to teach at Naruto Labs,’ and settled on, “… stealth, team observational skills, Quirk analysis, public interaction, situational recon, health care, resource management, and so on. Like how schools don’t really teach you about taxes and stuff before you graduate; well, I’m here to talk about that. Not taxes, of course, unless you really want to. But yeah, pragmatic skills for heroes in general.”
They looked both excited and a little apprehensive. Good. They should be. Toki grinned, and clapped her hands once.
“Anyway! We’ll start with introductions. Everyone, you’re going to introduce the person sitting in front of you. Their name, two things you noticed about them, what their Quirk is with a brief description if you can, then one good trait and one bad one. You can add more stuff if you want.”
It sounded like a lot, but it was actually a considerably basic thing to start analyzing people. Her students were practiced at it; so, to not freak them out too much, she turned to Hitoshi.
“You can start.”
“Hm.” Hitoshi looked at Midoriya, who was now appearing a little nervous, and frowned before launching into his introduction, “Izuku Midoriya, green hair, green eyes, freckles, short height, super beefy. He tends to think out loud by mumbling. His Quirk came in very late and he has less than a year of training, so his control is lacking. His Quirk is called Superpower and is a stockpile of strength so powerful that it can shatter limbs. It’s as dangerous for the user as it is for the target, or at least it is for now. Once controlled, it may end up just as powerful as All Might’s Quirk. One of Midoriya’s qualities is that he’s extremely altruistic. One of his flaws is the downside of that altruism, and he lacks confidence because he doesn’t want to step on anyone’s toes.”
There was a beat.
“Woah, man,” a blond guy who had to be Kaminari whistles lowly, “That was intense.”
Midoriya started sputtering indignantly. Grinning, Toki ignored him and designed the person sitting behind Hitoshi (who turned out to be Yaoyorozu). To her credit, the girl barely hesitated before describing Hitoshi’s agility, his love for all things cat, and the fact he had friends in other classes. She cited his intelligence as a quality and his standoffish nature as a flaw. But she floundered at the end, before admitting that she didn’t know his Quirk. Judging by Hitoshi’s satisfied grin, that was on purpose.
Then they moved to the next person, then the next…
It wasn’t boring, but nobody revealed interesting details. They always pointed out the most obvious thing about the person they presented. Toki looked for hidden depth. It would reveal good observational skills, mostly, but more because it would also be good intel and would allow her to launch on a lesson about keeping your cards close to your chest. Oh well, she would keep that for a later date. Ideally right before or after the Sports Festival, so she could point out how broadcasting your weakness on national TV was dumb.
In the end, the most remarkable introductions could be counted on one hand. There was Hitoshi, of course: but he knew what Toki was excepting, so it didn’t count. Midoriya had been very elaborate in his description of Mineta’s Quirk. And very polite in describing his flaw as being ‘easily distracted by girls.’ Uraraka had drawn a comparison between Kirishima and some pro-heroes with resistance-like Quirks, like Titania, which was good thinking on her part. And, surprisingly, Mineta had managed to mention Yaoyorozu’s stupid costume design as a flaw.
Okay, he had been gross about it and gave wayyy more details than necessary about Yaoyorozu’s measurements, but he had a good point when he mentioned she had no chest support and that she could get injured easily like that.
Some other introductions sucked ass. Todoroki had noticed next to nothing about Tokoyami; he hadn’t even mentioned the bird’s head, even though it was right there. Aoyama talked about Iida’s strict adherence to rules but didn’t even mention his relationship with Ingenium. But, whatever.
“Good work, fledglings. Can you guess why I had you do that?”
Hitoshi raised his hand, but so did a few other people. Toki beamed and pointed at Asui.
“So we could see how much attention we pay to each other, kero?”
“Exactly. Being a hero is not about having a flashy Quirk, it’s about being able to solve problems. And to solve problems, you have to see them. Sometimes they are obvious, like a woman with an elephant Quirk stampeding in a street with a stolen cash dispenser under her arm. But sometimes they are more subtle, like a guy acting shifty, or a bystander that looks a little like a wanted poster.”
They all nodded with appropriate seriousness. She wanted to give them little star stickers. Should she buy little stars stickers? It was more for little kids. But it could also encourage them…
Oh, fuck it. She was the teacher now. Stars stickers it was. She had full authority, and she could do whatever she wanted, mwahahaha.
“So, moving on! Nedzu mentioned the Sports Festival is still going to run. Not sure if it’s going to be changed, televised, or delayed, but whatever. You know what the Sports Festival is, you know it’s going to make you a little bit famous. Tell me one good thing about the Sports Festival making you famous.”
“Pro-heroes will want to hire us!” exclaimed Sero.
“Yes! Or rather, they’ll know who you are, and later they will think about hiring you. Having a foot in the door also help, so I encourage you to look for what you want to learn, what kind of hero would help you learn it, and start thinking about reaching out. In heroics, since you constantly put your life on the line, it helps a lot to have a personal relationship with people, as a basis for trust. So you better start networking early.”
“Is that how you did it?” Kaminari asked curiously.
“Nah, I was scouted before high school by someone in the HPSC. The networking was done for me. I had it easy on that front. Next! Who can tell me a bad thing about the Sports Festival making you famous?”
There was a beat. This time it was Satō who spoke, his voice oddly flat.
“Villains will know who we are, too.”
It kind of made a chill fall on the class. Toki pretended not to notice.
“Correct. It’s the heroes’ eternal conundrum by the way, or at least it is for limelight heroes. Should I reveal more about myself and my Quirk, to be more popular, have a bigger paycheck, draw more sponsors, have more sidekicks apply to my agency, have more missions, be more helpful to the public? Or should I keep my advantages hidden and stay in the shadows to avoid giving my enemies ammunition, to be able to gather intel easily, to better keep my objectives secrets? It’s a whole art.”
Midoriya started muttering under his breath. The words ‘not revealing her Quirk to the public’ were clearly audible. Toki snapped her fingers and pointed at him (and charitably didn’t say anything when he froze as a result):
“Exactly, Midoriya! I keep the name of my Quirk and the extent of its abilities a secret. Anyway, I don’t really have a lesson plan for today… so let’s play a fun game. You don’t know each other’s hero names yet, right? Perfect. You’re going to form pairs and suggest three hero names for your partner. Or more, if you want. You can talk with each other about it. But you have to pick one name very on the nose, one name that completely misdirects, and one name that is neutral. For example: Hawks’ name is very on the nose. He has wings, he flies, he’s a bird. Mr. Brave’s name, on the other side, is a misdirection. With a name like Brave, you would expect a brawler, but Mr. Brave is a scrawny fencer with versatile abilities. And names like Mirko or Endeavor are fairly neutral since they reveal nothing about their abilities.”
“What kind of name is Quantum, then?” Aoyama asked curiously.
She flashed him a grin full of teeth. “That’s the beauty of it. It’s all three at once.”
Then she let them get to it and started wandering around, listening to their conversations and their suggestions. She checked the time in the corner of her HUD display, satisfied to see she was right on track, but keeping most of her attention on the students. Occasionally, she butted in to make suggestions. A few kids had suggested their future hero names to their partners, already.
Then afterward, she made them announce the names they had all picked. Some were surprisingly good.
Mineta had even suggested names for Midoriya that were way better than Deku (not that the bar was high). Aoyama and Ashido each tried to outshine the other with the most over-the-top names possible. And Yaoyorozu’s ‘on the nose’ name for Hitoshi was Lavender, which… wasn’t bad, actually, even though Hitoshi made a face. Oh, Toki was going to tease him with that nickname for a while.
Just after the last student, Iida, had announced Asui’s name Toki checked the time at the corner of her HUD. Just as she had predicted, it was time to end things. She clapped her hands, congratulated them, and wished them a good day. The bell rang immediately after. Perfect timing, as usual.
Damn, she was good.
She disappeared in a flash of light.
She had class 1-B in something like ten minutes, but in the meantime, she actually warped above Yūei and flew around, zapping herself at every corner of the huge park, to try and get the lay of the land. When she had studied here, as a general education student, she hadn’t had access to most of the park. And to be honest, she had been way too submerged in schoolwork to explore. Now, though, was a perfect time. So she took exactly ten minutes to jump all around the perimeter wall, locate the USJ, locate the main training grounds, mentally draw a map, calculate distances, and so on.
Yūei was well-fortified. There were cameras all around. Pressure sensors, motion detectors, the whole thing was extremely well-watched. Each zone was readily accessible so help could arrive quickly. It wasn’t intended as a fortress, of course, it was a school, and they weren’t at war. But from the sky, you could see the shape of the property, kind of star-shaped like those old Vauban fortifications, where each side could have a clear line of fire to defend its neighbor, and there would be no blind spots.
She would bet that it was even more fortified underground, too. It was what she would have done if she tried to make this place impregnable. A geometrical fortress on top, and a maze six feet under, with quick exits and looping paths to trap eventual pursuers.
So Yūei was good. The League of Villains had only succeeded in their breach because of Kurogiri. At least it meant that the inside of the school was safe.
The outside… outside was another matter. Toki mentally shelved that topic for later. She would need to report her findings and debrief with the HPSC about that.
Anyways. Exactly one minute before her next class, she plastered an easy smile on her face, and flash, she teleported again, right in front of class 1-B’s door. Like class 1-A, the location hadn’t changed since her own high school days. Good to know. She gleefully opened the door, letting it rattle its frame.
Vlad King was still at his desk, but on his way to leave. When he saw her, he briefly glowered. Very tellingly, his gaze shifted for a nanosecond towards the second row, where Neito was sitting. Toki grinned. Ah, so he had an inkling that Neito’s Quirk was connected to the resident warper, after all. Not bad.
“Hello everyone!”
“HOLY SHIT!” screeched someone.
And then everyone started speaking at once.
She had expected class 1-B to be calmer than class 1-A, but she had been wrong. Actually, they were even louder and more excited. But… maybe class 1-A had been unusually subdued after what had happened at the USJ, making class 1-B rowdier by comparison? In any case, Vlad King didn’t waste any time in fleeing from the room, letting Toki deal with the teenagers.
She ended up fielding a barrage of enthusiastic questions and decided to go with the flow. It wasn’t like she really had a lesson to teach. She made them introduce each other like she had done with class 1-A. Since class 1-B had had their introduction to the USJ the day before the attack, they were already more acquainted with each other’s abilities than class 1-A, and the introductions were a little more in-depth. Good.
She made Neito start like she had done with Hitoshi. But unlike what had happened in class 1-A, people noticed: and so when Reiko Yanagi ended the round of introductions by presenting Neito, she didn’t miss the occasion to point it out.
“… one of his qualities is that he’s very smart and quick on his feet, one of his flaws is that he’s loud. His Quirk is Copy, and he can copy the Quirks of people he touches: but he also appears to have a teleportation Quirk. And two things I noticed about him are that he’s friends with someone in class 1-A… and that you two know each other.”
Several people perked up. Toki raised an eyebrow towards Neito, watching his reaction; but since he preened rather than deflect, Toki took it in stride and nodded in confirmation.
“Yep, we do. I have a few students already, and Neito here is one of them.”
Setsuna Tokage, Gecko’s little sister, stood up straighter: “Really? So his teleportation Quirk is yours?”
“No way!” barked Awase. “He’s got teleportation, not Lightburst!”
“Lightburst is actually a fan-made name, Quantum’s Quirk is unknown,” Neito pointed out very smugly. “Just for your information.”
“I fucking knew it!” hissed Kamakiri.
“No! His Quirk has no light!”
“Maybe he just doesn’t know how to make it?”
Neito started protesting indignantly as if the prospect of not mastering Warp-Space was a deadly insult. Toki sniggered, vaguely entertained, and spun a pen between her fingers rapidly.
“You’re both right and wrong at the same time. Indeed, Neito copied my original Quirk, the one I was born with. However, when I was about your age, I had a Quirk Awakening that completely changed it, hence the light. The Quirk is technically the same, though. And it’s a Warp Quirk, not teleportation.”
“What’s the difference?” Kendo seemed suspicious and frowned.
Toki’s mind briefly flashed to when she had asked the very same question to some guy in a suit, so many years ago, before changing the name of her power. Warp-Space, in honor of her mother’s Swap-Space.
Had her mom known Toki was a warper and not a teleporter? Doubtful. Swap-Space had been closer to teleportation than warping.
“Basically warping means creating a portal, while teleportation simply transports your atoms. So a warper pushes what’s in their way, while the teleporter fuses with whatever already occupies the space they’re targeting. A warper appearing in a pool of water will displace the water and make a splash; a teleporter will just drown.”
There was a beat. Toki grinned.
“And on that cheerful note, enough about Neito! Let’s speak about why I had you introduce yourselves that way!”
oOoOoOo
The children were delightful, and Toki had managed to greatly enjoy both classes. Afterward, though, she had to tackle the hardest task of the day: speaking with Nedzu.
Toki hadn’t forgotten that he was damn smart. So smart that he would absolutely outmaneuver her if she tried to pull any bullshit with him, and ruthless enough to do it. Nedzu was cute and fluffy, with white fur and pretty whiskers and pink little toes beans, alright?! But he was also creepy and possessive of his turf, and he didn’t like humans.
Toki remembered him from her canon memories as someone eccentric and polite, with a slight sadistic streak. He enjoyed toying with people, and while he cared for his students, he still held (rightfully) a grudge against mankind, who had experimented on him and tortured him for years.
The HPSC’s file on him confirmed that and took it a step further. Nedzu was actually very calculating and slipped into manipulation easily. He was never cruel about it, though. He was disgusted by violence. Even in anger, he was delicate, restrained. But his serenity didn’t change the fact that, either because of his chimera nature or because of the experiments done on him, Nedzu had extremely low levels of empathy. His ease when speaking with people or anticipating their goals came from high-level intellect, not from any shred of emotional instinct.
Someone had once theorized that Nedzu had turned to teaching to force himself to interact with children as a way to curb his natural distaste for humans. As a result, he liked his students, but he was very much a cold-hearted chess master. What made him a good chess master was that he won, preserving his pawns and never discarding any piece. He had a subtle touch and loathed brutality. But bottom line was that his lack of sentimentality could be chilling.
If Nedzu was human, he would be a high-level functioning sociopath.
Of course, that was the HPSC’s analysis. It could be wrong. Maybe Nedzu was super nice and kind, and the lack of empathy was just a mask used to fool the HPSC. And everything and everyone that worked with them. And even Genryusai-sama, the previous HPSC President, had an intelligence Quirk.
But Toki really doubted that.
Anyways. After her lesson with class 1-B, she perused the school for the rest of the morning, exploring every nook and cranny. She found aeration tunnels that were suspiciously large and had little scuff marks inside, as well as cameras, so she made a mental note that every ceiling could hide Eraserhead. Most of the security was done by robots, though. Damn, she hoped they had good encryption because if a villain with a hacking Quirk swooped in, it would be hell.
She also watched the students. The Heroic classes, but also the others. She felt a fond nostalgia for the Gen Ed kids. Sure, she hadn’t had many friends, but… they had been alright. Even Kurogumo, that asshole.
From what she saw, her old teacher Norogawa-sensei was still there. That was going to be fun. A lot of things hadn’t changed since her own schooling, actually! It wasn’t that long ago. Four years, top. But the staff was the same. Well, Eraserhead was a new addition, but apart from him, she already knew everyone. The menu at lunch was identical, too. Lunch Rush wasn’t very innovative. The buildings were still the same, as was the class configuration, and the planning.
The tension between Gen Ed and Hero Studies, too.
Which was, of course, very stupid. The Gen-Ed kids were going to graduate to become the backbone of society itself. They were going to be the ones helping evacuation and cleanup efforts, running important Agency matters, providing the medical response, and providing legal help. Some of them would work for the HPSC, maybe! Was it a good idea to let bitterness and jealousy fester at such a young age? Not that there was a lot the teachers could do to remedy it, not when it was something so heavily emotionally based. But well, Toki remembered how Kurogumo’s bully had been a kid in the Hero course, and how disheartened the Gen Ed students had been after the Sports Festival… and she wondered.
Anyways. At lunch, she went to grab a snack in the cafeteria, ate it in the park, then warped in front of Nedzu’s office in a flash of light. She waited three seconds to be polite, or rather for Nedzu to see her on the cameras, then knocked. The door opened with the faint mechanical hiss of a new mechanism, and Toki made a mental note that they had probably changed the door after the USJ’s security breach. Smart.
“Ah, Quantum,” Nedzu was sitting at his desk, a pleasant smile on his face and his beady eyes gleaming. “Right on time. Did you have a pleasant tour of the faculty?”
He was letting her know that he had watched her snoop around. Unbothered at being caught, Toki flashed him a brilliant smile and sat down.
“I did. The school is well-protected, although you seem a little over-reliant on technology. A hacking Quirk could be devastating.”
“We have procedures for that, don’t worry! And I would hardly call Yūei over-reliant on technology, with the invaluable assistance of all our fine pro-heroes teachers.”
“Sure,” Toki agreed out of politeness because the heroic teachers hadn’t prevented the USJ attack and they both knew it. “So, class 1-B is very energetic! And 1-A seems fine. Not too shaken. Kids are very resilient at their age!”
Or, most likely, the reality of Thirteen’s death hadn’t yet sunk in. There had been no corpse, after all. One moment Thirteen had been there, the second there had been ashes. No blood, no gore, no screaming, and no shocking image of violence. It was already hard enough to accept the death of someone when you saw it happen, but for something that fast… for kids unused to death, it was just too shocking. It didn’t compute. It would hit them later, the belated grief mingling with a persistent sentiment of surrealness.
Maybe it was for the best. If it had been gory or bloody, the death of Thirteen would have been undeniable even in their subconscious mind, but they would all have been heavily traumatized.
“Indeed, they are!” Nedzu smiled. “And you are acquainted with some of them, are you not?”
Aaaaand here was the confirmation there were microphones and cameras in the classrooms. Unless the kids had immediately babbled to a teacher, of course. It was plausible. Wait, no, he had said some, not one, so it included Hitoshi, and nobody in class 1-A had pointed that out, so Nedzu had to have watched her class. Cameras it was.
“Indeed I am. Is that a problem?”
“Oh, not at all! I was in fact pleasantly surprised. How did that come to pass?”
“Oh, life, the hazard of things, you know how it is. Now, can we talk about the Sports Festival? I’m sure you already prepared additional safety measures, so I would like a quick run-down of them.”
Nedzu had indeed implemented better security around the Sports Festival. The entries would be guarded, the class 1-A students’ Quirks wouldn’t be announced, and so on. Basically: the same thing as in canon.
Toki wanted to get rid of the Festival altogether. Of course, Nedzu said no. The Yūei faculty hemorrhaged money on a good day so the Festival was one of their main source of income. Commercials, sponsors, publicity spots. Also, by making public their students’ debuts, Yūei got 50% of any royalties they could make for five years. Most students didn’t have much merchandise in their first years, true, but during their second and third years, they had internships and work studies, a provisional License… They were basically sidekicks, and so they got publicity. They also got money from their mentors, and since Yūei had ‘introduced them,’ the school took a cut.
Money and power. It was always about money and power. Just like when the HPSC had kidnapped her and covered it up. So Toki took the same angle; speaking about accountability, protection, and what he stood to lose if his hubris got the better of him. Not with those words, obviously, because when negotiating you always had to pamper the other side’s ego.
Nedzu refused to not broadcast the Sports Festival. No matter how much Toki insisted, he wouldn’t budge. But he accepted to not mention any student’s Quirk. He also accepted to use of codenames instead of real names and cut down any close-up of their faces. The point was that they wouldn’t be instantly recognizable in public. Toki was also going to have a chat with the kids about disguise and misdirection, but that would come later.
Toki also innocently asked about a possible summer camp and the additional security provided if the class targeted by villains left Yūei like a big juicy bait. Nedzu stayed as polite and smiling as before, but Toki had the distinct impression he wasn’t happy with her interference here either. But well, he did agree to let her oversee the security measures of the summer camp when the question would arise. Good. Toki fully intended to confiscate the kids’ phones, give them GPS watches, and patrol the area herself.
“Well, I think it’s everything,” Nedzu finally said.
He hadn’t accepted even half of what Toki wanted. But she knew it was a long shot anyways. With a deep sigh, she nodded.
“Yes, I suppose it is. I’ll be back on Friday for class. In the meantime, if All Might is absent or late or whatever, don’t hesitate to call me so I can cover his classes.”
“Of course!”
He wouldn’t and they both knew it, but they were polite enough to pretend otherwise.
“Oh, before you go,” Nedzu added, as if as an afterthought. “Would you mind terribly if I asked you a few questions about your Quirk?”
Toki paused and considered it. Not just for show, but really.
She had… never spoken about the specifics of her Quirk. Hayasa-sensei had spreadsheets and stuff, when she had been training at Naruto Labs, so maybe they still had a copy, but Hayasa-sensei liked working with paper, and he burned sensitive documents afterward. Apart from him… Toki had never had the specifics of her Quirk written down anywhere. She barely spoke of it with Keigo. Her special moves, her range, her limits… it was all in her head. The whole point of the secrecy had been to hide.
To hide from Meteor. Who hadn’t wanted her dead after all? Who had never wanted her dead?
“Sure,” she said, very slowly, as if testing the words out. “If you want.”
There was that flash of calculation in Nedzu’s eyes again. Toki wondered what her hesitation had revealed, and what conclusion he was drawing from that information.
“Wonderful!” he exclaimed. “It’s a Warp Quirk, isn’t it? Would you mind telling me more? You keep it under such tight wraps. I suppose Lightburst isn’t the real name?”
“No, it isn’t. Why don’t you tell me what your guess is, and I’ll tell you if you’re right?”
The mouse-rat-bear-something grinned, apparently delighted by the challenge.
“It is obviously a Warp Quirk. Touch-activated, I believe, since you have proven able to warp people and objects as long as part of your body was in physical contact with them. The portals you create must be generated from your skin. Warping requires energy, though, and I do not know what is fueling yours. The obvious answer is light from your environment and mental focus. However, there is no proof that light is required, since you have been known to patrol at dawn, dusk, or poor meteorological conditions, with no significative change. You seem to be able to target any place if you are able to visualize it, hence your preference for traveling via the sky, giving you a vantage point over the city. Am I right?”
Toki blinked, slowly.
“Hm, yes, pretty much. There are a few mistakes but they’re the result of voluntary misdirection, so it was expected.”
Nedzu clapped, delighted. “Misdirection! Please tell me more, Quantum.”
“Well, my power source is muscular, not mental. The targeting requires focus and clear, visual memory. The warping itself uses muscular energy. Light is not, and never was a factor. The… scintillating… only come from the fact that my warping rejects photons, and so deflects light when jumping through space.”
“Muscular energy,” whispered Nedzu.
His eyes jumped quickly on her, and Toki knew what he saw. She was athletic, but not bulging with muscles the way All Might, Endeavor, or even Mirko were. Toki was more agile, scrappy, and wiry but not thick and beefy. She had the stature of a gymnast or a dancer. Or a marathon runner. Not a bodybuilder.
“I do a lot of cardio,” she grinned. The heart was a muscle, after all.
“Marvelous! And of course, this is why you explored the faculty today, to be able to take your marks, remember specific locations, and jump directly to them if needed.”
“Yep, that’s it.”
“But I couldn’t help but notice that you didn’t need a tour of the faculty to find class 1-A and class 1-B this morning. So of course, you must already be familiar with this place.”
… Toki hadn’t expected him to reach that conclusion that quickly. Nedzu’s intelligence wasn’t exaggerated. Good thing Toki had been bracing herself for it.
“I don’t know why you’re surprised,” she blinked. “I mean, I went to school here, and it wasn’t so long ago.”
It wiped Nedzu’s smile right off his smug little face. Toki took a mental screenshot of this moment and gleefully saved it in her memory. To hell with it, if it didn’t feel good to take aback the big bad badger.
Nedzu loved having all those Yūei alumni to call on when there was an emergency. He was proud of molding the best and strongest, and he took care of those connections. Like in canon, where he had stayed close to All Might; or where he had called on Endeavor and Edgeshot and so many others for the Kamino attack. But right now he was thinking ‘what the fuck, I let the warper slip between my fingers? She was here THREE YEARS and I have NO MEMORY of this?!’ and ooooh, that was great. Toki mentally sniggered.
What? She was allowed to savor it a little.
It wasn’t often that she had a chance to outmaneuver a chess master. Genryusai had played her like a fiddle about Naruto Labs, about Meteor, about all this kidnapping business. The Witch had brilliantly followed his footsteps and it was only thanks to a throwaway remark from a detective that Toki had discovered the amount of bullshit she had been swallowing for twelve years. And the Ghost Arsonist was still impossible to crack!
So yeah, it felt good to outsmart a smart guy. A little ego boost never hurt, right?
“I see,” Nedzu ponders with the voice of someone who wasn’t seeing shit and who was doing a lot of mental recalibrations very quickly.
“You do that,” Toki grinned. “In the meantime, I have a job to go back to. Give my best regards to the rest of the staff, alright? I’ll see you on Friday. Have a good day!”
She waved cheerfully and disappeared in a flash of light.
She still had the day off so she could spend some time with the Mihoko and Hinawa, and then she would get back to Fukuoka for evening patrol. She had laid the groundwork for her job at Yūei. She was ninety-nine percent sure nothing would happen until the summer camps, so she could take it slow. And holy shit she was a teacher at Yūei! Okay, she had also ruffled the feathers of maybe three-quarters of the staff. No surprise. She couldn’t really afford to be all buddy-buddy with them, not with the spy around and the HPSC breathing down her neck.
But holy shit. That was it. Canon had started, and Toki had a foot in the door.
They were in the endgame now.
Notes:
So a few ideas in that chapter come straight from the fic "Hawks-sensei".
I read the first chapters and really liked it, but then it went too stereotypical for my tastes (evil HPSC, abused!Hawks, the teachers being quick to adopts him, etc.). It's a great fic and i loved it! But it wasn't what i looked for. Anyway, the ideas about Toki comparing what she teaches to how schools usually don't teach taxes, as well as making students introduce each other, and considering using stickers as a rewards, are all ideas coming from the fic "Hawks-sensei" x)
Toki is so PROUD of herself for having outsmarted Nedzu! Let's let her bask in that warm and fuzzy feeling for a little while.
The wake-up call isn't going to be pleasant.
Also, i know you hoped for a Aizawa VS Toki confrontation, but you'll have to wait for the next chapter !
Also, just because i laughed, here is a comment on the Discord server about how Toki's cockiness is a Taiyome trait xD
__________________________
Anyway !
Fic rec of the day: "Prince of Heroes" series, by TheNarator. The Plot: Izuku wants to be a Quirkless hero to inspire the damned and the powerless of this world. Too bad that his estranged father, All Might, is a Quirkist bigot who disagree and wants to force his Quirk down his throat... litterally.
I've probably recommanded it before ? Not a fic for you if you are a fan of All Might. But it's fascinating to see Izuku have a spine and stay focused on being a hero without letting the lack of faith of his entourage discourage him. I love his gadgets. Also, Izuku-Hitoshi-Monoma is a great trio of friends and we need more stories about them!
Chapter 40: Old ghosts and blackmail material
Summary:
Toki finds out who Hobo-san was. Keigo meets Meteor. It's time to confront old ghosts.
Notes:
Wow this al already the 40th chapter?! Incredible.
My goal is to reach 100 ! I have about 60 written so far ^^
Anyway !
This time, it's Toki's story getting ahead of Meteor uh uh uh. If you left Meteor's story at chapter 11 to avoid spoilers, you can go back to it ! Here is the link =)https://archiveofourown.org/works/42031974/chapters/113492986#workskin
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
OLD GHOSTS AND BLACKMAIL MATERIAL
The week passed slowly. The Icarus agency cracked down on an extortion business and fell headfirst into a case of insurance fraud and corruption, so that was fun. And by that, it was no fun at all. No thrilling villain fights, there. Only boring paperwork and sad stomach-twisting testimonies. Stories of little grandmas who nervously poured all their pension into repairing a leaky roof, or exhausted-looking employees who started crying quietly when they mentioned the bills piling up, or young parents frayed at the edges and holding the hand of a too-silent child.
Being confronted with poverty was a punch to the guts. No one died of hunger or exposure in this world, but it didn’t mean abundance was everywhere.
On Friday Toki went back to Yūei for her classes. She was starting with 1-B this time, and she took them to the gym to make them run laps and stretch, so she could evaluate their physical fitness. She looked at their body language, analyzed their level of comfort with each other, and gauged the level of training they appeared to have, and the skill level they were at. If the League of Villains’ mole was here, maybe it was someone trained by AFO.
Of course, maybe it was just a normal teenager with sympathies for villains. Or maybe someone who was blackmailed, although it was a riskier gamble and, as such, not as likely.
Their level was… okay; not bad, but not exceptional either. Toki would almost say disappointing. For most of them, it was as if they had never received any training before. Not just Quirk training, but also martial arts training, analysis, endurance, flexibilities, and so on. Only four students were above average. Neito (of course), Setsuna Tokage (the little sister of the hero Gecko), Juzo Honenuki (not unexpected, he was the second recommended student in class 1-B and his parents owned the Honenuki Media company which had them working with heroes a lot) and, surprisingly, a boy named Sen Kaibara who had a lot of martial art training. His Quirk, Gyrate, was suited for hand hand-to-hand combat, so it made sense.
For today, Toki mentally adjusted the difficulty of the lesson to the skill level of her students. At their age, she had been… okay, she had been Quirkless, true. But she still had been a good fighter and could have kicked the ass of a hero student with ease. Which she had done if memory served correctly. Damn, it made her nostalgic.
But these teenagers hadn’t had intensive training since they were eight years old like Toki had, so she needed to use kid gloves. Sparring wasn’t on the table yet. They would do better with some of the exercises Hayasa-sensei used when Toki and Keigo had been eleven or twelve. So she divided them into teams of four, gave each team a token to protect, and told them that the team whose token would have completed the most laps around the gym would be the winner. They had to protect the token, protect their teammates, sabotage each other, and use their Quirk as little as possible. And of course, there was Toki herself running interference. She tripped them, snatched the tokens out of their hands, turned them around, and so on. The goal was to force them to be more aware of each other while doing something physically intense and challenging.
And also, it was hella fun.
“Keep up Awase! Tetsutetsu, be more careful of your teammates!” Toki ducked when Kamakiri threw himself at her with an incoherent yell of rage and used his momentum to trip him and make him fall flat on his back. “Nice try Kamakiri!”
“DIIIIIIE!”
“Love your enthusiasm! Here, have a gold star,” and she stuck a sticker on his nose, pretending not to hear his screech of fury. “Keep up the good work!”
Setsuna Tokage picked up her classmate with her right arm while the left, detached from her torso, went to snatch the token from another team. Neito appeared out of nowhere to slap her hand away, making her yelp in surprise. Toki used their moment of distraction to target their respective teammates by picking up Kodai and letting her fall in Bondo’s path. They nearly took out Shiozaki in their fall.
“Whoo~ops!” Toki cheerfully exclaimed. “Didn’t see you there!”
“I see who Monoma gets it from,” hissed Kendo, sweat beading on her forehead after her third lap and fifth fall.
“Get what from?” panted Kaibara.
“His talent to make people want to strangle him.”
Toki tripped the both of them at once, grinning and clapping her hands twice: “Chop-chop! If you have time to chat, you’re not paying enough attention!”
“RAAAAAAAH!”
Yes, this was hella fun. And when the class ended, Toki had a good understanding of everyone’s strengths and weaknesses.
Neito and Setsuna had the exact same ones. They were both chatty, confident, and reliable, with good leadership and teamwork skills but they hadn’t had much experience in adapting to stronger opponents on the fly. They froze and took too long to change strategies.
Kendo was calmer, both smart and quick on her feet. Her downfall was a lack of endurance. It was a weakness shared by a few of her classmates. Shoda, Fukidashi, and Shiozaki were all abysmal at it. Awase was good and he had excellent instincts, but he let his impatience get the better of him.
Kuroiro was overconfident and grew frustrated too quickly when he failed. Kamakiri was the same, but, like, dialed up to eleven. Oh boy, Toki really ought to have topped out the meter with that one. He had rage issues like canon-Bakugo! Well, he had better self-control and probably wouldn’t let his bloodlust drive him to beat someone to death in a dirty alley, but his obsession with screaming ‘die’ or ‘I’ll carve you up’ was kind of trippy. Then there was Tetsutetsu who was not as bloodthirsty but almost as intense, almost manic, about fighting and winning. They both got gold stickers anyways.
Shishida had no idea how to fight without using his Quirk. So did Tsuburaba and Komori actually. Then there was Yanagi, who was too isolated, and apparently hadn’t made a single friend. Being independent was good, but being isolated wasn’t. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Tsunotori looked to her classmates for guidance too much. She was strong and could carry her own weight with no problem, but the initial push always came from someone else. Maybe it had to do with the language barrier. Something to consider.
Rin was too serious. Nothing wrong with that but being in a team should build trust and confidence, not make him tense and frustrated!
Honenuki was good, he had the least problems of the whole lot, but he lacked the charisma to be a leader. Maybe some public speaking classes would help. He had won a gold sticker anyways. Kodai was very hard to read since she almost never talked and had an incredible poker face. Toki was still on the fence about that because she would say it was bad, that Kodai lacked communications skills… But it wasn’t necessarily true. In her own agency, Tyto was the same, and he was still a precious asset.
Last but not least was Kaibara. He was one of the best at hand-to-hand fighting, was mature but not stuck-up, and had very good teamwork skills. He was clever, too, anticipating Toki’s attacks and staying focused on his goal instead of letting her needling distract him. But he tended to attack head-on, instead of watching before pouncing. If Toki could train him out of the habit, he would be a much better strategist. And who knows, maybe a good investigator, too, like Salamander or Hayasa-sensei…
But that was a consideration for later. They went back to class, and Toki gleefully released them in the care of Vlad King. Most of the students sank to their seats with deep groans of despair. A few even faceplanted on their desks, dog-tired. Shiozaki was too dignified to do it, but her knees were wobbling almost comically. Woah, they were really exhausted! That had been a very productive morning! Toki was so proud of herself.
Afterward, she had about half an hour free. She could have stayed in the school and patrolled the grounds, but instead, she teleported away and went to see Mihoko-san and baby Hinawa.
Her daughter was growing up so fast. She could grab small objects, now, and had better coordination. She had a few teeth, she babbled happily, and she started having firm stances on such or such food or such or such toys. For example, she firmly pushed away vegetables, and always reached out to pet Missy the cat, or to hug the fluffy seal plushy Keigo had gotten for her. She batted her little wings when she was excited. They weren’t big enough to allow her to fly yet, thankfully, if they ever got that big. Oh, Hinawa wasn’t even walking yet, but she crawled on all fours, and she could even stand without falling!
Anyways. Toki spent some time with her baby, and then she went back to Yūei for class 1-A’s lesson.
She warped in the hallway right when Present Mic was exiting the class, closing the door behind him. There was a man dressed in black leaning against the wall, covered from head-to-toe in bandages, and context told Toki it was Aizawa even though there was no way in hell she could hope to recognize him.
Not only because she apparently sucked at recognizing canon characters, but also because he was a literal mummy.
“Hello, Quantum!” Present Mic grinned. There was a weirdly intense look in his eyes. “Long time no see!”
Oh, had Nedzu babbled about her being an alumna? Was Present Mic realizing he had taught her? No, he wouldn’t act like that. He would have mentioned it if he knew. But this weird focus meant that he had to suspect something was fishy.
Heh. Toki smirked.
“Hello, Present Mic. And hello,” she said to possibly-Aizawa, “strange, mummified man loitering in the hallways.”
“Hello, Quantum,” said Aizawa.
… and she knew that voice.
Fuck, she knew that voice. She hadn’t heard it in a decade and yet. It was unforgettable. This drawl, almost a growl… It was him, holy shit. It was Hobo-san’s voice.
What the fuck.
For a second she experienced a feeling of dissociation so intense she nearly blurted out a denial. Her smile slid from her face. She just stared, mute, and he stared back. The slouch, the voice, it was him. Hobo-san. Aizawa was her fucking teacher, Hobo-san, the one in Okamoto’s pocket.
It completely blindsided her.
Because canon-Aizawa was… okay, he was a shitty teacher, but he was good enough. Rational and protective and competent. But Hobo-san?! Hobo-san wasn’t the kind of individual that should be trusted with the welfare of a hamster, much less a bunch of kids. He was ruthless and brutal, bordering on dangerous.
A school was the last place she would have expected to find him.
Oh, Toki and Keigo had experience with harsh training and violent spars. But Hobo-san didn’t spar with them. He beat the shit out of them. That was completely different. The whole point of their sessions with him was to learn how to fight someone who outclassed them, overpowered them, and made them feel weak and hopeless.
They had learned a lot with him, true. And he hadn’t been humiliating and cruel, not like Okamoto. He had never taken any joy in inflicting pain. He had even accepted bantering with them, a few times. But… he hadn’t cared about hurting them, either. And Toki and Keigo, who had been fourteen, had always left those lessons covered in massive bruises from wrists to hips.
And Aizawa was that person? Canon-Aizawa, the grumpy guy who fought tooth and nail to protect his students, who feed stray cats and who would adopt Eri, was also the angry hobo who beat pre-teens black and blue for cash? How the fuck were they the same person? How the fuck had Nedzu let that happen? Did Nedzu even know?!
“Eraserhead,” she said, voice very even. “What a… surprise.”
Aizawa’s studied slouch tensed a little. He didn’t answer. They just continued staring at each other, silent. Present Mic’s gaze jumped from one to the other.
“Hmmm, do you two know each other?”
“Yes,” said Toki.
“No,” said Eraserhead.
Present Mic raised both eyebrows high on his forehead. Toki looked at Aizawa, unblinking. Eraserhead peeled himself off the wall, straightening slowly, and said lowly:
“A word, please, Quantum.”
Well, that was ominous. Still, Toki graciously accepted. She was mentally freaking out and doing a lot of mental recalculations. Was canon-Aizawa secretly a violent douchebag who hadn’t revealed his colors? It wouldn’t be a stretch, with his stupid teaching methods and his apparent delight in breaking children’s egos into pieces. Was Nedzu aware of this, and counting on this to unleash Aizawa against his enemies? It would make sense for Aizawa to go from being Okamoto’s attack dog to Nedzu’s.
But wait, Hobo-san hadn’t had a hero license when he beat them up. Toki was pretty sure it had come up in conversation at some point. Had Aizawa lost his license at some point? Did he even have one in the first place? Or was the lack of a license a lie? Why the fuck had he been working for Okamoto, then?
Was he still working for Okamoto? Holy shit was he a mole of the HPSC in Yūei?! Another one?!
She let Aizawa lead her a few meters back in the hallway, away from Present Mic who was staring at them so intensely that Toki wouldn’t be surprised if his gaze started burning a hole in her skull. Then, when Eraserhead stopped and visibly hesitated, his mummified face unreadable, she cleared her throat.
She hadn’t hated Hobo-san. But she had deeply disliked him. He was harsh and bigger, taller, and stronger than her. He had hit her and had broken her bones; it made sense that a tiny part of Toki was still kind of scared of him. And as such… it was normal, really, that bravado came out almost as a reflex.
“I would say time treated you well but that would be lying,” she said lightly, tone almost provocative. “Are you a teacher here? Poor kids. Do you snap their fingers too? Although Midoriya breaks his bones on his own, so that must be a nice change for you. Less effort on your part.”
Aizawa was standing ramrod straight now, tension and defensiveness were written all over the lines of his shoulders and neck. Wow, he didn’t like the reminder of their acquaintance, apparently. He did not like that at all. When he spoke, his voice was low, barely above a whisper, but his tone was freezing.
“Listen, Quantum. I know my training was… strict. I wasn’t in a good place. But I fulfilled my part of the deal. I never breathed a word. If Okamoto is trying to intimidate me, he won’t succeed.”
What?
Holy shit. Was he Okamoto’s mole after all?!
That was a hell of a plot twist. Toki needed to know more about this, like, right now. She needed to call Keigo and dig this lead as fast as she could. And not let Okamoto know she was onto him. Quick, time to misdirect.
“Okamoto has no beef with you,” she said easily, keeping her voice low too. “Well, it’s kind of hard to tell with him, so let’s just say no beef that I know of. I’m here because of the President. You know, the HPSC meddling in Yūei’s business because you got attacked on your own turf?”
“Good,” Aizawa said stiffly. “Then we don’t know each other.”
“Too late. I just said we were. Just go with the flow, tell them I swooped in to steal a case from you or something. They’d believe you and it would explain the stick up your ass.”
She went back to the classroom’s door. As she passed him, she reached out and patted his shoulder amicably, inwardly marveling at being able to do that without having her wrist snapped. Aizawa was glaring murderously, but he didn’t say a word.
Toki sauntered back to Present Mic. He was too far to have heard, but Toki was careful to appear casual, just in case.
“I didn’t know you were acquainted with Eraser,” Present Mic smiled amiably.
“Oh, it was a long time ago.” Maybe not the best excuse for someone who was twenty-two, but whatever. “I’m going to bring the kids to the gym and make them regret being born, is there anything special I should know?”
Present Mic didn’t seem phased by her plans at all, which cemented Toki’s conviction that all pro-hero teachers were secretly sadists.
“Nedzu wants to talk to you afterward if you have time!”
“Yeah, I expected that,” Toki smiled ruefully. “I’ll go and see him. Anyway, wish me luck!”
“YEAH!”
Gods, he was so enthusiastic, it was great. Refreshing, almost. He was wary of her, but he didn’t let it impact his hero persona, staying in character at all times. He was probably aware that it also made Toki more comfortable around him, too.
Toki grinned at him and sauntered into the classroom. As expected, all the students perked up excitingly.
“Come on fledglings! Today we’re testing situational awareness and adaptability. We’re going to the gym!”
On the way there, Toki quickly texted Keigo to tell him plainly that Hobo-san was Eraserhead and exclaimed ‘IS ERASER STILL WORKING FOR OKAMOTO’ followed by about ten exclamation and question marks. Keigo didn’t waste time in replying he was going to look into it. Good.
Maybe she should also ask Hayasa-sensei. Mmmh, no, better not. He hadn’t known who Hobo-san was, only that he worked for Okamoto and that he beat up his kids. And in any case, Hayasa-sensei had hated him with passion. Bringing it up would only result in Eraserhead getting run over by a car.
Toki let her phone fall back into her pocket and focused on her lesson.
And quickly, she realized that this class was more of a disaster than class 1-B.
It almost turned into a brawl instead of a steady endurance race! Their teamwork was abysmal. Well, not all of them. The kids who had fought the Nomu at the USJ were mostly in sync with one another. But they were- they had been impacted by that fight. They either held back a little too fearfully, or they threw themselves at Toki with excessive force, uncaring of the damage they could receive. Yaoyorozu, Asui, and Kaminari were afraid.
Ashido, Tokoyami, and Shoji were reckless. Uraraka, too, but to a lesser extent. And Midoriya… well, he was reckless to the point of being stupidly self-sacrificing. He could effortlessly strategize and put people in place, but then his confidence vanished and he folded on himself as soon as he had to give orders.
To avoid the mortifying ordeal of bossing his classmates around, he just took the hits meant for them.
Hitoshi knew Toki, so he had an advantage. He knew she liked talking, so he could have tried to catch her with his Quirk. But he didn’t. He wanted to keep it secret from his classmates, for the Sports Festival. Instead, he relied on his capture weapon to snatch people out of the air, trying to trip or catch Toki, stealing tokens, and so on. He was the most inventive of the lot, but, once again… not much teamwork.
Todoroki had a good grip on his abilities and excellent control: but he lacked the situational awareness needed to navigate around his allies, and twice he accidentally interfered with his own team, in his hurry to do everything on his own. He was also too isolated. The only person he accepted orders (or rather, suggestions) from, was Hitoshi. He really needed to socialize more.
Iida was too laser-focused, to the detriment of dirty tricks and unexpected traps. Ojiro was actually the best here; he was controlled, smart, fast, and quick on his feet. He even managed to not fall on his face after Toki tripped him and used his speed to help his less-talented classmates. He won a gold sticker for it. Satō and Sero managed to grasp the hidden goal of the exercise quickly and started moving in duo after the first laps, so they won a gold star each, too.
Mineta got his ass kicked because not only he ruined Hagakure’s best advantage, but he also failed to protect his token from the most obvious ploy ever. Kōda stayed too much in the background to make an impression, but he played support for his teammates without a hitch. Aoyama was too showy, using his Quirk almost excessively. He spent the last fifteen minutes of the exercise being carried on Midoriya’s back. That was disappointing.
But, well, Midoriya got a gold sticker for helping his classmate. He hadn’t gotten one for throwing himself in front of others, and Toki made sure to tell him so clearly, but carrying Aoyama had been helpful and had forced Midoriya to stop acting suicidal. So yeah, gold star for him!
(Man, teaching was more exhausting than she would have thought.)
“So, did you all guess the hidden point of this exercise?” she asked lightly when escorting them back to their classroom.
She had plainly told class 1-B without trying to make them guess, but class 1-B had been more successful, so she felt like class 1-A warranted a little more nudging in the right direction.
“There was a hidden meaning?” Ashido sputtered. “Was it how to handle teleporters?”
“Sabotage?” Jirō hazarded a guess.
“Improvisation?” Ojiro tried.
“Teamwork,” Hitoshi drones flatly.
“Good!” Toki smacked a gold star onto his forehead, and he glowered at her, but he didn’t remove it. “How did you guess that?”
“I watched who got stickers and for why.”
Ah! She knew the gold stickers would come in handy. Toki mentally patted herself on the back. That was some good teaching instinct there.
“Good deductive skills,” she complimented him. “Yes, I wanted to see how you handled cooperation, communication, and so on. You know how heroes are teaming up more and more to maximize their efficiency with more unity, so they bolster each other and are able to present a united front? Well, that was what I was after.”
“How could you test that in that exercise?” sputtered Sero. “We were competing!”
Toki shrugged, and stressed:
“You were competing against a common enemy. I just looked at how you guessed the skills of your teammates and planned with them to maximize your efficiency, how you could keep your ego in check and play support if you noticed someone more suited than you to a certain task, how you communicated with each other, shared your reasoning, and exchanged plans. And how you each adapted according to everyone’s needs.” She paused, peering at them all, then concluded cheerfully: “And you all sucked at it!”
They all dropped in discouragement. Toki patted Midoriya’s head since he was the closest to her (and also because he was one of the few kids short enough for her to do that without looking too awkward).
“Don’t be so gloomy, it’s fixable. I wasn’t any good at it either when I started training. We’ll work on it next week. In the meantime, I’ll give each of you an assignment. Take those seriously, alright?”
Once in class, she wrote up and sent an email to each kid with one simple task to do. For Todoroki, it was to imagine how he could best assist five of his classmates and describe how he could use his Quirk to support theirs. For Hitoshi, it was to think of how to best pretend his Quirk was something else, like sleep hypnosis. For Asui and Yaoyorozu, it was how to best reassure a civilian. For Kirishima how he would adapt when faced with a non-combat scenario, a rescue, for example. For Midoriya, what kind of topic he would like to discuss with his classmates, with the exclusion of Quirk analysis and hero work. And it went on and on, the goal being to make the kids think of the connections they had to build with each other, instead of just reacting to each other.
All Might may have inspired heroes to be strong on their own, but that age had passed. Now, it was time to learn how to build things together.
And time was running out. This lesson had to be learned quickly.
oOoOoOo
Toki went to see Nedzu with a smile on her face, not revealing a hint of her trepidation. He had to have discovered she was Hoshizora now. Well, he had discovered it because she had told him, after all. Now, maybe he would be willing to give her something in exchange for this show of truthfulness. Maybe even a few leads about the traitor. You scratch my back, I scratch yours: that’s how the world worked.
The rat was waiting for her, once again. When she appeared in front of his door, it opened immediately.
“Ah, Quantum!” He waved at her to take a seat, and Toki tried not to stare at his cute little toe-beans. “Did you have a good class? Any suggestions about the students?”
“Actually I have,” Toki answered, sitting down. “Do you have a good Quirk councilor? I’m aware that Hound Dog is a counselor, but I don’t know his exact qualification in Quirk-analysis and Quirk-related psychology. There are a few students I want to send him.”
Nedzu blinked slowly.
“Hound Dog is a certified Quirk councilor, yes. It doesn’t come up very often. Teenagers in high school are usually way past the age where they need it. Which children are you thinking about?”
Toki frowned. “Some people still need help after learning to control their Quirk. I was thinking about Mineta, Todoroki, Aoyama, and Midoriya in class 1-A, and Awase and Yanagi in class 1-B.”
“Oh?” Nedzu’s gaze sharpened. “Why those in particular?”
“Midoriya doesn’t even need an explanation. His Quirk is so badly controlled that it’s obvious he was a late bloomer. Very late. I’m guessing middle school, probably. I’m not sure he even had a Quirk-counselling session in his life. And there’s also his self-sacrificing tendencies. He also has very low self-esteem issues. Baffling for someone so strong, but not illogical if he grew up Quirkless.”
“Midoriya isn’t Quirkless,” Nedzu said in a very, very mid-tone.
“Of course, he isn’t now. But he was treated as such for most of his life if I’m guessing correctly. It leaves marks. It’s nearly a whole decade of trauma, after all.”
“He will grow out of it,” Nedzu said with confidence.
Toki narrowed her eyes, considering.
“Will he? I’m curious as to why you think that. Who was the last person you met who was Quirkless? Not counting Melissa Shields.”
Nedzu took several seconds to answer. Then he nodded, slowly, conceding her point.
“You are right. Midoriya indeed activated his Quirk very late. I’ll speak to Hound Dog about it. What about the other children? None of them exhibited worrying tendencies.”
Well, good. The point was to prevent them from forming those worrying tendencies in the first place. Toki shrugged, and counted on her fingers:
“Aoyama doesn’t judge his limits well. Maybe it’s bad stress management, but he’s sabotaging himself. In a combat situation, Todoroki almost exclusively favors his ice. He can use fire, but he barely does. Getting him to use half of his Quirk is like pulling teeth. Either he lacks control to a worrying degree or there are some issues that need addressing. Mineta is so obsessed with girls I’m surprised he hasn’t assaulted someone yet. He makes the girls in his class extremely uncomfortable. He needs a serious lecture on appropriate behavior, especially for a hero.”
She paused. When Mineta was spurred on by… let’s say, interest (in a pair of boobs or the perspective of being popular…) his sticky spheres were suddenly stickier and stronger. Maybe hormones played a role in his Quirk.
Toki would need more time to investigate it. But if that was the case, maybe Mineta’s lecherous behavior wasn’t so illogical, and maybe there were solutions. Maybe.
“Awase lacks creativity with his Quirk and it’s a shame. He’s also a little too defensive about it. It would do him good to talk to someone about it. And Yanagi…” she trailed off, hesitant. “She’s very isolated. Someone should check on her; be sure she isn’t having problems.”
“Duly noted,” Nedzu smiled. “It’s good to know you have the welfare of the students in mind.”
Toki’s eyebrows raised fractionally. She tried not to feel too insulted.
“I’m a teacher. What were you expecting? That I would swoop in, criticize your wallpaper, take a nap in the breakroom, then go on my merry way?”
Nedzu took exactly three seconds too long to answer, which meant that yes, that was the extent of what he had been expecting. Ouch. Well, Quantum hadn’t exactly been friendly. But really, they hadn’t expected any professionalism from her? She was young, not incompetent!
“Most of us didn’t expect you to take this job seriously,” Nedzu smiled. “It’s a relief to have been mistaken!”
Toki, no, Quantum watched him with a hint of disdain. That rat may be smart, but he clearly had blind spots. He let his misplaced distaste for the HPSC cloud his judgement. Quantum was the Number Twelve hero, and former Number Six. Hell, if Kameko’s calculations were right, she would be Number Four by the next Billboard Chart. Expecting her to be a cosmetic hero was just plain irrational. Even if he didn’t like her! There was being defensive, and there was being willingly stupid.
“Sure,” she drawled. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
Nedzu steepled his fingers… paws… whatever. His beady eyes gleamed ominously.
“You mentioned being Yūei alumni. It strikes me as curious for you to reveal it when you went to such great lengths to hide your civilian identity. You even pretended to be Quirkless. Why go so far? Why go to Yūei?”
Oh. Oh! He thought she had been planning to infiltrate them since high school! How cute.
Not illogical, of course. And hell, she could probably use this. Make him realize he was paranoid and make him a bit embarrassed about it, just enough for him to cave in and back off. Quantum ran the calculations at the speed of light in her head.
Yes, it was doable for her. She wasn’t a smooth talker like Hawks, but the point here wasn’t to be smooth, it was to snap.
(Also, Nedzu’s phrasing was weird, like he knew Hoshizora was another façade. Was he suspecting that it was a fake identity as well? No, surely not…)
“Well, Yūei is a name that opens a lot of doors,” she shrugged. “It was useful for going to college. As for the Quirklessness, it wasn’t a total lie. I had a medical condition stopping me from using my Quirk from age fourteen to seventeen. I only got it back a few months before graduation. My entry in the Quirk Registry was changed accordingly.”
“Why not change it afterward?”
Hook, line, and sinker. Quantum raised both eyebrows minutely. She kept her ton even, even as she retorted:
“That is a private question.”
“Are you not going to indulge my curiosity?”
“Nope.” This time there was a hint of steel in her voice. “I’ve been nothing but nice and helpful, giving you personal information to reassure you about my trustworthiness. My name, my past, my real appearance, and even my medical history. In return, you’ve insulted my competency and my professionalism, and now you think you’re entitled to more secrets about my civilian life?”
Nedzu’s face twitched. His ears flattened on his head. For a second, he was silent. Then, swallowing, he bowed his neck.
“You’re right. This is none of my business. I offer you my sincerest apologies. I’m afraid the USJ incident made me… unreasonably tense.” He paused. “I’m having trouble discerning your motivations. In the current context, I’m wary of unknown elements.”
Nailed it.
“My motivations aren’t hard to puzzle,” she answered calmly. “I want my students safe. I want the public reassured. I want the villains arrested.” She paused. “And I want the traitor to be found. So I would appreciate it if you shared your own conclusions about that, too.”
Nedzu watched her for a second, eyes intense and unreadable, before nodding shortly.
“Very well. I’ll do my best in that regard.”
Quantum wasn’t as good as Hawks when she had to smooth-talk people. But it didn’t mean she was bad at it. And, as she started discussing with Nedzu about the cameras, about the footage recovered after the incident of the press crumbling the door, and about his theories… Quantum carefully swallowed back a smile.
There were very few things she wasn’t good at.
This day was, all in one, very satisfying. Toki went back to Fukuoka feeling lighter than she had in a while, energy buzzing under her skin. Conflict, mysteries, progress, challenges! Really, the only thing that could have made her day even better would have been to find a new lead on the Ghost Arsonist, but that maniac hid himself well.
Most of the underground villains did, after all.
Not all. Apparently, one of the big urban legends, Kuma, the infamous underground villains who kidnapped people in glass balls like souvenirs, had disappeared. It wasn’t sure information, especially considering that Kuma’s existence wasn’t something sure in the first place. The overwhelming majority of heroes didn’t even know she existed! And most of those who had heard of her dismissed those whispers as simple rumors. The number of heroes who were certain of her existence could be counted on two hands. The only reason Toki was even aware of this was because Hayasa-sensei was among the very few who believed Kuma was out there.
Anyway, the point was that Kuma was an urban legend who had been active for several decades but apparently she had been arrested. Or killed. In any case, she was out of the game, she had met her match and lost, she wasn’t to be feared anymore. Hayasa-sensei hadn’t been able to find out more and it was making him vibrate with frustration; persuaded that the whole thing was a cover-up by the police and the HPSC to avoid a panic.
He was also a little pissed because he was one of the few heroes who had investigated Kuma. Not being able to know the conclusion of this investigation felt like a was robbed of his closure, in a way.
Speaking of closure… Toki had unfinished business with Hobo-san.
So Keigo and her started investigating him.
Hobo-san and Aizawa actually had the same crazy ninja skills; maybe Toki should have noticed earlier. And they had the same focus on the dirtier side of heroics. Hobo-san hadn’t taught Toki to grapple and throw people, but how to disarm someone carrying a weapon, how to neutralize a gun, how to break a chokehold, and how to escape someone holding you down. Things of that nature. Things that Aizawa would have to use, as someone who fought hand-to-hand and basically Quirkless. Things that seemed impossibly crucial to the job, to the point where Toki couldn’t believe they didn’t cover this at Yūei.
But their personalities were so… different! It was mind-blowing.
Toki hadn’t really thought of it in years, but she remembered it, vividly. Both Keigo and her had been almost ten years younger, then. But the training had been so rough, they had to wear long sleeves because the sight of those dark marks covering them made the researchers uncomfortable. Toki and Keigo too were uncomfortable talking about it. They learned a lot, they liked learning, and they were fascinated by what Hobo-san taught them, but there was still pain associated with those lessons. Their ribs ached constantly. The doctor at Naruto Labs pinched his lips in fury when he bandaged them. Hayasa-sensei radiated homicidal intent every time they left the Labs for those lessons.
Toki wasn’t an idiot. She knew that a great deal of the hostility between Okamoto and Hayasa-sensei came from the brutality to which Okamoto subjected them. It had been necessary, of course, and she wasn’t whining about it. But it had been… exceedingly violent. Normal children shouldn’t be subjected to that. Hell, Okamoto hadn’t even brought Toki and Keigo to those lessons for more than a few months, because he had been worried about damaging them too much.
Okamoto. Another person Toki would have been happy never thinking about. Asshole.
What was he doing now? Damn, she really hoped that his power-hungry ass wasn’t climbing the ranks. She really didn’t want him to become Vice-President or something. If Genmei-san was shot or got run over by a bus, and Okamoto became President… well, Toki was emigrating to Spain and changing her name.
Anyways. Keigo was as fascinated and as horrified as she was by that realization, and they spend the following days digging. Toki even badgered Kameko into investigating among her friends in the HPSC if they knew some stuff.
Getting access to the HPSC’s general files was near impossible. Of course, they probably kept super-classified things on that! Secrets about AFO, for example. Or Lady Nagant. Or the people old Genryusai had ordered killed. Or maybe the mystery of Kuma’s arrest was driving Hayasa-sensei mad.
But having the file of one specific hero could be arranged. So, by needling Mera-san a few days later, Toki managed to get access to Eraserhead’s file in the HPSC. Not the printed copy, but the digital file, with a history of all the modifications done to it. And here, there was the missing link because the year where Hobo-san had become their instructor…
“He got his license revoked!” Keigo exclaimed triumphantly.
Toki passed him a fresh cup of coffee, then took the tablet from him to read the file by herself. Her eyebrows rose. A report had been pulled from Eraserhead’s file, indeed. In another window, Keigo had managed to track down said report.
“Excessive brutality. He stabbed a guy almost to death. Yikes. But very in character for Hobo-san. That man had rage issues; it was obvious. He was a good teacher, though.”
Keigo side-eyed her from above the edge of his coffee mug.
“He wasn’t a good teacher, Toki. He was a good fighter. As a teacher, he was dismissive, spiteful, and angry. We were good students and very desperate, so we learned, but he wasn’t teaching as much as he was letting out his frustration on us. You remember how he broke your hand and forced you to continue fighting for two hours afterward? You could have permanently twisted your bones. Or when he strangled you?!”
“True,” Toki frowned. “But he only physically hurt us. He didn’t enjoy it. Not like Okamoto, who delighted in making us feel small.”
“… You have the tendency to excuse harm that’s almost worrying. Like, you forgive causing pain, but you draw the line at malice?”
“It’s not wrong to be forgiving!” Toki defended herself.
“No, but it can make you very vulnerable to an abusive relationship.”
Toki blinked. She had- really no idea how to respond to that. Her mind suddenly felt completely blank. She thought of her mom, inexplicably, before burying that terrible thought. She felt ashamed of it. Her mom hadn’t been abusive. She hadn’t been a good mom, but she never hit Toki or anything.
Fortunately, Keigo wasn’t waiting for her answer. He scrolled down the rest of the report and tapped a note near the bottom.
“There. His license was revoked. Look at the date. It was a little over eight years ago. And now, look at the date when this report was pulled, and the license was reinstated just ten months later. Shortly after we ended our training with Hobo-san.”
“How could he restore his license so easily?” Toki wondered. “There should have an exam license, a psych eval…”
“Not if he already had all the data from Eraserhead’s first license. He just had to use it to create a new shiny card, and deliver it like a replacement, as if the initial card had just been lost instead of revoked. And look, I have here a picture of Eraserhead’s current license, on his file.”
It was noted that this license had been issued when Eraserhead was eighteen. Just like Keigo said: this card acted as a replacement for Eraserhead’s first license, not a new one after a revocation.
And the best part? The signature of the guy who had delivered said license was Okamoto’s.
“So Okamoto gave him his license back,” Toki thought out loud. “That explains why he was training us and was paid in cash. He was jobless, unlicensed… and if Okamoto was dangling a reward like that in front of him, he would have to agree.”
Keigo nodded.
“And he got his license back without having to pass a psych eval or whatever hoops violent heroes have to jump through. Probably because he wouldn’t have been able to pass that eval in the first place. He wasn’t exactly a model of restraint, back then. For the sake of his students, I hope he changed.”
Toki thought about canon-Aizawa and frowned. He wasn’t a ruthless brute, in canon, and yet he had been downright cruel to kids sometimes. Unless she was letting her resentment color her memories?
“Maybe. I’m mostly concerned about the fact that he immediately mentioned Okamoto blackmailing him. For him, it’s not a thing of the past.”
“He’s spying on Yūei for him, you think?”
“Not sure.” The canon hadn’t mentioned it, and it was driving Toki bonkers. She hadn’t finished the story when she had been reborn! “I don’t like this.”
Keigo sighed and rubbed his forehead.
“Yeah, I don’t like this either. He was a right bastard. Be careful around him.”
It was so surreal to receive that advice about Aizawa. The guy who, in canon, defended children and had even adopted an orphaned little girl. Hobo-san had loathed teaching Keigo and Toki, and he hadn’t been shy about taking it out on them. He had been brutal, hateful even.
Sure, people changed, but… the kind of brutality Hobo-san had exhibited wasn’t just the result of ‘not being in a good place’. That didn’t go away as soon as you found a stable job and changed your brand of shampoo. That ruthlessness, that willingness to break bones without batting an eyelash, it was still somewhere.
Then Toki paused. She just had an idea.
“You know what we could do to solve neatly the problem?”
“Find proof Okamoto is blackmailing a hero and bring it to the President so she can make his career goes up in flames? Considering how pissed she is about abuses of power; she may draw and quarter him. Especially if you bring it to her attention, considering that the whole kidnapping business still is a sore subject between you.”
“… I was thinking of throwing him to Nedzu, but your plan is better. Let’s do that. I’m already investigating Yūei to find a traitor, I may as well try to find two.”
oOoOoOo
In the following days, Toki didn’t manage to catch Aizawa doing anything suspicious. She went to patrol in Musutafu more than what was strictly necessary, though. But Aizawa avoided her like the plague. She only saw him once, after the bandages had come off.
She noticed with shock that he had a small scar on his face from her knife attack when she was fourteen. It ran from his hairline to the middle of his right eyebrow, a thin line that was almost unnoticeable. But it was there. Damn, she had nearly stabbed him in the brain.
No wonder he didn’t like her.
But Toki felt no guilt for what she had done that day. Hobo-san had pushed her to her limit; he should have expected her to fight back. And now Toki was investigating him. She patrolled Musutafu often. Once or twice, she took Keigo, too. They snuck in a few visits to Hinawa while they were there.
Keigo saw Best Jeanist again and, somehow, they spent three whole days coordinating patrols together to chat about clothes while arresting villains. Honestly, their friendship was kind of baffling. But he was nice to be around, and well, his clothes-related puns weren’t that bad.
Best Jeanist was also very well informed about underground heroism. He didn’t have any underground heroes on his payroll, but his agency had a lot of gossips. Not as many connections with the police as the Endeavor Agency, or as much push with the HPSC as the Icarus Agency, but he had enough of both to stay on top of the game.
For example, he was aware that in the last decade or so, there had been a drastic increase in the more insidious crimes. Human trafficking, drug manufacturing and distribution, gambling rackets, fraud and insurance scams, and extortion and blackmail. Fewer murders, arson, and bank robberies, but no less crime. The villains had simply evolved ways to stay beneath the notice of limelight heroes.
The HPSC was aware of it and that was probably why they had bet so much on Hawks and Quantum. The era of flashy fights was gone, now polyvalence was needed. And it had taken them about ten years, but the limelight heroes had noticed too and started adapting.
Inferno wasn’t the only hero to have hired an underground hero to do more investigations. Best Jeanist was strengthening his relationship with the police. Mirko, despite her clear distaste for any teamwork, was apparently cultivating connections with various informants recommended by coalition-style agencies. Edgeshot had teamed up with Sherazade recently. Ryukyu had hired sidekicks specialized in information-gathering.
And of course, Endeavor had done his homework, too. That was probably the reason why he had gotten Meteor out of prison in the first place.
Speaking of Endeavor… One day, Keigo managed to get his hands on a case about a runaway villain who may have crossed Shizuoka, and he went to badger Endeavor about it. He timed it right, to run into him during the morning patrol. It was the time of the day when Meteor had the highest chance of being there.
And he could see him. He could see him, and watch how he was, how he was doing, and… and…
And Toki wanted to know how he was doing. She wanted him to be safe, and happy, and alright. But at the same time, she was scared of knowing. Of making it real. Her father had left such a massive mark on her whole life, even in his absence. She was afraid of what it could mean, to open herself even more to his presence. She wanted her dad, she wanted his forgiveness, and she wanted his happiness. And yet, she wanted him to have never resurfaced.
Would her feelings ever make sense? Would she ever stop feeling guilty about it?
This story has happened before,
this story will always be happening.
We're just footprints in the end,
left by hand-me-down boots.
Boots, blood, and a name
like an echo:
these are all the things your father left you.
Toki had written pages and pages in her poetry notebook about her parents. Her father, so strong and terrifying, and yet so loving and protective. She had never been afraid of her dad. Toki knew he would never hurt her. But then she had been the one to hurt him, to raze his life to the ground. It would make sense for all bets to be off. She would deserve it. She wanted him to be angry and resentful. She was angry and resentful, too; of having to watch, of having to choose. She wanted him to be angry so she could justify her own anger.
(But she didn’t know what she wanted from him to justify the fact that she had never stopped loving him.)
The story of Toki the Teleporter was never going to be happy one. Hoshizora, Quantum, Antares, those were just masks. Toki Taiyōme was the dirt underneath the gold. The girl who sold her own family in a fit of self-righteousness, without even thinking about what it would entail for them; what it would cost. As if the justice system, the heroic system, wasn’t just as violent as her parents had been.
And Meteor had spent thirteen years in prison. And Sayuri was dead. And it was all Toki’s fault.
I saved hundreds of people in making that choice, Toki tried to tell herself. But even the right choice could hurt.
So. Here she was. Sending Keigo to check on Meteor.
Toki felt almost sick with anxiety about it. Like Meteor would just have to glance at Keigo and know. Or maybe it wasn’t anxiety as much as guilt. She should be the one there, she should be the one checking on her father. It was the least she owed him. Or maybe what she felt was anger, because how dare he disturb her life, how dare he change, how dare he join the Good Guys now after Toki had torn herself apart to stop him?
The entire day she was nervous. For her lessons with the Yūei students, she had started teaching them analysis skills; watching people, watching each other, recognizing patterns, and so on (things they seemed to be cruelly lacking). But she didn’t feel like doing anything difficult that day, so she mostly put them in groups of five or so, and had them analyze each other’s Quirks, while she did a one-on-one Quirk analysis with a random volunteer.
In class 1-A, her first volunteer was Hitoshi, who didn’t want to discuss his Quirk with his classmates. They talked about how to pretend his Quirk was a sort of sleep hypnosis if he ever went on TV. For the Sports Festival, for example. How to misdirect, and how to make people think too small.
Toki also advised him to make a friend or two in the Support Department. Melissa was good, but she was a hero student and had her own shit to handle. Hitoshi should look to diversifying his relationships.
(The idea of Hitoshi meeting Mei Hatsume was also hilarious.)
Anyways. In class 1-B it was Tetsutetsu, and they mostly discussed chemistry and what metallic proprieties his body could have. If cold could make him brittle, what was his melting point, how electricity would affect him, could he change his density, and so on. Or, if someone chopped his hand off, could he melt it and fuse it again with his body? Could he forge a weapon in his arms or legs, like swords extending from his limbs? And even if he couldn’t forge something… what about turning some part of his body sharper, like the edge of a blade along his arms?
It was a very interesting discussion. Tetsutetsu was very enthusiastic. And it pulled Toki’s mind off Meteor for a while, which was perfect.
She went to pick up Keigo at an agreed-upon meeting point, far enough from Shizuoka that they had no risk of seeing Endeavor or his sidekicks. They finished their day of work by patrolling in Kyūshū. They teamed up with a novice hero who had trouble handling a building fire. They saved people. It was a normal day.
Toki felt like vibrating out of her skin.
She wanted to talk about Meteor, but at the same time, she really didn’t want to. It was only later in the evening when she finally broke.
“So? How was Shizuoka?”
How was my dad? Was he scary? Furious? Happy? She felt sick. She was terrified of the answer, whatever it could be. Keigo looked at her for a second, and smiled, softly.
“It’s crazy how much he looks like you.”
It wasn’t what Toki had expected. Growing up, she mostly looked like her mom. She blinked, owlishly. “He does?”
“Oh yeah. I mean there’s the eyes, of course, but you also share a lot of mannerisms. It’s unsettling. Like… you have the same way of squaring your shoulders before a social interaction with someone you don’t like. And you pinch your lips the same when you’re annoyed. And you have absolutely identical scowls, that death glare when your eyes glow and you’re pissed. Oh, and the same smirk when you think you’re being clever!”
“We do not!”
“You absolutely do. Except that on you, it’s charming. On him, it looks like he’s about to eat my liver.”
Toki hesitated. “So he’s… scary?”
She tried to picture him, tall and intimidating with glowing eyes and a bloodthirsty snarl. Like he had looked when the building had collapsed.
But Keigo shook his head.
“Not really. Well, a little, but… like Endeavor, maybe? He just radiates so much power and lethality, you know he’s top of the food chain. I wouldn’t approach a tiger like a housecat. But he isn’t rabid, furious, or even hateful. At worst he seems mildly annoyed with his duties, but no more than Hayasa-sensei on patrol when we are being a pain. He doesn’t dislike his job.” He hesitated, then added, cautiously: “In fact, I think he likes it.”
“What, being a hero?”
“Yep. Not for the saving people thing, of course. He has limited interest in helping. But he’s- comfortable. It’s hard to explain. He doesn’t quite fit among heroes, but at the same time, he does. He likes the freedom to use his Quirk. He likes being strong and doing things that have an impact. And he likes the company.”
“Really? Even Endeavor?”
“Especially Endeavor.”
Toki blinked, slowly. The President had said that Meteor had a solid alliance with Endeavor. What had been her words? They had come to respect each other or something like that. And of course, they must have some kind of bond, for Endeavor to take such a risk in taking Meteor out of jail. And maybe Meteor was grateful for it, but… Toki had expected his gratitude to last a few months, then fizzle out under the strain of Endeavor’s brash temper and bossy attitude.
Toki shook her head, a little baffled, and repeated incredulously:
“Really?”
Keigo sighed.
“Toki, I know I’m biased because I’m an Endeavor fan. But I know he’s a stuck-up jackass, alright? And even knowing that, I’m still telling you- they are friends. Remember when I told you that they were teaming up? Well, they are. They work like partners, like us, watching each other’s back. It’s easy to see Endeavor respects him. He listens to him, and he pays attention, and he watches him when he talks…” He paused, then admitted ruefully: “Actually, I was kind of jealous.”
It was still boggling. Toki was boggled.
“My Dad. The S-ranked villain. Friend with Endeavor. The Number One hero?” She shook her head, a little helplessly. “It just sounds so fantastical.”
Keigo raised an eyebrow: “Does it?”
Toki opened her mouth to say yes, of course! But then she frowned.
Maybe she was biased, too. She still saw her father as this bigger-than-life figure, both benevolent protector and unhinged beast, like a dragon in a fairytale. But she mostly saw Endeavor as a character. A flat character, whose defining characteristics were ‘good at fighting villains’ and ‘beat his kid.’
So she mentally took a step back. She deconstructed that mental picture. She tried to keep in mind what she actually knew of Endeavor, the hero, not the character.
Endeavor, the man Keigo liked, the hero who accomplished incredible feats of strength and control when he fought, the man Inferno admired, the hero Japan now relied on. A man who had single-handedly proven that Fire Quirks weren’t inherently villainous, and who had inspired a whole generation. A man who was prideful, ambitious, and easily angered. But also reliable, and clever. He didn’t bluster about the moral high ground, either. Not like most heroes who would sneer at working with villains. Endeavor was willing to get his hands dirty to get the job done. He was a great investigator, who had the most cases closed, more than All Might at his peak. He worked with the police rather than with other heroes, and more importantly, police officers liked him; unlike most heroes, Endeavor treated them with respect.
That didn’t fit with the image of a man obsessed with strength, the way canon-Bakugo was, always ready to spit on those weaker than him. Endeavor wasn’t like that. He respected strength, but also competency.
So yeah, she could see why Endeavor would come to respect Meteor. Because Meteor was strong, smart, and ruthless. Oh, he was exasperating, too. Always having the final word, smirking, so casually confident and provocative. It would drive Endeavor up the wall. But in canon, canon-Hawks had been just as annoying, and yet he had managed to win Endeavor’s respect as soon as he had shown his efficiency as a hero. It must be the same, here.
But why would Meteor like Endeavor?
“What’s not to like?” Keigo grinned. Toki realized she had spoken out loud and groaned.
“I seriously hope that my dad didn’t befriend him because he found him hot.”
Her father wasn’t even gay. Wait, was he bi? Toki had no idea. Those things weren’t genetic, were they?
“Hey!” protested Keigo, raising a finger. “First, it would only mean that he has good taste in men. And second, that is a very superficial outlook. Endeavor has plenty of other qualities. He’s brave, intelligent, reliable, determined…”
Yeah, realized Toki. All those reasons why Endeavor would come to respect Meteor, maybe even like him? They were also reasons why Meteor would respect him. And after Endeavor got him out of jail, well… it would be easy for respect and gratefulness to turn into friendship.
Meteor and Endeavor weren’t very different from each other. Both were strong, capable, and unforgiving. Both were willing and dismissive about hurting people if it brought them closer to their goals. Both of them were so ferociously and so wholly devoted to said goals.
(But what was Meteor’s goal? Before, it had been his family’s safety, their happiness, and their enjoyment of fructuous heists. What about now? What did Meteor want? What was he chasing, that put him walking side-by-side with Endeavor?)
“I still think it’s weird,” she frowned. “Teaming up, okay, I guess I can see that. They are both strong and dedicated, and with a common goal, they could easily ally. But… friends? It’s way bigger. It requires trust and reciprocation. I can imagine my dad trusting Endeavor, maybe. If they have a deal or something. But I can’t imagine Endeavor trusting him.”
Keigo’s smile slipped at that.
“He does. They both do. Trust each other, I mean.”
“They told you that?” Toki was dubious.
“Of course not. But I was there for hours, remember? I was all over Endeavor for maybe thirty minutes, to watch them with my own two eyes; and then I patrolled around the area while leaving some of my feathers stuck on Meteor.”
Of the two of them, Hawks was the one with the training to be a spy or an underground hero. Maybe the HPSC would have pushed Quantum to learn that, too, if she hadn’t had her accident. Or maybe they wouldn’t have. Her Quirk wasn’t as suited to espionage as Keigo’s.
Fierce Wings could sense vibrations even as faint as a rustle of displaced air. The feathers’ nerves started to deteriorate within fifteen minutes of being detached from the wing, though. The first two hours the decay was negligible, and the feathers could still be used for spying. After, it was harder. The transmission went fuzzier and fuzzier. By the third hour Keigo could only sense big vibrations, so he could use them to locate someone running in a building for example, but not detect a conversation in a closed room. By the sixth hour, Keigo lost all awareness of that feather.
A full patrol lasted three to four hours. Keigo must have followed almost all of it.
“So, what did you see?” Toki asked, morbidly curious.
“With my feathers? I saw how they moved together when they patrolled. How they positioned themselves in relation to each other, how steadily their hearts beat, and the vibrations in their voice when they talked. And with my eyes, I saw a few interesting things, too. How Meteor was watching me watching Endeavor. And more importantly, how Endeavor wasn’t watching Meteor.”
“Like he wasn’t a threat,” Toki frowned.
She had trouble wrapping her mind around it. Her dad allying with Endeavor, yeah, alright. Maybe. Toki would ally with Okamoto if needed. Hell, she would even ally herself with Dabi if she had to. If they somehow had a common goal. But even if she could be professional, she would still hate his guts.
She would never lose sight of who was a hero and who was a villain. She would never lose sight of the fact that the alliance was temporary.
And it didn’t sound like what Meteor was doing. It sounded like- Meteor wasn’t using Endeavor to escape, but rather as if he had just shrugged and decided to realign his loyalties.
Which was, of course, so completely fucking ridiculous that Toki half expected Keigo to burst out laughing at any moment.
But Keigo didn’t laugh. No, he frowned, and shook his head:
“It’s more than that. Endeavor has no hesitation in letting Meteor cover his back. And considering even some of his sidekicks don’t have that honor, I wondered how it happened.” He paused. “Trust usually grows in adversity. The sidekicks that Endeavor trusts the most are those who fought in battle with him. He trusts Meteor the same way. Well, it’s just a hunch, I don’t have enough data to consider it evidence. But during the whole patrol, Endeavor treated Meteor like an ally and not a prisoner.”
“Uh.”
“I know. But everyone seems used to it! And it doesn’t surprise Meteor! He’s, like, completely committed to his job, not dragging his feet whatsoever. Like his motivation isn’t to run, but to help.”
“Even though he’s a prisoner?” That seemed hard to believe.
“Hell, Meteor doesn’t consider himself a prisoner. He isn’t staying next to Endeavor like someone on a leash, he’s staying next to him like they are partners facing the same threat. And I thought, maybe they have faced the same threat. Remember that story in January about Endeavor running in the hero killer?”
Toki felt like a jolt of lightning had struck her.
“No,” she breathed. “I mean, yes, I remember, but you think- ?”
Frantically, she tried to remember the details. There wasn’t much. It had been mostly rumors and hearsay, and Endeavor Agency had refused to comment. The main consensus was that Endeavor had fought the hero killer during a patrol in Okayama, and the villain had escaped him. At the time, Toki hadn’t thought for a second that her dad was mixed in all that. Why would he? He was supposed to be a consultant. He trailed behind the heroes, he didn’t fight, he stayed safe.
But what Keigo was implying…
“I think that’s part of why they are friends,” Keigo nodded. “They don’t just solve crimes together. At some point, they fought a villain together. Maybe even more than once! That’s why they are both so sure that they have each other’s back: because it had happened before. That’s why Meteor isn’t acting like he wants to run away. Because he doesn’t. That’s why Endeavor doesn’t act like watching him is a chore. Because it isn’t. They are working together, for real.”
Toki tried to visualize it. Her dad, watching someone’s back as he did with Homura, or Fujio, or Nono, or even her mom. Her dad, not just a figure from her past, but someone with a real, present life. Someone who had moved on and had new goals. New friends.
Her dad, that Toki had damned, that All Might had put in prison, and that Endeavor has saved.
Endeavor had saved Meteor when Toki had refused to. It was a cold rush of shame to think of it. Endeavor wasn’t just a character, he was a hero, he was a person. A selfish, harsh person, but who could do good things, who did good things. He had saved Keigo. And he had saved Meteor, too.
Endeavor had taken him out of jail and had given him a new purpose. And maybe it hadn’t been the Flame Hero’s goal, maybe he had just wanted to use Meteor. But somehow along the way Meteor had trusted him enough to have his back, and worse than that: apparently Endeavor had started to trust him back. To help him, sincerely.
And Meteor had always been so loyal to the people who helped him. Loyalty may be the only thing he valued more than freedom.
(And how had Toki repaid that loyalty? By destroying everything her father had built. Was it any wonder, that he had turned away? That he hadn’t stayed stuck in the past like she had? That he had decided to reach out to the only person who had tried to make his life a little less miserable?)
Toki sat down in her chair, heavily.
“My father is friends with Endeavor,” she said, woodenly.
It was going to get some mental recalibration for that to really sink in. It… wasn’t inconceivable that Meteor would move on and start anew. It just was so goddamn weird that he would do so by joining heroes. And not just any hero… it was Endeavor! Who was a complete asshole!
Well, maybe he wasn’t anymore? In canon, he had his sudden realization right after All Might retirement… which had happened earlier, in that world. So maybe he was better.
Toki suddenly realized with a sick feeling that she didn’t know anything about Endeavor.
She had mistrusted him for abusing his family, but as she grew up, she had kind of rationalized it as ‘not that bad.’ Okamoto, Aizawa, and Hayasa-sensei hadn’t been soft and cuddly either. Sure, it sucked. It was bad, it shouldn’t happen. But it was survivable. And… she had been so busy. She had honestly forgotten about Midoriya’s bad childhood, so she absolutely had forgotten about Shouto’s, too.
But it was different now. Shouto, Izuku, they had been strangers. This was her dad’s life.
And Toki didn’t know what Endeavor was thinking, in this equation. All she knew was that Endeavor was an asshole. He was arrogant, cruel, and self-centered, and yeah, maybe it made him a right partner-in-crime for Meteor, but no matter how much Meteor had grown comfortable in his chains, they were still chains. Endeavor held all the power here.
Did Meteor realize that? For all his violence and his brutality, Meteor also cared so much. It blinded him. It stopped him from seeing how the people closest to him were the most dangerous.
It would have been different if Meteor and Endeavor were wary of each other. If Toki had been certain that Meteor could look out for himself. But if he wasn’t… if he wasn’t, then… then she owed him that, at least.
Right?
Notes:
Keigo: [jokes about Meteor finding Endeavor hot]
Toki: ah ah what a harmless little joke =)
Toki: wait why do i feel a chill of forboding all of sudden
Fic rec of the day:
"The 18 Reasons Why Aizawa is a Bad Teacher" by Mirrond.
The Plot : Aizawa expells Midoriya. All Might overhears and decide to tear him a new one. Someone needs to slap some sense in that condescending asshole.
I wanted a fic that would motivate me to yeet Aizawa into the sun and THIS. IS. PERFECT. You can read it even if you like Aizawa's character, because the dialogue is lifted straight from canon, so there's no twist or bashing to make Aizawa less likeable. It's just All Might giving him a well-deserved smack-down after Aizawa's ridiculous and discriminatory "Quirk assessement test".
If you left Meteor's story at chapter 11 to avoid spoilers, you can go back to it ! Here is the link =)
Chapter 41: The distant shadow of Meteor
Summary:
Maybe Meteor wasn’t the one stuck in his ways. Maybe Toki was. Maybe she would always be that little girl in a too-small bedroom, writing in a poetry notebook all the helpless fury and pain she couldn’t articulate out loud, while her parents were laughing and planning robberies down the stairs whilst she was planning to betray them. Planning to hurt them.
Maybe egoism and cruelty were in her blood. She had her father’s eyes and her mother’s face. Meteor’s strength and Sayuri’s power. Maybe she had their selfishness, too.
Notes:
So this chapter get ahead of Meteor's story (once again), so we'll learn an important plot-point in his story from Toki's POV. Brace for it x)
Obligatory disclaimer! The idea of Shouto's Quirk being able to do more than ice and fire (including creating gusts of wind) comme from a vey good fanfic which is called, i think, "Parallax" !
Quick reminder that in the last chapter, we left Toki having a crisis about her father being actually friend with Endeavor, and having legitimatly changed.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
THE DISTANT SHADOW OF METEOR
The end of April was sunny and bright. Toki, or rather, Quantum, hopped along the whole country and teamed up with a few heroes. Life was good, and the country was peaceful. The unease caused by Yūei’s attack was slowly settling down.
For a team-up, Toki almost went to Tokyo. Almost. In the end, she chickened out. She hadn’t set foot there since her father’s arrest. It was ridiculous, and yet, she still felt a visceral reluctance at the idea of going back there. Or rather, of going back there, without having fixed anything.
Could anything be fixed?
She had been doing fine. Shutting her past away, pretending it didn’t exist. Pretending that her father wasn’t locked in a maximum-security jail where prisoners were treated like shit. Pretending that her mom wasn’t dead because of her, and hadn’t died with terror, despair, and lack of good medical care. Pretending that she had a right to have the nice cushy life she had, with a loving husband, a stable job, good money and friends, and even a daughter, whole, healthy, and safe.
Did Toki deserve these things, after what she had put her family through? After feeling such rage and fear when her father had gotten out of jail? She had taken everything from him, and still, she had nearly belittled him his only chance at having a better life. She had been so close to sabotaging his paperwork. So close to ruining everything for him, again, because… because what, she was scared that he would (rightfully) be mad at her? Or because she had been unable to consider that he may have changed?
Maybe Meteor wasn’t the one stuck in his ways. Maybe Toki was. Maybe she would always be that little girl in a too-small bedroom, writing in a poetry notebook all the helpless fury and pain she couldn’t articulate out loud, while her parents were laughing and planning robberies down the stairs whilst she was planning to betray them. Planning to hurt them.
Maybe egoism and cruelty were in her blood. She had her father’s eyes and her mother’s face. Meteor’s strength and Sayuri’s power. Maybe she had their selfishness, too.
Your inheritance is a knife's edge
your inheritance is a culling
when the time comes, even your coffin
will be a family heirloom.
Why don’t you come and make sure
the measurements are right?
She thought she had changed. Maybe she had. She was Quantum, now. Why wouldn’t her dad be allowed to change, too? The only trouble was that she couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t know if her dad had changed until she saw him, and spoke to him. But doing that would also mean facing the past. Explaining what she had done, and why. Accepting judgment from him.
Maybe it was cowardly, but Toki still needed time to be ready for that.
And there was Endeavor. Toki had no idea what he was thinking. Why he was helping Meteor, why he was trusting him? If sounded wildly out of character! Endeavor wasn’t only a character, but Toki also didn’t know what he truly was like. She knew what one version of him would be in a fictional world that could be compared to a parallel universe. It had nothing to do with who Endeavor was, here and now. There had been too many changes, too many things impacting their life and creating infinite ricochets.
The next time she was at Yūei, she continued her Quirk-analysis with her students and tried to interrogate Todoroki. He had gone to one Quirk-counselling session, as requested, but that was it. He apparently had no interest in talking about his Quirk with a shrink. But…
“You haven’t used your fire in battle training yet,” Toki said carefully.
Todoroki’s mouth went flatter, and he looked away. “My control isn’t as good as it is with my ice side. I won’t use it until I’m sure it’s safe.”
…his reasons for not using his fire were different from canon. Which means his relationship with his father was different. Probably better. So… was Shouto different, was Endeavor different, or both?
“It will be easier for you to train with the rest of your classmates, you know. We all have missteps in the beginning.”
Their class had trained with Aizawa and with All Might, so far. The fake battle that All Might had orchestrated in canon had finally happened, with randomized duos playing heroes and villains with a bomb inside a building. They should have all used their Quirks, then. But Toki had looked at the footage, and only three people had limited themselves; Midoriya who had been afraid of breaking his bones, Hitoshi who hid his Quirk… and Todoroki who didn’t use his fire.
Interestingly enough, they had all fought in the same battle. Hitoshi and Midoriya against Todoroki and Yaoyorozu. That had been a clusterfuck from start to finish. Even with the three boys each limiting themselves, there had been a glacier, a collapsed floor, a broken arm, a near-strangulation by capture weapon, and a lot of yelling. In the end, it was Yaoyorozu who caught the bomb and won the match, but mostly by accident!
Todoroki hesitated, briefly.
“I was against Shinsō during the last training exercise. I didn’t want to risk making a mistake next to him.”
Toki hadn’t trained with Hitoshi near fire. But she suddenly imagined it. Imagined her adoptive brother flinching from bright light and burning heat, imagined him tensing with the phantom memory of sizzling flesh.
The wave of hate she felt towards Dabi wasn’t unexpected. The wave of affection she felt towards Shouto was more surprising.
“Good call,” she managed to say, throat tight. “It’s good that you’re looking out for him.”
Toki took a deep breath and held it in. Why was she trying to prod at difficult topics? She was being selfish. She was supposed to be helping Todoroki, not digging through his issues in pursuit of selfish curiosity. He should be her focus, not Meteor.
She let her breath out. Alright. Time to readjust. She was here to do Quirk analysis, not play detective. Focus, Toki.
“So, Todoroki. You can make fire and ice. But I think your Quirk is a little more than that. Do you mind telling me more? To what extent can you generate heat or cold?”
Todoroki had apparently never tried analyzing his Quirk. He had tried to push his limits, to make hotter flames or colder ice; and of course, he had worked on his control… but not much more. Like he wasn’t interested at all in the subtilities of his power. That was a grave oversight.
When he confessed, a little defensive, that until recently he had been reluctant to use his fire side at all, Toki mentally made a note. Shouto’s relationship with his father wasn’t as strained as it was in canon, sure, but that was only a recent development. For most of his childhood, Shouto had hated the fire side of his Quirk and wanted nothing to do with it.
But he was better now. More at peace. He gamely entertained all of Toki’s little experiments about creating hot air from one hand and cooling the air around the other or making boiling water turn to ice with just a touch, and so on. He looked more bemused than anything.
“Is there a point to this?” he ended up asking after half an hour. “I don’t know how it can be used for new moves.”
“It’s not about creating new moves, it’s about understanding what you’re working with!” exclaimed Toki. “It’s a doorway to creativity. And I think we’ve made great progress. Because your Quirk… It’s half-hot half-cold, not half-fire half-ice.”
“I know,” Shouto deadpanned. “It’s in the name.”
Smartass.
“No, no, no, don’t you get it?” Toki waved her arms, feeling a thread of giddy scientific excitement bubble to the surface. “Fire and ice are only two possible expressions of your Quirk. It’s not half-something and half-something else! Your power… It’s heat transfer. You absorb heat by your endothermic side and exude it by your exothermic side.”
Todoroki blinked, slowly. He didn’t seem to grasp how cool it was.
“Todoroki!” Toki exploded. “Do you know what heat is? Movement. The augmentation or the diminution of atomic activity. You could raise someone’s temperature to heatstroke level with a brush of your hand or give them hypothermia! Also, can you even imagine the combinations you can make with both sides at the same time? Fuck off with the ice and fire, you’re manipulating pure, raw, undiluted thermic energy. You could use it to fly!”
“Fly?” he repeated, sounding -for the first time- almost eager.
Toki clapped her hands enthusiastically.
“Cold air shrinks but hot air dilates. Heating up cold air quickly can make a big blast because the air massively increases in volume. So… Hypothetically, those blasts could be used to propel yourself in the air. Hence: flying. That’s why your Quirk is so cool. It has so much potential! You could use it to create differing air pressure, to make wind currents or change the weather!”
Todoroki almost looked like a normal fifteen years old right now. There was some light in his eyes, and he was almost smiling.
“I would like that.”
“Nice! I can make a spreadsheet if you want?”
Hayasa-sensei would be so proud.
They talked for the whole hour. Well, Toki mostly talked. Quirk analysis quickly mixed with physics lessons. She even took a whiteboard to write equations about mass, speed, heat, and volume. Todoroki dutifully took notes.
It was interesting. It was fulfilling, actually. To forget about Meteor, Endeavor, Aizawa, Okamoto, and all of her own secondary motives. To just focus on someone else, on helping them, teaching them. There was something freeing in that. Like going back to the roots of her vocation.
Shouto Todoroki was sensitive and intelligent. He quickly grasped new concepts and was good with direct explanations no matter how technical they were. Oh, he wasn’t the best at social cues, that was for sure. He was kind of out of touch with current slang and- pretty much everything modern. Like he had been under-socialized, which was probably the case. But he wasn’t awkward about it. He didn’t act like he felt self-conscious about it in any way. Cautious, yes, pretty typical for a teenager with self-esteem issues; feeling vulnerable and maybe even defective.
But he wasn’t ashamed or embarrassed in a typical teenage way. He just was oblivious to the stares of others, keeping his eyes firmly on his own goal and his own considerations. Breaking his shell and making him focus on something else required a delicate touch. He wouldn’t do something just because he was ordered to. He had to consider it first and see for himself how it aligned with his current objectives.
He was so serious. Not quite sad. There was a sharp edge of anger underneath that calmness. He was a deadpan smartass, too, and Toki could see why Hitoshi liked him. But- if he had been a little softer, Toki would have called him melancholic.
Flying would do him good. Keigo and Toki shared that, their love of height, speed, and exhilarating defiance of gravity. To fly was to exist in a state of glory. To be high enough so all there was around you was wind and sky; to flip so all you could see was an endless expanse of blue shot through with sun-touched clouds… It was only in those moments that Toki felt like she could touch the whole universe, humbled, and blessed all at once.
Shouto seemed like the type of person in dire need of feeling happy. Toki wasn’t sure heroics was the job for him since there was so much stress and sadness in that line of work, but… well, she hadn’t thought that about herself, either. And look where she was now.
Although she had gone into heroic to help people, not to climb the rankings. And maybe that’s something that should remind Shouto of, too…
“I think we hit a lot of points,” Toki finally said, towards the end of the lesson. “I just have one last question. It’s not really an analysis. It’s just for you. Did you ever think about going into rescue work rather than villain fighting?”
Judging by the blank look on his face, no, he hadn’t. Just like she thought.
“Not really,” he said slowly, watching her warily. “I don’t think my Quirk is suited to it.”
“Your Quirk is very suited to combat,” Toki admitted. “It’s flashy, it’s powerful, it’s polyvalent. But your Quirk could be used for rescue more easily than for combat because instead of aiming at people, you would be looking to control your environment. I noticed you don’t like unleashing your full power against people weaker than you, and in hero work, you’ll often face people weaker than you.”
“I’m not reluctant to use my ice,” Todoroki frowned.
“I didn’t say reluctant. I just said you didn’t like it. I watched the footage of your fight, during All Might’s lesson. You engulfed a building a glacier, and you just looked sad. Hero work isn’t sustainable if it doesn’t bring you a measure of joy, and…” She shrugged. “I think you would be happier comforting people, instead of hurting them.”
Todoroki stayed silent almost a minute, head lowered, his hair hiding his eyes. Toki didn’t press him. She could see the gears turning in his head.
She wasn’t lying. Todoroki had iced a building during battle training, just like in canon. He hadn’t looked happy, afterward. Even before Midoriya broke his arm to free himself. Well, he never looked happy, but… the way his shoulders had dropped… it spoke of resignation, sadness, bitterness maybe. Coupling that with what Toki could infer from her canon knowledge, Todoroki was a socially awkward introvert who didn’t enjoy stepping on other people, but most of all, he was a very sweet person.
Socially stunted, but sweet.
He wanted to build people up, not tear them down. But he didn’t know it- couldn’t know it, because he had been raised in an environment where those two things were indistinguishable.
If Toki had the courage, she would have told him he had no obligation to be a hero and could be way more useful working in a lab to work on temperature control. But well… better to take baby steps.
“How would my Quirk be suited to rescue work?” Shouto finally asked. His face was inscrutable.
“Many ways! Your ice can stabilize collapsed buildings, build shelters, redirect floods, and stop fires. You can also make ice packs for bruised civilians. It’s handy. And then there’s your fire! I suppose you use it as an offensive weapon, with big flames. But in rescue work, I would be more interested in how you can use it as a precision tool. Like a beam cutting for rubble and metal pipes, and so on. Or… well, for emergency cauterization.”
She saw his jaw clench. Yeah, she knew he wouldn’t take it well. But it had to be said. A rescue hero with a fire Quirk would have to be able to do that. Hell, in canon, hadn’t Endeavor saved Mirko like this?
“Burning people,” Todoroki said, flatly.
“Fire hurts,” she acknowledged. “I know that. But it can save someone’s life. It can be warmth and salvation.”
Todoroki looked at her. He had such an intense gaze, that boy. And he was tall, too. He was taller than Toki. In a few years, he would be terribly intimidating. Right now he was only grave and solemn, but he looked older than fifteen.
“Not in my experience.”
Toki breathed. She had suspected as much. Even if he didn’t hate his fire as much as he had in canon… Shouto still had this massive scar on his face.
“Fire is a tool,” Toki answered, voice soft and level. “A dangerous one, but just a tool. You can use it to hurt, to protect, to heal, to save. The choice is yours. It’s your power, isn’t it? So you get to decide.”
He cocked his head. There was something sharper in his eyes, suddenly. Like she had said something strange, something unusual, something that reminded him of someone else. Toki frantically tried to remember if Midoriya had had this conversation with him already…but no, that was supposed to happen in the Sports Festival, way in the future. What had he noticed, then?
She didn’t move. He didn’t either. For several seconds they just watched each other, and she felt like Shouto was actually scrutinizing her, almost like he was trying to recognize her.
(There was no way Shouto had ever met Meteor. Toki was completely paranoid. Right?)
Whatever Shouto was looking on her face, he didn’t appear to find it. There was a tiny frown on her forehead when he leaned back in his chair. He was still staring at her like she was a puzzle he couldn’t figure out.
“So, hypothetically. What kind of training would it entail, to do some rescue work?”
When in doubt, go back to talking about training. Toki recognized that tactic. That’s how she tried to avoid confrontations with Hayasa-sensei about not brushing her teeth, back in Naruto Labs. She swallowed back a twinge of fond nostalgia and smiled.
“Well, I would advise more precision training. For your fire, push the heat but reduce the input, to have a very thin and hot blade of fire. Precision training with your ice would be good, too. Giant glaciers are good, but you should aim to make smooth structures, well-balanced, without any cracks. Hmmm… Work on temperature control. You want to be able to make yourself cold when you’re walking into a forest fire, but also able to keep warm when you’re working during a snowstorm. Basically regulating your temperature without externally producing flames or ice.”
Todoroki took notes, looking pensive. When the class ended, he thanked her and even bowed.
Toki didn’t know if her words had made an impact. Seeing Shouto Todoroki work in rescue would be a massive divergence from canon. But maybe he would be happier like this.
Toki just hopped the tools she had given him to find his own path were the right ones.
In class 1-B she analyzed Komori’s Quirk. The name was pretty simple: Mushroom. Toki wondered if Komori could make other plant-based things, but apparently no, it was limited to mushrooms. And not any mushrooms. She apparently had to grow the spores in her own body, but also know the type of mushrooms, how they grew, what nutriments they required, and so on. Her arms were lined with hundreds of freckles that served as genetic samples for mushroom spores. Which, alright, gross, but cool. She knew a lot about mushrooms, and constantly tried to collect new and interesting samples.
Her main weakness was that she couldn’t exactly control where the spores went once she released them, so she could accidentally spread them to her allies. Toki mostly recommended reading on lab safety and sterilization to try and remedy it, but there was no miracle solution.
She did advise Komori to look up hallucinogen mushrooms. Not that being covered in fungus wasn’t already good, but… it could be cool too, additionally, to make your opponent trip balls.
Just saying.
It was nice. She was taking a step back from the ever-present worry of dealing with Meteor (facing him, being sure he was alright, wondering what place he could have in her life, or if he ever wanted to) and reconnecting with things she liked. Like hero work, or teachings.
It suddenly reminded her that there was another person she was supposed to teach, and she had completely forgotten about him. Bakugo.
Aw, crap.
Ok, technically she would only meet him in the summer, but she had vaguely planned on… you know, dropping by, being nosy. Except she hadn’t had the time. Really, she had enough on her plate without adding Naruto Labs to it. Should she still check on him? See if Okamoto was there? Wait, no, it was a very bad idea to meet Okamoto right now. That man could read into your very soul to detect lies and suspicions. Toki was a good actor, but if they met, Okamoto would probably guess that her mistrust wasn’t just the remainder of her harsh training but the product of a more recent discovery, and then… he would cover his tracks.
That didn’t suit Toki at all. She hadn’t managed to extract any more information from Aizawa. She needed to have something damning before going up to the President and nicely asking for Okamoto’s head on a spike.
Unless the President was on board with Okamoto on that one. But then, Toki doubted it. If the President already had a mole in Yūei, she wouldn’t have bothered to send Toki there.
And even if she had known and agreed with the scheme of Okamoto’s, the President couldn’t admit it. Not to Toki, not when she already had so much blackmail material.
Whatever. Point was, Toki pondered going to Naruto Labs and decided that it could wait. Maybe she would wait until summer, but maybe she could drop off after the Sports Festival. If she took half the day off, she could pop in and investigate at her leisure.
Hey, she may even get Titania’s autograph! The ex-heroine, previously Number Ten, was Naruto Labs’ new trainer. Toki had only met her once, at a hero gala and from what she remembered, Titania was a very zen person, who did yoga and seemed completely unperturbable. Either she was perfect for Bakugo, or he hated her guts. Or both. In any case, that would be fun to watch.
Anyways. A few days later, Toki was also reminded of someone else she was supposed to meet, and had totally forgotten…
________________
> PinkIsPunkRock: So I’m going on week-end with my girlfriend, any recommendation?
< Antares: … omg I completely forgot but weren’t we supposed to meet her?
> PhantomOfTheOpera: I wasn’t aware of that
> Moxie: oh no it’s just that Pink is Antares’ ex
> PhantomOfTheOpera: WHAT
< Antares: We just had ONE DATE! Chill!
> Megamind: for a romantic getaway I suggest the Cat Island!
> PinkIsPunkRock: not taking advice from the celibate high-schooler
> Megamind: fuck you
> EndeavorSucks: why not just bring her flowers and Netflix and Chill? 😁
> NotOnFire: flowers are gross
> EndeavorSucks: ?????
> EndeavorSucks: no they are not?!??
> NotOnFire: uuuuuh yes?
> NotOnFire: Plants: oh i'm gonna wave my genitals in the air
> NotOnFire: Humans: mmm fragrant
> PikaPika : why are you always so goddamn weird
> PinkIsPunkRock: … i didn’t think someone could make me rethink buying flowers and YET
> NotOnFire: especially since i’m rarely wrong =D
> EndeavorSucks: you said all might was a alien shapeshifter from another world and that’s why we know nothing about him
> NotOnFire: I said RARELY wrong
> PinkIsPunkRock: i can’t believe i came here for romantic advice. after all those years you would think that I know better.
> SpicyWings: The observatory tower in Osaka?
> PinkIsPunkRock: THANK YOU
> PinkIsPunkRock: at least one of you isn’t useless at this romantic thing. Takes note, Antares!
< Antares: rude
< Antares: also SpicyWings aren’t you supposed to be patrolling
> SpicyWings: i can do both
> SpicyWings: for your information I’m also browsing my email AND saving a cat from a tree AND stopping a robbery AND making my coworkers feel appreciated!
< Antares: you’re bickering with Ocelot aren’t you
> SpicyWings: we’re in a heated debate about how humanity has devised no greater test of cunning and persistence in the face of adversity than trying to operate the temperature controls of an unfamiliar shower. I have no idea how we ended up on that topic but I’m not gonna lose.
> PinkIsPunkRock: I can’t believe you two clowns are what’s holding the darkness of villainy at bay
> EndeavorSucks: I can
> EndeavorSucks: I mean heroes are all nuts. or freaks. or BOTH. Come on, considering Endeavor’s flaming tiddies, All Might’s suit literally painted on his ass, Mirko getting into a fight over a carrot cake recipe last thursday, Best Jeanist’s puns that take five years off my life each time I hear them, do you honestly think heroism is fit for sane individuals?
> Megamind: …
> SpicyWings: …
< Antares: …
> PhantomOfTheOpera: well the good thing is that we never claimed to be sane in the first place, so
> EndeavorSucks: is that supposed to reassure me?!
< Antares: oh btw, from a civilian point of view, I would like your opinions on Endeavor, if you have time to send me a PM
> EndeavorSucks: ????
> PinkIsPunkRock: why?
< Antares: reasons.
________________
oOoOoOo
Toki wouldn’t say she was obsessive. Buts he was aware that she could kind of hyper-focus on things, sometimes. And her new fixation was Endeavor.
Keigo was both thrilled and vaguely put out.
In any case, her Discord friends had plenty to say about Endeavor. He was brash, rude, and angry. He disliked interviews and he scorned galas and charities (although he poured a lot of money into them, but apparently it was his PR department who signed the checks). He was efficient. He was rigid, unflinching, and an utterly unrivaled fighter.
He took his responsibilities seriously as the Number One hero. He had been very bitter about obtaining the title without winning it, but he seemed to have… maybe not mellowed, but calmed a little. He was still terse and angry, but less prone to lashing out. He was more stoic. More willing to give other people a chance. He still didn’t team up with many other heroes, but his agency had spread out to offer support to others after the HPSC started pushing for more unity.
Melissa, who had interned with him, also pointed out that he wasn’t the Number One for nothing. In terms of combat abilities, he was standing a good head and shoulders above the others heroes.
His career was exceptional. Before Endeavor, Fire Quirks were considered bordering on villainous. Inferno had mentioned it, once. Toki should have paid more attention. It made sense, of course: unlike other Emitter Quirks, flames could go out of control. Fire couldn’t distinguish between friend and foe and consumed everything in its path. It spread, it flared up, and it could be carried by the wind. The hero’s weapon could turn into a natural disaster faster than you could blink. It only took a second. A hero with a fire Quirk couldn’t have anything less than excruciatingly perfect levels of control at all times, under all conditions.
Endeavor hadn’t been the first hero with a Fire Quirk. But before him, none of these heroes had ever broken into the Top Fifty. Endeavor getting in the Top Ten had been a Big Thing.
Of course, Endeavor hadn’t brought peace like All Might, or hope for the less favored like Melissa, or anything like that. He was too gruff and threatening to be marketable. But he was powerful, controlled, unrelenting, and talented. The living proof that real people, with flaws and unperfect Quirks and unperfect tempers, could thrive in heroism. His meteoric rise through the hero rankings, right after graduation, with an almost villainous Quirk, had shaken Japan to its core.
Sure, it had been thirty years ago, so it was basically ancient history now: but the impact had been real.
Endeavor had changed the way people viewed fire Quirks. He had changed the way people viewed flashy and dangerous Quirks, actually; he had normalized it, almost. You didn’t have to have a perfect Quirk to make your way into heroism. You only needed to be strong, and to make yourself strong. A lot of people with limitations and drawbacks to their powers had identified with him, with his struggle, with how he fought bitterly and mercilessly to gain every inch of ground, and how he had to earn his rank against such adversity.
It was… kind of humbling to read about it. Toki hadn’t been aware of how much Endeavor had shaped the world, even before becoming Number One.
PinkIsPunkRock, or rather Sachiko, was strangely insightful about Endeavor recently. And not just about his work ethic, but about his personality.
He was practical and work-oriented; a non-nonsense Number One who didn’t care about popularity or gossip, only about efficiency and success. He was strong and methodical about it. He focused on the world around him, on what was and not what could be, constantly absorbing and processing data so he could get the job done and produce practical results. Not a lot of patience for distractions. A great love of challenges, a constant hunger for triumph and self-validation and the rest of the world could go hang.
Sachiko didn’t mention a Quirk-marriage or anything. But she did suggest that his life outside of work must be non-existent. That he was separated from his wife, and probably not close with his children. That the kids were probably resentful of their absent father, and said absent father was maybe going to finally reconcile with them since he was finally Number One.
It was almost as if she had some insider knowledge.
But no, she couldn’t. She didn’t suggest anything about an abusive household. As if it didn’t cross her mind. Since Sachiko was always prompt to see the worst in a situation and to be indignant about it, there was no way she would have let it lie if she had even an inkling about what had gone down in this family. Maybe she just had really good instincts.
(One day Toki was seriously going to check if Sachiko was a vigilante. She was way too knowledgeable about some stuff.)
But reading the opinions of strangers about Endeavor wasn’t going to help Toki form her own opinion. She needed to meet the guy… or at least talk with people who knew him.
“Do you intend to meet him?” Keigo blinked. “I mean, your father has been with him for a year, at that point. I’m just surprised that you’re getting invested now.”
“Well, now I know my father is invested,” Toki shrugged. “Before, I figured he was just biding his time before trying to make a run for it, and then Endeavor would stop him and send him back to prison. Now… if he isn’t going to escape, what is his goal? That’s what I can’t figure out.” She paused, then reluctantly admitted: “And if he’s friends with Endeavor, he’s not going to jump ship. He’s very loyal. So I want to be sure he isn’t… being taken advantage of, or something.”
Keigo looked distinctively unimpressed.
“I assure you; your dad is not some defenseless maiden. He’s exactly where he wants to be. I mean, he was an S-ranked villain. He should be in jail or at least watched like a hawk by a gaggle of pissed-off and mistrustful heroes. Instead, he’s walking at Endeavor’s shoulder in broad daylight! Ok, not really broad daylight, he’s avoiding cameras. But… he’s making plans with him, being trusted like… like a second-in-command or… or like an underground hero.” Keigo looked like he had an epiphany. “Yes, that’s it. He has the same role as Hayasa-sensei! Or Salamander at Inferno’s agency!”
Toki tried to imagine it. It took some effort, but she could, to her great displeasure. Meteor had been an information broker in his spare time. Running around the neighborhood pulling strings, collecting rumors, tying a little net of intel and alliances.
But maybe a comparison with Salamander wasn’t the best choice of words. After all, Toki was 99% sure that Salamander and Inferno were dating.
“Yeah, and I get what Endeavor is getting out of this arrangement,” she muttered. “He has an underground hero who is both deeper underground than any other hero, and one he doesn’t have to pay. I don’t know what Meteor is getting out of it, though. What does he want, that Endeavor also wants, to make them work together like this?”
“Maybe he wants a safer society?” Keigo grinned.
Toki snorted. “That would be funny.”
Meteor didn’t care about governments or institutions. He cared about people. His people, specifically. The rest of the world could burn.
“What are you going to do, then?” Keigo asked curiously.
“Well, I’m going to pester Mera-san to learn what kind of case Meteor is consulting about, lately. Want to help?”
“Oh, hell yeah.”
And so they went.
It was funny, in a way. Toki didn’t know a lot of people in the HPSC. Maybe ten, fifteen persons that she knew by name. The ones she had a close relationship with could be counted on the fingers of one hand… but these people were at the top of the hierarchical ladder. And the weird thing was that Toki had managed to keep a close relationship with them for years, securing herself trusted allies.
Kameko for example. She had been a tiny kitten, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, hired fresh out of high school. And now, she managed one of the top agencies in Japan and had her fingers in a lot of pies. She basically supervised all heroic activity in the prefecture! And she had stayed friends with Toki all along. It was in no small part because of Kameko’s ambitions, true. The cat lady was well-aware that Toki had been her springboard to success. But the end result was the same. They had known each other for over a decade, and it created a solid bond. Kameko owed loyalty to the Commission above Toki, but she was still her friend.
Then there was Mera-san, who had been an HR manager when Toki had met him. Not the bottom of the barrel, true, but not very high up either. Solid middle of the pack. And yet, he was diligent and reliable, and more importantly, Genmei-san trusted him, so he had made his way up. Maybe he would have forgotten all about the scrawny kid he had picked up from a cat café in Musutafu, but he hadn’t. He had worried about her, worried enough to suspect her kidnapping… and try to make things right.
When Toki had been placed under his care, she had wondered about his hands-off approach. But it made a great deal of sense when you thought about his motives. Mera-san had wanted her to be completely free. He had wanted her to be able to take everything she could (money, a new heart, weapons) and run for the hills if she wanted, because he felt like the HPSC owed her that right. And if the HPSC wasn’t going to let her, then he would, personally. Even if it was his neck on the line.
Genmei-san… Genmei-san was a special case. Toki didn’t know if she could say they were close. They weren’t friends. They weren’t enemies either. They were allies. They both had way too much ammunition against the other, and yet they looked out for each other. And yes, Toki wasn’t blinded by resentment to the point of ignoring that Genmei-san had looked out for her. It was thanks to the Commission that Toki had her job, a place in Yūei, that she had managed to disappear during her pregnancy.
Point was, Toki didn’t know many people in the Commission, but those she did know were very high up. It was nice, to be cozy in the seat of power. She should make an effort to be friendly with the rest of the Commission’s Council.
Maybe it would come in handy when she would destroy Okamoto’s career. Ahahah.
(Also, Aizawa wasn’t doing anything suspicious, so Toki was kind of bumped about her plan to find proof of blackmail. In canon, had Aizawa even been Okamoto’s spy? Maybe he had, but he had stalled and given as little information as he could. From the way Aizawa had immediately balked when Toki had brought up their past, it didn’t sound like he liked Okamoto very much. Maybe Toki could use that. Ask him to implicate Okamoto and watch him go down in flames? But then… maybe Aizawa would immediately sell her out to Okamoto. Okamoto was a jackass, but he was good at his job and at cultivating alliances, after all, and Aizawa had known him for over a decade. Toki was just some arrogant hotshot who had managed to annoy half the staff at Yūei.)
(Man, when did workplace politics get so complicated?!)
Anyways. The occasion to go and bother Mera-san came quicker than Toki would have thought.
As a high-ranked dude in the HPSC, Mera-san was all over the place, going from one city to another to supervise various operations, to head meetings, and represent the President when big decisions were made with commercial partners. The next time he found himself in Kyūshū, on the very first day of May, Toki popped in just to say hi, and brought Keigo along because he was bored (and also kind of interested in the Meteor case).
She had expected to have to grill him for a while before he would cough up anything useful. Mera-san liked her, but he was smart, professional, and excellent at keeping secrets. So she was fairly surprised when, after the usual small talk, she innocently asked him what was Meteor up to, and Mera-san immediately narrowed his eyes.
“Did Mercury put you up to this?”
Both Toki and Keigo mimed zipping their lips. No snitching. And inwardly they were both screaming because what, Hayasa-sensei was involved somehow?! Would the plot twists never end?!
“It’s confidential,” Mera-san groused.
“You can tell us!” assured Toki.
“Yeah, the case is closed, right?” Keigo smiled brightly, confident, and cocky.
Mera-san stared at them suspiciously. They both blinked back, looking as guiltless as humanly possible.
“Alright,” Mera-san finally caved in. “Yes, it’s the Kuma case, and yes, it’s closed now. Well, at least Kuma is in Tartarus and we can focus on managing the aftermath. That’s why I asked for Mercury’s file about it last month. Turns out, not only Kuma was real, but she has kidnapped about four hundred people. Only a dozen underground heroes had open investigations on her, and even by pulling all their files, we still don’t have an extensive list of her victims. We’re still… triaging.”
Toki’s smile became slightly fixated.
Kuma was an underground villain. Toki knew about it only because Hayasa-sensei knew, or rather because Hayasa-sensei was one of the few heroes who really believed Kuma was real, and not just an urban legend. Her Quirk was to imprison things in little glass globes, in suspended animation. Flowers, trees, sculptures, animals, people. Kuma was considered an urban legend because she had been active for several decades without being caught, and the sheer scale of her actions was just overwhelming. The only reason she was known was because a few of her little snow globes had ended up tossed away over the years, and broke accidentally, liberating deeply traumatized victims.
If Kuma had been arrested… if she had had a few hundred little trophies like that… holy shit. Holy shit.
And Endeavor had arrested her? Endeavor, helped by Meteor?
The realization struck Toki like a piano dropping from the fifth floor.
That was it, that was their goal, that had been the goal all along! Keigo had suggested it a year ago when they had been trying to guess Endeavor’s motives in getting Meteor out of jail. He had wondered why they were so ostensibly teaming up and wondered what, or who, their target was. He theorized that it could be an underground villain, some big threat All Might hadn’t eliminated.
And it was. He was fucking right.
They had targeted Kuma and they weren’t done. Did that mean they were going after the underground villains?!
It was… actually, it fitted perfectly. They were going after villains that limelight heroes couldn’t arrest because they didn’t have the right skill set or contacts, and that underground heroes were too weak to stop. Meteor had the intel and the skills, and Endeavor had the raw strength and the legitimacy. Together they were unstoppable. An underground informant with enough strength to be a powerhouse of his own, and a limelight hero with colossal means and a destructive Quirk to boost. What kind of villain could stand in the way of such a team?
And suddenly, Toki could almost see it, the reason why Meteor stuck to Endeavor and why Endeavor helped Meteor. Because she knew, intimately, how it felt. That exhilarating thrill of having a common goal and perfectly complementary skills, to move as one, to fight and win, and never have to slow down for the other. To have a teammate on your level with the same thirst for speed and victory.
“Though case,” Keigo said with commiseration, always the smooth talker. “And that’s why there is such a seal of secrecy, I suppose? Finding out any detail is hard.”
“I should hope so. If the public were to find out that Kuma operated for thirty years and limelight heroes were completely in the dark about it… There would be riots.”
“To be honest that would be the reaction if most underground villains were revealed,” pointed Keigo. “They’re like serial killers.”
“Serial killers are a known quantity. They happen, the police investigate, they leave trails, and heroes chase them. They don’t usually have big tallies. Someone like Kuma…” Mera-san shook his head. He looked even more exhausted than usual. “The way she managed to fly under the radar is already scary enough, but the number of victims is chilling. I’ll be glad if I never see another case like that.”
“No kidding,” Toki muttered.
Mera-san shot her a strange look. Then he groaned and rubbed his forehead.
“Damn it, I forgot. Taiyōme. Of course, you’d be interested in that case.”
Toki blinked a few times, trying to understand what he meant. Then it dawned on her, and she had to bite back a snort of laughter:
“You forgot I was his daughter?”
“Hey, I’m used to thinking of you as Quantum!” Mera-san defended himself. “I had actually completely forgotten about your relation until I came face to face with him, and even then, it didn’t compute until I saw him taunt Kuma on her way to the police van.”
“He was there?” Toki asked sharply.
Mera-san looked at her strangely. “Yes, he was. Kuma nearly captured him, and Endeavor saved him.”
He had been what?!
“How could Endeavor let that happen?” she exclaimed, her voice a little shriller than she would have liked. “He’s supposed to watch him!”
Mera-san suddenly looked supremely uncomfortable.
“Look, it’s not your case, I already told you a lot. Anyway, your father is fine, Quantum, and Kuma is behind bars. So please, drop it.”
But Toki was already drawing her own conclusions. Had Meteor tried to escape with Kuma? Or had he become careless? Or worse, had Endeavor used him as bait? No, wait, that wasn’t Endeavor’s style. But then, had Endeavor been careless? That was so irresponsible of him!
At least, now, she felt less jittery, having a better understanding of what had pushed those two together. They were aiming towards the same goal, they had complementary skills, and they may be the only ones who could keep up with each other. Meteor had always been a very big fish in a very small pond. He had to relish the challenge, the sheer exhilaration of not holding back and having someone who kept pace with him.
And Endeavor… well, he wasn’t very friendly, but he had been one of the first Top Ten heroes to endorse the idea of teamwork when the HPSC had started pushing for it. He didn’t hate other people… he was just picky about who could support him and who could keep up with him.
In canon, he had worked well with Hawks. And he had led an army with no difficulty, giving orders and managing a crowd of fighters with ease and decisiveness. He was a good leader. No matter how much his personality was flaming garbage, he knew how to rely on other people. It was just hard for him to find people who could reach his standards.
But Meteor apparently did, somehow. And why not? He was so strong. If he had been a hero, he would easily be in the Top Ten. Hell, Toki had trouble imagining anyone beating him, apart from All Might, Endeavor… maybe Keigo…
… And maybe her. If she didn’t collapse into a nervous wreck at the idea.
(Toki was strong. She knew she was strong. She had beaten All Might and she was probably one of the most dangerous fighters in Japan. But there was something about the idea of fighting Meteor that made her break into a cold sweat.)
Anyways. They left Mera-san alone, and the very next day, when Toki went to Musutafu for her lesson at Yūei, she dropped off Keigo somewhere in Shizuoka so he could officially chase a lead about his case…
… and unofficially, so he could pester Endeavor into revealing what was his plan and why the fuck he was targeting underground villains.
Unlike the last time Keigo had been in Shizuoka, Toki wasn’t paralyzed by anxiety. She felt more at ease now that she knew what Meteor was after. She didn’t know why he was after it, true, but it was still something.
Besides, she had something else to focus on. Nedzu had announced that the Sports Festival would be held at the end of the month.
It had been pushed back three weeks or so. Apparently, it was a huge concession. It wasn’t enough to satisfy Toki, who would have wanted the event canceled entirely, but nobody listened to her about it. Oh, well. If Bakugo wasn’t at Yūei, it lessened the chances of Shigaraki deciding to go and capture one of the kids. And if he did decide to go down that path, well, at least Toki would be there, and the children wouldn’t be sitting ducks.
The kids she had recommended for Quirk-counselling had all gone for one meeting. But that was it. Either Hound Dog hadn’t managed to persuade them of the usefulness of his advice, or they were all too defensive to accept they needed help. No matter. If Hound Dog couldn’t help, Toki would make sure she could. And not just about Quirk-analysis, but about their overall fitness for survival, too.
That day, she centered her lesson on Quirk-analysis on ‘how to best use your Quirk to escape a hopeless fight’. She tried to be subtle, but Hitoshi at least definitively knew something was up.
Anyway, when Toki went to pick up Keigo and they went home, she was pretty satisfied with her day. It had been productive. But it didn’t take her long to see the slight tenseness behind Keigo’s cheerful façade.
Oh, he was a brilliant actor. He was even smarter and more adaptable than his canon counterpart, and canon-Hawks had conned the entire League of Villains and the Meta-Liberation Army. But Toki knew him inside-out, the smallest twitch of an eyebrow, the faintest pitch in his voice, the warmth in his eyes, the invisible tells between one glance and the next.
She was good at people-watching. But with Keigo, she barely had to watch. They knew each other so well.
“Did Endeavor call you on your bluff?” she asked worriedly, passing him a cup of his favorite coffee.
Keigo blinked, and his easy smile came back. It was more sincere, now.
“Nah, he didn’t guess a thing. But he’s definitively after underground villains. Maybe Switchblade, or the hero killer. I may have implied that we wanted to snatch Meteor from him to go after the Ghost Arsonist, and he went all pissed and defensive.”
Toki nodded with satisfaction.
“Well, it’s nice to have puzzled out his motive, at least.”
Meteor hadn’t had many enemies, from what she remembered. But then, she hadn’t been that involved in the crew’s politics. Maybe Meteor did have an enemy he wanted taken down. If it was an underground villain… well, Endeavor would be happy to help.
It actually made a lot of sense for Endeavor to go after underground villains. He didn’t care about glory or prestige, but about strength, about victory. Now that All Might had cleaned Japan from most of the limelight villains, the only big boogeymen around were the underground villains. Endeavor would not only be furious to discover that S-ranked threats still thrived just under his nose, but also elated at the idea of destroying enemies that All Might had clearly failed to notice.
Then Toki saw that Keigo was watching her intently. He didn’t seem tense or nervous, only… weirdly contemplative, with his eyes narrowed, and a pensive frown on his face. Like he was pondering odds in his head.
“What?” she frowned. “Did you see my father? Did he say anything? You’re being weird.”
Keigo exhaled slowly.
“Sorry. It’s just… well, the first thing is probably nothing. I’m going to need to investigate a little more before I tell you something completely stupid, though.”
Maybe he had found out a lead about Meteor’s motivation, then. Maybe overheard him talking to someone else at the agency. Or caught him calling or texting a villain accomplice. Or doing something he shouldn’t. But- if it had been something villainous, Keigo would have told her straight away. He would have tried to be as nice as possible about it, too, with all sorts of kind words and soft smiles.
There was no smile here. He just looked wary… and almost uncomfortable. Uh. That was new.
“You said the first thing,” she narrowed her eyes. “What’s the second?”
Keigo rubbed his neck. His cup of coffee stayed untouched.
“Welllllllll,” he drawled. “You remember when you said that there was no way Meteor would ever be a hero?”
“Yes, and I stand by that.”
“Endeavor disagrees. He’s going to petition the judge for Meteor’s early release and ask the HPSC to make him an underground hero.”
He was going to what?!
oOoOoOo
So, apparently, it hadn’t been some long-con by Meteor, to buy his freedom instead of fighting his way out.
It could have been! But it wasn’t. The idea came from Endeavor himself. Toki had no idea why he was so generous. Honestly, it would have been in Endeavor’s best interest to not change his deal with Meteor, and to keep all the power in that relationship. It was baffling. By making Meteor a free man and a licensed hero, Endeavor was giving him way more freedom than a murderer deserved.
Meteor could run away! He could use his license to spy on people and rob them! He could-he could do plenty of terrible, criminal stuff! Licenses were for people who protected the public! Not for people who took advantage of it!
Keigo pointed out that Meteor protected the public, now. But it only made Toki seethe, because… in the past, Meteor hadn’t cared to make the slightest effort about that. He hadn’t even cared about collateral damage.
Now, he actively helped people. He arrested villains, he followed heroic rules of conduct, he didn’t kill, and he didn’t even injure his opponents. Okay, yes, some part of Toki had desperately wished for it; for him to be better, to have a second chance, to earn this! But… but… Somehow made Toki’s eyes sting with tears of frustration with the unfairness of it. It was one thing to hope for it. It was another to hear it was happening, that someone else was responsible for it, that she hadn’t even seen it happen, and that she hadn’t even believed it could really happen. Because… because…
If Meteor had changed, that meant he had always had that capacity to change. And he hadn’t. With the crew, during all this time, he hadn’t. Toki had yelled, begged, and argued, and he hadn’t changed. So why now? Why now, and not then?
Why hadn’t she been able to make him change? She was his daughter. Hadn’t he loved her enough to make the effort?
Hadn’t she been enough?
“You were eight, Toki,” Keigo said. His golden eyes were dark and serious. “If he chose to do wrong, back then, then it was his responsibility. It wasn’t on you.”
Toki set her jaw and morosely pushed away a stack of paperwork.
She knew she shouldn’t feel guilty. It was very self-centered of her, to think that Meteor’s actions were related to her in any way. Bad people didn’t change when you tried to guilt them into it, when you berated them, threatened them, angered them, or begged them. There was only one thing that could make them change, and that was their own realization. Their own desire to shred their old skin.
That’s how canon-Endeavor had changed, after all. No matter how much his wife had pleaded, no matter how much damage he had dished out to his kids… none of them had managed to change him. Nobody, not even canon-Hawks, had placed Endeavor on the path to redemption: he had done that by himself, by realizing on his own that he could do better.
Hey, that gave him another common trait with Meteor. Former assholes trying to atone for their past crimes.
She rubbed her forehead, feeling exhausted all of sudden.
“Are you alright?” Keigo added after a second of hesitation.
“I’m- not sure.”
It was the missing puzzle piece. The reason why Meteor was keeping his end of the deal. The reason why Endeavor trusted him. Meteor had changed. She was still a little befuddled by the why, and the why now, but the facts remained. He wasn’t the man Toki remembered. Maybe he still had the same brutality, but he had different priorities, now. He cared. He tried. He was… better.
She hadn’t expected this in any way, shape, or form. She had wished for it, but it had been distant and vague. Toki hadn’t believed he was truly capable of changing. Not like canon-Endeavor had gone from ‘abusive asshole’ to ‘repentant dad’. It was too big, too huge. It sounded fantastical. It didn’t fit with her understanding of who her father was.
But well, people assessed probabilities incorrectly. They displayed confirmation bias, they tested hypotheses inefficiently, and they didn’t properly calibrate degrees of belief. They projected their own opinions onto others, they allowed prior knowledge to become implicated in deductive reasoning…
The point was that people messed up. Toki was no exception.
“I could always sabotage him,” she said, slowly. “Like I almost sabotaged his release.”
Keigo blinked. “Would you?”
“No,” Toki admitted. “I want him to be free. I want him to have changed. I just have a hard time believing it. Or rather, I believe it and I just don’t want to. It’s just- it hurts, that he could only get better by being free of me.”
“That’s not what’s happening,” Keigo retorted sharply. “You know that.”
Toki closed her eyes.
“I know.” Her voice broke. “I just feel so stupid. I’m not going to be able to avoid him much longer, if he’s freed, am I?”
“Do you want to avoid him?”
“I want to avoid the pain,” she confessed. “I know it’s going to hurt. My anger, his anger, our faults, our accusations. But I think- I think I want closure more than I want to avoid that pain. It’s so exhausting, to always be afraid of being hurt.”
She wanted to forgive him, to be forgiven. To forgive herself. To stop hurting, plainly. She rubbed her eyes with a deep, exhausted sigh. Damnit, she was going to have to face him, wasn’t she? Just like she had to face All Might to start letting go of her anger, to start healing from that old wound.
“Well,” Toki tried to say more lightly. “At least I don’t have to worry about Endeavor taking advantage. If he’s willing to give Meteor back his freedom, he must hold him in higher esteem than I gave him credit for.”
Keigo coughed awkwardly. “Yeah, there’s that, at least.”
It had been weighing on her, Toki realized. In a way, it was a relief to know that Meteor (no matter her issues with him) wasn’t exploited in some way.
Endeavor had honor. Toki felt a little bad for judging him so harshly before. She didn’t even know the guy. Clearly, she had allowed her prejudices from her canon knowledge to color her opinion.
Yeah, he had abused his family. But from what Toki remembered from the anime, his harsh training wasn’t so different from what young Olympic hopefuls were subjected to when their parents trained them. It was harsher than Hayasa-sensei’s training, but not by much. The main difference was that Hayasa-sensei had always been nice and encouraging, instead of being an asshole. And Hobo-san had been way more violent than Endeavor had been with Shouto.
“I’m going to continue investigating him anyway,” Keigo said with a reassuring smile. “Freeing Meteor surely won’t be an easy process. It will probably take a few weeks, and the HPSC is going to fight it every step of the way.”
“Oh, that’s for sure.”
The HPSC didn’t like having Meteor free. They didn’t like the importance he had for Toki. But also, they had tried to buy Toki from him once and failed, hence the whole kidnapping. Inevitably, one day, Meteor was going to find out.
Maybe he had changed, maybe he wasn’t a killer anymore, maybe he didn’t really care about finding out what had happened to his daughter. Maybe. But Toki wouldn’t bet money on him keeping a cool head about that.
(She was ten times nicer than Meteor had ever been, and if someone tried to kidnap her own daughter, Toki would still rip them limb from limb.)
“Exactly,” nodded Keigo. “And Endeavor is going to fight them with witnesses and statements, defend his corner. I can keep you updated.”
“You just want to see Endeavor again,” Toki accused him with a smirk.
“Ah, busted!”
Toki sniggered. Keigo could be such a fanboy sometimes. Honestly, it was kind of fascinating. Toki had never idolized a grown-up when she had been a kid, so she didn’t have this experience of letting the idea of a person take so much place in her life. You would think that meeting your heroes would be disappointing, but… Keigo didn’t act disappointed. On the contrary, he had been thrilled to meet Endeavor. It was a little baffling: the Flame Hero certainly wasn’t the friendliest.
Then Keigo grew serious again and went back to their initial topic.
“But, for real. To let an S-ranked villain go free isn’t going to be smooth sailing. Endeavor is going to need the judge’s approval, but also the HPSC. Plenty of things could go wrong. Maybe he won’t be released, you know.”
Toki nodded, slowly.
“Yeah, I guess so. But… the idea has been planted, right? Even if the judge says no, the cat is out of the bag. Meteor is good enough to be considered for release by Endeavor himself, the Number One. It’s a big deal.” She winced. “I can’t keep my head in the sand much longer. I tried to avoid him because I felt unsafe at first, then it was because I didn’t want to fuck up his rehabilitation, and then because I didn’t think he could handle it… but he can. He has changed, he’s not the same person, and he’s not out for vengeance. I’m just looking for excuses.”
“You don’t have to rush. What about… you’ll meet him after he gets his license? That way, you get a deadline, but you’re not rushed into it.”
“I guess.” She sighed, then smiled sheepishly. “Sorry to drag you into the Taiyōme drama.”
“Hey, I’m a Taiyōme too, you know.”
“Still. I hoped I could spare you that. Parents are-” she made a face, “-complicated.”
Keigo made a noise of assent. He had no contact with his parents, either, and still, Toki knew their ghosts lingered. Keigo had been all too happy to give up his last name; he loathed the burden of being a Takami. He hated his old man. And his mother hadn’t been very nurturing, to say the least. She had basically sold him to the HPSC after all.
But… Keigo hadn’t burned his bridges like Toki had. He had cut off his mother peacefully, almost. She had gotten checks for his whole childhood. When Keigo had decided he didn’t want her to leech anymore, he had quietly said something to the President, and she had been the one to handle the transaction. The money had stopped coming. Keigo’s mom hadn’t tried to reach out even once. Toki sometimes wished she would have had a separation as easy as this one.
But Keigo wasn’t her. His mom wasn’t Sayuri. His reasons for cutting her off weren’t the same as Toki’s. And she wondered, sometimes…
“Do you ever wonder about your own parents? About what they’re doing, if they have changed? If you ever want to reconnect?”
Keigo shrugged. “Not really.”
“Oh.”
“I still feel responsible for my mother,” he added more hesitantly. “When I was little, she was- she said- there were times where I felt like I was only worth something if I was useful to her, you know? It wasn’t a good feeling, exactly. But when I failed short of her expectations, when I didn’t bring food or money… being useful felt like a good feeling in comparison.” He snorted. “Not that it was a high bar to clear.”
He didn’t mention his father and Toki didn’t insist. The Thief Takami had been an asshole. He beat Keigo, treated him like trash, and he hated him. There had been no paternal feelings there, not at all. Keigo had once said it had been like sharing the cage of a hostile animal, nothing more and nothing less.
Keigo drank his coffee, slowly. It probably wasn’t hot anymore. But he looked like he needed something to do with his hands.
“I regret not keeping tabs on her sometimes,” Keigo suddenly said. “I know she makes me vulnerable. But she’s still worth protecting, worth saving. Everybody is worth saving. And she needed help.”
She had had help. Keigo’s mother had received a big monetary compensation every month, from the day she entrusted her son’s care to the HPCS to the day he turned eighteen. That was a lot of cash money. Tomie Takami may have been poor and desperate when Keigo left her, but she hadn’t been ever again.
“I could try to look into her if you want?” Toki impulsively offered.
Keigo looked startled, then fond.
“You don’t have to. It’s stupid of me to feel guilty about it.”
“I know. But you won’t have to feel guilty about it if I’m taking care of it, right? And I want to. It won’t bother me.”
“Alright, fine.” He hesitated a second. “Thank you.”
For a few seconds, there was silence.
“What a mess,” Toki sighed.
“Mmmh. There’s also the Sports Festival coming up. If you want to fly under Meteor’s radar, just saying, you should tell Monoma to not use Warp-Space.”
That was a very good point and Toki made a mental note of it. She wasn’t sure she was ready to tell her reasons to Neito, but if she asked him to compete without Warp-Space, with only his own Quirk, it wouldn’t be illogical to simply say it was to challenge him to try and win with his own power.
“Noted.” Toki hesitated, then frowned. “Speaking of students, I’m worried they’re going to pick up on the animosity between me and Aizawa. He’s avoiding me like the plague, and when we end up in the same room, you can feel the tension. Someone is bound to notice.”
Keigo shrugged: “Just blackmail him into selling out Okamoto. If there’s no love lost between them, it could work. And bam, problem solved.”
“I’m keeping that as a Plan B.”
But she didn’t want to burn that bridge yet. If she had to keep working with Aizawa in Yūei, maybe it would be best to not go straight for a direct confrontation.
Not that she enjoyed working with him. He was a jackass and a too-harsh teacher. He played favorites, he stuck his head in the sand, he had more prejudice than he was willing to admit, and he could be really mean. But Toki liked Yūei. She liked the kids; she liked the place. She liked teaching.
So, no frontal assault it was.
“Besides, I don’t want to make the students feel uncomfortable when they realize mommy and daddy are fighting,” she grinned.
“You’re the only one of us interested in really mentoring the new generation, you know,” Keigo sighed fondly. “The rest of us sponsorship kids are perfectly content without.”
“Inferno-senpai was happy to have a kōhai, you know!”
“Yeah, a fully trained one who could kick ass and who left him alone. A teenager is something else. They are needy.”
Toki playfully tossed a lemon candy at him, and Keigo snatched it out of the air before it could plunge into his coffee cup.
“You and I both have the same weakness for needy people, so you have no room to talk, Keigo.”
“At least I maintain a careful distance instead of diving headfirst into it. Can you imagine if I took on students like you?” He made a face. “I would be pathetically attached within a week. Like that meme with the police lady and the dog. “
Toki carefully didn’t start sniggering, but yeah, it was spot-on. In canon, Keigo… or rather, Hawks… had been very reluctant to take a student. When he had taken on Tokoyami, the main goal had been the press him dry for intel. But he hadn’t been able to stop himself from guiding him, counseling him, helping him grow. He just couldn’t help himself.
Before Tokoyami met Hawks, he was consistently losing control of Dark Shadow after dark. Afterward? He had not only been fighting but flying, and even allowing Dark Shadow to go feral under certain conditions. It had never been outright stated in canon… but Toki was fairly certain that it was Hawks who had taught him that.
Which reminded her that, in the not-so-distant future, maybe she could encourage Keigo to take an intern. But hey, that was a problem for later.
Toki had already a lot on her plate.
Notes:
MWAHAHAHA yes you read that right. Endeavor is working to free Meteor. Not just have him out of prison, under his surveillance; but remove that surveillance alltogether. Having him able to leave if he wants.
It will be expanded on Meteor's POV but... yeah, it's happening.
Spoilers !
That's Enji's solution to the fact that being romantically involved with someone under his power is illegal. He can't get rid of the romantic entanglement so he get rid of the power imbalance.
And also, the end of this chapter is basically this :
Toki: at least i don't have to worry about Meteor being taken advantage of or anything, i now understand that his partnership with Endeavor is 100% professional!
Keigo: *sweating nervously*Keigo what do you know. WHAT DID YOU SEE.
Also did your heart break when Keigo distractedly mentions that in chilhood he equaled 'happiness' with 'the absence of soul-crushing misery' because it was the closest thing he had to joy? Because mine sure did.
Also the next chapter of this fic is called "Sachiko's girlfriend". Try to remember all the clues i gave about Sachiko's girlfriend, and try to predict on a scale of 1 to 10 how likely it is that Toki knows her xD
If you stopped reading Meteor's story at chapter 11 to avoid spoilers of the main fic, here is the time to get back to it.
Chapter 42: Sachiko's girlfrend
Summary:
Toki had been to Sachiko’s apartment a few times, last year, when she was pregnant and lived as Hoshizora. It was a small, cozy place, with art supplies and plans and maps everywhere, some potted plans, wooden furniture, and cherry pink wallpaper. It looked halfway between the base of operation of an enthusiastic private investigator, and the messy but well-lived-in home of a character in a Ghibi movie. But there was no picture of friends or family, and even if Toki had once seen two toothbrushes near the sink, there had never been a clue to the identity or even the presence of the mysterious girlfriend.
Toki should have expected that to change, really.
Notes:
Mwhahahahaha.
(Also, i'm thinking of commissionning some artwork for Wisdom. If you know artists who are open, i'm interested!)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
SACHIKO'S GIRLFRIEND
Preparing the kids for the Sports Festival was fun. A little nerve-wracking, but fun. Ideally, Toki would have liked to train Melissa, too: the older students still had a Sports Festival, after all. But Melissa already had teachers and friends to help. She went to train with Toki once during the weekend, but otherwise, she already had all the help she needed.
Besides, what Toki couldn’t find the time to give in training, she gave it in moral support. Even if she couldn’t see Melissa often, she said hello when they passed each other in the hallways, and they were in touch via the Discord server. It was comforting.
The next week or so, for her lesson with class 1-B Toki decided to pause the Quirk analysis to teach them observation. It honestly baffled her that they never had had this kind of exercise. Seriously, there were some major gaps in their training! Sure, they were only starting out, but… they needed more observational skills. Some acting classes, too, to work on their improv. Be dropped into high-stress situations so they lost the reflex to freeze when panicking. Maybe volunteer at a clinic so they wouldn’t freak out at the sight of blood? Okamoto had had a good idea in making Keigo and Toki work at a veterinarian for a few weeks.
Also, they needed to learn more stealth and martial arts. They needed to know how to work with ropes and knots. How to disarm someone. And gun safety.
Seriously, what was Eraserhead teaching these kids? Or Vlad King? Those skills were kind of crucial!
So, people-watching. What to watch on a person, how to read their body language, and how to predict them. She gave spreadsheets to the kids and let them loose in the school, instructing them to hang out in populated areas such as the cafeteria, and observe people interacting with one another.
“Will it really be useful?” Awase said dubiously.
“Of course! Heroes need to react quickly, and they can react quicker if they can anticipate what will happen. Being able to correctly judge what people think or what they are going to do, can give you a few seconds of advance warning before a crisis. It can maybe even allow you to stop the crisis from happening in the first place!”
“Why is there a line called ‘Eyes’ on that spreadsheet?” Kendo asked with a frown.
Toki made the ‘I'm watching you’ hand signal.
“People look at what they are thinking of. They look at where they’re going, what they think is the biggest threat, and anything that holds their interest. Icarus has a telepath on staff, but unless you have Psyren with you, eye contact is usually your best bet at figuring out what’s going through your target’s mind. Expressions speak the words you want heard, but your eyes tell the real story.”
The lesson went well. Toki let them scatter and during the next two hours, she went from one student to another, asking pointed questions about who they were watching, why, what did they think about it, and what could they extrapolate from their observations.
Some of the kids were very analytical, like little Setsuna Tokage (not surprising for the sister of a low-power hero like Gecko, who used smarts instead of brawn), Kuroiro, and even the hot-headed Kamakiri. Others were less at ease with people, like Kodai or Yanagi. But overall, they did well. They grasped the usefulness of this lesson pretty quickly, too.
Although Toki suddenly realized that collecting their spreadsheets mean grading them, which meant more work. Damn, she should have thought of that before. Oh well, now she knew she wasn’t going to give them an essay to write. She had a feeling that Shiozaki would write fifteen pages. And Manga had, somehow, the most illegible writing she had ever encountered. It looked like hieroglyphs. How.
This lesson went well in class 1-A, too. Or rather, it went well for some, and not as well for others. Yaoyorozu was good. So was Iida, and surprisingly, Aoyama. Todoroki missed half the social clues, sometimes even more, but he wasn’t actually bad at reading implicit messages. He just missed a lot of context clues.
Mineta was blind to anyone who didn’t have boobs, but he was somehow astonishingly attentive to people’s measurements, and to who watched who. Shōji was too focused on what he heard to the detriment of subtle visual clues. Kaminari wasn’t focused enough, his attention veering in all directions. Kirishima was attentive, but he lacked decisiveness. He had seen three people arguing and half his report was about how he had agonized about intervening or not.
It was a stark difference from what he had done at the USJ, jumping at Kurogiri without thinking. Maybe… maybe he thought that his impulsiveness had played a part in Thirteen’s death. If he had let them attack, then…
Toki would have expected Midoriya to excel. But while he noted every detail, he didn’t necessarily interpret them right. He had tunnel vision. His understanding of people was twisted by his own low self-esteem. For example, he tended to over-focus on hostile demeanors, even when the people in question weren’t in his immediate vicinity. He braced for a confrontation and occluded everything else.
It wasn’t impossible to fix, of course. When you pointed out the mistake, he hastily corrected himself. It simply meant that even though things have changed from canon, the life of abuse Midoriya had lived wasn’t fixed so easily.
She mentioned it to All Might, who assured her he was handling it. Toki took his word for it. She wasn’t sure how to approach the problem either. She was no therapist.
Her days were packed to the brim. She was still a top hero with a busy schedule, after all. Patrol, paperwork, and some advertising… but she also had to find the time to work on her Ph.D. She had written pages and pages. But she hadn’t polished it, proofread it, or even structured it. It was just a massive info dump without any sense. She had a full chapter defending one theory and two chapters going in the entirely opposite direction. She even had maybe one or two totally irrelevant sub-sections, and absolutely all of her work had to be trimmed down because she repeated herself a lot.
Long story short: it was a mess.
She also didn’t spend as much time as she should’ve on it. Between hero work and her side investigations, she didn’t have a lot of free time. Toki didn’t really mind. She liked hero work; the fights and the tension, but also the leisurely walks, talking with civilians and compiling clues for her investigations. There had been a new fire, probably linked to Dabi. And Toki was also trying to find Keigo’s mom, which wasn’t as easy as you would believe.
Quantum, like Hawks, lived fast and was always juggling twenty tasks simultaneously. Aizawa was avoiding her (she had even seen him roll under a couch in the teacher’s lounge just as she passed the threshold, it was ridiculous!), so she hadn’t been able to find anything incriminating. The more time passed, and the more Toki considered dropping her baseless suppositions on Genmei-san’s lap and let the President handle it.
Nah. She could still try to have it her way. She was sure of it.
Anyway. One evening, as Toki was just getting home after her evening patrol, she received a call from Sachiko. It was rare. Sachiko and Toki mostly kept in touch via the Discord server, either in the #StarsChickenConspiracy salon or by PM. When Toki’s phone lit up with Sachiko’s name, she stared at it for three full seconds, taken aback. She was in the middle of swapping her hero costume for a more comfortable outfit and shrugged on a sweater as she picked up.
“Hello, Pink. What’s up?”
“Stars!”
Sachiko sounded on the verge of tears, out of breath and her voice shaking: Toki straightened at once, eyes wide, adrenaline flooding her body. She unconsciously switched into hero mode, her voice going low and steady, to be heard and to sound reassuring.
“Are you alright?”
“I’m…” There was noise in the background as if someone was frantically whispering next to Sachiko. Someone was hitting something, pounding on a window maybe? There was muffled yelling. Toki could hear Sachiko take a big, trembling breath. “I need your help. Please, I’m in real trouble, fuck, I think we’re both going to die, one guy has a gun…”
“Where are you.”
Toki didn’t even voice it like a question. She was basically in pajamas, but she warped inside her boots to have some solid footwear and grabbed her orange visor with her connected HUD. The screen flared to life, displaying her location.
“You can’t involve heroism in this, alright?” Sachiko’s voice was high and pleading. “I’m asking my friend, Stars, not some hero. I was doing… It was my fault, not hers. And technically we were trespassing but…”
“I don’t care if you’re a vigilante,” Toki cut her off mid-rant.
“How do you—?!”
“Do you think I’m stupid?” Toki huffed. “I suspected since we met. Now, I’m off-duty, I won’t arrest you, I promise, just tell me where you are.”
Sachiko took a big breath. In the background, Toki could hear a rhythmic banging, as if someone was trying to break down a door. It made her blood turn to ice. Oh, Sachiko, in what clusterfuck did you get into?!
“In Musutafu, there’s a place near the docks with abandoned warehouses, I turned off my GPS so I can’t send you a pin, but it’s the warehouse in blue right next to the one that burned last month, we’re locked inside a car…”
Toki knew where that was. Of course. The last warehouse to burn there had been a few days before the USJ attack, and it had been burned down by blue flames. She swore.
“You were investigating the fucking Ghost Arsonist?! No, don’t say it. I’ll be here in fifteen seconds. Don’t turn off the phone.”
She connected the call to her HUD visor to free her hand, just as Sachiko blurted out:
“There are six guys after us, they’re trying to break the door…!”
“I heard,” Toki said calmly.
She warped.
Musutafu was four hours away in train. With Warp-Space and a collection of lightning-quick jumps in the air, it was barely a few seconds. Toki reappeared above the docks, let herself freefall for about five seconds so she could quickly scan the view and find the warehouse she was looking for, then warped upside down to reverse her momentum, locating an open window in the meantime: and then warped inside that window with a Warp-Blast ready in each hand.
A warehouse didn’t have a complex architecture. It was a big storage space, and eventually one or two smaller closed room. This warehouse was filled with cars. Pretty good condition, except some scratched paint on one or two vehicles: and no license plate anywhere. Car thieves, maybe?
There were six guys crowded around a truck, two of them pounding on the door and the four other circling, yelling, red-faced in anger. A few of those guys had apparently fought: one had a busted nose, another held a hand over what was going to be a spectacular shiner. Another guy was slumped in a corner, unconscious.
Sachiko hadn’t gone down without a fight.
When Toki fell from the roof and landed in a crouch on a refrigerated truck that screeched upon impact, then all turned towards her. One of them had a gun: Toki blasted him first; another guy tried to make a run for it, and she blasted him second.
The other four unfroze and scattered, but Toki was on them in a second. Dodge, jump, hit, swept the legs, twirl out of the way of a knife, hit back. Those weren’t super villains, or even experienced fighters. In ten seconds flat Toki had all of them knocked out. She stood over their sprawled bodies and took a second to calm her racing heartbeat.
Then, she heard the truck’s door open and raised her eyes to Sachiko.
The first thing Toki noticed was that Sachiko was uninjured. She was wearing purple and black sportswear, with a dark baggy jacket over it. Her pink hair was hidden under a baseball cap, and she had a medical mask hiding most of her face (at least she took this vigilante thing seriously) but she seemed alright.
Then Toki noticed that Sachiko wasn’t alone. There was another girl with her. Same height, same stature, and same sportswear but her wide blue eyes seemed younger. She hid her face and her hair, too, with a baseball cap and a black medical mask. An accomplice, or maybe a protegee? She was straying behind Sachiko, posture tense, but eyes wide and scared.
She had blood on her gloves. Toki mentally adjusted her understanding of the situation. It wasn’t Sachiko who had beat up those guys, it was the mystery girl.
Of course. Sachiko has said ‘us’ and ‘we’, and spoken about involving ‘her’. She wasn’t alone in her stupid endeavor. Was it her mysterious girlfriend? Or a family member? Sachiko had always been drawn to people who loved to fight, after all.
“Thank you,” Sachiko said fervently. She still had her phone in one hand. “Thank you, I know you’re mad…”
Toki breached the distance between them and gave her a brief, strong hug. Sachiko made a surprised sound; but her arms closed around Toki immediately, gripping her with surprising strength. She was still trembling faintly.
Toki closed her eyes and breathed deep. Her heart was still beating like crazy. She would forever remember that frantic kick of panic when Sachiko’s voice had come out of the phone, shaky and terrified. If felt exactly like receiving that phone call from Mihoko-san after the USJ’s attack.
“I am so mad at you,” Toki muttered without breaking the hug. “I am going to be on your case forever. But I’m so relieved you’re alright, too.”
Sachiko let out a strangled laugh. “Yeah, me too.”
Toki bit back a nervous chuckle, and stepped back. She raised an eyebrow toward the other girl, the one blue eyes.
“You will have to make introductions… and give me a serious explanation.” At this, Sachiko looked a little sheepish. Toki sighed, forcing her shoulders to relax, and gestured to the knocked-out guys around them “But first, I need to call the police to collect these guys. I have a policy against littering garbage.”
Sachiko sniggered, a little hysterically.
“Fair. Can you drop us off to my apartment first? I don’t want to be there when the police arrive.”
Toki gave an oblique look to the yet-to-be-introduced accomplice, and Sachiko shrugged:
“It’s fine. She knows where I live already.”
“Oh, this is so reassuring,” Toki said sardonically.
But she offered her arm all the same. Sachiko gripped it without hesitation. The other girl wavered a few seconds, but Sachiko made an encouraging noise and, finally, with a deep sigh of resignation, the other girl grabbed Toki’s wrist too.
Through the cotton of her sweater, Toki noticed that her hand was very cold.
Toki had been to Sachiko’s apartment a few times, last year, when she was pregnant and lived as Hoshizora. It was a small, cozy place, with art supplies and plans and maps everywhere, some potted plans, wooden furniture, and cherry pink wallpaper. It looked halfway between the base of operation of an enthusiastic private investigator, and the messy but well-lived-in home of a character in a Ghibi movie. But there was no picture of friends or family, and even if Toki had once seen two toothbrushes near the sink, there had never been a clue to the identity or even the presence of the mysterious girlfriend.
Toki let go of her two passengers in the apartment, then warped back to the warehouse to tidy-up her mess. She texted Keigo to tell him why she wasn’t home. Then she checked her prisoners to be sure none of them were really hurt, before calling to the police as Quantum, saying she had received a tip from a trusted source about an assault and made a civilian arrest. She had knocked out six men but hadn’t seen anyone else. The police thanked her and told her they will be there in five minutes.
Toki quickly used that time to snoop around the warehouse… and found what had probably drawn Sachiko here in the first place.
It was a hidden security camera near the entrance, probably to watch out for interlopers, but whose angle could allow it to see who came up to the next warehouse, the one that had burned down. There may be a good shot of the Ghost Arsonist there.
Well, it was over a month ago, so maybe the camera’s memory had been wiped since then. Toki still took it. You never knew. She just had enough time to warp away before the police arrived.
Sachiko was waiting for her.
She was sitting on her lumpy couch, her right leg bouncing nervously. While Toki was gone, she had removed her silly cap and mask, as well as some layers of her vigilante outfit. In just black leggings and a tank top, Sachiko looked like she had just stepped out of the dojo. It threw Toki back. Her friend-slash-accomplice-slash-maybe-girlfriend wasn’t there, but Toki could hear the shower running.
“So,” she finally said, sitting next to Sachiko. “Want to fill me in?”
Sachiko inhaled slowly. “I guess I owe you that. I… The first thing I have to tell you, though, is that I’m not really a vigilante.”
Toki looked faintly incredulous. “You’re gonna have to be more precise.”
“I do vigilante stuff, sometimes, like punching muggers in the dick, alright? But I’m not planning vast operations or anything. I’m… I’m an information broker, actually. Kind of what I do on Discord you know? Finding conspiracy theories, puzzling out mysteries, and so on. I usually send my findings to hero agencies with a big underground presence, like Black Cloak, and they use my intel to catch bad guys without looking too hard at their source. And that’s all! Today was the first time I joined a heist like that.”
That made more sense. Sachiko’s panic, the stupidity of being cornered when investigating the HQ of a band of thieves at the time of the day when thieves were the most active, the fact that her first reaction had been to back herself in a corner… Sachiko wasn’t an experienced vigilante! Toki didn’t know if she was relieved by that, or incredulous. She had trouble picturing Sachiko not seeking out fights.
“But you love fighting!” Toki blinked.
Sachiko puzzled over that. “That makes me sound like a horrible person.”
“Why?” Toki frowned.
“That I reject peace.”
Toki waved a hand dismissingly.
“Peace, at least in the long term is an illusion. Life, from birth to death, is a fight. Peace— It isn’t the absence of war. It’s building things, making compromises, looking for resources, searching for solutions. It’s not easy. I like that, too: the challenge, the struggle, the possibilities. That’s why I’m a hero after all. I can’t stand idly by when stuff needs to be done. You’re the same. And if I was on the verge of vigilantism at age fourteen, I’m a little surprised that you aren’t actually one.”
Sachiko sighed. “Yeah, I wish. I go into fights regularly, you know. Hell, when I go out at night, I escort girls from bars or nightclubs to their home, you know? There isn’t a week where I don’t beat up someone. But my Quirk makes me pretty horrible at vigilantism; the fighting kind anyway.”
“You never told me what your Quirk is.”
“I didn’t.” Sachiko visibly steeled herself. “It’s a healing Quirk. I can transfer the injuries of the people I touch to myself. The problem is that it self-activates if I keep prolonged contact with someone sufficiently injured. In a dojo, it’s fine, I can disengage when I want. In a real fight, where I can be grabbed and strangled, and where people can pass me real injuries, it’s… basically unsustainable. Even with gloves on! Half my fighting style is trying to keep minimal contact, it’s infuriating. That’s why I mostly deal with intel instead.”
Toki’s first reflex was to say ‘wow, it sounds useful’. Because yes, that kind of Quirk would be very useful for heroes, to have a personal medic as support. But then she put herself in Sachiko’s shoes and winced.
With that kind of power… you could be used without your consent to heal people. You could be hurt, very badly, and your pain dismissed because your talent was too practical to ignore. There was an enormous potential for abuse there.
“It sounds— inconvenient.”
“It is. I’m always careful about touching people. I heal faster than average, but the pain level stays the same, and the dangerousness of the wounds, too. It’s a bitch to deal with. And I’m not allowed to lie in the Quirk registry, so Wound-Transfer is written next to my legal name and I’m always terrified that some villain is going to break in the national database in a desperate bid to find a black-market healer, and then try to kidnap me to chain me down in his basement.”
“Damn. I hadn’t thought of that,” Toki swore.
Unbiddenly she thought about Recovery Girl, whose parents had used her as a black-market healer before the HPSC took her in. The situations weren’t dissimilar.
“You should have,” Sachiko said bluntly. “When I was a kid, I was proud of my Quirk so I healed every little ouchie in my school. Word got around. Parents and other adults started coming to me with various little wounds. Then… I was abducted, once. I was seven, I think, and I don’t remember it well, but it was a close call. I was very lucky a hero stopped the guy. My parents spent all their time arguing, afterward. We had to move. We changed our names, and we took my mom’s name instead of my dad’s. My parents became overprotective but at the same time, they didn’t know how to deal with me. I was pushed towards heroism because, you know, better to heal heroes than to be Quirk-trafficked and heal villains, right? They tried to get me an apprenticeship with Gecko when I was fourteen, but the first thing he said was that heroes were always thankful for the sacrifice of people like me, so I noped right out of there.”
Damn it, Gecko. The Lizard Hero was nice, but he had no tact, and he had a self-deprecating way of talking about his own Quirk (and all healing Quirks) that would have made a young Sachiko bristle for sure.
“You never said anything about it on Discord…”
“I don’t like talking about it.”
“Sorry.”
Sachiko shrugged. “Not your fault. Besides, my family is better now. Distance did us good. Anyway, part of the reason I went to Yūei was so I could get advice from Recovery Girl on how to handle my Quirk. It’s still a pain, but I can sense its activation now, so I have a better handle on it.”
A few seconds passed in silence. Well, that was depressing. Toki cleared her throat.
“So you leave the vigilantism to your girlfriend, then? And somehow you decided it would make a romantic date?”
Her voice was a little acidic, because, yeah, that was stupid as fuck. Sachiko stiffened.
“It wasn’t like that. She wasn’t even a vigilante when I met her. She got into it accidentally! We were mugged after a date, and later I found out that this mugging… and the way we kicked ass that day… it gave her ideas. She started looking for fights because she’s secretly an adrenaline junky like me. She went out at night searching for people doing bad things and beat the shit out of them. She was stabbed once! She put two guys in the hospital. And… I couldn’t just let it go! So I gave her intel, just so she wouldn’t end up in something too big for her.” Her gaze turned pleading. “I promise, I never put her in danger. We escort drunk girls home and beat up purse snatchers, that’s all. We only wanted to see inside this warehouse for clues about the Ghost Arsonist. But we didn’t manage to find the monitor for the security camera before those goons showed up! And it was harder for her to fight when she also had to protect me!”
Toki crossed her arms. Being careful was all well and good, but with vigilantism… you took all the risk a hero took, but without any of their guarantee or their security net. And if the mysterious girlfriend had put two guys in the hospital, then she was dangerous, too. Hurting someone demanded a lot of strength. A lot of ruthlessness, too. Breaking bones, making someone bleed and scream… it required cruelty, viciousness.
That’s why heroes had rules. So they didn’t turn into vicious beasts. Not like vigilantes left unchecked.
“This is reckless,” Toki finally spat. “You could get hurt. Or arrested. Or killed! And investigating the Ghost Arsonist? The guy is a murderer and a complete lunatic. He’s dangerous! He nearly killed Hitoshi!”
Sachiko looked incredibly uncomfortable.
“I know, I know. It’s just…”
“Don’t yell at her,” said a new voice, softy. “I asked her to do it.”
Toki turned on her heel and faced the mysterious girlfriend for the first time.
She didn’t recognize her right away. In a corner of her mind, Toki had often wondered what kind of girl had managed to capture Sachiko’s heart. Maybe someone fierce like Toki herself? Or maybe, more realistically, someone who wore her heart on her sleeve, who campaigned for the poor and destitute and devoted their life to helping others. Maybe a riveting beauty. Or maybe someone ordinary, but with plenty of conviction and faith in mankind.
But then she had a good look at her, and the smile slid right off her face.
Worse, the other girl got a good look at her, too, and recognized her. It was obvious. She stopped and her eyes went very wide and shocked. Like she was seeing a ghost. Like she was seeing someone she hadn’t expected to find at nine p.m. in her girlfriend’s apartment after a confession of vigilantism. And this, maybe more than the turquoise eyes or the rectangular glasses or the long white hair, clued Toki in. This person knew who she was.
And suddenly the piece of the puzzle clicked together. The girlfriend, that reaction, the fact that she was looking into the Ghost Arsonist, probably for the exact same reason Toki was…
“Oh,” said Toki, feeling a great pit of dread opening in her stomach. “You’re looking into the Ghost Arsonist because he attacked your brother.”
Fuyumi Todoroki squared her shoulders and looked her in the eyes.
“Yes. I am.”
oOoOoOo
Fuyumi Todoroki was the least person Toki would have expected to be a vigilante. Honestly. What the fuck. In canon, hadn’t she been meek and kind?!
But kindness didn’t mean weakness. And the more they talked, the more Toki could see flashes of Endeavor’s ruthlessness and ferocity in her. No, Fuyumi wasn’t brash and brutal like him. Her first reflex was always to plead and cajole, to play the conciliator. But she had a temper, too.
“I’m not a violent person,” Fuyumi argued. “But fighting is freeing. All the frustrations of work and family fade away and I just completely focus on winning. I don’t have to worry about being nice enough, about helping everyone, about trying to guess what the others are thinking and if I’m good enough at my job, I just… I can make them stop. I can be in control, instead of just bottling up my frustration. I can fight, and I’m good at it.”
“And it’s good to help people!” Sachiko interjected with a too-bright smile.
“That too,” Fuyumi admitted, a little sheepish.
Yeah. But it wasn’t about helping people. It was about winning. About feeling in control. Toki let her eyes linger on Fuyumi, and tried to make this new piece of information fit with the rest of the puzzle.
It was strangely easy. Fuyumi was tall, as tall as Toki herself (who, at one hundred seventy centimeters, was aware that she wasn’t on the short side for a girl), and she had the shoulders of someone who regularly lifted weights. She stood straighter when she spoke about her vigilante activities, too. It made a disturbing amount of sense. The daughter of Endeavor burned with the urge to unleash her wrath, just like her dad.
Maybe it just felt good to be able to hurt people and make them feel the consequences of their actions. She didn’t need to put on the persona of a perfect little girl, playing nice while subtly trying to convince them that their actions were wrong. All she had to do was punch them into submission.
Toki wondered if that was how Endeavor felt, too. Was it why he had become a hero? Was it why he had started beating up his kids? This desperate desire for control, to fill a void inside of him: to hurt someone, to not care about their pain, to just bask into the brief and mindless knowledge that you were stronger than the other. And somehow the only time you weren’t afraid, was when you made someone else afraid of you.
“That’s not healthy.”
“I’m working on it,” Fuyumi defended herself.
“Does your father know?”
Fuyumi looked briefly petrified and meek like Toki would have expected canon-Fuyumi to be, but then she narrowed her eyes. Her blue eyes as cold as Endeavor’s, and fired back:
“Does yours?”
Touché.
“Wait, what?” blinked Sachiko. “Isn’t your father dead?”
Toki raised a hand to silence her, studying Fuyumi intently. A few weeks, or hell, even a few days ago, this situation would have made her anxiety skyrocket. But now, knowing what she did now, and knowing that she had powerful leverage over Fuyumi with this vigilante business, she didn’t feel as panicked as she could have been.
So, someone else knew about Meteor? Fine. Toki wasn’t eight years old anymore. She could deal with it. She could face him if need be. She wouldn’t spend her whole life cowering from her own father. Not anymore.
“You’ve met him?”
Fuyumi looked at her, faintly accusatory.
“Yes. He was injured after patrol and my Dad brought him home. He mentioned his missing daughter. You’re Toki Taiyōme, then? You’re not denying it?”
“Toki Taiyōme?” Sachiko repeated, bewildered. “That’s your name?”
Toki ignored her again.
“Oh yeah?” she narrowed her eyes. “Did he mention that I’ve been missing after turning him over to heroes because he was an S-ranked super-villain with a body count in the hundreds?”
Fuyumi paled abruptly. Sachiko made a strangled noise of incredulity.
“It can’t be,” Fuyumi stuttered. “He works with the Endeavor Agency!”
“Yes, because your father dragged him out of Tartarus.”
“But they are friends!”
“Yes, Endeavor is such a stellar character,” Toki sneered. “A true paragon of virtue and patience and kindness. No wonder they got along so great.”
“Don’t talk about my father!”
“Well, don’t talk about mine.”
“SILENCE!” shouted Sachiko. “BOTH OF YOU! Damn it, can you please chill for one minute?! I was expecting a freak out about the vigilantism, but it went completely off-rails! Everyone takes a deep breath. And stop yelling! You’re going to scare my neighbors to death!”
“Oh, I’m sure all the times you went home at four in the morning covered in blood made them feel very safe,” snarked Fuyumi.
“You what?!” Toki jumped.
“It wasn’t mine!”
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?!”
So.
It took a few minutes, but they calmed down. They took a deep breath. Sachiko brought out snacks and whacked Toki on the head when she tried to launch back into a lecture.
And… they managed to talk about it calmly.
It took some time a few thinly veiled threats, but Fuyumi promised to keep her mouth shut about meeting Toki. She didn’t have much of a choice. If she babbled about Toki, then Toki would tattle about her vigilantism. She could have her arrested. Even if Fuyumi didn’t use her Quirk most of the time so as to not be identified, she could still be charged with a fair number of assaults.
Yes, because apparently, Fuyumi’s Quirk wasn’t just ice, as the canon had led Toki to believe. It was called Steaming Ice. It was an ice Quirk alright, but it came with fire-resistance, and Fuyumi could also use blazing jet of cold that made steam fizzle in the air. Fuyumi had inherited her mom’s Quirk, but with tiny pieces of her father’s Hellflames. Just like in her appearance. She her mom’s white hair, but with hints of her father’s red, and his turquoise eyes, too. It made sense that her Quirk was a blend of the two, instead of being half-and-half like Shouto’s.
It was a nice Quirk, too. Honestly, Fuyumi could have used it to become a hero. Her ice was just as powerful and versatile as Shouto’s. Fuyumi admitted that her father had trained her a little, but only to teach her how to use her Quirk safely and to defend herself. Apparently, Fuyumi’s lack of fire had been enough to protect her from her father’s obsession with creating a masterpiece. Tch! Go figures.
Fuyumi could produce ice and burst of cold from her whole body. She could create whole icebergs, just like Shouto. With the right training, she could have been an heroine on par with Shirayuki, the famous Ice Hero that had been killed in Fukuoka and that the Icarus duo had been trained to replace. Toki could think of a dozen application for such a Quirk, both in combat and in rescue.
But she wasn’t here to do Quirk analysis. Fuyumi was a good sport and let Toki geek out over her Quirk for a good half-hour. But making her agree to stop investigating the Ghost Arsonist was something else.
“I need to do something!” Fuyumi argued.
“Pass a License exam. Then you can kick as many car thieves in the balls as you would like.” Seeing her glowering, Toki winced minutely and changed her angle. “Look, I’m already investigating him. I know what he looks like, I think I know who he is. I’ll get him. But you… He’s out of your league. And even if by miracle you managed to corner him, then what?”
“I will steam his eyeballs for touching my brother!”
“Er, babe,” Sachiko interjected hesitantly, touching Fuyumi’s arm. “I believe in you, and I know it’s important to you. But Toki… Quantum… She’s a top hero. She’s my friend, too, and she knows how good I am. If she tells us we’re outclassed, it’s the truth. Maybe we should listen to her.”
“I could find him,” Fuyumi insisted. “I could fight him.”
Toki sighed, wary. Yeah, that was what she was afraid of.
“And he will kill you. It wouldn’t even make him pause. Trust me, by going down that road, you won’t like what you find. He’s S-ranked, at least.”
And you’re not, she charitably didn’t say. But Fuyumi heard it loud and clear anyway. Toki saw her clench her jaw in anger. For a second, with that murderous expression and her shoulders braced for a fight, the resemblance with Endeavor was striking.
Then Fuyumi deflated, and suddenly she didn’t look like the daughter of the Number One hero. She looked like a tired young woman, with a round face, round eyes, long eyelashes, and messy hair desperately scrambling for a way to feel in control in an increasingly chaotic world.
“Can I do anything?” Fuyumi asked resignedly. “Anything at all? It’s killing me to be so useless.”
Toki opened her mouth to say no. And then, suddenly, she remembered that there was something that Fuyumi could do to help her find the Ghost Arsonist. To help her find him, understand how he thought, what he wanted, what goal he pursued, and what alliance he could make. To understand him, Dabi. Touya Todoroki.
“No,” she said, slowly. “But at a later date, if I ask you to introduce me to someone, no questions asked, could you do it? I promise you that it will help.”
Puzzled, Fuyumi agreed, and that’s how Toki secured a possible future opportunity to speak with Rei Todoroki.
Toki left late. It was nearly midnight. She was emotionally exhausted. One more person knew her secret now, and it was someone so intertwined in Toki’s personal life, in Sachiko’s personal life, that blackmail wasn’t really a good solution. Fuck, one day or another Toki was going to have to confront Meteor, if only to remove that leverage. She couldn’t live in fear of it. It was stupid.
More canon situations were approaching at terminal velocity, so why was she dithering?
Fuyumi hadn’t really talked about Meteor. But she had said that, when he had stayed at their house after an accident (Toki had done the math and concluded it was probably after Kuma’s arrest), Meteor had been perfectly polite. He had made them laugh, he had told stories, and he had cooked.
Toki had forgotten her father liked to cook. It was a small shock, suddenly, to remember it.
But her father was fine. He was friend with Endeavor, and he was happy. Endeavor trusted him, and Meteor trusted him back, and somehow their friendship seemed real. They cared about one another. A part of Toki was seething, because fuck, if someone had to kickstart her dad on the path to redemption, it should have been someone nice, someone kind. But somehow that brute, Endeavor, Enji Todoroki, had managed where everyone else had failed, and… as long as Meteor was happy, what ground did Toki have to complain?
He was fine.
He was good, he was happy. He had friendships, support, and people he cared for. He had all of that because Toki had stayed the fuck away from him. She didn’t have the right to begrudge any of it.
It was fine.
Everything was fine.
(It wasn’t fine. Toki felt like she was juggling too many things too fast. Something was bound to happen to send them crashing down. She just hoped it wouldn’t be unfixable.)
So. Toki went home.
She told Keigo. Somehow, he got weirdly fixated on the part where Endeavor had brought Meteor to his house. Which was kind of weird. But since Endeavor was tasked with keeping him on a leash, it made sense that he hadn’t left him to his own devices. Especially if Meteor had been injured.
Maybe Keigo was seeing something she didn’t. Maybe he was thinking that Meteor was playing a long con, gaining Endeavor’s trust to betray him as soon as possible? But it wasn’t really Meteor’s style. And Endeavor didn’t seem like the type to fall for such an obvious plot.
Whatever. Toki was very firmly Not Thinking About It, at least until after the Sports Festival. She already had enough on her mind.
Fuck, she really hoped that for once, the League of Villains would act like expected, and not try anything against Yūei during the Festival.
The best Toki could do on that front was to train the children to the best of her abilities. Toki made them work on their overall fitness, how to fight without Quirk, how to be inventive, and so on. She taught them how to deescalate a tense situation instead of going straight for a fight, how a rescue operation was organized, and how agencies coordinated themselves for big team-ups. She showed them how to use their environment to their advantage, why being insured was mandatory for all heroes, how to use a grappling hook, how to tie knots, how to disarm someone using a knife, how to walk silently, how to roll to cushion your fall when free running…
Basically, all the stuff that their homeroom teachers should be teaching them, but weren’t.
Toki wasn’t complaining. At least, when she was in charge of those lessons, she was sure it was being done correctly. She continued sprinkling Quirk-analysis in during all of her classes, cheerfully giving out stickers to anyone who did well. Midoriya especially was always a good student. He tended to over-analyze, admittedly, but it wasn’t a bad trait.
She reminded them to keep a few aces up their sleeves, to misdirect the crowd as much as their opponents, and to be aware that people were watching them. She was thinking about the public, but she was also thinking about the spy. She still hadn’t managed to find out who it was.
But they were here, and they were watching. Toki was careful not to let her carefree mask slip. She texted Yagi after school, but rarely approached All Might.
She had to suppose that the spy was watching him, and by extension watching all the staff.
All Might didn’t take the threat of the spy very seriously. It was exasperating. That man was really used to doing everything on his own. When he walked from one edge of the campus to the other, he often waved away the other staff members offering to accompany him, but Toki refused to be cowed, and always bulldozed him into letting her come with him.
It made her look like a bully, probably. But hey, at least it gave her a chance to chat with him away from prying eyes.
In front of an audience, All Might and Toki acted like two distant colleagues. But it was hard to not be friendly with him. Especially if they had to talk about their students’ progress. Once, Toki made an impression of Midoriya yelling ‘SMASH’ and wondered out loud why he was so focused on clenching his butt-cheeks, and Yagi started laughing so hard he had to sit down. Toki barely managed to warp them both to the teachers’ lounge before All Might accidentally deflated with how hard he was giggling.
Dumbass. Now Toki couldn’t even think of the word ‘butt-cheeks’ without sniggering irresistibly.
“You could be a little nicer to our colleagues,” All Might criticized her once.
“Aizawa loathes me and enough teachers take their cues from him for it to be a waste of time. Besides, one of them could be the spy.”
Yagi scoffed. “They were all picked by Nedzu. I doubt any of them work for the enemy.” Clearly, he wasn’t aware of Aizawa’s uncertain loyalties.
“The probability for the spy to be a teacher is low, sure, but not zero,” Toki argued.
“The probability that there is a spy in the first place is low too,” All Might countered. “There is no need for an inside job when teenagers brag about what they do in school where they shouldn’t.”
Toki made a face. Yeah, that was true. For boys, especially. They loved to brag about their training, where they were going, what they would do, who taught them, and who they had to fight. But even if they weren’t as loud and clueless, girls could be a leak too. They were chatty. It would only take one enthusiastic discussion between Ashido and her old classmates in a café, or maybe one phone call from Tokage to her brother while he was waiting for tests in a hospital, and an attentive bystander could learn plenty.
“If there is someone stitching up monsters with multiple Quirks to kill you, I think it’s a fair assumption to say that they aren’t relying on teenage gossip to plan their murder attempts.”
“… Point taken.”
Toki didn’t mention the name of All For One (or the name the underground heroes gave him, Soul Stealer). All Might didn’t, either. It was funny, in a sense. They both knew who was behind this, but they didn’t dare utter his name. Like it would be a confirmation. Like it would plunge the other into this fight.
Should Toki mention it?
“About that guy, actually…”
All Might tensed. “Yes?”
Toki hesitated but chickened out in the end.
“If he’s after you, I’m worried he’ll target Midoriya. He’s your student, and his Quirk is very much like yours, so it makes sense that he’s special to you. I was wondering if there was a way to shield him from the public during the Sports Festival? Maybe tell him to only use a small percentage of his strength, to not show how powerful he is exactly?”
All Might opened his mouth, then closed it. He looked thoughtful.
“I actually thought the Sports Festival was a good chance for him to announce ‘I Am Here!’ to the world. But maybe Young Midoriya isn’t ready for it, yet. And he’s only a first-year. There is no rush to turn him into a Symbol. I still have a few more years in me to allow him to grow without the pressure of stepping into my shoes.”
“Since he still breaks his bones, maybe putting more pressure on him isn’t a good plan anyway,” Toki joked.
She kind of wanted Midoriya to figure out this not-breaking-bones thing on his own, because that was part of his growth, and he deserved to have this epiphany. That was why she gave All Might a clue about using only a percentage of the Quirk but didn’t state the solution outright. Midoriya deserved to have this triumph all by himself.
But if that didn’t work, and he broke more than one bone in the Festival, well. Toki didn’t care about Aizawa’s insistence that kids shouldn’t be coddled, or about All Might’s desire to see his protégé shine: she would bench that kid until the end of the event, and tell him herself about Full Cowl.
“I don’t want to deprive him of his chance to attract good internship’s offers!” lamented All Might.
Toki frowned.
“If he breaks his bones on live television, he may impress the public, it’s true, but aren’t you worried about pro-heroes collectively deciding he’s more trouble than he’s worth and not extending any offer to him? Self-sacrifice is a noble quality, but in the long term, it’s destructive. And it’s not what pros are looking for in a young student that is just beginning his career.”
All Might paused. Then he sighed deeply and rubbed his forehead.
“I didn’t think of it. You’re right. But he just needs to make that Quirk his, and it’s… difficult. He was a very late bloomer. It’s not his fault! He should be encouraged, instead of dismissed for his difficulties.”
“Hey, don’t sweat it. I want him to get better, too. But if he needs the extra help, I’ll gladly take him on at Icarus. Or I will recommend him to someone who’s good with Quirk-analysis, like Salamander. Or Majestic.”
Yagi smiled. Not an All Might smile, blinding and full of teeth, but something softer and more sincere.
“Thank you. You’re a good friend.”
Toki sputtered indignantly and hit his shoulder. “Don’t make it weird!”
They didn’t talk about All For One, or One For All. A good friend or not, Toki wasn’t close enough to All Might for him to share this burden. Maybe it was his way to protect her, too.
It didn’t really matter. Toki had asked Hayasa-sensei to investigate Soul Stealer anyway. Not that it helped much. According to Hayasa-sensei’s research, Soul Stealer had gone missing six years ago and hadn’t resurfaced. Maybe he was dead, maybe he was in hiding. In any case, there was no proof he was behind the League of Villains, or even that he was alive.
But did it matter? Toki knew the truth. And she knew that, sooner or later, she would have to face him, just like the rest of the world.
She only hoped that the kids would be more ready by then.
oOoOoOo
The Sports Festival was just around the corner. The rest of the staff hadn’t really warmed up to Toki. But the students loved her. It was kind of flattering, really. Maybe it was because of her youth, or was it because of her enthusiasm? Or maybe it was because, of their usual heroic teachers, Vlad King was very authoritative, Aizawa was straight-up contemptuous, and All Might had trouble making himself relatable or approachable.
Toki not only had experience teaching but she was also friendly and analytical. And she didn’t believe the kids were all assholes in need of a reality check. Seriously, why was Aizawa a teacher if his motivation was that he hated kids?
Well, he didn’t hate children. He just hated that they had a childish outlook on life. Which was stupid, because they were children! Uuuurgh.
Anyway, the point was that Toki liked those kids. Since the Sports Festival was in less than a week, they had all picked hero names or pseudonyms to protect their civilian identity. Toki hadn’t been able to snag that lesson from Midnight, but she had given in advance plenty of recommendations, and to her great satisfaction most of the kids had listened to them! Sure, these names would be temporary, and they may change them later. But it was still so very satisfying!
In class 1-A, Midoriya wasn’t going with Deku this time around, but with Dekiru, for example. Iida had picked Recipro. Yaoyorozu had picked Alchemist instead of Creati. In class 1-B Rin was going with Malachite, which was super cool. Kaibara had picked Helix instead of Spiral. Awase had chosen Fusion as his alias. All were very badass and, in Toki’s opinion, way cooler than what they had chosen in canon.
Damn, she had grown attached quickly. It would make ferreting out the traitor even more heart-wrenching.
So far Toki had ruled out a few students. Midoriya wasn’t the spy, and neither were Neito or Hitoshi. And she didn’t just say that because she liked them. She had done extensive background checks on the three of them.
From there she also eliminated from her list all the kids related to heroes, since AFO targeted people who needed a favor and not people already at the top of the food chain. That ruled out Yaoyorozu, Iida, Tokage, Honenuki, and Todoroki. Kirishima was probably too damn honorable to be a spy, and so were Tokoyami and Tetsutetsu. Uraraka was poor, so she hadn’t been bought.
And… that was all she ruled out so far, actually.
It still left way too many students. She couldn’t possibly interview all of them. Maybe she could try and spy on them a little? Or at least check out their house and see if they were too rich or too tense or anything. Canon said that the League of Villains wouldn’t try anything before the summer camp, but Toki always took that knowledge with a grain of salt. After all, the universe she lived in wasn’t the same as canon. She couldn’t assume that her intel was correct since her source was so outdated.
But outside of this slow-going investigation, things were going well.
Fuyumi hadn’t breathed a word about Toki to Endeavor, judging by how the Number One hero still kept his distance. He still had no clue. Good.
Fuyumi had been shaken by the revelation that Meteor was actually a redeemed villain. Toki had sent her the link to a video of his arrest, with the crumbling building and everything. It was a lot. But within a week Fuyumi was over it, arguing that people changed and that Meteor had been nothing but nice to her family.
Yeah, he had been nothing but nice to the people who lived in that building, too.
But he saved people now, a little voice whispered to Toki. He helped heroes. Who cared that it was because he chased the thrill of victory, and not because he was altruistic?
After all… That was also Endeavor’s motivation for being a hero. That was Fuyumi’s motivation for being a vigilante. Why did it matter? Meteor did good things. He saved lives. He had changed. Toki knew that. She had to accept it. She didn’t know why she felt so bitter about it, why she couldn’t just be happy for him.
Whatever. As long as Fuyumi kept her secret, Toki didn’t care. For now, she had achieved a precarious balance where everything was going well. Fuyumi’s investigation of Dabi was stalling, but with the promise Toki had exhorted from her, it wouldn’t stay that way forever. Toki had also found a promising lead on her investigation of Keigo’s mom. As for the rest… Well.
The Icarus Agency was flying high in the rankings. Hawks would definitively still be Number Two at the next Billboard chart. Quantum was neck-to-neck with Best Jeanist for the third spot. She had a better arrest record but she wasn’t as popular, so really, she wasn’t sure who would come first. The fourth spot probably wouldn’t be so bad. The important thing was to be a Top Hero to support Keigo, after all.
And the best way to be an even better hero was to have even better techniques up her sleeves.
She had been playing with the idea of teleporting energy for months now. She had a few equations and notes written up, but she had never really found the time to experiment. The problem with the kind of life she led was that you rarely had free time. You had to make it.
“Wanna go and train?” Keigo offered one morning. “Our photoshoot this afternoon is canceled. We could go to Jehda and wreck the few buildings you left standing!”
And, what the hell. “Sure. I’ve been meaning to try and teleport gravity.”
“Ooooh, should I expect to take an apartment complex to the face?”
“Hopefully, only its gravity. Which would have the interesting side-effect to make said building rocket towards the sky.”
“Nice. I was thinking more about sword-fighting for today, so, let’s keep the imploding buildings for last. Look at what I’ve got!”
And he brandished two massive, very real-looking katanas. Toki’s inner nerd immediately squealed in glee.
“Where did you get those?! They are so cool!”
Keigo preened. He didn’t need a sword or blades in general. Not when he had his feathers. However, when they were kids, they had trained with weapons. As Hayasa-sensei liked to say, Keigo’s supply of feathers wasn’t inexhaustible. Besides, it was good for him to train with metal blades, to get used to their heavy weight until every delicate technique of sword-fighting was engraved in his muscle memory, and then he could switch to his lighter feathers.
Still, it had been years since Toki had seen Keigo train with real swords.
“I want to try something else,” he grinned. “Heavier hits, more frontal attacks. Working with blades will be good to reinforce my shoulders and force me to attack head-on. I want to be able to draw the bad guy’s attention and hold it. I may not be a powerhouse, but right now I’m focusing too much on speed over strength. I can do better.”
“You still have hollow bones,” Toki pointed out.
“They’re hollow, they’re not made of glass! Besides, it’s not unfixable. If I get gloves with enough support in the wrist, I could punch just as hard as you with zero risk.”
Toki punched about two to three times harder than he did. They had measured it. She was genuinely heavier, true, but they were both packed with muscle. No, the main difference was in training… and in bone density.
Toki had been taught boxing. She had learned how to punch strongly, how to put her back into it. As a result, along the years, the bones in her fingers had suffered microfractures and then healed, over and over, becoming thicker and denser. That was called bone conditioning. It was very normal for boxers or martial artists. It gave them a greater resistance and stronger punches. On the contrary, Keigo punched like an amateur. If he tried to hit as hard as Toki did, he would probably break his fingers or hurt himself.
“Fine,” Toki smirked. “I’m going to kick your ass. There are a few moves that I want to try with weapons, too.”
She had a Google Alert set up for Lady Siam, and recently her Eternal Rival had been filmed knocking out five people with an incredible demonstration of skill, using only the sheath of a katana stolen from her opponent’s belt. It had been very badass.
“You can try,” Keigo generously allowed.
“Can we bet on it?”
“Sure. Winner gets a kiss.”
Toki burst out laughing. Still giggling, she took a sword and experimentally swung it a few times. She had never been an expert at this, not like Keigo, but she had been his sparring partner for their whole childhood, and she knew how to use it. Personally, she was more at ease with knives, to get close and personal. But she could make do with swords.
Finally, she offered Keigo her arm. He accepted it graciously, and she warped them both high in the sky.
Jehda wasn’t very far, but it still took her several mini-jumps to get there. The place looked even more a wreck than when Toki had last laid eyes on it. More than half the city was completely destroyed, and a good portion of the rest was damaged. She didn’t remember how much damage she had done here with All Might. Sure, other fights had probably happened here, but… she was pretty sure she recognized most of the destroyed buildings.
Whooops.
They took positions, each with their blades. Keigo even shed most of his primaries to not be tempted to use them as back-up, and to focus solely on the blade in his hands. They sized up each other, grinning—
And it was on.
Their blades collided and steel rang like a bell, sparks flew and already they had disengaged to attack again. Toki warped to strike from above; Keigo jumped back with a powerful kick of his wings, sending a blast of cold wind in her direction.
Attack, hit, parry, flash! Disappear, reappear attack again; quick, always so quick, just a flash a movement, and then they were gone again, running and flying and dodging and chasing each other like two streaks of color on the blue sky. Toki’s feet barely scrapped the ground before she was off again, in the sky, hitting and parrying, using the impact of her blade against Keigo’s to change her momentum, like a leaf dancing on the wind, playing tag with a bird just as fast and nimble as she was.
The beginning was more play-fight than anything, both of them taking a few moments to familiarize themselves with the blade’s weight. But they were both used to training together, to chase and be chased and hit and run and fly everywhere at once, laughing manically and plunging on their prey like wild raptors.
It was a fight, and the impact of their blades were heavy and violent… but more than that it was a dance, reckless and still so familiar, running circles around each other, with each other, like there was nothing and nobody else in the whole universe. Only this chase, only them. They flew and ran and hit and dodged again, changing directions at breakneck speed, drunk on their speed and on the danger. Toki’s heart was thundering in her chest, and she was grinning so hard her cheeks hurt.
Yes, this was the life! The speed, the challenge, the danger!
It had been ages since they had the time to do this! No civilians to save, no public to smile for, no villain to fight, no high stakes, just this! Twirls and jumps and parades, violent hits and brutal steel impacts, muscles tensing and pushing and running, swift turns and fast-paced hits. Faster, better, stronger!
It was fast-paced, breathless, relentless, and amazing. Toki loved it; they both loved it. This is was what they were born for, to somersault away from a blast of air, twirl around a deadly strike, like two dancers armed with steel, locked in a lethal dance.
They both started to get tired at the same time, breath coming shorter and more labored, muscles stiff and heavy, but still carrying on their trademark lightning-quick pace. They wouldn’t be very good heroes if they slowed down when tired, wouldn’t they? So they continued chasing each other, hitting and pursuing and searching for a weakness with increasing recklessness…
Toki hit harder, but Keigo was objectively faster and better at playing defense. With his feathers fanned out and attentive at the slightest vibration, it was impossible to attack him from behind or to surprise him. Still, the goal was to work on his strength, was it not? So Toki continued pushing, pushing, warping in all directions to constantly change her angle of attack, chasing and being chased, using her whole weight behind every strike.
It was only when a particularly audacious move from Keigo made Toki’s blade fly high in the air, disarming her, that they froze where they stood, gasping, while the sword clattered to the ground.
Keigo grinned, panting harshly but his eyes gleamed triumphally.
“I win.”
Slowly, Toki’s tense muscles uncoiled. The sun was noticeably lower in the sky. They had been at this for more than two hours, she realized. No wonder her back and arms were screaming in protest.
“You win,” she agreed.
Keigo slid his sword back in its sheath, and a couple of feathers went to do the same to Toki’s sword on the ground. He had trouble unclenching his fingers from the handle, his fingers stiff and uncooperative. For him too, the exercise had been tiring. He straightened with a grunt, before chirping cheerfully:
“So, that was fun! Do you still want to try and warp gravity?”
Toki groaned.
“Maybe later. I don’t have the brainpower right now.”
Keigo shoved her playfully with a wing, and she pretended to fall so he would catch her. He did, but he also dipped her like a tango dancer, making her squeal in surprise and wrap her arms around his neck.
It was easy to forget, with his short stature and the baggy clothes, but Keigo was all muscles, wiry and lean but undeniably strong. For a second he grinned at her, honey-bright eyes and blond hair haloed by the sun, and then he leaned down and kissed her.
They were both sweaty and tired; there had been more romantic kisses, but as always, Toki closed her eyes and melted into it. And then Keigo’s arms couldn’t support the position any longer, and he pulled Toki back up with a laugh.
“That was nice,” Toki smiled. “We should do that more often.”
“Kissing or sword fighting?”
“Either. Both. They’re not mutually exclusive.”
They grinned. On impulse, Toki kissed him again. When they parted, their foreheads touched briefly, eyes still closed.
They should stretch to avoid cramps. They should go back to Fukuoka and use their free time to advance in their paperwork. They should debrief about this chase, retrace their steps, see where they had been too slow or too careless, or too showy, and think about perfecting themselves. They should speak about their objectives for the future, about the incoming Sports Festival, about their plans, about their work, about how to be better, faster, always faster. But they didn’t.
“Let’s not go home right away,” she whispered.
Keigo’s grip on her arms tightened infinitesimally. She wondered if he was thinking about his mission as a spy, about making contact with killers and psychopaths, about the pressure the HPSC put on him, about Okamoto and his schemes, about Endeavor, about Meteor, about the hundred different ways that a hundred different problems could explode in their hands.
“It’s alright,” Keigo answered gently. “We have time.”
They didn’t. They were Icarus, chasing the Sun on wings of wax. Everything was a race against time. But for a little while, Toki closed her eyes and pretended they could allow themselves this indulgence.
It was fine. Nothing really bad could happen as long as they had each other, after all.
Notes:
The "how to learn people-watching 101" thing in this chapter comes from the fic "Hawks-sensei" that i mentionned in the past!
Several of you had guessed that Fuyumi was Sachiko's girlfriend. And yeah, it was kind of predictable? xD But i like writting predictable things because i also like reading them! I, a story enjoyer, go completely bonkers about it because its like Enrichment in my Enclosure. A scene parallels another earlier scene between different characters thus serving to highlight the differences in their views and priorities???? A line makes me think "hmmm I bet that's gonna be relevant later" ends up being relevant later????? I'm so so happy. Please, writers, foreshadow more things. Throw the completely anticipateable plot beats at me like catnip mousies!!!!!
Also, the fic rec of the day is....
"Mild-Mannered School Teacher/Adrenaline-Junkie Vigilante" by JajaLala. The Plot : Fuyumi didn't plan to become a vigilante. And she REALLY didn't plan finding her (surprisingly alive) twin in the process. The most unexpected thing was to befriend the League of Villains, though.
Ok, i don't agree with the characterization of all characters there, especially Dabi (i like him best as he's in canon: an unhinged psychopath who rip the wings of flies for fun) but the relationship between Endeavor pre-redemption and Fuyumi is worth a read. And more importantly: FUYUMI HAVING INHERITED HER DAD'S HUNGER FOR VICTORY AT ALL COST. That's good shit.
The idea of Fuyumi being a vigiliante comes from this fic, i devored this headcanon with PASSION. The quote about feeling in control when she beat up thugs is lifted straight from that fic.
Anyway. With this chapter (and the fact that Sachiko is dating Fuyumi), we're now starting one of my favorite recuring joke: that EVERYONE around Toki is crushing hard on the Todoroki. She's bewildered by that developpement.
Wait until your fledgings start being interested in Shouto, Toki. Just wait.
I hope you enjoyed it ! Next chapter will be "festivities and hard truth", and it will be... the Sport Festival!
See you next week !
Chapter 43: Festivities and hard truths
Summary:
“What’s happening?” she asked immediately.
“The HPSC just reached out to me about Meteor’s rehabilitation process,” Yagi explained hurriedly. “Endeavor has petitioned to make him an underground hero, and the HPSC wants me to be the person to interview Meteor and give the all clear. The interview is in two weeks. Of course, it’s the President who will give the final verdict, but it’s been implied that my decision may determine hers.”
“... What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” All Might admitted. His voice was softer than Toki had expected. “I only knew him on his very worst day. It shouldn’t be enough basis to pass judgment on him. But you knew him before. You know him now, you investigated him. What do you think I should do?”
Notes:
Here is the Sport Festival! And also a good number of revelations x)
Writing actions scenes without being in the action is weird, so sorry in advance if the retelling of the Sport Festival is boring! I did my best here xD
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
FESTIVITIES AND HARD TRUTHS
On the day of the Sports Festival, Toki wasn’t scheduled to go to Yūei. She had booked some patrol in the afternoon in Hosu just in case the hero killer made an appearance… although Ingenium wasn’t scheduled to patrol today, so Toki hoped that the canon attack wouldn’t happen.
Anyway, Toki hadn’t made big plans. She wanted to use her morning to slip on her Hoshizora disguise and investigate stuff as a civilian. Check on Sachiko, maybe. But she still went sniffing around the school, just in case. In canon, the League hadn’t tried anything, but this wasn’t canon. This was a whole new universe where people had a different experiences and, as such, drew different conclusions and planned different courses of action.
Also, was the League even the same as in canon? Dabi was already moving on his own. Would he join forces with Shigaraki once again? The hero killer’s reputation had been both boosted and tainted by his fight with Endeavor, and he had apparently been injured enough that his killing had all but stopped. Would Shigaraki still try to recruit him? Would the League still coast on his message, and would Spinner and Toga be inspired by it enough to join? Impossible to know. There were too many variables. Toki could only prepare herself to adapt on the fly.
She spent ten minutes checking on the various places she would attack from if she was the League, including the USJ, the lower part of the park, and the underground parking lot. All was clear. She was going to leave when, unexpectedly, she ran into All Might… or rather, Toshinori Yagi. He looked a little harried.
“Quantum? I wasn’t aware you were on watch for the Festival.”
“I’m not,” she shrugged. “I don’t want to distract the kids, but I’m checking out the security. All is clear, by the way.”
He nodded, discreetly looking around them. The hallway was deserted, but he still lowered his voice.
“Good, good. It’s actually lucky that you’re here. Do you have a minute to talk? It’s about Meteor.”
Toki stiffened. “… Not here.”
She took his arm and warped them in the teacher’s lounge. It was the only place that she was sure was going to be completely deserted. Since all the teachers were running around to prepare for the event that would start in less than half an hour, nobody was going to walk on them. And if it was about Meteor, she didn’t want anyone to overhear.
“What’s happening?” she asked immediately.
“The HPSC just reached out to me about Meteor’s rehabilitation process,” Yagi explained hurriedly. “Endeavor has petitioned to make him an underground hero, and the HPSC wants me to be the person to interview Meteor and give the all clear. The interview is in two weeks. Of course, it’s the President who will give the final verdict, but it’s been implied that my decision may determine hers.”
Toki opened her mouth, then closed it.
It… it made sense, actually. Since Endeavor was backing up Meteor, the HPSC would need very strong grounds to veto his liberation. Stronger than the Number One hero’s testimony and the records from his agency showing how invaluable Meteor had been. And for that, well… they would need to argue that Meteor was too dangerous to be free. And who better to say that that the Symbol of Peace, the man who had put Meteor behind bars?
It would all come full circle, Toki realized with a small jolt. Once again, her father’s life and freedom would be in All Might’s hands. She swallowed.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know,” All Might admitted. His voice was softer than Toki had expected. “I only knew him on his very worst day. It shouldn’t be enough basis to pass judgment on him. But you knew him before. You know him now, you investigated him. What do you think I should do?”
It took her aback. The weight of that decision fell on her stomach like a block of lead; and yet, at the same time, she felt something like gratefulness.
Yes, once again her father’s life and freedom would be in someone else’s hands. But this time Toki wasn’t eight anymore. She could impact what would happen; All Might would help her impact what would happen.
She took a long breath, weighing her answer.
A small, selfish part of her wanted to lock this secret far away from her, be sure nobody would ever find out. To just be Quantum and Hoshizora who were simple and easy to manage. But she knew it wasn’t really an option. And besides, another part of her desperately wanted to get closure. To see her father grow and thrive and to be better, be happier. She didn’t even have to be part of his life again. She just wanted him to go forwards.
And outside of her own selfish desires, didn’t Meteor deserve this chance?
He had changed. That had been an unpleasant pill to swallow, but he was different now. Maybe because he had escaped the influence of all his criminal friends, or because he had shed away the painful reminders of Toki’s betrayal, or because of Endeavor’s influence, or just because he had decided to change himself for reasons unknown… Meteor was a hero now. If chaffed, yes, and some part of Toki would always be bitter about it; that he had been able to change so much, and so late, decades too late.
And yet there was no denying it. He wasn’t a villain anymore. Endeavor thought he could be a good hero, and he knew Meteor better than Toki these days. Hell, even Keigo thought that Meteor fit into this new life. So, outside of Toki’s stupid wish, there was only one good answer to give.
“I think you should give him that chance.”
“Are you sure?” There was no judgment on Yagi’s face.
“Yeah. My father is probably still a ruthless bastard but… He’s choosing to do good now. He helped take down big villains. He probably saved Endeavor’s life. He should have the opportunity to have a fresh start.” Toki frowned and added, “I still have my issues with him. I don’t think I can forgive what happened. Not yet. But his redemption has nothing to do with my forgiveness, and just because I haven’t reached the latter, doesn’t mean I have any right to deprive him of the former.”
Yagi’s expression softened. “That’s very noble of you.”
Toki didn’t think so. She thought it was cowardly, to let her father do all the work himself and just stay back and wait for forgiveness to come at them on its own. But that wasn’t what Yagi wanted to hear, so she simply shrugged.
There was a short silence. Outside, you could hear the faint roaring of the crowd. The Festival would start in fifteen minutes, and Present Mic was probably hyping up the public. Toki opened her mouth to offer to warp Yagi back to the stadium when suddenly a cheerful voice piped up from behind them, and Toki’s whole body froze in dread.
“Well, this explains a lot!”
Yagi jolted in surprise, bursting into his muscle form like a startled pufferfish. Toki turned on her heels so fast she almost gave herself whiplash.
It was Nedzu.
The rat-bear-badger-thing grinned at them from the opened vent high on the wall, then gracefully jumped on the couch under him, and sat. The vent closed soundlessly, like an automatic door. Toki suddenly thought back to the scuff marks she had found in the ventilation shafts, and that she had attributed to Eraserhead. Fuck. It hadn’t been him, after all.
And what the fuck was he doing here? Toki had been sure that he would be at the Festival. He was supposed to referee the events for the Third Years!
“A-aaah!” All Might boomed, voice slightly higher-pitched than usual. “Mr. Principal! How long were you there?!”
Nedzu smiled at them, his fur all soft and fluffy, and his dark beady eyes gleaming ominously in the light.
“Long enough! But don’t fret. None of what had been said here was a surprise to me!”
Toki felt her stomach churn. Wait. That meant… He had known about Meteor? Even after she had misdirected with Hoshizora’s identity?
How?! She had been so proud of that stunt!
“You knew?” she said hollowly.
“About your relation to Meteor?” Nedzu blinked innocently. “Yes. I found out shortly before your arrival here.”
Toki took it like a blow to the chest. She saw Yagi throw her a worried glance, but she was past that. He had known for so long? Nedzu’s smile widened at her shock, and he happily explained:
“When Genmei-san mentioned that someone would be sent as a security consultant, it didn’t take me very long to conclude that it would be you. As such, I immediately ran a background check. But it was very difficult since you kept your identity such a secret. However, I had looked into Toki Taiyōme’s file a few months ago, when Meteor had been freed. I try to keep up with the new moves done by all players in the game, you understand. There was a superficial resemblance… and the Quirks, of course. Teleportation and Warping are often confused with each other during childhood. It wasn’t much, but I made a hypothesis. It had maybe an 8% of chance of being true!”
He let out a small laugh. Toki didn’t find it very funny. Especially since Nedzu had been right. Teleportation and warping were often confused in their early stages. Toki had hoped that the light show would throw people off, but apparently, Nedzu had been smarter than that.
The Principal continued, looking delighted:
“I then looked for clues to either confirm it or dismiss it. Your cover story was very elaborate, with the deceptions about your age and so on. However, I found enough clues to shift my 8% to nearly 46%. It would have been higher if I could be sure that you, Hawks, and the Commission were all lying! But I wasn’t certain until we had a talk, in this very office, and you mentioned using voluntary misdirection. The probabilities then jumped to a whopping 84%! And right now, your reaction is all the confirmation I needed. I do love being right!”
Toki remembered this talk. She should have guessed that Nedzu wasn’t just curious about her Quirk. And she had felt so smart when she had wiped the smile off his face with her admission of being a student here. He hadn’t known that: but that wasn’t because he was stupid, that had only been because he had already known the very thing Toki was hoping to hide.
“… Wait. You found out about my birth name, which is protected by the Heroic Identity Protection Act and several layers of confidentiality. But you didn’t find out that I went to school here for three years?”
Nedzu’s ears dropped a little. He looked a little embarrassed by it.
“Yes. That was a surprise. In a heroic school, Gen Ed students are able to fly under the radar more easily. It’s an oversight that, since then, I have rectified. I must commend you for it! It is so delightfully refreshing to be outsmarted in a good-natured game. But to answer your question, no, I wasn’t aware of Hoshizora’s existence until you told me.”
Fuck. Toki hadn’t outplayed Nedzu, when she had revealed him her civiliansona. She hadn’t led him to a dead-end. She had handled him on a silver platter one of the very few mysteries he hadn’t found out about her.
(And for a second Toki experience a stab of panic, because the only real secret she had left was her daughter. Oh, Hinawa was well-hidden. She didn’t have any paperwork, her vaccinations were taken care of by Dr Shinsō, there was no paper trail linking her to either Quantum or Hoshizora. But still. Her name was Hinawa Taiyōme. If someone looked around the Taiyōme name, they could find her. All of Toki’s subterfuges would have been for nothing.)
“I see,” she said, flatly.
“Mr. Principal,” All Might said lowly. “I think it’s quite enough.”
“I only seek to complete the bigger picture,” Nedzu countered amiably. “It is fascinating! You created a completely separate identity to pursue a higher education unencumbered by the constraints of heroism, and I wouldn’t have a clue if you hadn’t revealed it. It gives some insight about your character, though, and ironically, about the depth of your relationship with the HPSC. For them to support you to this extent, hiding not only one but two of your identities… they must be quite certain of your loyalties.”
Toki snorted bitterly. She wouldn’t call it loyalty. Maybe understanding. After all, becoming enemies would only lead them to mutually assured destruction.
“They are.”
“Mr. Principal,” All Might said, and this time there was a warning in his tone. “Do you have a point?”
Nedzu’s nose twitched.
“I do, actually. I had reasons to be concerned by your ease around her, All Might, considering she was here to spy on you; and even more so by the fact that you two were hiding it. I do not like not knowing things. Especially in my own school.”
Toki balled her fists. A hot stab of hanger burned in her stomach. Yes, because she was clearly the enemy here, and it justified digging in her private life and preening about finding her unresolved issues like they were jokes, obviously.
“So?” she bit back. “Are you reassured?”
“Mostly,” Nedzu beamed. “I would like the full story, though! The daughter of a villain turned hero is already fascinating, but I can’t help but wonder how you and All Might became acquainted. Did you really find out about his weak form by luck, I wonder?”
“Nedzu!” All Might snapped. “Enough! She’s not our enemy in this.”
Nedzu shifted his gaze to him, still smiling pleasantly.
“There is a difference between an ally and a friend, All Might. You should remember it.”
All Might glared at him: “Quantum is my friend.”
Toki felt almost as taken aback by that statement as Nedzu seemed to be. It was so unexpected. It wasn’t something they rarely talked about and yet, hearing it so boldly proclaimed, while the Symbol of Peace was defending her, make something tighten in her chest.
In the silence, they heard the crowd outside roar in delight. The Festival had started.
“Quantum is my friend,” All Might repeated, lower and just as firmly. “She encouraged me and gave me perspective. She supported me when she had no reason to, shared her dreams and her thoughts with me when I was aimless, and forgave me for the harm done to her family when I did not deserve it. She knows more about me than almost everyone in Japan. If I had realized you mistrusted her so much, I would have said something sooner, but I am telling you now. Quantum is my friend, and you will treat her with the respect she deserves.”
Toki stared at him, feeling dumbstruck. She hadn’t expected such a passionate defense. All Might was standing to his full height, towering about the sofa where Nedzu sat: he was exuding righteous anger and power to the point Toki could almost feel the shift in the air, like the atmosphere getting heavier before a storm. He looked intimidating. Nedzu’s smile had frozen on his face.
Blowing out at Nedzu, the small and cute mammal that was as smart as Genryusai-sama and twice as cold blooded, wasn’t something that most people found easy to do. Even when the pricking of dread and humiliation had zinged through Toki’s body at hearing Nedzu so casually talk about her darkest secret, she had stood still, very aware that escalating would have consequences. She had to think long-term, she had to think about her place here, about her job, about her mission.
But All Might hadn’t hesitated. He had stood up for her. Not many people had done that for her, in the past. Keigo, Hayasa-sensei, and… nobody else.
She took a careful breath, and let it go silently. Once, she hated this man. Now, seeing him rising to her defense, she thought wondered how it could have been so. She felt… she didn’t know what she felt. Touched. Grateful.
Awed, maybe.
“I see,” said Nedzu, lower, without smiling this time. He turned to Toki and said very seriously, “I apologize Quantum. I thought you were here to undermine All Might on Genmei’s behalf. I didn’t realize you knew each other already.”
Toki took a second to compose herself. Her throat was still tight and her hands clammy, her heart beating fast as if preparing for a fight. She tried to forcingly relax.
“Are you going to keep hindering me in finding the spy?” she said stiffly.
“How professional of you,” smiled Nedzu, before turning serious again. “No. If All Might vouch for you, then I don’t have to worry about you making a student disappear as soon as they reach a certain level of suspiciousness, I suppose.”
So he suspected a student, too. Toki inclined her head. It wasn’t quite enough to make her happy, but she would take what she could.
“Why would you believe Genmei-san wants to undermine me?” All Might asked, sounding a little baffled by the idea.
“To use your notoriety to make one of her protégés the next Number One, of course,” Nedzu answered easily.
Toki barely hid a wince. Yeah, that was pretty much Genmei-san’s plan. Of course, Hawks and Quantum were already in a position to become the Top Heroes (and Endeavor was getting old; he wouldn’t be Number One forever). But if Genmei-san could make All Might speak in their favor, or publicly entrust his legacy to them, or something like that… well. They wouldn’t just be Top Heroes. They would become an institution, like the Symbol of Peace.
“Genmei-san and myself have a cordial relationship,” Nedzu added easily, “but we’re both schemers at heart. Looking for secondary motives to her every gesture is second nature, and I felt genuinely concerned that she didn’t seek to plant a pawn on my territory after Thirteen’s passing. Of course, her kindness meant that I owe her a favor now. But it was too much of a kindness, which meant that there had to be more to Quantum than what meets the eye. I expected a poisonous gift, but…” There was a calculating glint in his beady eyes. “Does Genmei know about your friendship with All Might?”
Toki shook her head. No, the President wasn’t aware that she had kept contact with Yagi. They probably didn’t even know that they had seen each other after their fight. Somehow, Nedzu seemed to like that.
“Ah,” he said with satisfaction, steeping his paws. “So it really was supposed to be a poisonous gift. Once again, the power of friendship threw a wrench into the best-laid plans.”
On another day, it would have made Toki snort. Right now, however, she just glared at him. It wasn’t as funny as he thought he was. Sociopathic badger, indeed.
“Are we done?”
Nedzu sighed. “Yes. Please do not hold my wariness against me, Quantum.”
“What about your rudeness?” she fired back.
“We all have our flaws,” he admitted pleasantly.
Toki harrumphed then turned on her heels. She threw a questioning glance to All Might, but he shook his head, making no move to follow her or to be warped back to where they came from, so Toki left him there and warped on her own.
She reappeared on the rooftop and took a few seconds to calm her racing heartbeat. The surge of adrenaline was dying down and her back was covered in a cold sweat. Nedzu’s sudden appearance, the spike of fear when she realized he had heard…
Toki closed her eyes.
She needed to let it go. She needed to face it, to stop being so afraid of people knowing the truth. Her name, her past, her mistakes. Her father. Why was she even afraid? Meteor wasn’t out for her blood. He wasn’t a shameful secret. Soon, he would even be a hero.
But maybe there was a lingering fear of people in power using her past to blackmail her. When she had been a kid, hiding behind Hoshizora’s name and then behind Quantum, it had been a very real fear. Those kinds of things weren’t easily forgotten.
And yet she needed to grow up. Meteor wasn’t a dirty secret. He was a person, he was living his life, and he was going to be a hero soon. He would be part of her life, wherever she wanted him to or not. And she wanted it, she really did. She needed to have that closure and wanted to see him be happy. Toki had to make her peace with it. Nedzu wouldn’t be the last to confront her about this. Trying to stick her head in the sand wouldn’t help her.
Besides, the next person to figure it out would probably be Endeavor. That was a conversation she wasn’t going to be able to avoid. Then, after him, it would be other people, maybe her sidekicks, maybe people from Endeavor’s agency, maybe other heroes. And later, it would be the public.
Toki breathed in, breathed out. She tried to see her childhood fear like a chasm clinging to her in her mind’s eyes. She gathered it, like threads of wool, and then… let it go.
Meteor hadn’t been a monster. Brutal, a little manic, scary, violent, ruthless; but also protective, loving, clever, loyal. No, he hadn’t been a monster. Never. And Toki hadn’t been one, either. Even when she had turned the Crew over to the heroes, she hadn’t been a monster. She had been a child. She had been stupid, that’s all.
So the next time someone would mention her relation to Meteor, Toki swore to herself that she would just look them in the eyes, and say, as flatly as she could, “So what?”
She breathed in. She breathed out. She let the fear go.
Like the earth or the moon
I am covered with craters and scars.
This is not something
I need to be saved from.
She would see her father, one day. Maybe she would ask for his forgiveness. Maybe he would ask for hers. She didn’t know what either of their answers would be. But she knew she wouldn’t ask for denial. She wouldn’t ask for a mask, for lies, for the erasure of their relationship.
She was Toki Taiyōme. The name wasn’t a clean one, but it was hers. And she should stop being afraid of its legacy.
oOoOoOo
Toki patrolled Hosu for a little while without finding any trace of the hero killer. She left early in the afternoon. Her main focus wasn’t on the patrol, and it was a dangerous mindset to be in, when looking for a serial killer. She wanted to look at her phone to follow the Sports Festival. The stakes weren’t the same as they had been for Melissa’s Sports Festival, and Hitoshi and Neito had far less riding on this event: but they were still her students, and she wanted to see them do well!
In the end, she folded and went back home for lunch. Ingenium wasn’t supposed to be on patrol, and Stain was allegedly more cautious than in canon following his near-death experience against Endeavor in January. It would be fine.
Toki decided to work on her thesis while watching the event on TV. She had missed most of it, but during the break, it wasn’t hard to catch up by changing the channel to something that played the various events in replay.
Nedzu was refereeing the Festival for the Third Year, and Toki tried to ignore his grating voice. She just watched long enough to be sure that Melissa was doing well. The first event had been some kind of scavenger hunt where people had to find shiny gemstones hidden in the arena. The people with the most gemstones went on to the second round.
The second round was a team battle, as expected. Teams of four people had to claim the gemstones collected in the first round from each other, while also guarding a corner of the arena designated as their territory. If you lost control of your territory, you couldn’t pass to the next round, no matter the number of gemstones you had. The obvious solution was to split the team between offense and defense. Melissa had teamed up with the telekinesis guy, Nejire Hado, and the fire-whip guy, and they were trouncing their rivals something fierce. While Toki watched, Melissa started chasing a naked guy (Mirio Togata, probably) while swinging around a grappling hook that was sending electric arcs everywhere.
Her cute little student had become pants-wetting scary.
Anyway. Toki didn’t want to listen to Nedzu cheerfully commenting on the by-play of the battle, so she changed the channel to watch the Sports Festival of her other students: the first years.
The challenges were the same as in canon. Shame. Toki would have liked some novelty. Oh, whatever.
The first event ended up with Midoriya as the victor. Toki wasn’t surprised. She didn’t know if All Might had told him to tell the world ‘I Am Here!’, but in any case, Midoriya was smart enough to pull it off. More people in 1-B had passed this time around. Mineta hadn’t made it to the second round, and neither had Satou or Hagakure. Hitoshi was better ranked. So was Neito, actually. He had come in third, right after Todoroki!
The second event, the cavalry battle, was… animated. The teams weren’t the same as in canon, for one.
Midoriya partnered up with Hatsume but also with Hitoshi and Iida. Neito incomprehensibly joined forces with Todoroki and no one else, in a team of two people only. Toki had no idea how he had pulled that off. But following his example, the two classes merged a lot more than in canon. Yaoyorozu, Tokage, Ashido, and Kendo made an all-girls team; and Kaminari joined Shiozaki’s team.
Curious. In canon, class 1-A and class 1-B hadn’t even met before the Sports Festival, so they hadn’t known each other’s Quirks and definitely hadn’t trusted each other enough to partner up. She wondered what had changed. She had mentioned to each class what happened in the other class sometimes, mostly to encourage them (mentioning to Kirishima that he wasn’t the only one with a hardening Quirk in the school, talking about martial arts to Kaibara or Ojiro, and so on) but she had only meant to plant a seed of self-awareness, and she certainly hadn’t seen any sign of curiosity towards the other class.
But maybe it wasn’t her at all. Toki’s gaze shifted to Hitoshi, a horse on Midoriya’s team, and Neito, a rider of his own minimal team. Those two hung out with friends in their respective classes all day, but they also ate together every day, at the same table, in a big communal cafeteria. It would be very surprising for someone as community-oriented as Neito to not introduce his various friends to each other. It would also be very surprising if Hitoshi hadn’t reciprocated.
Toki hadn’t seen them spend time together or train together, of course. But as she watched teams form, she wondered if maybe she could pitch the idea to Yagi. Especially for combat exercises, or even rescue exercises. Instead of two groups of twenty students, there would be only one group of forty. Harder to manage, but more versatile and powerful.
Yes, that could work.
But back to the point!
The cavalry battle was pandemonium from start to finish. For the first five minutes everyone was gunning for Midoriya, but soon Todoroki and Neito started making it known that it was their fight, and everyone else decided it would be wiser to be… anywhere but in the immediate vicinity of these basket-cases. Neito had copied Uraraka’s Quirk and had made himself weightless so as to not hinder his partner, but he also regularly switched to demonstrate the Quirks of various people to hand them their own asses on a silver platter. Toki recognized Kendo’s Quirk, Tokage’s Quirk, and Tetsutetsu’s Quirk…! It was very impressive! He had probably spent the first event collecting hairs from them and then taping his various trophies to his arms to have multiple Quirks directly accessible to him.
What a devious little shit. Toki loved it.
Anyway, the rest of the students weren’t bad either. Uraraka and Sero made a really amazing duo, swinging around the whole arena; Kirishima and Tetsutetsu had an epic match; Honenuki showed off his talent with ambushes; and the all-girls team defended themselves really well. It was exceedingly chaotic, with everyone attacking everyone while running from the constant deluge of ice and fire and various projectiles coming from Todoroki’s team, but it was great!
Todoroki and Neito came in first place. They stole the ten million points headband halfway through the event and then had to defend it, but they did well. Especially considering that they were only a team of two. Most people were four, so they could distribute the workload, but Neito and Todoroki didn’t have a second to breathe, right until the end.
Neito threw up immediately after the buzzer, and barely missed Todoroki’s head, but that was an acceptable price.
Then came the individual matches!
That was the best part, in Toki’s opinion. First, there was Kirishima against Tetsutetsu, again, and Tetsutetsu won by the narrowest margin. The difference was in skills rather than strength, apparently. It looked like all that advice about metallic properties had paid off.
Then it was Neito against Ashido, and it was barely a fight at all. Oh, Ashido was no pushover! But Neito won within thirty seconds using Todoroki’s fire (probably copied right before his match). It was a little brutal, actually. Toki even winced from her seat. But as soon as Midnight declared that Ashido was out of bound, Neito ran to her to help her stand up, and the camera zoomed on the way she reassured him with a laugh. No hard feelings, there.
After, it was Uraraka against Midoriya. An interesting match-up, to be sure. They both looked as determined as they were petrified. The boy didn’t use his Quirk at all, as to not injure himself (or Uraraka!), but he was pretty good at hand-to-hand combat. He may even have some formal training. He was about three to four times more muscled than Uraraka, too: so Toki totally expected him to win. But to her surprise, Midoriya floundered at the last minute when Uraraka grappled him. Afraid of her Quirk? Or of having a girl plastered against him? Point was that their last grapple was a little uncontrolled. They tumbled over the boundary line together.
It was only by watching the footage that Present Mic announced that Midoriya had left the ring first. Too bad for him.
The matches continued. It was Yaoyorozu against Tokoyami, then Iida against Tokage… Then there was Kamakiri against Hatsume. Oh, what a show. The hot-headed insectoid boy from class 1-B, and the girl genius from the Support Course! Toki almost regretted not having any popcorn. Seeing the infuriated Kamakiri run behind the pink-haired girl while screaming in rage, all while Hatsume exuberantly commented on her various babies, was absolutely hilarious.
Keigo came home halfway to this fight, and wordlessly Toki scooted over to make some room on the couch. It was rare for both of them to be home before the end of the day.
“Nedzu found out about Meteor,” she told him without preamble.
Keigo paused, his gaze turning briefly assessing. Reassured by her calmness, he sat down next to her, a wing curving up behind her back like an instinctive hug.
“How come?”
“All Might told me that the HPSC was going to make him the final authority on whether Meteor would be freed or not. Nedzu overheard. He told me he had known all along, apparently.”
“… You’re taking it well.”
“I had my freak-out,” she confessed. “But then All Might rose to my defense. It was nice of him. And afterward, I did a little thinking about all this stuff, and— you know, I can’t freeze and panic every time the subject is brought up, now. He’s going to be a hero. More people are going to find out. Hell, I bet Endeavor is going to stumble upon the truth sooner rather than later, no matter how cleverly I hid my tracks. I need to be rational about this.”
Keigo made a contemplative noise. On the screen, it was time for the next match. Hitoshi stepped on the ring to fight Sero. Capture tape against Quirk-made tape, that was an interesting match-up. Toki couldn’t help but lean forward, hoping that her student would win.
He did.
For a while, they danced against one another, swinging around in a brilliant display of agility. Toki could see their mouth moving, meaning Hitoshi had caught Sero right at the beginning: but Hitoshi waited until he had punched him, until he had indubitably made physical contact, to activate his Quirk and put Sero to sleep. Hitoshi was keeping the charade about his Quirk. Good for him. He was announced the winner and strutted out of the ring with a bright smile that almost eclipsed his eyebags.
“Are you going to tell other people?” Keigo finally asked.
“Like Mihoko-san?”
“Yeah. And the sidekicks at Icarus. And Hayasa-sensei.”
Toki made a face. “Hayasa-sensei, yes. He should know. The others… it’s less urgent.”
As an underground hero, Hayasa-sensei would probably meet Meteor in the not-so-distant future. It made Toki shiver in anxiety. She didn’t doubt that her father had calmed down a little, but… Hayasa-sensei was part of the organization that had kidnapped Toki. Worse: he had raised her, taking the place that Meteor may see as rightfully his. When it would come to light, it wouldn’t be pretty.
And it would come to light. Those things always did.
“Speaking of reveals,” Keigo suddenly said. “When are you going to expose Hobo-san for corruption and Okamoto for abuse of power? Because if you haven’t found anything by now, I doubt he’s going to slip later on.”
True. Toki scowled.
“I’ll try to raise the subject right before the kids go on their internship, so they don’t see the fallout. I don’t want everything to go down in flames in front of them. Their trust in authority figures would take a blow. But yeah, you’re right. The perfect proof of collusion isn’t going to fall in my lap. I need to provoke it.”
Keigo made a sound of satisfaction. He wasn’t vengeful like Toki was, so he wouldn’t have picked a fight with Aizawa if their positions were reversed… but Toki was well-aware that Keigo hadn’t liked Hobo-san at all. Respected him, yes. But nothing more.
Toki let her head fall on Keigo’s shoulder and refocused on the TV. She briefly changed the channel to see Melissa’s Sports Festival. She had missed Melissa’s match, apparently. She was just in time to see Togata win against telekinesis-guy. Toki checked that Melissa was part of the bracket advancing to the next round, then went back to the channel showing the first years’ tournament.
The last match of the first round was between Kendo and Todoroki. Kendo was good, but her strength was in close combat. Todoroki kept her at a distance with his fire, then ejected her from the ring with a wall of ice.
Then it was the second round, and Toki noted with amusement that unlike what had happened in canon, class 1-A and class 1-B were equally matched. There were four people in each class. Neito was probably happy. Oh, he wasn’t as obsessed with class rivalry as he was depicted to be in canon (not when his best friend was in 1-A!), but he was still a little protective of his classmates, and he wanted to see them win. Neito was very community-oriented, after all.
The second round started with Tetsutetsu against Neito: not the best match-up for someone with a Copy Quirk. Fortunately, once again Neito entered the ring with someone else’s Quirk… in that case, Hitoshi’s. A single punch to pretend the need for physical contact (yes, Neito was a good bro, supporting Hitoshi with his subterfuge!), a few more words, and Tetsutetsu started swaying… rubbing his eyes… and then he slowly folded on the floor, snoring.
Neito had really pretended to put him to sleep, uh. He had even made it look as if he didn’t wield the supposed Sleep Hypnosis Quirk as powerfully as Hitoshi did. Toki admired his commitment.
After that, it was Uraraka against Tokoyami. It wasn’t much longer. Uraraka’s Quirk worked on Dark Shadow, true, but Tokoyami himself carefully kept his distance. In the end, after a short but brutal bout of brawling, Uraraka was ejected from the ring.
Then it was Setsuna Tokage against Kamakiri. The lizard girl against the insectoid boy: an interesting combination. Tokage could split her body into several pieces, allowing her to avoid the slashes of Kamakiri’s bladed arms, but she was no slouch either and gave as good as she got. Pushed and enraged, she aimed for his face, his eyes, his throat. Kamakiri was objectively more dangerous, with his blades. He got first blood, second, and third, and honestly Toki completely expected Tokage to forfeit.
But she had underestimated the girl. Using the same stratagem as Melissa once had, Tokage lured Kamakiri close to the boundary line and made him trip over it with his own momentum. She was the worst off, but she still won.
The last match was Hitoshi against Todoroki and boy Toki was nervous about that one.
Todoroki was stoic. Oh, Hitoshi would have no problem getting under his skin if he really tried to; but they were also friends. In his class, Hitoshi mostly hung out with Yaoyorozu or Midoriya, gluing himself to their respective groups of friends. Toki hadn’t failed to notice that he never minded joining Todoroki’s side. Todoroki, who didn’t try to socialize with anyone, but still tolerated Hitoshi’s presence with ease. Todoroki, who didn’t want to use his fire in combat against Hitoshi because he didn’t want to frighten him.
The match began. They fought. Todoroki only used his ice, at the beginning. Hitoshi came at him strongly, trying to brawl and wrestle. And they seemed to argue, too. Toki distinctively saw Todoroki pause and go slack once, before suddenly straightening, as if Hitoshi had caught him and then let him go.
What the hell could they be talking about? Fuck, she would have given an arm to be able to listen to their conversation!
Whatever it was, it gave Todoroki the kick he needed, and he threw a fireball at Hitoshi. Toki saw the way Hitoshi’s spine went rigid, the exact spit-second of blind panic. Then she also saw him roll and dodge, and get back up grinning, taunting his opponent. Todoroki huffed a laugh, maybe, and then he was caught, and Hitoshi won the match.
Toki realized that there was a serious possibility that the finalists would be her two students and couldn’t help but feel a little giddy at the thought.
“Why are you back so early, by the way?” she asked curiously, turning to Keigo. “I thought you would patrol all afternoon. I’m the one who took the day off to do stuff.”
“Did you do your stuff?” Keigo countered.
“I was a little rattled after talking with Nedzu,” she admitted. “I tried to patrol anyway in Hosu, but my mind was elsewhere. I came back to work on my thesis.” She looked at her computer, still open but untouched during the last two hours. “It’s a work in progress.”
“So basically, no?”
“Basically. Hey, you didn’t answer my question!”
Keigo huffed a laugh, and then spread out even more on the couch, leaning against her comfortably.
“Believe it or not, it was Hayasa-sensei. He said I had done so much overtime that he was putting me on mandatory time-out. I only had one patrol and paperwork planned for the afternoon anyway, so he basically ordered me to go home, relax, watch the Festival with you, and pick an intern that won’t give him grey hairs. His words, not mine.”
Toki sniggered. “Damn, he really mellowed out after leaving Naruto Labs.”
Hayasa-sensei had been a hardass about training and rules. A good teacher, but also rigid. He always drew a line between what was professional and what wasn’t. But he had loved them anyway, hadn’t he? That was why he had been so furious with Okamoto when he brought them back covered in bruises, that was why he had snapped his own ligaments rushing to help Toki when she had had her heart attack. He had loved them; he just hadn’t been able or willing to let his walls down… and hadn’t wanted to be more than a teacher.
But he had changed. He had reconnected with his family, then set out in the world on his own. And when he had found them again, he hadn’t been so strict with them. Hadn’t been so strict with himself. Maybe because he wasn’t their teacher anymore, and it was easier to admit they were also friends… family, almost.
Hayasa-sensei had raised them. Even when he had only been their teacher, he had also been the closest thing they had to a parental figure.
“I think he just like fussing over us,” Keigo grinned. “He’s secretly a mother-hen.”
“I know, right?”
They exchanged an amused smile. Then Present Mic screeched that the semi-finals were beginning, and their attention snapped back to the TV.
The first match was Neito against Tokoyami. Not a good match-up for him: Dark Shadow was a mutation, so he couldn’t copy it. He would need to use a Quirk copied outside the ring, but he had a time limit. If he didn’t defeat Tokoyami within five minutes, his borrowed Quirk would fizzle out.
So Neito didn’t lose any time. When the match began, he immediately attacked with Kendo’s Quirk, his hands turning as big as him and hitting Dark Shadow head-on.
Dark Shadow was a strong, powerful Quirk. If she had been in Neito’s shoes Toki would have picked something different to fight him. Probably something to do with light… ah, but maybe Neito had been limited by what Quirks were available to him at the time. He had copied Todoroki’s Quirk once, but the bi-colored boy probably hadn’t let him do it a second time.
Anyway, it was a pure brawl from there on, firsts against shadows, while the crowd roared in approval.
Neito had more technique. He ducked and hit, dodged, and riposted. It was obvious he had trained in hand-to-hand combat. Toki was proud. Even without having followed any lessons in a dojo, Neito had progressed by leaps and bounds after training with Melissa, Hitoshi, and herself.
Tokoyami had a more powerful Quirk, but he lacked finesse. He could have used his jacket to provide more darkness. He could have attacked by himself, too, instead of only relying on Dark Shadow. He stayed too static, too, not taking advantage of the space around him. Maybe that was what made this match so great and terrible to watch: to see him fumble with so much untapped potential. Because Tokoyami was stronger, but right until the end it was impossible to be sure who would win.
In the end, Neito ducked under Dark Shadow’s strike and headbutted Tokoyami so hard that they both staggered back… and the bird-headed boy collapsed, knocked out cold.
The next match was between Tokage and Hitoshi. Tokage was careful. She had watched all of Hitoshi’s matches and she had probably figured out how his Quirk was supposed to work. Hitoshi had always taken care to touch someone before putting them to sleep, even if that wasn’t immediate. The only exception was Todoroki, but they had fought in close quarters with ice obscuring the visibility, so it wasn’t illogical for Tokage to extrapolate that distance was safety.
Big mistake.
She tried to keep away as much as she could, separating her body in several pieces that zipped around him at dizzying speed, avoiding his touch but trying to herd him towards the boundary line. Hitoshi grinned and started talking. Tokage made the mistake of replying, or maybe just sighing or grunting or acknowledging him… and then her detached body parts froze mid-air. Eyes vacant, she reconstructed her body, then laid down on her side with her arm as pillow, and promptly went to sleep.
Hitoshi hadn’t bothered touching her. He hadn’t even taken his hands out of his pockets.
And, when he left the ring under the delighted yelling of the crowd, while Present Mic screamed that his talent to put people to sleep was really extraordinary… He also managed to not reveal the extent of his abilities. To everyone in the public, his Quirk was just some kind of sleep hypnosis. Oh, he was good, he was really good!
Toki bounced in her seat, vibrating with manic energy. Keigo wasn’t as delighted as she was, but he was still laughing, rubbing his hands in delight.
“I can’t believe that your fledglings stole the Sports Festival! You can be proud.”
“I am! I am so proud I can’t even begin to tell you! Oh, man, after this is over, what do you say we go to Musutafu to celebrate with them? You can meet Neito!”
And, unvoiced, was the fact that if they went to Musutafu, they would absolutely swing by Mihoko’s apartment to see Hinawa. Keigo smiled, radiant.
“Sounds like a plan.”
“And NOW THE FINALE!!!!!” shrieked Present Mic on TV. “It’s Phantom Thief! Against the underdog, Cheshire! THE WINNER TAKES IT ALL, FOLKS!”
“It’s starting!”
In the arena, Neito and Hitoshi were face to face. They weren’t speaking, just watching. Even when Present Mic gave the signal to start the match, they didn’t move immediately.
Hitoshi started talking. Toki could see his lips moving. Neito didn’t answer… but he smiled, before coming at him swinging. Hitoshi jumped back, avoiding the slap at the cost of being almost punched in the stomach, and suddenly Toki’s eyes went wide when she understood.
Oh. Neito hadn’t borrowed a Quirk this time around.
This time around, Neito had no hidden ace in his sleeves. It was just Copy. This match… was Brainwashing against Copy, and nothing else. No one else, rather. The two finalists of the Sports Festival had stripped off their subterfuges and their support, baring themselves to the public to show that even without a crutch, they could still reach the top.
Just like Melissa had done, two years ago.
They circled and punched, kicking and dodging, dancing circles around each other. It wasn’t all-out brawling. Hitoshi would have won easily, then. But Neito was faster, quicker on his feet. He couldn’t beat Hitoshi with strength, but he could make him sweat. And after getting a few hits in, well, they both had Brainwashing now. If they made the other grunt or growl, in response to a taunt or to pain…
It wasn’t going to be a battle of strength, but rather a battle of wits. Of luck, quick thinking, and adaptability. They had to coax the other into talking, but not answer the opponent’s own overtures; they had to keep their breath while the other would try to take it away; they would have to keep silent, while also forcing the other to make noise in reaction to them. The winner would be the first to let his control slip.
Which of them had the best poker face? Toki would have said Hitoshi, usually. Neito was too passionate, too loud.
But they also knew each other very well. They both had an instinctive grip on strategizing and adapting to their opponents, and they had been best friends for years. They knew each other’s strengths and weaknesses, and it put everything in the air again. Technically, Hitoshi had more experience working with Brainwashing so he should have the advantage, but…
But Neito was simply better with people.
“WHAT’S THIS?!” Present Mic yelled. “Cheshire just froze! He stopped fighting completely! OH! He’s LAYING DOWN! He’s falling asleep! Phantom Thief got him?!”
And indeed, Hitoshi laid down, and stopped moving. Toki let out a noise of surprise, then a massive grin bloomed on her face. Holy shit, he had done it. He had done it! On the screen, Neito beamed, and she started laughing. She was so fucking proud!
“PHANTOM THIEF IS THE WINNER!” Present Mic screeched.
The crowd roared in delight.
“EXTRAORDINARY!” Present Mic sounded almost manic with glee. “He defeated his opponent with his own Quirk! No tricks, no ace in his sleeve, just PURE SKILLS! Did you see this? DID YOU SEE THIS?! Excuse my language people BUT THIS IS FU—,” There was a sharp noise, like someone had switched off the intercom. It almost immediately came back to life, screeching through the stadium. “—NG INCREDIBLE!”
Toki laughed, clapping along the crowd from her couch, almost jumping up and down. When she turned to Keigo, she was grinning from ear to ear.
“Did you see that?!”
“I did,” her husband laughed. “And after such a showing, how could I refuse to meet your precious pupils?”
oOoOoOo
Two days after the Sports Festival, Toki’s excitement came to a screeching halt.
The first two days went great. Keigo and her had gone to Musutafu as planned, carefully disguised with their civiliansona. Firstly, they spent a few hours with Mihoko-san and Hinawa. Their daughter was nine months old now. The same age Hitoshi had been when Toki had met him for the first time; wasn’t that a head trip?
Hinawa was smaller than Hitoshi had been at that age. Lighter, too. She didn’t have Keigo’s hollow bones, but she was still more delicate than Hitoshi had been. She laughed and babbled happily, and she had a big gummy smile with only a few with teeth. When she managed to stand up now, still using something or someone for support, she spread her tiny wings to have a better balance. Hinawa could even take a few steps now before falling onto her bottom and deciding to crawl to her goal. She was so active, too, always moving! When she would learn to walk and then to fly, she would be everywhere at once!
Anyway. In the evening, when Yūei had released the students, Toki and Keigo had later left the apartment to collect the little fledglings and celebrate at a local fast food. Neito, Hitoshi, and Melissa had all been on cloud nine, replaying the best moments of the festival with exuberance. Melissa had come in second place, this time. She had tied with Mirio Togata, both of them knocking each other out at the same time, and Nedzu had suggested to determine the victor with arm wrestling. Melissa was strong, sure, but Togata had bigger biceps, and he had won without much difficulty.
A large part of the crowd had booed and accused the school of being biased, even if the arm wrestling had been picked at random among other options. It was a little heartwarming, to see that the public totally believed that Melissa could win the Festival if she was given a fair chance.
But back to the point! They had dinner. Neito had been a little starstruck in front of Hawks, of course, but considering that the red feathers were nowhere to be seen and that Hitoshi constantly called him ‘SpicyWings,’ it was hard to remember that it was the Number Three hero, and it was easier to see him as a friend from the Discord server.
It had been a good evening, filled with laughter, delight, and happiness. Toki had told the kids how proud she was. Melissa had beamed. Hitoshi blushed. Neito had almost cried. They had talked, bantered, and laughed.
“How did you make Hitoshi respond, in the end?” Melissa asked avidly.
“I asked him for Todoroki’s number,” grinned Neito. “Then I started sounding my pick-up lines and asking him what would work on the local ice prince.”
Toki thought that it added credence to the theory of Neito being Thunder Thief’s son because that tendency to flirt had to be genetic. But she was also self-aware enough to recognize her bad influence here. She was a flirt, too.
And Neito had picked up the habit. She didn’t know if she was proud or horrified. Hitoshi’s face clearly showed that he was horrified.
“But it was a joke, right, Neito?” he asked a little pleadingly.
The blond boy shrugged noncommittally. “He’s cute.”
Hitoshi gagged. Melissa started laughing, nearly choking to death on a nugget, and Keigo grinned from ear to ear.
“And you made a great team, too.”
“Don’t encourage him!” Hitoshi wailed.
So yeah, a great evening.
But then normal life resumed. For the kids, it meant classes. For Toki and Keigo it meant patrolling, paperwork, meetings, commercials, investigations, fights, and training. A hero’s work was never over.
And then two days after, Toki learned that the hero killer had gotten Ingenium.
Fuck.
She wanted to hit something. She had looked for him! She had been so careful to check if Ingenium was scheduled to patrol anywhere, and then she had herself quadrilled Hosu to avoid this exact scenario!
But somehow, somehow, bad luck had struck again.
It wasn’t Toki’s fault. It was no one’s fault. Ingenium shouldn’t have been outside that day. He had been watching the Sports Festival on TV. He had called his brother to encourage him at lunch! And then one of Ingenium’s sidekicks had said he couldn’t make it to patrol because his wife was giving birth, and so Ingenium had taken his spot for that afternoon’s patrol in Hosu. He had gotten on a train from Tokyo and had arrived in Hosu less than an hour after Toki’s departure. It was infuriating.
It could have been avoided. Ingenium hadn’t been Stain’s target. On the contrary, he had seen Stain trying to stalk another hero, Native, and given chase. He hadn’t been the prey!
But he was a hero, so of course, he had interfered. He had made himself a nuisance.
Toki tried to imagine how Iida’s brother could have done things differently, but she knew that Ingenium had made the right call. The only call, really. He had sent for backup but thrown himself into danger anyway because there was no time to lose when a serial killer was going to strike. That’s what heroes did, they couldn’t stay idle when someone was in danger. Ingenium had only done his duty.
But he hadn’t been strong enough. By the time his sidekicks had caught up with him, Stain had vanished.
Ingenium wasn’t dead, but he was in a coma. He hadn’t woken up.
(It was unlikely he would.)
In canon, his spine had been damaged and he was paralyzed from the waist down. But Toki was sure he hadn’t been comatose. He had been awake. He had talked to his little brother, or how else would he have tried to offer him the Ingenium name?
This universe wasn’t the canon one. In both, Ingenium had chased Stain and had paid the price, and in both worlds, it was a small miracle that he was still alive. But the wounds weren’t the same, the methods weren’t the same. The consequences weren’t the same, either. In canon, Ingenium’s survival had been pretty much guaranteed. Here… Here, it was so much more uncertain.
And Toki couldn’t help but think of a time, not so long ago, when a big Japanese city had lost its hero. When Hellmaker had burned Fukuoka, and Shirayuki with it.
Those times were supposed to be in the past. Long before Toki’s birth, before the dawn of the Symbol of Peace, when there hadn’t been quite so many limelight heroes to scare off murderers from the streets. And yes, limelight heroes had their issues! Lots of them were glory hounds, and Toki was very much aware of it. But Stain’s rampage wasn’t helping anyone.
Who the fuck cared about heroes’ motives when it was their actions that mattered?
Limelight heroes, even if they were in the game for selfish desires, helped people. And not just by fighting villains. They had an undeniable effect on the crime rate wherever they operated. Toki knew that. That was why she was a limelight hero, too, to produce a visible effect on her city’s security! Underground heroes didn’t have the same dissuasive effect.
Forty years ago, it hadn’t been out of the ordinary to have a small death count every day of the week from villain activity. Today you could go months, almost years in Japan without a civilian death. All Might hadn’t been solely responsible for that, but plenty of heroes like him had worked hard to bring about that level of change. Heroes like Shirayuki, heroes like Ingenium. Heroes like Quantum and Hawks.
It was frightening, to see it attacked.
Hayasa-sensei quietly requested a few days of leave so he could go and support his sister. It was granted, of course. Hayasa-sensei had issues with his sister’s family, but she was still his sister. Ingenium was his nephew.
No matter how much Toki felt like Hayasa-sensei was their family, she couldn’t forget that he had another family. A blood family, that had both abandoned him and been abandoned by him once. Of course, he would want to be there to offer his help. If she had been in his shoes… Toki would have done the same. Hell, she was doing the same, in a way, hovering worriedly around Meteor to try and help him while not daring to approach him.
Family was just so complicated, sometimes.
Anyway. Hayasa-sensei left, grave and somber, and Toki tried not to feel his absence too keenly.
Icarus had enough intel and connections to continue their heroic work even without their favorite underground hero. Still, during Hayasa-sensei’s absence, Toki reached out to little Serpentine to ask her if she was interested in sniffing out crime around Fukuoka. It would be a learning experience, and Toki would feel better having some reinforcement here. Since she often patrolled around Musutafu, she didn’t want Icarus’ numbers to decrease too much.
Serpentine, of course, was thrilled. But then, she was often thrilled. The girl was so energic that it helplessly reminded Toki of Lady Siam sometimes. Except without the booming voice and the manly slaps on the shoulders, maybe. Serpentine didn’t like to touch people, Toki had noticed. Even in close quarters, she kept her hands to herself. She talked a mile a minute and leaned close into her interlocutor’s personal space when she was excited about something, almost draping herself over them, but she didn’t hug or enlace or even touch people.
Maybe it was a snake thing? Or something to do with her poison?
Or maybe that was just how she was. Toki was well-aware that all heroes had their neuroses.
Anyway, little Serpentine was currently a solo hero, and she could even be qualified for underground on the sole fact that she didn’t do commercials or photoshops. She could allow herself this lack of publicity, of course, since she didn’t have a debt to reimburse or a mortgage to pay for an agency. Serpentine valued her autonomy. Oh, she gave interviews and when her fights were filmed, she wasn’t camera-shy. But the idea of posing for pictures and taking time in her day just to do merchandise deals made her balk. She was comfortable in action but apparently not with sitting still for more than a minute.
So she was, in a way, kind of becoming like the pro-hero Sherazade. Very pretty, always dressed in a brightly colored costume, immediately recognizable as a pro-hero, but utterly uninterested in the commercial side of things, and even avoiding them. Except that Sherazadade worked with the police in de-escalation situations, and Serpentine mostly worked on her own to do recon and villain containment.
Kind of like Mirko, who worked alone too. Uh... That was a thought.
Having Serpentine near Fukuoka was also a good excuse for Toki to catch up with her, and keep an eye on her progress. Serpentine was kind of her kōhai, so she felt responsible. Not that Serpentine really needed her. She was very competent. And actually better adjusted than Toki had been at her age.
Not that she was ill-adjusted in any way. But well, growing up in a training facility didn’t favor normal social interactions. At least Serpentine had had a normal childhood since she had only joined the sponsorship program at age fifteen or sixteen. She always held herself with confidence and she had no problem switching off her hero persona to do investigative work in civies, for example. That was something Toki had a little more trouble with.
________________
< Antares: Do you think i’m a well-adjusted member of society?
> PinkIsPunkRock: are any of us, really?
> EndeavorSucks: Speak for yourself
> EndeavorSucks: I’m great
> PikaPika: and so modest.
> PikaPika: what brought this on anyway? Are you having a mid-life crisis?
> NotOnFire: ARE YOU DYING?
< Antares: no?
> SpicyWings: chill man, you’re really jumping to conclusions
> NotOnFire: I was just asking
> NotOnFire: I like jumping to conclusions ‘cause it's the only exercise i get
< Antares: 🤣
< Antares: just thinking about a young coworker of mine and how mature they are compared to me at that age
> SpicyWings: to be honest you were always a bit feral
< Antares: … touché
> NotOnFire: speaking of being feral my patience is wearing thin at work with this new manager who can’t manage shit
> NotOnFire: my sanity is gonna snap like a fucking glowstick
> EndeavorSucks: can’t you quit?
> NotOnFire: I might, but I don’t have another job lined up, and it would suck
> PinkIsPunkRock: oh!!! I forgot to tell you!!! Speaking of job
> PinkIsPunkRock: today a guy called me a bitch at work and I said ‘was it not a bitch who nursed Rome?’ so I’ll never come out with anything that good in my life again
> Megamind: 🤯
> PhantomOfTheOpera: that clapback is so powerful it just gave me a minor in classics
> Moxie: please share more of your wisdom with us o great @PinkIsPunkRock
< Antares: DO NOT influence my fledglings!
> PinkIsPunkRock: if you insist, little ducklings
> PinkIsPunkRock: the secret to life is to always use more spinach and less rice than you think you’ll need
> PinkIsPunkRock: the second secret to life is that fresh air, warm sun and a cup of tea will make your problems small enough to start handling
> PinkIsPunkRock: the third secret to life is that violence sometimes really is the answer
> Megamind: XDDDDDD
> Moxie: I’m taking notes
< Antares: [deep sigh]
> PinkIsPunkRock: anyway
> PinkIsPunkRock: calling me a bitch, tch, like it’s so original. I wish people were more creative.
> PikaPika: with insults?
> PinkIsPunkRock: uh yeah? It’s boring otherwise
> EndeavorSucks: you’re so weird
> PhantomOfTheOpera: no I agree with her!
> Megamind: you WOULD. You’re so dramatic.
> PhantomOfTheOpera: slander!
> PhantomOfTheOpera: but yes we live in an age of regrettably half-assed insults. I would have done GREAT at like 1654 where you could walk up to someone you don't like and just say shit like "how cruel can nature be, that now age denies you wisdom, as youth once forbade you beauty" and get stabbed.
> SpicyWings: I don’t doubt it for a second
> PhantomOfTheOpera: that I would have done great?
> SpicyWings: no that you would get stabbed.
> EndeavorSucks: 😆 😆 😆
> PhantomOfTheOpera: rude
> Megamind: well he’s not wrong xD
> Moxie: btw Phantom and Cheshire! i had a very emotional thought for you today, because I went down to the Support Department and guess who I met?
> Megamind: HATSUME
> PhantomOfTheOpera: HATSUME
> Moxie: Yeah exactly
> Moxie: she’s brilliant
> Moxie: and insane
> Moxie: I want to marry her
> Moxie: do any of you know any asexual pick-up lines I could use?
> Moxie: (and this is me casually revealing that I’m ace, ‘cause i have been thinking about it for a while)
< Antares: oh! Thank you for telling us =)
> EndeavorSucks: most of us are queer as hell here
> PinkIsPunkRock: congrats on figuring it out!
> SpicyWings: yeah congrats!
> PikaPika: if you want an asexual pick-up line my favorite is: “hey are you a salad? cause im only interested if you're dressed”
> Moxie: xDDD
> Moxie: it’s perfect!
> Megamind: besides, it’s HATSUME. If the pick-up line fails, just start talking about textile tension and explosives and tasers and she’ll start groping you in no time
> PhantomOfTheOpera: I smell a story
> Megamind: the same story that every traumatized hero student can tell you
> Megamind: I think Dekiru even passed out when she tried to smother him with her boobs
> PhantomOfTheOpera: your class is NUTS
> PhantomOfTheOpera: … does the ice prince go to the Support Department sometimes? asking for a friend.
> Megamind: he does not
> Megamind: and you have no reason to talk to him now that the Sports Festival is over
> PhantomOfTheOpera: CHALLENGE ACCEPTED!!
> NotOnFire: …
> NotOnFire: is that me or that discord is really more animated since we added high-schoolers
> EndeavorSucks: I like it. It’s free entertainment
> PikaPika: well if there’s one thing we never lack here, it’s entertainment for sure!
________________
Chatting with her Discord friends was always refreshing. Toki never failed to have a smile on her lips as she put her phone away. It was nice. It took her head off Hayasa-sensei’s absence and its reasons.
The hero killer was still at large.
He hadn’t been seen again after what had happened to Ingenium. But he was certainly still in Hosu. He usually killed three times in one area before running. There was no reason to believe he had broken his pattern. Especially since it was his first reappearance since his fight with Endeavor in January. Apparently, Stain had been grievously injured there. The details were unclear since Endeavor had kept a tight lid on what exactly had gone down during their fight, but Toki would put good money on Stain being burned and possibly maimed. It was a miracle he had managed to escape, apparently.
All the more reasons for him to mark the occasion.
Ingenium’s attack hadn’t really been about Ingenium. The hero had seen Stain giving chase, so maybe Stain had only killed him to escape (and would, afterward, rationalize it as a part of his purge). Stain was making his great return, after six months of absence…. and a fanatic like him would feel even more honor-bound to stick to his previous methods, like a show of force to prove that Endeavor hadn’t scared him. He couldn’t allow himself to weaken his stance or slow down his killing.
The internships were next week. Toki was pretty sure that in canon, the internship arc had been very close to the Sports Festival arc, but putting some time between the two wasn’t a bad idea. It would allow people to forget how the students looked like. The Sports Festival wouldn’t be so fresh in their memories.
Good. It left a little more time for Toki to tie some loose ends before the kids left for their first taste of heroic work.
And it started with Aizawa.
Notes:
I updated the poetry file if you want!
It's the list of all of Toki's poems ^^ Here is the link !Anyway! I hope you liked the chap ^^ Toki is slowly moving towards acceptance of her dad, and we're crawling towards the reunion =D
But first she has other problems to solve... Like Aizawa. The next chapter is called "Facing Aizawa", by the way! I hope you're ready, mwahahahaha!
NEXT WEEK: i'll update "House of wisdom" with Melissa's POV. Get ready !
Fic rec of the day: one of my all-time favorites!
"Anyone" by Gentrychild. The Plot: Izuku get told by All Might he can't be a hero, then look for a transferable Quirk, finds one, and *steal OFA from All Might*. Now, there is no WAY he's giving it back. And if it means becoming a criminal, so be it. He won't stop helping people.
Oh boy that fic makes me wants to EAT MY PHONE, i love it. You'll either hate it or adore it. It's the epithome of crack treated seriously. Izuku is kind, but also jagged, bordering on merciless. And him being All Might's ennemy, knowingly, is just SO FUCKING WELL-WRITEN. Heroes are corrupt, the HPSC is panicking, Hitoshi is way in over his head. Also, Dabi and Shouto having a passive-agressive war of conspiracy theories because they are both convinced that Izuku is somebody's lovechild, but is the father AFO or All Might?!
Chapter 44: Facing Aizawa
Summary:
Time to face Aizawa for good.
Notes:
I had planned on posting tomorrow, but i probably won't have time... So here, have the chapter 24h earlier xD
For those of you who didn't see, i updated "Snapshots of wisdom" ! So you now have new fanarts, including Hitoshi's and Neito's hero costume, and a close-up of Aizawa's scar from Toki.
Also, since the Discord server is ENABLING ME, i'm writing another AU of this fic! One where Toki wasn't picked up by the HPSC but by the Yakuza. Not sure where this is going, but Yakuza!Toki has a good vibe. mwahahaha.
Anyway. HERE WE GOOOO !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
FACING AIZAWA
Toki had only one lesson with each class before the internships, but she tried to make it count. What to look for in a boss, who to pick as a mentor. She had sent internship offers to all forty students, so if even one of them had trouble picking or hadn’t impressed sponsors, they could at least look to her for help. She already knew that Tokoyami would pick Icarus, though. She had personally pleaded with Keigo to pick one intern, “just to see if you can teach!” and he had settled on Tokoyami. Like her, he had seen his untapped potential.
Also, it was no secret that Keigo really liked heroes with bird aesthetics.
Most of the kids had plenty of offers, though, and Toki was all too happy to chat with them about which agency would help them grow the most. She encouraged Uraraka in her decision to join a combat agency to gain more experience. She pointed out to Kendo, and later Yaoyorozu, that Uwabami usually did commercials at this time of the year and while managing public relationships was a useful skill to have, it would do them good to work with a more hands-on hero for their first internship.
She encouraged Shiozaki to look at the offers that had been sent to her by sidekicks. They were just as competent as heroes. They just didn’t make the headlines because they were more suited to support. Kaibara needed help to decide, as did Ojiro. Hagakure was torn between going the flashy path or the stealthy path. Aoyama was disappointed by his offers. Toki spoke with almost everyone to advise or orient them the best way possible.
She took Midoriya aside, too, right after the class ended. Unlike in canon, he hadn’t shattered his limbs in the arena (since he had been reluctant to unleash that kind of power against Uraraka), so he had plenty of offers. His stunt with the minefield had pleased the crowd. Toki didn’t know if he would still pick Gran Torino as his mentor, but even if he did, the boy deserved some advice.
“Did you ever go to Quirk counseling?” she said directly. “I know you’re a very late bloomer, so you have to have seen Hound Dog at least once.”
“Ah, some?” Midoriya cringed. “We had one session. We mostly talked about how I was too reckless and how to take better care of myself?”
Adults were so useless sometimes. Toki sighed, disappointed.
“Your power is a lot like All Might’s,” she declared without ambage. She pretended not to notice how Midoriya started sputtering in denial, and barreled on: “But you’re not All Might. That means your body can’t handle it at full strength. And since you can’t train with something that breaks your bones, I can see why you’re stuck. But I’ve been watching you, and I want you to work on a few ideas before you’re back to school, all right? Imitating All Might is all well and good, but you’re not him, and you shouldn’t be like him. You’re your own person and it’s your power. Make it your own.”
Midoriya looked like a deer caught in headlights. Toki hoped he would listen. The Quirk was a tool to the hero, but with Midoriya’s self-esteem issues and the weight of All Might’s legacy… It would be easy (and very destructive) for Midoriya to see himself as a vessel for All Might’s power, and nothing else.
“So,” Toki cleared her throat, continuing. “You might be able to handle your power safely if you regulate your power outage. Instead of using 100% in one arm and shattering it, you should try using 5%. And to spread throughout your whole body, to decrease the stress on your limbs. It should also feel more intuitive, more natural.” She paused. “Also, try activating your Quirk more often, but without hitting anything. Just… holding it. Like clenching your abs, you know? It’s like a muscle. You have to use it outside of combat or else you won’t be used to it when combat becomes necessary.”
“Oh.” Midoriya looked a little taken aback. “I-I hadn’t thought of that. T-Thank you, Quantum-sensei.”
“No problem. Try to talk to All Might before you pick an internship, too. He’s a newbie at teaching, but since he has a strength Quirk too, he may have good advice about which hero would help you the most.”
“A n-newbie?” Midoriya looked like was going to have a stroke. “But he’s All Might!”
“He’s strong, but not all-knowing,” Toki said gently. “Don’t put too much pressure on him to be perfect. He has the same flaw as you, always pushing himself too hard to meet someone’s expectations, especially when it’s someone he holds in high regard.”
She almost winced afterward. She hadn’t meant to be so direct. Or so… honest. That outlook revealed more than what she was comfortable sharing about her feelings on All Might’s situation.
But Midoriya didn’t protest. He gave her an indecipherable look.
“You’re friends with All Might-sensei, aren’t you?”
“What makes you say that?” she evaded.
“You really know him. And you like him, but not as a hero, as a… as a person, I guess. Does that make sense?”
Damn. He was right on the money.
She considered her answer for a second. At this point, denial could still work, but Midoriya would probably keep digging. When it came to his idol, he was like a dog with a bone.
Oh, well. In for a penny, in for a pound, right? Izuku Midoriya was maybe the only person who was for sure not the spy. And she would rather give him that info right now, rather than have him stumble on that realization later on and let slip something compromising.
“If anyone asks, no, Quantum isn’t friends with All Might. But…”, she leaned towards him, and achieved in a whisper, smiling, “Toki Hoshizora is friends with Toshinori Yagi.”
For a second, Midoriya didn’t get it. Then his eyes went incredibly wide, so round that they looked like they were going to fall out of his head. He let out a squeal, pointing a trembling finger at her.
“It was you! Y-you were—!”
Toki winked at him with a grin, making him turn red for a moment, then white as a sheet. She grew serious again.
“It’s my best-kept secret. Don’t tell anyone.”
“O-of course!” he stuttered, still looking like he was going to have a stroke. “B-But why tell me? I’m just— I’m just one student…”
“All Might trusts you,” Toki answered simply. “And if you need any help, even with a secret that’s bigger than you, I want you to know that I will be here for you.”
Midoriya may be the Protagonist, but he was also a teenager with a worrying tendency to self-sacrifice. Toki wanted him to be able to ask for help. He wouldn’t dare to ask Aizawa because his teacher was too standoffish, he wouldn’t dare to ask All Might because he didn’t want to disappoint him, and he wouldn’t dare to ask his classmates because he felt like he had to protect them. But Midoriya should have someone. Anyone.
Kids should be able to rely on adults. Especially teachers. It was their job, after all.
Well, Toki would have reached out, at least, right?
Most of the kids had no problem picking internships. Toki gave her opinion as needed, but it was still their choice and she was curious about what drew them to such or such agency. Shōto Todoroki decided to intern with his father, which wasn’t a surprise. Hitoshi had also received an offer from Endeavor, which was more unexpected. Maybe he had been impressed?
It was the Number One hero, so receiving an offer from him was a big thing!
Honestly, Hitoshi had really hesitated. But in the end, he had announced that he wanted to see an underground hero at work at least once, so he had taken an offer from Sherazade. Their Quirks would be so perfectly complementary! Toki kind of wanted to drop in sometimes and see how Hitoshi would work with someone whose Quirk was to make people talk. It would be so epic.
Neito had had the most offers. Nearly four thousand! He was a little awed, and he had a hard time picking. He confessed to Toki that he had considered going to Icarus, but… well. He wanted to work with Quirks other than Warp-Space. So, in the end, he decided to go with Best Jeanist’s offer. A hero with a strong focus on presentation and style would help develop his own hero persona better. They hadn’t talked about it, but Toki was aware that Neito tended to unconsciously mirror the people he copied Quirks from. It would do him good to try and find himself. Best Jeanist could help with that.
As long as Neito didn’t start wearing denim as part of his costume, Toki totally approved of his choice.
(Also, was he avoiding Icarus because he knew Thunder Thief was his father? Seriously, she needed to elucidate this mystery. It was killing her.)
Most of class 1-B already knew where they would go. Tokage had picked Majestic’s agency. Tetsutetsu was going with Fourth Kind, Kinoko with Kamui Woods… Awase would intern under Basalt, a pro-hero who could manipulate the earth. Tsuburaba would join a new heroine named Prismatic, and Toki vaguely wondered if it wasn’t the heroine who had passed her Exam License with Serpentine, and who could make forcefields.
Everyone knew where they were going, or rather to who they were going to. Toki still took great care to remind them to ask themselves good questions. What did they hope to see? What did they hope to learn there, that they couldn’t learn anywhere else? What piqued their curiosity the most? What part of the job were they the less familiar with? And so on.
It didn’t escape Toki’s notice that there was one student who hadn’t asked her for advice at all. One student kept to himself, jaw set and eyes burning with anger.
Iida.
Ingenium was still comatose. It had been a few days already. The prognostic hadn’t changed. He would wake up on his own, or not at all. Until then, it was impossible to know the extent of the damage. Maybe the spine had been touched, maybe not. He had also taken a hit to the head (hence the coma), and there may be irreparable damage to his brain. Nobody knew.
The media acted like Ingenium was already dead. It was no wonder that Iida exuded such fury and such misery. His brother had been his role model, and now he was just… gone. Tensei may not have been dead, but he wasn’t there.
Toki could understand how he felt. She had held the same smoldering ember of hatred in her chest for a long time, from Meteor’s arrest until her fight with All Might. She knew that Iida was feeling that rage a thousandfold stronger: and she knew why, despite reason and logic, he burned to avenge his brother. Because it ate at him, and men burning alive couldn’t take a step back to reevaluate their life choices. The only thing that would make the pain stop would be a sense of justice. No, not justice. Catharsis.
So yes, Toki understood. It didn’t mean she approved. On the contrary, she knew it was a fucked-up idea. If he went against the hero killer, Iida would die. His mother had already almost lost a son, she shouldn’t have to lose a second or see him be shipped to prison. And Hayasa-sensei! Hayasa-sensei shouldn’t have to see that, either. Yes, Toki had to stop him, but she just didn’t want to put him on the spot. He was a kid, and he didn’t deserve it.
But you know who deserved it? The asshole teacher who let it happen.
And, what happy a coincidence! It was the same teacher who enjoyed breaking Toki’s bones when she was younger, who was in Okamoto’s pocket, and who she had been dying to yell at since the beginning of her time at Yūei!
Toki still hadn’t found a way to connect Aizawa to Okamoto, other than what had happened nearly ten years ago. She hadn’t noticed any calls, hadn’t seen Aizawa doing anything shifty, hadn’t seen Okamoto hanging nearby. The only proof she had of their ongoing cooperation was Aizawa’s slip when she had met him. But like Keigo had said: if she hadn’t found anything now, it was doubtful that either Aizawa or Okamoto would become less careful. On the contrary, they may already have adjusted to her presence at Yūei and her general nosiness. Toki wouldn’t find any dirt by just waiting.
Good thing that she was tired of waiting.
After this little confrontation with Nedzu, Toki was all out of patience. Nedzu shouldn’t dish out accusations of spying if he couldn’t keep his own house in order, and it started with Eraserhead. Toki bared her teeth, adrenaline making her heart beat faster. Yeah, it had been a long time coming. She had been itching for retribution of some kind for years. She deserved to hit him back, make him fucking sorry for what he had put her through when she was kid, what he had put Keigo through—
But hey, Toki decided to not make any hasty judgments. Maybe what had happened in the canon universe wouldn’t repeat. Maybe Aizawa had thought to look at the papers the students were giving him, this time. Maybe having Toki at Yūei had made him more paranoid and had reminded him of his duty to care for his students at all times, and not just have their back in battle.
She would leave him one chance. If Aizawa had at least tried to look out for Iida, then Toki would swallow her resentment and tried to be the bigger person.
But if he hadn’t, he was in for a serious shitstorm.
Why had Nedzu even hired him? Aizawa was too harsh. He played favorites. He was fond of mind games because he believed making kids afraid was more important than giving them space to grow. He had also been a dickhead to Melissa, which Toki had not forgotten. He was unhelpful. And he didn’t even read his students’ files, apparently, because he clearly wasn’t aware of Midoriya’s late booming or of Kaminari’s ADHD. If you added to that the fact that in his youth, he used to beat Toki bloody because he was paid in cash by that asshole Okamoto, well, was it any wonder that Toki wasn’t well-predisposed towards him?
So. Toki sent an email to Genmei-san saying that in her investigation of the spy, she had found some juicy stuff about a teacher. That he had lost his license, then had been illegally reinstalled by a higher-up in the HPSC. The teacher was Nedzu’s problem, of course, and Toki didn’t even disclose Aizawa’s name. But she sternly pointed out the fact that said higher-up was tampering with records to blackmail heroes into owning him favors. It wasn’t just a massive red flag, it was also a crime, and it would be nice to do something about it right the fuck now.
You know, before Toki decided to do something about it herself. Like asking for a judge how much that kind of stunt was worth for, in addition to her kidnapping.
And then, the day after, even if she wasn’t scheduled to drop by Yūei, Toki paid the school a visit. It had been twenty hours since she had sent her email: the President had had time to process it and get ahead of the game. Now it was time to turn her attention to Aizawa. The kids should have given their internship paperwork already, so Toki appeared directly in the teacher lounge.
Aizawa was there as she expected, like a mummy laying on the couch. As soon as she materialized, he froze as if not to attract her attention. Usually, it worked, and Toki ignored him. But not this time. Toki still went straight to him, and extended a hand:
“Hey, can I see your kids’ internships?”
Aizawa watched her without a word. Then, he stood up warily, retrieved a bunch of papers from under his sleeping bag, and passed them to her. Toki hummed a sound that could pass for thanks (not that she would ever say thank you to that prick anyway), and started perusing it.
From the corner of her eyes, she saw that Present Mic, Snipe, and Vlad King had all paused their conversation, fascinated. Aizawa and Toki usually didn’t interact at all, so they were probably expecting something interesting to happen.
Midoriya would be interning with Gran Torino. Yaoyorozu was going with Fat Gum, as Toki had recommended. Tokoyami would be with Icarus, under Hawks’ responsibility. Good. Toki hummed and continued her search. Kirishima, Ashido, Uraraka, Aoyama, Hagakure… Iida.
In Hosu, with the hero Manual. Just like in canon.
Damn it.
Toki exhaled deeply. She had been expecting it, and yet she felt bitterly disappointed. Disappointed in herself for not seeing it sooner, in Aizawa for being such a failure as a teacher, in Nedzu for not noticing, and even in Okamoto for creating her animosity with Aizawa in the first place. In adults, to so constantly fail the children they were supposed to protect, maybe. Annoyance and anger made her clench her jaw.
Well. This was it, then. Keeping eye contact with Aizawa the whole time, she uncapped a red pen and wrote REJECTED in big characters across the page.
“You and I both know that you’re a piece of shit in addition to being a bad teacher,” she said, her voice very even. “But if I hadn’t known it, you would have a student dead by next week.”
She slapped the page on Aizawa’s chest.
“Do better.”
Aizawa took the paper and read it, silent and tense as a bowstring. Toki could see the exact moment when it clicked for him. His eyes widened, the only visible part of his face behind the bandages. Then he straightened.
“Maybe he just wants to visit his brother in the hospital.”
But his voice lacked conviction. He knew it wasn’t that. Toki narrowed her eyes:
“Yeah? Go have one conversation with your student, and then look me in the eyes and tell me you really believe that.”
There was a beat of silence, then Aizawa inclined his head, stiffly.
“Thank you for bringing it to my attention. I’ll tell Iida he needs to find another hero to intern with.”
He left the room as swiftly as a half-mummified man could. Toki glared at the door as it clicked shut behind him.
That was it? She had expected a fight. But no, he had folded like a house of cards. Was he afraid of her blurting out his dark past? Or maybe he regretted it? No, it was unlikely, with that attitude. If he regretted it, he would have apologized by now and tried to convince her of his sincerity.
Or maybe he was such a disaster of a human being that it hadn’t crossed his mind to apologize. Just to clam up and brace for impact like a tortoise in his shell. Canon-Aizawa hadn’t had very good people skills, either.
“What the hell?” blurted out Present Mic.
He was standing up, glaring at her. Both Snipe and Vlad King were staring, too, but they looked more flabbergasted than angry. Mic, on the other hand, was pissed off.
“Eraser is a good teacher,” he spat at her. “What do you think you’re doing, saying things like that? And why the hell did he let you?!”
Oooooh Present Mic didn’t know. Toki envisaged in a blink all the possibilities that this opened, and she mentally gave out a bark of evil laughter. On the outside, however, she only shrugged passively.
“He is a bad teacher, though,” she pointed. “He’s never there for the students. His logical ruses make it impossible for them to trust him. He comes off as uncaring and lazy, making them feel like they’re on their own. He’s Quirkist and prejudiced. He doesn’t like kids in general, and they can feel it.” She shrugged. “I won’t argue about his abilities a hero, but he sucks in a classroom. That’s just the facts.”
Mic let out a screech like a furious cockatiel: “You’re going too far!”
“Yeah!” Vlad King glowered. “You know, he risked his life to protect the students when the USJ was attacked!”
They knew she was right. They had to know, obviously. Aizawa’s methods couldn’t be popular among his colleagues. But Aizawa was their friend. He was one of them, and Quantum was the outsider. Obviously they would jump to his defense. So Toki stood her ground.
She tilted her head with a half-smirk straight from the cocky-persona-handbook, and countered:
“So? Plenty of heroes risk their lives for other people, even if they don’t like them very much. That doesn’t make them suited to teaching.”
She snorted dismissingly. Present Mic’s jaw worked for a second, and Toki realized that he was getting his Quirk under control to not yell at her. He still looked furious, but it was a cold anger, the one you felt when the affront had sunk in, rather than a hot-blooded reaction.
“That’s no reason to insult him,” he spat. “Eraserhead has been nothing but polite and professional to you, the least you could do is offering him the same courtesy. Your place in the rankings doesn’t allow you to treat your coworker like that.”
“Oh, please,” Toki swatted the air, smirking wider. “The only reason Eraser hasn’t been rude to me is because he’s been avoiding me like the plague. He’s scared shitless of what I could say about him.”
Vlad King narrowed his eyes.
“And what could you say?”
Hook, line and sinker. Sorry Aizawa. But if you weren’t working with Okamoto, then you wouldn’t crash and burn with him.
Toki considered her answer. I know about his dark past. He’s bought by a corrupt bureaucrat with shit for morals. I still got scars from our training. I don’t trust him to take care of the students, and you shouldn’t either. If he lied and cheated his way into heroics, it’s making him weak to blackmail and by association, it makes your school weak. You should thank me for patching up the holes. He’s an ass. Being good at punching bad guys is not a guarantee of goodness. So what, the fact that he doesn’t enjoy hitting children after they’re past their growth spurt is supposed to make him acceptable as a high school teacher?
In the end, she just cocked her head arrogantly. “Why don’t you ask him?”
oOoOoOo
The fuse had been lit; the fire had been started. Toki called the President to ask if she had received her email. The President tersely informed her that her request was being processed. Okamoto had been suspended. There was an investigation. It would take time because he was so well-connected, but Genmei-san swore to her that the Commission was done with abuses of power, and she would keep her word
Of course she would. Genmei-san had honor. But more importantly, she knew that her alliance with Toki depended on it. Not that Toki by herself was very powerful, but she knew enough about the HPSC’s dirty secrets to destroy them if she wanted to.
Oh, they would 100% bring her down with them. Her, and Keigo. Nobody wanted that. But mutually assured destruction was still an efficient threat.
The kids were starting their internships peacefully, or at least Toki hoped so. None of them were in Hosu. Shouto was interning with Endeavor, but since the hero killer was in Hosu, Endeavor had sent a few of his sidekicks there and opted to stay in his territory to teach his son how to handle the routine of heroics. Toki approved of this show of prudence. Going hunting for a serial killer was not how you introduced your fifteen-year-old son to his first patrol.
Besides, the hero killer wasn’t even Endeavor’s case. They had fought once, and so Endeavor was one of the very few heroes to have survived an encounter with him. But, technically, the Number One hero wasn’t in charge of this investigation. That dubious honor had been given to the hero who had opened the case in the first place, a woman named Junebug (who was clearly in over her head).
The hero killer didn’t have the kind of mediatic traction that he had had in canon. Ingenium’s attack had made the headlines, but it was mostly about Ingenium’s bravery, about how he had rushed in and saved Native.
Stain was known, and of course, the news talked about him. But he wasn’t as popular as he had been in canon. Here, he wasn’t a serial killer that no one had stopped, steadily rising for months. He was a serial killer, true, but he had been almost caught, had gone to the ground, and was making a tentative reappearance. It was completely different. Several news anchors were enthusiastically supporting the theory that it wasn’t even the actual hero killer, but rather a copycat.
That would explain why he had attacked Ingenium.
Apparently, Stain usually targeted a different kinds of heroes. He went after beginners who had shown themselves clumsy and starved for praise, cosmetic heroes who stole their colleague’s targets and constantly searched the spotlight, and non-combative heroes who mostly used their Quirks and notoriety for their side-gigs (like Present Mic’s radio show).
Toki wondered if the League would even make contact with Stain. He didn’t have the same public, the same appeal. Would Shigaraki still be jealous of his popularity? And if Shigaraki didn’t contact him, got rejected, and work himself into a tantrum over it… would he still send his Nomu to create chaos? Or could that disaster be avoided, too?
So many ripples had made waves by now that Toki had trouble keeping the chronology straight!
Toki brought Tokoyami to Icarus herself. Sure, he could have taken the train, but why spend four hours on public transport when he could be there in less than ten seconds?
Also, it gave Toki a chance to see how Tokoyami handled himself at high altitude. Suffice to say, he was a little green upon arrival, but he hadn’t thrown up or been afraid of the heights, which boded well for the rest of his internship. Toki delivered him to Keigo, ruffled the feathers on the top of his head, and went on her own patrol with Sunspear and Thunder Thief.
Life as usual.
Toki didn’t have an intern, unlike Keigo. It was her plan in the first place (Toki had wanted to be a security net for everyone, and not prioritize any student) but she still remembered with fondness Melissa’s internship. It had been nice, to introduce someone to heroics, to explain what she did, to share that job she loved.
Melissa still had a work-study, but it would start later that year. Shame. Toki would have liked to spend some time with Melissa alone. Ever since Hitoshi and Neito had started Yūei, Toki felt like she had focused more on them, at the detriment of her oldest student. It didn’t seem to bother Melissa, who did her own thing and never lacked distractions, but still. Toki missed a little their technical discussions about support items, their plans for training, and their debates about Quirklessness and society in general. They still did those things but only on the Discord server, and it just wasn’t the same.
But, whatever. A whole week without any fledglings attached to her meant that Toki was free to drop on any of the students for a surprise inspection, too, so there was that. But it also left her a little time to catch up on the stuff she had neglected.
Like her investigation of Dabi.
Or her search for Keigo’s mom.
Toki finally got around to examining the surveillance cameras she nicked the day when she rescued Sachiko and Fuyumi. There was, indeed, a grainy shot of Dabi there. Not very good quality, but still recognizable. It was still a good thing Toki had stolen this camera. If Fuyumi had seen it, and recognized her brother— or even not recognized him and still used that video to hunt for a man covered in burns and medical staples…
Shit, the magnitude of that disaster. Toki felt like they had really dodged a bullet there.
The Ghost Arsonist continued to act out. Every week or so, something new burned. Sometimes it was just a warehouse, but sometimes it was a gas station or an apartment complex. Toki had put up a map in her office and added a pin at each new case of arson. Conclusion: there was a fuckton of flammable stuff in Shizuoka, and she was no closer to finding a pattern to lock onto.
Toki still had another lead to explore; one Fuyumi had given her. But she was… a little reluctant to do it.
She didn’t want to go and visit Rei Todoroki.
It was too close. If Toki saw her, and got involved, then she would be sucked into the mess of the Todoroki family in its entirety. She would have no plausible deniability anymore.
Endeavor wasn’t an abuser any longer, apparently, so Toki had been happy to stay on the sidelines, but— if she got involved, then she would have to dig deeper. She would have to confirm that he had changed, she would have to confirm what had had happened in the past, and Toki knew firsthand that sometimes, reopening old wounds did nothing but slow down the healing process.
Besides, did she really want to get involved in Endeavor’s business? Wasn’t she already lacking objectivity about him, because of Meteor?
Endeavor had saved Meteor; helped him, rehabilitated him, gave him a new chance, and became his friend. Endeavor had saved her father, while Toki had done nothing but hurt him. The embers of shame and self-recrimination were always here, and Toki knew that she would never be able to be objective about the Flame Hero about this. Quantum was a good hero, intelligent and rational… but Toki Taiyōme had always been a resentful little shit, a little feral, and very possessive. And the two tended to bleed into each other.
No, Toki didn’t want to see Rei Todoroki. Not until she had no other option.
Her search for Keigo’s mother was easier.
Toki had found little clues, like a trail of breadcrumbs, and now she only had to follow them. Tomie Takami had lived off the Commission’s money until Keigo reached his eighteenth birthday. After that, the checks stopped. Tomie had then left the apartment she occupied and closed the bank account where the money had been deposited. Said bank account had been almost empty anyway. Tomie had seemed to anticipate her departure and moved her money somewhere else in advance. Smart.
But Tomie had still left some traces. Before being closed, her account had been used to buy a car, for example, and to pay the deposit for an apartment elsewhere. The car and apartment had been purchased under a different name, but the trail of breadcrumbs continued.
Tomie had found a legal job in the neighborhood. The timing coincided with the time she had tried to call Keigo at Naruto Labs, but he had refused to talk to her again. Tomie Takami had already felt the wind turn, even then. That apartment, that car, it had been her preparing for the day she couldn’t count on her son to continue to send her money. Toki would bet that if Keigo had accepted to talk with her, accepted to be guilt-tripped into supporting her for the rest of her life, then Tomie wouldn’t have bothered changing her address.
But Keigo’s refusal shouldn’t have come to a surprise for his mother, anyway. She had sold her child. Was it any wonder that said child had been wary of her motivations later?
Tomie Takami had worked for a while in retail. Two years, to be precise. Then the trail stopped, and Toki spent a while scratching her head trying to figure out where she had gone. The car hadn’t been sold. There had been no big purchases, no indication of a new departure. In the end, it was by stalking her colleagues’ social media from a few years back that Toki found out the next clue.
Someone had posted a picture of Tomie with a man, and commented:“My colleague hadn’t even told me she was engaged!!!!! Congrats!!!”
Uh.
Should Toki be surprised? Tomie Takami had Keigo to keep his father with her, to force him to marry her. Attaching herself to a man for protection wasn’t illogical when you were poor or lived in a dangerous place. Even after getting out, it wasn’t surprising that Tomie had kept this mindset like a reflex. She had been looking for a protector to shelter her now that her husband, then her son, were both gone- and she had found one.
So Toki looked up that guy and bingo. He was married. His wife had taken his name. He already had two kids from a previous marriage, and on his social media, a few people had made disparaging comments because he had married barely six months after the death of his ex-wife. He had needed someone to take care of the kids, said a few snide comments.
Toki browsed the website anyway. There weren’t many pictures, but still, Tomie appeared in a few.
Tomie Takami didn’t really look like Keigo. She had his hair, or rather he had hers, albeit a little spikier. In Toki’s memories from the Before, Tomie had been haggard and harried-looking, like a drunk; a little dazed. But on her husband’s social media, she was… very normal-looking. A short woman with fluffy hair that fell in her eyes, a polite smile, the air of a mousy demure housewife. She had been married two years ago, and she always appeared in the pictures next to her husband’s kids, holding their hands or even carrying them, while the children held onto her distractedly. This wasn’t a woman who pretended to play a role. Young kids like that couldn’t act. They were used to holding onto her, to grabbing her hand, to being carried, to being cared for.
Like a perfect little family.
Toki felt a wave of anger fill her chest on behalf of Keigo. That bitch…!
Tomie had been a piece of shit of a mother to him! Keigo had told her about his childhood, about being hungry, about being forbidden to leave the house, about sleeping on the ground without even a blanket, about not having any shoes, about never being hugged or held or loved, about being beaten by his father while his mother watched passively, about having fucking lice when the HPSC had picked him off the streets. His parents had been awful. They had treated him like trash. Tomie had used him then sold him without a moment’s hesitation.
It made Toki’s eyes sting with tears and her fist clenched in fury just thinking about it, just thinking you could treat anyone that way. But it was worse because it was Keigo, so bright and so easy to love. Keigo deserved so much better. Tomie Takami was a piece of shit for treating him like she had.
And yet, she had been able to be a good mom for those two little kids that weren’t even hers! Where was this love, when Keigo had needed it? If Tomie had been able to care for a child, then why hadn’t she been able to do it for him? Her own son?! Hadn’t he been enough?!
It was like Meteor all over again, Toki realized.
A deep wariness replaced the rage, like sand falling on a firepit and snuffing out the flames. She squeezed her eyes shut.
I sat with my anger long enough
until she told me her real name
was grief.
Mother, father, caretaker, it was all the same, wasn’t it? Adults were fallible. They let their children down. They left. They left, and let their kids pick up the pieces of their broken hearts.
Meteor, Endeavor, Tomie Takami, all of them were the same. They had changed but changed too late. It was unfair. Bad parents should suffer and rot to pay for their failures. But they didn’t. They continued to live their lives… and sometimes, they got better. Sometimes they met the right person, or they had the right opportunity to grow. They became a nicer person for it. They became someone who would have made the right choices if they were thrust into the same situations as before. Like how Meteor had become a hero. Like how Endeavor had stopped being an abuser. Like how Tomie Takami had turned into a good mother for these children.
But the opportunity had passed. The damage had been done. Toki would never get a hero as a father. The Todoroki children would never get their childhood back, and Keigo would never know the love of a mother.
The adults went forward, enjoying their second chance. But the kids were left to grow around the wounds their parents had caused.
It was good for Keigo’s mom that she was happy, and it was good for Toki’s dad that he was happy, now. Toki shouldn’t begrudge them their growth. But that growth didn’t make up for the past, didn’t make up for the times when they had been awful. Knowing that they wouldn’t hurt their children now didn’t change how they had hurt them then. It didn’t make the pain go away.
Did Tomie remember her son? Did she regret what she had done? Would she seek Keigo’s forgiveness? And if she did, would it be for Keigo’s sake, or just to feel good about herself?
Did it even matter?
Toki memorized Tomie’s new address, then erased her research. She would tell Keigo that she had found his mom and that Tomie Takami was happy, and leave it at that. If he asked for more details, she would tell him, but right now… he didn’t need to know that his mother had decided to shower strangers with the maternal love she hadn’t had for him.
It wouldn’t help. Toki knew all too well that it wouldn’t help.
Two days passed, after that.
On the third day, Genmei-san called Toki to talk about Okamoto. Apparently, a secretary who worked for him had heard about the investigation and dropped on Genmei-san’s desk a cardboard box filled with proof of shady activities. Okamoto rarely left a paper trail behind him, but damning clues still existed and this secretary had them.
Among those documents was the report that had suspended Eraser’s license which had been later ‘removed’ by Okamoto without any proper procedures. That single document was enough to end Okamoto’s career, but there were about a hundred other things like that. Okamoto’s arrangement with Aizawa wasn’t the only illegal stunt he had pulled.
The secretary hadn’t agreed to testify, though, so Genmei-san didn’t think it was solid enough to go to court. Okamoto would be punished by the Commission, of course, and severely demoted. But he wouldn’t go to prison for tempering with heroic licenses or using heroes as mercenaries, even though he should.
Privately, Toki thought that the old witch didn’t want to go to court. It would drag the Commission’s name through the mud. Besides, most of the shady stuff Okamoto had done had probably been approved by Genryusai-sama. It fit his methods, and Okamoto had worked for Genryusai-sama for way longer than he had worked for Genmei-san. If it went to court, most of the blame would be shifted on old Genryusai, then Genryusai would be investigated, and Genmei-san really didn’t want to open that Pandora’s Box.
Because, you know, Genryusai-sama had approved plenty of other shady stuff; including the use of black ops assassin to take out dissidents. That would be a nightmare to explain to the public.
“You know,” Toki said pensively, “I could testify. Eraserhead, too. And all those people whose names you’ll find in that box of evidence.”
On the phone, Genmei-san sighed. She sounded wary.
“This is the hill you want to die on?”
“Oh no!” Toki blinked, “I just love arguing, in case you hadn’t noticed. I fully intend to leave this hill once it gets boring. Sorry for the confusion.”
There was a noise like a surprised snort of laughter, then the witch grew serious again:
“In that case, consider the argument over and done. Let’s skip that step. Do you want Okamoto to go to jail?”
Toki thought about it, then shrugged. “Would it make me a bad person to say that I don’t care? If you want to follow the rules, he should be punished. It’s not a disciplinary fault, it’s crime. There are laws. But me, personally? It’s been years. I would just be happy knowing he won’t ever have the opportunity to harm anyone else.”
“Then it’s what will happen. He will be demoted, then sent as the HPSC’s supervisor in Tartarus, with a black mark on his record for severe abuse of power. He won’t ever be promoted. He’ll work in that prison until he retires.”
“You give him free reign over a prison? That seems too good for him.”
“It’s Tartarus. It’s guarded by heroes. The role of a HPSC liaison here is very limited. For all intent and purpose, it’s a professional tomb. There is no getting out of there. Being there means being sacrificed to an ingrate, thankless task, and Okamoto is aware of it.”
That seemed acceptable. Toki made a noise of agreement. Then, abruptly, she asked: “Were you friends?”
There was a pause. The President’s answer was measured. “We had known each other for a long time. We were sometimes allies, sometimes rivals. He almost became my Vice-President. Why?”
“No reason. He used to badmouth pretty much anyone, even heroes. The only people he never mentioned were you and Grenryusai-sama. I had wondered if it was out of respect for the hierarchy.”
“Not likely,” muttered Genmei-san.
Toki couldn’t help but laugh at that, because yeah, that tracked.
“What about Eraserhead?” she asked. “Is he going to have his license suspended?”
“His license has technically been suspended since he stabbed someone in the stomach,” the witch said evenly.
“Seriously?” Then Toki was hit by another realization. “Oh, shit. Does that mean that all his arrests were acts of vigilantism?”
“If we respect the letter of the law, yes. But, since it would be completely unmanageable, we’ll follow the normal procedures to reinstall his license, and make it retroactive to the date of suspension. He’ll still have to pass an interview and a skill assessment, however.” Genmei-san paused. “I can’t help but notice that Nedzu left me a voicemail kindly asking for a chat over tea. Do you know anything about that?”
Toki smiled. It wasn’t a nice smile.
“Yeah, I may have implied that Eraser wasn’t really white as snow to the other hero teachers. Maybe he folded and told Nedzu everything. Or maybe Nedzu investigated and found the same thing that I did. Anyway, it will encourage him to clean house.”
“I’m sure he’s very grateful that you’re here to find spies,” the witch said mildly.
“And I’m sure you’ll tell him that in those exact terms.”
“Absolutely.”
Toki took a second to be a little disturbed by how well she understood the witch’s pettiness, then moved on. She had one last topic to broach, after all.
“About Meteor.”
The tentative complicity vanished in a second. Toki could feel it, even over the phone. Wow, that wasn’t a topic that made the witch happy.
“What about him?” Genmei’s voice was completely inscrutable.
Toki breathed deeply. Her palms were sweating, and she resisted the urge to wipe them down as if somehow the President could see that gesture of nervousness from afar.
“I know you want to keep him on a leash or send him back to prison. Don’t. He’s not a good person, but he still deserves a chance to do good things. He’s saved lives. He can save even more, now. I would rather have him on my side than always looking over my shoulder for fear of being stabbed in the back.”
“He’s an S-ranked villain.” Genmei-san sounded a little cranky. “Nobody of that level has ever been rehabilitated. Our wariness isn’t entirely due to your relationship with him. Meteor could be a legitimate threat to the whole of Japan, especially now that he had acquired a good understanding of how heroes work. It could make him even more dangerous.”
“I’m well aware. But Meteor has seen both sides of the coin now. He knows enough to escape. He probably knew enough months ago. And yet, he’s still here.”
“He still has the moral compass of a villain. He doesn’t have any love for society as a whole. How can he be tasked with protecting it?”
Toki thought of Endeavor, their Number One hero, who held order and peace in the country, and who had gotten in this job because he only wanted strength and validation. She thought about Fuyumi, a vigilante who defended drunk girls and beat up muggers, and who did it because hurting people made her feel in control. She thought about Inferno who had watched his father burn alive with pleasure, and who protected a whole city without ever faltering. She thought about Tenya Iida, eyes burning with revenge, who was still aiming to be a hero. She thought about Aizawa, who belittled and insulted his students and yet would die for every single one of them.
She closed her eyes, briefly.
“Love, by the old philosophical definition, is willing good unto others. It’s an action. It’s not essentially a feeling.”
Genmei-san made a non-committal noise. Philosophical answers didn’t interest her. Facts and results did. And while Meteor’s results were good, they didn’t erase the fact that he had a massive body count. Nothing could erase that. It was normal for the President to be wary.
Toki took a deep breath and played her last card.
“Give my father a chance, alright? I would appreciate it.”
I’ll owe you one, it meant. And maybe Genmei-san had known it already, but it had a different weight when Toki acknowledged that it was what she wanted. That by accepting to give Meteor his freedom back, the HPSC would do something she would feel grateful for.
“… I’ll consider it.”
And that was it. Now, Toki could only wait for All Might to meet Meteor and make his decision, then for the witch to review his choice and make her own. It was out of Toki’s hands. She had done what she could, but now…
Now, it was up to her father to prove himself.
oOoOoOo
Two days later, on the fourth day of the internships, Toki received a message from Nedzu asking her to drop by his office, ‘please and thank you.’ Ah, so he had had his conversation with the witch, then.
Toki wondered if he had defended Aizawa, or turned on him upon learning of his deception.
Honestly, both could happen. Same thing with the other teachers. If Aizawa was in deep shit with Nedzu, would the other teachers blame her for being the whistleblower, she wondered? There was a fifty-fifty chance. For Present Mic, the odds were a little more in Aizawa’s favor, but the point was that Toki had just dropped a huge rock in the middle of the tranquil pond that was their workplace politics, and she was totally expecting the waves to come crashing down.
Aizawa spying on them was a big deal. Even if he hadn’t actively reported to Okamoto, it was a massive breach of trust.
Had Aizawa reported to Okamoto, actually? Toki would bet that he hadn’t, or else in canon, the HPCS would have known about Yagi’s weak form in advance. But then, maybe in canon, Okamoto had been dead or retired or something. So many things had changed from the canon, it literally wasn’t the same universe anymore. She shouldn’t draw comparisons.
But well, in this world… Okamoto had kept contact with Aizawa, and used him to have an ear at Yūei. Blackmailed him, probably. It had been a huge vulnerability not only for the school but for all the teachers involved in it, all those people who had trusted Aizawa at their back. And Aizawa had lied to them about it.
They were bound to be unhappy.
Anyway. When she warped in Yūei, Toki first appeared on the rooftop. She wanted to breathe some fresh air first. It always reassured her to look upon the city from a vantage point before going inside.
But she wasn’t alone on the roof. When she materialized there, somehow, Toshinori Yagi was waiting for her in his skinny form.
He knew she always arrived in Musutafu by teleporting here, like a bird touching the ground after a long flight. She wondered if the other teachers had noticed. Probably not. They hadn’t bothered to learn to know her, and she hadn’t made their task easier.
Yagi was sitting on the ground, his back against the wall. Lanky and boney, like a big scarecrow, he unfolded himself and got up. Toki was always surprised by how tall he was. As All Might, of course, he was massive, but even in his skinny form, he was two meters high! His gauntness made it even more flagrant. He got up without needing a hand, though, and brushed the dust from his pants sheepishly.
“Hello, Quantum. I was waiting for you.”
“Oh, that sounds ominous,” she grinned. “Hi, Yagi-san. I was coming to see Nedzu.”
Yagi’s smile died, and his expression turned solemn and thoughtful. “I know. Quantum, I owe you an apology.”
Toki blinked. “No, you don’t.”
“I do. You said to me, less than a month ago, that Aizawa-kun loathed you. I didn’t think to ask you why. Or if you loathed him in turn.”
Toki put her hands in her pockets, suddenly a little uncomfortable.
She wasn’t sure what Aizawa had told Yagi, or what he had told Nedzu. She was expecting something along the lines of ‘Aizawa lost his license’ or ‘he was spying for a shady bureaucrat.’ She had expected the focus to be on Aizawa himself and his link to Okamoto, and not on her: not on what her feelings were on the subject.
“There is no point in asking that question now, is it?”
“There is,” Yagi said gravely. “What Aizawa did was wrong.”
“What did he tell you he had done?” she asked, suspicious.
Yagi clenched his jaw. “He said that he lost his license years ago after using excessive force on someone. A higher-up in the Commission offered to have his license reinstalled in exchange for a few favors. One of those favors was to train you in hand-to-hand combat.”
Toki nodded, relieved. She hadn’t expected Aizawa to mention her training and admit that it was how they had known each other, but other than that… yeah, that was pretty much what had happened. And yet, Yagi’s gaze hardened.
“He also said,” and now his voice was colder, “that you were thirteen years old, and that training was only an excuse for a beating. He said that he broke your bones, punched you until you puked, kicked you until you stopped moving, and strangled you. He said that he barely cared if you learned, and mostly did it to inflict pain. He said that if any teacher did what he had done under the guise of teaching, especially without a license, especially to a child, that person should be tried for assault.”
Hearing it like that made Toki’s body go hot and then cold in a sudden flash of humiliation.
It had happened, she knew it had happened, but something inside her violently balked at the blunt phrasing Yagi had used. Like she had just taken it, like a victim. She hadn’t: she had fought back, clawed and scratched and punched and kicked at Aizawa, even stabbed him. It hadn’t been a fair fight, of course. But she had hurt him back.
“I was fourteen, technically,” she protested hotly. “Besides, that training was necessary. Better to learn that with someone who isn’t allowed to go too far, than in real-life situations. It was hard, yeah, but it made me strong.”
“Better?” Yagi repeated. “Quantum … Toki. You were a child. You weren’t supposed to be strong, you were supposed to be safe.”
Toki crossed her arms, defensive. “Sometimes it’s the same thing.”
Yagi didn’t look happy at her phrasing. Toki shook her head, and added pleadingly:
“Look, can we not talk about it? I’m over it. It was years ago. I just destroyed the career of the guy who engineered it anyway. It’s fine.”
Yagi didn’t like it, clearly, but at least he let the matter drop. They went to the principal’s office. For once, Toki walked, instead of warping, and let Yagi walk at her side like a disgruntled bodyguard.
Not that she needed protection, but it was touching all the same.
There hadn’t been many people who had wanted to protect her. Keigo, of course. Hayasa-sensei, who had been ready to throw down with Okamoto as soon as he had seen the first bruises. And All Might himself. That was all, that was everyone. Nobody else.
They reached Nedzu’s office. The door opened before they could knock. The principal was sitting at his desk, smiling amiably at them. There were four chairs in front on his desk: the one on the far right had been toppled on the ground. Aizawa was sitting on the chair next to it. He didn’t turn when they entered.
“Where is Mic?” Yagi asked.
“Taking a break,” Nedzu said mildly. “Hello, Quantum. Thank you for coming.”
Toki’s eyes went to the toppled chair. Present Mic must have taken the news harder than she would have thought.
“Hello, Mr. Principal,” she said evenly. “Eraserhead.”
She sat. It didn’t escape her notice that Yagi took the seat between her and Aizawa first, like a buffer, glowering at Eraserhead the whole time. Toki had a bad feeling about this meeting.
“Genmei-san informed me today that she would consent to retroactively reinstall Eraserhead’s license,” Nedzu begin cheerfully, “since he operated without one for the last eight years. She also told me that the person Eraserhead reported to had been demoted, and as such didn’t need a spy in Yūei anymore, and that she hoped that it would allow me to focus on the other spy within our walls.”
Toki snorted. Of course, the witch would phrase it like that. It was nicely done and just the right balance between helpful and insulting, with an undertone of gloating.
“Eraserhead was kind of enough to provide clarifications,” Nedzu continued.
Oh, man, that must have been a very awkward meeting. Like, hello, my Nemesis just told me you were spying on me, can you please tell me what she meant? Nedzu must have been pissed.
“However,” he continued, “I would also like your input, Quantum, considering your involvement. See, when I asked Eraserhead if there was anything he would like to tell me in regard to his allegiances, he readily admitted that he was blackmailed by a certain individual. However, I did not expect him to voluntarily shed light on the nature of your acquaintance.” Nedzu smiled. There were a lot of teeth in that smile. “This is the third time I discover something unexpected about you, Quantum; you really are full of surprises.”
“You didn’t know?” Toki blinked.
“Oh, I already knew that you and Eraserhead were acquainted, and I had deduced that it was in less-than-ideal circumstances already. Neither he nor you were particularly subtle in that regard. However, I didn’t know the specifics. I would like to hear, in your own words, what kind of training Aizawa provided.”
“Er, why?”
“Well, to consider the question of his employment, of course.”
Toki straightened, frowning: “Hey, I didn’t come here for a trial.”
“Don’t you want one?” Aizawa suddenly said.
They all turned towards him. He was watching Toki intently. His eyes were dark, and his face looked carved from stone, like a condemned man walking to the gallows: and yet there was something vindictive in the twist of his lips, like he was daring her to take a cheap shot at him.
Toki considered her answer a second. Then she shook her head:
“I don’t care about you enough to want one.”
A wry smile passed on Aizawa’s lips. “I don’t believe that.”
“I don’t like you,” Toki admitted readily. “And yeah, it would bring me great joy to break your jaw in a sparring match. But unlike you, I don’t enjoy hitting people who are down.”
She saw the blow land. But then Aizawa crossed his arms, and bit back:
“It’s your last chance. I know you hated me. You were more bruises than flesh at some point, and yet you still wanted to claw my eyes off.”
Was he baiting her by trying to remind her of how she lost their fights and cried, back in the day? Yeah, he was probably baiting her. But it didn’t make sense! He should try to change the focus of that conversation to Okamoto, instead of casting Toki as some sort of victim. Was he hoping that she would snap and try to break his neck in the middle of Nedzu’s office?
Toki was kind of baffled here. What was he aiming to accomplish? It didn’t make sense for him to encourage her to attack him, either verbally or physically.
“It was eight years ago,” she said flippantly. “I moved on. I don’t like you because you teach your kids bad coping mechanisms, and your training was one of the worst times of my life in terms of physical pain. But this?” She gestured at the office, Nedzu’s attentive gaze, the four chairs aligned in front of his desk. “I have no need of this. The one I wanted to snipe was Okamoto, not you. You are just collateral damage, one of the many people in his pocket who are suddenly exposed. It’s not personal. You’re not the first person who tried to break me and failed. There’s nothing special about you.”
She turned to Nedzu, who was watching the exchange with a lot of interest, and narrowed her eyes:
“Also, I don’t see why our history should change anything to Eraser’s employment. Your problem should be that he lied to you and kept lying. The fact that he kicked my ass when I was a kid was already true when you hired him. Nothing has changed.”
“Surely you can see how that would be an issue!” Yagi said in a scandalized tone.
Toki threw her hands in the air in exasperation:
“No, I don’t! Plenty of people have a fucked-up past and did terrible things! So what? What matters is that they don’t do these things anymore. What matter is what they do now. So what if you discover skeletons in their closet? It happens to everyone! You accept it, you move on, you do better. End of the story. The fact that Aizawa sucks as a teacher is what you should be focusing on right now, not the fact that eight years ago he broke my hand!” She paused, then narrowed her eyes. “Why are you so fixated on this? Are you looking for an excuse to fire him?”
Nedzu’s paws twitched, a minute reflex of suppressed surprise, but his face stayed indecipherable, his amiable smile still in place.
“Of course not,” he said smoothly.
But you are, Toki realized with a sudden cold shock of clarity.
It was obvious. Because a teacher fired from Yūei, a discredited hero… someone scruffy and angry and who didn’t fit the picture of heroism… someone wronged by Yūei… that person had the perfect excuse to infiltrate the League of Villains.
Holy shit.
If the HPSC had thought about using a spy of their own, why wouldn’t Nedzu think of it, too?! Hawks hadn’t made contact with the League yet. No hero had. The HPSC, Yūei, the heroes, everyone… They were flying blind and looking for clues with increasing urgency. How could Nedzu not see the perfect opportunity to turn a failure into a magnificent trap?!
A trap where Aizawa would be bait.
It couldn’t be anyone else, of course. A limelight hero getting fired would attract too much attention. After all, limelight heroes talked to the press, made public appearances, were seen, and watched. An underground hero being fired was more discreet. The press wouldn’t learn it, which meant no bad press for Yūei, and no pressure from the media. Yūei could sweep it under the rug, like every rich organization making the poor exploited employees paid the price of their bosses’ mistakes.
But underground heroes could spread rumors in the underground, where villains got their intel. Fuck, it was a gold mine. Getting fired gave the disgruntled hero a reason to hate Yūei and to want to join their enemies. It gave him a motive, a backstory, something that villains could check, something that the villains would trust.
Besides, didn’t Shigaraki like Aizawa? There was only one hero that Shigaraki called cool, and didn’t dismiss out of hand. Him. If Shigaraki learned that Aizawa had been fired by Yūei, tossed away like trash, oh, the temptation for him! Just like he had wanted to turn Bakugo to his side so he could steal something from heroic society, why wouldn’t he want to get his grubby little hands on a former Yūei teacher? Someone with good intel, someone who wanted revenge?
After the shock came a dizzying rush of relief. Because it meant that Keigo wouldn’t be the spy, Keigo wouldn’t be caught, and Keigo wouldn’t be burned.
Then, so close behind that it was almost the same reaction, a cold blanket of calm descended on her.
The calculations rushed through her mind at lightning-speed, crystal-clear, and filled with possibilities. Could Aizawa be a spy? Maybe? Nedzu certainly wanted to try. Would it work? No idea. But was she willing to go along with it? Absolutely.
“Yeah, you should totally fire him,” she backtracked suddenly.
Aizawa’s eyes widened. Yagi sputtered, clearly taken aback. They hadn’t expected her to catch on. Oh, right, they didn’t know that she knew about the HPSC trying to plant a spy.
Nedzu didn’t know she knew, either. But he had made a good enough assumption, she could see it in his reaction, or rather his lack of one.
“Oh?” said Nedzu, beady eyes gleaming.
“Yes. Not because of the hand thing, like I said, but because he’s bad at his job.” Toki decided to really ram the point home, and started counting on her fingers: “He’s been teaching the kids to not trust their teachers. He didn’t read his students’ files, meaning that he still operates without taking into account the disabilities some of them have. He nearly let a student go full-vigilante on a misplaced revenge mission. He lied to you since the day you met, and if I hadn’t ejected Okamoto, he would still be lying to you.”
“All valid points,” Nedzu hummed. “Aizawa, do you have any counterarguments?”
Aizawa breathed out, deeply. His hands were so crisped on his thighs that his knuckles were white. Several seconds passed in silence. He didn’t say a word.
“I see,” Nedzu smiled. “It’s a shame, really. We’re going to need a new homeroom teacher for class 1-A, then.”
His eyes were on Toki when he said that, and she realized that maybe it had been his plan all along.
For a second she was a little bewildered. She was clearly the HPSC’s pawn, the intruder. The other teachers didn’t like her. She lived in Fukuoka, half a country away. She was a very high-ranked hero, which mean that to offer competitive employment, Nedzu would have to offer her a ton of money. Why turn to her?
But then she realized… who else?
She knew about All Might’s weak form and kept his secrets; she was his friend. She was already investigating the spy in Yūei, so she was aware of the risks. She was familiar with the kids and had proved she could be a competent teacher. Yes, who else could do it? There was no need to search for the perfect gem that would be both strong enough to protect the students and trustworthy enough to protect the school: she was already here. There was no one else they could possibly choose.
Toki smiled like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth.
“I happen to have some free time. I would be happy to send you my CV.”
Nedzu clasped his paws, beaming, and exclaimed it was marvelous. Toki smiled at him, listening to him prattle about how they would need to change the lessons plans. But from the corner of her eye, she was watching the two men at her side.
Yagi was looking at Aizawa, his mouth a thin, angry line, like disapproval or fear or maybe both. He knew about this scheme of sending him as a spy, then. Did he think that it was a way for Aizawa to redeem himself, to repay for his mistakes?
Unbiddenly, Toki’s mind flashed to the possibilities, how this meeting had happened, how the conversation had gone. How it had started with Aizawa admitting the blackmail, and then ended with someone (probably Nedzu) pitching the idea of using Aizawa as a mole.
Had Aizawa told them about beating Toki to make them angry? Yagi had taken it badly, in any case. Present Mic, too. Or maybe it was the idea of infiltrating the League that he had taken issue with. Yagi didn’t seem to have anything against that, at any rate. Maybe because he was pissed at Aizawa, and indeed thought that it was the least he could do to make things right. Maybe that was why he was watching Aizawa with such a pinched, conflicted expression.
But Aizawa was looking at Toki.
His eyes were as coldly resolute as the day she had met him, when he had only been a thug in an alley, promising that he would teach them to survive someone stronger than themselves. Dark and unreadable, like two pools of ink, devoid of any warmth or any weakness. Just like that time, Toki held his gaze without flinching. Like a challenge, like a dare.
And, for a fraction of a second, Aizawa smiled.
Notes:
Uhuhuhuh. Mwahhahaha. MwhuhuhuMWHEHEHEHEHEH!!!
I bet you didn't see THAT coming =)
I didn't plan to have the story take that direction either. It hit me while i was writing the sentence "are you looking for an excuse to fire him", and HOLY SHIT. I couldn't not use it. It's insane and brillant and i'm 100% sure this plot-twist will bite me in the ass and make the plot even more complicated, but hell if i didn't scream at my laptop when i wrote Toki's realization.
So! Aizawa is going to be a spy =)
It's either going to be awesome or it will go down horribly.Also, here is what someone on the Discord said about Toki's cocky attitude and it's SO TRUE !
Also here is a reminder that this fic has a Discord server !
Chapter 45: Wildfire
Summary:
Even without his hero costume, dressed casually as a civilian, Enji Todoroki was intimidating. The only other person Toki had met who was so muscular and physically threatening was All Might. For a few seconds, Toki and Endeavor both gauged each other in silence.
Endeavor had the exact same blue eyes as Fuyumi, the same shade of red hair as Shouto’s left side, and the same frown. Toki couldn’t help but be a little thrown, to see a person she had only imagined from a vague amalgam of concepts and prejudices.But there was no masks here. Only the truth.
“Hi,” said Toki, face unreadable despite the way her heart was pounding. “I’ve heard you were looking for me.
Notes:
This is officially the begining of the Meteor Arc !
This chapter is titled after the next chapter of "wisdom of the fallen". Because mwhahahaha, things finally spiral out of control.
Also ! I realized i forgot to post one picture in the chapter 4 of "snapshots of wisdom", so i added it. It's a fanart of Toki, Keigo and Hinawa all together ^^
Here is the link of the pic ! https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/taiyom10.jpg
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
WILDFIRE
No student was attacked during the internships. No Nomu appeared, either. Stain grievously wounded a hero in Hosu, trying to go after Native once again. Said hero survived, though, and was in good enough shape to testify that Stain was more unhinged than ever. Silver lining, though: Stain’s injuries from January had apparently been serious enough that he still sported their marks. He was slower, heavier, and hiding some sort of supporting exoskeleton under a coat. His injuries after his fight against Endeavor must have been severe.
Native, for his part, announced that he was taking a vacation. Most likely, he was going to hide. Toki didn’t envy him. Being chased by a serial killer wasn’t fun, but having two of your colleagues badly hurt because they tried to protect you? It must feel horrible.
But there was no Stain attacking the kids, no Nomu, and no League of Villains. Iida had done his internship in a city far away from Hosu, and Toki had had the foresight to text Hayasa-sensei to tell him to keep an eye on his nephew. There was a full weekend between the internship’s end and the return to school, and she didn’t want Iida to get any ideas about the use of his free time. As a result, Iida came back to school looking grumpy, but a little more settled than before.
Hayasa sent Toki a short text telling her that he was grateful that she had warned him. So apparently he had caught Tenya just in time, and they had had a talk about it. Or at least, Toki hoped so.
The rest of the kids seemed happy with their internships, too. Midoriya was almost skipping instead of walking, delighted by his progress. Hitoshi greatly enjoyed working with Sherazade. Neito spent a lot of time complaining about how Jeanist had slathered his hair in gel, but otherwise seemed satisfied.
“Isn’t Aizawa-sensei here?” someone inevitably asked when Toki came to class instead of their homeroom teacher.
Here we go, she thought and plastered a smile on her face.
“No. That’s why I’m here. Everyone, sit down. I have an announcement to make.”
During the weekend, Yūei hurried to prepare Toki’s new post. The HPSC had been discreetly called. Aizawa had packed his bags. The staff had been told by Nedzu something about Aizawa spying for Okamoto and Quantum being hostile towards him because she had been working on exposing Okamoto as a corrupt asshole. That explained neatly the fallout and made Toki look good without painting her as a victim.
The lesson plan had been changed. A new contract had been negotiated between Icarus and the school (so basically, between Kameko and Nedzu) regarding Toki’s employment, this time as a full-time teacher instead of a security consultant that would occasionally meddle in All Might’s lessons. Toki had told her sidekicks and made the necessary adjustments to her schedule.
She had been afraid that Keigo would be pissed because he really wanted her to be in the Top Ten with him. And yes, he had been upset, but… not as much as she would have thought.
As long as she didn’t hide her strength and gave it her all, it wasn’t really important. Sure, spending time in Yūei meant spending less time working at Icarus, and thus less chance of climbing the rankings, but even with a teaching job Toki still had a reasonable chance to end up in the Top Ten. Not as high as she would be if she devoted herself to heroism full time like Keigo, but high enough to make her strength undoubtable.
That was the most important. After all, it was by making her strength known that Toki would be able to make the best.
“Is Aizawa-sensei all right, kero?” immediately worried Asui.
“He is. But something came up during your internships.” She paused. “It knows it’s sudden, but Aizawa resigned. He no longer works in Yūei.”
The class exploded in exclamations and protests. Iida’s hand shot up. Kaminari and Kirishima had jumped to their feet, bombarding her with questions. Toki waited two whole minutes for them to get it out of their system, then raised her voice:
“All right, quiet down! Aizawa left because an error of his came to light, and leaving was his way to make up for it. It has nothing to do with you. It was something that had to do with his heroic work outside of Yūei.”
The key was to pick the right words. An error, implying a fault, something that Aizawa had to be held accountable for. Leaving, as if it was his decision, but with the implied message that he didn’t really have any other option if he was paying back a mistake. Nedzu wanted to paint a certain scene and put in place a particular décor. It was a good one, Toki had to admit. For naïve students, it looked like a hasty departure, nothing else. But if it were just a smidge more suspicious… then it looked like the faculty was washing its hand of Aizawa, discreetly burying any sign of his passage here: paying back with ingratitude all the sacrifices he had made.
“There was a problem in one of his missions, maybe?” Midoriya whispered, dismayed. “It must be something big…”
“What kind of error? What does that mean?”
“He’s got to come back!”
Toki waited for a beat, then shook her head. Her face was grave. Slowly, the protestations died down.
“No, kids. I’m sorry, but I don’t think he will be back.”
There was silence. She could see them thinking about it. Kirishima, Ashido, Uraraka, and Kaminari all looked dismayed and sad. The rigid ones, the ones who believed in rules in fairness, like Iida, Yaoyorozu, and Asui looked shocked and a little afraid. And the few who knew to look underneath the underneath, who didn’t take what adults said at face value, narrowed their eyes and drew their own conclusions.
Midoriya. Todoroki. Hitoshi. Tokoyami. And, somehow… Aoyama?
“Anyway, moving on!” Toki clapped her hands once, loudly. “Starting today, I’m your new homeroom teacher. Aizawa didn’t have much planned, so we’ll be continuing our Quirk analysis until everyone has gotten through it at least once. I also want to make a joint training with people from class 1-B, with randomized duos. It will be strictly voluntary. You don’t have to sign up for it if you would rather focus on your own skills. If you’re interested, though, please write your name on that list…”
Holding class wasn’t all that complicated. Toki mostly drew from her memories of her own homeroom teacher when she had been in Yūei, Norogawa-sensei. Hmmm, now that she was a full-time teacher, she should try to say hello. She was going to spend several hours at this school now, she was bound to run into him sooner or later.
Of course, Toki was still primarily attached to the Icarus Agency. Yūei employed multiple pro-heroes and teachers because each one taught only one class. It would be completely unsustainable for a hero to spend eight hours teaching and then go do their heroic job! No, the teachers’ schedules were calculated so they only taught two or three hours every day, no more.
Becoming a teacher, a real teacher at Yūei, not just an interloper getting their foot in the door to watch out for the Plot… it felt a little like being granted free admittance to the sandbox. Toki hadn’t realized how Nedzu’s mistrust had limited her access until suddenly she was invited into his castle for real, to have a seat at the table and everything. There was a clear difference between the clearance of a security consultant, who could rummage around but wouldn’t be helped, and the clearance of a teacher, who could get advice and explanations from the Principal himself.
Also, some members of the staff had noticeably warmed up to Toki.
Not all of them, of course; Midnight was still cranky. But Snipe, Power Loader, and Cementos had all made a conscious effort to be warmer when Nedzu had introduced Quantum as the new homeroom teacher for class 1-A. She didn’t know what excuse he had cooked; but it must have been a good one. Maybe all she needed was the Principal’s vote of confidence. Or maybe all she needed was to be a little nicer. Who knew?
Present Mic knew there was more than that, though. He knew exactly what had gone down between Aizawa and her. Oh, he was warmer all right... But he was also falsely cheerful and almost apologetic, and it was weirding out Toki. The truth was that Present Mic probably felt bad about Toki’s history and Aizawa’s role in it.
But if he tried to bring up the subject, Toki would 100% punch him in the face. For the last time, she was no victim!
Whatever. They held class. Toki made her briefing then left the kids organize themselves. She let them talk about what they had learned from their internships and how they planned to organize themselves to study for the next round of tests.
A homeroom teacher supervised more than they taught, usually, so Toki enjoyed taking a step back and watching the students. Seeing then outside of a training situation revealed a lot about their dynamic. Who gravitated towards who, and so on. Midoriya, Uraraka and Iida formed their own little cell, but so did Kirishima, Kaminari, Sero, and Ashido. Mineta was still too pushy towards the girls, but he managed to get along just fine with Kaminari and occasionally joined his group of friends. Ojiro and Hagakure were the quiet ones. Yaoyorozu, Todoroki, and Hitoshi were, amusingly enough, considered the “cool kids.” Clever, aloof, charismatic, and popular. They sometimes had lunch together with some people of class 1-B or upperclassmen, which only enhanced their reputation.
Anyway. It went fine. Afterward, All Might came to fetch the kids for basic training. Toki waved them goodbye, and that was it.
First day as a homeroom teacher was a success! Toki went back to Icarus with a spring in her step.
Routine resumed. Patrol, meetings, paperwork, training. There were not many arrests that day, but there were more than a few reprimands to people who used their Quirk a little too recklessly.
That was the downside of the law allowing Quirk use in public areas. Oh, it had its good sides; the economy had jumped, the entertainment business had found itself riddled with a lot of very niche jobs seemingly overnight, plenty of struggling people suddenly had more options to look for jobs, there was more awareness of people with mutations Quirks, and several pseudo-villainous Quirks were suddenly seen in a better light. But there were also consequences to this bigger freedom.
The law was vague. Quirks could be used freely so long as they didn’t cause public disturbances. Unfortunately, some Quirks were loud, or too bright, or intimidating, and any use of such Quirks could cause their neighbor to shriek in offense or protest.
A man yelled that his female coworker using her strength-enhancing Quirk was disturbing the office because she made her male colleagues embarrassed; or a mother arguing that her neighbor with a feline mutation should still cover up instead of parading around naked (even if she was completely covered in fur!). A firefighter was arguing that he deserved a promotion more than his colleagues because he was the only one with a water Quirk…
Some people also used their newfound freedom to flex their powers in some kind of intimidation display, like bullies in a schoolyard. A woman with an acid Quirk made thin rings of acid dance around one of her coworker’s feet, for example, nearly splattering it on her dress and calves. It wasn’t legally a disturbance, since there was no damage and no assault, but it was still bullying.
Nothing unusual.
There had been an influx of cases to be argued in front of judges about what qualified as ‘a disturbance.’ This law had been passed more than a year ago, but things weren’t yet settling down. Quirks were so varied it was hard to settle on a precise definition.
Aside from that, Toki tried to focus on something she had kind of left off on… training.
Not so long ago, she had considered the possibility of her Quirk warping gravity. She had done the math since then, and yes, it was possible. Her Quirk created a portal, so basically she could warp about anything. Mass and matter, but also energy. She could even transform stuff when it went through her warping: cutting it up, compressing it, and so on.
“So what would be that special move?” Hayasa-sensei frowned. “I don’t see how the effect would be different from when you use a Warp-Blast to enhance the strength of a punch.”
He was just back from his vacation and was running on a treadmill in Icarus’ gym. Keigo was spread out on a bench, reading a stack of papers while filling out a report and cooling down after his stretches. Toki was still finishing her last set on the parallel bars.
They had the gym all for themselves this afternoon. When that happened, it wasn’t rare for the three of them to fall back into the familiar pattern of discussing theories and ideas for Quirk training, just like they had at Naruto Labs.
“It’s completely different because I won’t teleport matter,” Toki explained, gesturing vaguely at the air. “I won’t teleport something that has a mass and occupy a space. Just raw energy, just movement. The strain on my Quirk will be lesser, and I could probably warp, I don’t know, maybe a hundred times what I could warp in terms of matter!”
“And did you test it?” Hayasa-sensei immediately focused on the biggest problem with laser-like precision.
Toki made a vague so-so gesture. She had teleported her own momentum before. Surely that counted as testing. But her teacher raised a dubitative eyebrow, and she sighed.
“Not really.”
“I think she’s full of air,” Keigo interjected from his bench, smirking.
“Be nice, children,” Hayasa-sensei chided. “Quantum, give me your full reasoning.”
“Uuuuuuh… All right. So, gravity is basically the pull the Earth has on everything that has a mass. It’s a movement, a vector, a push: kinetic energy, plain and simple. I already know that I can teleport kinetic energy because when I warp, I always carry my momentum with me. I can also warp momentum separately from mass. That’s why I store momentum by waving or jumping when I create a Warp-Blast so I can aim and give direction to the compressed air that I warp. It doesn’t explode in my hand. It’s fired in one direction like a cannonball. With me so far?”
“I am,” Hayasa-sensei nodded, frowning. “And that’s what makes you so sure that you can warp gravity.”
“Yes! Gravity is momentum, basically. It’s the fact that things are moving towards the center of the earth, and it’s countered by the resistance of the ground. My point is that I should be able to grab the momentum of, said, a building; the push that building exerts on the surface of the Earth as it’s pulled toward the core of the planet; and then I should be able to warp with it. When I remove the gravity from a building, it should implode towards the sky, and when I eject that gravity like a Warp-Blast, it’s just energy, without any mass behind it, but still raw kinetic energy. Like slapping that building against something.”
Hayasa-sensei slowed down the treadmill, frowning pensively.
“I see. To your opponent, it would feel like the building was dropped on them. There would be no rubble or physical projectiles, but only the force that those projectiles would have.”
“Yes, exactly!”
Hayasa-sensei blinked and made a complicated face. “And you can do that?”
“My Quirk is Warp-Space, not Warp-Mass or Warp-Matter. And space is…” Toki tried to find the words. “It’s where mass and matter and energy and movement exist.”
“You don’t warp things, you warp what contains those things,” summarized Keigo. He had abandoned his report and was watching her, leaning on his elbow.
“Yes. But warping energy is complicated because Warp-Space is based on visualization, and energy isn’t exactly visible. So, how to grab gravity? Or momentum, energy, whatever. Grabbing things I can’t see is super complicated. It was hard enough with air, but even then I had the understanding that the atmosphere was an object, something solid that I could touch. Energy, though? That’s another thing.”
“Could you trick your brain into it like you did for air?” Hayasa-sensei wondered.
“I could do it, theoretically! But since visualization is a key part of my Quirk, and energy is even more difficult to visualize than solid objects… even objects as small as air molecules… I’m kind of stuck. I need to write the equations, then think about it, integrate the math in my belief system that everything is an illusion and that I’m a god, and hope that it’s precise enough to work. I don’t have the brainpower to do it. Even if I did, it would require several minutes of focus and probably a whiteboard. It’s unusable in combat.”
Keigo squinted. “Wait, quick question. What about the release? You already get a recoil when you make compressed air explode. If you warp the energy of a whole building on your fist like a punch, your limbs will shatter.”
Toki imagined her arm breaking Midoriya-style and shuddered. No thank you.
“Yeah, that won’t be a problem. Compressed air expands in all directions. Kinetic energy already has a direction. Upon impact, part of the energy is going to disperse in a shockwave, but it’s going to be deviated, not inverted.”
“Oh,” Keigo blinked. “That sounds useful. Basically, you could have super-strength and become a massive powerhouse.”
“Yeah, ‘cause the laws of physics are my bitch.”
“Quantum!” Hayasa-sensei snapped. “Language. What is the problem, then?”
“It’s so much math! I’m smart but not that smart! I would need a massive billboard to do the calculations, and those calculations would constantly change with the quantity of energy I warp with me! I don’t know if you realize, but my brain is already at its maximum capacity with what I can do currently. I can imagine more, but I can’t put it in practice, there’s too much data and not enough room on the main computer! My processor doesn’t have infinite space!”
She broke off to take a big breath, then let it go in an exasperated huff. It was so frustrating. Like visualizing a scene so perfectly but being utterly unable to paint it with her clumsy hands. She was running into a wall, and that didn’t happen to her often.
Then Hayasa-sensei raised an eyebrow:
“Find another processor, then.”
“Huh?”
“Honestly.” He snorted. “Mankind invented supercomputers centuries ago. Are you telling me it would be impossible for you to connect to your HUD some program that would help you run the calculations?”
Toki bluescreened.
It was so simple she hadn’t even thought about it. But yeah, the math she did could be run by a computer. It would be faster. And at the end, she would just have the results, up for grabs… and if it was in her HUD, maybe she could even program a visual aid, like a projection or something…! And, oh, shit, even for her Scalpel move, she could have visual aids too! It would have to be an A.I. especially attuned to her, to be able to read the movements of her eyes because in a fight Toki would not be able to use a keyboard or even give verbal commands, but holy shit, it could probably be done!
“Sensei. You’re a genius.”
“Not really,” Hayasa-sensei said, an amused twist to his mouth. “But I am practical.”
“Where the hell am I going to find that, though?” Toki wondered out loud. “I don’t think the Support Department knows a lot about A.I.”
“Maybe they will know more on I-Island,” suggested Keigo. “We have the TechnoBurst Company backing us up, now!”
Toki grinned from ear to ear. Oh, she couldn’t wait.
That very day, she called the TechnoBurst Company and started the project ‘Ada Lovelace.’
She didn’t share the specifics of her Quirks with TechnoBurst, but they already had enough information to know that her Warp-Blast was based on teleportation of compressed air. The idea of teleporting energy was kind of a stretch, but they were enthused by it.
TechnoBurst’s area was mostly into support items; tools, weapons… solid stuff. They dealt with hardware rather than software. They had a few engineers and programmers that dabbled in Artificial Intelligence, and they were willing to start working on it, but they warned Toki that this kind of project couldn’t be completed at a distance. What she requested needed to be completely personalized.
The A.I. would have to think like Toki, basically. Having a program do the math wouldn’t be complicated, but it needed to be able to do that math with the same thought process as Toki, at a speed that she had to be able to follow, so the A.I. could adjust its reasoning in real time. The program also needed to be in sync with Toki’s eye movements, be able to read her body language and anticipate her needs.
Basically, it would be created from scratch to assist her, personally.
TechnoBurst could provide the hardware and make it so small that it could be integrated into her visor. They would also help with the basic software, giving the A.I. the mathematical knowledge required. But the personalization, the personality of the A.I., would require someone on-site to consult with Toki. And since that project was highly confidential, it would have to be one lone programmer, doing almost all the work by himself. TechnoBurst had contacts with a few programmers, though, and quickly offered Toki a register and a few recommendations to find the rare pearl.
Toki’s choice fell on a guy named Hotaka Hisuitoka. He was young, barely older than her, and he had gone to Yūei, in the Support Course. He worked with hospitals, clinics, and private clients, but he also worked on the security of Heroic Agencies and hospital dealing with heroes. Basically, he operated in the grey area between support items and accessibility devices for the disabled. It was what had made Toki pick him, honestly. She liked that he wasn’t just in the service of heroes, but rather that he used what he had learned in the service of heroes to help the general public.
Also, his picture looked vaguely familiar. He was a young man with jade-green hair and eyes, and Toki was almost sure she had seen him somewhere in the past. Maybe he had passed Yūei’s entrance exam at the same time as she had?
He just had something about him that seemed familiar. She couldn’t put her finger on it…
Oh, whatever.
Toki emailed him the next day and they started making plans. While TechnoBurst worked on the mathematical intelligence of her future assistant and how to integrate a computer in her thin visor, Hisuitoka would work on the communication interface. Toki hadn’t really explained to him what her A.I. would need to do, besides guess her thoughts from simple visual contact and run complicated calculations. Hisuitoka still assured her that it was in his competencies. He had once designed a security protocol for a hero agency that could read eye movements and corporal language to send a distress signal.
Toki was thrilled with that idea, and it had the potential to be a great success. All was well.
And then, two days later, Endeavor showed up in Fukuoka.
oOoOoOo
Toki came back from her patrol in the early afternoon, chatting and joking with her sidekicks. Today, it was Psyren and Ocelot. The day had been going well. They stopped several muggings, an assault getting out of hand, prevented a kidnapping, and rescued fourteen people from what could have been a very serious car crash. Toki was tired, but it was a good kind of fatigue, the sated soreness of a full day of work well-done when your body is ready for a hot shower.
The day wasn’t over yet, though. Toki took a lukewarm shower to cool down, then started on her paperwork. Her mind wandered to her other projects. Maybe she could swing by Musutafu later, to squeeze in a little training with Hitoshi, Neito, and Melissa? Or maybe they could all go see the new Fast and Furious movie. It looked pretty dumb, but it was nice to go see dumb movies from time to time.
Or maybe Toki could use that time to see Hinawa. Her daughter crawled everywhere these days, and she even took a few hesitant steps on her own two feet, with her little wings flapping madly to help her keep her balance. She ran after Missy the cat all day, and she was fascinated by shiny things. Mihoko had put glow-in-the-dark stickers of stars in her room. Toki had found an online shop that made plushies of heroes and had bought a plushy of Inferno whose body could flicker with orange light just as if a fire was lit inside. Hinawa chewed on it more than she really played with it, but apparently, she loved it.
And she was using small words now! She babbled a lot, but she also knew how to communicate! She said “no” and “more” and “bye” and “up!” and even “kitty”. She called people by their names, too! Hitoshi was “Hi-tan”, the Inferno plushy was “Efo”, and she called both Mihoko-san and Missy the cat “Mi”, which was hilarious.
She hadn’t said “Mom” or “Dad” yet, though. Toki felt a gnawing guilt in her belly when she thought about it. Maybe Hinawa didn’t use those words yet because she had no reason to use them. She saw Missy the cat more often than she saw her own parents.
Yeah, maybe Toki should swing by Musutafu later.
There were also a bunch of things she wanted to do at Yūei. Maybe find out if Nedzu had already thought about the dorms? There had only been one attack on the students, so maybe this project would only concretize itself after a second attack, but frankly, Toki would rather avoid it. Oh, and maybe she could finally try to approach Norogawa-sensei and say hello.
And she had a few ideas to improve Yūei (and hero schools in general) that she wanted to talk about with Nedzu. Ideally, she wanted to send them out to the HPSC and see if they could implement her recommendations as a mandatory part of the curriculum. But it was better to consult with a real teacher first.
Like, how about teaching about law and stuff to the kids? Or teach them some economics. Or make first aid certification a requirement to apply to heroes school. Or change the fucking entrance exam. Maybe do something more teamwork based? All hero schools had their own entrance exam, of course (Shiketsu had a race, Yūei had robots, Ketsubutsu had a hide-and-seek game…), but they all relied in some part on combat. It wasn’t a bad thing, but… sometimes it was a little too central to the test.
For example, Toki thought that Yūei could adapt their entrance exam to have teamwork points. And instead of just fighting robots, the students could also look for various tokens, too, and try to collect them like a heroes running recon and collecting clues.
Oh, and they should automatically disqualify people who didn’t score any rescue points. If someone could spend ten minutes in a dangerous situation and not see fit to help a single person around them, then they probably weren’t suited to a career as a hero. Besides, students who are admitted only on villain points were probably more violent, more likely to kill or seriously injure villains, and more destructive in terms of property damage.
Yes, that was a dig at canon-Bakugo.
Canon-Bakugo had ended up changing and growing as a person, but let’s be honest, at the beginning, he was completely unsuited to heroism. He had the emotional maturity of a toddler and the aggressiveness of a rabid bear. He had grown, but Midoriya shouldn’t have had to suppress his own growth at the detriment of his feeling of safety. The teachers should have seen it, and they should have done something.
Toki wondered how Bakugo was doing, right now. She was supposed to visit Naruto Labs in the summer, and it wasn’t so far away anymore. Oh, well. She would see in due time. Come July, maybe she could convince Keigo to join her. It would be nice to take a trip on memory lane together.
She had been working for a little over an hour when her phone rang. It was Keigo, calling her from his personal phone. She frowned. He was supposed to be on patrol, having started just an hour before she finished her own. Was it an emergency? No, if that was the case, he would have used his Icarus-issued communicator. But a personal call in the middle of the day wasn’t his type…
She picked up.
“What’s up?”
“Toki.” His voice was deadly serious, and Toki unconsciously straightened. “You passed by Kasuga Park, right?”
“Uh, yeah,” Toki blinked, perplexed. “I always do.”
She passed there once at the start of patrol, then halfway through, then at the end. It allowed her fans to have a specific spot to wait for her if they wanted a picture or an autograph. That way, they didn’t have to randomly accost her during patrol. Of course, she would still stop if a civilian wanted a chat because it was polite. But having a predetermined place to be seen helped her to keep pace during her actual patrol. The downside to that was that if a specific villain wanted to make a declaration of war, they would also aim for the park. It had happened twice, so far, but each time, Toki had swiftly subdued them.
She hadn’t just picked the park because it had pretty scenery. It was wide enough for her to fight unimpeded.
“Did you notice a big guy hiding behind a hat, and watching you from the sidelines?” Keigo sounded a little nervous.
Toki narrowed her eyes, “With a coat too long for the season, and sunglasses? Yep, I did. He was there the three times I stopped at the park. But I’m not going to walk up to everyone who stares at me and demand an explanation. I wouldn’t get anything done. Why, did he do something?”
“Toki. It’s Endeavor.”
It felt like her heart was dropping to the floor. Toki sucked on a breath.
“Fuck. You’re sure?”
“Certain. I just flew over the park. I didn’t recognize him in his civilian get-up, but I sent a few feathers around just in case, and… that heat signature is very distinctive. It’s him. As a civilian. Waiting the whole day at the only place where you’re sure to stop.”
He didn’t have to say more. It was pretty clear already that Endeavor wasn’t here to speak to Quantum or Hawks about hero work, or that he was here as Enji Todoroki on a leisure vacation. He was here, incognito, investigating.
He was here because he was looking for Toki Taiyōme. Fuck.
Had he recognized her? Toki took a second to entertain the notion that he hadn’t. That she had been too far, that her visor had obscured her glowing eyes. But she wasn’t so naïve. If Endeavor had come to Fukuoka, he had already identified Toki. He was just here to check his conclusions. He had come here to see her with his own two eyes and compare her to Meteor, because he knew Meteor.
Endeavor was not just a great investigator with the highest number of cases closed in Japan; he was also Meteor’s friend. Someone who knew him. Someone who knew how he spoke and how he moved and how he laughed and how he acted; someone who would recognize his scowl, how he squared his shoulders, or his arrogant smirk.
It’s crazy how much he looks like you, Keigo had said once.
Someone who knew Meteor, and who knew what they were looking for, would not be misled by an orange visor. They would have no trouble seeing Toki for who she was. What she was. The runaway Taiyōme. Dread settled in Toki’s stomach like a ball of lead.
“Shit,” Toki whispered. There was a beat. She heard Keigo take a deep breath.
“Don’t freak out. He’s going to come here to talk to you, but there’s… there’s something I should explain to you, first. Meet me on the roof in five minutes.”
He hung up. Toki stared at her phone, vaguely incredulous. Well, that wasn’t ominous at all.
The idea of Endeavor confronting her felt almost surreal. It had been more than a year since Meteor had gotten out. It had been longer since Toki had learned that maybe her father didn’t hate her after all. And yet, the idea that he may look for her hadn’t really sunk in.
Because why would Meteor want to see her again, after all? She was the one responsible for Sayuri’s death, for Hikari’s death. For the Crew’s imprisonment. Did her father want closure? Did he want forgiveness?
Did he want her back?
No. Stop. It was stupid. It was childish. Toki was twenty-two years old. It was naïve and immature of her to project her old childish longing on her estranged father. When she had been small, she had wanted an adult to come and save her; she had wanted someone to want her, as she was, without trying to change her or use her or gaslight her or— anything. She had wanted an adult to be her family without condition, to love her because she was Toki and that was enough.
Keigo had loved her like that, of course; but Keigo was different. He had been her friend, her soulmate, her partner, her equal. What Toki had wanted, as a scared and lonely little girl, was a protector. Someone to make the nightmares go away.
Neither her dad nor her mom had been any good at that.
Now her mother was dead, and it was her fault, and her father was… Toki didn’t even know what kind of person he was now. And she didn’t need a protector anymore, anyway. Why was she thinking of it? It had been stupid of Toki to wish it then; it was stupid of her to wish it now. Her father wasn’t-
He wasn’t even there, she suddenly realized. It wasn’t him that she was going to confront, it was Endeavor.
The Number One hero. Meteor’s friend. Coming on Meteor’s behalf, only knowing what Meteor had told him. Fuck, what did he think? Was he pissed at Toki for her betrayal? Why was he coming here? Why was he friend with Meteor, of all people? Him, who was a brute and an abuser, but had apparently changed, and was a good person?! And more importantly, who was a hero?! The top hero of Japan?!
Toki had been simmering with unanswered questions for months now. Maybe now would be her chance to ask them. She’d already realized she didn’t know anything about Endeavor; about who he really was, what his goals were, what he saw in Meteor, or why he was even bothering with this whole mess. It made a new kind of anxiety open like a pit in her chest, because she didn’t know what Endeavor wanted from this.
From her, but also from Meteor.
Keigo had said they were friends. But Toki couldn’t fathom a hero being friends with the Meteor she knew. Unless Endeavor had suddenly completely changed his goals and was now a corrupt individual only interested in money and revenge? Unlikely. But then, it meant that Meteor had changed, had become the kind of person who could like and follow a pro-hero without breaking out in hives, and it was just so boggling. Toki didn’t know who this Meteor was. She had Keigo’s stories, she had the rumors, and she had Mera-san’s brief retelling of Kuma’s arrest, but her father felt like a stranger now.
Toki took a long breath and went to the roof to wait for Keigo.
She immediately felt a little better there. Honestly, ever since she was a child, she had always liked the way rooftops looked. From the ground, roofs were boring and predictable but from above they became a landscape all its own, with the patterns of vents and fences to break up the flat line of what was ultimately just a covering for the building below. The utilitarian fashion of architecture was as intriguing to consider as the human affectations of clothes and accessories. Toki had never been scared of heights, either. After all, she trusted her balance. She trusted herself to know her limits better than she knew nearly anything else.
True to his word, Keigo was here a few minutes later, flying so fast he was like a red blur, only slowing down right above the building. Toki could see his wing spreading wide like a parachute when he halted his descent. She could imagine his back straining to not hurt himself with the sudden deceleration. In three seconds, he went from breakneck speed to touching the ground as softly as a feather.
“Hey,” Toki smiled, shoving her hands in her pockets. “Nice meeting you here. Come here often?”
Keigo snorted. She saw the line of his shoulders relax: “Only to meet beautiful and incredibly clever women.”
“Aw, you flatterer!” Toki playfully swatted him.
He ducked, and for a second they grinned at each other. Then, at the exact same time, they both grew serious again. Keigo shifted his weight from one foot to the other, looking suddenly nervous.
“You remember that time when I went to Shizuoka and overheard Endeavor offering Meteor to make him an underground hero?”
Toki’s eyebrows rose: “I know you found out about it, but I didn’t know you were literally there when Endeavor revealed his plan to Meteor.” She suddenly had a thought: “He didn’t know before, at all? How did he react?”
Keigo coughed.
“Well, that’s the thing. I had left feathers on Endeavor’s office when I left, and when Meteor came by, the connection was still very clear. So I could listen to their conversation but also hear their heartbeats, the rustle of clothes, and have a good idea of where they were in the room. All the details. And since it was a very important conversation, I landed on the roof and focused on what was happening there, and I saw… well, you know what I mean, but yeah, I kind of saw something. Something more than Meteor’s surprise. Something, uh, something that made me think they were more than friends. I, er— I think they’re involved.”
Involved in what? Toki almost asked, dumbly; but she stayed mute. She knew what he meant, anyway.
More than friends, Keigo had said, and there were not a lot of wrong ways you could interpret that. Understanding was curdling in her stomach, cold like dread, heavy like lead.
Endeavor was supposed to be all nice and redeemed by now, but he hadn’t always been. He had abused his family, badly, for years. Toki knew it took a certain type of viciousness to do that. No, not viciousness: ruthlessness. Not caring about the damage you wrecked, because your eyes were firmly set on your prize, and nothing else mattered. That kind of cruelty, of selfishness, didn’t just disappear like that. Endeavor still had the potential to hurt and manipulate and abuse people to further his own goals.
Especially people under his total control. Like someone who had no legal rights and who wore electric cuffs.
She hadn’t thought about it. It would be so far-fetched, so paranoid. They were both straight men, right? And Endeavor was married to his work, besides. It was ridiculous to imagine anything between them. Endeavor and Meteor were just friends, as ridiculous as it seemed. Keigo had said they were friend, the President had said they were friends, everyone knew they were friends. You could be friend with someone who held power over you.
But more than friends?!
“Probably physically,” Keigo nervously blabbered. “And almost certainly, er, romantically. That’s what I wanted to check afterward, by the way. I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, so I went back several times to spy on them, on their body language and everything, or to meet the heroes who worked with them and see if they noticed anything.”
“And?” Toki’s voice seemed to come from very far away. “Did they notice anything?”
Toki didn’t know what face she was making, but it must have been pretty bad. Keigo hurriedly took a step forward and took her hands in his.
“Don’t freak out. I know you’re immediately imagining the worst-case scenario because I did, too. I know…” Keigo swallowed, “I know what it looks like. But it’s not.”
Toki’s heart was beating like a drum. The worst-case scenario of abuse and blackmail and coercion she had pictured didn’t seem so paranoid, anymore. On the contrary, it didn’t seem paranoid enough. It felt like the floor had opened under her feet. And now Keigo said it wasn’t what it looked like?!
The shock suddenly turned to fury, like petrol catching fire.
She thought of her memories from Before, of Endeavor’s abusive home, of his wife smacked around, of his children terrified of him, of little Shouto crying and puking, treated exactly like Aizawa had once treated Toki, beating her and punching her because he didn’t care if it hurt. She thought of it in crystal clear, full technicolor nightmarish clarity, and she thought of her father, her father that she had hurt and put in prison; and she saw red.
She snatched her hands back, barring her teeth, eyes likely blazing.
“It’s not?! It’s not?! You’re telling me that the guy who dragged my father out of jail and can send him back anytime, who has the remote control to inject him with drugs or electrocute him at will, who controls his every move, who basically owns him, that guy is also sleeping with my father, and IT’S NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE?! There’s a fucking word for what it looks like!”
It was inconceivable. Her father was so strong, so wild, so terrifying. Imagining him as a prisoner was already a stretch, but when Toki had thought of it, she had always imagined him with teeth bared, fierce and unbroken. Meteor was too strong. He would never allow himself to be stripped of his pride. He wouldn’t let anyone hurt him like that. It was so incompatible with the image Toki had of him that it had never crossed her mind.
But now the idea crashed on her like a boulder, in all its horrifying clarity, and she felt sick. Cold sweat broke on her back, her heart thundered in her ears.
There were statistics of rape in prison. Cold hard facts, tales of abuse. It could happen to anybody. Meteor may have left Tartarus but he was still chained to his jailor. More specifically, Endeavor was his jailor. Endeavor, who beat his wife, who would have no qualm about doing worse…!
Fuck. She was sick and furious, shit, she had never felt so angry in her life. The horror had been sublimated into overwhelming fury, like a red haze over his eyes, a physical fist clenching on his throat. Her blood was boiling in her veins. Her hands were shaking with it. She could barely breathe with how it burned, that rage, that hatred, that wrath roaring to life like an inferno, blinding and ravenous. It felt like something alive uncoiling in her chest, something immense, uncontainable and merciless; and in a cold flash of clarity, Toki knew she would kill Endeavor over this.
She would rip out his fucking heart. It would be so easy.
“Toki!” Keigo snapped. “I know, okay? I thought of it too! That’s why I investigated!”
“Did it fucking need an investigation?!”
“Yes! I can feel people’s heartbeat, pick on the tremor of their voices, and sense the slightest tremble in their breaths! Do you think I wouldn’t have seen it, immediately, if someone in that room was afraid or even mildly uncomfortable? But they weren’t! I swear, if there had been a hint of coercion, I would have done something! You know that! You know me!”
Toki clenched her fists so hard her nails bit into her palms.
Blood was pounding in her ears. She clasped her hands behind her neck and started pacing, to the edge of the roof and then back, until she was face to Keigo again. It took a conscious effort to loosen her shoulders, to not give into the furious urge to snarl and go break something (preferably Endeavor’s neck).
It felt like something corrosive was eating away her lungs, like she could breathe fire and spite venom with the sheer strength of her rage, her indignation, her terror. Gods, she had never felt so close to murder before. Even when she had nearly stabbed Aizawa at age fourteen, so blinded by the need to make him bleed that the rest of the world had faded to nothingness.
But she trusted Keigo.
She trusted his skills, she trusted his judgment, she trusted his word. She trusted him more than she trusted her own heart. If he told her she was wrong, then she was wrong. If he told her there was no coercion going on, then it meant that Toki wasn’t reading the information correctly. It meant she didn’t have the full picture. Toki swallowed once, twice, and then unclenched her jaw. The blood was pounding so hard in her ear that it took her two tries to manage to speak.
“Fine,” she bit out. “So what was happening exactly?”
Keigo eyed her warily.
“Nothing weird. I never caught them doing anything suspicious afterward. I think it was just the euphoria of the moment. Endeavor laid out his plan to make Meteor an underground hero, and they started talking about it, and then Meteor, uh, kissed him. Then they just leaned on each other for a few seconds and then they went back to talking.”
Toki blinked, thrown. She hadn’t imagined her father as the instigator. She hadn't... She didn’t know what she had imagined, but not that. A kiss, but also the implied casualness, the ease they must have around each other.
It took the wind out of her sails. She swayed a little, feeling like a puppet whose strings were abruptly cut.
“Oh.”
“Yeah. So I investigated. And I found nothing. They’re hiding it well. But they’re not hiding the fact that they are friends. And they are friends!” Keigo insisted. “At some point, I wondered if the coercion couldn’t be, you know, the other way. Meteor forcing something and then using that to manipulate Endeavor, or pressure him…”
Toki’s heart skipped a beat. The idea that her father could do something like that… it was almost as bad as the other possibility.
“… but I don’t think so,” Keigo continued, and the lurch of relief was almost nauseating. “They are both way too comfortable with each other for blackmail to be involved. Endeavor trusts him at his back, no question asked. And Meteor would follow Endeavor into hell. He seems like that kind of person.”
“He is,” Toki said, woodenly.
She let her hands fall to her sides, limp and unresisting. Her head was filled with static. This time, when Keigo hesitantly took her hands, she leaned into him with a deep breath. Red wings enclosed them, like a barrier separating them from the world, and Toki allowed herself to close her eyes briefly.
Nothing made sense. Meteor, Endeavor, their relationship, all of it. Her thoughts were jumbling together, and her emotions were chaotic and disjointed, like a raging ocean. From worry to horror to fury to relief to shock, she felt like she had been run over by a truck.
Toki had always pictured her father angry. Spiteful, fighting every step of the way, distrusting everyone. Even when she had begun imagining a friendship with Endeavor, even when she had accepted that her father trusted him, she had imagined a bond tainted with posturing and aggressivity. At best, something like a rivalry frayed with taunts and provocations.
She hadn’t imagined softness, quiet trust, or casual closeness. She hadn’t really thought Meteor capable of it with anyone else but his Crew. But that was what Keigo was describing.
“There’s no…?”
“There is nobody taken advantage of,” Keigo told her firmly. “They are friends, they don’t hide it. But they’re also— more. That’s what I wanted to tell you. I hoped that I could wait a little longer, to investigate a little more, but… If Endeavor is here, and you’re going to confront him, you should have all the facts. Including that he’s emotionally compromised, and that your father probably is, too.”
Toki let out a deep sigh, and let her head fall on Keigo’s shoulder. She was emotionally compromised, too. When Meteor was concerned, and when family was concerned, Toki had never been capable of being rational.
There was a short silence. She squeezed her eyes shut. The revelation was sinking in.
Oh, she hated that it made sense, too. She had wondered why her father had decided to change, why now: and here she had her answer. Her father wouldn’t stay on the heroic side because he had morals. He didn’t have morals, he didn’t give a single flying fuck about society, about rules, or about order. He had no love for the law. Meteor was loyal to people. He really didn’t care much about the ideas Endeavor was fighting for. One opponent or another, it was all the same to him. But he did care that Endeavor cared.
And Endeavor wasn’t releasing Meteor because he was awed by his newfound moral compass. He was releasing him because he was emotionally compromised and wanted to help him.
All the pieces of the puzzle that had been too loose suddenly fit perfectly, when you accounted for the fact that those two fucking imbeciles had caught feelings.
And what the hell?! Her dad, she could understand. He had a few screws loose. The fact that he was into men was a surprise, but inconsequential.
But Endeavor?! First of all, was he bi? And second of all, what the hell was he thinking?! He was a hero. He should have known better. Getting involved with someone under his supervision, under his power, was incredibly unprofessional and even maybe downright criminal. Had he never read a book of law in his life? What about abuse of power, fraternization, red tape, impaired judgement?!
“I’m still going to have a very strong-worded conversation with Endeavor.”
“Yeah,” Keigo said dryly. “I figured.”
oOoOoOo
They met.
Keigo had been right. Endeavor came to the Icarus Agency, presumably to confront Toki where she couldn’t run away. Keigo intercepted him before he reached the entrance and brought him directly to their office via their private elevator.
When Endeavor stepped out, Toki was waiting, leaning against her desk.
Even without his hero costume, dressed casually as a civilian, Enji Todoroki was intimidating. The only other person Toki had met who was so muscular and physically threatening was All Might. For a few seconds, Toki and Endeavor both gauged each other in silence.
Without the billowing flames, he looked normal, not… bigger than life, like Toki would have imagined Endeavor to be. It felt strangely dissonant, to look at this tall man with piercing eyes, and to know he was also the Flame Hero. He looked gruff and toweringly tall, but he was also calm and stoic. Toki had imagined more yelling.
But this man in front of her was silent and careful; his sharp gaze revealed nothing. He also had the exact same blue eyes as Fuyumi, the same shade of red hair as Shouto’s left side, and the same frown. Toki couldn’t help but be a little thrown, to see a person she had only imagined from a vague amalgam of concepts and prejudices.
He was staring at her, too, and Toki suddenly wondered who he saw. What comparisons he was drawing? She had changed into a civilian outfit because it wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have as Quantum. But it wasn’t a conversation she wanted to have as Hoshizora, either. She hadn’t put on her make-up or her colored contacts. She wore jeans and a dark red tank top from Hoshizora’s closet, but she had Quantum’s simple hairstyle, the one she had had since childhood, with her twin buns and her bangs falling messily on her forehead. She hadn’t disguised her glowing orange yes, either.
No masks here, only the truth.
“Hi,” said Toki, face unreadable despite the way her heart was pounding. “I’ve heard you were looking for me.
Endeavor exhaled slowly, his eyes not leaving her. “So you’re really Toki Taiyōme.”
Keigo closed the door. The click of the mechanism seemed too loud in the room. Toki raised her chin in defiance:
“Yeah, I am. How did you find me?”
“You didn’t want to be found?” Endeavor fired back.
“I asked first.” Toki narrowed her eyes. “My identity is a secret. If I left loose ends, I need to know.”
Endeavor visibly hesitated, then said gruffly:
“You didn’t. I looked up your agency for something unrelated and noticed the family resemblance. I wasn’t sure until now.” He didn’t give time for Toki to sigh in relief, and added, almost accusingly: “Where were you all this time?”
Oh, loaded question. Toki set her jaw. For a second, she considered hiding the Naruto Labs from him… but hey, she had argued with the President herself to make the program more transparent. It would be hypocritical to back out now.
“I joined a program sponsored by the Commission. In exchange, they gave me a new identity. It got me off the streets and protected.”
Endeavor narrowed his eyes. He didn’t insist; but Toki could almost see him mentally shelving that for later, to pry and poke and investigate until he found satisfactorily answers. The President was going to blow a gasket.
“You know Meteor got out of prison,” Endeavor said flatly, changing his angle. “Why didn’t you come forward?”
And here was the crux of the matter. What could Toki possibly answer? She didn’t even know what the truth was. There were too many things holding her back.
I was angry at him for being a villain. Until recently I thought he hated me. I’m still not sure he doesn’t. I’m furious that he could change for you for not for me. I’m responsible for every bad thing that happened to him in the last fifteen years, and I’m too ashamed to face him again. He hurt me, too; we hurt each other so much.
She shrugged, projecting an almost aggressive air of casualness:
“He’s happier with me gone, isn’t he? I ruined his life once. I don’t intend to do it twice. Besides, he clearly doesn’t need me.”
Endeavor looked at her, frowning: “That’s not how he feels.”
“Oh, because you know how he feels,” Toki sneered. Endeavor glowered, opening his mouth to protest, but she cut him off, “No, you owe me an answer, now. What do you think you’re doing with my father?”
Behind Endeavor, Keigo shifted his weight, his wings opening with a whisper of feathers. Toki didn’t look at him. She was watching Endeavor, her eyes narrowed in anger. Her muscles were coiled, ready to pounce. She believed Keigo when he said that her father was an enthusiastic participant in this train wreck. But still. She couldn’t just ignore how easily Endeavor could abuse his power.
She had her issues with Meteor but she loved him. She loved him, and if Endeavor had hurt him— if Endeavor had abused him, forced him, laid a hand on him while he couldn’t defend himself… then she was going to kill him. She could feel it in her bones, that supernatural calmness, like nothing else mattered but the weight of her fury.
When she spoke, her voice was low and cold, and she knew her eyes were glowing ominously.
“What are you really doing, behind closed doors?”
Endeavor froze.
His eyes darted to Keigo, as if suddenly realizing he was blocking the door, then came back to her. Suddenly his curtness was gone; he looked like deer in headlights. It was almost funny, to see on the face of the Flame Hero the ‘oh shit’ expression of the jig being very much up. Sputtering flames briefly broke out on his neck and shoulders.
She narrowed her eyes, and Endeavor hastily raised his hands in a placating gesture:
“I’m not… We’re not…” He cut himself off with a frustrated growl. When he finally spoke, he was weighing his words very carefully. He was still a little wild-eyed, but his voice was carefully even. “We’re… close friends.”
“He wears a shock collar on each wrist,” Toki snarled. “Of course you’re close if he can’t physically get away!”
Endeavor straightened. He looked like he was steeling himself.
“He can, actually. The electric cuffs are deactivated. He also got rid of his implants back in January.”
That wasn’t what Toki had expected.
January?! That was months ago. Six months ago, actually. Half a year! And Meteor had stayed? Why?! He could have run so easily! Wait, Endeavor had implied that Meteor had gotten rid of his implant by himself. Meaning that he hadn’t had any kind of go-ahead, so…
“Why didn’t he escape?” Toki blurted out.
“He did,” Endeavor said flatly. “He came back.”
“He did?” Toki repeated numbly.
Endeavor nodded. He crossed his arms again, confidence coming back in his stance. No, it wasn’t quite confidence. It was more something like resolve. Stubbornness, maybe. Somehow, now that the jig was up, Endeavor powered on like a dam had been opened, and the words couldn’t stop pouring out.
“He was gone for ten minutes, then changed his mind and came back. He saved my life that day. I didn’t report his attempted evasion or the loss of his implants. He could have escaped anytime, afterward, but he stayed.”
Toki briefly wondered if her father had stayed because he had nowhere else to go, before discarding the idea. It wasn’t the kind of person Meteor was. He wasn’t insecure like this. On the contrary, he was full of himself, overconfident almost to the point of narcissism.
He didn’t stay with people because it was convenient, or because the unknown was scary, or because he didn’t know what to do with himself. He stayed with someone because he wanted to. Because, at his core, Meteor wasn’t driven by a thirst for power or even a love of violence, but by loyalty.
“And then you started sleeping together,” Toki fired back.
Endeavor looked supremely uncomfortable, ears turning red and small flames licking at his jaw; but he didn’t back down.
“Not… right away. It’s a recent development.”
He hadn’t denied they were involved. Toki glowered at that confirmation. Behind Endeavor, Keigo raised an eyebrow in her direction, as if to say ‘see?’.
Toki ignored him. She hadn’t thought that Keigo had been mistaken, and yet, it was a little galling to have confirmation that Endeavor was fucking her dad.
Ewww. He really had no taste. Both of them had no taste.
“And now you’re, what, trying to free him as payback?”
Endeavor shook his head.
“I’m trying to free him because it’s the right thing to do. He’s intelligent, charismatic, powerful, and capable. He should have options.” He briefly hesitated, then added a little stiffly. “And if he wants to… work with someone else, he should be able to cut ties with me without turning back to villainy.”
Oh. Endeavor was giving Meteor an out if he wanted to leave him.
Well, technically, without the cuffs and implants, nothing could physically stop Meteor from doing what he wanted. But cutting ties in his current situation meant breaking the law. Endeavor was trying to avoid that. He was trying to give him the possibility to keep a place in society, and a job as a hero, even if they broke up.
It was surprisingly chivalrous.
But then, Endeavor was honorable. It was something Keigo had always admired about him. Toki should have remembered that. In spite of herself, she felt some measure of respect for the Flame Hero.
“He’s a murderer,” Toki said flatly.
“I know.” Endeavor’s voice was wary. “But that’s not all he is.”
“What is he, then?”
Endeavor hesitated. His eyes quickly jumped to Keigo, then back to Toki, and he looked like he was gathering his courage. Toki had the stomach-dropping thought that she was asking her father’s romantic partner to implicitly declare himself, and gods, it was very awkward and yet, somehow, terrifying.
“He’s a good fighter. An astute strategist. An excellent information broker, with good contacts and a talent to make people trust him. He’s clever, analytical, ruthless, powerful… and occasionally funny.”
Toki snorted, taken by surprise. Yeah, she remembered that. Her father, unable to shut up, always snarking and bantering with the rest of the crew.
Endeavor’s lips twitched, but he continued decisively:
“He’s also proud, stubborn, ferocious, uncompromising. Honorable, straightforward. And he’s protective of those he cares about. He’s so very loyal.”
Endeavor held her gaze, and this time, it was Toki who looked away first.
That was Endeavor. The Number One hero, tall and unwavering, intimidating, with tension in the line of his shoulders, and steely determination in his eyes; and that was Enji Todoroki, bared of his flames and his bluster, laying painstakingly his secrets at her feet. Speaking of Meteor with such faith.
Toki’s heart twisted uncomfortably in her chest. It felt wrong, awkward, and intrusive. As if she was witnessing something private. And yet it hurt, too.
They’re both emotionally compromised, Keigo had said. Maybe it was just a booty call, friends with benefits or some casual arrangement. But considering the length Endeavor and Meteor were both willing to go for each other? Toki very much doubted it.
Emotionally compromised sounded about right.
Yes, Meteor didn’t stay with someone for mundane reasons. He stayed with people because he wanted to fight by their side, because he would kill for them and die for them. Because he loved them: because he knew he was loved back. Toki realized helplessly that maybe that was the only sure thing about Meteor, now. He was loyal to Endeavor, just as he had been loyal to his Crew in the past; because Endeavor cared about him too. Cared enough to make him change, like Toki hadn’t been able to.
She had stayed silent a beat too long, because Endeavor frowned, and his voice lowered:
“You know, he never gave up on you. He never stopped believing you were alive, and he never stopped looking. He loves you.”
Toki hadn’t expected it, weirdly. It felt like a punch to the gut to hear it so plainly, said without the slightest hesitation.
Are you sure? some childish part of her wanted to ask, like a frightened kid. She knew her father had loved her, once… But it was so long ago.
She was so different now.
Maybe Meteor was attached to the idea of her, the idea of a little girl who was too smart for her own good and who glared at the world like a tiny spitfire. The girl who was supposed to obey when asked to carry money. The girl who was too scared to think to disobey her mom, and who cried herself to sleep but folded like a house of card when she tried to confront the Crew. The girl he had taught to fight. The girl who threw up in secret after being forced to participate in a heist.
But Toki hadn’t been that girl in a long time. She had changed. And she knew that love sometimes didn’t survive change. Sayuri had grown distant when Toki had started rebelling, so what would Meteor do? Toki had done worse than rebel, now. She wondered if her eight years old self would recognize herself in the mirror.
“Why did you come here, Endeavor?” she asked lowly.
He frowned, seemingly surprised by the question.
“To find you.”
“Why?”
Endeavor considered her question for several seconds. He looked at her, and Toki wondered if he saw a hero, if he saw a child, if he saw a threat, or maybe all three.
“Meteor was my informant on the Vicious case,” he began, “I needed the intel, so we made a deal. He would help me put down underground villains, and in exchange, I would find his daughter.”
Toki let out a deep exhale. Well, at least she could now say with certainty that Keigo had been right on the money with his theory of Meteor and Endeavor teaming up to go after underground villains.
And they had brokered that alliance years ago. How old had been Toki, then? Sixteen? Fifteen? She had been living her life as Hoshizora, denying her name, scared of her father’s wrath, believing that there couldn’t possibly be anything but anger and resentment. And yet, even then— he had wanted her found. Even then, he had cared. He had never stopped caring. Toki had been so sure that her parents would stop loving her, she had built herself justifications and excuses around it. But the truth— the truth was—
Oh, Dad.
“Well, you found me,” she breathed. She held his gaze and spread her hands, almost mockingly. “Congratulations. Now, what happens?”
Keigo still didn’t say a thing, but she felt the weight of his gaze boring onto her skull. She didn’t look at him, though. She was looking at Endeavor.
“What happens now?” she continued. “If I tell you I’ve given up my name, that I’m only Quantum now, that nothing ties me to my father anymore, what are you going to do? I’m not some civilian you can push around. I’m a hero and I’ve got the HPSC’s backing. So what will you do? Turn back, forget that you saw me, and lie to Meteor’s face when he asks how your search is going? Or are you going to twist my arm, tell him where I am, blackmail me into revealing my identity?”
“That would be a clear violation of the Heroic Identity Protection Act,” Keigo chirped. “Just as a casual reminder, you know. That’s a felony.”
Endeavor’s face twitched, but he didn’t back down. Toki had hoped that he would get angry and give her a reason to get angry right back. But he only looked at her, grave and silent.
When he spoke, his voice was calm and even:
“Did you give up your name?”
He knew the answer already, Toki could see it in his eyes. She scowled.
“… No.”
“Then I would try and convince you.”
“And if I’m not convinced?”
Endeavor shrugged. “Then I’ll try again.”
His calmness was perhaps the most surprising thing about him. Toki had expected Endeavor to have a temper, to rage and yell and glower, to be easy to rile up and provoke, to start a fight as soon as he didn’t get his way.
But somehow, Endeavor was steadfast and solemn. Analytical, observant, resolute. Toki noticed that he hadn’t approached this like a battle like she had. She had been bracing for a fight. But he had approached the whole thing like you would approach a stray, discarding intimation and power for honesty and comfort, reaching out with an open hand instead of attacking. It was jarring.
“You think you can convince me?” she said, slowly.
Endeavor looked at her, calm and unwavering. “I can try.”
Toki briefly closed her eyes.
Some part of her wanted a fight. Fighting was easy. Fighting was simple. And she was still so angry about her dad being a villain, about her dad not being a villain anymore, about Endeavor sleeping with him (because holy shit, what the fuck, what the actual fuck?!), about everything. She wanted that fight, that catharsis.
It was easier to be angry than to admit you were hurt.
And yet… Part of her also wanted to reach out, desperately, to that open hand. She wanted this second chance. She wished she could have had more time with her family before her own stupidity destroyed them.
Everyone always wanted more time.
The Crew had been terrible people, but they had loved Toki, and she had loved them back. She had betrayed them, but she had also loved them. She had betrayed Meteor especially, but she had loved him, also, loved him more than anyone else; and if she was granted a second chance she wanted to grasp it with both hands.
She missed her dad. She missed his snark and his banter and the comfort of knowing he was okay, even if he hated her, even if he never forgave her. But more selfishly, she wanted him to forgive her.
She wanted that forgiveness that she had never been able to grant herself.
“Okay,” she said, quietly. Her eyes opened, and she stared at the man who had crossed half of Japan to find her. “Let’s talk, then.”
Notes:
EVERYBODY STAY CALM EVERYBODY STAY CALM
It's happening! Mwahahahahaha, i love this. You'll have their conversation next week!
And to tide you over this week, maybe i'll post something in House of wisdom. MAYBE.
Also, you may have noticed that i just... obliterated the Stain arc. No Iida in Hosu, no Nomu attack... There's a reason for that. Stain isn't where he would be in canon. Mostly because when Meteor nearly eviscerated him back in January, Stain had to go and find medical assistance SOMEWHERE.... and for a price.
We'll see more of him later ! =)
Also, if you know artists who takes commissions, i'm thinking of asking for one with Toki and/or Meteor. Any recommandations?
Chapter 46: Endeavor
Summary:
“What am I angry about? So many fucking things! My mom died, and my brother died, and I never even could visit their graves because I felt so horrible about it. I had my bones broken, I trained so hard my heart gave out, I had to get surgery, I went under massive debt, I got betrayed by people I trusted… And then! And then, Meteor decided that finally, he could be bothered to change!”
Her voice wanted to rise; she forced it to lower to a hiss. But oh gods it ranked, it burned, because it was the most unfair part of it all.
“He decided to change because he could. He could change, all along, he always could change, but he didn’t see the point. Until now, apparently! For you! Of all people, why did you get to have his good side?”
Notes:
Are you ready for the conversation that will rip your heart out?
'cause i am !
Fair warning: this chapter is titled "Endeavor" but the actual conversation with Endeavor is like, 1/3 of the chapter. The rest is Toki coming to terms with what she has to do, and the world moving on. You know, the usual.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
ENDEAVOR
Toki didn’t want to have this talk in her office, or anywhere in the Icarus Agency. Being Taiyōme in that space where she used to only be Quantum made her feel jittery and defensive. So Toki warped them in neutral ground, downtown in Fukuoka, and they took a walk.
Keigo had gone back on patrol. When Toki had faced Endeavor in their office, he had insisted on being there to mediate if necessary. He didn’t completely trust Toki to not fling herself into a blind rage, after all. But now she wasn’t at risk of turning the Number One hero to carpaccio anymore, he had been free to leave. This conversation was going to be nerve-wracking enough already. Toki wasn’t sure she would be comfortable with a witness, even Keigo.
She already wasn’t comfortable walking those streets with Endeavor. She hadn’t put on her Hoshizora disguise, either, so wandering around as Toki Taiyōme felt like a transgression.
“So?” Toki said, shoving her hands in her pockets. “How are you going to convince me? By singing his praises?”
Endeavor threw her a considering look.
“If you like. Or I could ask you why you don’t want to be convinced.”
Toki actually stopped walking for a second, then narrowed her eyes. That was… a good strategy. Letting the other lay their cards on the table, let them rant and unleash their anger, and meet them halfway after they calmed down. She hadn’t expected that from Enji Todoroki of all people.
“Because you’re such a good listener?”
He stayed silent for a beat. “I have three children,” he finally said, gruffly. “I’m learning.”
Well, Toki’s first source of anger was all but dropped in her lap, then.
“Yeah, I know about your children,” she hissed. “I investigated you when you got my dad out of jail. I wanted to know what kind of person you were.”
Endeavor stiffened. Toki took a deep breath, waiting for indignation to come like a flood. For righteous anger, rage, and protectiveness. The man facing her was an abuser. He had destroyed his wife’s mental health, he had made his children miserable, he had driven Touya to destruction and murder, and he had traumatized Shouto. She knew that, intellectually, and it should make her furious.
And yet, she only felt empty.
Empty and off-balance. She had wanted to hate Endeavor for what he had done to his family; but then, wasn’t it in the past? She didn’t hate Genmei-san for her lies or Aizawa for his brutality, either. They had acknowledged their mistakes and atoned for them. It was enough. Holding onto a grudge would be petty.
You have the tendency to excuse harm that’s almost worrying, Keigo once said. Like, you forgive causing pain, but you draw the line at malice?
Maybe he had been right. Toki was looking at someone who had hurt people. He had hurt children, his children, and yet… there was nothing. Mistrust, anger, and annoyance. But it was rooted in fear, that old fear that still clung to her skin when Meteor was brought on. Fear, guilt, and regret.
She wanted to see Endeavor as an enemy. She wanted him to just be an abuser in her eyes, the bad guy, a monster, and someone she would feel good about punching. But somehow the rage didn’t come. Maybe because she knew he wasn’t the same man, and what was the point of hating someone for their past sins? The abuser had been a character in a manga. The person facing her wasn’t a character; it was a man who was trying to mend burned bridges, and maybe that’s why it was so hard to draw on her anger.
Or maybe it was because he was so calm and polite about it; somehow it probably confused her brain and made her feel self-conscious about her own desire for aggressivity. Or maybe… maybe it was just because he was here for Meteor.
Endeavor was the man who had saved her dad when Toki abandoned him. The man who, for more than a year, had been steadfastly rehabilitating him, befriending him. The man that apparently Meteor liked enough to kiss in the middle of his fucking office; the man he was loyal to.
It was mind-blowing, scary, and unfair. It made Toki feel young, stupid, and angry. Not the kind of anger that made you rage and howl and hurt people. It was the kind of anger that made you want to cry, that made your voice shake and your throat close up, the kind that made you weak. Not the anger of someone who was done; but the anger of someone who cared too much.
And she cared so much it hurt.
“I wanted to know what kind of person you were because I was worried you would take advantage of him,” Toki said, quietly. “So I investigated why your wife was in a mental hospital. Why your eldest son burned alive. Why your other kids don’t speak about you. Why Shouto has a burn scar on his face. Nobody wants to look to closely at the Number One hero’s flaws, so nobody bothered to dig too deeply, but I did. I know you abused your family for years.”
She paused. Endeavor wasn’t looking at her, tension was written in every line of his body. But he wasn’t denying it. He wasn’t exploding in rage or protests. He was simply waiting, rigid and silent.
“Do you deny it?”
Endeavor took a breath. “No,” he whispered. Then, louder, “No, I don’t. I was— blinded by my ambitions. I was terrible to them. Becoming Number One opened my eyes. I’m trying to atone.”
Toki pinched her lips. She wanted to berate him; to yell and say it would never fix anything. But what would be the point? He knew that already.
“Alright. I believe you.”
He looked taken aback. “You do?”
Toki snorted. “I investigated you, remember? I know you were cruel to them. I also know you’re trying not to be anymore. If you were, Shouto wouldn’t have the same attitude.”
He startled as if suddenly reminded that she was a teacher at Yūei. Yeah, think about that, buddy. Toki had been right under his nose the whole time.
She narrowed her eyes and continued, her tone turning acidic:
“I know you’re trying to be better. That doesn’t mean you don’t have the potential to do other fucked-up things to other people.”
Endeavor’s jaw worked in silence for a second. He looked so tense and stiff that Toki was almost worried about him pulling a muscle.
“I’m not… forcing him to do anything. I wouldn’t.” There was a special kind of vehemence in his voice, disgust verging into outrage. “I would never.”
Toki didn’t say anything.
No, Endeavor wouldn’t. He seemed like he would be repulsed by the very idea. And yet, Toki knew how easy it was for angry and aggressive people to take out their anger on others. To yell, to make them cower, to be a little too forceful, to not notice fear or hesitation. She didn’t have the luxury to ignore it; she was a girl living in a testosterone-filled profession where violence was common: of course, she had to think about it.
But she also knew that it wasn’t what was going on between Meteor and Endeavor. Keigo had spoken of romantic involvement and used the words emotionally compromised. He didn’t get those kinds of things wrong. She had complete faith in Keigo.
“You’re going to argue there isn’t an imbalance of power?” she said acidly. “Deactivated cuffs or not, that doesn’t change the fact he’s a prisoner.”
Endeavor snorted. “I said the same thing. He wasn’t convinced.” Toki looked at him skeptically. Endeavor sighed, and tried again: “You could ask him directly. He could have this awkward conversation by himself.”
“Good try. The answer is still no.” She paused. “But I appreciate that you don’t try to speak for him.”
“Meteor can speak for himself. He doesn’t need me to fight his battles.”
“Sure. But just because I’m keeping my distance doesn’t mean I don’t care.” She narrowed her eyes. “And let’s be perfectly clear. If you lay a hand on him in a way he doesn’t like, I don’t care if you’re Number One or not. It’ll be the last thing you do with that hand.”
Endeavor didn’t lower his eyes. He just nodded, once, acknowledging the warning. Toki turned away, and they kept waking.
Meteor. She realized that Endeavor didn’t shy away from the name. On paperwork, when Toki had browsed the file about her father’s conditional release, his villain name hadn’t appeared anywhere: as if people were trying to ignore it. The only people who used that name were usually trying to allude to his villain past. Like how Inferno had sneered and compared him to Hellmaker, or how the President had pointed out that he was dangerous. Other people, like Mera-san, just called him Taiyōme.
But Endeavor didn’t.
For him, Ryūsei Taiyōme was Meteor, and vice-versa, even now. Maybe because Endeavor knew it, too. You didn’t shed your sins by changing your name. Just like Toki may hiding behind Quantum’s mask. Underneath, she was still a Taiyōme.
“Would it be so bad, to see him again?” Endeavor suddenly asked. He wasn’t looking at her. “Are you still… disappointed with him, after all this time?”
Toki blinked. “I’m not disappointed.”
“You’re— not?”
“Oh, no. I’m fucking angry.”
Endeavor squinted warily: “What are you angry about?”
Toki scoffed. What was she not angry about, more like.
“For starters, I’m angry that he was a villain in the first place. I told them! Him, my mom, the Crew, I told all of them that it was wrong, that they could do better, that it was dangerous, that I didn’t like it, that I didn’t want to be a part of it, but did they listen? Did any of them listen? No! It was like talking to a brick wall. Pleading didn’t work, or screaming, or begging. They didn’t care. None of them. And they made me participate in their scheme; they made me transport the money, and I hated that! I hated that I had to do it, I hated myself for doing it, and they still didn’t see the problem. They were happy, they were celebrating! How could I not be angry about it?!”
She paused to breathe, clenching her fists, feeling her heartbeat getting louder and louder in her ears. It had been a while since she had thought about that day. Fuck, Toki barely remembered carrying the money because she had been dissociating so badly. How she had threw up, and bawled her eyes out, and had to wait days until they came back. But the worst had been when the Crew had come back to the hideout, everyone so obviously delighted while Toki felt like shit. How uncaring they had been, how they had treated her horror like a tantrum.
The feeling of unfairness still made her stomach roll.
“Then I’m angry about the arrest,” she bit out. “I’m angry about how it went down; about everyone just kept destroying stuff and hurting each other; I’m angry that I was there, I’m angry that I had to see it, I’m angry it fucking happened. I’m angry at Meteor, I’m angry at All Might, at the police, at the heroes involved, at myself! And then, I’m angry because I ended up alone. It was my fault, I brought it on myself, but it was still unfair. I deserved better.”
Her voice heated; she was winding up like a steam engine picking up speed. Some dam had been opened and the words were pouring like an angry flood.
“What am I angry about? So many fucking things! My mom died, and my brother died, and I never even could visit their graves because I felt so horrible about it. I had my bones broken, I trained so hard my heart gave out, I had to get surgery, I went under massive debt, I got betrayed by people I trusted… And then! And then, Meteor decided that finally, he could be bothered to change!”
Her voice wanted to rise; she forced it to lower to a hiss. But oh gods it ranked, it burned, because it was the most unfair part of it all.
“He decided to change because he could. He could change, all along, he always could change, but he didn’t see the point. Until now, apparently! For you! Of all people, why did you get to have his good side?”
Her steps slowed down, then stopped. Her throat was tight, and Toki briefly squeezed her eyes shut. At her side, Endeavor was completely silent.
“At the beginning,” she said without looking at him, “I didn’t believe he had changed. I thought he was just tricking everyone to make a run for it. But he did change. And maybe that’s what I’m the angriest about. Because if he could be a good person… if he could be a hero… shit, if he could just be someone who didn’t hurt and kill innocent people… then why the hell couldn’t he have been all those things for me? What was so wrong with me that he couldn’t be better for me?”
Toki swallowed, feeling winded and exhausted.
She hadn’t planned to unload all of her baggage on Endeavor. Oh, hell, she had unloaded all of her baggage on Endeavor; the Number One hero, big and tall and scary. Shit.
She briefly felt a shock of self-consciousness. Then she scowled. She had just given him the shovel talk, and frankly Endeavor was the person the most involved in the whole mess about Meteor; even more than Toki herself. He could deal.
“There is nothing wrong with you.” Endeavor’s voice was quiet and sad. “It was him. You were a child. It wasn’t your job to fix his issues.”
A beat too late, Toki realized that her words may have stuck too close to home for Endeavor. He had failed his children, too. And rather spectacularly, at that.
“But you did,” she said without managing to hide the note of resentment in her voice. “You fixed his issues. He’s helping people. He’s better.”
She took a long breath, trying to wrangle her feelings back in some semblance of order, before darting a glance at him. Endeavor was looking at her, a solemn look on his face. He hesitated:
“I wouldn’t go that far. He’s still ruthless. He has no compunction against killing. He doesn’t believe in rules or laws or the orders of things. He doesn’t care about people in general, he doesn’t feel the need to help strangers. But he can… temper his own indifference. Try to do better.”
Understanding twisted uncomfortably in Toki’s chest. Meteor had always been a pack animal, deep down.
“Because you do it, and he follows your lead.”
Endeavor shifted; from the corner of her eye, she saw him nod reluctantly.
“Yes. But it’s not just me. He tends to mirror the moral compass of people he’s close to. When he was a villain, he was surrounded by people who didn’t care about spilling blood. Now that he’s surrounded by heroes, he adapted.”
Toki glared at him. “I was there, too.”
She had been there, and she had been horrified by what the Crew was doing. But Meteor hadn’t cared about her moral compass at all. She had been his daughter; and yet, she hadn’t been enough. She had never been enough, for either of her parents.
Endeavor looked her in the eyes, and his voice was suddenly strangely kind.
“You were eight years old. It wasn’t your job to save him.”
Then whose was it? Toki wanted to ask. Instead, she just hunched her shoulders, looked away, and started walking again. After a beat, Endeavor followed.
Toki’s steps had taken her to the road leading to the planetarium. She slowed down when she realized it. She didn’t go there often, but it was a nice place; comforting, and where she liked to huddle with her laptop to work on her thesis. She had never gone there as Quantum… or as Taiyōme.
Actually… she had never gone anywhere as Toki Taiyōme.
This city was filled with Quantum’s presence; and in the rare spots where Quantum didn’t fit, there was Hoshizora. Toki Taiyōme had no place here. Toki Taiyōme was no one, really. She didn’t matter; she hadn’t really mattered ever since Quantum had taken her place. Toki wasn’t ashamed of her name, not anymore; but she couldn’t deny that for years, it had beckoned melancholy rather than hope.
After a long silence, Endeavor spoke again.
“You know that the procedure for Meteor’s release is well under way?”
Toki shrugged: “Yeah, I know. He should be free before the end of summer.”
Endeavor frowned, looking doubtful.
“That’s optimistic. Don’t you know who is going to conduct his final interview?”
“Yep. It’s All Might, isn’t it? That’s why I’m sure it’ll succeed. I asked him to endorse the release proposal. I also used my last big favor with the Commission request that they accept it.”
Endeavor was taken aback. “I thought you wanted to avoid him.”
“I still want him to be safe and happy,” she fired back. “I’ll fight for it, even if I never see him again.”
Endeavor digested that for a second, then glowered, thunderous:
“All Might knows?!”
Ah, shit. Toki mentally swore, then hurried to defuse the situation, casually waving a hand as if it didn’t really matter.
“It came out when we met. Chill. Plenty of other people know. There’s the Commission’s leadership, my civilian friends, and some other heroes, too. Hawks, Inferno, and probably Salamander. Maybe Eraserhead.”
She should really tell Hayasa-sensei, too. She hadn’t gotten around it, with all that excitement about the hero killer and then Aizawa getting fired; but she really should. As an underground hero, Mercury needed to have that information.
Endeavor scowled at the mention of Inferno and Eraserhead but didn’t say anything. He should realize that the Heroic Identity Protection Act didn’t allow anyone to babble about the whereabouts of Toki Taiyōme. Confidentiality was important when you dealt with secret identities.
After a silence, Endeavor said cautiously:
“When he’ll be free, he may come looking for you.”
Yeah, that was what she had been afraid at the beginning: that Meteor would run away and then try to hunt her down. But Toki had calmed down, since. She had an answer ready.
“I have more push with the Commission than you do. I could ask them to assign him to Sapporo, on the other side of the country, and they would do it.”
Endeavor stayed silent several second. Toki threw him a glance, and saw him working his jaw, as if nervously trying to choose his words. When he spoke again, his voice was very quiet.
“He would stay away, if you asked him to.”
“I don’t think he would.” Toki balled her fists. “He’s too nosy, too possessive. He wouldn’t recognize a boundary even if it hit him in the face.”
“He worries about you,” Endeavor conceded. “He would want to see the proof of your survival with his own eyes, it’s true. But afterward, he would leave you alone. He would do anything if it meant you’ll be happier.”
Toki’s throat closed up. “You don’t know that.”
“I do.” Endeavor’s blue eyes softened; he looked old and weary, suddenly, and very sad. “It would break his heart and he would hate himself for driving you away, but he would do it. Cross the country, never see you again, whatever you want. You only have to ask.”
And Toki realized that, during all this conversation, not even once she had said that she wanted her father to leave her alone.
It wasn’t a surprise, really. Even at her most angry, at her most bitter, she had longed for closure. She wanted him safe and happy, and for a long time she had convinced herself that he could have all that if Toki stayed the fuck away from him; but she had known, even then, that she was lying to herself. There was too much unfinished business between them. Just like Toki would never be at peace until she faced what had happened, until she faced him and forgave him and apologized to him; then her father wouldn’t be at peace, either
They had hurt each other so badly. It was the kind of wound that didn’t go away. But couldn’t it be healed, instead of aching constantly? Fourteen years had passed since. He was different. She was different, too. It had been so long. Toki missed him more than she remembered him, but she missed him all the same.
“I don’t,” she admitted, looking away. “I don’t want him to go away. I want…”
Toki didn’t know what she wanted. For Meteor to be sorry; for him to be angry. For all her pain and self-recrimination to be validated, for someone to scream at her all the awful things she thought about how everything bad that had happened was her fault; for the emotional pain to turn physical, with screams and punches, because wounds were so much easier to heal when they didn’t come from the inside.
She wanted him to not be a villain, she wanted him to not be a hero; she wanted him to be her dad, to choose being her dad over villainy, because he had chosen villainy over her in the past and that scar still ached. She wanted him to forgive her. She wanted to forgive him, too. She wanted family to mean comfort and acceptance, instead of shame and bitterness and secrecy.
She wanted to stop being angry; she wanted to stop being afraid. But Toki could only do that by facing him, and she was so, so scared of the judgement she would find in his eyes. So scared to see her own shame and self-directed anger reflected there. She wouldn’t be able to bear it, if he blamed her for what happened like she blamed herself.
She wanted to tell her dad she was sorry. She wanted to tell him she loved him. She never had a chance to tell him.
She never had a chance to tell her mother, either.
Toki took a long breath, and held it for a second before letting go. Her heart was thundering in her chest.
“You can tell him you found me,” she finally said. “Don’t tell him who I am, though. I’ll find him, after. I don’t know when, yet, but… I’ll come to him before the end of summer.”
Endeavor exhaled deeply; the tension in his shoulders relaxed.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. I don’t even know if it’s a good idea.”
But bad idea or not, and even if it made her hands shake and sweat with anxiety, it was too late to turn around now. Toki had made her decision.
oOoOoOo
They talked some more. It was stilted and cautious, but without the undercurrent of hostility Toki had been braced for, it wasn’t that bad. They mostly talked about hero work: their various case, their overlapping acquaintances, but also Meteor and his place in the Endeavor Agency. How he was with his coworkers, which underground heroes were ready to vouch for him. How the rehabilitation was going. If he was safe and if he was happy.
Endeavor cared about him. Of course, Toki had known, because Keigo had told her and that would have been enough. But it was different to hear it from someone who knew. Endeavor spoke of Meteor with fondness, but more than that, he spoke of him with respect.
Endeavor wasn’t at all like she had expected him to be.
So they talked. Toki grudgingly came to terms with the fact that her charade was coming to an end. Endeavor left Fukuoka in the late afternoon, and Toki went home.
And… that was it.
It took a while to really sink in. The next day, it was the weekend so Toki swung by Musutafu to see Mihoko-san, and maybe update Hitoshi and Melissa on the Meteor situation since they were part of the very few who were aware of it. It turned out that Hitoshi was hanging out with friends that day, however. Friends, plural; Neito, Melissa, but also Shouto Todoroki and several of their classmates, apparently. Little Hitoshi was becoming popular.
Toki told Mihoko-san about her father, instead, and spent a few hours with Hinawa. They played with plushies and Toki indulgently listened to the babbling of her daughter. When Toki left, she felt a little more settled.
It felt scary to think that she was going to face her father again. But at the same time, having made the decision made it less anxiety-inducing than her previous uncertainty. She had chosen a path, so she wasn’t in the dark as much now.
It would be a lie to say that Toki wasn’t afraid. She thought of it sometimes, when she let her gaze wander on Fukuoka’s streets, or when there was a lull in conversation in Icarus’ breakroom, or when she was dozing off on Keigo’s shoulder at home, or when she wrote in her poetry notebook, or when she styled her hair and suddenly found herself hesitating between Hoshizora or Quantum’s hairstyle. For years she had been running from her past.
It was stupid, wasn’t it?
She had resolved to accept her name, to accept the place her father had had in her decisions. And yet, she still had been wavering, undecided, frightened of facing him. She was afraid, of course: of him, of herself, of what could happen, of the past, of the future. Cowering and ignoring the past wouldn’t make it disappear. Toki could face it.
Maybe it would hurt but maybe it wouldn’t. And in the end, it wouldn’t bring her down. She had weathered bigger storms.
you are a church of broken glass and hallelujahs.
you are haunted like every other holy thing.
what tried to destroy you didn't have the strength.
still you stand,
sturdy and smelling of smoke.
At Icarus, Toki told Hayasa-sensei about the identity of her father and his soon-to-be release, but it didn’t change anything. Hayasa-sensei had known she came from a bad background. Having a name to go with that information didn’t rock his world. He patted her on the shoulder, thanked her for the heads-up, and that was it.
There was still patrol, paperwork, meetings, and emails to answer. She patrolled with all the sidekicks equally, but she also tried to have a few more shifts with Keigo, too. When they patrolled together, they were so fast no one could follow, dancing across the whole city in a matter of minutes, making a contest of every chase and altercation, exhilarated with the challenge and the thrill of not having to hold back.
Keigo didn’t judge her for caving and agreeing to reconnect with her father. Toki wouldn’t go as far as to say he approved, but he was definitely relieved that she had taken this decision instead of huddling in on herself, bracing for an inevitable confrontation that wouldn’t be on her terms. Keigo was more inclined to toss himself headfirst into danger, to jump into the void too fast to get frightened by the highs. Unlike Toki, who overthought things constantly, he would rather act quickly and decisively.
It made him reckless and impatient, it put him in danger, and it was sometimes completely irresponsible. But hell; it was why Toki had fallen in love with him in the first place. Keigo shone so bright; was so full of life and wonder, so unafraid. He had always been like that. Stone-cold brilliance and scorching-hot charisma, a lazy grin more dangerous than he would lead anyone to believe, and a softer heart than he would ever admit. He was a genius, he was a prodigy, he was clever, vicious, and merciless; he was selfless, protective, funny, and kind. Toki had never stood any chance. She knew it then, she knew it now, and she had never regretted it even once.
Keigo had been part of her life longer than Meteor had been.
It was a weird thought. Actually, it was strange to think that Toki herself was so much more now than who she had been when she had last seen Meteor. She had been a child then, with nothing and no one on her side. But today she had a life, a job, a dream, and people she loved. Her life was so full, now.
What if Meteor expected her to still be that empty shell of a child? He would be severely disappointed. He didn’t have anything left of his own past life, so maybe he expected the same of her. But Toki had grown and changed.
She had her own family, now. People that she would put before him. It made a low twang of anxiety thrum in her stomach. Meteor had never been possessive, but he had been rabidly protective. He wouldn’t approve of Toki’s choices. That was a boundary she would have to enforce. She really didn’t look forward to it.
“What if he doesn’t like me?” Keigo’s tone was light but with an undercurrent of uncertainty.
Toki touched his wrist, the contact feather-light.
“Then I’ll deck him.”
“… I’m not sure it will make him like me more.”
“I love you,” Toki said bluntly. She saw Keigo’s eyes widen, his shoulders jolt, taken aback by the sudden confession. He knew it, but it was rarely said. “I love him, too, but he has no say in my life and how I live it. You’re my priority. And if he doesn’t respect that, I’ll deck him.”
Keigo ducked his head, a flush rising to his cheeks.
“You’re such a barbarian sometimes,” he complained: but he was smiling.
Even if Toki reconnected with Meteor, she knew there were parts of her life that would stay forever closed to him. Her time at Naruto Labs, the bond she had with Keigo. Most of her friends. Hell, she knew he would absolutely love Hinawa, but she wasn’t even sure she would tell him about her. It would require trust, a lot of trust, and her father was a stranger for now.
Maybe they could rebuild something. But maybe they would tear each other apart, and nothing would ever come of it; it was a moot point.
The days passed. All Might told Toki he had interviewed Meteor. When she asked if it had gone well, All Might had made a face and admitted that no, it hadn’t gone very well. Meteor had exuded rage by every pore of his skin. No matter how ‘rehabilitated’ he was, his hatred for All Might was too strong to bow to his self-restrain.
“But he can do good,” Yagi quietly told Toki. “He hates me, but even then, he holds back. Going from all-out murder to passive-aggressive taunts is an encouraging progress. Besides… He really looks up to Endeavor. And he let it slip that everything he cares about the people he works with. They’re the only thing he care about. The interview didn’t go very well: but making me interview him was a plot to sabotage him, and even then, there is hope for him.”
And so, Yagi had given his all-clear to the HPSC.
The HPSC clearly hadn’t expected it. They floundered, and took more time to consider Meteor’s file. They were dragging their feet, but at that point, Toki knew they couldn’t say no. They had counted on All Might to sabotage the process. But with the Symbol of Peace giving his support to Endeavor’s petition, there was no way to stop the process now.
Anyway.
Toki went to Musutafu more often now, for 1-A homeroom class and to supervise their general heroic training. The first day, she went there holding her breath, worried somehow about Shouto knowing something, but the youngest Todoroki was oblivious. Class went on as usual.
The kids were progressing by leaps and bounds. Of course, nothing could replace real experience, and Toki was needling Nedzu about letting the children have practical classes like she had had with Okamoto, but it was harder to pull that off with twenty students instead of just two.
Besides, several of the things Okamoto had taught them… like how to handle dead bodies or how to help a horse give birth… may not exactly be suitable for high-school students.
Toki got the all-clear to send kids in groups of five people to volunteer at homeless shelters, though. They would need a teacher’s supervision and All Might, or rather Yagi-san, immediately volunteered. He knew several soup kitchens that could use the help.
Meanwhile, Toki would give class to the fifteen remaining students and talk about inequality and how helping people went beyond getting them out of burning buildings. Or they would play board games. What? Playing board games was essential to growth. Keigo and her had played a lot at Naruto Labs, and it wasn’t just because they were bored. Toki had read that because they provide a state of controlled conflict, board games could improve your relationship skills by requiring that you practice taking turns, following rules, being fair, and winning or losing gracefully.
They also did normal training, of course. Running around fake cities, rescues practice, teamwork exercises, and one-on-one matches. And of course, Quirk analysis.
Denki Kaminari was the next volunteer to have his Quirk analyzed, and Toki had been waiting for him to step up since maybe the beginning of the year. He was a human taser! She couldn’t fantom why he insisted on going overboard with his voltage to try long-ranged attacks, instead of focusing on hand-to-hand and small, more precise moves. Of course, the heroic culture drowned them in a mantra of ‘Plus Ultra’ and ‘Bigger is Better,’ but there was a time for dick-measuring contests and there was a time for efficiency.
For example, by discharging about ten thousand volts onto a person’s clothes, Kaminari could use static cling to stick them to an appropriate surface. Small, discreet, effective, and a perfect technique to restrain an opponent without harming them. Or to help allies become more mobile and cling to walls! In the same vein, if Kaminari gave himself a small electrical charge and held it steady, he could use magnetism to secure himself to metal surfaces, which could allow him to climb sheer metal walls or stop himself from falling. Or he could also attract small metallic objects!
Kaminari deplored that he lacked control with smaller voltage, but Toki had seen him charge a phone by holding the cable in his mouth, so clearly it was a solvable problem.
If his electricity passed more easily through the mucosa, then it was just a matter of humidity. Water was a conductor. A single experiment with a moisturizing cream was all Toki needed to have confirmation; a substance like lotion could prevent moisture loss from the skin, and the water acted as a conductor letting electricity pass through the membrane easier. Then because it was easier for the electricity to pass through the skin, it didn’t have to build up a strong current before it could break out of Kaminari’s body. As a result, Kaminari was able to let it out in smaller amounts.
She recommended a few moisturizers to Kaminari. Then she paired him up with Ojiro for extra hand-to-hand practice and let them go wild. With that new awareness of his Quirk, Kaminari could probably pull out an ultimate move before all of his classmates.
Toki tried to find some time to train with Hitoshi and Neito, too. Melissa joined them for a bit, for nostalgia’s sake. She completely outclassed the boys, now. Oh, Neito with Warp-Space could keep up with her, but otherwise, she really left them in the dust, even without deploying her whole arsenal.
She just had so many gadgets and tools, that it bordered on overkill.
Not only could she fly, but she had at least three weapons of choice (shield, grappling gun, and a net), and all of them could be electrified. And that was without counting all the gadgets she pulled out from her utility belt like a magician with an infinite supply of rabbits in their hat. There was a fire extinguisher, smoke bombs, flash grenades, and even shuriken. Melissa’s tools were a walking advertisement for TechnoBurst miniaturization technology.
A few discontents among the public whined that of course anyone could be a hero if they were supplied with as many weapons as Melissa but they were quickly shut up when told that Melissa wasn’t supplied with anything, she made her support items herself. Plus, she also had crazy skills. Not everyone could pull off aerial stunts like she did with her flying boots.
And of course, she had a mean right hook.
Melissa Shield, resident badass. Yeah that sounded about right.
Her third-year work-study would start in September; this time, she would go to Icarus. She planned to work there after graduating, so of course it made sense. Toki was thrilled. Who would have guessed that they would go so far, five years ago, when she had typed out an answer on an online forum?
Neito and Hitoshi were also both growing stronger. Hitoshi could make Brainwashed victims follow more complex orders, now. They could talk in an absent-minded voice, although they could only repeat what Hitoshi said, and not volunteer information. They were also harder to wake up. A simple tap wasn’t enough anymore. If Hitoshi focused, he could keep them under his Quirk even as they were slapped or punched.
Neito was getting better and better with Warp-Space, able to warp quicker and orient himself more easily when in freefall, teleporting around with as much ease as Toki herself. He didn’t use Warp-Space as a weapon as she did, only as a way of moving around, but it was still an impressive sight. He didn’t neglect his own Quirk either. He could now copy someone’s Quirk for five whole minutes, verging on six. When it was Warp-Space, he could even go up to eight minutes. He could hold more Quirks at once, too. When Toki had started training him, he could only copy four, and now he could copy six at a time.
Neito’s first costume design had been a three piece-suit, like a butler or some discount Arsène Lupin. Privately Toki also thought that this costume looked like it had been inspired by Thunder Thief’s, which only reinforced her theory that her sidekick was Neito’s father. But using Warp-Space and free-running on rooftops wasn’t the kind of thing you did in a dress shirt and slacks, so Neito’s outfit had evolved. Now it looked like a ring master’s costume, with a deep purple jacket. Under it, Neito wore a fitted jumpsuit in gold and silver, more reminiscing of Quantum’s costume. He also wore boots with good ankle support, and golden cuffs to slip strands of hair under it and collect new Quirks in case of emergency.
It looked very cool. Ostentatious, but very cool.
Soon after, Toki went to patrol in Osaka, to catch up with Inferno. Her senpai didn’t like the thought of her reconnecting with Meteor, and he made it pretty clear, but he also admitted that maybe his own issues with his villain father were clouding his judgment.
“Meteor didn’t look so bad when I saw him,” he admitted reluctantly. “But people aren’t the same with the public and with their family.”
“You’re telling me,” Toki muttered, thinking of Endeavor. Then she frowned: “When did you meet him exactly?”
“I saw him once when you were on leave. And I saw him more recently when Endeavor swung by Osaka. He wanted to have me vouch for Meteor’s rehabilitation. I gave him the green light, but I know the HPSC won’t use my testimony anyway.”
“Really? Why?”
Inferno shrugged. “Because a villain’s kid isn’t considered objective when it comes to villain rehabilitation. Hawks or you wouldn’t be able to testify either. Or Snatch, or Kesagiri Man.”
Toki filed away that information for later and frowned. “That’s bullshit. What about Serpentine? Majestic? Recovery Girl?”
“They’re not a villain’s kids. Recovery Girl was Quirk-trafficked, and both Serpentine and Majestic took the sponsorship program to avoid getting thrown into juvie.”
“Really?! I didn’t know that. What did they do?”
“Majestic was twelve at most, but he was a very successful scammer who stole credit cards. It was mostly nonviolent but he also stole money from heroes. At that point, it was either become a hero himself to have a clean slate or rely on the local gangs for protection. As for Serpentine, she accidentally killed a man while playing vigilante. It could have been ruled as self-defense because he was certainly trying to kill her at that point… but, uuuh. She used her fangs. It would have made a jury uneasy.”
“Shit,” Toki swore quietly. “How do you know all that?!”
“Salamander.”
“Urgh, your boyfriend is so much better informed than mine,” she muttered.
It was a shot in the dark. But Inferno grinned, and didn’t deny it.
“He snoops around the HPSC’s files more often than yours. In his defense, Salamander has been at it longer, and he worked with Okamoto before the old prune got nuked; that made him a little paranoid. Was it you, by the way?”
Toki waved a hand dismissively: “I was just the whistle-blower. He tanked his career on his own, and there was a secretary who was nice enough to collect evidence for ten years. Did you know he reinstalled a hero stripped of his license?”
Inferno let out an impressed whistle. “All in exchange for a few favors, I guess?”
“Yep. Not hard blackmail, but… you know. Little things like looking away when Okamoto was being a little too shady. In his line of work that could go a long way.”
They stayed silent for a bit.
“Why did Endeavor ask you to support Meteor’s rehabilitation, if you can’t testify?” she suddenly asked.
“Ah, but Endeavor doesn’t know that. He doesn’t know anything about the sponsorship program, and the character witnesses are anonymous anyway, so he won’t be able to check if I did it.” Inferno smiled, a little wistfully. “But I appreciated that he came to me, anyway. Endeavor doesn’t trust a lot of people.”
Toki mulled over this new information and glowered. “He trusts my dad, apparently.”
“Yeah. But I understand why he does. Meteor may be a cold-blooded killer, but he honors his debts. Endeavor saved him when no one else did, and it’s a big deal. Especially because he saved him from Tartarus. I mean… it makes sense that Meteor will never turn his back on him, after something like that.”
“Clearly,” Toki said without enthusiasm.
Inferno looked at her sideways. “I’m serious, Quantum. I wouldn’t call him a reassuring presence, that’s for sure. But he was honest when he said that he was loyal. And I’m not the only one who noticed it. Meteor is kind of intense about it.”
“Yeah,” Toki muttered. “I guess he is.”
They were silent for a beat. Then Inferno snorted.
“So… Do you go by Taiyōme? Or not anymore?” At her startled look, he shrugged: “It’s his name, so it’s not like it’s a secret.”
“I suppose. I have a civiliansona on the side, but…” Toki smiled briefly, then bowed formally: “My name is Toki Taiyōme. I’m in your care, senpai.”
Inferno looked amused. Then he shook his head: “Oh, what the hell. Nice to meet you, Toki Taiyōme. I’m Kaname Hibashira.”
“Kaname-senpai, then,” she said, testing the name on her tongue. She wondered if Hibashira was Hellmaker’s name. Probably. It made this gift even more valuable. “I’m honored.”
“Aw, don’t be.” Her senpai laughed and elbowed her good-naturally. “Us street rats have to stick together, you know?”
“Yeah,” Toki smiled ruefully. “I know.”
oOoOoOo
In an unexpected turn of events, Native was killed.
The news was kept very hushed: Toki was only aware of it because Hayasa-sensei kept tabs on the comings and goings of all other heroes, including obituaries and suspended licenses. It wasn’t clear if it was the work of the hero killer or someone else. Native had been on vacation, after all, incognito and everything. His throat had been slit, which didn’t fit with Stain’s usual methods either. He usually stabbed people and let them bleed out. Native’s death had been quicker, if not cleaner.
It looked like an assassination more than a fanatic’s crime.
The police kept it quiet. Nobody wanted to provoke panic. But it raised a new level of alarm among heroes. A villain killing heroes was scary, yes, but it was a danger they expected to face in the line of duty. A villain hunting down their secret identity to kill them while they were at home, disarmed, supposedly safe; that was more chilling.
Native hadn’t taken great pains to hide his civilian identity, but he hadn’t broadcasted it either. You couldn’t find anything online, you really had to investigate his life to find it: follow his car, spy on his friends, stalk his family, and so on. That required dedication. Stain hadn’t killed Native on a whim like the other victims. He had literally hunted him.
If it was Stain, of course. That wasn’t even sure. It didn’t fit with his usual modus operandi, true; but Stain’s methods had been a little… erratic, ever since his fight with Endeavor in January. Maybe his injuries were more grievous than previously thought and required him to adapt. Or maybe he had gotten even more obsessed, discarding long speeches in favor of speedy executions.
In short: nothing good.
But Icarus didn’t have the hero killer’s case, and so Toki’s reach was limited. She had to focus on her own case. Dabi. The Ghost Arsonist. The residential asshole.
Who, apparently, had gone fucking missing.
There hadn’t been a new case of arson with blue flames in almost a month. That was the longest Dabi had gone without setting fire to shit. Toki was low-key fretting. Had Dabi changed his plans? Had the League of Villains recruited him, or rather re-recruited him after the USJ disaster?
Maybe he was dead. He didn’t have a great survival instinct; maybe he had picked a fight with someone stronger than him. Gods, if only! That would make one less problem.
There were enough villains on the streets already. The crime rate hadn’t increased until then, thanks to All Might’s continued presence and the frenzy of goodwill unleashed by his public announcement. Now that things were settling down, though, villains were getting bolder. But it was mostly vigilantism that was on the rise, and it sometimes intersected with villainy. A lot of do-gooders who didn’t have a license, and whose definition of good went from collecting trash to beating the crap out of local gangs.
Sure, Quirk use was decriminalized, so tiny acts of vigilantism (like picking up trash with your Quirk) didn’t count as a crime anymore. But superpowers being used more freely meant more chaos. More brawls that unexpectedly or accidentally escalated. More mistrust of mutant-Quirks. It was a headache and half.
Oh! Speaking of vigilantes… The same day she learned of Native’s fate, Toki met Fuyumi Todoroki again.
At least it managed to take her mind off Stain and his gruesome murders.
It wasn’t planned. Toki had swung by Sachiko’s neighborhood after classes. She wanted to check on her little fledglings, moved by a fit of protectiveness or maybe paranoia. Hitoshi and Neito were hanging out with friends. Melissa had a date with Hatsume. It apparently involved a homemade game of laser-tag with live explosives in one of Yūei’s training grounds. Toki was a little afraid to ask.
Anyway, she had some time free, she decided to see Sachiko… and it just so happened that her friend was leaving the dojo, but not alone. Fuyumi Todoroki was with her, chatting cheerfully and making Sachiko laugh.
Toki hesitated to turn back.
She could treat Shouto the same even after meeting Endeavor, but it was different here. Fuyumi knew about her already. Toki took a step back to retreat out of sight… but it was too late. Sachiko had already seen her and waved excitedly. Oh, whatever. Toki mentally shrugged and went to meet with them.
Apparently, Fuyumi had joined Sachiko’s dojo. She had a good level, and unlike her girlfriend, she hadn’t been banned from competitions because she had the good sense to hide her tendencies to pick fights.
“But you do pick fights,” Toki pointed out with an eyebrow raised.
“Not without a facemask,” Fuyumi bashfully answered.
Toki sniggered. But the murder of Native was still fresh on her mind, and she frowned worriedly:
“Martial arts are good and all but against real villains, you should also learn how to fight dirty. Aim for the eyes, and so on. That’s not something you can practice in a dojo.”
Fuyumi looked annoyed. Sachiko only laughed.
“You want to kick people under the belt? I would have expected a keeper of the peace such as yourself to be, well, more peaceful. So much for the virtues of heroism.”
Yeah, the dirty tricks Hobo-san had taught Toki weren’t pretty. But they could save her life, and in the end it all came to that: what was she willing to lay on the line, what was she willing to do to defend it.
“You can be peaceful or you can keep the peace,” she answered evenly. “You cannot do both.”
Sachiko found it very wise. Fuyumi briefly looked a little sad. She knew first-hand how full of rage and cruelty could the so-called heroes really be.
“Anyway,” Toki continued. “I love karate, it’s great, but if you think that’s enough to take on villains then you’re a walking cold case waiting to happen. You need to know how to claw their eyes out, how to get out of a chokehold, or how to disarm a gun. Self-defense against brawling isn’t a thing you can learn in a dojo. There might be self-defense classes in Musutafu, but even then, I don’t think they have quite the level you require.”
“I can defend myself,” Fuyumi grumbled.
Toki shrugged and spread her arms, like an invitation. She was dressed as Taiyōme today. Not quite Hoshizora, but not really Quantum either. She had Hoshizora’s braided twin buns, but her bangs weren’t styled and she didn’t have contacts; she didn’t have Hoshizora’s elegant clothes either, and today her outfit was casual and comfy, with dark jeans taken from Keigo’s closet and a black crop-top. She didn’t look very fearsome.
“Come on, try to take me out. I won’t use my Quirk.”
To her credit, Fuyumi barely paused before lunging. Her attack was strong and precise, direct, aiming for Toki’s face without hesitation. She knew how to fight, how to punch to hurt.
But she hadn’t been taught by Hobo-san.
Toki slithered around her attack like an eel, grabbing Fuyumi’s hair on her way to yank it and undermine her balance; Fuyumi recovered and went to strike again, and Toki hit her throat, fast and precise. The white-haired girl choked, her hands reflexively going to her neck.
Toki sidestepped, fast as a snake, then grabbed her jacket and pulled it down to immobilize her arms behind her back: she kicked her kneecaps for good measure, and Fuyumi would have faceplanted on the sidewalk if Toki hadn’t grabbed her by the collar of her shirt at the last second.
“And that’s how you do it,” Toki said smoothly.
She righted Fuyumi, who was still coughing, then stepped out of range just in case her opponent wanted to take a swing in revenge.
“Fuyumi!” Sachiko gasped, rushing to her girlfriend’s side.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” coughed the girl.
Her eyes were still watering. But when she took her next breath, she didn’t erupt in another hacking fit. She struggled to right her jacket to free her arms, then smoothed her shirt back in place. Her ponytail was pretty much a disaster after being used as a leash, so Fuyumi shook her hair free; then she turned to Toki:
“Can you teach me how to do that?”
Toki blinked. “You could also give up vigilantism.”
“No way. I need an outlet for my anger issues.”
Toki let out a deep sigh. Well, she didn’t want to let Fuyumi try to gain experience by herself against people who fought like that, so…
“All right. I have a little free time today, so let’s make the most of it. I don’t know when I will be able to swing by next. Do you have somewhere to train? Usually, I would go to your place, or where I parkour with my fledglings; but you live with your family and my fledglings happen to be friends with Shouto. I don’t suppose you want them to find out.”
Fuyumi went a little grey.
“Yeah, definitely not.”
“I’ll find a place,” Sachiko offered. “But I want to learn that kind of stuff too!”
The place where they ended up going was an empty building that belonged to Sachiko’s dojo. It was used as a storage area. They were technically breaking and entering and trespassing, and Toki spent about ten minutes lecturing Sachiko on how it was illegal until Fuyumi pointed out that since she was a vigilante she really didn’t care, and Toki gave up.
They had barely two hours to go over what Toki had learned over the course of several weeks, but that was all right. She didn’t need to teach Fuyumi how to take a beating. She wouldn’t want to, anyway. Toki’s situation in learning from Hobo-san had been unconventional to say the least. Fuyumi already had the basis that Hobo-san, or rather Aizawa, had had to beat into Toki. Basically, all that was left to teach her was the finest points of ‘technique.’
Toki had taught that kind of stuff to Hitoshi and Melissa already, and she hadn’t thought much about it. But she had met Aizawa since then and realized who Hobo-san really was. Maybe that was why he was at the forefront of her mind when she taught Fuyumi how to punch someone’s crotch or how to jab at the eyes.
Or maybe because Fuyumi had an instinctive grasp on brutality. Hitoshi and Melissa learned what Toki taught them and integrated it into their fighting styles; but Fuyumi’s fighting style was all brawling and dirty tricks, and what Toki taught her didn’t need to be integrated as much as rediscovered, like putting the missing pieces in a puzzle.
So. Toki thought about Aizawa, distractedly.
She wondered how he was doing. If he missed teaching. If he had even liked teaching in Yūei. Why he had hated teaching when it had been Toki and Keigo, a few years earlier. Why he had been so brutal? Just because she wasn’t resentful towards him didn’t mean Toki was blind. She knew what had happened had been fucked up. She had just never allowed herself to feel hurt by it. She had no expectation of goodness from Hobo-san, and so his cruelty never took her by surprise.
But now… Now she knew how to teach brutal things without being brutal herself, and she wondered.
What had been wrong with Aizawa, that he had felt like hurting a small teenager was an acceptable thing to do? She had been fourteen. She hadn’t deserved that.
It was years too late to be indignant about it. It was weeks too late to ask Aizawa about it. But it still stung. She thought she was past it, but apparently, you never quite get past childhood trauma.
The training session ran for about two hours. About halfway through, Sachiko stepped back, tired of being their guinea pig. She was happy to stay in the background and read fanfiction on her phone while Toki and Fuyumi talked about how to rip out someone’s junk or how to use headphones as a lethal weapon.
If someone had overheard their conversation, they probably would have thought that they were completely deranged.
Soon enough Toki looked at the time and declared it was time to pack up. She had to go back to Fukuoka in time for the evening patrol, and she didn’t want to start too late, so she could go home early and cuddle with her boyfriend. Husband. Well, you know.
“Are you still working on your anger issues?” she asked Fuyumi.
“Punching people helps,” the other admitted sheepishly. “But yes, I am.”
“Good.” Toki paused. “I don’t have any reason to think anything bad about you. But Sachiko is one of my best friends. Your family history is messed up and you enjoy violence just a tad too much. So I’ll just throw out there that Sachiko can fight back. But if she can’t or doesn’t want to, I’ll gladly do it for her. You get me?”
Fuyumi briefly looked upset, and then, somehow, fond.
“I get you. Thank you, for looking out for her.”
Toki didn’t quite know how to answer that, so she only shrugged. She tried not to think about the fact that it was the second Todoroki she was threatening.
“Don’t give me a reason to act on it, that’s all.”
“I won’t. You know, I was serious when I said I was working on it. I meditate, I do yoga. I’m thinking that maybe I should see a therapist. My mother is going to go see one, when she moves out. Maybe I’ll go with her.”
Toki nodded approvingly. “I’ve ever been to therapy, but I heard it helps.”
“That’s the whole point,” Fuyumi laughed.
Sachiko, who had noticed they were done and was sauntering towards them, raised an eyebrow: “The whole point of what?”
Toki and Fuyumi looked at each other, then Fuyumi answered breezily: “Speaking of you behind your back.”
“So mean!” Sachiko gasped.
“You’ll live.”
“Toki, you’re a bad influence on my girlfriend.”
“What?!” Toki sputtered. “She came like that. I’ve got nothing to do with it!”
Sachiko stuck out her tongue, then started laughing. She looked younger when she laughed, brighter and wilder. Toki was remined of a time, not so very long ago, when she had a terrible crush on Sachiko, with her pretty hair and her unwavering confidence.
It was still completely surreal that Sachiko, of all the girls in her prefecture, had ended up dating a canon-character. And not just any canon-character! Fuyumi Todoroki! Shouto’s sister! Dabi’s sister! Endeavor’s daughter! And she was a vigilante! Really, this family was so completely messed up, filled with drama and secrets piled upon each other. Nobody knew Dabi was Touya, nobody knew Meteor was fucking Endeavor (and, again, ew), and nobody knew Fuyumi was a vigilante. What was next? Was Natsuo secretly a terrorist? Was Shouto the only normal one?
“Oh, that reminds me,” Toki suddenly blinked. “Sachiko mentioned that you’re not out to your family yet, Fuyumi.”
The change in topic apparently blindsided her, and Fuyumi looked briefly taken aback.
“That’s correct. My mother is very sheltered, she wouldn’t understand. And my father is…” she hesitated, “traditional. He wouldn’t understand, either.”
Toki let out a strangled laugh. She had thought that about Endeavor too. He just had this kind of vibe. But she had been very wrong, apparently. The Flame Hero was definitely not straight.
“Yeah… no. I’ve met him, recently. You would be surprised.”
Fuyumi froze for a beat. Sachiko, too. Toki shrugged:
“It’s not my business. Just… He would listen.”
And that was it.
Honestly, Toki wasn’t sure why she was interfering. The Todoroki drama was like a vortex. You dipped a hand into it and then get sucked in whole. Touya was a villain, and his identity reveal was a bomb just waiting to explode. Shouto was in a class targeted by villains. Fuyumi was a vigilante. Endeavor used to be an abuser, was still a very high-profile figure, and, in addition to that, he was sleeping with a former S-ranked villain. Supposedly redeemed or not, it was shady as fuck. Was Natsuo the only normal one? That was to be determined.
So if Toki could de-dramatize at least one thing… Well, she was going to do this. Queer people should have each other’s backs. Even if one of them was Endeavor.
Urgh. Toki couldn’t freaking believe she was taking his side in this.
She didn’t like Endeavor. She probably would never like him. She had complicated feelings about him, about her father, and about their relationship… but she acknowledged that Meteor’s loyalty wasn’t one-sided. Endeavor had been looking for her for years just because Meteor had asked him to. That’s… that’s a lot of dedication. And he had been so fervent in his defense of Meteor. He really cared for him. Enough to fight the system, go through the legal channels, and defend his corner for half a decade.
It was a little humbling. It made Toki feel… disarmed.
No, she didn’t like Endeavor. But she didn’t dislike him, either. She had wanted to dislike him. Not only the man, but also the canon character. Everything he was and everything he represented. The fake hero, the villain of the story. Someone who did bad things and pretended to do good just so he could hide his cruelty from the crowd. Someone like Bakugo, except that his actions had all the weight of an adult in a position of power instead of being the petty cruelties of a middle school bully.
It was easy to be angry at that kind of person. Someone brutal, someone rude, cruel, and ruthless. Someone simple. Someone easy to hate.
But Endeavor had been none of these things. He had been quiet, withdrawn, and grave. A little awkward and viscerally real. There was an undercurrent of sternness to him, something hard and unyielding like steel, something destructive like fire; but it wasn’t so all-consuming that it hurt to look at it directly. It had been, once upon a time. It was obvious. Endeavor’s stillness wasn’t born of peacefulness but of resignation, or maybe exhaustion. Toki had looked at him and expected anger, rage, hatred, aggressiveness, something violent that would provoke violence in turn; but she had only met tentativeness.
She had wanted to dislike him, just like she had wanted to hate All Might. And just like with All Might, she hadn’t been able to after talking to him. After really meeting him and seeing the person under the mask. Concepts and projections were easier to hate than a real person. Especially real and flawed people. Especially when they tried to be nice to her.
Afterward, Toki went home. She patrolled around Fukuoka. She sat down with her thesis and polished it a little more. She was feeling pensive after that impromptu meeting with Fuyumi.
She was thinking about the Todoroki family, Meteor, and Aizawa. She thought about how shit went down and sometimes caused irreparable damage, yet they all managed to survive it and find a silver lining. There was a moral to this story, probably. What happened was really unfortunate and had lasting repercussions, but it hadn’t been the end of the world. It was done, it was in the past. In the end, something good came out of a bad situation. Like a sign that good always prevailed just like how heroes always won in the stories.
And she realized, with a surprised smile, that she had managed to not think about the hero killer for the whole day.
Notes:
Hope you liked it !
I finally included the headcanon about how Kaminari's Quirk could be used, with static and magnetism! Holy shit it only took me something like ten chapters. It's from the wonderful fic "Heroics and Other Things That Don't Require Superpowers" by TheNarator, that i recommanded already ^^
Speaking of amazing fic... It's been a while since i did that, but...
Anyway! Fic rec of the day !
"komorebi" by Calamitatum. The Plot: Yūei desperatly needs to find who the villains' spy is. Hitoshi Shinso desperatly wants to do something heroic. The solution is obviously to become the heroes' spy in the League of Villains.
I love how this fic doesn't shy away from the fact that double-agents cannot have clear and total loyalty to one side over the other, because as soon as they start getting close to the ennemy and humanize them, they end up emotionally compromized. Seeing Hitoshi training for this was great too! And it's one of the few fics where Hitoshi has a real, caring mother, so bonus kudos for that =)
____________________________
EDIT: some of you were surprised that Toki let Endeavor off the hook so easily, especially knowing he was an abuser.
But remember... Toki may know things about some characters, but it rarely, or maybe even ner, impact her interractions with or her judgement of the people.
She liked the characters of Hawks, but that isn't what prompted her to befriend him, or to fall in love with him. It just gave her warning that his fate was a tragic one, and it added to her determination to protect him.
She disliked the character of Sir Nighteye because he was a dick: and yet as a child she asked for his help, and even as an adult, when she met him, she was open and polite... up until he insulted Melissa, and showed that he was looking to manipulate All Might.
The only exception would be Dabi, and even then, it's to take with a grain of salt. She was afraid of Dabi because he would hurt Hawks, but then it was canon-Dabi hurting canon-Hawks: so she was afraid of the possibility, but didn't see it as written in stone. It just increased her wariness about him... and thus, when the Ghost Arsonist started setting stuff on fire, she was quicker to ressent him than with most villains.
But the point is: Toki's knowledge of characters is, to her, not really relevant to the *people* she meet, because... It's like hearsay. It doesn't feel real.
So she knows that Endeavor used to beat his kids, but it doesn't really compute. What really compute, though, is the fact that Endeavor is calm and quiet and contrite, and he saved her father. That is something Toki knows, that is something real.
And that's why she acts like she does.___________________________________________
Anyway, i hope you enjoyed this chapter ! See you next week in "wisdom of the fallen" =)
Chapter 47: Encounter at the mall
Summary:
The issue of reincarnating into canon was that you tended to forget details. Like the fact that at some point, a hostage situation was going to FRIGGIN HAPPEN.
Notes:
Mwahaha, this chapter as a lot of forshadowing, i love it.
And we also meet a new OC that i *love*. Those of you who read my french fic know that i very often make a cameo of the same character, and... well she decided to join my MHA fic too ! xD
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
ENCOUNTER AT THE MALL
The end of June was sunny and bright, and Fukuoka was exceptionally peaceful. Toki’s side project, an A.I. that would decipher her intent and make the calculations for her to teleport gravity, was going well. TechnoBurst had already sent her an upgraded visor with a better HUD display. Hotaka had managed to get a rough program running.
All that was left was to finely attune it to Toki’s body language and to run tests with the movement of her eyes, to see if the A.I. managed to read her intent to warp something with only brief eye contact.
Hotaka also suggested giving the A.I. the ability to receive verbal orders. Toki could then direct the A.I. to prepare for the warping of specific targets so the program would be ready to run when Toki would need to change directions at the last moment in a fight. Ideally, the A.I. would also be able to isolate something small to allow Toki to teleport with part of something; like a villain’s hands, for example.
It made Toki feel a little bemused. She would have never been able to create a technique so advanced with her natural Warp-Space. I mean, if her Quirk was a program, then Toki had both updated the hardware with her new heart, and the software with assisting devices that would help her visualization process. It was crazy. It was like she had stockpiled the power of two other Quirks inside her own! No wonder One For All was such a powerful Quirk if it did that seven times over!
But she wasn’t quite at that point yet. She wasn’t trying to put the carriage before the horses, after all.
________________
> PhantomOfTheOpera: So I just watched Ryugamine Chronicles, you know, that new anime?
> PhantomOfTheOpera: and let me tell you, it’s GREAT.
> Megamind: Is it a shonen?
> PhantomOfTheOpera: Not really? it’s more action/suspense/intrigue, with a heavy dash of urban fantasy in the mix. The characters are great and I’m hooked.
> PhantomOfTheOpera: Most of the characters have mentalist, weak or ‘bad’ Quirks, and the story isn’t centered around their powers! It’s basically the life of the city with gangs rising and collapsing, an information broker gleefully provoking chaos, and the power of friendship. Also the main character actually has only half the screentime because so much plot is carried by all the amazing cast! Everyone is the main character of their own stories, and they all intersect in incredibly surprising ways!
> Megamind: nothing could dethrone Fullmetal Alchemist in my heart, but you intrigue me
> PinkIsPunkRock: I like urban fantasy, so maybe I’ll check it out!
> PhantomOfTheOpera: tell me when you see it! I desperately want to geek about it!
> PhantomOfTheOpera: what are you watching these days anyway?
> PinkIsPunkRock: I’m watching Marchombre, that fantasy series from France
> PikaPika: I’m not very into manga
> Moxie: I’m watching Ninja Cuisine, that anime with the cooking competition!
> Moxie: it’s making me desperately hungry. I want a croissant so bad.
< Antares: … aren’t you gluten intolerant?
> Moxie: i am.
> Moxie: it’s my single greatest regret
> Moxie: that and not kicking in the nuts of that teacher I had in middle school who explained that it was normal and expected for girls to find husbands and that our attractiveness would peak at 15 yo
> PinkIsPunkRock: wow. what a creep
> PikaPika: people don’t you give shit about being ace, Moxie? ‘cause sometimes they’re worse about it that if you’re gay
> PikaPika: if i had a yen every time someone told me I should just wait for the right person… 🙄
> Moxie: yeah, don’t tell me
> Moxie: i didn’t tell many people IRL but I’m still online on a bunch of forums, where I told people, and they are so NARROWMINDED
> Moxie: people are like “oh my god, I couldn’t possibly imagine being asexual, how sad, you’re missing so much…” bitch! you know what’s sad? Being gluten intolerant! if you placed two pills in front of me right now, one which would turn me allosexual and one which would enable me to tear into a freshly-baked oven-warm olive-and-rosemary ciabatta without utterly destroying my body, it would not even be a choice. “hyuhhh-duhhhh aren’t you worried you’ll die alone”, no, but aren’t you worried i’ll just launch myself over the bakery counter in our local grocery store one day and stuff croissants in my mouth like a starving raccoon until i die and the whole place has to be closed down as a health risk while they peel my bloated body off the linoleum floor? you should be!!!!!!
> PikaPika: ….
> NotOnFire: …
> EndeavorSucks: not what I expected when I logged in today, but I approve
> EndeavorSucks: why are we talking about Moxie being a bloated raccoon?
< Antares: I think we kinda verged off-topic xD
> Megamind: you think?! lol
> PinkIsPunkRock: xD
> NotOnFire: in other news: I’m gonna quit my shitty job!
< Antares: really?! good for you!
> PinkIsPunkRock: congrats! You hated it x)
> EndeavorSucks: nice going! you have something else lined up?
> NotOnFire: i might, i have an interview later this week.
> NotOnFire: even if i don’t have it, i’m not staying for the summer rush. We’re so understaffed, it’s hell. And that asshole manager does jack shit about it! he’s just gargling himself with his own importance while being the biggest turd I’ve have ever met!
> NotOnFire: seriously, even if you meet him on the street, you can SEE he’s an ass.
> NotOnFire: it’s like six different vacuum salesmen were assessed for their most immediately obnoxious visual feature, and those parts had then been reconstituted into a whole greater than their sum: Sleaze Voltron.
> NotOnFire: hot pink patterned tie with violet purple jacket, the hair oiled back, gigantic sunglasses, mustache, chewing gum, a cowboy belt buckle, polished caiman shoes. that’s how he was dressed TODAY. my eyes are bleeding, people.
> NotOnFire: just writing it is making my tension rise. Quick, someone tell me something soothing.
> PinkIsPunkRock: er, a kitten?
> Megamind: multiple kittens?
> EndeavorSucks: my homophobic grandma died! 😁 I no longer have to hide the fact I’m queer as fuck
> PhantomOfTheOpera: that qualifies as soothing?
> NotOnFire: i’ll take it.
< Antares: you told your family that you were gay?!
> EndeavorSucks: most of them knew already, but yeah, I announced it as soon as the casket was closed, pretty much
> EndeavorSucks: The only one surprised/annoyed was the stuck-up aunt that I’ve never seen before, so it went well.
> EndeavorSucks: she was like: [high-pitched voice] “are you telling me you are a practicing homosexual?!”
> PinkIsPunkRock: oh snaps! What did you answer?
> EndeavorSucks: that I didn’t need to practice because i was very good at it.
> PikaPika: holy shit
> NotOnFire: 🤣 🤣 🤣
< Antares: [high-five]
> PinkIsPunkRock: I’m saving that comeback because it slays.
> PinkIsPunkRock: also, speaking of which. my girlfriend came out to her family (well, part of it). And it went well!
< Antares: oh? nice! =)
> PinkIsPunkRock: yeah
> PinkIsPunkRock: what about you Stars? what’s up in paradise?
< Antares: work, work, more work
< Antares: i may reunite with my dad one day, seeing he’s out of jail. nothing much.
> EndeavorSucks: your father was WHAT
> NotOnFire: ??!?
> PikaPika: each time you’re dropping a bombshell like that i think you’re screwing with us, but. jesus fucking christ. knowing you it’s probably true.
> PhantomOfTheOpera: … is that top-secret or…?
< Antares: well, no more than my identity. So YES. But i’m telling you so you can be warned if i start moping about how fathers suck.
< Antares: also Pink, I just realized, but you definitively have a type.
> PinkIsPunkRock: no?!??? i do not???!?
< Antares: bookworms that are secretly adrenaline junkies with daddy issues
> PinkIsPunkRock: ….
> PinkIsPunkRock: shit
> PinkIsPunkRock: i have a type
________________
Toki couldn’t find Dabi.
It was worrying. He hadn’t burned anything in weeks. Where the hell was he? Had he changed his plans? What were his plans? What was taking his focus away from his apparent objective of pissing off Endeavor?
She sat down in her office with a spreadsheet and notes and tried to guess. He had ties with the League of Villains already. He hadn’t been influenced by the hero killer ideology, or at least not like he had been in canon, because unlike in canon Stain had never gone mainstream. So… maybe he had been reabsorbed in the League? But then, given how their first collaboration had turned out, maybe he had decided to not ally himself with them. In which case, what could keep him away?
Fuck. Too much had changed.
Stain hadn’t been arrested, and that was a serious worry, too. He could spread his doctrine better in person. In canon, his message had reached a lot of villains, and that was only thanks to an amateur video. If Stain went around giving speeches, he could create big waves. He hadn’t been really interested in doing that in canon, but… too many things had changed. Stain might rethink his methods. Especially if he had been injured and had lost some mobility in his fight against Endeavor in January. Maybe he would try to assemble followers, to do his bidding and continue killing.
Toki couldn’t be sure of anything anymore… There were too many variables and too many chances that those people wouldn’t follow the same path as in canon. For example, there was the possibility that the League would ally with Stain. They could adopt Stain’s ideology since it wasn’t so far removed from their own. They both wanted to destroy heroes, after all. Stains wanted to destroy all heroes except All Might, and the League wanted to destroy all heroes, especially All Might, but there was enough overlap that an alliance could be negotiated.
But Dabi could also join neither the League or Stain! In canon, Dabi allied with the League because they gave him support with his goals, and Stain because he vocalized those goals. But in this universe, Stain had publicized no message, and the League had already tried and failed to support him in his goal to (apparently) kill Shouto during the USJ attack.
Where could Toki look for him, then? Were there any other players that Dabi could be tempted to ally with? People that would try to use him; people that he would try to use. Who were the other big villains in canon?
The yakuza, maybe? Overhaul would become powerful, but he was based near Tokyo, where Sir Nighteye had his agency, not in the Shizuoka prefecture. And Overhaul had no interest in killing heroes, his plan was to get rid of Quirks. No, Dabi wouldn’t be interested in that. Not the yakuza.
The Meta-Liberation Army… that was something to consider.
They must have lost a lot of traction now that Quirk use had been decriminalized. But they hadn’t disbanded. Toki kept an eye on a few online forums centered around that kind of rhetoric, and the movement was still alive. Instead of saying that the government oppressed them by forcing them to not use their Quirks, they mostly argued about the eugenic nature of Destro’s doctrine… like how Quirk marriages should be mandatory, or how Quirkless people should be bred out until extinction (and that was one of the tamest ideas). This band of lunatics still had traction. That meant they were probably still recruiting for their army.
Would they recruit Dabi? Maybe. He was strong and the MLA needed power. With the decriminalization of Quirk use, they had lost a big chunk of their recruitment speech, so their numbers must have thinned. It would make sense for them to go with quality over quantity this time.
But would Dabi join them? That was more uncertain.
Dabi wanted to destroy Endeavor. That could tie in with the MLA’s plans to take over Japan, since the Number One stood in the way of that, but only loosely. Even then, it still deserved to be investigated. The MLA was the only current villain group with the resources to help Dabi make big waves. They had money, followers, hackers, and they had access to mass media. In canon, Dabi’s broadcast had been a great boon for the MLA, crushing people’s spirit with devastating efficiency. And Shigaraki hadn’t even been involved in that! It had all been Dabi and the hacker. What was his name again? Sceptis? It would make sense for them to think of this strategy in this universe, too.
Or maybe Toki was just chasing shadows and Dabi was totally elsewhere. Damn it.
Anyway. In the meantime Toki found a great distraction, because her supervisor for her PhD called her (or rather, Hoshizora), and casually announced that someone had just cancelled their thesis presentation in August. If Toki wanted, she could have that slot to present her own thesis.
“T-T-That’s in two months!” Toki stuttered.
“Yes, and you have to send your thesis a month before the presentation date. But I thought you were almost finished?”
Toki made an unarticulated noise of panic. Yes, she had all the material needed for her thesis. She had about two hundred pages, graphics, diagrams, and so on. But it was just data. It lacked organization and coherency. Consistency, too, actually. Basically, it was dense and maybe even genius in some places, but also a mess.
A very complete mess with the possibility of being a brilliant insight in the possible uses of the Ion Dive as well as a fervent plea to continue space exploration, but still: a mess. Toki usually felt pride at the thought of her research, but at that instant, all she felt was a paralyzing fear of being a complete idiot unworthy of a PhD, like at any moment her supervisor was going to burst out laughing and say ‘what, you really believe that I’m going to read that ball of misaligned words you call a thesis?’
Imposter syndrome, hello.
“You don’t have to take that slot if you need more time,” her supervisor assured her. “But don’t take too long! The next opening isn’t before December.”
“I’ll think about it,” Toki managed to squeal.
So life was going great. And she was not at all panicking.
In addition to that, she also had to prepare the end-of-term tests for the heroic students at Yūei. It would happen soon, during the first week of July. Teams of two students would face teachers wearing weights, just like in canon. The matchups were slightly different than in the manga, considering that the composition and abilities of the students weren’t quite the same. For example, Kaminari and Tokoyami were going to be paired against Ectoplasm, and Toki distinctly remembered that in canon Kaminari had been paired with Ashido against Nedzu.
Whatever. Toki was going to fight Shouto and Yaoyorozu, to try to make them focus on strategy rather than their over-reliance on their Quirks. Then she would fight Neito and Honenuki in class 1-B, for the exact same reason. And also because, according to Vlad King, Neito thought himself invincible with Warp-Space and needed to be taken down a peg or two.
Toki was pretty much swamped with work. Hayasa-sensei would tell her to slow down, but hey, Hayasa-sensei had no room to talk. Sure, he was all mature and responsible now, and he had undergone a Major Character Development after leaving Naruto Labs, but back then he had been as much of a workaholic as Toki and Keigo combined.
How long had it been, anyway? It always felt a little vertiginous to look back and realize that it had been years. Toki had been a child when she had joined the HPSC. She had been fourteen when she had said goodbye to the Labs, and eighteen when Keigo and her had found Hayasa-sensei again and convinced him to become a hero again. It felt like it had all passed in the blink of an eye.
Hayasa-sensei had been part of her life for so long, now. He had been her teacher since she had been eight. He still was! Hayasa-sensei didn’t have the speed to keep up with Keigo and her anymore, but he still designed their training, they still went to him to bounce ideas back and forth when they considered new moves or how to use their Quirks in innovative ways. They had grown together. Shit, when they had first met, Hayasa-sensei was in his early thirties. Now he was well into his forties. It was almost incongruous.
No, Hayasa-sensei wasn’t just an underground hero. He wasn’t just a teacher, nor was he a parental figure. There was a little of those three components, true, but Hayasa-sensei was… Just Hayasa-sensei.
A friend, a colleague, a trusted advisor, a trainer, a mentor. He helped raise them, but now they were his bosses, theoretically at least. In reality, the Icarus Agency was headed by Kameko more than anyone, but Keigo, Toki and Hayasa-sensei were more or less equal. Keigo and Toki were more of a public figure than their teacher, and he did more paperwork, but they were all essential gears in this huge machine. The Icarus Agency wouldn’t have the same rate of success without its underground hero.
Oh, they would still have risen high and fast. Keigo’s feathers were the best spying tool there was. It was no wonder that canon-Hawks had become Number Three in a few years! With sidekicks to take care of the clean-up, and the HPCS’s money as a springboard, nothing could impede his meteoric rise. He didn’t need an underground hero to collect clues and investigate leads, no more than he needed a teleporting hero partner. He could investigate stuff and arrest villains at lightning speed all on his own. That’s just how talented Hawks was.
But Toki couldn’t help but think that without Hayasa-sensei… without Mercury… Icarus wouldn’t have known the same success.
Keigo was good, but raw talent didn’t quite make up for insider knowledge and experience. On his own, would he have learned about underground villains? On his own, would he have the patience to track down drug dealers to patiently figure out who were suppliers or leaders? On his own, would he have figured out the motivation behind two villains’ rivalries, and why their neighborhood was taking sides, allowing him to fix the problem at its source? On his own, could he have taken the time to speak with common people in bad neighborhoods, gained their trust, then put together breadcrumbs until he got the perfect picture of who was a respected figure and who could calm people down without needing a hero’s intervention?
Probably not. Hawks would have swooped in, in a flurry of feathers and devastating efficiency. Sure, he would have solved the issue, but he wouldn’t have dug deeper. He wouldn’t have found the underlying causes and traced them back to other players.
Fukuoka was now the fourth most peaceful metropole in Japan because not only villains had been arrested, but many of the factors contributing to creating villains in the first place had been found and eliminated. Industries that bullied their employees and created toxic workplace atmospheres had been investigated, or sometimes just vaguely threatened with a chirpy speech from Quantum.
Agitators and petty gang leaders had been removed from the city by being offered better jobs in more rural areas. Greedy landlords had been booted out and their tenants were given more stability. Drug suppliers had been found and arrested. Poorer areas of the city had received an influx of cash and care, thanks to the popularity of heroes patrolling there and attracting cameras.
Oh, it wasn’t the end of all problems. In a super-powered society, an incident or a moment of anger was enough to create long-lasting damage. It was utopist to dream of a society where heroes wouldn’t be needed because conflict was part of human nature. Accidents, disputes, misunderstandings, distrust, annoyance, and being aggressive happened all the time. It was good that it happened because it meant Fukuoka’s citizens were people with emotions and reactions, not brainwashed robots.
But Toki compared the city now to the city four years ago, and she was astonished by the change. Not just on the surface, but deep down, too. Maybe from an outsider’s point of view, Icarus’s rise looked very similar to canon-Hawks: but Toki firmly believed that this time, the city was better anchored in stability, and better cared for.
They were a good team, all of them. Keigo, Toki, Kameko, Hayasa-sensei. They ran a tight ship. All of them had been essential to change Fukuoka.
They liked each other. They loved each other. But making an agency work, especially a big one like Icarus; it couldn’t just be about being friends. For someone to have your back like this… feelings were maybe 10% of the actual things. The other 90% was about willpower, about teamwork.
Like in Toki and Keigo’s relationship. They hadn’t fallen in love like children. It hadn’t been a crush evolving into something more. It had been companionship, friendship, support, trust, and understanding. The complete and utter certainty that they could rely on each other no matter what, that they understood each other without having to speak, that they would always make each other happier and safer and stronger. Romantic love hadn’t been an unexpected development, but their teamwork would have existed just the same even if romance had never appeared.
They were a team. And you trusted your team to have your back, right? Even when you were afraid of being wrong. Even when it could be dangerous. Love could make you afraid, could make you irrational, could make you try to handle everything on your own to shield the one you loved from the ugliness of your life. But a partnership wasn’t just about protecting the other; it was also about letting yourself be protected.
“Hey, Keigo. Could I-- could I ask you a favor?”
From his perch on the railing next to her, Keigo blinked in surprise. The sun haloed him in gold. At the end of patrol, sitting alone on top of the highest building in Fukuoka, they had the most beautiful view of the city.
“Of course!”
“I want to preface this by saying the Ghost Arsonist is mine,” Toki warned him. “He’s dangerous, and you’re weak to fire. So if you happen to stumble upon him, you let me handle it. Promise me.”
“Yeah, yeah, I promise. You’re very strong and scary and you can warp him in orbit, I get it.” He shoved her playfully, then grew serious. “Come on. What do you need?”
Toki shifted on her seat, on the railing. She didn’t like asking this of him. But Keigo was better at investigation than she was. He was better at listening to things, collecting rumors, following online debates, and at lying. In canon, he had pulled off the greatest undercover op of all time and probably saved Japan from a coup, while Toki would have gotten caught within a week and Hayasa-sensei wouldn’t have been able to get recruited in the first place.
He was the perfect man for the job. He was just that good. And yet, she didn’t like this.
“The Meta-Liberation Army still has sympathizers, and not just because of the recrudescence of the debate about free Quirk use. I think it’s bigger. I think it’s recruiting to make a come-back. And I would like you to investigate it, to find out exactly how big it is.”
Keigo frowned, trying to follow her logic.
“You think they would recruit the Ghost Arsonist?”
“I think the Ghost Arsonist has a goal, and to reach it, he needs support. He clearly didn’t find it within the League of Villains, so I’m looking into groups that he would want to use, and be willing to be used by in turn. The MLA isn’t very well known, but it has the potential to be very well-connected. And if they want firepower…”
Keigo hummed pensively. “Yeah, not good. Okay, I’ll look into it. And I’ll be careful, so don’t worry.”
Toki snorted. She would worry anyway. Her husband… her best friend… her partner! Of course she would worry. She was asking him to investigate the thing that had nearly killed him in canon. It was Dabi who had done it, but the MLA was where the threat had really begun to take shape. It tied Toki’s stomach in knots to send him there; and yet, as frustrating as it was, Keigo was maybe the only person who could pull this off.
“Hey.” Keigo nudged her with a wing. When she looked at him, his eyes were soft and warm. “Thank you for trusting me with this.”
Toki swallowed.
She didn’t like this. But it wasn’t about her feelings. It was about teamwork. It was about, sometimes, admitting that you weren’t good enough, and asking someone stronger to lend you hand. Asking someone to have your back.
Show me the most damaged parts
of your soul,
and I will show you
how they still
shine like gold.
oOoOoOo
The end-of-term exam was a breeze. Honestly, Toki had expected more difficulty. Maybe some adolescent drama, maybe a villain attack, maybe tears, maybe an unexpected crisis?
Fighting against Shouto and Yaoyorozu was a pleasure. They behaved as expected, leading with brute force and relying on Shouto’s Quirk until Toki proved to them it was useless and Shouto started to tire quickly. The point of this exercise was to make him consider his partner and accept following her lead. Shouto wasn’t a brat; he didn’t dismiss other’s people on a whim. But it often didn’t occur to him that he could be better suited to support than to solo fighting. The only person he seemed to accept orders from was Hitoshi, and it was a hard-won privilege.
But they finally figured out that Toki could keep going to evade fire and ice forever, so they retreated and thought about it until Yaoyorozu came up with an idea with flash grenades and a weighted net. Toki let herself be captured and they passed.
Honenuki and Neito were a little more difficult to pin down. Honenuki was smart and rational, and Neito was a great team player; so in theory it should have all been smooth sailing. But Neito had a tendency to get carried away, especially when he felt like he had something to prove. He also overly focused on Warp-Space, sometimes to the detriment of his own Quirk. Vlad King saw it as arrogance, but Toki knew it was actually insecurity and defensiveness. The lesson Neito had to take was the same as Shouto’s: there was nothing weak in relying on his classmate. Honenuki’s strength and weaknesses perfectly complemented his. It wouldn’t hurt Honenuki to also take a leadership role, too, especially in a low-stake environment like this.
It took a while, and Neito got smacked around a little before getting a clue, but in the end, Neito used Warp-Space as a support tool to lead Toki on a merry chase, and then he copied Softening and both Honenuki and him buried Toki in rubble so they could snap the cuffs on her. They passed.
“I’ll take Shouto on a celebratory date,” Neito joked afterward.
Toki raised an eyebrow:
“Oh, you’re on first name basis now?”
“So what?” Neito retorted defensively. “I call Hitoshi by his first name too. And Melissa! And even Setsuna!”
“That’s because you flirt with her,” Honenuki interjected flatly.
“Well, I flirt with almost everyone, it’s my mentor’s bad influence.” He dodged the half-hearted swipe Toki made for his head, and then continued merrily: “Besides, I especially flirt with Shouto, so you really don’t have a case here.”
“Does he know you’re flirting with him?”
“… It’s not my fault he’s so dense!”
Toki snorted, then asked half-seriously: “Do I have to give him the shovel talk?”
She hoped not. Gods, that would make three Todoroki that she would have threatened. What the hell. For twenty-one years she had never seen hide or hair of them, and now they were worming their way in every corner of her life! Shouto knew her as Quantum, Endeavor had found out Toki Taiyōme, and Fuyumi was dating Hoshizora’s best friend. What was next, was Natsuo going to pop up on the Discord one day and meet Antares?!
“Nah, it’s fine,” Neito shrugged and continued easily. “It’s just good fun, you know? I don’t intent to date anyone seriously before graduation.”
“Then why are you flirting so much?” Honenuki groaned. “Do you know that the business course is planning to market you as the residential Casanova?!”
“Well, I have to let people know how charming I am,” Neito purred, “so they can hit me up later. It would be cruel to deprive them of this opportunity.”
And then he winked. Toki couldn’t help but snigger helplessly. Especially when she saw Honenuki groan like he was dying. You had to admit it was pretty funny.
Also, it totally lent weight to her theory about Neito being Thunder Thief’s lovechild. That attitude could only be genetic.
Anyway. It was supposed to be all there was. The exams were done, the kids were safe, the next problem was supposed to be the summer camp. And Toki was already grilling Nedzu about the security for the summer camp, so she was ahead of the Plot. Right?
Wrong. Very, very wrong.
The problem with being reincarnated in a fictional universe was that you didn’t remember everything. Sure, Toki’s memories from canon were as crispy-clear as they had been when she had finally awakened her consciousness, at age four. But those memories weren’t a full encyclopedia for canon. Toki didn’t remember miscellaneous facts. Hell, she didn’t even remember some characters, as evidenced by the fact that somehow, she had managed to overlook Tsukauchi, Eraserhead, and even Mera-san.
Toki had overlooked something else. After the end-of-term exam, class 1-A went to the mall.
And they met Tomura Shigaraki there.
________________
> Moxie: … In conclusion, if you haven’t tried a croissant, you should rectify that error as soon as humanly possible.
> Moxie: Unless you’re allergic to butter, in which case I’m not entirely sure what you should be eating instead. Maybe a frozen Eggo waffle or something. Then again, I can think of a lot worse ways to kick off than eating my own weight in French pastries.
> Moxie: At least with all this dairy as a lubricant, I’ll slide smoothly into my casket.
> EndeavorSucks: It’s crazy how delicious food can totally fuck up your insides.
> SpicyWings: Not me! I’ve been blessed with the ability to eat basically anything and be fine
< Antares: I can attest to that
< Antares: he ate a live worm once
> SpicyWings: ON A DARE
< Antares: that doesn’t make it better!
> SpicyWings: you’re the one who dared me!
< Antares: yeah and you’re the one who did it!
> EndeavorSucks: i can’t believe she agreed to date you after that
> EndeavorSucks: so gross 🤮
> SpicyWings: ah but she did! Because worm or not she had a CRUSH on me =)
< Antares: …
> SpicyWings: she liked meeee. She thought I was cuuuute. She wanted to hold my hand and take me out on dates and kiss me. 😘
< SpicyWings: Didn’t youuuuuuuu, Antares? ~
< Antares: … yeah.
> SpicyWings: ahahah, how embarrassing!
< Antares: oh my god. Chicken. We live together. We are MARRIED.
> SpicyWings: that doesn’t change the faaaacts ~
> Moxie: 🤦♀️
> NotOnFire: WHY are you online FLIRTING when you could do that in person?!?!
> PikaPika: let them!
> PikaPika: it’s hilarious
> EndeavorSucks: yeah I want to hear more about top heroes being dumbasses
> EndeavorSucks: especially those two
> SpicyWings: rude
> SpicyWings: also I’m patrolling around Tokyo today so I’m far from home and I’m bored. I only stopped forty-five incidents since this morning =(
> SpicyWings: forty-six*
> SpicyWings: just rescued a cat =)
> Megamind: @Antares
< Antares: ?
> EndeavorSucks: hey you said you’ll be with friends today, did you miss us so much? xD
> EndeavorSucks: …
> EndeavorSucks: hello?
> PikaPika: maybe it was a typo from his pocket
< Antares: with a perfect ping of my username? Doubtful.
> Moxie: you can see he’s typing
> Megamind: i have shigaraki under mindcontrol
> NotOnFire: uh what
> EndeavorSucks: what’s a shigaraki
> Moxie: fuck
> Megamind: we’re at kiyashi ward mall
> Megamind: second floor near a fountain
> Megamind: i made him let go of midoriya but if someone jolt him or that warper come back again we’re all dead
> Moxie: tell me you’re joking
> Moxie: why are you still typing
> Megamind: not a joke please help
< Antares: ETA 1 min hang on
< SpicyWings: I called the cops and the local heroes. They’re going to evacuate the mall. @everyone please stop typing until the hostage situation is resolved.
< Moxie: fuck he’s not joking
________________
Flashing across the sky in a succession of rapid-fire teleportation, Toki was frantic. Panic, shock, unanswered question, rage and terror made her heartbeat thunder in her chest.
Shit shit shit shit! What had happened in canon? Hadn’t Shigaraki approached Midoriya to rant about the hero killer? But the hero killer wasn’t as famous in this world. And he hadn’t had the popularity boost that his arrest had given him in canon, either. Actually the heroes and the cops were all but burying his story, trying to hide what had happened to Native. So why would Shigaraki approach the kids? Why now, why here?!
Toki had been to the Kiyashi Ward Shopping Mall in the past, but she didn’t remember the exact location of the fountain Hitoshi was near, so it took her several long, awful seconds to find it. She had to warp on a vantage point, locate the fountains, and warp to each one in quick succession until she found on her third try the one where Hitoshi was.
Midoriya and Uraraka were there, too. With Hitoshi, they formed a loose circle around the frozen man that had to be Shigaraki. They were all pale and tense. When she appeared, there was naked relief on their faces.
“I have him,” Hitoshi bit out. His jaw was clenched tight, and his eyes were fixed on Shigaraki as if afraid that the other would vanish if he blinked. “I have him, but something isn’t right, like there’s… a shade in his mind.”
Shigaraki was unmoving. He was looking blankly ahead. With his dark clothes and nondescript hoodie, he didn’t look like much. Long grey hair, dirty and clumpy, escaped from his hood. His face was pale, his skin chaffed and irritated, his neck and mouth covered with an angry-looking rash; and even relaxed at his side, his hands were bony and clenched like claws, as if desperate for something to grab and crush.
“You can hold him?” Toki checked worriedly.
“Yeah, but not… as securely as I could with someone else.” His voice wavered on the last word. There was fear in his tone. “I can’t make him fall into a deeper trance; he’ll wake up if he’s hurt. There's... there’s something wrong with his mind like there’s a leak somewhere, it’s... I don’t know, slippery. But yeah, yeah, I can hold him. As long as he stays here and nobody touches him, he can’t escape.”
If pain could wake him up, Toki wasn’t going to risk teleporting him into a prison cell. Warping was uncomfortable. It varied from person to person, but if Shigaraki was so sensitive, then maybe discomfort would be enough to shake off Brainwashing.
Toki straightened. Her heart was pounding but her mind was clear, like always in crisis mode. She knew what to do, she was in control. And if Shigaraki moved, she could warp him high enough in the sky that no amount of Decay would save him from becoming a splatter on the ground.
“Alright,” she decided. “The mall is going to be evacuated. If you have a group chat with your friends, tell them to leave. Hitoshi, focus on holding him. Uraraka, keep an eye out. Midoriya, explain what happened.”
The green-haired boy was so pale that his freckled stood out starkly on his bloodless face. He nodded shakily and started talking.
“He, he approached me from behind, pretending to be a fan. By the time I realized it was him, he had his hand around my neck, and I couldn’t… he said he would kill me and everyone around if I screamed, so I didn’t. He said he just wanted to talk, so I tried to stall…”
“You did well,” Toki reassured him. “What did he want to talk about?”
Midoriya frowned, looking uncertain.
“It... It wasn’t very clear? He was angry that people wanted to make Stain the leader of the League of Villains, even though apparently Stain owed the League for doing something for him. From what I understood… Stain had joined the League in exchange for that favor, but he hasn’t done anything useful for Shigaraki or the League. And Stain is being listened to more than Shigaraki, and he’s worried that his sensei wants to replace him. He wanted to know what made Stain more appealing than him to people.”
There was… a lot to unpack here.
Holy fucking shit it was Stain again?! Why? How?! Stain had never gained the same mainstream popularity! Nobody knew what his message actually was! Well, maybe some people in the underground, but the public didn’t know anything about Stain besides the fact that he killed heroes!
… But Stain’s doctrine was known all the same, wasn’t it?
It wasn’t Stain’s doctrine, per se, but the idea that heroes were fake, that heroes were the source of every problem because they weren’t Pure and Wholesome… it was a current that had gained traction when All Might had retired. Especially now that civilians were allowed to use their Quirks. It made people more confident; it made them feel more annoyed about heroes who showcased their powers, and who were so much better at it than ordinary citizens.
So, yes, Stain hadn’t inspired people this time around, but his beliefs were more widespread. If he started sprouting his rhetoric in a bar full of pissed-off people, he would certainly find an echo.
And All For One had taken a liking to Stain?! And he had recruited him in the freaking League? What the hell?!
Oh, god, now Toki knew how Stain had killed Native. It hadn’t been him. It had probably been Toga, as the League’s favor to him. Shit.
“Okay,” Toki said, slowly. Around them, the crowd was thinning. The mall was being evacuated. Good. “What happened after?”
“Uh, I tried to stall. I told him that Stain’s ideals were more relatable to people because it gave their frustration direction. They’re angry that the world is unfair, but if they blame heroes for not being as good as All Might or some imaginary ideal, then there’s someone responsible instead of hundreds of factors that you can’t touch. He didn’t really like that. He said that’s what he had been trying to explain all this time, how it was All Might’s fault… Sorry, it wasn’t very clear.” Midoriya swallowed. “He was getting really annoyed. I tried to distract him to say that he should make Stain respect him then? To show he could be a good leader? He calmed down a little. Then he suddenly asked if my teachers had told me that. He wanted to know if Eraserhead had been fired. He looked happy about it, and he asked a lot of questions about what I had been told. And that’s when Shinsō-kun showed up.”
Shit, so Eraserhead had made contact? Or maybe Shigaraki was just collecting gossip? In any case, that was precious information. Toki nodded, then turned to Hitoshi.
Her student picked up where Midoriya had left, without looking away from Shigaraki:
“I ran into Uraraka when she was looking for you. I saw your hair when I passed the fountain, so we went back together. I recognized Shigaraki immediately.” His hands clenched into fists. “I hesitated in the USJ. I didn’t, this time.”
Midoriya let out a weak laugh. “It was so cool! He approached us like it was nothing and then he asked Shigaraki if he was a friend of mine, and then he just ordered him to let me go and step back. I had no idea your Quirk was something like that, Shinsō-kun!”
“I try to keep it that way,” Hitoshi muttered.
While Midoriya and Uraraka both hurried to assure Hitoshi that they wouldn’t reveal his Quirk, Toki connected her police communicator to the local frequency to keep track of how the evacuation was progressing. So far, so good. Nobody had panicked or attacked. The League hadn’t tried to rescue their leader, then.
Maybe the League didn’t even know Shigaraki was here. Toki wouldn’t put it past him: sneaking out seemed just like the kind of thing that a man-child like Shigaraki would do.
“Quantum, do you copy?” a business-like voice crackled in her visor. “Tsukauchi speaking. The evacuation is nearly complete, do you have the villain in custody?”
Tsukauchi? Ah, yes, he was in charge of the League of Villains’ case. That was convenient. Toki shook her head, and then taped her visor to answer:
“Quantum speaking. The villain is kept in a trance by one of the three hero students I have with me. He’ll wake up as soon as he’s transported. I need cuffs to neutralize his Quirk before I warp him in a cell. If’s a five-points activation Quirk. Oh, and… Ideally, I would also need a sedative.”
“Roger that, a hero is coming to assist you and bring you cuffs. The sedative will wait for you at the precinct; I’ll ask them to prepare it.”
Quirk-suppressing cuffs didn’t exist, unlike what many fanfictions believed… but there were ways to prevent people from using their Quirk. Especially five-point ones reliant on hands. Cuffs designed for that kinds of villains were big chunky manacles that held their wrists at a distance, but also held their fingers separately. The whole thing weighed maybe four kilos, so Toki rarely had one pair on her. She only had normal handcuffs in her belt pouch!
Soon enough, five police officers showed up. Tsukauchi was among them, with two heroes that Toki recognized as Kamui Woods and Crust. Defensive heroes, who could create shields and obstacles. A good choice when dealing with Shigaraki, although Toki would have preferred to have Midnight here to knock out the guy.
Cautiously, as if Shigaraki was a live snake, the cuffs were put on him. He let them do it, docile and compliant, but Toki could see Hitoshi flex his jaw and frown heavily, sweat glistening on his forehead. He had been holding his Quirk on an unwilling prisoner for nearly thirty minutes. That had to be a strain.
“Kamui Woods, can you make a stretcher?” Toki asked, frowning. “Then Hitoshi, you’ll make him fall in deep sleep, and we’ll transport him like that.”
“I’m not sure how deep his sleep will be,” Hitoshi warned her nervously, while Kamui Woods was obediently creating a wooden stretcher that looked almost like a straightjacket. “He’ll wake up if the teleportation jostles him or something.”
“Do it anyway,” Tsukauchi interjected. “If he wakes up after Quantum warped him at the police station, it’s no big deal: there will be someone with a sedative waiting for him. The danger is if he wakes up now.”
Hitoshi gulped. Was he thinking of the hundreds of civilians just outside the mall, probably lingering around with undisguised curiosity? Probably.
Toki certainly was.
In any case, Hitoshi obeyed and made Shigaraki lie down in his stretcher/wooden straightjacket, and then he ordered him to close his eyes and fall into a deep, restorative sleep. Only then he released his hold, and let himself step back on wobbly legs. Toki was here to steady him.
She expected Kurogiri to appear at any moment, but he didn’t. No dark cloud materialized itself, even when she sent the kids back outside, even when Toki warped with Shigaraki to the police station. The warping woke him up, though, because when they reappeared in the precinct, he was blinking. He didn’t have time to do more. Toki had barely stepped away from the stretcher before someone injected him with a sedative. Shigaraki went right back to sleep.
That was anticlimactic. It couldn’t be that easy, could it?
The cops apparently thought so. Shigaraki would be held there and interrogated before being sent to Tartarus. He had killed Thirteen, so the cops weren’t going to be careless. Unlike in canon where Shigaraki had been a petulant failed mastermind at that point of the story, here, he was seen as a real threat.
Tsukauchi insisted they had the situation in good hands, but Toki still decided to stay at the precinct until Shigaraki woke up. Because, you know, reasons. All For One wasn’t going to let his puppet be arrested like that. He was going to make a move, and Toki couldn’t just leave and let the precinct defenseless. Sure, there were a few heroes around, and the security was tightened: but they had no idea what they were up against.
All Might, though… All Might knew. Or at least he suspected very strongly. Not five minutes later he texted her, warning her to be vigilant. He was almost out of time today, but he was going to hang out around the precinct as Yagi. He worried about the warper, too.
He was right.
About an hour after their arrival in the police station, a black portal opened in the police station and mustard gas filled the whole building.
There was no warning. One second Toki was taping her finger on the desk, frustrated with the whole waiting thing; and the next there was gas everywhere, as if a pressurized canister had exploded. Immediately her lungs burned so hard she broke into a violent coughing fit, like almost everyone around her.
Toxic gas? She thought, frantic, hacking so hard she had tears in her eyes. Shit, it burns! Mustard gas maybe? Fuck, wasn’t there a guy with a mustard gas Quirk in the League at some point, in canon? Is the whole freaking League here?!
She needed to get Shigaraki, right the fuck now. She stood up, still coughing, trying to orient herself. She hadn’t seen the cell where Shigaraki was taken, but she mostly knew the layout of the building. If she warped in the corridor on the level below, she could follow the hallways and then…
“FIRE!” yelled someone with a note of hysteria.
“Good guess!” a muffled voice exclaimed cheerfully.
That did not sound good.
There was a WHOOOSH of flames, and then someone was screaming. Toki turned so fast her neck cracked, and swore. Two masked people had emerged from another portal in the hallway and started throwing Molotov cocktails while laughing manically.
Damnit. You could barely see anything in the thick fog of bluish gas. It was dense and heavy. It hindered your vision, your breathing; Toki’s had a visor flush with her face, protecting her a little, but even then, her eyes were watering. Everyone else was functionally blind. Everyone was coughing, yelling, panicking; with such poor visibility, no policeman would dare to draw a weapon for fear of hitting a friend. The villains had counted on that. The fire was already spreading, like always with Molotov cocktails: chaos was total, it was turning in a stampede, someone was probably getting Shigaraki out of his cell right now, she had to fucking go…!
Someone screamed in terror and pain, in the vicinity of the flames that were now consuming the hallway. The hero part of Toki’s brain took over, focusing on the immediate threat.
Fuck Shigaraki: people were being hurt now.
Quantum tackled the bigger arsonist out of a window, then frantically started warping people out. Five, six at the time, as many as she could grasp or see with her blurry vision. Five heartbeats later she was in front of the second villain who had emerged from the portal and who was throwing another bottle, right in the middle of the crowd: Quantum grabbed the Molotov cocktail out of the air, hissing when her hand closed on the burning-hot glass, and tossed it in the hallway that was already on fire and evacuated.
It saved the people behind her, but it nearly got her killed.
The villain used that instant of distraction to throw himself at her, giggling, and nearly stabbed her in the stomach with a wicked-looking switchblade. Quantum only evaded the blade by an inch. She felt it graze her sweater.
Shit, that villain wasn’t a he, it was a her. Short, with blond hair in buns, a high-pitched laugh, a knife, and an association with Shigaraki? It was definitely Toga under that mask. And she moved incredibly fast for a teenager with no training, holy shit; in a restricted space like this with limited mobility, with all those bystanders that could be hurt, it made her all the more dangerous!
Quantum twisted, kicked, evaded, snarled in wordless frustration. Fuck this, she was going to grab the whole room with her and warp forty kilometer high, and then she would triage during the fall. She braced herself, trying to catch a breath she didn’t have to focus...
There was a blaring sound. Toga let out a whooping laugh, somersaulted back, and backflipped right into the black shimmering portal.
“Shit,” Quantum swore, eyes widening. “No, no, wait--!”
Too late. The portal closed. A few minutes later, Toki wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Shigaraki was now missing from his cell. The League’s mission had clearly been a success.
oOoOoOo
Nobody was seriously hurt. Even the guy who had nearly been burned alive only had a few scratches. The firefighters put the fire out quickly, and when all was said and done, everybody breathed a sigh of relief. No death, no injuries, and no lasting damage from the mustard gas. They had been lucky.
But well. From a PR point of view, that had gone a little worse than in canon.
Not only a villain had escaped under the heroes’ noses, but an attack in a police precinct was a slap in the face. Toki could already imagine the headlines! In canon, a mall had been evacuated: no big deal. Nobody had even seen Shigaraki. It had been an unlucky encounter, discreet and without violence. It had quickly blown over. But this? This had been a coordinated, well-planned, and successful attack on a police station, and everyone in this building had been sitting ducks.
All Might had been in the neighborhood, but he hadn’t been able to capture the villains, either. Even the guy Toki had tossed from a window had vanished, thanks to Kurogiri.
It was a clusterfuck, plain and simple.
The only good news was that Toki was now more or less sure that Shigaraki had heard about Aizawa getting fired and was interested. She didn’t know if the League had recruited him or even considered doing so, but it was…. It was something, at least.
Anyway. The kids were brought back home. Toki personally brought back Hitoshi, Uraraka, and Midoriya. A teacher had to reassure their families, after all. The children hadn’t fought, but they had been within spitting distance of an A-ranked villain who had murdered one of their teacher less than four months ago; they were bound to be a little shaken.
Afterward, Toki debriefed with All Might, Nedzu, and most of the heroic teachers at Yūei. They needed to speak about how to upgrade the school security measures. It was clear that class 1-A was a trouble magnet. One time was bad luck, two times was suspicious; three times would make it a pattern, and Nedzu wasn’t willing to risk it.
Toki wondered if Nedzu was already considering implementing dorms. If he was, he didn’t say.
They only spoke of more security checks, regular check-ins, more supervision, and maybe asking some heroes outside of Yūei to shuffle their schedules to patrol around the school. There was talk of sending the kids to the provisional License exam, too. If they were targeted by villains, then they should be allowed to fight back without fearing repercussions. Quirk use was decriminalized, yes, but only if it didn’t disturb the peace. If you used it to fight then you better have a license. Self-defense required someone to attack you first, and when faced with a A-ranked villain, the kids shouldn’t take that risk.
Hence the necessity of a license.
Hitoshi was already on thin ice for having used his Quirk on Shigaraki. It was very lucky that Toki was here to vouch for him, not simply as a teacher but also as a mentor. Kind of how a hero parent would argue that their child had been trained to handle their Quirk safely since childhood. And even then, it would have probably gone differently if Tsukauchi wasn’t in charge of the case and willing to let it slide.
And then, after Yūei, Toki was quietly called in the HPSC’s headquarters for another debrief.
It was a smaller committee than in Yūei. When Toki appeared in the room, there were only two people. The first was Mera-san. The second was a woman Toki didn’t know, who had dark purple hair and a pink tie brightening her otherwise boring black suit. Toki nodded at her, opening her mouth to say hello… and then her eyes stopped on Mera-san, and she blurted out without thinking:
“What the hell happened to your face?”
He scowled. “Only you would manage to make it sound like a bad thing.”
“Holy crap. You look like a completely different person. Where did your eyebags go?”
Mera-san sighed deeply, but Toki didn’t pay it any attention, staring at him disbelievingly. He looked maybe five years younger. That wasn’t sleep, that was dark magic. Maybe even human sacrifice. Wait, how badly had he been sleep-deprived before? Probably a lot, if six hours of rest could metamorphose his face like that. He even stood straighter!
“Did you quit your job? Were you fired?” Her eyes widened: “Are you on drugs?!”
The woman with the pink tie turned to Mera-san with a grin and said:
“I see what you mean about her.”
That was suspicious enough to make Toki postpone her investigation of Mera-san’s sudden return to the land of the living and the well-rested. She faced the newcomer, smiling with the teasing casualness of Quantum the carefree hero.
“Oh? And what did he say about me?”
“I said that you had the same respect for protocol,” Mera-san sighed, sounding exactly like his old exhausted self. “Quantum, meet Nadeshiko Yoshimi, my assistant. Yoshimi-kun, meet Quantum, the Starburst hero.”
An assistant! Well, if he had some help, maybe that explained how Mera-san could now have a life outside of work. A second pair of hands wasn’t to be underestimated.
They both gauged each other, then grinned.
“Nice to meet you, Yoshimi-san!”
“Likewise, Quantum! I heard good things about you. You’re Mera’s favorite hero, did you know?”
“That’s enough,” Mera-san huffed. “Yoshimi-kun, can you tell Mrs. President that Quantum is here?”
“What a polite way to tell me I don’t have the clearance to listen to the reports of your spy in Yūei,” Yoshimi sniffed haughtily. “I know what it is. Shame, Mera-san, shame on you. I can’t assist you if you don’t tell me shit.”
Toki gasped and put her hands on her mouth, delighted. It wasn’t often that you heard a HPSC’s official swear. Mera-san sighed again, but he looked fond, instead of exasperated.
“I’ll tell you later. Stop nagging.”
Yoshimi sighed dramatically, then went to leave the room, waving at Toki as she passed.
“Well, since I’m so obviously unwelcome, I’ll take my leave. Bye, Quantum! It was a pleasure!”
She closed the door. Toki waited for a beat, then turned to Mera-san, grinning from ear to ear.
“She sounds fun.”
Mera-san raised an eyebrow. “She used to be Okamoto’s secretary.”
That made the smile slid right off Toki’s face. Then the clues suddenly fit together neatly, and she narrowed her eyes thoughtfully.
“She’s the one who brought you the evidence to cut him down, isn’t she?”
“Yeah, that’s her.”
“… I wouldn’t have imagined Okamoto working with someone like that.”
“She knows how to be quiet. And Okamoto didn’t care if she swore or dressed in pink, as long as she kept paper trails in order.” Mera-san shook his head. “Her family had debts, and since she supported them with a big salary, she had no room to complain. She worked for Okamoto for sixteen years. She had a lot of dirt on him.”
“And she betrayed him? Just like that?”
“Like you wouldn’t betray the President if someone better came along,” Mera-san snorted.
“Well, yeah. But I wouldn’t betray you.” She paused for a second, both to reconsider her answer and to absorb the look of shock that passed on the Mera’s face, and then amended: “Well, not without serious consideration.”
Mera-san blinked owlishly, apparently trying to process that, then decided that the healthiest approach was to ignore it, and carried on.
“Yoshimi-kun is ambitious. She never intended to be a paper-pusher forever. But although she got more complex tasks and an increase in pay, she never got any acknowledgment. After more than a decade of good and loyal services, it left her a bit miffed. She expected a promotion, and maybe even to be officially trained by Okamoto to succeed him, since he was getting on the years. She had also found out about some less-than-legal transactions that made her nervous. But Yoshimi-kun isn’t a gambling woman, so she probably wouldn’t have turned on Okamoto if you hadn’t started this mess by suspending him.”
“Uh-huh. She told you that?”
Mera-san looked a little indignant. “Well, yes. We bonded. Also, the President had to figure out what Yoshimi-kun was after, to be sure not to be backstabbed again.”
“And? Is she gunning for Okamoto’s job?”
Toki had no idea what Okamoto official job had been. Was there a particular title for an extremely shady left-hand man who did weird unethical shit?
“No,” Mera-san answered easily. “She after the President’s.”
Toki boggled at him.
“… No shit?”
“Why not aim for the top?” Mera-san shrugged. “Mrs. President found it funny. Besides, Yoshimi-kun is smart enough to pull it off. And she has Okamoto’s old connections while having more of a moral backbone than he ever had. It would be a criminal waste to keep her as a simple secretary. She has a true gift with paperwork, for soothing ruffled feathers, and managing money, but also at drawing hard limits and sticking to them. She’s part of the reason why Okamoto got away with so much. She stopped him from going too far. Such talent should be put under the spotlight. So now Yoshimi-kun is learning from me, and will eventually make her way up through the upper echelons of the Commission to become Vice-President, and later President.”
And, unsaid, was the fact that the upper echelons were all looking at Yoshimi’s progression with a lot of attention, to see if she ended up like Okamoto. Or like old Genryusai. Shit, Okamoto was the one who had ended up like Genryusai, wasn’t he? Genmei-san was the exception, not the rule.
Toki made a pensive sound. She knew that Mera-san was pretty high-ranked, but there were quite a few people above him. The President, the Vice-President, the Security Council, a few dozen more people. Mera-san technically only handled public relations, and even though a lot of things could be crammed into that category (like all contracts with heroes), there were also several departments that Mera-san had no power over, and whose supervisors Toki didn’t know. Like who handled the administration of heroic licenses, who directed the morality committee, who ranked the missions, and so on.
Toki didn’t really need to know these things, because Kameko acted as a proxy between the HPSC and the Icarus Agency. Hell, Toki had never met the Vice-President. But it wouldn’t be completely superfluous to know who they were, she realized.
Just in case.
The door opened again, and Genmei-san entered, as if summoned by Toki’s thoughts. They exchanged a nod, and then then the President went straight to business.
“I read your police report, Quantum, but I would like a more detailed one, starting from the moment Hitoshi Shinsō called for your help. Did he call you personally?”
Toki’s heart did a little jump, even if her face stayed relaxed. She thought of Mihoko-san, of Hinawa, of the fact that she had been training Hitoshi for years, and how the depth of her personal connection had to be hidden at all cost. And yet, there were things that she couldn’t hide: like how Icarus had once paid for Hitoshi to take the provisional exam license, or how his fighting style so closely resembled hers…
She shrugged, affecting casualness, and answered smoothly.
“Yes. I have known him for a few years. I actually met him while I was a Yūei student, although I only approached him with an offer of training once I had the identity of Quantum.”
None of it was untrue, but it was misdirection enough. Genmei-san raised an eyebrow.
“You took him as a student?”
“I wouldn’t say that. Our Quirks are too different. But yes, I admit I took a special interest in Hitoshi Shinsō. Considering the versatility of his Quirk, I was planning on recruiting him straight out of high school.”
“Having a direct line of contact to you was a boon for him, in any case,” Mera-san pointed out.
Genmei-san nodded and resumed her questioning. Where was Toki when she received this text? How long did it take her to arrive? What had Hitoshi said?
The questions were very standard and none of them overly focused on Hitoshi, so Toki relaxed. She didn’t miss Genmei-san’s interest when Hitoshi’s file was pulled up and it was revealed that his Quirk wasn’t some kind of somnambulism, but straight-up Brainwashing. Toki could hardly blame her. It was the kind of Quirk that made you wary. If Hitoshi had been a normal student, having an encounter with a villain and being brought up to the HPSC’s attention in those circumstances, Genmei-san would have probably tried to orient him towards heroics anyway, either with a scholarship or via the sponsorship program.
But since he was already a hero student, and Quantum had stated a claim, the President moved on to more interesting topics.
Toki recounted what Midoriya had told her, and both the President and Mera-san were appropriately alarmed by the mention of Stain. The hero killer hadn’t been seen since Native’s murder, and his change in methods was alarming. The idea of him being recruited by the group that had managed to breach Yūei, that had killed a pro-hero in broad daylight, and that had a warper at their disposal, was very disturbing.
The mention of the mysterious Sensei also made them frown worriedly. Shigaraki was dangerous, but he was also erratic, unstable, not a good strategist, and prone to lashing out instead of planning carefully. But if he had a mentor… Someone who drafted the plans for him… Then it was a cause for concern.
Especially with the hero killer among his crew. Who knew, maybe this sensei was the reason why Stain had changed his methods, going from violent ambushes of heroes on patrol, to careful assassinations of off-duty heroes.
Toki didn’t mention Soul Stealer and neither did Genmei-san. But they both knew it didn’t take a genius to infer that this Sensei, the League’s backer, was probably the one stitching together crazy monsters with multiple Quirks to take down All Might. You didn’t need to be a genius either to make the link between the myth surrounding Soul Stealer, and the multiple Quirks crammed into the Nomu’s body. And since the people in this room were part of the few in the know, they could even make the link between Soul Stealer’s disappearance six years ago and All Might’s declining health following a very gruesome fight.
Two plus two made four. Soul Stealer had fought All Might and lost, but hadn’t died. Now he was back and wanted his revenge, but since frontal assault didn’t work (or he was too weak to fight), he was sending pawns to do his dirty work. Toki could draw this conclusion without relying on any foreknowledge.
But she didn’t bring it up, and neither did the President.
They moved on. The President and Mera-san were interested by the mention of this Sensei, but they even more interested by the fact that Shigaraki had brought up Eraserhead. Toki had reported to the HPSC the story of how Nedzu had turned against the underground hero and fired him, but she hadn’t told them her suspicions about the end-goal of Nedzu’s strategy. If she could think of it, then the President would think of it too, and they would both get plausible deniability.
So Genmei-san asked Toki was Midoriya had said exactly, made a pensive sound, and then changed the subject entirely. But there was a calculating glint in her steel-grey eyes. Just like Toki, Genmei-san knew what this could mean. But… She knew it was important not to draw conclusions, and to not mention anything out loud. Plausible deniability, indeed.
Then they aborded the topic of how Shigaraki had been taken from the police station. The attack, the villains who had been there. Toki described Toga with as much detail as she could, considering that the girl had worn a gas mask. But Toki had seen her hair, her clothes, her build; she heard the pitch of her voice, the edge of delight in her laugh when she swung her knife, the squeal of joy when had nearly stabbed Quantum. From there, the HPSC had enough to infer an age, a gender, and maybe look for stabbing as an antecedent.
There had been five other villains there. The man that Toki ha tossed from a window, two other people attacking the street, and another guy attacking another level of the station alone. None of them had been identified. The descriptions were vague, but it was enough for Toki to recognize some characters: a man with a lizard-like mutation and a costume reminiscent of Stain, a slim man with a top hat and a long coat… But nobody had used blue flames.
Dabi wasn’t with the League of Villains. So where the hell was he?
“The situation is unfortunate,” Genmei-san sighed. “This black warper is becoming a problem. Quantum, I know you’re not in charge of the League case, but…”
“If the warper appears, he’s my priority,” Toki assured her.
But she was a bit slumped about how she could defeat Kurogiri.
She had fought a warper once; or, more exactly, a teleporter. She remembered it well. It had been during the operation in collaboration with the Nighteye Agency. Her enemy could only teleport in unoccupied spaces in his line of sight, but it was already a powerful Quirk. If the teleporter had been able to escape in the street… In the sky… then Toki would have lost him for sure. Teleporters were slippery, dangerous opponents. She knew it better than anyone else.
It was why she had waited until her mother was powerless to lead the heroes to her father’s doorstep. The only way to defeat someone with an unbeatable Quirk was to remove the Quirk from the equation.
“I want to be kept in the loop about the League investigation,” she told Genmei-san.
Nedzu was officially in charge of the case, but the HPSC has its own sources. Genmei-san nodded.
“It’s only fair. However, if you get involved in a more official capacity, we’ll have to pull out Hawks from this S-ranked mission.”
Yes, because they were a package deal. It would phenomenally stupid to have one half of the Icarus duo involved into the League investigation while the other half was trying to infiltrate the League. As a spy Hawks would have to make a show of good faith, and the League would absolutely use his connection to Quantum to ask for copies of the investigation about them.
But there was a perfect solution to that. Toki raised an eyebrow.
“Well, remove him from the mission, then. Hawks hasn’t made any progress. And even if he had, he’s not the only one with this mission, is he?”
Unlike what had happened in canon. Here, the President wasn’t putting all her eggs into one Hawks-shaped basket. Toki wasn’t exactly sure why (maybe because the League seemed more dangerous, with All Might weakened? Or maybe because Hawks was more valuable than in canon? Or maybe because other heroes had stepped up, in this universe?), but she wasn’t complaining.
“I was considering it anyway. He’s too visible, he won’t be approached.” The President sighed. “Fine, you’ll be kept updated, and Hawks is off the League case. Go home. Start to make plans on how to face the League the next time they appear. It’s going to be summer break. You don’t have to worry about teaching for a while. You can spend time relaxing. Maybe go visits Naruto Labs?”
Toki narrowed her eyes. Yes, visiting Naruto Labs had been in her plans for a while. How good of the President to remind her.
“You know what? Maybe I will.”
It was high time she met the new sponsored pupil of the Commission, after all.
Notes:
For those of you who are curious about the end-of-term exams and matchups, with how Thirteen is dead and how the class composition has changed, here it is:
Kaminari and Tokoyami VS Ectoplam (to force them to fight at close range) = PASS
Jirou and Koda VS Present Mic (his Quirk outclass their sound-based Quirk) = PASS
Kirishima and Sato VS Cementos (who doesn't have a time-limit) = FAIL
Aoyama and Hagakure VS Nedzu (light Quirks in an underground maze) = FAIL
Uraraka and Asui VS Vlad King (to make them focus on the offensive) = PASS
Ojiro and Iida VS Power Loader (he can negate their mobility) = PASS
Sero and Mineta VS Midnight (distance fighting) = PASS
Hitoshi and Midoriya VS All Might (to force them to keep their cool) = PASS
Todoroki and Yaogorozu VS Quantum (over-reliance on their Quirks) = PASS
Shoji and Ashido VS Snipe (focus on avoidance and stealth) = PASS
Also, about the Ryugamine Chronicles mentionned on the Discord Server by Monoma (PhantomOfTheOpera):
It's basically Durarara!!!, but in the BNHA-universe. I love this anime. I come back to it from time to time, when i want to watch chaos and tragedy and hilarity, and scream in surprise when suddently a plot-twist unravel. If you want to write a sociopath that you hate to love, then the main antagonist (or is he a protagonist?) is the best there is.
For those who aleardy know Durarara!!!: go watch it again ! And try to imagine it with Quirks. That would be so awesome. Having Quirks wouldn't even really change the multiple plots, but i would absolutely love for Izaya to have the power to make people confess their deepest desire (kind of like Lucifer in the Netfix show) xD
About Yoshimi: for those of you who read my french fics in the Harry Potter fandom, she's Alyssa/Cassie, the pink-haired Slytherin comic relief with hair-raising competence. I wanted to give Mera and assistant for a while, too xD Poor guy deserves a break!
So here we have it. Yoshimi will have her entry in "Snapshots of wisdom" too !
Mmmmh i hope nothing bad happen to Hitoshi now that he single-handedly took down Shigaraki.
Just saying.
Chapter 48: King Nitro
Summary:
It is time for Toki to meet the HPSC's new protégé.
It's also a chance to think about where she comes from.
Notes:
I'M BACK !
So many things happened during those two weeks since the last chapter! I went LARPing (and didn't die), i fell back in the ASOIAF fandom... by the way, if you ever read "The Weirwood Queen" on AO3, HOLY FUCK what a masterpiece. I'm still lying on the floor, trying to process it.
Shit. I am in awe. This fic unmade me on a molecular level.
It's what ASOIAF should have been if GRRM wasn't sexist or racist, had done more historical research, and left amazing end-of-chapter notes to explain his worldbuilding... while keeping his masterful intrigues, and the character's dry humor. Every character is extremely well-handled! Even Daenerys who is really not easy to write because she has good intentions but her way to cope with her abuse is to BECOME her abusers (a dragon like Viserys, a conqueror like Drogo), which obviously lead her to commit atrocities and then backpedal to justify them. Anyway this fic is GREAT. i fucking loved the suspense, the plot-twists, how things are both better than in canon and yet the general theme of "death can come at any moment" was still very much a threat. Fuck, i am in love.
Also, it's super long, and i'm a slut for very long fics. 157 chapters? I LIVED OFF THAT FIC FOR NEARLY A WEEK. It was magical.ALSO i started writing a ASOIAF fic but i'm not sure where i'm going with it. It's a self-insert in Renly Baratheon. I love it because his plan was "not make any waves, just pretend i'm a genius by inventing the printing press or some shit" and then in THE FIRST CHAPTER i just shot myself in the foot because Renlywena is a soft-hearted hufflepuff so he made roads, healthcare, justice, charity, and both the grand inventions and the political meddling took a backseat for at least a decade, which is just HILARIOUS.
Also i'l trying to write with alternating POVs and let me tell you it's REALLY NOT easy.
Oh and also i've been daydreaming for the past three days about a Wisdom Fae AU. Meteor is a vampire, Endeavor a fire giant, Kameko a kitsune. This is all the Discord's fault. I love you guys <3
BUT WHO CARES ?! You're here for the chapter !! And here it is !
Disclaimer: the idea of "Bakugo having No Chill Ever because of his Quirk" comes from a great analysis of his Quirk that i found on Tumblr. Actually, quite a few quotes about Bakugo in this chapter come from meta and analysis that i found on Tumblr. I went down a rabbit hole when i started researching his Quirk x)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
KING NITRO
Summer break was a time of freedom and relaxation for students. Toki had no classes to teach until September, and she fully planned on using all that free time to train and fight and appear more often in the spotlight, climbing the rankings just as she had promised Keigo.
But she could also relax. Take time off.
Well, as much as a workaholic like her could take time off. The first week of summer break was busy for her. She brought her laptop with her and went to visit Mihoko-san, so she could frantically work on her thesis while spending time with her daughter. Or she went to Musutafu with Keigo and a whole stack of files to read, and they took turns filing their paperwork and playing with the baby.
Hinawa called Toki Mama, now. The first time she said it, Toki felt like all the air had felt her lungs. It made her knees weak, and suddenly, the realization that she had a baby girl, and that baby girl knew who Toki was and loved her.
Less than two days after, Hinawa called Keigo Papa; and Toki could see the exact same realization wash over her husband’s face.
Hinawa was ten months old. Her big orange eyes took in the world with never-ending curiosity. She toddled unsteadily on her legs, with her little wings flapping to help her keep her balance. The fuzz on her wings was getting denser, fluffy, and soft. According to Keigo, it wouldn’t turn to real feathers until she was at least two years old. She was a hatchling still, not yet a fledgling.
Her wings hadn’t grown at all and seemed comically small compared to the rest of her body. It made it easier to hide them under her clothes, at least, and Mihoko didn’t have to purchase garments tailored for mutants.
Hinawa spoke more, too. She babbled and exclaimed and pointed imperiously to things when she wanted to be given their names. When Toki took her on her knees and enthusiastically told her a story, pointing to colored pictures in books, Hinawa exclaimed in all the right place, following the narration with wide eyes and all the focus of her little mind. She loved being told stories. She loved bright colors and soft fabrics, too, and she made grabby hands at everything that attracted her eyes. She was fascinated by Keigo’s wings. He made his feathers dance for her, and she always let out a bell-like laugh, filled with pure childish wonder, clapping her hands, her whole face alight with joy. She loved being tossed high in the air, too; she loved it even more when it was Keigo who did it, with his feathers discreetly stuck to her clothes so he could lift her even higher.
Time was flying so quickly. Hinawa was so big already. She was happy, and undeniably raised with love and care, with her aunt Mihoko and her big brother Hitoshi, and her Mama and Papa visiting so frequently that they had their own bed in the apartment. But when she would be grown, would she remember it with fondness? Would she resent her parents, for letting her be raised by the Shinsō? Toki and Keigo had made Icarus their priority over their daughter, just like Meteor and Sayuri had once prioritized their villain careers over their child.
Toki didn’t want her daughter to doubt herself like she had.
So she took care to tell to Hinawa who much she was loved, how much she was wanted. Toki told her about her day, complained about the stunts of her sidekicks, laughed when she admitted that she always participated in theses stunt wholeheartedly; she explained how black holes worked and why space exploration was great; she ranted about spaceships and rockets and constellations… Maybe Hinawa was too little to understand everything, but Toki wanted her to know about her world. Toki wanted Hinawa to never doubt that her mother wanted to share everything with her.
Keigo had the same attitude. He was maybe even more enthusiastic. And yet, more careful, somehow; like he was always afraid of being too brusque, always afraid that the sharp edges of his longest feathers would cut something. Protective, like a mother hawk. When he had his daughter in his arms, sleeping peacefully, with her weight supported by his feathers securely… Keigo’s wings puffed up in happiness, and his smile was blinding.
And, unbidden, Toki thought of her father, too. Meteor may not have loved her like Toki loved Hinawa, he may not have been a very present father or a perfect one, but he loved her, didn’t he?
Toki had promised that she would reach out. Before the end of the summer, she had said. That left her two months. Sometimes she was relieved by how far away this deadline was, and sometimes she just wanted it to be over with.
She texted Endeavor on impulse, to ask for news about Meteor. The Number One hero responded so promptly that Toki wondered if he had been waiting for it.
“I can’t believe you have Endeavor’s personal number,” Keigo bemoaned. “You know, six months ago I would have given a kidney for that!”
Toki made a complicated face. “Don’t tell me you’re still fantasizing about him.”
“Nah. It’s less funny when he’s going to be my father-in-law.”
Toki froze, because that consideration hadn’t crossed her mind, and now holy shit what a horrific realization it was. Aaaaaarghjhgew-ew-ew, please, no.
Keigo saw her eyes go wide, and he grinned.
“Ah, there it is. The freak-out. I had mine, too, you know? At first I was laughing, and then there was a slow descent into horror as I wondered if I had a daddy kink. It was very sad.” Toki made a garbled noise, and Keigo’s grin widened as he continued cheerfully: “Now I made my peace with the situation, however. Because if there is one conclusion to be reached from the fact that your father is thirsty for that flaming beefcake and you’re thirsty for my twinky self, it’s that the Taiyōme have impeccable taste in men.”
“…. Please stop talking.”
Keigo cackled. But he mercifully changed the subject. “Did you make plans to meet him? Your dad, I mean.”
“Not yet. But Endeavor gave me his personal address. We agreed it would be weird to organize that at his agency or ours, so it will be in his home. I’ll go check out the place later, when no one’s there, so I can teleport in and out.”
“How stalkerish of you. I approve. You know, you could have just asked Fuyumi to give you a tour.”
Toki was reminded that yeah, she had told Keigo about Fuyumi, a while back. Somehow the subject had never been brought up again, because when she had told him, he had gotten fixated on… not the vigilante stuff, but the fact that Fuyumi had meet Meteor face to face. Because Endeavor had brought him home, holy shit, they definitively had fucked, urgh, gross. Toki let out a moan of despair, and put a hand on her face.
“I didn’t tell him I knew Fuyumi,” she muttered behind her hand. “And I don’t intend to. She would be in serious trouble if her father found out she was a vigilante.”
“Well if you’re coming clean about your identity, she doesn’t have any leverage to force you to keep that a secret, does she?” Keigo asked rationally. “And that leverage is the reason why you kept silent in the first place.”
“Yeah, but now I also taught her how to fight, and I’m involved. If I say anything I could also implicate Sachiko, too. Better to just… not say anything.”
“Mmmh. That will make for an interesting family reunion.” Keigo’s voice was morbidly curious. “It sounds like the setting for a wacky rom-com. The hero and the redeemed villain start a relationship, and their children have to cohabitate while also not revealing that they already know each other… and they also have to hide that they’re a hero and a vigilante respectively.”
Toki groaned.
“Oh, and the fact that your ex is the vigilante’s current girlfriend just makes it spicier,” Keigo added with laughter in his voice. “And isn’t your fledgling Monoma trying to woo little Shouto? Damn, those Todoroki sure are attractive.”
Toki groaned louder.
It was so ridiculous. When you dipped a hand into the Todoroki drama, you got sucked whole. Toki had found the metaphor funny before, but she hadn’t realized how much it was true. What had been the start of this crazy spiral? Had it started when Hitoshi had befriended Shouto? When Toki found out about Fuyumi? When Meteor had decided that he was going to woo freaking Endeavor (because what was another bad decision in his impressive tally already)?
Toki’s favorite Todoroki was now Natsuo, on the sole basis that he was the only one in this insane family that hadn’t wormed his way into her life.
Whatever.
Toki couldn’t mope forever about her father and his bad tastes in men (and in life decisions). She had a job to do. She had villains to arrest, incidents to solve, and a maximum amount of work to cram into her day so she could climb the ranking before the next Billboard Chart. She also had her Ph.D. to work on. She had booked the free spot to present her thesis in the third week of August.
It also made her have a serious talk with Melissa because this thesis would be presented and defended by Toki Hoshizora, an astrophysics student. Toki Hoshizora’s name would be known, her CV would be distributed to potential employers or researchers: and Toki Hoshizora was Quirkless.
It wasn’t a bad thing! Only bigots would call attention to it. But attention would be called to it, whether Toki wanted it or not. So she could either stick to her guns and pretend to be Quirkless, make herself a voice for them…
Or stop lying, and admit she had a Quirk.
She could easily change her entry in the Quirk registry. She didn’t even have to put down Warp-Space! She could pretend to have a mental Quirk, like the ability to steal hours of sleep from other people to make them insomniacs at the cost of becoming sleepy herself. Or the ability to always guess the weather! Nobody would think too hard about it if she had the same Quirk as Mera-san, and it was easy to fake. You just had to look at a weather report every morning.
Or maybe she could pretend to have a variant of Warp-Space. Her Quirk allowed her to do quite a lot of nifty little tricks that could look like a completely separate power. Like the Warp-Blast. Or Switch, that move where she teleported one object from one hand to the other.
The point was that when Hoshizora’s identity had been created, pretending to be Quirkless had been the easiest path. Nobody asked questions, there was no need to invent a Quirk and a way to fake it, and the fact that Toki was ‘disabled’ also made it easier for people to dismiss her. But now… Now Toki had other options.
And being Quirkless wasn’t the easy cop-out that it had been in the past.
Now being Quirkless was a social issue and a statement. There was a Quirkless hero in training. Human rights were discussed more vehemently. Discrimination was a serious offense, instead of being shrugged off as ‘people being too sensitive’. So if Toki Hoshizora claimed to be Quirkless, yes, she could help the cause, give a face and a voice to a minority, and maybe it would help them, in the short term. But it would be a lie. It would be dishonorable.
And what about the long-term, when the truth came out? Toki wouldn’t be able to go advocate for the Quirkless and pretend to be one forever. It wouldn’t feel right. She would slip, or someone would take a radio of her feet to discredit her or something.
It was tempting to have the power to speak up and immediately say that she was going to use it to speak for the voiceless. But maybe it wasn’t her place.
Toki talked about it with Melissa at length. Melissa spoke of it with… people, Toki supposed. Maybe her uncle. Maybe the Ordinary Community, online. Maybe her father. But in the end, Melissa agreed with Toki about needing to come clean.
And within the day, Toki edited Hoshizora’s entry in the Quirk registry, to give her a Quirk named Switch.
It was good to support Quirkless people. Support them, yes; but impersonating them was another story. So Toki Hoshizora gained a Quirk, discreetly. On her online job, she had never stated being Quirkless, only staying silent on the subject, so it was easy to slip a word here and here to make sure people knew she had a Quirk.
At college, it was harder: quite a few teachers had a looked at her file, and there was even one bigoted teacher who knew for sure she was Quirkless. Rectifying the situation required a little effort. Toki put on her Hoshizora disguise to take a stroll down the Fukuoka University and struck a pleasant conversation with the secretary to change her (fake) address in her file. She used the opportunity to lightly complain about having once forgotten to update her file in the Quirk registry, leading to a mislabeling of Quirklessness for years before she realized the error! They had a good laugh over it.
Then Toki left, and let the rumor mill do its job.
At the end of the week, she came back to get some insignificant paperwork, and no less than four people teased her about her forgetfulness. They all asked what her Quirk was. The bigoted teacher who had scorned her for years didn’t even dare to make eye contact.
Toki patted herself on the back for a job well done.
Anyway. That was how her first week of summer break went.
And then Toki decided to pay a visit to Naruto Labs.
And not just for a casual stroll, no. This was an official visit. An ex-sponsored hero supervising the program, as per regulations. The recommended student had a summer break, too, but only the month of August would be spent with his family. In July, either he stayed there to train, or he was sent on a formative summer camp. Toki had a feeling that Bakugou would be there.
Keigo wanted to come with her, more for curiosity’s sake than anything. Toki also reached out to Inferno, Majestic and Serpentine, to see if they were interested. Inferno didn’t seem very enthused at the idea of going back, but apparently Salamander tore him a new one about responsibility and raising the new generation and making sure the young ones had it easier than him, so in the end he agreed to come, too. Majestic bowed out, however. So did Serpentine, even if she apologized profusely for it.
Toki had the weird impression that Serpentine didn’t have many friends. Which was strange, because she was very cheerful and outgoing. But maybe it was because she worked as an underground hero? It was harder to make friends when you relied on secrecy. Serpentine had joined a coalition-style agency but as a young hero, she probably tried to seem tough and to do everything herself to prove she wasn’t weak.
Toki knew the feeling.
Anyway. Toki warped the three of them to the Labs. Nobody had been warned of their arrival, and it was kind of funny to see the researchers scramble to inform their bosses. But within two minutes, order came back, and a lone figure strode out to meet the newcomers in the hallway.
“Welcome,” serenely said Titania, former Number Ten, and oldest retired heroine. “It’s a pleasure to have you here.”
Quantum had met Titania before, and she nodded her head respectfully. Inferno, slouched with his hands in his pockets, only yawned.
“Yes, yes, we’re all very happy to be there. Can we see the boy wonder to make sure he doesn’t have rabies, before going on our way?”
Keigo started sniggering, and Toki let out a loud groan:
“Senpai! I can’t take you anywhere.”
“Clearly it doesn’t stop you.”
“Senpai.”
“Aw, be nice!” Keigo chirped, sauntering towards Titania to live her an extravagant bow. “Titania, it’s been a while! How is life as a teacher treating you? Our own sensei used to say that it felt like herding cats away from boxes, but that may have to do with the unruly nature of his students and not with the job itself.”
Titania’s lips twitched. “I can’t imagine why.”
“Me neither! I was such an adorable kid.”
Titania shook her head fondly, then turned. “Come with me. King Nitro is at the training ground.”
“King Nitro?” Toki repeated. “Is that his name?”
“For the moment. He changed it several already. His first proposal was King Explosion Murder, which was vetoed.”
Inferno had to slap a hand on his mouth to bite down an incredulous guffaw. Toki didn’t blame him. Unperturbed, Titania continued in a bland voice:
“Mera-san assigned him the handle Detonator until something better came along. Within a month the boy changed it to Rampage. Then it was King Rampage, and now, it’s King Nitro. I’ve been given to understand that there’s a betting pool among the researchers, for the duration of his current name as well as what he’ll pick next.”
“Of course there is a betting pool,” scoffed Toki, but she was smiling.
They crossed the labs, and soon enough they were at the familiar training ground. The place was the same, but also… not. A lot of the high hoops and other stuff needed to train two flying teenagers had been dismantled when Serpentine was training and been replaced with tunnels and high blocks to climb; and now those things had been replaced with big walls and chunks of rock, wooden structures for agility races, and so on.
And there, hands in his pockets and looking mulishly at their little group, was Katsuki Bakugo.
He was slouching, like a rebellious teenager unhappy to be dragged into a family reunion and letting his displeasure known. His eyes widened slightly when he recognized the newcomers, before narrowing again with mistrust.
Bakugou didn’t look like much: spiky ashy blond hair, red eyes, pale skin, and muscular shoulders. Not a single scar on his bare arms, which was unusual for a teenager immersed in physical training. And oh boy, he had a death glare. He could have been a pretty boy, kind of like Neito Monoma, if he hadn’t seemed so pissed.
“So this is him?” Inferno didn’t look impressed.
Bakugo bristled. “Who the hell are you?”
“Nitro, be polite,” Titania said evenly. “These are heroes who trained here before you. Your senpai, if you will. Inferno, Quantum, Hawks, this is King Nitro, the newest hero hopeful of the sponsorship program.”
Then she leveled a look at Bakugo. He made a face, but then dutifully growled: “Yeah, whatever, pleased to meet you.”
Toki almost did a double-take. That was almost polite. Either she was misremembering canon, or Bakugo was drastically more chill than he used to be.
“The alumni of the sponsorship program have a visitation right to Naruto Labs,” Titania continued, unperturbed. “They will drop by periodically to evaluate your performance.”
“And also to make sure you’re not chained down in a basement while they sell your organs on the black market,” Toki added. Everyone looked at her. She blinked: “What? It’s a secret training facility kept out of all paperwork. There must be some oversight. Genmei-san refused to let the Top Ten interfere, so it’s us, the alumni, who have to do it.”
“She got a point,” Keigo shrugged. Then he grinned at Bakugo, “Nobody sold your organs, right? Both kidneys accounted for? You’re not missing part of your liver?”
“Fuck no.”
“Good! See? That’s how efficient we are. Now, I’m not super-clear on what we’re supposed to do. Do we get a tour, or do we go straight to the demonstration part? With a name like King Nitro I will be very disappointed if nothing explodes.”
“Oh, you’ll have explosions alright,” Bakugo snorted.
Keigo raised an eyebrow toward Toki. He didn’t need to do more for her to get the message, and she turned to Titania.
“I’m not opposed to that tour before having a demonstration. It’s been a while since we’ve been there, right, Inferno-senpai? Hawks can supervise the warm-up.”
Meaning: Hawks could interrogate Bakugo alone, sensing his heartbeat and judging his stress level with his feathers, while Inferno kept Titania away and Toki poked around the Labs. Titania nodded once, always with that absolute placidity.
“Of course. Follow me.”
oOoOoOo
They did a tour. They saw the labs, the cafeteria, and even the bedrooms. The library. The gym. Little sinks had appeared pretty much at every corner of the facility, with a special soap that got rid of nitroglycerine. One of the unused classrooms (where Toki had once busted a lamp with her first Warp-Blast, a lifetime ago) had been converted in a music room. There were drums, a bass, two guitars, a small piano.
The place didn’t look like a prison. It looked like a research lab with comfortable living quarters, where a teenager also happened to live. Bakugo wasn’t locked up. He went to school all week in the nearby village. He also had joined two clubs, because he had an obligation to socialize a little.
Not that he really liked it. Titania said Bakugo was an introvert. Surprising, for someone so loud and emotional, right? Bakugo found other people frustrating, or even straight-up exhausting (but he would never admit it, just like he would never admit any vulnerability). He was more comfortable jogging alone in the park. He had one weekend free every month, and he used it to go hiking. If he hadn’t been so determined to be a hero, Bakugo would have probably been happier as a hermit somewhere.
Toki inquired about his parents and his relationship with them. Did they call often? Were they allowed to visit? Did Bakugo talk about them?
But the answers were kind of frustrating. The Bakugo parents (or at least the father) called once a week, in the beginning. Now it was once a month. Bakugo had been offered to go home in August, but even though he had agreed reluctantly to go back for one weekend, he had refused to stay at his parents’ house longer. He would come straight back to the Labs and spend the rest of his summer break hiking.
Well. Toki didn’t remember much details about the relationship between Bakugo and his parents, but she did remember his mother being just as aggressive as he was. Maybe they had parted on bad terms? In any case, there were no warm and fuzzy feelings to be found here.
It was worrying. Kids should have a good relationship with their parents. But hey, Toki, Keigo, and Kaname-senpai hadn’t: and yet they had turned out all right in the end.
Toki mostly worried about Bakugo being lonely. Isolated. Even an introvert needed to spend time with friends, to have people who made him feel safe and appreciated. Even if it was only on an online forum or something. That was the reason why Toki had wanted to check Naruto Labs in the first place. She wanted to be sure that this place was treating Bakugo correctly, not just as a hero in training but also as a young teenager that still needed support to grow. If Bakugo seemed unhappy or mistreated in one way or another, Toki would have no qualms about kidnapping him and raining down hellfire on the Labs.
But Bakugo didn’t seem unhappy. Titania even said that he seemed more grounded now than he had been in the beginning. No less explosive, but somehow less volatile. Toki wondered if it was his teacher’s influence.
Titania was… very zen. Always so calm, almost blank, like nothing remotely phased her. Some would even call her emotionless, but she wasn’t empty, or robotic. Just serene, like the still waters of a bottomless lake.
The old heroine didn’t seem like the kind of person who would click with someone as emotional and explosive as Bakugo. And yet Titania appeared to do a good job. Toki had already drawn comparisons with Hayasa-sensei, ready to find the former Number Ten wanting; because hell, even if she was a super-strong heroine, that didn’t mean Titania was a good teacher. Eraserhead was proof of it. Teaching required sternness but also empathy, understanding, adaptability… and a healthy measure of playfulness, especially when you taught teenagers.
Titania, a very old heroine reputed for her placidity, wasn’t who Toki would have picked for the job. But while they toured the Naruto Labs, they talked, and… Toki had to admit to herself that maybe she had been wrong.
After all, in canon Bakugou had clearly respected Aizawa. The harsh no-nonsense kind of teaching grounded him more than kindness. Titania wasn’t without kindness, of course, but she also didn’t sugarcoat things.
“King Nitro’s issue isn’t a lack of control over his Quirk but a lack of control over his emotions. It leads to violent outbursts, and since he was never taught to restrain this behavior, he never internalized the need for control. His physical prowess is excellent, his mind is brilliant; however, he has the emotional maturity of a child. A child who can maim or kill someone every time his frustration spikes, and who has never been taught any healthy outlet.”
Yup, she didn’t sugarcoat things at all.
“There’s also the issue of his Quirk,” Titania added.
Toki blinked, taken aback. Wait, what? Bakugo never had an issue with that in canon. Inferno frowned.
“I thought he had no issues with controlling his Quirk.”
“He doesn’t. He sweats nitroglycerin from his palms, and nitroglycerin is used medicinally as a strong vasodilator. It can lower blood pressure dangerously even at low dosages.”
Toki sucked in a breath. Holy shit. She may be a little rusty with chemistry, but she wasn’t completely clueless. And yet it had never occurred to her to look up the medical side-effect of secreting toxic chemicals. Bakugo’s palms produced the stuff, but the rest of his body wasn’t completely immune to it, was it? Meaning it got into his bloodstream. Meaning he was constantly exposed to what should be a deadly dose of chemical. Which meant his body had adapted, which meant—
“High blood pressure,” she breathed.
“Correct.” Titania nodded. “While people can build up some immunity to nitroglycerine over time, high exposure would still be dangerous. To survive, his body uses some sort of counter. Two of the best are adrenaline and cortisol, two hormones that can significantly raise blood pressure and do so fairly quickly.”
“Meaning that Nitro having No Chill Ever is actually his body’s way of keeping his blood pressure even!” Toki realized; eyes wide. “He’s constantly at ninety-nine percent stress level for everything. It’s why he’s so intense! He’s got near max levels of adrenaline in him at all times.”
Inferno raised his eyebrows, looking incredulous: “So you’re telling me that being calm for once in his life would kill him?”
“Basically, yes.”
This new information about Bakugo seemed to soften Inferno somewhat. He hadn’t been very well-disposed towards the teenager, that much was obvious. Since Salamander knew so much about the HPSC, he had probably learned of Bakugo’s circumstances. For Inferno, who had suffered a lot because he lacked control over his Quirk and hurt people without meaning to… Bakugo must seem like an overly privileged brat. After all, Bakugo had perfect control over his Quirk. Meaning that if he hurt people, it wasn’t an accident, it was because he deliberately chose to.
Uh. Now that Toki thought about it, everyone in this conversation knew exactly who Bakugo was: his name, his past, his reason for being here. They were all skirting around it but they all knew. Ironic.
“Jeez,” Inferno snorted. “No wonder he looks like a powder keg ready to blow.”
“Not an inaccurate metaphor, considering his Quirk,” Titania said blandly.
Toki had no idea if Titania was being humorous or not. It was hard to say, with her impeccable poker face. But maybe it was part of the joke for her; having people do a double-take, wondering if she was serious or if it was deadpan sarcasm.
“He still has a piss-poor attitude,” Inferno commented.
“Oh, come on.” Toki elbowed him. “All of us were brats when we were here. Except Hawks, of course, because he’s nice like that. But we were all filled with existential rage.”
“Yeah, because we had a legit tragic backstory and daddy issues. Nitro has neither. He’s an angry kid who can’t stop throwing temper tantrums.”
True. Toki felt no compassion for petty bullies like him. When aggressivity and arrogance came from a place of insecurity and fear, it wasn’t excusable but it was understandable. Toki thought about Neito’s bragging and competitiveness, or about Hitoshi’s assholes tendencies. But when cruelty came from a place of privilege… then it was unforgivable.
But then, maybe she was judging Bakugo too quickly. She didn’t know him, after all. She had only seen him for three minutes, max. So she turned to the one who did know him, and asked lightly:
“What’s your verdict, Titania? Is his poor attitude fixable?”
Titania blinked, slowly. She looked like a very old owl statue, with her face placidly unreadable.
“He will be a great hero either way.”
“But will he kind?” Toki insisted.
Titania thought about it a moment.
“Probably not.” Her voice was just as calm as before. “He will be serious. He will be competent. He will be in control. He may regret his past actions. He may occasionally show generosity. He may learn how to be gentle. But he does not like people. Kindness will never come naturally to him. Nitro is selfish to his core.”
“That’s, uh, that’s a bad trait for a hero. Just saying.”
“Not really,” Inferno frowned. “Endeavor loathes the press, the crowds and all that jazz. He’s not very personable. He’s selfish, too, and arrogant. But that doesn’t stop him from having a good sense of duty and exceptional control over his anger, and that’s why he’s a great hero. I’m more worried about Nitro’s inability to handle his emotions like an adult.”
“Emotional maturity is a trait that takes time to develop,” Titania agreed blandly. “Nitro is a child that wasn’t taught a critical skill when he should have, but he can still be taught. It will take time. Maybe it won’t be done in three years. But I will do everything that I can for him, and I will endeavor to give him the tools to self-improve even after his departure from this facility. He’s hard-working and determined. He can do it.”
Toki pondered that for a moment. Then she took a long breath.
“Okay, then. And will he be happy? He’s got a lonely road ahead of him.”
“So do we all,” Titania retorted, unflappable. “It may be better for him to come to understand himself alone, at first, before undertaking the task of understanding others. He may be lonely, sometimes. But he will spread his wings and leave in a few years: and finding happiness will be up to him.”
So there was that.
They got back to the training ground. Keigo had struck up a conversation with Bakugo, who was frowning heavily but not yelling yet. They were speaking of aerial maneuvers, Toki heard when they got close. Keigo had pulled out his phone and was showing a video of Quantum fighting midair, using her opponents’ momentum against them. He was pointing out her kicks, and how Bakugo could easily integrate the same attacks in his own style, since his hands would be busy firing explosions to propel him. Bakugo was grumbling, but his eyes were intensely focused on the screen, and he wasn’t disagreeing. Toki couldn’t help but feel her cheeks heat.
Then Keigo spotted their approach and pocketed his phone back, winking at her.
“So, did you have a nice stroll?” he called out, grinning. “Can we get to the fun part now?”
“Absolutely,” Titania said without any inflection whatsoever. She turned to Bakugo. “Which exercise would you like to pick?”
“What, we can’t choose, as his senpai?” Keigo pretended to gasp in offense.
Titania ignored him, pointedly looking at Bakugo like it was only his opinion that mattered on that particular subject, patiently waiting for an answer. Bakugo grinned.
“A fight.”
“A one-on-one duel.” Titania tilted her head. “Pick your opponent, then.”
“I could take all three!” Bakugo fired back.
“You could not.” He puffed up like an angry cat, but Titania barreled on, not even raising her voice. “It is not a criticism, but a statement of fact. You have not yet reached their level. All of them are high-ranking pro-heroes with a lifetime of experience. Separately they would all pose a challenge to you. Together, they are unstoppable. Your fight would not be educational unless they considerably limited themselves, which would be a frustrating experience for you. To reach their level you must focus on your progression, and to focus on your progression I would suggest a one-on-one duel.” She paused. “Unless you have a counter argument, in which case I would ask you to verbalize it.”
Toki had a feeling that verbalizing things was not Bakugo’s strong point. He glared at her, worked his jaw for a second, then bit out:
“I never train against multiple opponents. It’s a shit oversight. I need the practice to get stronger.”
Titania considered it. “Good point. Would you accept a fight against all three of them, even if it means they will heavily restrain themselves and not fight you at one hundred percent of their strength?”
Bakugo narrowed his eyes, considering. Toki couldn’t help but be fascinated.
She had been so completely wrong when she had thought that Titania was unsuited to teaching Bakugo. Maybe their personalities were opposed, but Titania actually spoke his language. She put into words what frustrated him, she was blunt, she offered him options, she listened, she offered corrections, she didn’t back down… Titania communicated with him better than any teacher he had had in canon.
“I would still want a three-way fight,” Bakugo growled.
Titania turned towards the heroes. “Do you accept? I would ask you to moderate yourselves to fifty-percent of your strength at the maximum.”
Inferno groaned. “Do I have to?”
“What, you’re fucking scared?” Bakugo growled.
Inferno glared at him. Toki swatted his arm. “Senpai, be nice. It’s been forever since we fought together. It’ll be like old times!”
Inferno let out a sigh and got his hands out of his pockets. “Fine.”
And that’s how they all fought Katsuki Bakugo. Which was, Toki had to admit, something she had kinda resigned herself since deciding to visit the Labs. Bakugo couldn’t connect with people unless he tried to explode their faces, so to try and get to known him, Toki had to put herself out there. Literally.
So.
They fought.
It became immediately apparent that Bakugo was a fucking powerhouse. It was amazing. For a teenager, he was incredibly fast and his explosions were massive. He had incredible agility, even though the recoil on his shoulders must be horrible. And yet he bounced between gigantic blasts, bulldozed through fire and blades like a missile, attacked, powered on, as unstoppable as a hurricane.
It was great! Of course, he didn’t have their level, but he still made them work for it! It was rare for Toki to have a good aerial chase, and it was even rarer for her to be chased instead of chasing, and boy that was amazing! To have her heart speed up, narrowly dodge, to hit, to strike, to punch like you meant it!
He fought smart, too. Within five minutes he understood that Keigo’s feathers were weak to fire and from then on, he used Inferno’s blaze as a shield, even at the risk of being roasted medium rare himself. Especially since the fire could ignite the nitroglycerine on his palms, which Inferno gleefully did to try and sabotage Bakugo; but Bakugo got right into his face, fearless, because if he was going down he would take his opponent down with him.
Toki had to swoop in to warp Bakugo in the air and stop him from escalating things; and she nearly got her face blow up for her trouble. She escaped with a powerful Warp-Blast. When she reappeared with another Blast ready to go, Bakugo and her exchanged matching feral grins.
Explosions were dangerous, whether it was compressed air or nitroglycerine. They could propel you but they could also dislocate your shoulders; they could main, injure, kill.
Most people believed that the most dangerous thing in an explosion was the heat. It wasn’t. It was the concussive force, the shockwave. That thing had strength. It punched you like a locomotive at terminal velocity. After an explosion, you usually found charred bits of people; but you found bits, because as they were cooked they were also blown to pieces, their soft insides torn apart by the release of kinetic energy.
So Toki felt her respect for the kid climb a little when she realizes the exact amount of control he must have, at all times, over his sweat build-up and the strength of his detonations.
And then, without any hesitation, she exploded a Warp-Blast at his fucking face and braced herself for retribution.
Bakugo didn’t pull any punches. Toki had to, of course, or else they would have torn each other apart; but she still grinned with utter exhilaration, zipping in the sky, falling and warping and hitting, dancing with the red feathers, dodging flames and heavy blasts, laughing all the while.
It was fun!
After half an hour, Titania gave a sharp whistle and ended it. Well, Bakugo yelled a lot about how he could keep going, they weren’t fucking done! But he still stopped fighting on her order, which Toki mentally took note of.
In her memories, Bakugo had been the kind of lash out even after the end of a fight, if he wasn’t happy. Hadn’t something like that happened with Midoriya? And with Shouto?
But he did stop fighting, growling, and slouching almost aggressively. He didn’t even recoil when Toki, still riding the high of a good fight, excitedly slung an arm around his shoulders.
“You can’t poach that one for Icarus,” Inferno mocked her. “Don’t you already have your hands full with your disaster ducklings?”
Toki stuck out her tongue at him: “Rude. And they’re fledglings.”
“Besides, I don’t think Nitro here would be on board to be a sidekick,” Keigo pointed out, looking totally unruffled (Bakugo had never been even close to touch him). “Unless I’m wrong, Nitro?”
“Fuck no. I’m going to go pro directly and be a solo hero.”
“Like Mirko!”
Inferno laughed. “Oh, gods, exactly like Mirko.”
“A hero who’s in to kick ass and doesn’t give a shit about moral lessons?” Toki remembered. “Damn, you’re right. It’s a shame Mirko doesn’t do internships.”
“Are you satisfied with your visit, then?” Titania asked serenely.
Toki looked at Bakugo. He stared back at her without blinking, his red eyes full of defiance and fire, his back straight, his stance relaxed but steady as a rock.
This Bakugo would never have his canon storyline. He wouldn’t get to befriend Kirishima, he wouldn’t get to make his peace with Midoriya through war and shared hardship, he wouldn’t find a rival in Shouto. He wouldn’t get taught by All Might, Aizawa, Present Mic, or any of the Yūei teachers. He wouldn’t taste fear and failure at the summer camp, he would never get captured, never carry the guilt of ending the Symbol of Peace; he would never get the catharsis of a fight with his childhood friend turned victim turned rival, he would never learn companionship and trust at his side.
Maybe he would never be as happy as he had been in canon.
But maybe he would never be as afraid as he had been in canon.
What could have been didn’t matter as much as what was; and Bakugo was here, for better or worse… and he wasn’t unhappy there. He didn’t even seem lonely. He was more in control of his temper than Toki had expected. He was strong, too; maybe even stronger than he had been in canon. He was grounded. Yes, Titania hadn’t been wrong when she had used this word. Bakugo had found a solid foundation here, something steady and capable of making him grow, and he was building himself from the ground up.
It wasn’t what had happened in canon, and maybe this was depriving Bakugo of things that only the canon would have taught him. But this Bakugo wasn’t canon-Bakugo any more than this world was the canon universe. What he would live through and learn here may be things that the canon universe would have never let him experience. What was, was.
There was a serenity in this, too. Acceptance, maybe. Toki had written countless poems about this, once upon a time, looking for a way to make this peace settle within her bones, to accept what was instead of itching to know what could have happened.
She breathed in. She breathed out.
Let it go
let it leave
let it happen;
nothing in this world was promised
or belonged to you anyway.
This Bakugo would never have his canon storyline. It wasn’t good, nor was it bad. It just was. Sometimes people got more options, sometimes they got less. Sometimes they took paths that you wouldn’t have envisaged for them. People adapted to the world around them, and this world wasn’t the canon one. It had never been, and it never will be.
Toki owed nothing to what could have been.
“Yeah.” Toki smiled. “I’m satisfied.”
oOoOoOo
Before leaving, Toki exchanged phone numbers with Titania and gave her an itemized list of the kind of stuff Okamoto had taught her and that she thought could be useful to learn for a hero in training. Keigo and Inferno were politely pretending to wait for her at the gates, and Bakugo was clearing the rubble from the training ground, but Toki had no doubt that they were all eavesdropping.
So Toki didn’t mention how Okamoto had them work at a morgue to get used to dead bodies, and she definitely didn’t mention Hobo-san beating them in deserted parking lots. But she did mention working in an animal clinic to get used to blood, working in a fire station, a hospital, and a shelter. She mentioned being taught how rescue worked and how to organize one; she talked about the soup kitchens and how it had helped her understand that not all evil could be defeated with her fists.
She saw Bakugo scoff from the corner of her eyes, at that. But Titania only nodded, completely serious, and said she understood. It would be difficult to accept for Bakugo, who had elevated self-reliance to a matter of principle he needed to live by. But people had to help each other. It wasn’t just good; it was necessary. Individualism could only exist if a community existed first to support the individual.
To take it a step further, individualism was rubbish. It was true in heroism, but also in society, as a whole. The individual was an entirely powerless unit. No matter how strong your Quirk was, how smart you were, or how self-reliant you were as a single individual, you couldn’t do anything truly meaningful. The individual could not give birth to themself, could not raise themself, educate themself, or change the world by themself.
Your individual self was entirely a product of the people and the environment around you. You existed because of other people; you were part of a whole, and even if you were whole by yourself, you would always be less on your own than you could be within a strong and healthy community.
It was especially true when you did a demanding and dangerous job, like heroism. You couldn’t ignore the rest of the world, the rest of your team, because you wanted to prove yourself. You had to work with others. You had to want to work with others; and for that, you had to realize they had value.
Toki also offhandedly suggested working with hero schools, you know, to teach Bakugo how to navigate a battle or a rescue operation with other people as opponents, but also allies, or bystanders. Explosions could have massive collateral damage. It would be better to have some practice in a controlled setting, before letting loose in a real fight, with real stakes.
Titania assured her that it was planned. Bakugo had been signed up in every Provisional License Exam, both official and remedial, to assist the coordinators and play various roles (either against the competitors or in support of them). It was… it was kind of smart, Toki had to admit.
It also meant that Bakugo would be here when Class 1-A would pass their Provisional License Exam. With Midoriya. And Hitoshi. Crap.
That was, uh… That was something Toki should try to anticipate, maybe.
Toki didn’t let her little freak-out show, and politely thanked Titania. She offered to give her a copy of the uhei’s curriculum since she was a teacher there. It wasn’t badly done, even though as a sponsored child herself, Toki considered it lacking. Titania readily agreed. And then it was time to say goodbye.
It had gone… not really like Toki had expected it, but not badly.
Toki brought everyone back to Osaka, and they got lunch at one of Inferno’s favorite restaurants. The place was discreet, and they had yakitori, so it was perfect. Salamander was already waiting for them, and it was a nice occasion to catch up.
Also, Salamander was kind of curious about the HPSC’s newest pupil, even if he hid it under his usual grumpiness. He asked pointed questions, and he didn’t interrupt Keigo once when he recounted their fight with way too many details. He did close his eyes halfway through, too. He was either asleep or meditating. Astral projecting? Hayasa-sensei did that sometimes when Keigo or Toki talked a lot.
“King Nitro isn’t a bad name, but it kind of gives away how his Quirk works,” Salamander finally grunted.
Inferno scoffed, and stole a skewer right out of his plate. “You don’t get room to talk, Salamander.”
“He got you there!” Toki laughed. “But yeah, we should have suggested some other names. It completely slipped my mind.”
Keigo made a face.
“We may not be the best people for that. I mean, my name is Hawks. His name is Inferno. We couldn’t find something less subtle even if we tried. And your name is an obscure reference to physics because that’s how you mind-tricked yourself into perceiving your Quirk, so once again, we go back to being useless at not naming ourselves after our powers.”
“Hey,” Toki protested. “I didn’t mind-trick myself about my Quirk. It is grounded in physics!”
“No more than anything else. You look at it in terms of physics to shape your conception of it, when in reality it’s closer to pure want.”
Toki opened her mouth to argue, and then let out a squeal of outrage when Inferno reached and stole a mushroom right from her bowl. In retribution, she tried to steal a piece of chicken; he fended her off with his chopsticks, and ferocious battle was engaged.
Keigo and Salamander looked at each other, then wordlessly used the distraction to steal Inferno’s last two skewers.
It definitely derailed the conversation.
“Still,” Toki said with dignity once they got back to the topic at hand. It had nearly devolved into a food fight, but since they were mature adults (and had already almost cleaned their plates), they had ended up with the mature compromise of ordering dessert. “I could totally suggest good names unrelated to his Quirk.”
“You probably shouldn’t suggest names related to his personality, though,” Inferno deadpanned.
“Yeah, Lord Explosion Murder can do that all by himself,” Keigo grinned.
Salamander and Inferno both sniggered. Okay, that name was a little cringe. But the kid was fifteen, for goodness’ sake. He was allowed to have bad taste. Toki snorted and started listing ideas of names, counting on her fingers:
“Apex, like an apex predator. Napalm. Combustion.” She paused, then admitted, “I do have a special fondness for Ground Zero, but it’s related to explosions.”
“Unlike Combustion?” Inferno said incredulously.
“Oh, no; that was referring to his personality.”
So basically, they had a great lunch, and they spent a little more time than necessary roasting Bakugo. But hey, you had to take joy where you could find it. Even if it was mean to laugh about a teenager behind his back, this specific teenager really had it coming.
Afterward, everyone went home. Toki’s mind still went back to him several times in the following days. She had felt responsible for him and maybe intrigued, too. Not by Bakugo himself, but by his canon-character.
She had known from the very beginning that they wouldn’t click. He was too brash, too aggressive, too rude, and too selfish. Toki knew it wasn’t the kind of person she could befriend quickly. The reverse was true, too. Bakugo wasn’t the kind of person that would trust her so easily, and even if she could be nice she wasn’t sure how to connect with a personality as explosive as him. So yeah, Toki had known they wouldn’t get along…
… and yet she had been prepared to take responsibility for him, to take the role of a mentor or a teacher, if he didn’t have anyone better.
She was kind of relieved that she wouldn’t have to, to be honest. Even in during their brief visit, Bakugo had answered best to Keigo (probably because he was higher ranked and more outgoing). If Toki had had to take responsibility for Bakugo, she wasn’t sure how she would have handled it.
She did understand him a little better, though.
Partly because of her conversation with Titania, but also partly after their fight. After seeing how ruthless and focused he was, with an attention to detail that verged on hyperfocus. Or how talented he was and how he made it look effortless but used muscles that had to be the result of years of intense training. Or how he spoke with Titania; how his teacher phrased her demands, laying down facts that Toki wouldn’t have considered (like how, obviously, three heroes against a kid were going to hold back). The emphasis Titania put on Bakugou’s progression, his choice of test, and the necessity to not compare himself to others.
It made a lot of sense when you thought about it.
Bakugo was tense, high-strung, and always at one hundred percent focus at all times. That was why he yelled and got frustrated so easily because everyone else was so fucking slow compared to him. He was callous and unthinkingly abrupt, but he hadn’t been cruel. He hadn’t even been mean. Only selfish.
What Bakugo wanted wasn’t to hurt others. Hurting other people wasn’t the goal, it had never been the goal. It was just a side-effect of getting what he wanted, and what he wanted was to feel good about himself. He wanted to feel strong. He wanted to feel like all his hard work was accomplishing something. It was normal; it was natural.
But Bakugo’s self-esteem didn’t come from what he had accomplished himself; it came from the feeling of being better than others. He had an inferiority complex, probably born from the societal pressure to be the best, which is why he not only had to be the strongest, but he also had to put others down below him.
Toki had a feeling that it was also why Bakugo was so pissed at the suggestion of his opponents holding back. In his mind, that meant that his opponents didn’t allow him to win fairly, and in his head, it was the same as not winning at all. Not winning meant losing… and losing meant being worthless. That was probably why canon-Bakugo lashed out when he felt like somebody was disrespecting him or not taking him seriously.
Bakugo’s mindset was very insular. Like Titania had said, he didn’t have the emotional maturity you could usually presume from a teenager. He just kind of assumed that everybody thought exactly the same way he did because he was not emotionally intelligent enough to understand other people.
For example, canon-Bakugo had assumed that canon-Todoroki holding back was an intentional insult against him instead of a trauma-induced flashback, so he had gotten angry.
But that was a moot point, now. This Bakugo would never meet Todoroki like that, and even if he did, Shouto used his fire freely now.
Anyway, Toki shouldn’t think too hard about this. Bakugo wasn’t her problem. Also, keeping him far away from Yūei may be safer for everyone. He hadn’t won the Sports Festival and hadn’t been chained to the podium, meaning that Shigaraki had no reason to try and recruit him, meaning that the summer camp probably wouldn’t be attacked… and really, that was all Toki was looking for in the near future.
Although, let’s be honest, she wouldn’t be serene until the summer camp was done and over with. She had a very bad feeling about this.
Nedzu hadn’t yet announced where or when the summer camp would happen. He said that he would send a notification to students and their families in mid-July, and the camps would happen somewhere around mid-August, but nothing more precise. Toki knew it was to avoid giving the League any clues, but she didn’t like the mystery.
She had her thesis presentation on the 18th of August. If Nedzu managed to have the summer camp at the same time she would go ballistic.
________________
< Antares: language is an unwieldy cudgel we use to beat the human experience to death in an attempt to communicate fully with another being. i wish intelligent life had never evolved. i want to go back to the cell stage like in spore.
> NotOnFire: mood.
> NotOnFire: also, what?
> SpciyWings: she’s working on her thesis and freaking out
> NotOnFire: you’re doing a thesis IN ADDITION to heroism?
> NotOnFire: do you ever stop?!
< Antares: well I named my hero agency Icarus, not ‘let’s lounge around in pajamas and wait for accomplishments to pass us by’
< Antares: so no.
> Moxie: savage.
> EndeavorSucks: -pat pat-
> EndeavorSucks: it will be alright
< Antares: you don’t know that!
< Antares: who can tell what whims will possess the overly fat and disenchanted professor that will read the fruit of my years of hard labor? who can tell if he will feel seized by admiration and passion and the poignant emotion that inspired mankind to reach for the stars? who can tell if he will stay unmoved, like a lump of rock in a garbage-filled sewer, reading the words with the dispassionate passivity of a quadragenarian waiting for the microwave to heat his soup after a day in the office, so disillusioned with life that no sense of poetry or purpose can tug at his soul? who can tell? can you tell? can I tell? who am i? what is the point?
> EndeavorSucks: er
> EndeavorSucks: … well I don’t have all the answers, but I do have some pretty hilarious evasive responses if wanna hear them?
< Antares: xD
> NotOnFire: xDDDD
> Moxie: btw Antares I sent you the paperwork for my work study this September 😊
> EndeavorSucks: how can you all be so focused on work
> EndeavorSucks: it’s summer! Relax. Do nothing. Be your laziest self. Transform into a couch.
> PikaPika: how are you on break right now, don’t you have a job?
> EndeavorSucks: it’s low-key right now, so I took a week off
> PikaPika: lucky you
> PikaPika: hooking up with your Grindr guy again?
> EndeavorSucks: nah I moved on
> EndeavorSucks: I got a new one
> SpicyWings: a cute one or a nutcase again?
> EndeavorSucks: both? he’s hot, in a nocturnal animal kind of way.
> NotOnFire: XD
> Moxie: … what the absolute fuck is that supposed to mean
< Antares: language
> Moxie: I can’t believe YOU are saying that, you’re the adult that swears the most around me
> PikaPika: shame on you Antares!
> PikaPika: what a poor example to give to the innocent youth
< Antares: ‘innocent youth’?!
< Antares: I cannot believe I’m hearing that about the girl who made a mecha-suit to kick people in the family jewels
> Moxie: I plan on making a career out of it
< Antares: I know. I’m so proud.
< Antares: … also neither Megamind nor Phantom are online, that’s rare
> Moxie: they’re with me, we’re training =)
> Moxie: we went to a ghost neighborhood to parkour and Megamind dropped his phone
< Antares: do you need me to pick you up?
> SpicyWings: don’t ditch patrol
> SpicyWings: how are you going to be Number Three if you slack off?
> NotOnFire: hey she could be Number Two by the next billboard chat, you know
> SpicyWings: I still got her beat in popularity, because I’m charming and she’s feral
< Antares: NOT TRUE
> SpicyWings: guess we’ll see 😉
< Antares: oh, it’s on.
________________
It was refreshing to swing by the Discord server from time to time. Sometimes they discussed really stupid things, like how the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was technically the highest ratio of killing birds with one stone in all of Earth’s history. And sometimes they argued about Quirk analysis something fierce, or about how the rankings were obsolete until they were all super-fired up and Toki was a hair away from petitioning the HPSC to end the Billboard Chart.
But sometimes it was just nice to chat with friends, get some news, and stay in touch. Also, Toki couldn’t forget how the Discord Server may have literally saved Hitoshi’s life that one time when he had intercepted Shigaraki.
Shigaraki. That was also a problem that needed solving. Even if he didn’t attack the summer camp, he would still make a move against class 1-A, sooner or later. He still needed to be stopped.
Toki remembered all too well how dangerous Shigaraki had been, in canon, after his Quirk awakening. It was so destructive. Decay spreading on the ground for miles, breaking out AFO, an army of villains, hundreds — no — thousands of people killed…
Yes, Shigaraki needed to be stopped.
And yet Toki was a bit slumped because she also remembered his tragic backstory and how he was used by AFO. She felt bad for him. AFO was the evil guy in this story. The puppet master. A murderous, evil, immortal mastermind who relished in chaos and mental torture, and who like to collect interesting, traumatized people like chess pieces that he could watch autodestruct from afar. In canon, AFO had never hesitated to sacrifice a pawn, but he cherished his main pieces.
It kind of baffled Toki that Shigaraki could adore someone so monstrous.
Not because he was evil. Hell, hadn’t Toki loved her own parents even if they both were cold-blooded killers? No, what baffled her was the fact that Shigaraki… or even people in general, like the doctor and all the villains who had worked for him… could love AFO even though they knew he could turn on them. AFO didn’t see his subalterns as people, only as toys and playthings, amusing but ultimately replaceable. He didn’t even hide the fact that he was using them.
And yet… Dr. Garaki, Gigantomachia, Shigaraki… a man like All For One had to show some kindness to them, some respect, to inspire the kind of reverence that those characters had seemed to feel for him.
… Could Toki make Shigaraki see that he was being used? Could she turn him against AFO, if they talked? Could she save him?
She considered it for the span of a whole minute. In the end, she reluctantly abandoned the idea. It didn’t matter that she could present a strong case. Shigaraki wouldn’t believe her.
Why would he? He had no reason to care about the sad story of his father. Nana Shimura was nothing to him. Toki had no proof that the fanon theory of ‘AFO gave Quirkless Tenko a destructive Quirk to ruin his life and then groom him’ was true. And even if she pretended it was, Shigaraki wouldn’t believe it.
That was the core of the issue, wasn’t it? People were always free to choose. And sometimes they chose evil.
Because they believed in it, because their friends were on this side, because it was easier, and because they had good reasons to mistrust the Good Guys… It boiled down to the same thing. They made the choice. And they had to be held accountable.
Shigaraki loved his mentor, as twisted as it seemed. Even if he knew AFO was a monster, even if his life was filled with pain, even if AFO wasn’t even hiding the fact that he was pushing him on a destructive path… It didn’t matter: Shigaraki revered him. AFO had saved him and raised him. He had made Shigaraki his puppet, even stripping him of his identity, and maybe on some instinctual level, Shigaraki knew he was a tool for his master. But it didn’t change his loyalty.
Toki sighed, closing her eyes. No, it didn’t change his loyalty. Maybe it enhanced it, actually.
“What are you thinking about?” Keigo asked, closing the door behind him.
Toki blinked, and shook her head. She started closing the tabs on her computer. It was late, they were probably the last people at the agency; it was time to close shop. She wouldn’t go any further with this case tonight, anyway.
“About villains, about kids being groomed by villains, about kids being groomed by adults in general. About how sometimes abuse can feel like love.”
Keigo paused, and then a wry smile passed on his face.
“Yes, I suppose. Starving people would eat anything.”
Toki briefly thought of Tomie Takami. Keigo hadn’t broached the subject after Toki had told him that she had found his mother and that she was happy, but it wasn’t the kind of thing you forgot. Had it been enough, or had he looked her up? Had he found what Toki had found? Was he bitter about it?
Did he remember, too, how it felt to be hurt by your family’s callousness, and yet to confuse it with love?
“Sorry.” She sighed. “I’m bringing the mood down.”
She turned off her laptop. Keigo shrugged, “We all have our moments.” Then he paused, looking at the jacket Toki was putting on, and raised an eyebrow. “Is that new?”
In the summer, for patrol, Toki removed her orange sweater vest and only wore her short-sleeved jumpsuit. It was hot, okay. But the problem was that in the evening, it felt a little chilly. And like an idiot, she had left her sweater at home, so: new jacket it was.
She had indulged in a bit of shopping with Psyren and Thunder Thief. What? It was a team-building activity.
“It is,” she admitted. “You like it?”
She gave a twirl. It was a simple jacket, black with a trim of decorative fur, warm enough for mid-season but light enough to not be cumbersome. Keigo snorted and reached a hand to touch the edge of her sleeve. Toki let herself be drawn close, smiling helplessly.
In the semi-darkness of their office, everything felt quiet. Keigo’s hand fell from her sleeve, and their fingers interlaced. His golden eyes were very bright, filled with tenderness.
“It suits you,” he said softly. “You always look good in dark colors. It brings out your eyes.”
Toki took half a step closer, to be enclosed in the shadow of huge red wings. Her free hands skimmed the front of Keigo’s vest, climbed up his shoulders, and clasped at his nape. He went easily, closing his eyes, and they kissed.
Love and wonder made her heart capsize in her chest. Four years already, and still she had butterflies in her stomach, still she couldn’t help but smile, still she wanted to kiss him like the very first day. When they parted, she didn’t open her eyes right away. She spoke against his lips; her voice was so low and soft it was almost a whisper.
“Mmh. Good to know what holds your attention. Imagine what I could get up to with the Number Two hero wrapped around my little finger.”
Keigo let out a little huff of amusement. “You don’t need clothes for that.”
“Oh, I know. Taking them off seems to work well enough so far, anyway.”
This time he laughed, and then he took her face between his hands and kissed her again, harder and longer. She kissed back, feeling her heart beat faster, and when they parted they exchanged a bright grin, foreheads touching, breathing the same air.
“Ready to go home?” she whispered.
There were still issues to address, problems to solve, villains to arrest, and past trauma to confront. There was AFO, Shigaraki, Dabi, Stain, and the League; there was the imminent summer camp, Toki’s thesis, Meteor, and the future. All Might was getting weaker, class 1-A was getting stronger, Hinawa was getting bigger, and so many things Toki would have to deal with. But she would deal with it in the morning.
“Yeah,” Keigo smiled at her, eyes warm and soft in the darkness. “Let’s go home.”
It was time to rest now. The world could wait until tomorrow.
Notes:
And finally a chapter ending in a soft, peaceful note! Gods i was getting tired of the endings with tension or cliffhangers or suspense. Now it's nice and soft and if you're binge-reading this, you can take a break, drink water, and go to sleep because it's four in the morning.
ANYWAY!
In my first draft Toki was supposed to take a more active role in Bakugo's story. Like, instead of being Monoma's mentor and/or becoming class 1-A homeroom teacher, she took Titania's role. But it didn't fit with the story anymore. Also, when i wrote this chapter, somehow Bakugo was perfectly happy where he was, and Toki had no room nor desire to intrude? So making her his mentor wouldn't have worked. They would have had no chemistry, and i can't force that kind of thing.
Still ! It's an interesting chapter to drop in the middle of the "Meteor arc", because it's the story of Toki going back to where she grew up, and realizing the world goes on. The HPSC has a new protegee, the cycle continue, but it's better because Toki made it better; so what she lived there was worth it in the end. She got stronger, she made friends. It's reassuring. It's reaffirming.The fact that this system exists is by itself a sign that the world isn't perfect. But this system was born of good intentions, and Toki helped make sure it stopped being misused. So... yeah. It's a hopeful chapter.
Here are some memes for the chapter! Thanks Kirumi =)
[LINK]
[LINK]
[LINK]
[LINK]
Here is a reminder that this fic has a Discord server !
Here is the update schedule for the next chapters :
04/08/23 FALLEN - Radiance
11/08/23 FALLEN - Flare-up
18/08/23 WISDOM - The ashes of who we used to be
25/08/23 WISDOM - No place like homeAnd then it will be the end of the Meteor arc, everyone! So there will be a short break while i gather my inspiration (and that will also allow you to pull yourself together because if the last chapter doesn't emotionally wreck you, it means i did something wrong xD)
![[LINK]](https://i.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/610.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/710.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/810.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/910.jpg){kind=link}
Chapter 49: The ashes of who we used to be
Summary:
Maybe Toki made a sound, or maybe she unconsciously moved forward, but Meteor turned his head, and his eyes landed on her.
Everything in the background had faded into nothingness. Toki barely registered Endeavor leaving. The quiet spread out around them like the surface of a pond going still after the ripple of a stone thrown into it.
She wanted to run, but she stayed rooted to the spot.Toki swallowed. “Hi, Dad.”
Notes:
The title come from the song "angel on fire" by Halsey, with that verse 'i'm standing in the ashes of who i used to be'. Always a good artist to listen to when you want to write a scene that's haunting you down to your bones...
So! If you're reading Meteor's story, you know how this chapter end =) Thank you for your patience! And sorry for the cliffhanger last time. But now we're here! To the long-awaited chapter of the reunion between Meteor and Toki!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
THE ASHES OF WHO WE USED TO BE
Since the universe had a dark sense of humor, Nedzu gave the date of the summer camp and Toki realized with a groan that her thesis would be right in the middle of it. Nedzu knew who Hoshizora was, and probably kept watch over her career: so he must have known about it. That was on purpose.
Son of a bitch.
Well, she hadn’t expected him to accommodate her. Toki may be Yagi’s friend, but she was only Nedzu’s ally. There was a difference. He hadn’t forgotten she was the HPSC’s pawn, and it was a subtle way to remind her of this fact. She wasn’t invited to the summer camp, even though she was class 1-A’s homeroom teacher. Since the camp was supposed to be safe, it made sense. They didn’t need protection, they could go on without Quantum; inviting her would have been a favor, and they didn’t do it because they had no need of her.
At least that was the message Toki was getting.
She had already told Nedzu that she thought the summer camp could be attacked, and she had insisted about improving his security and having pro-heroes with the students, so Toki couldn’t really do more. Except maybe stalk the kids and invite herself to the camp? But if they were attacked, Nedzu would suspect Toki of being the leak (either voluntarily or involuntarily, if the HPSC tracked her); and if they weren’t attacked then Nedzu would totally lose whatever trust he had in her. In both scenarios, she lost.
Damn it. Toki was going to have to settle for equipping all the kids with her phone number, and giving a talk to Neito and Hitoshi about her reservations.
Also, another problem got dropped on her head the very same day…
“I made contact with the MLA,” Keigo announced at breakfast on their morning off, like it was a totally normal occurrence.
Toki didn’t spit her tea, but that was only because she had manners.
“How come?” she coughed.
A few red feathers helped thump her back while Keigo was grinning at her, probably enjoying her reaction to his announcement.
“You remember that charity gala where we made an appearance last week? I talked with that politician, from the Hearts and Mind party. His name is Hanabata-san.”
“The Hearts and Mind party,” Toki repeated slowly, frowning. “I wouldn’t have pegged them for extremists, but it’s true they have been a little more radical since the law authorizing free Quirk use.”
Political life in Japan was kind of low-key. They were dozens of parties competing, but since attention was mostly on heroes to keep order and heroes were forbidden to support any political party, it never got very intense.
There were all kinds of political parties, of course. Radical, moderate, extremists. There was a far-right party that sprouted eugenic nonsense on a daily basis and was mostly ignored; Toki totally believed them to be followers of the MLA. There was a communist party whose ideas were usually half-reasonable, maybe logical, and half-cartoonishly excessive for a country with a strong sense of traditionalism. Still, they were socialist so they had a special place in Toki’s heart. And, of course, there were a lot of moderate parties. The Hearts and Mind wasn’t a big one, though, but it was solidly in the middle of the pack.
Mostly Toki remembered it because it had advocated free Quirk use, like a lot of small parties desperate to gain traction. When the new law had passed, making all Quirk use free as long as it wasn’t harmful or disturbed the peace, the Hearts and Mind party had been at loss. Their main selling point was gone. Several parties like it had all but disappeared or been cannibalized by other, bigger coalitions.
The Hearts and Mind party hadn’t disappeared, but it was a shadow of its former self. Its main rhetoric these days was that people didn’t unite enough to fight discrimination against strong Quirks. Like how a firefighter with a water Quirk was oppressed for not getting a promotion, even though he was more useful than his comrade; because his colleagues were jealous of his power when they should be praising him.
It was Quirkist, but not radical. At least they didn’t preach the benefits of Quirk marriages or encourage Quirkless people to be bred out of the population, which was what the extremist party did, and pretty openly too.
“Meh, so-so,” Keigo gestured vaguely. “They’re not radical, not really. They approve the belief of some radical parties, but they disagree with their message. They don’t incriminate themselves.”
Toki raised her eyebrows. “And Hanabata-san talked to you about the MLA? That’s incriminating.”
“He didn’t come out and say it! He’s very smooth, that guy. Anyway, we were making small talk about how heroism and Quirk and stuff like this, and he asked for my opinion on my ranking compared to yours, knowing your Quirk’s brute force was more powerful than mine; but he phrased it by saying the greatness of the ability you were born with. That’s a quote from Destro’s book.”
Toki sucked in a breath. “It is?”
“I basically learned the damn thing by rote. If I want to join a cult I should sound like someone who believe in their credo, so making it look like I interiorized Destro’s doctrine sounded like a good plan. And it was! I answered him with something along the lines of elevating one’s ability is the only way to really live. Another quote from Destro’s book, if you don’t remember.”
“No, I remember that one.” Toki made a face. “It’s the whole part about how your rank in society should be tied to your Quirk, and how your life has no value beyond your Quirk, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. But they don’t call it Quirk because it’s diminutive and derogatory. They call it meta-ability, meaning it’s meta-human, beyond mere humanity. Which incidentally, is something that I should really integrate into my language because if I slip they’re gonna see it immediately… Anyway! I said the magic words, and I could see him light up. He didn’t confront me right away, he just congratulated me on that good come-back. But his questions were a little pointed. Like, Quantum supports Quirkless rights and so on, but Hawks is careful to always play the cool guy and pay lip service to whatever sells the best; he was really digging into that, trying to figure out what I’m thinking.”
“You didn’t mention it after the gala…”
“No, I didn’t want to go too fast. Maybe it was a fluke. But yesterday I got an email from him, he wants to be in touch. He said that he likes my literary references. So I’m pretty sure he’s MLA.”
Toki chewed on her lip a second. It was good, right? She didn’t remember the names or the Quirks of the MLA characters in canon, but there had been a politician among the highest-ranked lieutenants. He had a Quirk that could motivate people or something, like a Bard in a DnD game. Toki was pretty sure that if she looked up Hanabata’s Quirk in the national registry, it would be something like that, meaning that it was a canon member of the MLA, and Keigo had indeed stumbled upon the cult.
So yeah, it should be good. But her stomach was twisting into knots.
“I have a good opening,” Keigo said, his voice serious but his eyes gentle. “It would make no sense to back out now. If the MLA is recruiting people among heroes, it’s my duty to investigate. Not only to root out the corruption, but also because it means they have plans. And it goes double if, like you think, they have the Ghost Arsonist with them.”
“I wasn’t going to tell you to back off,” Toki said weakly.
“Good. I’m not going to.” He smiled brightly. “Come on, I’m great at infiltration and at chaos. I’m sure me and the nutjobs are going to get along like a house on fire.”
Toki snorted. “Property damage and people screaming?”
“As long as it’s not my house and I’m not the one screaming, that’s fine by me!”
They both sniggered. A knot of tension in Toki’s chest eased. Keigo was taking this seriously, but he was also confident enough to joke; it was good.
“Anyway,” Keigo shook his head, serious again. “We need to get our story straight. You’re pro-equality, so I need to craft a good reason for which a MLA enthusiast like me would stick with you.”
Good point. Toki winced, and they started sounding out various ideas, going from ‘Quantum doesn’t actually believe in equality’ to ‘Hawks is just pretending to care to get in her pants’. The simpler the better, but they needed to sprinkle on some nuance.
In the end, they went with how neither of them was radical, but Quantum had had a crisis of conscience in teenagerhood after a violent Quirk mishap, and Hawks half-heartedly supported her because he liked her. Hawks was supposed to be cocky and arrogant; although he cared about Quantum, he thought her idealism cute, but naïve. Hawks was more realistic, and after climbing to the Number Two spot at age twenty thanks to his amazing Quirk, of course, he believed that his meta-ability destined him to greatness. Besides, if push came to shove, Hawks honestly believed that Quantum would be realistic and give up her childish beliefs. After all, cocky Quantum was too haughty to honestly not believe herself inherently superior!
They discussed a little more about their plans, about what to do if the MLA started digging, how to hide their agenda, how to hide Hinawa. Their daughter was safe and sound in Musutafu but they should take extra precautions the next time they visited. For Keigo, that means glasses and a medical mask, but also maybe a hat to hide his hair. For Toki, it meant making Hoshizora even less distinctive, maybe ditching her distinctive twin buns and wearing glasses too.
She would be back in Musutafu soon anyway. All of her students would be gone for summer camp in August, but in the meantime, they still wanted to train. Melissa’s summer camp was next week, so she wanted to squeeze in some extra practice in a ghost neighborhood. Hitoshi wanted to work on his hand-to-hand combat. Neito was training with Shouto Todoroki more these days, so he was looking to practice using Warp-Space in close quarters.
And… in Musutafu… Toki would also need to see her dad.
She hadn’t offered a date to organize a meeting, yet. But she was in contact with Endeavor, asking questions about his schedule, about Meteor’s schedule. She was trying to gather her courage to finally give herself a deadline.
Fuck, she was so scared.
She was scared of her father being angry, but she was also scared of him not being angry. Of making him sad, rather than furious. It would be almost worse. Because if he was angry then it would mean she had offended him, but if he was sad then it would prove she had hurt him, and Toki wasn’t sure she could stomach it. Yes, sadness would be worse.
The worst, thought, would be to see him and have his eyes glide over her without recognition. After everything, to realize that in the end, Toki Taiyōme had never mattered at all. She had thought she had made her peace with that, back when she still believed her father hated her guts. Learning that he had refused to sell her to the HPSC had ignited a wild hope in her heart, and she didn’t know what she would do if it turned to ashes.
So yeah. That was something she was… considering. She felt like she was standing at the edge of a very tall building, balancing precariously on a railing, her heart beating a wild staccato as she waited for the final oscillation that would make her fall. She had made her decision, in a way. She was just… hesitating.
It was a curious feeling, to realize that so much of her life was haunted by the ghost of someone who wasn’t even dead.
When can I say your name
and have it mean
only your name
and not what you left behind?
Meteor had cast such a huge shadow over her life. But all this time, he had been absent; the mark he had left was muted by distance and retrospect. Toki could consider it with a cool head, be rational, and take a step back. But she couldn’t anymore. Not now that she was going to see him again. There could be no step back, no dispassionate detachment. He would be there; she would see him, speak with him. It was huge. It was scary.
Emotional vulnerability was never easy, after all.
“Would you come with me, when I go and meet my father?” Toki suddenly asked.
Keigo paused.
“You don’t even have to ask,” he said softly. “You decided, then?”
“Yeah.” She bit her lip. “I’m still not sure of who he is now, of why he changed sides. But I want to apologize to him. I want… I want to see him again. Maybe I’ll get some explanations, too.”
Keigo made a pensive noise. “You really pissed he’s a hero now.”
“Not pissed. More... hurt, I guess? I don’t understand what could motivate him to change this much.” She frowned. “Even if somehow he managed to have feelings for Endeavor.”
“Uh-uh.” Keigo put his chin on his hand, looking pensive. “I’m more astonished that he managed to land the big guy, though. Your father must have some serious game.”
“Okay, first of all: ew. Second of all: ewwww. And third of all: what, it’s your extensive experience as a womanizer that make you said that? For all you know Endeavor is easy.”
Then Toki made a face, because she couldn’t believe those words were coming from her mouth. Why was she playing that game?
Ah, yes, because it was easier to laugh about it that it was to descend into horror.
“Hey!” Keigo protested, pointing his little spoon at her threateningly. “I’m charming, and I have plenty of game.”
“No you don’t. You flirt with garbage men and old little ladies just like I do, that doesn’t count.”
“Not true! For your information, I’ve been with lots of beautiful women.”
“Romantically?”
“This conversation is over.”
Toki sniggered while Keigo pretended to drape himself in his dignity and served himself more coffee. They both knew that their romantic experience outside of each other was basically inexistant.
“Honestly it’s not a bad thing that your father ended up with Endeavor,” finally said Keigo. “He could have decided to fall for worse, like a villain.”
Toki’s good mood vanished. She scowled. Keigo knew she had investigated Endeavor, of course; but Toki had never shared his finding with him. She had never found proof of his abuse, of course, but… She had found enough clues.
“Endeavor is not that good. I have reasons to think that he was a scumbag to his family for years. He changed, but he was an abusive asshole for years.”
“Hey,” Keigo frowned. “That’s not something you should say lightly.”
“You didn’t meet Shouto Todoroki,” Toki fired back. “You didn’t meet Fuyumi. They had a crap childhood, they fear fire, they don’t trust their father. Parents don’t have to beat the shit out of their children to mistreat them.”
Keigo paused. There was an unhappy twist to his lips.
“Endeavor doesn’t enjoy hurting people.”
“I’m not making this up. He admitted it to my face.” Then she paused and amended: “I don’t think he harmed them, not like Hobo-san. Well, not Fuyumi. Shouto had training, so I can’t be sure how bad it was. But he admitted that he treated them like crap when he was Number Two. He was obsessed with being the best and they bore the brunt of his temper. He neglected the kids who had what he saw as having weak Quirks, and pushed Shouto to train until he collapsed. His eldest son killed himself in a training accident. His wife had a mental breakdown and has been in a hospital for ten years. Fuyumi is a vigilante because beating up thugs makes her feel in control, and she learned that from him. They didn’t have a happy home; none of them.”
Keigo absorbed that in silence. Toki suddenly felt bad. Keigo had admired Endeavor since he was a kid. Having his idol fall from his pedestal couldn’t be pleasant.
“Sorry,” she said, lamely.
Keigo made a face. “Don’t be. It’s not your fault. I always knew Endeavor wasn’t nice. I liked that about him, that he didn’t pretend to be something he was not. His anger and rudeness made him real. When I meet him, I one hundred percent expected him to explode when I annoyed him.”
“You have that effect on people.”
“Yeah,” he snorted. Then his smile faded, turning melancholic. “I just didn’t think of how it could translate to his private life. It made sense that he wouldn’t be very affectionate, but… It’s just sad, all the same.”
“If it can reassure you, he changed. He realized his past behavior was heinous and started making amends with his family before Shouto joined Yūei, so I’m guessing around the time All Might retired, and his lifelong ambition was dropped on his lap. But,” Toki shrugged, “that doesn’t change what he did before that.”
There was a lengthy pause.
“That’s why you were so afraid when I told you,” Keigo said suddenly. “Not because Endeavor had the power to hurt Meteor, but because you knew he had done things like this before.”
“Yeah.” Toki slumped against the back of her seat. “I mean, Endeavor isn’t like that anymore, and his change of heart started before Meteor got out of jail. But I still knew, and… even if people change, it doesn’t mean that who they were disappears without a trace.”
“It doesn’t mean you can hold who they were against them either. Especially when they regret it and try to atone.”
Toki nodded, because yes, she agreed. After all, she had forgiven Genmei-san because of this. Mera-san, too. And Hobo-san. They were sorry, they had moved on, and so Toki had no reason to stay stuck on their past offenses, right?
But it was different when it was about her father. It had always been different.
“I know it’s irrational. But it’s like Meteor becoming a hero. I just can’t seem to let go.”
Keigo raised an eyebrow. “Okay. That’s a topic we’ll revisit later. But your father, why doesn’t it make sense that he’s becoming a hero? It’s not illogical. I mean, he’s not like me who can’t live without heroism; but you’re not like that either.”
“Yeah,” Toki conceded with ill grace. “But that’s different.”
“Not as much as you think.” Keigo put his coffee mug on the table and spread his hands. “Why are you a hero? Did you always want to save people? You didn’t care, as a child. You were scared and selfish back then.”
“I was eight! And I cared. I didn’t strive towards it, but…” She struggled for words. “When people were suffering next to me, I couldn’t ignore it. I could do something. And I guess that’s why I’m a hero.”
“Because you could.”
“Yeah. I have the skills, I have the will. I’m good at it, and it needs doing. It’s a duty, but it’s also a choice. I’m a hero because… because I can, and so I should.”
Keigo smiled brightly: “Exactly. It’s not really different for Meteor. He doesn’t care about people. But he has the skills. As for the will… let’s just say his goals are aligned with people who have it. He’s not altruistic. But he still can save people. He can, and therefore he should. Even if he’s not really a nice person, he’s not a total scumbag. He’s like,” Keigo waved a hand, frowning, “what it’s called when your morals are not always good or evil. Morally bisexual?”
Toki facepalmed. “… Ambiguous?”
Although morally bisexual may not be completely inaccurate where Meteor was concerned.
“Yes, that one!” Keigo snapped his fingers. “And since his moral compass is currently aiming at Endeavor, then no, it’s really not illogical that he would go for heroics. You can’t deny he’s a good fighter. I mean, if he was limelight, he could probably be ranked.”
The idea was so preposterous that Toki scoffed. Yeah, right. Then she remembered that Endeavor had a garbage personality and had still managed to reach the Number Two spot out of sheer strength, and she shuddered.
Really, his ranking system needed to be dismembered and burned to the ground.
“He’s too brutal.”
“Sometimes brutality is necessary. Aren’t you glad that his strength is on our side? You aren’t going to beat the League or the MLA by offering them tea.”
“I could poison them,” Toki said mulishly just to have the last word.
“Toki.”
He was right. Again. Like often, actually. Toki groaned, and massaged her temples.
“I hate it when you’re the voice of reason. Right now, I don’t know if I want to kiss you or shove you off a bridge.”
“Oh, can I pick?”
Toki sniggered helplessly, and Keigo grinned, looking pleased with himself. She realized belatedly that he had been trying to lighten the mood, and shook her head with fondness.
“Thanks. I’m not going to chicken out you, you know. I made my decision. I’m going to see him again. I’m just… afraid of how it’ll turn out, I suppose.”
“It will be fine.” Keigo’s voice was firm and confident. “He’s been looking for you for years. He loves you. He’s not going to get angry.”
“We don’t have to be angry to say hurtful things,” she muttered. “And he must have plenty to say. Meteor was never one to pull any punches.”
“Maybe when he was a villain. But… You knew him fourteen years ago, Toki. You changed, since then. So has he.”
She looked away with her throat tight. “I know. I just…”
She wished she knew him; knew him enough to stop loving him or knew him enough to never have hurt him. But things were never so simple.
Toki wasn’t strong enough to cut ties like Keigo had done with his mother. To say: I wish you well, but I can’t be around to see it. I may think softly of you from time to time, but I’ll cut off my hand before I reach for you again. Toki had never been good at letting people go. Burning her bridges and leaving her family had required utter destruction, a blaze of violence and chaos… even then it hadn’t been enough. She had always remembered them, longed for them, and felt guilt for what she had done to them.
She steeled herself and squared her shoulders.
“I just wish I wasn’t scared, that’s all.”
“If he’s mean to you, I’ll deck him,” Keigo promised. Toki swallowed back a chuckle, and her boyfriend grinned. “When do you want to arrange the meeting?”
“Sometime this week, I guess. Maybe Thursday. If Endeavor is okay with it.”
It was an impulsive decision. As soon as the words passed her lips, she almost wanted to take them back. But Toki knew she wouldn’t get it done unless she backed herself in a corner, so there it was. A deadline.
Oh gods that was it, that was a deadline, she was going to do this.
“Thursday, then,” Keigo agreed. He paused. “Hey, by the way, how are you going to introduce me to him? Are you gonna start with ‘hey this my hero partner, because I’m a hero by the way’ or with ‘this is the love of my life and you’re always going to be second to him’? Or maybe you would you rather go with ‘this is the guy I have been having mind-blowing sex with for years’? Just asking.”
Toki put her head into her hands with a groan.
“Can you please let me have one crisis at the time, honey?”
oOoOoO
It was funny. As a kid, Toki had wanted a hero to come and save her, but most of all she had wanted her parents to save themselves. And here she was, more than a decade later, being a hero and a teacher, priding herself on the fact that she stood up for the little man. Somehow, as an adult, she had tried to develop the character traits that would have rescued her parents…
And yet her father had rescued himself all on his own.
He had changed. Like Keigo said, the last time she had seen her father, Toki had only been a child. They weren’t the same people they had been back then. The change made her bitter, in a way. There would always be bitterness. They could never go back to what things were. Toki could never go home. Home had been the building destroyed under All Might’s fists and Meteor’s rage; home had been the crew, scattered and imprisoned and dead. And even if her home had still been standing, Toki had changed so much by now, that she wasn’t the person who had belonged there anymore.
Would Meteor see it, and recoil? Would her father see her, and not recognize her? How much can you change, before you’re someone else? Meteor had loved little Toki, Munchkin, tiny spitfire of a thing who glared at the world, dreamed of stars, and refused to let anyone use her.
Would he still love her, as she was now? Quantum, who lived to help and serve and protect, who laughed too loud and who smiled with unwavering patience, who was friend with All Might and married to her job? Hoshizora, cheerful and dynamic and neck-deep into her research, who spoke of math and physics more than she spoke of dreams? Toki Taiyōme, who didn’t even know who she really was and existed in the space between her masks?
Maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe Toki would have to grieve the past, then. Grieve what could have been, grieve the girl she had been just as she had never managed to really grieve her mother. And yet she didn’t think it likely.
This little girl wasn’t dead. She lived within Toki, as all her past selves did. Was a seed dead just because it grew into a flower? Was an egg dead just because it hatched?
Will you still recognize me, Dad? Will you accept me, will you see me, even though I’m so different now? Do you need that closure as much as I do?
Will you forgive me?
Can I forgive you?
There was no point torturing herself with those questions, Toki knew it. And yet it ate at her, all day long. She tried to focus on her work, on patrol, paperwork, villain chases. She had an interview where she went through the motions, feeling jittery and distracted. Psyren actually had to tell her (looking very embarrassed) that her anxiety was distracting her on patrol.
Not that Psyren was usually susceptible to it, but Toki was so rarely this anxious that it was, in turn, making her nervous.
Great.
So Toki took an hour off in the afternoon and went to Musutafu to visit Mihoko-san, and tell her the whole story. Half of the reason was that she wanted to see Hinawa, actually; seeing her daughter helped her settled her nerves. But Mihoko also deserved to know the truth, especially now that Meteor was going to be back in the picture.
That was a weird conversation.
Mihoko had known Toki longer than almost anyone. Hell, she had known Toki when she was eight and homeless, right after Meteor’s arrest. Mihoko had never asked how Toki had ended up on the streets or what she had been running from; she had never even asked her real name. But Mihoko wasn’t stupid, and after their encounter, she had puzzled things together. She had looked for missing children named Toki, and it hadn’t taken her very long to stumble upon the report about Toki Taiyōme. And after that, she had found who wore that name, too, and the story of how Ryūsei Taiyōme, codename Meteor, had been taken down by All Might a few weeks before.
Most of these articles had been taken down now. To protect the privacy of their family, the name of arrested villains was confidential (villains who were on the run, though, were apparently fair game). And now that Endeavor was trying to make Meteor a hero… the HPSC was going to have to make the rest of those articles disappear. But yeah, fourteen years ago, there had been enough out there for Mihoko to piece together the truth.
So Mihoko had known who Toki was for a while. But she hadn’t known that Meteor had been released, and she hadn’t known that he was going to be here, either; and of course, she was learning for the first time that Toki was going to reconnect.
She wasn’t really enthused by the idea.
“Forgive me for not being thrilled by the prospect of a serial killer being freed,” Mihoko said dryly.
“He’s not a serial killer! He just has a very high body-count.”
Mihoko stared at her. “Oh, because that’s so much better.”
Toki shrugged, a little helplessly: “People change.”
“You think he’s a changed man?” Mihoko asked skeptically.
Toki had to wince, because that was a very complicated answer. On one hand, yes, he had to be different, or else he wouldn’t have attached himself to Endeavor. On the other hand… she couldn’t imagine her father without his ruthlessness, his bloodthirsty smirk, his hunger for violence following him like a dark cloud.
No matter which side he was on, he was still Meteor.
“I don’t know,” she admitted quietly.
“And it doesn’t bother you?” Mihoko asked incredulously.
“Of course it does! But I can’t help but think… Even if he’s still a killer, even if he doesn’t regret anything, part of me doesn’t care. He’s ruthless, but I knew that already, and I loved him anyway. As long as he doesn’t hurt anyone else, it’s enough. It would be enough for me. Is it so bad?”
Mihoko pursed her lips, and threw a worried glance at Hinawa. The toddler was still playing in her pen, moving colored cubes with utter focus to build a wonky enclosure around her Inferno plushy.
“I don’t know, Toki. I may not be the best person to judge. People like him, who can lash out and hurt other and then manage to walk free without consequence, without even putting up the appearance of remorse… I can’t judge them fairly.”
“Because he’s a murderer?”
“If only,” Mihoko muttered. “No, because he’s utterly privileged. If someone like Hitoshi or me did even a tenth of what he did, we would never get out of Tartarus. We would be branded monsters, treated like rabid animals all because our Quirk is frightening. We have to hold ourselves back, to smile, to never take insults personally. We either suppress our Quirks completely or devote them to the system. Your father was blessed with an amazing Quirk, he had at birth the social acceptance that Hitoshi will never have, even if he bleeds himself dry to protect the public. So when I see what he did… Using his power so violently and so selfishly, and then being allowed to have a second chance like that, even when he’s not sorry, just because the higher-ups were so charmed by his strength that they decided to brush it under the rug…! No, I can’t judge him fairly. All I see is someone gifted with every blessing genetics could give him, and then squandering his opportunities away, like spitting in my face.”
Toki stayed mute with shock. It was a perspective that hadn’t crossed her mind, at all.
But Mihoko wasn’t wrong, was she? Meteor could have easily changed his path. He could have been a hero, he could have been anything he wanted, really, with such a great Quirk. But he hadn’t. He had grown up with poverty and crime: it had become his life, and he had never tried to get out of it. He could have. It wouldn’t have been easy, and yes, it was unfair that society made it so hard; but Meteor hadn’t even tried. Neither had Sayuri. It simply hadn’t crossed their mind. They had liked the violence.
Toki felt a spike of guilt, and then squashed it mercilessly. No, she was moving forward from now on. She was done feeling guilt for thing that she wasn’t responsible for; she was already responsible for way too much.
“Sorry,” she said in a small voice. “I hadn’t thought of it like that.” She cleared her throat, and then said lightly: “Well, I’m not asking you to meet him.”
“For now.”
“Well, I’m not going to force you to…”
But Mihoko smiled, a little ruefully. “If you decide to let him have a place in your life, and that’s entirely your decision, then I would like to meet him, even once. You’re like a daughter to me, and I want you to trust me with what’s important to you.”
Toki’s eyes softened. “You already do, you know.”
In her playpen, Hinawa decided she was bored with the cubes, and used her Inferno plushy like a bat to demolish her construction. The blocks scattered with a clear noise of hollow plastic, making both Mihoko and Toki turn. Hinawa giggled, beaming, and extended her arms imperiously.
“Up, Mama! Up, now!”
“Well,” Toki smiled, picking her daughter up and tossing her in the air just to hear her shriek in delight, “how can I say no when you ask so nicely?”
(Her relationship with her father may be a complete mess, but Toki had a family besides him. It was small, and quiet, and hidden; but it was her family all the same.)
The day passed.
Toki texted Endeavor to arrange the meeting. She asked him not to tell Meteor she was coming. It would give her the upper hand, even if it was only because she would arrive quietly, instead of announcing her presence and allowing Meteor to prepare. Endeavor agreed, but he didn’t seem happy about it.
Well, too bad for him. Toki was calling the shots here.
She prepared. She arranged things with Icarus so that she and Keigo would have the afternoon off, and would start late in the morning, too (she had a feeling that she would need rest to get over the emotional exhaustion). She called Fuyumi, too, to warn her… and also reassure her that no, she wouldn’t tell Endeavor about her nighttime activities.
It was soon. It was too soon. Toki wanted to tell people, but at the same time she was terrified of telling people. She wanted to tell All Might, and Inferno, and Mera-san, everyone who was aware of this mess; as if to say ‘see, I’m dealing with it, I’m not afraid!’. But the truth was that she was afraid.
Toki had dreaded of this confrontation ever since the day the building had come down.
She was afraid. She was angry. She was sad, she was grieving. But most of all she felt guilt, and sorrow, and yearning. Meteor had been a bad man but he hadn’t been a bad father. He had loved her; he had probably loved her more than anyone when Toki had been a child. More than Sayuri, who had been so quick to discard Toki; more than the rest of the Crew, who all had their lives and their priorities. Meteor had never made Toki felt second-best. When she was in the room, her father had always lit up in joy at seeing her, had always given her his full and undivided attention, had always made her feel important and loved. Even when she had been mistrustful and angry, he had never been anything but kind.
And in return, she had destroyed everything he held dear. She had put him into prison. If she hadn’t told the heroes where to find him, maybe he would have stayed free, maybe Sayuri wouldn’t have died—
Toki could never apologize to her mother, now. They hadn’t always agreed, they had hurt each other as much as Toki had hurt her father; but now Sayuri was dead, gone, gone because of Hikari, because of Toki, because of… Because of so many things but mostly because of Toki, actually.
And Toki could never take it back. If she had done things differently… If she had waited… If she had decided to stay quiet, play her part, submit to what the Crew wanted…
But it wasn’t who Toki was. It wasn’t who she had been, even then.
It had been the right choice, the righteous choice; and yet it had been horrible. It had been unspeakably cruel, it had been a betrayal of the highest order, and yet Toki had done it anyway. She had been young. She had been stupid, and scared, and angry.
She had thought… She had thought she was fixing things.
And then reality had come crashing down, and part of Toki was still stuck in that moment. Part of her would always been this little girl watching All Might crashing into her home, watching her father roar in rage as he rained down death and destruction on the heroes below, watching as the building came down. Part of her would always be there, frozen in shock and growing horror.
Who was the real me, in the end? The one who did something awful, or the one who’s horrified by the awful thing I did? Is one part of me allowed to forgive the other?
There had been no good option at the time. They had been no right choice; there was never a right answer to the trolley problem. The best Toki could do was what she had done at the time: realize she was in over her head and ask for help from the adults who were supposed to give it. Those adults had fucked up, they had all fucked up; it wasn’t her fault.
And yet Toki had never forgiven herself.
She had never forgiven herself because it wasn’t something she could do on her own. Forgiveness is a long walk to a quiet room, she had once written in her poetry notebook, but she had been walking for fourteen years now, and there was no light ahead. She couldn’t reach it on her own.
It was something she needed to hear from Meteor. It was something she could only make peace with if she got closure.
And maybe… Maybe her father needed closure, too.
She couldn’t imagine him being sorry for all those deaths. It was a core part of who he was. She couldn’t imagine him regretting being who he had been back then, wild and fierce and unstoppable; you weren’t sorry for the things you loved, and Meteor had loved this life. Even the blood and the violence. Especially the blood and the violence.
But like Toki had said to Mihoko: did it matter? She loved her dad even when he had been a monster. She had known, even then, and she had accepted it.
You can love a monster, and it can even love you back: but it doesn’t change its nature.
Meteor wasn’t a good person. He would never be. He was selfish, violent, brutal, and ruthless… but he had always been so devoted to others, wholeheartedly, almost to the point of dangerousness. He didn’t delight in causing suffering. He only protected what was his, and what his people wanted. The Crew had wanted money and violence and Meteor had delivered. Now Endeavor wanted order and peace, and Meteor would help him.
And fuck, that was still a startling realization to have, that now Endeavor was the person that Meteor would follow and use as a moral compass! Even without the shock of knowing they were romantically involved, it was still just so staggering.
But the point was that Meteor loved his people. He had loved the Crew, he loved Endeavor, and he loved Toki. And maybe… maybe he felt sorry for how things had ended. Maybe he wanted to yell at her or punch her, and gods knew Toki deserved it. But maybe he also wanted to tell her he didn’t hate her. Maybe he wanted to tell her that he had never forsaken her, never considered her worthless, never wanted to toss her away.
Maybe he loved her still.
And maybe, like her, Meteor needed that apology. Remorseless or not, he still had feelings, and he had lost his whole world that day. Maybe he needed to hear it from her. Maybe he needed to know if Toki had hated him, needed to know why; needed to know why his wife was dead, why his son was dead, why his daughter had turned her back on him, why he had to spend years in a prison that treated him like a rabid animal. Maybe he needed to hear it, because after what he had lived through, didn’t Meteor deserve at least this?! If not closure, at least catharsis?!
Toki owed it to him, and she wouldn’t chicken out.
She didn’t tell All Might or Inferno, or Hayasa-sensei or even Melissa (who was already gone for her summer camp anyway), or Hitoshi. She didn’t want to see understanding or pity in their gaze. But she had an obligation to at least warn the HPSC.
So she told Kameko.
“Oh, crap,” the cat lady blurted out. “Do you anticipate a happy family reunion, or do you want me to order you a coffin?”
Toki was abruptly reminded why she got along so swimmingly with Kameko. I mean, yes, she could be a smooth-talking, kind-looking little kitten that batted her eyelashes at competitors; and she could be a smart businesswoman who handled negotiation and trade deals with poise and sharp instincts.
But her metric for what was and wasn’t inappropriate was fucking bonkers.
“I can deal with it.”
“That’s also what you said about that patrol in Miyazaki and Ocelot told me it went sideways almost immediately.”
“It didn’t! It’s just that some teenager got hysterical about us searching her boyfriend because he smelled like drugs, and she stabbed Ocelot in the arm with a pen. Ocelot was fine, he was just pissed.”
Kameko whistled. “Yeah, I bet. But it’s impressive! Seriously, it’s not an easy feat to stab someone with a pen! It takes a lot of force to get those to break skin. You can’t hesitate at all if you’re going to make a weapon of one of them. That’s real dedication is what that is. How deep did it go?”
“I’m not going to ask how you know that.”
“Good call. Anyway, do you need anything?”
Toki hesitated. “That’s all? You’re very calm about this.”
“I freaked out when he was released,” Kameko admitted. “But you didn’t say anything, so I supposed you had it under control. It’s not my business. Avoidance is a perfectly valid strategy to deal with stuff… as long as that stuff isn’t on paperwork.”
Toki loved that little precision. She shook her head with fondness.
“No, I don’t need anything. But can you tell Mera-san, on Thursday? And tell him that afterward, he has no reason to delay giving Meteor a license.”
More than half the reason the HPSC was dragging their feet with that procedure was because they were scared of what Meteor would do when he learned that the HPSC had kidnapped his daughter. Or, well, when he learned Toki was hero.
He would probably have a good laugh about that, actually. For a villain’s daughter to turn to heroism, the universe really had a sense of humor.
“I’ll make sure to pass along the message,” Kameko promised. She looked a little worried. “Good luck.”
“I don’t need luck,” Toki smiled. “I’ll have Hawks with me.”
“Yeah, but you never know. Sometimes things can get ugly. And if he has your temper, it could also get violent.”
It was the first time Toki had heard it referred that way, ‘he has your temper.’ As if her father had something of hers and not the opposite. She took a long breath.
“It won’t happen.”
But even if it did, well. Toki knew she deserved whatever anger her father directed her way, but that didn’t mean she was going to take it lying down. He should not mistake her dislike of violence for an inability to deal with it.
But whatever. The day passed. She made her preparations. She slept poorly and woke up petrified the next day.
And then it was time.
oOoOoOo
The Todoroki Estate was big and sprawling, a display of wealth in the shape of a massive traditional house and a vast plot of land around it. The whole thing screamed money and power. That was a place fitting for the Number One hero. The design of the house was refined and harmonious, but when she trailed a hand on the railing near the door, Toki absent-mindedly wondered what measure of harmony the Todoroki family had known here.
She balled her fists to stop her hands from trembling. She was so nervous that she felt like throwing up.
“We can leave,” whispered Keigo.
“No,” Toki said, not bothering to lower her voice. “I need to do this. I want to do this.” She briefly closed her eyes. “I want to see him again.”
I’m sorry, Dad. I just wanted to stop you. I didn’t want to— I didn’t mean to—
Toki bit her lip. She didn’t mean to, but it had still happened. Fourteen years had passed since then. They had both grown and aged, lived other things, and built other bonds with other people. But the reminiscence of this betrayal would always be there.
The weight of unanswered questions. Screams of why and how could you, always stuck in their throat, unvoiced, festering. It had been years and maybe the pain and anger weren’t as fresh as before, but they were still there. The wound would never heal until they got closure.
“I mean, phones exist,” Keigo pointed out in a reasonable tone. “You could call. Or even send a text.”
Toki sent him a half-hearted glare. “People don’t even break up by text if they have some self-respect! I’m not going to reunite with my estranged father, who I put in jail, with a text message.”
“Point. I understand the need for dramatics.”
Well, he wasn’t wrong. Toki let out a nervous laugh. “I think I get that from him.”
He chuckled. For a few seconds, there was silence. When Keigo spoke next, his voice was low and subdued, almost hesitant.
“I don’t want you to go and see him out of a misplaced idea that you deserve punishment. You don’t.”
“I know.” Toki swallowed. “I know it was the less bad choice, but it was still a bad choice. I need to apologize to him for it.”
“And maybe he needs to apologize to you,” Keigo pointed out, perceptive as always.
It was something Toki hadn’t let herself contemplate too closely. She felt guilt, most of all, but there was also a knot of anger that had never gone away. She had betrayed her family, but they had betrayed her first. They had used her. They hadn’t listened to her. They had rejected everything she was and everything she believed in.
They hadn’t been cruel. They had always been kind and patient. But they had hurt her, too, so deeply that Toki still felt the ache of it, this certainty that love was always conditional. That rejection was always on the table, hidden behind soft words and a plea to be reasonable.
Had Meteor realized the harm done, later? Had Sayuri? Had any of them? Had they regretted it, even a little?
Toki shoved her hands in her pockets, hunching her shoulders almost up to her ears. She thought of that day where she had carried the money, feeling like a spectator watching her own body move like a puppet. She thought of how she had bawled, had thrown up, and had to wait all alone for days while stewing in her own despair. She thought of how dismissive the whole Crew had been, after. How it had broken her heart.
But she shouldn’t get her hopes up. Maybe she wanted an apology, but even then, she wasn’t sure she could make sense of the tangled mass of conflicted emotions in her chest. She just wanted to get this over with.
No apology would ever be enough. Forgiveness couldn’t be earned, only given. And yet, Toki wanted to hear it… And more than that, she needed to tell she was sorry. She wanted to tell him that despite the hurt and the anger, she loved him anyway. It wouldn’t fix the past. But maybe it would stop weighing on her future. On both their futures.
Meteor deserved that peace as much as she did.
Yes, she had waited long enough. It didn’t matter how many poems Toki wrote about her feelings. It didn’t matter if she talked about it with Keigo, or with friends, or even if one day she saw a shrink. You can’t get catharsis through avoidance. You can’t get peace by plugging up your ears and closing your eyes and hoping to wake up when the bad stuff had passed. You had to confront reality, one way or another. The ugliness of it, that you couldn’t romanticize; and the beauty, that you couldn’t forget.
Nothing ever ends poetically,
it ends and we turn it into poetry
but all that blood was never once beautiful.
It was just red.
Toki looked at the front door of the Todoroki Estate, not really seeing it. She felt so tense and anxious that it took her a conscious effort to unclench her fists.
He was here. Her father was in that house, probably talking with Endeavor, being his infuriating self, unaware that his daughter was only a few meters away. If she left now, he would never know. But if she opened the door, crossed the hallway, went to him…
It wouldn’t change what had happened. Sayuri would still be dead. Hikari too, and Homura, and all those people killed in the arrest. It wouldn’t change anything. But maybe the past wouldn’t weigh so much on Toki, afterward. Maybe it wouldn’t weigh so much on Meteor, either.
They both deserved that closure. But only Toki could give it to them. It was time to stop being a coward.
“Okay,” she whispered. “I’m ready.”
She wasn’t, but Keigo was nice enough to not call her out. He closed his eyes. His wings shifted; a stray feather reattached itself to them. When Keigo reopened his eyes and spoke, it was with the weight of certainty.
“There’s only two people here, and one of them is Endeavor. They’re on the patio. It’s on the other side of the house, so they won’t hear us come in. They would definitely hear it if you rang, though.”
Toki had a jolt of terror at the idea of ringing the doorbell and then waiting for someone to arrive. Her nerves were already frayed enough.
“I think we can manage.”
Toki closed her eyes. Breathed. Her heart was thundering in her chest, but she steeled herself until her hands weren’t shaking anymore. Then, she quietly opened the front door.
It wasn’t locked. Endeavor had made good on his word.
Keigo took her hand, a wordless gesture of support. They both stayed completely silent. Tiptoeing through the house, they crossed a hallway, a living room, then another living space. In other circumstances, Toki would have admired the minimalist décor, the airiness, and the volume of the house, or maybe scoffed at it. As it was, she barely took note of it. All of her focus was elsewhere.
There were voices, muted but distinctive. Toki recognized the growling baritone of the Flame Hero; then there was an answering bark of laughter, and her heart jumped. It had been years since she had heard it, but she instantly recognized this smooth cadence, this mocking tilt, like the words carried the same smirk as the man who spoke. Dad. She took another step, barely daring to breathe.
The patio’s door was open.
It was a nice place, the terrasse sprawling along the house with a beautiful view of the garden. They were there, just talking. Toki could see their profiles. She let go of Keigo’s hand and took a step closer, as if transfixed: then another, and another. She stopped before reaching the door, her throat tight and her blood pounding in her ears with every beat of her heart.
He was here. He was right there.
Meteor hadn’t seen her yet, and he was talking to Endeavor with a bright grin, his chin tilted up arrogantly, his glowing eyes cringing up in amusement. For a few seconds, Toki only watched him.
Her throat was tight, her palms clammy. Gods, he was here, suddenly, so close, and it made everything seems more real. The real-life Meteor didn’t tower over her like the giant of her memories, but he filled the space just the same. Maybe even more so, for being so tangible. In comparison, her memories now seemed muted. It washed over her like a physical thing, the realization that he was here, no longer separated from her by an invisible barrier but existing in the same space as her. It would only take one step, one sound, for him to look at her, for his eyes to lock on her face and recognition to dawn on his, for his voice to speak to her, for a hand to reach out.
Toki was frozen where she stood, petrified of breaking this fragile moment where she could still exist outside of his awareness. She knew that when he would look her at her, there would be no going back.
But gods, it was him. Meteor, tall and smirking and unwaveringly confident, with long dark hair spilling down his back. Her father, with broad shoulders and disquieting feline grace, always moving like a prowling jungle cat. He was here, he was real. Toki blinked back the threat of tears, feeling shaken to her core with an emotion too hopeful to be fear and yet too tense to be joy. She took a deep breath to settle down her nerves.
Maybe she made a sound, or maybe she unconsciously moved forward, but Meteor turned his head, and his eyes landed on her.
There was no moment of doubt. The realization was immediate. Like there had been no possibility, for him, that she could have been anyone else. His ember eyes widened, and his smile gave way to shock. He took a step towards her, more like a reflexive action than due to any conscious thoughts, and Toki’s heart jumped in her throat. Her mouth ran dry.
Everything in the background had faded into nothingness. Toki barely registered Endeavor leaving. The quiet spread out around them like the surface of a pond going still after the ripple of a stone thrown into it.
She wanted to run, but she stayed rooted to the spot.
Toki swallowed. “Hi, Dad.”
She had never seen her father’s face so open, eyes wide and mouth softened in surprise. He took another step, and Toki’s feet moved towards him without her input, until they were face to face. When Toki had been little, she had to crane her neck to look at him; he seemed like a titan. Now he had less than a head on her. She had gotten tall. Or maybe he had gotten old.
“You came,” her father said softly.
She pressed her lips tightly together, trying to hide the tremble of her mouth and the way her heart was thundering in her chest.
“I wasn’t sure you would want to see me.”
“I do,” he answered immediately, almost vehemently. “Of course I do, I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
Toki couldn’t speak for a second, seized by guilt and love and regret and longing and a wave of emotion too crushing to name them all. He had looked for her, he had cared, and he had wanted to save her, even then. But he knew, didn’t he? He knew what she had done.
He had to know. Toki couldn’t bear it if he didn’t. She searched his expression, almost pleadingly:
“It was my fault. It was me, Dad, I sent my notes to the heroes. It was my fault, everything, the prison, and Mom, and Hikari, it was me—”
“Oh, Toki,” whispered her father.
He reached out and took her hands. The physical contact made a shock run through Toki’s spine. She hadn’t expected it. His hands were large and strong, warm, and real, and Toki feel her breath desert her. She grasped his hands tight, as if afraid that he would vanish in smoke.
After being so frightened of the confrontation, suddenly she was terrified that he would leave.
“I know,” Meteor said. His voice shook halfway through. “I’ve always known. It’s all right, I don’t care.”
How could he not? It was a lie, it had to be: how could he not care, when Toki cared so much it tore her chest in two? But he was still holding her. He hadn’t let go. She shook her head almost disbelieving, looking up at him with wide pleading eyes.
“I’m sorry.”
The apology had been weighing on her heart for fourteen years. When she said it out loud, Toki felt a decade-old grief and despair surge up, closing her throat and burning her eyes. Tears rolled on her cheeks, impossible to hold back.
A dam inside of her was shuddering, cracking, and on the verge of collapse.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated, her voice breaking. “I didn’t know what would happen. I didn’t want to hurt any of you.”
“It’s all right,” he repeated. “I forgive you.”
What? Like that? So easily? It was like he hadn’t even needed to think about it. Toki tightened her grip on his hands, blurting out:
“You shouldn’t. You should be mad.”
Meteor let out a strangled laugh. His eyes were wet, Toki realized with a shock of disbelief so hard it was like a punch. She had never seen him cry; she hadn’t even imagined him able to. But he was crying, smiling, his eyes softer than she had ever seen them, and for a moment Toki couldn’t breathe with how her heart was breaking.
“I was,” he said quietly. “I’m not anymore. I forgave you long ago.”
He let go of her hands then he breached the last remaining distance between them, wrapping her in his arms in a fierce embrace. Suddenly he was there, solid, and real, holding tight.
Toki took a startled breath and buried her face in his shoulder like she was eight years old again. In her chest, the dam was falling to pieces. The storm of grief and joy and despair and longing that it had been holding at bay hit Toki like a flood. A fresh wave of tears sprang free; she squeezed her eyes shut, but she could no more stop crying than she could stop her heart from beating.
She clawed her hands into his shirt and hugged him back. First weakly and then desperately, clutching at him with all her strength, as if a hug could undo fourteen years of absence. There was a lump in her throat so big she couldn’t talk. She was shaking, great heaving sobbing breath that shook her whole body, like all the anguish she had held tightly within herself was breaking free.
“I’m sorry too.” Her father’s voice was trembling. “I should have been there for you. I shouldn’t have let you carry this on your own, I should have listened. I should have heard you. I’m so sorry, Munchkin. I’ll do better.”
It was too much. Toki squeezed her eyes shut. She felt like a raw nerve, shaking all over.
She hadn’t had a lot as a kid, but her family had been her whole world. And then they were gone; gone because of her, and she never had closure. She had clung to her anger because it was easier than to acknowledge the pain; and with time, both had dulled until they were tolerable. But the wound had never closed, and seeing her father again was like ripping it open again. The grief, guilt, despair, terror, and love were as strong as they had been that day, staring at All Might tearing down her home.
She had hurt her father, but he had hurt her, too. She should be angry at him, and some part of her still was. Some part of her would always be, the old trust irreparably shattered. And yet at that moment, all she could feel was a disbelieving wave of gratitude, as childish as it was desperate.
To whom do i owe
the biggest apology?
Nobody has been crueler
than I've been to me.
They had both lived through so much. It had been fourteen years. They had grown apart, they were different people now; and yet their separation had been like a wound never closing, an ache never healed. Betrayal, anger, love, grief, and longing. They had hurt each other so deeply but they also loved each other.
They loved each other so much. Their universe had been so small, their loved ones so few; was it any wonder that they clung to each other so desperately? It was in their blood, the rage and the grief and this intense, ferocious loyalty, like a raging wildfire. Toki had always loved her dad and admired him even when she had been like a skittish stray cat trying not to get attached. Her father had loved her, even at the very beginning. He had protected her and raised her, even if it had only been for a little while; and he had adored her. Wasn’t it why the betrayal had hurt so much?
They had loved each other so much, and they had hurt each other all the worse for it: not out of malice but simply because they didn’t notice before it was too late. Toki had hated him for it, but she had hated herself more. The hurt had seeped deep into the foundation of her being, and she had built who she was around it, and… she didn’t hate who she was now, but that ache had always been there. Like a scar that never faded, a constant reminder of the closure they didn’t get to have.
But now they were here, now, somehow. They were miraculously here, miraculously alive, and free. Maybe they were not alright and maybe they would never be alright, either of them, but—
Wasn’t it time to let it go?
“It’s okay,” she hiccupped against his chest, her voice breaking. “I forgive you.”
Notes:
Did i make you cry? Because i absolutetly teared up when writing this.
"He can save people, and therefore he should" is a great quote that comes from the fic "Beyond The Broken Horizon" that i recommended already! Please go check it out, it's really amazing.
______________________
Some food for thoughts!
Isn't Mihoko too harsh in her judgement of Meteor?
Not really. I mean, you know that Meteor didn't have an easy life, but she doesn't. In her POV, it makes perfect sense.
It's funny because both Meteor and Mihoko were part of minorities discrimined against, and yet they both see the other as utterly privilegied. The barriers that they faced to belong in society weren't the same. Meteor had to deal with poverty, extreme violence, like growing up in a war-zone; Mihoko had to deal with social ostracization and fear of her own powers. Mihoko's acceptance by society was conditionnal on her hiding what she could do; Meteor's acceptance by society was conditionnal on his rejection of the place that birthed him and the coping mechanisms that came with. Mihoko folded, Meteor did not.
Mihoko think: "if i had the Quirk he had, i would have been accepted". But Meteor would surely think "if i had the wealth/safety/stability she had, i would have been accepted", too.(I'm also well aware that Meteor's background doesn't entirely justify the fact that he's a sociopath!)
Does Meteor feel remorse about what he did?
He feels remorse about not listening to Toki, not paying attention to her needs and the way she was hurting. He doesn't regret stealing/hurting/killing, though. That's the paradox of Meteor.
If he could do everything over again, he would maybe change his ways and stop robbing banks! But it would be to not make Toki sad, not because he suddenly saw value in human lives.When Toki says she forgives Meteor, does she forgive what he had done to other people? Or was it more about forgiving what he had done *to her*?
Both, in a way? They go hand in hand.
It isn't really Toki's place to forgive him for the innocent bysanders Meteor hurt in the past. But the point of this reunion was for the wound to close. To put everything behind them. Including Toki's own guilt!
Toki had started making peace with what happened (her anger, her guilt, her fear) when she fought All Might. After that fight she stopped looking for excuses and ways to push the blame on All Might's shoulders and confronted the fact that she felt bad about what had happened because she felt responsible. And of course that responsability was shared: Toki fucked up but the Crew also did, the police did, nobody was innocent.
But now she found her father again. It's not going to fix everything. Sayuri is still dead, the Crew still destroyed, all the victims are still dead. And even if somehow everyone was magically fine again, it wouldn't change the fact that they had hurt each other, lied and betrayed and manipulated. But Meteor's forgiveness allows Toki to let it go. To say "yes it was fucked up, but i can't carry that pain forever, i'm allowed to put it down".
So Meteor forgives her. Toki forgives him. And she forgives herself.
Holy shit that was one heavily emotionally charged chapter.
Anyway! One more chapter to conclude the Meteor Arc, and then we'll move on to the Kamino arc, mwhahahahahahaha.
Chapter 50: No place like home
Summary:
“So,” Meteor said lightly. He was watching Keigo, this time. Toki’s heart jumped into her esophagus. “Aren’t you going to introduce us in an official capacity, Toki?”
Keigo straightened, and Toki cleared her throat, her voice skipping in to a high-pitched nervous tone:
“Sure!”
Oh, shit, it was happening.
Notes:
And here we are !
This conclude the Meteor Arc. What a ride. This is the 50th chapter of the fic, holy shit.
Also, not to be a dick but: if you don't like a character that's fine, i'm just not interested in reading a vitriolic essay about how you gleefully want to kill/hurt them. The other readers who read coments aren't really enthused about it either, and they deserve to enjoy the story without all that toxicity.
Anyway, i hope i didn't kill the mood. Enjoy the chapter ! =)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
NO PLACE LIKE HOME
They talked. They had fourteen years to catch up, and so many things to tell each other.
Meteor’s voice was rougher than in her memories, deeper, and yet still clearly recognizable. His eyes were just as intense as she remembered, though: glowing like embers, with slit pupils like a cat. Toki couldn’t stop watching him, mesmerized, somewhat shell-shocked. It was a shared feeling. Her father was staring at her like he still couldn’t believe it, grinning a little helplessly.
He told her about entering the rehabilitation program, pursuing a degree in criminology, consulting with heroes and the police, and then making a deal with Endeavor to catch underground villains. How he had slowly started to get used to a life where not everyone was out to get him. How he had gotten used to help people, not out of self-interest but because it didn’t cost him anything.
Meteor was still a cold, unfeeling bastard towards strangers: but now he was a cold bastard who helped people to their feet when they were on the ground, instead on pouncing to deliver the killing blow, and it was honestly such an enormous progress.
She told him where she had gone after his arrest, how she had lived in the streets, paranoid about being hunted for her Quirk. She skirted around the topic of where, exactly, she had been raised, and by whom; but she did admit she was picked up by the government after a few weeks and got a new identity to protect her.
And then she had to tell him she was a hero, she was Quantum. She had an agency in Fukuoka, she was Hawks’ hero partner, she was a ranked hero, she was rich, she had students, she had gone to Yūei… It tumbled all out in a rush, like a ripping a band-aid.
Meteor gawped at her like a fish for two full minutes before groaning in dismay. It made Toki break out into nervous giggles. All this time, she had been right under his nose.
“Wait,” he suddenly frowned. “I may not be very knowledgeable about the current heroes, but I know full-time limelight heroism is demanding. Are you holding up? Did you ever experience dizziness or chest pains?”
Toki tried not to be pissed about the fact that both her parents had clearly known this weakness of her Quirk and yet neither of them had ever told her.
That was another fun conversation to have (yes, that was sarcasm). Toki had to explain, with the most edulcorated version possible, that she had a new heart. It explained the side effects of her Quirk, with the light. From there, it devolved into an explanation of why her Quirk was Warp-Space, not Teleportation.
Toki glossed over the fact that she had had a heart attack, although she was pretty sure he had guessed that she hadn’t randomly woken up one day and decided to have a massively invasive and exorbitantly expensive surgery. But she explained in detail how her new heart allowed her to use the full potential of her Quirk without experiencing backlash, and her father looked almost impressed. A little wistful, too.
“If I had known this kind of thing was possible, maybe Sayuri and I could have looked into it,” he mused.
Toki’s expression turned a little pinched. They had avoided talking about Sayuri, until then.
Toki loved her mother, she did; but it was a sore subject, too, aching and bitter. Even years after, Toki hadn’t managed to sort out all her feelings about her mom.
Meteor saw her expression and didn’t insist. They were both sitting on the ground, at the edge of the patio, looking over the vast garden of the Todoroki Estate. It looked unnervingly peaceful out there. And yet, with the roller-coaster of emotions she had been riding since her arrival, Toki felt wound-up and jittery.
“I must admit, the irony is almost poetic, though,” Meteor mused. At her perplexed glance, he smirked. “I wanted you to become a villain like me, and instead I’ll become a hero like you.”
Toki hadn’t considered that angle. She snorted.
“Neither of us ended up where we thought we would fifteen years ago.”
“True.” He made a face. “But really, Fukuoka? You could do better.”
“I did a great job there,” Toki retorted hotly. “It’s one of the safest cities in Japan today.”
“I’ll take you at your word. It was a horrible place to live when I was a child.” Meteor made a face. “I wasn’t planning on ever setting foot there again.”
Toki suddenly thought of her own wariness and distaste for Tokyo. She had carefully avoided going there, ever since her debut as Quantum. She had even traded patrols with Hawks a few times to avoid being sent back where Meteor had been arrested.
She didn’t know how she felt about what Meteor’s answer implied, though. Did he mean that he hadn’t planned to come back before, but now he was going to? Oh, Toki was glad to see her father again. But she didn’t know yet if she was ready to have him invade the rest of her life. It was huge.
“But now you changed your mind?” she hesitated.
Meteor paused. Toki could almost see him swallow back his instinctive retort and pick his words with care, and she inwardly reeled that he was so mindful of her feelings. He hadn’t been like that at all when she had been a child. He had been wild and impetuous, snarky, mocking; he had been so self-confident that he was utterly uncaring about the divergences of opinions he could have with other people. And now…
“I could visit you sometime if you want,” Meteor said slowly, as if testing the words. “Or you could come visit me in Shizuoka if you prefer.”
That was… a good compromise.
“Maybe.” Toki bit her lips, then admitted wryly: “I’m in the prefecture often enough, with being a Yūei teacher and all that.”
Meteor boggled at her.
“You’re a teacher at that fancy hero school?! Wait.” His eyes narrowed. “You’re the one they sent as additional security after this Nomu attack. To bodyguard All Might.”
Oh, minefield ahead. Toki shrugged, affecting indifference.
“There is no better defense against a warper than another warper.”
Unfortunately, her father didn’t drop the subject. His ember-like eyes glowed ominously, his fingers clenched into fists. When he spoke, there was a hint of a growl in his voice, and it made a shiver of recognition course through Toki’s back. There he was, Meteor the killer, prowling like a predator, exuding danger and power.
“Does All Might know who you are?”
Toki swallowed. Then she squared her shoulders and raised her chin defiantly. Even at eight she hadn’t been scared to butt heads with her father. Now she was older and stronger, and she would not cower.
“You mean, does he know I’m the one who told him were the hideout was, or does he know I’m your daughter?” she threw back to his face. “Yes, to both.”
Meteor hissed. He looked murderous.
“He fucking knew when I saw him.”
“Of course he knew,” Toki snapped. “I asked him to help you, with that interview.”
At least that threw Meteor for a loop. He blinked, seemingly torn between outrage and incredulity. In the end, incredulity won out.
“You what?”
Oh, man, they were going to have that conversation. Toki winced.
“So, listen, I was mad at him for a long time. It was easy to blame him for what had happened; it allowed me to not think too hard about how I was blaming myself.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Munchkin,” Meteor protested. “You were a child. We should have cared for you better. I don’t blame you at all.”
“Well, I blamed me, okay? I blamed myself but hating All Might was easier. So I hated him for a long time, and then I had an… informal opportunity to fight him, and then I threw a building at him and yelled at him.” She paused, belatedly realizing that she was getting ahead of herself. “That’s classified, by the way.”
Meteor didn’t seem fazed by the idea that heroes beat each other bloody sometimes. But he looked faintly worried. “You fought him? Were you alright?”
“I had a broken arm, that’s all. I got off lightly. The point is that we fought. It was a good catharsis. He apologized…”
“What, for arresting me?”
“Well, no,” Toki admitted. “Mostly for making me sad.”
Meteor harrumphed, but he looked like he found that answer acceptable. It was, Toki realized, maybe the only answer that Meteor would have believed, would have understood. Apologizing not for doing something wrong, but just for having hurt the feelings of someone who mattered: because right and wrong didn’t matter to him, only the right or the wrong people.
That apparently hadn’t changed.
Toki cleared her throat, and continued:
“He knew who I was after that. We kept in touch, for uuuuuh, an undercover mission. We get along.” She hesitated, then said in a rush, “We’re friends. When he was tasked with that interview, he told me, and I asked him to support you.”
Meteor clenched his jaw. He didn’t look happy about this. Either with the idea of owing something to All Might, his enemy (and wow, actually, no wonder he got along so great with Endeavor, they both had a total hate-boner for All Might); or with the idea that Toki was friend with the Symbol of Peace. Probably both. He let out an exasperated sigh.
“All Might. Damn it, Munchkin.”
“Hey, I don’t want to hear any criticism from you. You’re friends with Endeavor and he has the personality of a block of charcoal. All Might became perfectly nice once we were done beating the shit out of each other.”
Meteor rolled his eyes. That was his way of conceding the point. Toki didn’t miss the fact that he didn’t correct her about his relationship with Endeavor. Well, good, because there were already enough emotionally-charged conversations to have today; Toki didn’t want to add that one to her laundry list.
For a second they were both silent. Then Meteor snorted.
“You threw a building at him,” he repeated. He grinned, a little manic. “Ah! Sayuri thought that you would be like her, but you’re like me.”
Toki opened her mouth only to close it. In the end, she let out a little helpless laugh.
“Yes,” she admitted self-depreciatingly. “I guess I am.”
A powerhouse, like her father. An S-ranked threat. But that wasn’t the only thing they had in common. Toki thought of cruelty and arrogance, and the way the building had collapsed above dozens of civilians. She thought of devotion and love and selfishness, and about Icarus, about her studies pushed to the side, about her daughter left to be raised by someone else. She thought of bitterness and greed, about refusing to let go of the past; about her looking for her father and her father looking for her, about her clinging to her foreknowledge of canon and yet never sharing that secret with anyone.
She thought about anger; about a raw power born out of love and out of loss, as you dig deep into yourself and say to the heavens themselves give me vengeance or give me death; she thought about glowing eyes and the kind of stone-cold clarity that had descended upon her sometimes, faced with Hobo-san the first time, and Endeavor the second, when she had been ready to kill someone, not because it was good but because the wrath in her could only be sated by violence; and she thought yes, I guess I am like him.
“About Endeavor,” she suddenly said.
Her father didn’t even twitch.
“What about him?” he said, voice even and smooth.
He was a good actor. If Keigo hadn’t told her, Toki would have never known. For a second, she thought about raising the subject, just to see if her father denied it. Then she chickened out.
If it was true (and she knew it was true), then really, that specific conversation could wait. Forever, if possible.
“He’s the one who convinced me to come,” she finally said. “He explained that you’re working together to take down underground villains, like you said. I don’t get why, though. You were never interested in that kind of thing before.”
Meteor chuckled. “Oh, Munchkin, there’s a lot of what I did back then that evaded you. I never went to war with them, but that didn’t mean we were friends. Vicious and I were at each other’s throats for nearly a decade. Fujio shot War Dog; he had been on her kill-list ever since. I took down one of Lady Plague’s bases, and she tipped off the heroes about one of my heists when you were six. We were always enemies. I had an alliance of circumstances with Octavius on one occasion, but it didn’t last more than a day and afterward we were right back and ignoring each other. I have no doubt that every single one of them would have sold me out to heroes if the situations were reversed.”
“No honor among thieves, uh,” Toki muttered.
Her father shrugged: “Something like that. They aren’t my people, why should I care? They wouldn’t.”
Toki had a vivid flashback to their conversations when she was younger: his casual dismissal, his faintly bewildered smirk, as if the ideas of drafting alliances and building bridges was some cute fantasy as physically impossible as flight.
Well, the joke was on him now. Toki had learned to fly.
“How does that attitude work with heroism?” she wondered honestly.
“Surprisingly well. I don’t have a crisis of conscience when I have to collapse a building on an enemy, unlike some people.”
“What about civilians? Collateral damage?”
That had been the main conflict between them, after all. Meteor hadn’t seen the point in not hurting people, and Toki had been horrified by it. If her father had changed his attitude back then… if he had just stopped hurting people, even if he didn’t stop robbing banks… then things would have turned very differently.
“They’re not important to me personally,” her father said, slowly. “But they’re important for my team. I’m good at it, too. I don’t mind it. I prefer a straight fight, and saving people isn’t a reflex, but— that doesn’t mean I can’t do it.”
Toki scowled at the vast lawn in front of her. She would have loved for him to have that realization fifteen years earlier, to see that it didn’t cost anything to be kind, even just a little—
“I just wish…”
Her voice trailed off. She bit her tongue, feeling stupid for still feeling bitterness and longing. She had her father now. It was unfair to wish she could have had him a decade earlier, when fate could have so easily never reunited them.
“I know.” Meteor’s voice was low and serious. He was looking at the lawn, too. “I can see what you meant now. About…” He waved vaguely, his shoulders tense. “About people, and what everyone owed to each other, and how our way of life was a cruel choice. I’m a cruel man, Munchkin: but you aren’t like me. You were a kid. I should have protected you from this life. Maybe I could even have turned away from it entirely, if I tried. I know that, now. I didn’t, back them.”
Toki took a shuttering breath. The words burst out from her, raw and painful.
“Why? Why couldn’t you?”
But her father only spread his hands helplessly.
“I don’t know, Munchkin. I was too selfish. It was easier. It made sense. I thought I was so much wiser than you for seeing the world as it really was. I used to think you would grow up.”
“I did,” Toki said, bitterly. “But not in your world.”
Meteor let out a long breath.
“Maybe it was for the best,” he said slowly, almost reluctantly. “My world is a very fucked-up place to grow up. I just couldn’t see it. I needed to get dragged kicking and screaming to a different mindset, to be honest. I would never have changed if I hadn’t been forced to adapt.”
Well. What was done, was done. It still hurt. But not so badly, now. Toki could take a full breath of air and not have her chest ache with the weight of anger. There was still bitterness lingering, and it would probably take years to fade, if it ever did. But there was gratefulness, too. Relief. Gratitude that, after all those years, her father had still chosen to change for the better; that he was willing to try, even if he had nothing to gain by it.
“I guess I have Endeavor to thank for that,” she grumbled.
Her father glanced at her, sharply. “You don’t like him.”
He was perceptive. Toki had been trying to keep her face neutral, if not her tone. She was kind of grateful for the change in subject, though. She didn’t want to talk about their past anymore.
Even healing, the wound was still so raw.
“I don’t not like him,” Toki grudgingly admitted. “I totally expected to hate his guts, but he’s not like what I expected him to be.”
“And you expected him to be what?”
“A total asshole. A flaming piece of garbage with anger issues the size of Mont Fuji and an even bigger ego.”
“Because he got me out of jail? Harsh.”
“No,” Toki scowled. “Because he’s ruthless like you, but unlike you, he never got what he wanted, and it made him angry and bitter.”
Meteor looked thrown for a second, then amused. Did he think her take was wrong? Toki didn’t leave him any time to speak anyway, and powered on:
“I was worried when he got you out of jail because I thought he was a total asshole. I investigated him and I found out he treated his family like trash for years, meaning he’s predisposed to abusing the power he has over people. And he had power over you.”
She clenched her fists and swallowed. It was a frightening feeling, to admit that she had been afraid for him: to not only admit it but to confess it, to his face, to bare her soul and say I loved you even then.
“Munchkin,” Meteor said softly.
“I know he’s a changed man since becoming Number One, or whatever,” Toki interrupted him, scoffing. “I worried all the same. When he found me, I could see that he respects you and he likes you. But that’s no guarantee. So tell me, are you okay with how things are? I can interfere if you want to get out. I have enough push with the HPSC and enough ammo to destroy Endeavor if need be, or even just to make him back off; once you get released you could become a solo hero wherever you feel like it.”
Her father shook his head with fondness. Then he reached out to run a hand through her hair, messing up her twin buns. When Toki let out a squeal of protest, he laughed, and let his hand fall on her shoulder to drawn her in for a hug instead. He dropped a kiss to the top of her head, like she was little kid again; when he spoke, Toki could feel him smile against her hairline.
“Thank you, Munchkin, but it’s fine. I knew he was a right bastard when I started working with him; hell, that’s why I liked him in the first place. But you can stop fretting. We’re friends. He’s good to me. I trust him.”
Toki groaned and closed her eyes.
“You have bad taste in friends.”
Meteor laughed, and released her, grinning. He looked very pleased with himself.
“Can’t argue with that. At least this one is a hero. And he was more of an ass in the past. You said it yourself: he’s a changed man, since he’s Number One.”
“Yeah, but even if he changed the way he acts, his core is still the same. He’s ruthless and selfish.”
“And I’m not?”
Meteor’s voice was kind but serious. Toki frowned, absentmindedly kicking her legs at the edge of the patio.
“I know you are. Doesn’t mean I have to like the fact that your new buddy is, too.”
“Aw, give him a chance. He’ll grown on you.” He paused. “He’s the one who pointed me towards heroism rather than villainy, you know.”
“I guess he has that going on for him,” Toki grumbled. “But he’s still on thin ice.”
Her father shook his head, looking amused by her grumpiness.
“So, while we’re on the subject of common acquaintances: how many heroes did I meet that actually know you?”
“Probably a lot,” Toki admitted. “But none of them know who I am. Mmmmh, Eraserhead may have guessed, since he saw me without my visor, but maybe he didn’t connect the dots. Inferno knows for sure; he figured it out right after meeting you. And there’s Hawks, of course. We’re… close.”
“Ah, yes. Your friend,” Meteor said slowly as if testing the word.
Toki coughed awkwardly. She didn’t let herself time to freak out.
“Husband, actually.”
Meteor blinked disbelievingly. He opened his mouth, closed it, then let out a deep sigh. Toki wondered what that expression reminded her of, and then suddenly she realized that it was the same face she did when she had to deal with an unexpected amount of craziness on her job.
“… Do you have any other bombshells to drop on me, while we’re here?”
Toki thought about it. She had quite a lot of secrets but she wasn’t ready to share them with him. Not yet. But she would be, one day: and there was something reassuring in that, too. One day she would be ready. One day was now an option.
She shook her head, and laughed. The sound was lighter than she expected.
“I’ll give you some time to adjust before dropping the next one, Dad.”
oOoOoOo
They talked for hours.
Toki talked about Keigo a little. She was prepared to be defensive, but her father hadn’t seemed to disapprove at all. He wanted to know if she trusted him with her life, and that was apparently enough for him. He was curious, though, and without even realizing Toki ended up recounting parts of her childhood. The joint training, the challenges, the thrill of defying one another and pushing each other to be the best. The summer camps and the crazy shit they got into, with prank wars and hilarious stunts.
She talked about some arrests they had done, too. About cleaning up Fukuoka, pouring money into poor neighborhoods, advertising little shops, making the place safer to encourage more business to open; about escorting kids to school, and helping grandmas cross the streets, and saving kitties from trees, and looking for lost dogs.
Meteor told her about the Endeavor Agency. He told her about the work, the people. The sidekicks he got along with the best, the receptionist that he took smoke breaks with, and the antics of the staff.
He told her about bantering with Burnin’, Onima, and Kidô. He told her about the receptionist Kiriko who loved gossip. He told her about the conversations they had, and the private jokes they shared. Meteor liked to cook, and he never declined an opportunity to do so, especially to feed a crowd. So a lot of people at the agency had a habit to supply him with gifts of good quality ingredients and then beg for a good bento when he got to work with their groceries.
He told Toki about Endeavor, too, a little. He didn’t want to tell her the whole truth. It was obvious in the way he picked his words. But he talked about Endeavor all the same, with a smirk and something soft in his eyes, calling him grumpy and grouchy and snappish, and brave and relentless and clever and powerful. Meteor spoke of Endeavor with the same tone that Endeavor had used in Fukuoka when speaking about Meteor: respect and confidence, but also some admiration, and a hint of affection, too.
Meteor didn’t tell her he was involved with Endeavor. Toki wouldn’t have guessed it, listening to him and the words he carefully chose. But they were friends. She didn’t need Meteor to tell her that’s where his loyalty lied: that much was obvious. Meteor was taunting and joking, but the way his face lit up, the sincerity of his laughter, the way his eyes gleamed with mirth when he spoke of a good chase or about training to make a combo move with the Flame Hero: he couldn’t lie about that.
Damn it.
Anyway. Toki told him about her agency, and her friends. Hayasa-sensei who had trained Keigo and her for a few years when they were younger (she stayed vague), and who had agreed to resume hero work to watch their back. Kameko, the crazy cat who managed to juggle so many tasks and was always as energetic as a kitten with zoomies. The sidekicks, too; there were fourteen now! Toki was only close to five or six of them, but it was a whole circus to manage. Psyren, Thunder Thief, Sunspear, Tyto, Zero, Ocelot…
She told him about Moxie, her student, who had interned at the Endeavor’s Agency; and Meteor recognized her description, faintly incredulous about how ‘the girl with the flying boots’ had been so close to the truth.
Then Toki went on a tangent about her other students, Neito and Hitoshi, and then the other kids in Yūei, including Shouto. How much they had progressed, how Toki loved analyzing their powers and imagining new way they could use their Quirks to their full potential.
She told him about studying astrophysics under a fake name. There was no paper trail leading to Toki Taiyōme, but over the years Toki had used plenty of other surnames. If she dug into her memories she could remember almost all of them. It wasn’t hard. Fake-ID guy had done a good job of picking names related to stars.
Toki told her dad about being Quirkless for nearly three years, while her new heart was being grown in a lab and living as a civilian. She told him about how it made her itch for a fight. How she loved academia, how challenging studying could be. But how hero work was so much more rewarding, with every effort creating something concrete you could touch, unlike classes where you had to cram equations until your head felt like it was bursting, and teachers were Quirkists assholes. She told him about studying the Ion Dive and went on a rant about space exploration until Meteor looked like he had totally lost the trail of what she was saying, but still watched her with fondness.
Meteor told her about the patrol routes and the fights, and how nobody but him could keep pace with Endeavor. He told her about meeting various heroes, and hopping through the whole country while All Might was on vacation (Toki was pretty sure that it was because at the time, All Might had to stop working after his lung surgery). He told her about meeting Best Jeanist and seeing Tokyo again.
He told her about how stiff and mistrustful Inferno had been. Toki had to laugh and admit a little bashfully that Inferno had just been protective of her.
Meteor told her about the process for his early release, and how the HPSC had been dragging its feet. He told her about the cops he worked with, sometimes, on investigations. He told her about meeting underground heroes and building his own network, not as a villain but as a future underground hero.
Meteor told her about the support he had at the agency; about the sidekicks happy for him, about the janitors and the secretaries who congratulated him. He told her about the support department that was made up of three people who swung wildly between cheerfully manic and overtired grouchiness, and how they sometimes argued together about completely nonsensical things. He told her about how they were making him a damn hero costume, all grey and orange; and Toki and him had startled laugh when they realized that their costumes would match.
They talked and talked, until the sun was almost setting. Toki’s voice was a little scratchy with all that use, and her father’s was no better. The sky was tinted pink and red, and Toki realized with a start that it had been hours.
“It’s late. I should go back home.”
“Home,” her father repeated, almost wishfully. “To your husband, I suppose.”
“Actually, he came with me today.”
There was a calculating gleam in Meteor’s eyes: “He did?”
“For moral support. He’s probably bothering Endeavor as we speak.” Toki glared at her dad, suddenly deadly serious. “I can introduce you if you promise to be nice to him.”
“Aw, not even a little shovel talk?” Meteor said lightly.
“Dad. I’m serious. He’s…” she almost hesitated, then powered on. “He’s the most important person of my life. That’s not where you want to draw the line.”
Meteor was silent for a few seconds, his orange eyes undecipherable. When he spoke, his voice was low and soft, and yet deadly serious.
“All right. I’ll be nice.”
“Good.”
There was a pause. Toki had talked about going home, and yet neither of them moved. Her father took a deep breath.
“Toki, there is…”
From behind the patio’s door, there was a muted crash.
They both turned at the same time to look. You could hear faintly raised voices. Toki’s eyes narrowed, because she was pretty sure she recognized several of those voices. She stood up, marched over, and wrenched the door open.
There were eight people in the living room, which was way more than there should have been.
Endeavor was here, and Keigo. And Shouto, with Hitoshi and Neito. And Fuyumi near the entrance, with Sachiko, of all people. And then there was a tall guy who had Endeavor’s scowl but snow-white hair, and who was looking pissed with everyone. Toki didn’t let her confusion show, and nodded at him with the unflappable cool of Quantum:
“I suppose you’re Natsuo Todoroki, then.”
Natsuo glared: “And who the hell are you?”
“Toki Taiyōme. I would say pleased to meet you, but it may ring untrue after that display of poor manners.”
Natsuo reddened. His sister facepalmed. Shouto hissed something like “I knew it”, and Endeavor cleared his throat, glowering. Keigo was quietly sniggering from the sofa.
“Oh, this is lively,” Meteor remarqued, appearing at Toki’s shoulder and glancing at the crowd. “Are we having a party?”
“I invited my friends,” Shouto declared evenly. “Somehow they were better informed of what was going on here than me.”
Hitoshi and Neito both waved. Toki raised an eyebrow.
“What did you do?”
“Hey!” Neito protested, raising his hands in surrender. “I didn’t do anything! This time.”
Hitoshi shrugged. “Long story short? We were hanging out and Todoroki told us that his father had a colleague over today. I remembered that Mom told me you were visiting your father this afternoon. I put two and two together and guessed you were involved. I shared this theory with Neito and Todoroki, and then Todoroki texted his siblings, and then we got here Natsuo was already there. His sister Fuyumi just arrived, and…”
Then he turned to the eight-person, who was standing next to Fuyumi with a bright grin, and concluded: “I have no idea why you are here, though.”
“I was with Fuyumi when she got your text,” Sachiko said brightly. “I was curious to see how it went down, and Fuyumi offered to introduce me; so here I am!”
“Oh,” Hitoshi blinked. He turned to Shouto with a wry grin: “Hey, small world. I didn’t know your sister knew Sachiko.”
After he said her name, Natsuo, Shouto and Endeavor all zeroed on Sachiko with razor-sharp attention.
Oh, Toki realized, holding back a hysterical bark of laughter. They knew that name, clearly. Sachiko didn’t even twitch, her smile taking on a slightly fixated quality; but Fuyumi turned bright red.
Neito blinked, then did a double-take. It took Hitoshi three seconds longer but his eyes widened almost comically, and then Toki could see him mouth “the girlfriend!” to himself with incredulity. For a second everyone was completely silent.
Keigo leaned towards Toki and whispered without moving his lips, so low that no-one else could hear:
“One stack of paperwork that Fuyumi decided to introduce her girlfriend in a way that would allow her to use this chaos as a buffer.”
“No bet,” Toki whispered back. “It was clearly Sachiko’s idea.”
There was loud snort of laughter behind Toki. Then her father put a hand on her shoulder (she jumped about a foot in the air) and said loudly.
“Well, shall we do introductions then?”
It broke the spell, at least.
Everyone scrambled for some dignity. Endeavor started growling that Shouto and Fuyumi should have told him they were bringing guests; then Natsuo retorted that he hadn’t told them he had guests, too; and then Shouto pointed out that clearly they weren’t guests, it was a home invasion… At which point everyone started talking at the same time. Hitoshi and Neito barely hesitated five seconds before taking Shouto’s side, even if Toki could clearly see them watching Endeavor (the Number One hero) with more than a little awe.
They had shared a Discord server with a guy named EndeavorSucks for more than a year now, so Toki would have expected them to not be too awed by the real-life Endeavor; but apparently she had been wrong. Well, it wasn’t too surprising. Toki couldn’t deny that the man had a certain presence. He was so tall and charismatic, and he scowled so fiercely; it wasn’t the kind of person that you dismissed out of hand. And kids were so easily impressed by real-life heroes! Neito had tripped on his tongue more than once when he had met Keigo for the first time, and that was after speaking with him on Discord!
It was kind of hilarious. After the tension and the emotions of this long conversation with her dad on the patio, Toki felt like she had accidentally slipped in a comedy. Somehow Natsuo ended up grilling up Sachiko about what she did and how she had met Fuyumi. Toki almost considered rescuing her friend, but Sachiko was handling her own admirably. Endeavor clearly looked like he had no idea how he had ended there and was struggling to keep his cool. Hitoshi and Neito were watching the chaos unfold like it was a tennis match. Toki almost expected one of them to whip out some popcorn.
Fuyumi pinched the bridge or her nose, and said she was ordering take-out. They were all invited for dinner. No, that wasn’t an option.
“So,” Meteor said lightly. He was back at Toki’s side, but he was watching Keigo, this time. Toki’s heart jumped into her esophagus. “Aren’t you going to introduce us in an official capacity, Toki?”
Keigo straightened, and Toki cleared her throat, her voice skipping in to a high-pitched nervous tone:
“Sure!”
Oh, shit, it was happening. Keigo and Meteor watched each other, an unreadable look on their faces. Meteor had crossed his arms; Keigo had his massive wings half-open, a casual gesture that emphasized how imposing his wingspan really was. Toki tried to swallow her nervousness. She didn’t miss the fact that at least four people in the room were not-so-discreetly eavesdropping.
“Dad, this is…”
She had a brief flash of panic because she couldn’t very well introduce the love of her life as Hawks; but Keigo hadn’t agreed to reveal his name, and for someone as private as him, that was a big thing. Something she couldn’t do without his permission. He hadn’t even wanted to tell his name to Hitoshi or Mihoko or Melissa!
But Keigo caught her eyes and gave her a tiny nod, a reassuring smile. ‘Go on, it’s fine.’ Because it was Toki’s dad? Or maybe because his name wasn’t Takami, anymore. Keigo had always loathed that name; he had been all too glad to leave it behind.
It didn’t matter in the end. Toki took a big breath, and let out in a rush:
“… my husband, Keigo Taiyōme.”
There was a slight hush in the conversations around them. Meteor blinked, looking briefly taken aback.
“You took her name,” he said quietly.
Keigo didn’t square his shoulders; he was almost a head shorter than Meteor, it wouldn’t have helped. But his wings shifted slightly, and he tilted his head in that peculiar way that made him look eerily like a bird of prey, before asking mildly:
“Should I not have?”
There was a new appraisal in Meteor’s eyes when he looked Keigo over, this time. Something surprised, but softer and warmer.
“No,” Meteor shook his head with a slight smile, “it was a good call. I’m delighted to meet you, Keigo.” He paused, looking him over, and made a pensive noise in his throat: “Unless you would rather be called Hawks?”
“Hawks is fine, Meteor-san.”
Toki made a face. What a weird term of address. And yet her father looked strangely pleased, as if Keigo had done something unexpected but amusing.
Meteor looked at Toki, then at Keigo, and then shook his head with gravity.
“Stop fretting, the both of you. I’m not going to dictate you how to live your life, Toki. If he’s part of your family, that makes him part of mine, too.”
Toki blinked, a little stunned by that easy acceptance. Keigo looked thrown, too, eyes wide and startled.
Toki had a large family. She had Keigo, she had Hinawa, and now she had her father back, too: her family by blood. But she also had Mihoko and Hitoshi Shinsō, and in some way she had Neito, Inferno-senpai, even maybe Yagi or Mera.
But Keigo didn’t have that.
He had plenty of friends! Hell, he had more friends than Toki. But he wasn’t as close to them. Mirko was his best friend and he trusted her, but even with her he wouldn’t bare his heart, talk about his feelings, allow himself to be weak. It was a privilege that only Toki had, because Keigo only had Toki. Well, Toki and Hinawa: but he couldn’t really talk to Hinawa and count on her support. Toki was the only one who did that for him. Nobody else was Keigo’s family; and it had probably never crossed anyone’s mind to claim him as such.
And Meteor… He was kind of intense. When he claimed you as his, come hell or high water, he would fight to the death for you. It was humbling but it was also terrifying, because Toki had seen to what lengths Meteor could go for people or just for his own comfort. Murder was always very much on the table for someone like him.
He didn’t even pretend otherwise.
Maybe that was why he was so intimidating. Meteor was all smooth smirks and taunting jokes, but then suddenly the mask fell and he could be downright unsettling. He did it on purpose, too. Just to remind you that even if he condescended to be nice and charming, at his core he was a predator, delighting into blood and violence. A tamed tiger still had claws, and fangs, and the instinctive urge to sink both of them in your throat.
And then he smiled again, and suddenly the tiger was once more as indolent and pleased as a housecat.
“Ah,” Keigo said haltingly, in an uncharacteristic display of shyness. “Thank you.”
Hidden behind his wings, Toki grabbed his hands and squeezed it, briefly. Maybe she wasn’t as discreet as she had thought, because she saw Meteor’s eyes track the movement of her shoulder. His lips twitched in a smile.
“Don’t thank me. It’s natural. My daughter told me a lot about you.”
Keigo’s shoulders relaxed infinitesimally; his smile was a touch warmer, too.
“Good things, I hope?”
“Good things indeed. I’ll even skip the shovel talk.”
“Dad,” Toki hissed, mortified.
Meteor laughed low under his breath. “I’m joking, Toki. You should be happy I’m bonding with my son-in-law.”
That was a terrifying thought.
“Yes, yes,” Toki waved a hand, “everyone is very pleased. Now let us please focus on the train wreck that is going with the Todoroki, all right?”
oOoOoOo
Somehow, they ended up having dinner with the whole Todoroki family.
Take-out arrived. Endeavor sighed and made himself some disgusting healthy smoothie that was green, and that Toki eyed with thinly veiled horror. It looked like some of those awful protein shakes that Keigo drank sometimes in the evenings. Gross.
But everyone else sat at the table, in an atmosphere of cheerful chaos completely at odd with the ambiance of the house. It was weird. It should have been downright awkward, but it was like everyone had decided they were past awkwardness and just embraced the incongruity of the situation. Natsuo and Fuyumi almost seemed to overplay it, as if delighting in being allowed to be loud and joyful in this too-big house.
Also, the intruders here were basically all members of the Discord Server, with private jokes and snappy come-backs ready to go; it did wonders to ease the conversation. They knew they had friends at their back. Toki relaxed, slowly, letting tension slowly trickle down from her spine. Against her chest the pressure of anxiety was shifting, easing away from nervousness and into something warmer, brighter, brilliant like sunshine fitting against the curve of her ribs. It was crazy and chaotic, and yet somehow they were all managing to talk and joke and be at ease with each other. It was a hell of a relief.
Natsuo had been loud and indignant at the deluge of surprises tossed his way. Sachiko’s identity, the fact that Meteor was an ex-villain, the fact that apparently Shouto hadn’t told him about his friends, and so on. But Natsuo was very much like his father, and didn’t simmer in rage very long. He exploded, then moved on. Within ten minutes he was drawn into conversation with Sachiko and forgot about being angry.
Toki witnessed Hitoshi and Neito firing quips like a comedian duo, making the stoic Shouto Todoroki swallow back laughter. And more surprisingly she saw Meteor joke with Endeavor, and she realized that the Number One hero, scowling and awkward, actually had a sense of humor under his lack of social graces. He was dry and deadpan, and he was reticent to join a conversation, but he wasn’t mute. He could joke, and he could use sarcasm.
Endeavor wasn’t exactly comfortable bantering with people… But Meteor wasn’t exactly people. At one point Toki heard Endeavor absolutely roast him over some stupid remark, making her dissolve into surprised laughter.
And Meteor was, somehow, utterly in his element.
It was startling. Toki had forgotten how lively dinner was in the hideout, with the Crew laughing and bantering, and Meteor effortlessly ping-ponging between different conversations, adding animation to some debates and calming down arguments even before they began, lightening the tone, steering conversations. He managed to cajole Natsuo into forgiving him for lying about his past as a criminal, he made Fuyumi laugh, he argued about heroism with both Keigo and Sachiko, he talked with Neito and Hitoshi and Shouto and then went right back to Endeavor, somehow managing to connect the two conversations without a hitch.
That wasn’t exactly how Toki had planned on introducing her dad to her friends (specifically: her most normal friends, the civilian ones, the ones who weren’t heroes… or Melissa, who was in a category of her own). But maybe Sachiko had had a good idea to piggyback the sheer chaos of this dinner for her introduction to the Todoroki family; it provided a good buffer.
Most of it was provided by Shouto Todoroki, actually. Toki had once considered him melancholic, but the boy was also absolutely fearless and completely tactless. Toki had suddenly absolutely no trouble imagining him insulting a police Commissioner to his face. Gods, little Shouto had a mean streak like a delinquent. You could fit all the fuck he gave in a matchbox and still have room for the matches.
“How was it to be a S-ranked supervillain?”
“Shouto!” Neito squealed.
The boy was completely unbothered. “What?”
Meteor grinned, looking delighted:
“No, no, it’s refreshing. Can you believe that everyone walks on eggshells around my career change? And those who don’t are so boring. It’s always ‘your redemption is something you have to work towards for the rest of your life’ and never ‘how was the unhinged spiral into evil? the unhinged spiral into evil looked fun’.”
Shouto blinked placidly. “So, was it fun?”
“Very,” Meteor answered, grinning like a shark. “So much less paperwork. You’re your own boss. You set your own hours. It was great.” He winced, suddenly, like someone had kicked him under the table, and added half-heartedly: “No dental coverage, though.”
“Oh yeah,” Hitoshi drawled, “that sounds terrible.”
Meteor’s attention shifted to him, mock-serious: “Dental coverage is more important than you think. The state of medical care in prison is appalling.”
None of the boys were even remotely surprised by that information, so instead of backing off, they just shrugged. Hitoshi leaned forward, waving hand dismissingly:
“Yeah, yeah, whatever. The real question is: hypothetically, how do you hotwire a car?”
“No idea.”
“Aren’t you a criminal?” gasped Hitoshi, incredulous.
“I don't have a driving license,” Meteor shrugged. “What would be the point? I can fly.”
Toki held back a snort. What a liar. Meteor used to steal sport cars for fun!
“… He’s a got a point,” Neito frowned.
“I can show you how to hotwire a car,” Sachiko butted in.
“How do you know how to do that? Wait, no. Forget I asked. I don’t want to know.”
Toki ducked her head behind her glass, pretending to drink so she could hide her delighted grin.
Dinner was good. Somehow, while Meteor was busy charming everyone and Sachiko was busy corrupting Toki’s little fledglings and Natsuo was busy bickering with his sister about something or the other while Keigo was gleefully adding fuel to the fire… Toki ended up striking a conversation with Endeavor.
It was awkward, at the start. But they managed to talk about Inferno, and then they moved on to common acquaintances. They actually had a lot. From then, they moved on heroics as a whole, debating about the pro and cons of limelight versus underground heroism.
Surprisingly, Endeavor was very well-informed about underground heroism. He didn’t employ any underground heroes (beside Meteor) because nobody was good enough for him. The whole police department filled that role for his agency; but every member of the Endeavor Agency was required to be trained in underground tactics, like disguise, filature, recon, surveillance and so on. Even Endeavor himself, although he admitted with a scoff that he had never been very good with disguises.
Considering that he had thought that a hat and sunglasses were enough to hide himself when he had visited Fukuoka, Toki was inclined to agree.
She bragged about being excellent with disguises, to which Endeavor reacted with polite incredulity. And after the first huff of outrage, Toki had to sheepishly admit that he may have a point.
Toki Taiyōme hadn’t been very well-hidden, if Endeavor had managed to see her from behind Quantum’s visor.
“The visor was supposed to hide my eyes,” she muttered.
Endeavor looked unimpressed.
“You kept the same haircut and a space-themed name.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think this though.” Toki shrugged. “In my defense when I picked my hero persona, I had no reason to think I should hide more. And when Dad got out of prison, if I had suddenly changed my appearance, it would have attracted attention. Twin-buns are an insanely popular hairstyle now, so I figured that the visor and the whole charming persona were enough. No one else saw through it, not even Sir Nighteye! The only person who figured it out was Nedzu, and he wasn’t even sure until I confirmed it.”
Endeavor made a pensive noise. “Maybe it’s for the best. I wouldn’t have found you otherwise.”
Toki cracked a smile: “What, everything happens for a reason?”
“Yes,” Endeavor said, raising his eyebrows. “And sometimes that reason is that you’re dumb and makes bad decisions.”
Keigo, who had been listening, spat out his drink with how hard he was laughing.
Toki thumped him on the back and pretended offense, but in truth she was grinning, too. I mean, you don’t survive adulthood if you don’t have a healthy dose of auto-derision.
And she should have expected to get roasted by Endeavor at some point.
They talked, and they ate, and with time and food and jokes and easy conversation, they grew more comfortable. Shouto, who had been so tense and had probably brought Hitoshi and Neito to his family to test boundaries more than out of a real desire to introduce them, relaxed until he was smiling freely. Fuyumi, who had been so skittish and nervous, beamed in joy. Natsuo’s grumpiness abated until he was all friendly and chatty.
It felt faintly surreal, although Toki didn’t know what part of it was the most surreal. To be in Endeavor’s home? To share a meal with Neito and Hitoshi and Sachiko and a bunch of strangers who suddenly all knew her name? To not be freaked out about those people knowing her name?
To have Meteor here? That Meteor got along so well with everyone, even Hitoshi and Neito, even Keigo?!
Yes, it was surreal. And yet the whole thing went so smoothly! Everyone played nice with each other. Even Endeavor, even Meteor. Oh, Meteor wasn’t nice; he probably didn’t know how to be nice. But he pretended to be well enough… And he was charismatic. Toki had forgotten just how much. He was charming and interesting, and he had everyone wrapped around his little finger. Even the people who knew he was a mass-murderer! It was insane. And he loved that. Toki could see it. He basked in the attention like a cat luxuriating in a patch of sunlight.
And somehow that happiness felt contagious. It was incredulous and warm, bubbling in her chest like champagne. When he caught her eyes across the table and smirked, she couldn’t help but grin back.
We’re okay. We’re both okay.
Toki knew that Meteor would most likely hurt people again. It was in his nature. He thrived in chaos and violence. The fact that he was aiming at villains, and with the aim to protect society, didn’t change the fact that this violence existed. She knew that; and yet… it was fine.
She knew her forgiveness didn’t mean he had become a good person; but you don’t need to forgive someone to let them participate in society. You don’t need to forgive someone to love them. Her father wasn’t a good person, he would probably never be a good person… But she loved him anyway, and she forgave him.
She was just happy to have this second chance.
Distantly she entertained the thought of telling him about Hinawa, one day. About Mihoko-san and Hayasa-sensei and Kameko and Mera-san and Inferno and all the people she considered her family, as dysfunctional and broken and ambitious as they were.
It wouldn’t be anytime soon. But it could come. It was an option, now. And this thought was hopeful enough to make her smile helplessly.
When it got late, Endeavor rightfully pointed out that Neito and Hitoshi should go back home or maybe tell their parents if they were spending the night. The implicit offer of welcoming them didn’t went unnoticed. Toki could see the surprised but pleased look that Shouto leveled to his father.
Neito laughed and said no one was waiting for him at home. Toki could see Fuyumi’s big sister instinct kick in, and he was invited to stay in a spare room. Apparently the Todoroki estate could house a whole regiment. At that point Fuyumi casually announced that Sachiko would stay, too, and the three Todoroki children not-so-subtly stared at their father. But Endeavor just shrugged and said “fine” like he barely noticed.
Well, that evening sure was full of surprises.
Anyway. Hitoshi, for his part, had no excuse to not go home: his mom would worry, and Toki could drop him off. That was a good opportunity for Toki and Keigo to make their exit.
They said their goodbyes. That was also a nerve-wrecking perspective, to be honest. Keigo acted as the distraction, pestering Endeavor and making a whole show of it, and Toki found herself face to face with her father in the hallway.
He had taken his hair out of his neat ponytail. With dark hair falling down his shoulders and back, he looked startingly like the Meteor of her memories. Younger, wilder; and when he smiled down at her, almost softer.
He looks like me, Toki realized with something like surprise. She had always believed she looked like Sayuri: round cheeks, brown hair, long eyelashes, her nose, her frown, even the same pout. But she had Meteor’s pointy chin, his high cheekbones, the same sharp smile. Her eyes had the same shape as her mother’s but the color was all Meteor. Her dark brown hair was dead center between her parent’s, but it was thick and almost wavy at the ends, just like her father’s.
For several seconds they just stared at each other. Then Toki ducked her head, scuffing her foot on the hardwood floor absentmindedly.
“Would it be fine if I came back next week-end? It doesn’t have to be here. Just in Shizuoka in general. We could… I don’t know, have lunch somewhere. Maybe. If you’re okay with it.”
“I would like that,” her father said lowly.
He accepted it so easily. Toki smiled, shaking her head with faint disbelief. No pushing, no prodding, no taunting, just easy acceptance that she would be the one to come back to him. It still left her a little stunned.
“You changed so much.”
Meteor looked a little put off. “Yeah, believe me, I’m aware.”
“You sound annoyed about it.”
“Life was so much simpler when I could be a complete bastard and not care about other’s people feelings,” he grumbled.
Toki let out a loud snort of laughter. Then, on impulse, she took a step forward and hugged him.
“Goodbye, Dad,” she whispered. “I’ll see you soon.”
Her father hugged her back, ruffling her hair just like when she was a child. “Yeah.” His voice was impossibly fond. “I’m holding you to that, Munchkin.”
And that was it.
Toki left with Hitoshi holding onto her elbow and Keigo’s fingers interlaced with her own. One jump, two, and she was right in the middle of the Shinsō’s living room. It was midnight and Hinawa was sleeping, but Mihoko was still up, sheepishly waiting for her son. Hitoshi grumbled a bit because he was fifteen, not a baby, Mom, he could go home after midnight without turning into a pumpkin, but he accepted Mihoko’s fussing easily enough.
They didn’t chat for long. Within minutes, Toki and Keigo were off again, warping high in the sky to make the series of quick warps that would bring them back in Fukuoka.
Their apartment was quiet. After the chaos and animation of the Todoroki Estate, it left Toki almost disoriented. It felt strange that her home could exist in the same plane of existence as the place she had just left, a place where her father was happy to see her and working with heroes and where Toki could have dinner with a gaggle of chaotic people who all knew who she was and who didn’t care. Like stepping out of a dream and then realizing it hadn’t been a dream after all, that it had all really happened.
“So,” Keigo said after a beat, removing his shoes. “Did it go how you expected it to?”
“Honestly? Not really. But I had no real expectations, so that’s on me.”
He snorted. “Fair. Well, I was bracing for the worse, but it went extraordinarily better than I hoped for. I even saw Endeavor laugh once. It was like witnessing the Elenin comet. Except that the Elenin comet passes above the Earth every decade or so, and who knows when Endeavor’s sense of humor will be triggered again.”
“I don’t know,” Toki mused. “He wasn’t the stick in the mud that I imagined.” She paused. “Also the Elenin comet passes the Earth every thirteen years, not every decade. But I’m still impressed that you memorized that much.”
“Believe me, it’s not on purpose. But listening to you mumble about your thesis kind of makes me pick up things.”
Toki sniggered. She straightened her shoes on the shoe rack and followed Keigo inside the apartment. As they reached the bedroom, he looked over his shoulder to throw her a questioning glance.
“But my point was… Are you happy with how it went down?”
Toki searched her feelings.
Happy? She didn’t know for sure. She was still shaken, disbelieving, incredulous, shocked, joyful, grateful, and so many things at once that she didn’t know where to begin. She felt raw and tender, aching and yet drained, like the aftermath catharsis of a good cry after an emotional outburst.
It was always hard to define happiness. People hardly noticed when they were happy and typically only noticed when they weren’t. You could notice joy, thankfulness, amusement, even love; because it was strong and blinding and your brain was floored with dopamine and other nice chemicals. But real happiness? Not a rush of joy, but being content with how things were, not wishing for anything and yet not feeling boredom or disinterest aching in your chest; it was harder to see, and yet you missed it so terribly when it was gone.
Most people spent their whole life searching for it, actually.
Toki breathed, and smiled. She thought of baby Hinawa, sleeping safe and sound in the Shinsō’s house, protected and cared for, who called her Mama and who never doubted that she was loved wholeheartedly. She thought of Neito and Hitoshi and Melissa, strong and happy and young; she thought of all her students, all of her sidekicks, all those people she had made hers; hers to lead or to protect or to guide, and who trusted her. She thought of the HPSC, of Japan, about heroism and her mission and astrophysics and how far she had come, how extraordinary her path had been. She thought of Keigo, at her side, still looking at her with the same affection as four years ago or fourteen years ago; always at her side, always making her heart capsize with love.
She thought about family and what it meant. She thought about second chances and how scarce they were. She thought about death and danger, about habits and selfishness, about violence, about loneliness. She thought about how people didn’t change unless they decided to, unless they cared enough to put in the effort; about how her father hadn’t cared enough fifteen years ago, and her mother never had the chance to live long enough to change her mind…
And Toki thought about Meteor changing, right now, maybe not for her or not only for her, but changing anyway, because it was important for him.
She thought about her father, who should have been lost forever to her, hugging her tight and saying he forgave her; and her breath caught in her chest. She had grieved him like she had grieved her mother, like you care for a wound that scarred over and healed wrong. She hadn’t believed that she would ever get a second chance, and yet—
She thought about how lucky she was, so lucky that she couldn’t quite believe it, like how you didn’t recognize a miracle until it was staring you in the face.
“Yeah.” She smiled at him. “I’m happy.”
Notes:
We're going to have a short break just to get over that chapter x)
I'll see you on September 1st for a crack chapter in House of Wisdom, about how everyone arrived to the Todoroki Estate for the big reunion. Like Shouto said, it's a freaking house invasion! xD
In the meantime, i'm going to update the last chapter of "Snapshots of wisdom" ! Go and look at it, because Yuelan made me an AMAZING fanart of Meteor ! =)
Chapter 51: The center of the universe
Summary:
One month later...
Notes:
Welcome back !
I'm posting this chapter 24h earlier than planned because tomorrow i'll be at a funeral. Not a person i knew personnally (i met her twice) but it's the mother of a family friend, so... we're all going to show moral support.
Don't worry about me, i'll soon come back home and will get plenty of cuddle from my cats Bandit and Filou to feel better!
Anyway.
Here it is !This is the begining of the Kamino arc! Nothing crazy happen, but i like this chapter. We have Toki and Meteor bonding! Yeah!
This chapter happens one month after the last, so we have a small time-skip !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE
A month later.
Mid-August, early in the morning. It was hot, the sky was clear, and the city was busy with people going to work, shops opening, and teenagers enjoying their holidays. Toki looked down the window, feeling her expression soften when she took in the view of Fukuoka. Her city. Her kingdom.
Then she reported her attention on her laptop. It wasn’t yet nine, and Toki was already hard at work.
Her thesis presentation was in five days. She needed to absolutely nail it. But Yūei’s summer camp for classes 1-A and 1-B was in two days, and she needed to be ready for this, too. Just because she wasn’t invited (or even told where the camp would be) didn’t mean she couldn’t take precautionary measures.
She had already briefed Neito and Hitoshi and trained them to the brink of exhaustion. Escape training, recon and risk assessment, memorizing the list of villains suspected of involvement with the League. Toki had pulled all the stops so her little fledglings would not fly in there unprepared. And she also needed to stay on top of her patrols, and paperwork, and find a half-day somewhere to escape and spend some time with Hinawa, and damn she needed to find a way to convince Yagi to tell her about AFO, and she also needed to tell Tsukauchi that he could un-classify Toki Taiyōme’s file…
Fuck, had Tsukauchi called? Not yet? Damn it, she would have hoped to have an answer by now. She had asked him to do something for her about the League case, or rather, about the Nomu case. It wouldn’t help the police much, but it would help Toki personally and she could even use it for the training of her fledglings. The problem was that Tsukauchi hadn’t called her back yet. Had he been refused access? That would blow. Toki had high hopes for this little project.
So much to do, so little time. Toki frowned. She had taken in account the fact that, in canon, Yūei's summer camp happened in the mountains. But Toki didn’t know if Nedzu had made the same decision in this world. Odds were in favor of no change, though, because in canon, it had been a good strategy. Avoiding an attack had been the main goal, after all, and for that, what better plan than to hide?
Toki, who knew that the attack would happen, would have forfeited the plan to hide altogether, and organized the camp in a bunker instead. But, well, she had foreknowledge Nedzu didn’t. So of course he wouldn’t believe her. All Toki could do was warn him, warn her fledglings, and prepare to manage things if she was proven right and things went to shit.
Oh, she really hoped she wouldn’t be proven right.
“Quantum!” Hayasa-sensei called.
Toki’s head jerked from her laptop. She was sitting in the rafters of Icarus’ gym, and although it was a great spot to creep on her sidekicks or scare the crap out them, it was usually also a good hiding spot to work on her astrophysicist research without being interrupted.
Well, not when Hayasa-sensei was involved, clearly. The man was staring straight at her, completely unimpressed. Toki sighed, closed her presentation, and then warped next to him.
“How did you know I was here?”
“I raised you. If I hadn’t noticed you love high places, I really wouldn’t deserve my job as this agency’s investigator.”
He had a point. Toki shrugged. “You got me. Do you need me back on patrol? I thought still had—” she checked the time in the corner of her HUD, “— about two hours before relieving Sunspear and Ocelot.”
“No, but I would like to speak with you about the Firelights case if you have ten minutes. I’m back from Miyazaki and I may have a lead about how to cut their supply.”
“I’m all ears. They’re the last drug cartel in on Kyūshū that we haven’t cleaned; anything would help.”
Hayasa-sensei snorted, as they both walked towards the elevator leading to the top floor where his office was located.
“Oh yeah, the only gang that two young heroes didn’t catch in their whole career that started only four years ago, while establishing leadership over the whole island, while also cleaning up the most villains-ridded city in the country. What a disgrace.”
Toki stuck her tongue at him, very maturely. They stepped into the elevator at the same time. Hayasa-sensei didn’t waste any time.
“Firelights arose from the remnant of a Yakuza family, that’s why their community is too tight-knit and didn’t fall apart when the city started becoming safer. They’re in it for the money of course, but there is a genuine sense of loyalty there. It’s also why infiltrating them is so complicated. They don’t trust outsiders much.”
“We took down yakuza before,” Toki pointed out.
“I know. They’re a thing of the past, and they are getting weaker and weaker, but it also means that they cling to the remnants of their power all the more ferociously.” Hayasa-sensei frowned. “There is even one group in Sakai who’s dealing with Trigger now.”
Sakai… It was just south of Osaka. That was where was Sir Nighteye’s agency. Toki narrowed her eyes. That one was probably the Shie Hassaikai. Who appeared in canon right after Kamino. Kamino, which would happen soon.
Mmmmh.
“Anyway,” Hayasa-sensei continued. “Firelights mostly do business with another group in China, who supply them with drugs. Now to take them down, we need to cut them off from the mainland, so they have to look for resources here. This will give us an opening. When I was in Miyazaki, I talked to one of my sources on the docks, and…”
As they entered Hayasa-sensei’s office and he started spreading the files on his desk, Toki listened, humming in the right places, and mentally drawing out the plan in her head. She was trying to make it fit among her mental notes of patrols, other villains to take down, projects to follow, alliances to tie, and the canon-timeline in the background. It was like an elaborate game of Jenga. She was pilling up tasks and traps and intel, and in the end it was supposed to be a beautiful tower— but if one move was botched the whole edifice would go SPLAT.
She wasn’t too anxious about it, though. Maybe in a different world, maybe at a different time. But here and now, she had a strong support system, a competent agency, and some solid protection. Icarus had recruited two more sidekicks, bringing their numbers to nineteen. They weren’t quite at the level of the Endeavor’s Agency, who employed thirty sidekicks (most of them being hero-level!), but they were close. Not many heroes had such a team.
But then, not many heroes controlled a territory as vast as theirs.
At first, Icarus’ territory had only been the city of Fukuoka. But within a year, it was most of the prefecture. By the time Toki was twenty, it covered Fukuoka’s prefecture and two others, so more than half the island of Kyūshū. When Toki had been ‘undercover’ (aka, on maternity leave), Icarus had slowed its expansion, but not by much. By the time Toki had come back, there was only one prefecture left. It was done within four months and then they had started expanding into the main island of Japan.
For heroes, controlling a territory was tricky because you couldn’t conquer the place. You had to negotiate with the heroes in place, patrol in a way that didn’t hinder them, share intel, and so on. A good hero, even the best, couldn’t do everything by himself. The point of expanding your territory was to take unofficial command of agencies smaller than yours, so you could get intel from them and lend assistance when needed. Then, in turn, they gave you a place at the table when decisions were made and when the public wanted a protector to look up to.
That was what heroes classically called the Endeavor method, by the way. Because that’s how Endeavor had established himself: by conquering his territory. By putting his strength at the service of those weaker than himself, but not letting them use him and, on the contrary, keeping full authority. On the other end of the spectrum was the All Might method, which was to ping-pong everywhere without a base of operations, fighting all the battles people asked you to, and making the swiftness of your answer a priority over the management of the aftermath.
Mirko, for example, followed the All Might method. So did Sumire, Majestic, or Shishido, Fatgum, and so on. Most heroes who worked solo did it. Those who belonged to well-established agencies, with numbers and cohesion, leaned towards the Endeavor method. Like Inferno, Ingenium before his injury, Best Jeanist, Gang Orca… or, of course, Hawks and Quantum.
It was a question of manpower, but also of personal adaptability. Icarus Agency needed to be able to function even if Hawks, Quantum, and even Mercury took a big sabbatical! In their line of work, unpredictable absences were inevitable. Toki still disappeared semi-regularly to work on her thesis, train her little fledglings, and come September she would resume her classes at Yūei. Hayasa-sensei, as an underground hero, sometimes left for a week to infiltrate some place or some other.
And Keigo…
Well, giant red wings weren’t discreet, so he had more difficulty disappearing, but that didn’t mean he didn’t juggle secrets.
After all, Keigo was currently infiltrating the MLA.
He was going slowly. He couldn’t appear eager. He was in contact with Hanabata and had recently been introduced to a few of his friends at some gala, but nothing crazy. He couldn’t tip his hand too soon. But he had a foot in the door, now, and Hanabata was persuaded that he had Hawks all figured out.
It wasn’t difficult for Keigo to make his front of arrogance lean slightly towards eugenics. To make his cockiness verge on smugness, hinting at the belief that having a good Quirk made him inherently superior to people, like Destro’s book preached.
Getting recruited was just a question of time, now. Toki only hoped that Keigo would be able to be introduced to the MLA conspiracy before they became foot soldiers for the League. Both groups were dangerous, but to avoid an all-out war, they needed to be taken down before they merged.
Well, a lot of things happened in canon before the MLA merged with the League. First, Kamino. Then the Shie Hassaikai Arc. The current timeline wasn’t quite there yet. Kamino hadn’t happened yet, and considering that Bakugo wasn’t a Yūei student maybe it wouldn’t happen at all, and Toki was worrying for nothing.
But hey, better to be worried about nothing than caught unaware if Shigaraki acted at the summer camps.
“… and that’s why I want to talk to Selkie,” Hayasa-sensei concluded. “He’s one of the best coastal patrollers around and having a water Quirk will be useful if we have to chase down boats.”
“Why not Wani?” Toki frowned. “He’s established in Kitakyūshū, so he’s our neighbor. Wouldn’t it better to rely on him than on a hero who does most of his business in the main island? That was the whole point of conquering Kyūshū in the first place, so we can use the heroes who are already here.”
“Wani is barely older than you. He’s also a rescue-oriented heroes, no matter his abilities in a fight, while Selkie is experienced in patrols.” Hayasa-sensei paused, and made a face. “Also, he’s rude.”
Toki acknowledged the point. Wani was a young hero with a water Quirk and a prickly temper. He wasn’t always easy to work with, but he was good at his job. He was already ranked 92th, which wasn’t bad for a hero in his twenties.
Yes, Toki knew every hero on her island. It was her little kingdom. Keigo was the independent prince consort, but Quantum (and her warping Quirk) reigned supreme.
“He did arrest smugglers last month,” she pointed out. “So he can clearly do that kind of job, too. Look, why don’t we put them both on that case? That way Wani can get more experience from Selkie, and Selkie can have more support in case of a fight.”
“Alright. You talk to Wani, then. He’s your vassal.”
“Urgh, don’t use that word, it’s so weird. Okay, I’ll talk to him, but you have to convince Selkie. Heroes from the main island rarely go this far south.”
“I know,” Hayasa-sensei agreed. “Selkie is always in the South during winter, though, so I may convince him to patrol around Kyūshū for a change. If we can have him from December to February, that would be a huge help.”
“Wait, he migrates?” Toki blinked. “Like a seal? Do seals even migrate?”
“I wouldn’t say migrate. But he’s in the water half the time. Wouldn’t you want to swim in warmer water in December?”
“I wouldn’t want to swim in December, period!”
Hayasa-sensei acknowledged her point with a pensive hum, and moved on.
“Anyway, I want to put at least five sidekicks on the Firelights case. I know it’s a lot, but we need to find where they smuggle the drugs to cut them off and infiltrate them in the meantime.”
Toki waved a hand. “Five is fine. We’re not short-staffed. Besides, Melissa will be working at Icarus starting in September, for her work-study, and in a year she’ll have graduated and will become an official sidekick… So if she takes up part of Ocelot’s duties, he will have more time for that case. Well, if it’s not solved by September, at least.”
“Optimistic.”
“I try,” she grinned back at him.
They shared a moment of comfortable silence. Toki distractedly grabbed a stack of paperwork and flipped through it, making a face when she saw it was an analysis from the HPSC.
“It’s been a while since I’ve seen mail from the HPSC,” she wondered.
“We have the usual amount,” Hayasa-sensei shrugged. “It’s been four years since your start, and it’s normal that requests and advice are starting to dry up. Icarus doesn’t need much guidance from them. We’re well-established now so they don’t need to send big missions our way. The missions come to us, especially now that we have a huge network.”
“True.”
Hayasa-sensei gestured to the file she had in her hand:
“That one is an analysis of our success rate. Basically, why and how we’re so good, and what can other agencies use to copy us.”
Toki snorted. “Good luck with that.”
Icarus was one of the most well-performing hero agencies in the whole country, and it made the HPSC look good to say that it was thanks to them. It meant that the HPSC could give the formula to success to any hero looking to improve themselves. But the truth was that once you got to it, Icarus’s formula couldn’t be replicated.
First, there was money. Icarus had such a meteoric rise because they had taken a huge loan from the HPSC, and they had plenty of funding to set up shop. This was a problem because not everyone had that kind of cash and borrowing that money, even at a low-interest rate… well, good luck, if you weren’t the HPSC’s golden geese.
Second was Quantum and Hawks’s training. Not only the quality of said training gave the HPSC a guarantee of success (hence the low-interest rate of their loan), but it also ensured that they would shoot up in the ranking quickly and start paying back their loan just as fast.
Then, there were the resources at their disposal. The intel. The easy access to other heroes or top-notch consultants, thanks to the HPSC’s relations. The fact that they had an underground hero tackling the issues behind villainy at the same time the limelight heroes took down villains. This ensured ten more didn’t rise when once was taken down. And there was Kameko, too. She who was a resource of her own; smoothing down edges, preparing contracts, and buttering up their contacts.
I mean, half of the formula for success was an incredible amount of preparation and a lot of money. The other half was an exceptional amount of talent, a great deal of personal trust, and sheer blind luck.
“It’s Sabira-san’s opinion too,” Hayasa-sensei admitted a little sheepishly. “But even if it’s useless to help a normal agency get off the ground, it can be used to improve those who have a solid enough base.” He paused. “Also, Sabira-san said it’s proof that she’s awesome and she wants to rub it in the faces of as many people as possible.”
“… Yeah, that tracks.”
Toki and Keigo were the main heroes, but almost all the administrative side of things had been taken care of by Kameko. Without her, they wouldn’t have been able to get so many missions, they wouldn’t have such easy access to resources or such good publicity, and they wouldn’t have climbed the rankings so fast… Basically, she was the mastermind in the shadows making sure everything ran smoothly.
“Speaking of the Commission,” Hayasa-sensei said suddenly. “Did you see Mera-san recently? He looks… better.”
“You mean he doesn’t look like a reanimated corpse? Yeah, I saw! He has an assistant now, I meet her a few weeks ago.”
“Oh, good for him!” Hayasa-sensei looked like he really meant it. “I’m not surprised you knew before me, actually. Mera-san always had a soft spot for you.”
“What, really?”
Hayasa-sensei shrugged. “Is it so surprising? Sabira-san is the same. They recruited you, so they feel responsible. And maybe a little protective, too. No matter how frightfully competent you became, they can’t forget they knew you when you were eight.”
Toki raised an eyebrow:
“And you didn’t?”
Hayasa-sensei coughed, a little awkward, then straightened and fixed his collar in a way that was eerily reminiscent of how Tenya Iida fidgeted when he was embarrassed of having feelings. Toki laughed with helpless fondness. Then, shaking her head, she reached to pat his arm, sparing him the mortifying ordeal of admitting that he was attached to the two little terrors he had raised for years.
“Off with you,” Hayasa-sensei groused, flustered, but trying to hide a smile. “You can go back to your thesis. It’s in five days, isn’t it? How do you feel?”
“Like I can blow their minds but also like I want to throw up,” Toki answered honestly.
He snorted. “Relax. You’ll do fine. I feel like you’re stressing way more about academia than about heroics, somehow.”
It wasn’t inaccurate. In heroism, Toki knew what she was doing. Plus, she had Keigo at her side, Hayasa-sensei, and Kameko, and Icarus’s sidekicks. In her PhD, half of the time she felt like she was bullshitting her way through.
But she had another stressor besides her thesis that Hayasa-sensei was ignoring. Maybe that’s why he always blamed her canon-related anxiety on her studies.
“Well at least I solved my issues with Meteor, so I can only freak out about one thing at the time.”
She was actually freaking out about several separate things (the PhD, the summer camp, her side-project she had with training Neito Monoma, Keigo’s sting as a spy, the Ghost Arsonist who was still missing, the League, AFO…) but at least she had removed her father from her list of worries. Silver linings, and all that.
“True,” Hayasa-sensei said pensively. He watched her for a second, then raised his eyebrows, “Are you going to introduce him to anyone here one day?”
Hayasa-sensei and Kameko had both been told that Toki had come clean to her father about her identity, but nothing more. Toki shuffled her weight awkwardly, and hesitated.
“Maybe, one day? We’re not there yet. We meet for lunch some days, but that’s it. I haven’t really met his friends at the Endeavor Agency either.”
“Mmh. Maybe he doesn’t want to broadcast the fact that his daughter is a top hero. It’s a pretty big vulnerability.”
For me or for him? Toki wanted to ask. She bit back the question. It was a stupid one. The answer was both. Meteor had always been Toki’s weakness, and now she realized that maybe the reverse was true.
“It’s kind of weird,” she admitted.
“Family often is.” Hayasa-sensei sighed, looking a little weary. “You know you don’t have to see him if you don’t want to, right?”
“I want to! It’s just weird. He was so much taller and impressive in my memories. Now he’s… well, still impressive, but we’re on more equal ground, and it’s—” she shrugged, and finished lamely: “… weird.”
“Most things are when you’re involved,” her teacher said dryly.
“Slander. I’m perfectly normal.”
Hayasa-sensei was nice enough to not laugh in her face, but Toki could definitely see the mirth dancing in his eyes. He waved her away.
“Go, shoo, back to work. Do normal things.”
“Yeah, yeah, alright. Good luck with your case!”
Hayasa-sensei waved at her, and Toki warped. In a heartbeat, she was back in the rafters of Icarus’ gym, and she reopened her laptop to go back where she had left. Namely: her thesis, that she would defend in less than a week and finally obtain her PhD at the age of twenty-two years old. What a high.
She shook her head with fondness. It was so strange to think that what she had long considered to be a dream was now completely accessible. But she realized, now, that it wasn’t her greatest ambition. She still loved astronomy, she still wanted to reach the stars. But Hoshizora and her studies were barely a third of her life. Probably even a little less.
It should have been a depressing thought. And yet, Toki only wanted to chuckle. Hayasa-sensei had been right. She was putting too much pressure on herself. Her work in academia was important, but it wasn’t the end of the world.
Her life was so full, now. It was filled to the brim with love and support and new possibilities.
oOoOoOo
There were constants in Toki’s life. Keigo. Hayasa-sensei. Kameko. Hero work, petty fights with villains, wild chases all across the island. Paperwork, reports, meetings, accounting.
And of course, the discord server.
________________
> EndeavorSucks: a reminder that bats are superior to swords for their inherent potential for inflicted pain.
> EndeavorSucks : Swords are cool, and they can make you bleed, of course, but for just raw pain, bone breaking, blocking, and parrying, bats reign supreme.
> SpicyWings: it took me a full minute to realize that you weren’t advocating using a flying rodent to inflict pain
< Antares: what
< Antares: I’m just logging, what the hell is going on and why are you inciting violence against rodents? We talked about this
> SpicyWings : we were talking about weapons!
< Antares: my bad, sorry
> NotOnFire: no no wait back up, what do you mean ‘you talked about this’
> PinkIsPunkRock: do you. as heroes. have conversations about inciting violence against rodents?
> Antares: I mean yeah at one point we were discussing the possibility of yeeting Nedzu from a window
> PinkIsPunkRock: ok fair
> NotOnFire: I love how Pink is like “oh no poor rodent!” and then someone said “but what if the rodent was in a position of authority” and she’s like “fuck him up.”
> PikaPika: I would like to point out that this conversation was originally about unsafe medical practices to help me win an argument
> PikaPika: but this is vastly entertaining so you can carry on
< Antares: what unsafe medical practices?
> PikaPika: well
> PikaPika: everything to do with barbaric, outdated practices that people still use because it’s like the good old days.
> PinkIsPunkRock: most of the time it’s inflicted on women and/or disabled people and/or mutants
> PinkIsPunkRock: I’m thinking declawing children with animal mutations, for example, even though declawing means removing the last knuckle of your fingers. But there’s also all those abhorrent practices used in hospitals, especially on women, like the husband stitch? Basically after a brutal birth, their vagina is stitched up tighter so it’s more pleasurable for the guy, but it means sex become painful for the woman. And it’s ALWAYS DONE without the woman’s knowledge or consent!
> PikaPika: and there’s also everything about sterilization and birth control.
> PinkIsPunkRock: yes!
> PinkIsPunkRock: in Japan it’s illegal but did you know that in the USA (their healthcare is GARBAGE by the way) they still make girls take care of birth control! Either it’s pills (with side-effects), either it’s shots (with DANGEROUS side-effects) or, in some case, they shove a piece of copper in your uterus.
> EndeavorSucks: I’m so glad I’m not a girl
< Antares: yikes
< Antares: to be honest I don’t know much about old-fashioned birth control methods, but I know IEDs can be a bit risky right? With the ions in the copper?
> PinkIsPunkRock: …. okay I know people make this mistake a lot but I’m sorry, it’s driving me a little insane because you absolutely mean IUD
< Antares: ?
< Antares: googling it
< Antares: oh shit
> SpicyWings: 🤣 🤣 🤣
> SpicyWings: I’m on the floor xD
> NotOnFire: wait what
> PinkIsPunkRock : an IED is an improvised explosive device, and an IUD is an intrauterine device.
> NotOnFire: … oh
> PinkIsPunkRock: I know medicine was kinda primitive compared to now, but they didn’t put car bombs in people’s cervixes
< Antares: Well, in my defense in my job I’m more confronted to ieds than iud!
< Antares: Also with an ieds they wouldn’t get pregnant then
> PinkIsPunkRock: Keping digging yourself in a hole, Antares…
> SpicyWings: xD
> PikaPika: I’m dead 😂
> EndeavorSucks: Do you even know what a cervix is?
> PinkIsPunkRock: Please tell me you at least know the basis of the female reproductive anatomy
< Antares: Hey
< Antares: I’m not totally ignorant
< Antares: I’m a 22 yo woman and I’ve shagged
> SpicyWings: If you say so
< Antares: I HAVE!
< Antares: I just didn’t know it was called IUD!
< Antares: Give me a rest
> SpicyWings: It makes all that supposed sex you’re having a bit suspect
< Antares: STOP IT.
< Antares: I FUCK.
> NotOnFire: Er, as her husband, shouldn’t you know that?
> SpicyWings: Oh yeah I was there
________________
Everyone who said online friendships weren’t real friendships was a liar. Toki’s friends from the Discord server had known her since she was twelve. They were all batshit crazy and they never failed to make Toki laugh.
She had been there for more than ten years now, holy crap.
It made her feel normal. There was so much going on in her life that she felt like she was in a shōnen manga sometimes. Living as a superhero and an astrophysicist student and a young mother was surreal, sometimes. And there were so many problems, sometimes small but sometimes absolutely huge, that Toki had to tackle herself because she couldn’t trust anyone else with them.
Well, she could trust Keigo, of course. But some of these issues were deeply personal, like the whole thing with Meteor. And there was also the canon foreknowledge that she hadn’t told anyone about and that was becoming less and less reliable the more this world diverged from canon.
Which wasn’t a bad thing. The canon timeline had some pretty big issues, and Toki was happy to tackle them in advance. But she didn’t enjoy the unpredictability that came with it. Especially when it concerned people she cared about… like her students that would be sent to a summer camp possibly targeted by the League.
Anyway, the next day, Toki received a call from Tsukauchi. She had been waiting for it for a while, and she couldn’t help but let out a slight sigh of relief. She finished her rounds with Sunspear and Ocelot and took the time to banter with Thunder Thief as she left, then she warped straight to Musutafu.
Tsukauchi was waiting for her at Dagobah Beach. They could have met at the police station, but considering that this little experiment would involve a minor, Toki could understand that Tsukauchi wasn’t super-enthused at the idea of doing this in an official setting.
Hitoshi, Melissa, and Neito were there. Technically they were all here for training; Tsukauchi was the interloper, not the other way around. But Toki fully intended to kill two birds with one stone. She joined them, waving cheerfully at Tsukauchi so he could leave the shadows where he was dithering, and made introductions.
Melissa already knew Tsukauchi. She called him Naomasa, in that overly-familiar way that seemed to be an American trait. But both Hitoshi and Neito were watching the detective with polite wariness.
“Is it about the League?” Hitoshi frowned. “You’re the detective in charge of that case, aren’t you?”
“He’s also the detective in charge of my missing person case,” Toki informed them cheerfully. “Funny coincidence, isn’t it? Oh, by the way, Tsukauchi-san! You can un-classify my file now. The whole point was to hide from Meteor, and I came clean to him last month.”
Tsukauchi opened his mouth, closed it, and then apparently decided he didn’t want to know any details. Smart man.
“This isn’t about the League,” he said instead. “Not entirely. I came here at Quantum’s request. She has an interesting theory about how you would be able to help our investigation, Monoma-kun.”
“And it would also help you train a very specific skillset that you would never be able to use against normal opponents,” Toki added.
Now the three kids all looked intrigued. Tsukauchi briefly hesitated, but finally seemed to decide that they all had the necessarily level of clearance. After all, Melissa already knew about this by her uncle and her friends, Neito had been informed by his friends, and Hitoshi had seen first-hand the USJ attack.
“You know that the League used a bioengineered weapon at the USJ, called a Nomu. That creature was a puppet equipped with several Quirks. We already identified a few, like shock-resistance and regeneration, but there might be more.”
“And that’s where you come in, Neito,” Toki took over smoothly. “I want you to use a DNA sample to try and identify all the Quirks the Nomu has, and see if you can copy some of them. If you can only copy all or nothing, don’t even try it. The Nomu was braindead for a reason, so copying all its Quirk could be dangerous. But identification should be safe enough.”
The all absorbed that in silence. Hitoshi’s eyes jumped from Toki to Neito with obvious wariness, but Melissa seemed pretty curious. Neito frowned.
“Well, I can try. But what use is it to identify the Quirks of Nomu?”
Toki considered her answer. In the end, she decided to be honest.
“The League is certainly backed by a powerful underground villain who has the reputation to be able to steal Quirks. So identifying which Quirks the Nomu has may allow us to close some missing persons cases.”
“Quantum!” Tsukauchi hissed.
“What? The existence of Soul Stealer is hardly a secret in the underground. Besides, every single one of these kids is going to intern at Icarus at some point and be told about it.”
Tsukauchi still looked unhappy about it. The children were a little paler, though. Ah, playing with sensitive information was less fun when it was tied to cold cases and dead bodies, wasn’t it?
“Wait,” suddenly said Hitoshi, frowning. “That explain why Tsukauchi-san needs your help, Neito. But since it’s To— Quantum-sensei who arranged this meeting and requested his presence, what does she get out of this?”
Smart. Sometimes Toki was blindsided by how smart her little fledglings were. Hitoshi would be a fantastic investigator once he gained a little experience. He was good at seeing loose threads and unrevealing mysteries.
“I told you I suspect that the League will attack your summer camp,” she said simply. “If they have a Nomu with them, I want you to have a way to fight them.”
Tsukauchi made a face. He could hear the truth in her statement, but Toki had a feeling he would have preferred if she lied. He probably didn’t like how confident she was in the fact that Yūei would be attacked, again.
“The Nomu aren’t the only dangers of the League,” Hitoshi said slowly.
He had the scars to prove it.
“I know.” Toki kept her voice level. “But right now, the Nomu are the only thing I can do something about.”
Tsukauchi glanced at her, sensing the lie, but he didn’t call her out on it. He pulled out of his pocket a small round thing, that Toki recognized as a petri dish. Inside was a perfectly round circle of something that looked like dark, smooth leather.
“Is that skin?” Hitoshi gagged.
“Only cultivated cells,” Tsukauchi said smoothly.
Toki didn’t need a lie-detecting Quirk to know it was false. That was totally a circle of skin taken off the Nomu. But the lie seemed to reassure the kids a little, and Neito fearlessly put two fingers on the leather, eyes closed to better concentrate.
For a few seconds he didn’t say anything, frowning. His eyes were moving behind his eyelids as if trying to focus. Finally, he let go of the petri dish with a deep exhale.
“Seven Quirks, I think? It’s really weird to have so many in one person. Well, one sample. I think I know which one is Regeneration, and there are at least two mental Quirks, but I couldn’t identify the others.”
“You can always guess what Quirk someone has when you copy it, though,” Melissa pointed out.
“Yeah, but after I’ve already copied it. It’s like trying to look at something from a distance, and then taking it and examining it up close. My mother can identify Quirks with touch better than I do.”
“That could be useful,” Tsukauchi frowned.
Neito’s polite smile stayed firmly in place, but his eyes darted to the side, betraying his discomfort.
“She’s unwell. She couldn’t help you.”
Tsukauchi nodded, so it probably didn’t register as a lie. Inwardly, Toki wondered how unwell Neito’s mother actually was. She had been in rehab for more than a year now. Maybe Toki should pay her a visit.
“Can you identify them better?” Melissa asked with interest. “Maybe if you focus on one, or if you take more time?”
“Uuuuh, probably? But I’m going to need a minute. Just the fact that there’s so many crammed in the same space is weird. It feels like someone shoved a bunch of mochi in a too-small container and they’re all squished together.”
In the end, Neito identified with confidence Regeneration, Shock-absorption, two strength-augmenting Quirks, one Quirk related to speed, and two unknown mental Quirks that may or may not be connected to numbness or obedience.
Copying a Quirk in particular was trickier. Toki was adamant that Neito should only try to copy one, even if he could hold several Quirks at once, she was pretty sure that Regeneration was made of several healing Quirks smashed together, and she didn’t want to know if it counted as several Quirks and could overwhelm her student if he copied them.
They took their time. Toki brought Hitoshi and Melissa away to spar. They had come here for training, and watching Neito struggle was no excuse to slack of. Hitoshi practiced his hand-to-hand, with Melissa dodging kicks and punches. Then, they trained in aerial maneuvers, or rather, how to take control of your fall. Orienting your body, recovering your balance, swallowing back the instinctive panic of ‘of shit I’m FALLING’ and looking at the ground not with mindless terror but with purpose, to find a target or identify an objective. It was something that parachutists did… except that when Toki was around, there was no need for parachutes.
Meanwhile, Neito tried to copy the Nomu’s Quirks, meaning he mostly stuck his hand on the petri dish and glared at it.
After nearly two hours, and with much difficulty, Neito let out a triumphant noise when he managed to copy the speed Quirk. He spent the next minutes running frightfully fast on the beach, leading to a merry chase with Toki whose warp-Quirk was the only way to keep up with him.
After six minutes, the Quirk disappeared from Neito’s copy and he tripped on his feet, falling flat on his face. It was also very funny to watch. But having copied and played with the Quirk, Neito was able to analyze it much thoughtfully.
“It’s not a speed Quirk, it’s an acceleration Quirk, actually,” he explained pompously. “It’s not just the legs or the muscles. The heartrate, the breathing, every muscular twitch! Even the eye movements. It gives you the impression that everything around you moves slower because you’re faster. Three or four times the speed, I think. Maybe more if I focused. But it’s not constant, it has to be knowingly activated.”
“Do you know the name of the Quirk?”
“I’m not psychic, I can’t know how the original holder named it in the Quirk registry. But if I had to name it, I would say something like… Enhanced Acceleration? Or Speed-Up? Maybe?”
“Alright, that’s helpful,” Tsukauchi said, scribing everything on a notepad. “Can you copy another Quirk? We’ll leave the mental Quirks alone, but it would be useful to know more about the others.”
It had taken almost two hours for Neito to copy the speed Quirk, though, so they would be here all night if they tried to go over the other Quirks today. Instead, Tsukauchi agreed to leave the sample in Toki’s hands. They were both aware that she was going to give it to Neito as soon as Tsukauchi had left, but as long as nobody said that out loud, Tsukauchi could have plausible deniability.
Anyway. Tsukauchi thanked Neito for his help, loudly told Toki he was giving her the sample of the Nomu under her responsibility as a pro-hero and left. Toki waited until he was gone from the beach, and then shoved the petri dish into Neito’s hands.
The summer camp was in two days. Toki really, really hoped that nothing would happen there. But if it did—
“Keep practicing, alright? And I’ll give you a braid of hair to keep with you at all times. Nedzu is confident that the secrecy surrounding the summer camp will protect you, but the secrecy only helps draw away attention. It doesn’t help if the enemy’s attention is already on you.”
“Great pep talk,” Hitoshi said sarcastically.
Neito looked a little pale, but he accepted the sample all the same.
“With that power,” he said slowly, “I’ll be the strongest hero student during the summer camp. I can keep everyone safe, this time.”
“You shouldn’t have to!” Melissa said, vehemently. She turned to Toki so abruptly that her blond hair snapped in the air. “The teachers are supposed to protect them. Why is Nedzu trying to keep you away?!”
Toki winced. That was a complicated topic.
There was the fact that Quantum was the HPSC’s pawn, meaning that in the friendly game of IRL chess that Nedzu and Genmei-san played, he couldn’t trust her like he would trust his own pieces. There was the fact that Toki had blindsided him three times already and Nedzu was understandably wary that she would throw a wrench in his plans with more surprises. There was the fact that she was friend with All Might, which was a liability because being the only support of All Might was an assumption that had factored in a lot of Nedzu’s plans, especially when offering him a teaching job; and it was that teaching job that had drawn the League to Yūei, putting Nedzu’s people at risk.
There was the fact that Nedzu was Nedzu, a sociopathic badger who liked to flex that he was smarter than everyone. And finally, there was the fact that Nedzu had once not been Nedzu, but a lab’s test subject, and he loathed humans from the bottom of his soul. He loathed organizations, he loathed secrets, he loathed lies, and Quantum incarnated all three.
“Because I’m an ally,” she summarized. “But I’m not a friend.”
“That’s bullshit.” Melissa scowled. It gave her a striking resemblance to Yagi when he was angry. “If you’re fighting a war, you do it with people who believe in the same cause, not just people you like during peacetime.”
“War?” Hitoshi laughed nervously. “That’s a strong word.”
“That’s what the League is aiming for, isn’t it?”
Woah, Melissa was pulling absolutely no punches today. Toki wildly wondered what All Might had told her exactly. About his injury, about AFO and OFA, about the League and who was backing them.
“It is,” Toki admitted. “They want a war, they want chaos, they want fear and destruction because they are powerless in the current order. But don’t worry.” She grinned. “I am here.”
Silence. Then all three of her students groaned.
“Did you just quote All Might?!”
“So lame, Toki-sensei. So lame. You should do the pose!”
“Damn it, I should have recorded this!”
Toki sniggered. She was pretty sure Melissa was going to repeat that story to her uncle at the first occasion. She hoped Yagi would have a good laugh.
She checked the time. It was late. They had spent more time at the beach than she expected. Her little fledglings were tired, and it was time to wrap this up.
“Do you have to go home, or do you want to get some fried chicken?”
It wasn’t a surprise when they picked the fried chicken. In a few days, they would be on their own, and Toki had to prepare for the possibility that she couldn’t keep them safe… but for now, they were still there with her, and they were allowed one evening of carefree relaxation.
oOoOoOo
Three days until Toki presented her thesis.
The kids were leaving for their summer camp today. They were actually already on the road, with Vlad King and Present Mic and Midnight corralling class 1-A and 1-B. Without Eraserhead, maybe class 1-A would have an easier time of it. At least nobody would make them cross the forest on their own as an anticipated test of their abilities.
In canon, the League had attacked the second day of the summer camp, or something like that. Toki was standing by, ready. Hitoshi and Neito had been briefed and armed. They both had concealed panic buttons. It would be fine.
Probably.
In any case, Toki couldn’t just sit on her ass and wait anxiously for the League to attack. She had work to do. Practicing for her thesis presentation in front of her mirror wasn’t even the main thing on her agenda today.
Today, she was meeting her father for lunch.
Weird, right? The idea of meeting her dad over a bowl of ramen in some restaurant in Shizuoka sounded so normal. It was the kind of thing that ordinary people did when they wanted to catch up with friends or casual acquaintances. It wasn’t the kind of thing Toki could picture her father doing, and it wasn’t the kind of thing her father could probably picture her doing, either. It seemed so impossible, to cram the ridiculously over-the-top drama of the Taiyōme family in casual meetings like this; to deal with their extraordinary baggage in such an ordinary way.
And yet, how else were they supposed to deal with it?
One overly-emotional reunion at the Todoroki estate had been enough. Now they had to hammer this relationship into the space left in their usual lives and make it fit. For that, they had to meet. They had to talk. Meteor couldn’t go to Fukuoka, Toki’s identity was still a secret, she couldn’t waltz into the Endeavor Agency unannounced, and phone calls were terribly awkward.
So… lunch.
It wasn’t the first time. Ever since their reunion, Toki dropped by Shizuoka at least twice a week to meet with her father. They sat down, and they talked. They got to know the stranger that the other had become. Restaurants were neutral spaces, so it worked out pretty well.
Shortly after their reunion in mid-July, the HPSC had given its agreement to give Meteor an underground hero license. They didn’t have any more reason to drag their feet. Having the HPSC’s agreement meant that Meteor’s freedom was all but secured. He could leave the Agency for private business without heroic surveillance.
Hence: going to restaurants.
Toki had forgotten that her father really liked good food. When she had been a kid, at the hideout, they didn’t have takeout delivered, but she remembered how Meteor or Nono or sometimes Homura would come home with big packages of something smelling delicious, and she realized that most of their meals had been prepared by fancy restaurants.
Meteor was secretly a gourmet. What a wild thought.
Anyway. Meteor’s audience had been held early this morning. It had been short, a simple formality. With the HPSC’s agreement, all the judge had to do was ask a few questions for formality’s sake, and then validate Endeavor’s request for early release, on the condition that his provisional license becomes definitive. The whole thing was kept hushed. It wasn’t even a public audience. The whole thing had been wrapped up in ten minutes. Immediately afterward, Endeavor had validated Meteor’s provisional license, the HPSC had processed the paperwork… and since eleven o’clock today, Meteor was a free man and an underground hero.
Yes, it still felt faintly surreal.
“You kept Meteor as your hero name?!” Toki choked.
Her father shrugged. “The only rule is that I can’t take the name of an active hero or villain. Since ‘Meteor the villain’ hasn’t been active in fifteen years, the name is free for the taking. Why shouldn’t I claim it? It suits me.”
They were in a high-end ramen restaurant, near the bleach. The view was great. They had seats on the terrasse overlooking the ocean. Meteor had picked the place, and Toki absentmindedly wondered when he had the time to check out the restaurants in the city. The food was rich and delicious. Even her novice palate could taste the difference with the cheap bowl she usually ate when she wolfed down something during patrol.
She had her hero costume in a backpack, but when they met, they were always dressed like civilians. Today her father wore a Hawaiian shirt that was completely out of place on him. At least, he really didn’t look like an ex-criminal. He looked like a tourist. For her part, Toki wore denim shorts with a tank top, due to the stifling hot weather, and a kimono jacket in shades of red and gold. It was an outfit she would have been uncomfortable to wear as Hoshizora since it was too bright, and too eye-catching. But she was getting used to being just Toki Taiyōme again.
And Toki Taiyōme wasn’t afraid of being noticed.
She one last look to her father’s hero license, to the way he grinned at the camera like a serial killer, and then shook her head fondly.
“Congratulations,” she said wryly, giving him back the license card, and picking back her chopsticks. “You look like an unhinged lunatic in that picture, though.”
Meteor flashed her the exact same toothy grin.
“They caught my best angle.”
“Dad.”
He laughed, unbothered by her put-on air of long-suffering exasperation. Toki supposed he was on the receiving end of that look pretty often if he worked with a stick-in-the-mud like Endeavor. Wait, was she becoming a stick-in-the-mud too? That was totally Hayasa-sensei’s bad influence.
“So, did the Endeavor Agency celebrate your release?” she asked, genuinely curious.
“I didn’t go back there yet,” he admitted. “I came straight here after the audience. But knowing them, probably. I saw Kiriko order enough champagne and sake to get all of us fantastically drunk. What about you, are you going to celebrate my release?”
“I’m here, aren’t I? And I never doubted it.”
Meteor’s eyebrows rose. “Such faith in your old and unrepentant father.”
Toki shrugged, not wanting to admit that she had used her pull with the HPSC and with All Might to have him liberated. That would probably lead to another emotional conversation. Instead, she oriented the conversation toward a safer topic.
“So, what’s new since last time? Did you arrest anyone interesting?”
“Interesting is such a strong word. I do have a funny story for you, though. Just last Thursday, there was this guy trying to climb down a balcony in his underwear…”
Of all the surreal things about reconnecting with Meteor, it was how easy the conversion flowed. Especially when it was about hero work. Toki was sometimes blindsided by it. Meteor was a ruthless fighter but he was also a keen strategist with an eye for details, and he injected such life in his stories that you couldn’t help but be hanging on his every word.
Oh, they disagreed on many topics. Anything to do with morality, ethics, the need for reforms, the very structure of society, and politics. Meteor was so utterly lawless in his approach to society that it was like they spoke a different language! He saw reforms and law as empty words never followed by actions. He saw homeless shelters as scams and charities as traps. Discrimination was a fact of life for him, just as inevitable as gravity for those unlucky enough to be born with mutation or bad Quirks. The idea of fighting it, fighting for those people, still left Meteor faintly baffled because what was in for him? He didn’t need their help in turn, so why waste his energy and time in this battle, and risk giving potential enemies an opening?
Meanwhile, Toki was foaming at the mouth because of course discrimination and hatred should be fought, because they could be fought, and fighting them was the right thing to do... And yet she couldn’t find the words to make Meteor understand that he should care about other people.
So they usually avoided those particular topics of conversation.
But when they spoke about work, it wasn’t hard to get engrossed in the conversation. And then they spoke about missions, and people they had met, and funny stories they had heard. Meteor had told her about Vicious, and Kuma, and Soul Stealer. Toki had told him about the League and the Nomu. They exchanged intel. They spoke about the sidekicks’ shenanigans and patrol routes, about paperwork and rescue protocol. They spoke about movies, books, and the latest gossip about other heroes. They spoke about training, about races and obstacle courses, and the weird competitive spirit between even the humblest heroes.
Toki didn’t talk much about Keigo, Hayasa-sensei, Hitoshi, Neito or Melissa, though. It was a reflex at this point. She kept her loved ones close to her, and didn’t lower her walls for anyone. Meteor had the same attitude. He chatted about his day and the sidekicks and the cases and the food and a thousand of little things, but he rarely (if ever) mentioned Endeavor outside of his actions on patrol. By listening to him, Toki would have never guessed that there was more between them than the camaraderie of fellow heroes fighting side-by-side.
But she knew better. Unfortunately. So she was half-waiting and half-dreading the day when her father would trust her enough to tell her what was going on. Because he wouldn’t be able to argue forever that he wanted to stay in Shizuoka because he admired Endeavor’s fighting spirit.
Admiring his spirit, yeah, tell me about it. He admired the way his spirit looked in spandex, rather.
Anyway. They chatted about all and nothing. Cases, villains, yakuza, rumors; gossip about heroes, stupid jokes, half-drawn plans for the future. He was actually a good listener when Toki wanted someone to bounce ideas back and forth about her Quirk. She had explained to him how she was able to teleport part of things by imagining they were whole, and that reality was just a fancy concept she could disregard as she wished in her mental considerations, and he had grasped that even more easily than Hayasa-sensei or Keigo.
“But why can’t you apply the same principle for gravity?” he argued. “Just visualize it and warp it.”
“It’s not that simple! I can’t see gravity, or momentum, or energy, and Warp-Space hinge on my visualization.”
Meteor’s eyes flashed, glowing like embers. “Yes, but you’re not visualizing correctly. You’re doing only half the reasoning.”
“Hey, is it my Quirk or yours here?”
Her father rolled his eyes, then waved a hand: “Alright, alright. Your base Quirk is to warp things you can see and touch, that you visualize as having grabbed. When you try to warp part of things, to cut them, you had to trick your brain into thinking you had only grasped half that thing, and the other half was untouched by your Quirk. Correct so far?”
“Surprisingly yes,” Toki muttered.
“For this, considering the base version of your Quirk wasn’t enough, you went to a second stage. You tried to see the world from an outside point of view. An amalgam of atoms and molecules separated by void and bound together by magnetic fields or gravity or whatnot. A big mass of little dots that you could pick apart. Your goal was to use your Quirk like a precision instrument to scoop a collection of little dots. And it didn’t work, even though the physics and the math were sound, because this mental process lacked willpower. Correct?”
Toki opened her mouth, then closed it. She hadn’t seen it like that before. It was infuriating to realize Meteor was right.
“Maybe?”
“Good. Then, seeing that this second stage didn’t work, you went to the third stage which is considering that everything outside of your body only exists because you wish it to, and willing the target to obey not the laws of physics but the laws of your own will. Correct?”
“That is a gross oversimplification because it took me a lot of thinking to bypass my mental blocks and—” Toki cut herself off, pinched the bridge of her nose, and let out a growl. “All right, fine, correct.”
Meteor threw his hands up in exasperation:
“Then why are you stuck with the second stage when you try to teleport gravity?! You don’t need a super-computer to help you, you need to get your head out of your ass and use the third stage, which you already use on a daily basis!”
“That is—”
Uh. Wait a minute. Toki blinked, feeling her brain rebooting. Meteor continued, gesturing with animation.
“Don’t think of your Quirk as something you have to direct to a specific target. You get your power from me. Psychokinesis isn’t like a third arm with delicate fingers; it’s a rolling storm, moving and breathing and surrounding you in permanence. Stretching your Quirk to surround a building, stretching it away from you— It’s like trying to channel the ocean through a straw. You’re complicating things! Your power is already there, ready to be used, why try to do mental gymnastics to change its shape? Just warp with all the energy around you! Expand Warp-Space like a bubble, five meters, fifteen meters, thirty meters large, even including part of that building that you so badly want to destroy; and warp all the energy in this bubble. You don’t have to do the math! You don’t have to visualize something more complex than a sphere! You don’t have to target one specific object that could have gravity, like a building; there is already gravity all around you, in you, so warp with that!”
Toki just sat there with the weird impression of having been slapped with a dead fish, while her ideas were reorganizing themselves at lightspeed.
I mean, she still wanted Hotaka’s A.I. to warp the gravity of a whole building right into someone’s face, obviously. She had plans to name this attack Warp-Force. But she hadn’t thought she could warp energy outside of what the A.I. would calculate, and…
She had been wrong.
Fuck, she already teleported her own momentum because it was with her. Meteor was right. If she expanded her conception of “with her” to include not just her body, but a whole sphere of space around her… Then she could warp the energy contained in that sphere, no matter what was inside! If she stood high in the air, she would warp with the energy around her, the wind, the momentum of air particles, the gravity of the atoms; but if she stood on a street or on a roof or next to a speeding car, she would warp just the same, with the energy generated by those things!
Mind. Blown.
“That’s not… I mean, yeah.” She sputtered, trying to organize her thoughts. “But it’s not…”
“I see why you’re trying to visualize the universe that way,” Meteor cut her off, waving a hand dismissingly. “Thinking about the infinitely small, atoms, being part of something very big, all that stuff. If you’re thinking about stars and planets, it makes a great deal of sense to cut the universe into tiny manageable pieces. But this is not about stars and planets. It’s about you, about what exists in your immediate vicinity. You are not a small part of the universe. You are the center of the universe.”
“That sounds very self-centered,” Toki weakly managed to say.
Meteor leveled at her a piercing gaze, ember-like eyes narrowing like they could see straight through her soul.
“It is the truth. When you warp from one point to the other, you’re not jumping from a place to the other; you are commanding the universe to shift on your command. You’re the cornerstone, the central point, the pivot around which everything moves. Don’t make yourself small, don’t think about yourself as something tiny that has to work according to the rules of giants. You are the giant. Your willpower rules the universe. Your acknowledgement of nature is what created nature in the first place. Your mind is the beginning and the end of everything; the sun and Earth rotate around you; the entirety of creation is expanding from where you stand.”
Toki gaped at him. It was inspiring and mind-blowing. And she had a feeling he wasn’t just speaking about her Quirk, either.
Her father had always been a selfish, brutal man, self-centered and passionate. Of course, he would see the universe as something that was defined by the conception you had of it. If you were dead, then the universe didn’t exist for you; so if it only existed when you were alive, did it exist at all outside of your conception of it?
They had argued about this, once, during their first lunch together; when they didn’t know yet to avoid the topic of ethics and morals. They were talking about why they were heroes. They both had very different reasons. Meteor wanted fun, action, fighting, and violence, but he also wanted protection, the certainty that heroes wouldn’t come again to destroy what he held dear. If you can’t beat them, join them, he had joked. But Toki had been all fired up and passionate about what she owed to other people, how great power meant great responsibility, how they were all one planet, one people, and they should take care of each other.
She had raised her voice when her father had started grumbling. Yes, she was serious! Yes, no one was perfect, everyone was fundamentally flawed and yet humanity was still worth fighting for. Meteor scoffed with annoyance, and Toki bared her teeth and kept arguing her point; yes, she still believed mankind was worth fighting for. Because no matter how far they may fall, no matter how flawed they were, no matter how much harm they, how much evil existed in the world, people were capable of just as much good and kindness and selfless, reckless love, and they could always, ALWAYS, choose to be better. Yes, she had to do this, even if it meant risking her life. Yes, dad, it’s worth it! What was one life, when weighed against millions?’
And Meteor had slammed his fist against the table and growled who are the millions, to demand your life?
(Toki hadn’t had an answer to that.)
“… I still have to test that theory,” she said weakly.
Her father sniffed haughtily. “It will work. I’m never wrong.”
Toki rolled her eyes, shock and awe replaced by fond exasperation. She loved her dad, really, and she respected his intelligence. He was smart, incredibly smart. But he was also completely insufferable.
“Yeah, right.”
“Come on, Munchkin,” Meteor grinned, a spark of mischief dancing bright in his eyes. “Respect the wisdom of your elders.”
“Yes, yes, forty-six years old. You’re positively decrepit.”
Meteor pretended to be stabbed in the heart, making her giggle. Then there was a brief silence, quiet and comfortable.
They had both finished their ramen, now, and the rest of the broth was cold in Toki’s bowl. It would soon be time to go back to their respective agencies. Toki leaned back against the back of her seat, pensive. The restaurant was filled with the low chatter of customers; the weather was sunny and hot; the city was busy and full of life… It felt so normal, so peaceful. Like they had always been here like that moment had nothing extraordinary.
It had only been a month since they had reunited, but they had found an easy balance, all things considered. Toki would have thought that it would take weeks, that she would never find her footing again with Meteor. They were too different, and they had too much baggage. They had hurt each other and forgiven each other but the memories were still there; and even if Toki had pardoned him, she still had nightmares of the way the building had come crashing down on a screaming crowd.
But in only a month, they had found a familiarity like they had never been apart. They had inside jokes. They shared the same mannerisms, the same expressions. It felt unfair, that they could fit together so easily. As if the fifteen years apart, more than half of Toki’s life, had done so little to change her that it was insignificant.
In a way, it was. No matter the years and the distance, part of her mind had always been with him. His presence had always weighed her as much as his absence. Ryūsei Taiyōme was her father. He owed half of her genes and half of her history.
It was bittersweet, but these days, it leaned towards sweetness rather than bitterness, as the old wounds weathered down with age.
Oh, the bitterness was still there. They had hurt each other in the past. But old wounds turned to new scars, to new skin, to new beginnings. For so long Toki had been haunted by the past. It felt like there was a ghost after her, wearing a frightfully familiar face. But she was making peace with her ghosts; peace with her father, peace with herself.
It was good to be turned towards the future. The canon timeline was here, the first steps were taken, and they were moving towards the next big trial toward the summer camp arc, towards Kamino maybe. But to stand strong against the current, you had to root yourself into place, you had to be strong, you had to be stable. You couldn’t be running.
Toki was done running.
“Hey, Dad,” she said. “Same time in two days?”
“Sure,” her father agreed easily. “I’ll let you pick the place.”
Notes:
I hope you liked it !
I'm going to post the next chapter of "Snapshots of wisdom" (with Toki in her summer outfit, and Meteor in his hero costume) today, if I can ^^
Here are some memes for the chapter! Thanks Kirumi =)
Here are some memes for the chapter! Thanks Kirumi =)
[LINK]
[LINK]
[LINK]
See you next week for a chapter of "wisdom of the fallen" =)
![[LINK]](https://i.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/310.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/110.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/210.jpg){kind=link}
Chapter 52: Reaching for the stars
Summary:
To like and to trust were two very different things. They interlaced more often than not, but Toki could admit that as a hero, she needed to differentiate the two. She liked people, she enjoyed working for the public: but that didn’t mean she trusted the crowd to have her back if things went south. She trusted her colleagues, she trusted her fellow heroes, but that didn’t mean she had to like them, especially Eraserhead or Endeavor. Some people she liked a lot but only trusted moderately, and some other she trusted with her life but didn’t have any meaningful relationship with.
So she liked Mera-san. He was a friend, he was reliable, he was funny and he had good morals. She liked him more than all HPSC’s members. And she trusted him almost as much as Kameko. But even then, there were parts of her life that she would firmly forbid him, because he had his agenda and she had hers, and there were crossroads where their loyalties would pull them in different directions.
It wasn’t sad. It wasn’t tragic. That was just how life was.
Notes:
Look! A new chapter! Posted 12 hours early even !
(As i'm typing this text, my kitten just ran at full speed toward his reflection on the glass and bonked his head so hard he bounced off. THIS IS YOUR REFLECTION. YOU KNOW IT DUMBASS. YOU SEE IT EVERYDAY. WE WENT OVER THIS.)
(I mean i love my tiny Bandit, but he's got two braincells and they're both fighting for third place.)
Anyway. Here we are. With that title, you probably guessed, we're going to talk about astronomy.
The thesis! Finally ! And also, the begining of the action! *evil laughter*
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
REACHING FOR THE STARS
The kids hadn’t called on the first day, meaning their summer camps hadn’t been attacked, meaning that Toki shouldn’t be worried. Everything was fine. Right? Right.
And still, she felt jittery and anxious. She had looked up the location of the Wild Wild Pussycat’s lodge online, though, so she could know in which direction to teleport if Hitoshi rang his panic button. She had looked at the lodge from Google Earth, to try and see the lay of the land. She was nervous, plain and simple. Hayasa-sensei was chalking it up to her thesis, but Keigo knew she was thinking of the League. He even agreed with her. If there were supervillains trying to spit on Yūei and provoke All Might, then killing hero students was a valid strategy; and there would not be a better opportunity than right now, away from school and protection.
“Your thesis is tomorrow,” Hayasa-sensei growled. “Go home. Rest. Stop fretting. And stop messing with my spreadsheets.”
Toki turned her best puppy eyes to him:
“I wanna work! At least let me look into those yakuza who are dealing with Trigger. They’re in Sakai, that’s basically Inferno-senpai’s territory. Salamander may know something.”
Hayasa-sensei sighed deeply, then looked at his watch.
“Fine. You have forty minutes to call Inferno or Salamander or start digging however you want to. But, in forty minutes, I want you to go home. Hawks can handle Icarus for a day.”
Toki pouted some more, but as Hayasa-sensei wasn’t swayed, she resigned herself to do what he said.
She was genuinely curious to learn if that yakuza family was the Shie Hassaikai. If they were, it may give her some advance notice about canon-events about to unfold. In canon, the Shie Hassaikai had started gaining traction because of the disappearance of AFO, which had happened because of the Kamino fight. Now, if the Kamino fight didn’t happen (and Toki still had her fingers crossed), then maybe the Shie Hassaikai would stay more discreet, avoid drawing attention. They wouldn’t ally with the League. Sir Nighteye may already be looking into them, but would he mount a full operation to take them down if they didn’t make waves?
Would he rescue Eri?
And if didn’t rescue her, if he didn’t even know she needed rescuing… then… Toki had a responsibility to step up. It wasn’t like Midoriya’s or Shouto’s situation, kids who were hurt and that she could talk herself into ignoring because she was young, because it would get better.
This was a villain torturing an innocent prisoner, and Toki was now an adult and a hero. Finding excuses was much harder, now.
But Toki knew nothing about where Eri was held, so rescuing her was completely out of her reach. That was why she had to investigate. If she started digging and found out… then she could intervene. She wasn’t an easily cowed intern like Lemillion and Deku had been in canon; she was the fastest hero alive; she could totally grab the little girl and hightail out of Overhaul’s reach. Poor little Eri shouldn’t have to stay in his clutch any second longer than necessary.
Hence, looking them up in advance, to prepare to roll with the punches… and maybe give a tiny little nudge here and there, to make people pay attention, to point out victims who needed help.
So. She warped to Osaka and went to badger Inferno about it.
Inferno’s agency had a large territory, with dominion over plenty of smaller agencies led by heroes who were less combat-oriented. For example, Sir Nighteye’s agency. They only had one combat-oriented hero, Lady Siam. Their area of expertise was information gathering, and they usually worked on a national scale. But when trouble brewed closer to home, Inferno’s agency was the first they would call. So it would make sense that if Sir Nighteye was investigating the Shie Hassaikai, Inferno would have good intel.
In canon, there had been no Inferno Agency during the Shie Hassaikai arc, and Toki wondered if that meant that in canon Inferno hadn’t existed. Or, if he had but died before those events. It was kind of a depressing thought. Life was better with her beloved senpai in it.
Inferno was kind of like a weird, doting, smug older brother. They shared the same sense of humor, the same background of training at Naruto Labs, the same daddy issues of having a murderous villain father (although Inferno’s had been way worse than Meteor!). He was one of the heroes she teamed up with the most often, too. They had a good chemistry, with Inferno supplying firepower and Toki the mobility.
They disagreed on many topics, though. Especially Meteor.
Inferno was of the opinion that Meteor would disappoint her. He grudgingly acknowledged that maybe Meteor wasn’t a murderous villain anymore, and was actually loyal to Endeavor because the Flame Hero had got him out of jail. Even more so now that Endeavor had found Toki for him. But Inferno also firmly believed that Meteor was a dirtbag with no conscience and that sooner or later, he would do something awful. As such, Toki shouldn’t get attached.
“Aren’t you projecting your childhood issues on me?” Toki snipped.
Inferno just sniffed haughtily. “So? That doesn’t mean I’m wrong. And I’ll have you know that I resolved my childhood issues to my satisfaction.”
Toki stared at him.
“Senpai. That’s so dark.”
“Only because you know what happened. When I say that, usually people think I’m a very mature individual who parted with his parents in good terms and with dignity.”
“Yeah, instead of sending a fruit basket to the guy who burned his father alive. And keeping it a secret for a decade.”
“It was a very nice fruit basket.”
Toki groaned and rubbed her eyes: “Let’s go back to the topic of the murderous yakuza family who deal drugs.”
Inferno sniggered and waved at her to get closer to his desk. For once, Toki had caught him doing paperwork at his agency, instead of being out on patrol. All the better, actually. Inferno’s office was more private than rooftops, and they were less likely to be interrupted by a villain chase.
“I know which yakuza you mean,” Inferno said idly, closing the file he was working on and digging in a precariously piled-up stack of colored folders. “They’re the Shie Hassaikai, in Sakai. They’re literally Sir Nighteye’s neighbors! He hates it. He’s basically foaming at the mouth every time they came up in conversation. For an intelligence gathering agency like his, yakuza are the worst. Unlike most villains, they deal with shady business rather than outright violence, and they are harder to catch.”
Inferno snagged a folder from the middle of the pile, which wobbled dangerously. Inferno stabilized it with his shoulder without even looking, already flipping through the pages of his file.
“It’s a good thing you mentioned it actually,” he said offhandedly, eyes scanning one page after another. “Sir Nighteye is in charge of that case, but we exchange a lot of intel and since Nighteye doesn’t have the firepower to take down the whole organization, I’ll be in charge of the attack once we build a sufficient case against them. This yakuza group grew a lot in the past year. Worryingly so. I would have probably asked for some support from Icarus for the big fight.”
“Always happy to help,” Toki answered dryly.
Inferno snorted, then went to the photocopy machine in a corner of his office to copy a dozen pages. He put the originals back in the folder and gave the duplicates to Toki with a theatrical flourish.
“Here is the rundown of what we have on them. Names, numbers, cases they’re involved in. You should see Salamander, too. He thinks they’re connected to one attack near Tokyo, even if it’s completely outside of their territory.”
“Really? What attack?”
“Someone tried to kidnap Eraserhead.” Inferno snorted like it was a good joke.
Toki nearly dropped the papers.
“What? Is he alright?”
“Yeah, don’t worry. Someone tried to chloroform him, but he curb-stomped them. They guy was arrested, and he tried to say that someone had paid him to bring Eraserhead alive to their boss, but since he couldn’t even describe the middle man because they meet in a dark warehouse, it went nowhere. The only clue was that the middleman had some kind of big beak, so maybe a bird mutation. Salamander think it was actually one of Overhaul’s cronies, the ones who wear bird masks.”
Toki’s brain was running at light-speed. Holy yakitori. Eraserhead had been attacked?! And it could be the Shie Hassaikai?!
Maybe Salamander was onto something.
Toki didn’t remember an attempted kidnapping in canon, but that didn’t mean anything. Maybe it had happened, and it had been so pathetic that Eraserhead hadn’t thought it useful to mention it, hence the narrator never being aware of it. Or maybe in canon Eraserhead hadn’t patrolled near the would-be kidnappers, since in canon he was very busy doing his job as a teacher.
But maybe it wasn’t the Shie Hassaikai at all. After all, Eraserhead probably had enemies as a hero. Or just as a person. He wasn’t exactly pleasant to be around, in Toki’s memories. Maybe even a little scary, when he glared murderously.
And then, when he used his Quirk, it activated in two similarly ingrained ‘Oh Shit!’ buttons in Japanese culture: the ability to shut off a someone’s Quirk with bright red eyes, like he had Sharingan, while his hair shot straight up like he’d just gone Super Saiyan and was one hundred percent ready to beat you into a pulp, full Vegeta style.
… Yeah, she could totally see why someone would try to take out Eraserhead. It didn’t even have to be the Shie Hassaikai.
But if it was— well, that was an interesting lead.
Toki checked the time in the corner of her HUD. She still had ten minutes left before having to go home. Oh, nobody would notice if she ran a little late, right? Duty called.
“Where is Salamander today?”
And that’s how Toki ended up in Kobe, tracking down Salamander while he was wrestling a mugger on the ground in a narrow alley. A purse was knocked on the ground, likely abandoned when the victim had run. One other guy was knocked out on a pile of trash bags, and a third was suspended to a balcony by his suspenders, gesticulating wildly and swearing up a storm.
Toki looked at the mugger, looked at Salamander, and leaned against the wall to wait until he was done. He had the situation well in hand.
Salamander was around the same age as Inferno, or maybe one or two years older. But he had always seemed gruffier, larger, more imposing. Which was weird because when they were side-by-side, you could see they were the same height and the same stature. Their shoulders even had the same width.
But Salamander had a darker aura. He didn’t have Inferno’s cocky smile or his slouched posture; he stood straight and towered above people. When he moved, he had a reptilian grace to his every move, something smooth and brutal. Like a ninja, maybe, but heavier; more powerful. He could crack bricks or dent metal with a single punch. Yes, Salamander had always been slightly more… threatening than Inferno.
If you meet him in a dark alley, your first reaction certainly wouldn’t be relief.
And yet Toki had never felt threatened by him. Salamander was tall, looming, gruff and rough; but then he opened his mouth and under all the gruffness and rude statements, Toki only heard concern. He was constantly worrying about Inferno, grumbling about how reckless he was but changing his own patrol route to be sure his friend would be safe; he took the time to warn Toki about the President’s schemes when Genmei-san looked for people to take on a fucked-up mission; he investigated the why and the how of the shady missions he got just to be sure he wouldn’t hurt people if he could avoid it.
He was just a big softie, deep down.
And when Salamander was done cuffing the three muggers in a neat little circle, the first thing out of his mouth when he looked at her was:
“Quantum. You need help with something?”
Toki smiled at him. Yeah, totally a big softie.
“Not really. I’m just hunting down rumors and Inferno said you were the person to see if I wanted to know more about who would attack a common acquaintance. Do you want me to drop those three at the police station?”
“Go ahead.”
Toki did her delivery service (it never got old to see the policemen jump a foot in the air when she appeared out of nowhere), and then came back. Salamander had grabbed the abandoned purse from the ground and was busy picking up the various items spilled around it. Knowing him, he would find a way to give it back to its owner today.
“Sorry to bother you on patrol,” she apologized.
“Whatever,” Salamander grunted. “You want to know about Eraserhead’s attack?”
“Yeah. I’m looking into the Shie Hassaikai because—” Toki waved a hand, “Actually it’s not important. But Tokyo isn’t their territory. Why do you think they’re behind Eraserhead’s attack? Don’t misunderstand, I think it makes sense, Eraserhead is a dangerous hero and it’s logical for villain groups to want to take him out. But Inferno made it sound like it was planned, like they had ordered a hit.”
“Because it was,” Salamander said abruptly. “Eraserhead was specifically targeted. The guy confessed that he was given a time, a place, a description of Eraser’s appearance, a rundown of his Quirk. His client wanted Eraserhead in one piece to study him.”
Toki shivered. To study him? That couldn’t be anything good. It sounded like something a mad scientist would say.
Then Toki frowned. No, maybe she was getting ahead of herself. Eraserhead had made contact with the League… were they testing him? Wait, no, the League hadn’t made contact with the Eight Precepts yet, according to canon. Overhaul was acting on his own.
Which meant—
“Do you know why?” she asked cautiously.
“I have my suspicions,” Salamander admitted gruffly.
Toki bit her lip. Okay, it was time to go on a limb here. She chose her words with care:
“There is only one thing that set Eraserhead apart of other heroes, and that warrant further study. He’s the only hero who can nullify Quirks.”
Eraser could have been targeted because he investigated something that he shouldn’t; but since he wasn’t on the Shie Hassaikai case, it was unlikely. He could have been targeted by someone wanting to strike at Yūei and unaware that he had been fired: but only the League had that aim. No, it had to do with Eraser’s power. The power that Overhaul was trying so hard to replicate.
The power that Eri was the key of.
But Toki only knew that because of her canon-foreknowledge. If she wanted to make any progress, she had to learn it from somewhere in the real world. It was the only way to cross-reference things, to see how what she remembered overlapped with what was actually going on. His world was different from the canon-one, and she needed to actually check facts before acting on her past-life memories. She needed to have sources, trustworthy sources.
Salamander frowned. He quickly scanned the streets as if to make sure they were alone, then lowered his voice.
“The Shie Hassaikai deals in drugs. Mostly Trigger and shit like that. But there’s also rumors that they have a new product, something that can level the playing fields for villains against heroes. A weapon.”
He paused. Toki let out a long exhale.
“It would be logical to think,” she started carefully, “that their new product is something to enhance the villains’ Quirks, like Trigger. But since they targeted Eraserhead, to study him, study his Quirk…”
“Yeah,” Salamander nodded somberly. “One of my inside sources says that they’re developing some drug that dampen or actually suppress someone’s Quirk.”
Jackpot.
“That would be a great weapon,” Toki said carefully. “Do you have any leads on this?”
“Ask Inferno, he’s got the files. Besides that? No clue besides the ramblings of one very drunk yakuza that hasn’t been seen since. You would have a better chance to ask Sir Nighteye, but I don’t think he’s better informed.”
Toki made a face. “Yeah, hard pass. We don’t see eye to eye.”
Salamander paused, considered that, and then shrugged.
“Makes sense. He likes people who fit neatly in little cases.”
It was, Toki realized, exactly what had bothered her about Nighteye, holy shit. He wanted people to sort themselves into neat, prepackaged categories, like jock, nerd, or goth. He wanted frontline heroes like All Might; tall, loud, and strong. People like Endeavor, Lady Siam, or Inferno. Forces of nature.
And consequently, for Sir Nighteye, people who didn’t have shoulders large enough to carry the world should step back and know their place. They should aim to advise, direct, provide aid. They should free the spotlight. Hawks and Quantum were short and speedy, but (to Nighteye’s knowledge) they weren’t in the same category as All Might or Endeavor, and as such they had no business hogging the spotlight when they could be more productive elsewhere. When they could support bigger and stronger people, instead.
Nighteye had tunnel vision. Everything, everyone should work in a way that maximizes efficiency. Personal feelings and ambitions had no place in the system (except when it was his feelings and ambitions, that fucking hypocrite). He saw Quantum and Hawks as selfish, dithering and enjoying popularity when they should focus on lifting bigger and better fighters. They didn’t fit the mold he thought was suited to them.
They usurped their betters, in a way. In Sir Nighteye’s vision of the world, people well-suited to support should be sidekicks, not lead heroes.
That was probably also why Nighteye thought himself qualified to select All Might’s successor. I mean, other than his massive ego. All Might wasn’t just a person, he was a belief, an institution, a role. He was a warrior; his job was to inspire good people and punch bad ones. Crowd-management, strategy, investigation, the careful weighting of options and futures solutions; that was Nighteye’s job.
By selecting his successor, not only All Might was putting his personal choice (his individuality) above his role in the system, but he also denied Nighteye’s competency.
Uh.
“Thanks anyway.” Toki shook herself back to the present. “I wonder how they could synthetize something like that without dissecting Eraserhead, though. Erasure is unique.”
Salamander shrugged, like Toki had expected he would. The claim that such or such Quirk was unique was often meet with that kind of casual dismissal, because Quirks were so varied that the obvious answer was always…
“Maybe there’s someone with a similar Quirk out there.”
Yep, exactly. They were other Quirks that could weaken or erase a Quirk, of course: but not in Japan. It was a power even rarer than teleportation.
Toki raised both eyebrows, and said in a very flat tone:
“And they’re dissecting that person instead?”
Salamander jaw twitched, but Toki didn’t miss his small hesitation. Ah, so he hadn’t thought of that. He had been thinking about a chemical cocktail, maybe. But now he was considering the possibility… and knowing him, he was adding it to the list of his priorities.
Good.
“Stop being so morbid,” Salamander snapped. “You’re spending too much time with Inferno. Don’t you have something to do besides lurk in alleyways?”
“Hey, not fair. I only came here because you were lurking!”
“I’m an underground hero, this is my job.”
They bickered some more. Then Toki let it slip that Hayasa-sensei had forcibly made her go home to rest and prepare for civilian stuff (technically neither Salamander or Inferno knew about her PhD, but they had enough clues to know that Toki was in college in addition to heroism), and Salamander kicked her out of his city with strict instructions to rest.
Really, all the cranky dudes were secretly mother hens.
oOoOoOo
Thesis day.
Toki was going to throw up.
No, she was not. Either she could blindside the jury with her brilliance, or she could baffle them with her bullshit, she didn’t know which, but one thing was sure she couldn’t afford to be sick. Gods, it had been years since she had had stage fright. Yet she felt especially jittery this afternoon, her stomach twisting into knots like she was twelve again.
Oh gods, it was happening.
________________
> PikaPika: so today is the big day!
> PikaPika: how do you feel?
< Antares: like I’m gonna shit myself
> EndeavorSucks: lol
< Antares: no seriously
< Antares: suddenly I am so dumb
< Antares: I’m like a squeaky hamster wheel in human form.
< Antares: If you lean in real close you can hear my singular brain cell bouncing around like a windows screensaver.
< Antares: please distract me, i’m so nervous
> SpicyWings: YOU CAN DO IT
< Antares: FOCUS ON PATROL
> SpicyWings: you’re just jealous that I can text and arrest villains at the same time 😊
< Antares: Laugh it up chicken boy
< Antares: I’m still the fastest one
> SpicyWings: You wish
> SpicyWings: I’m the terror quacking in the night
> PinkIsPunkRock: 🤣
> EndeavorSucks: I mean he’s right, since Quantum doesn’t patrol at night
< Antares: QUANTUM does!
< Antares: just not a lot
> SpicyWings: she doesn’t see shit
< Antares: nobody see shit, it’s THE NIGHT. That’s what it’s called when it’s dark outside.
< SpicyWings: shame you don’t have hawk’s eyes
< Antares: …i have the whole hawks
> SpicyWings: yes you do
> PikaPika: ugh, you’re so in love, it’s disgusting
> EndeavorSucks: don’t be jealous pika
> PikaPika: I’m not! Im’ just saying. All those shippers online are RIGHT and they don’t even know it
< Antares: XD
> EndeavorSucks: Well, you’re distracted x)
< Antares: aaaaand now I’m stressed again
________________
Toki closed the Discord app, and tried to take deep, even breaths. She was in the hallway, waiting to enter the auditorium to start her presentation. Her stomach was in knots.
Keigo wasn’t there. Someone had to lead Icarus, after all. He was juggling patrols, paperwork, and later in the evening he was invited to hang out with common acquaintances of Hanabata, meaning heroes who were part of the Meta-Liberation Army. Keigo hadn’t been officially told of the conspiracy, yet, but he was pretty sure that Hanabata intended to give him the recruitment speech this evening, while he was surrounded by sympathizers.
So today, both him and Toki had to dazzle different crowds. No pressure.
Keigo wasn’t here for her thesis. But Mihoko-san had made the trip. Sachiko was babysitting Hinawa for the day.
It was very difficult for Mihoko-san to find a babysitter outside of the people aware of Hinawa’s real parentage, because Mihoko technically didn’t have the proper paperwork entrusting her with the care of the toddler who very much didn’t look like her. Daycares kept track of these kind of thing: watching who had a kid, if it was well-taken care of, if its placement was legit. In a world where Quirk-trafficking was a risk, especially in a country where there was a low-natality rate and pretty babies were coveted like treasure, people were vigilant about that stuff. Daycare sometimes had vigils. And you couldn’t drop off any baby there, either: you had to submit to a background check to be sure that this kid was yours!
It was a real pain in the ass to keep Hinawa’s existence discreet. When you took in account the fact that bird-like mutations were considered the most exotic sort of mutation… when someone showed up with a baby that obviously weren’t theirs, it raised questions.
Mihoko didn’t need to work and was delighted to be a stay-at-home mom with her side-gig of dance, painting, and graffiti. But Toki was well-aware that if one day Mihoko wanted to resume her career, they would be in a delicate situation.
Ironically, Japan provided plenty of public services to help take care of babies: nurseries, daycare, trained workers, counselors, pediatrists, all free! But to enjoy those benefits, you had to claim your child, raise it in the open, like normal people. By hiding her daughter’s existence, Toki was slipping through the cracks. The number of people that Toki could entrust her daughter to were limited, considering that the secrecy forbade them to use the systems put in place specifically to support young parents.
(Toki was very glad to have such good friends. And she wasn’t going to lie to herself: she was also very glad to be rich. Not having to worry about money was a huge part of what made this whole system functional.)
Whatever. Back to the thesis.
Toki didn’t have a lot of acquaintances that could follow her level in astronomy or just in physics. Actually, the only person who could probably understand what she was going to talk about, with the Ion Dive and the mechanism of it, was probably Melissa. And maybe the support engineer working with her A. I., Hotaka.
The A.I. had been installed in her visor a while ago. It was called A.D.A., after Ada Lovelace, but also because it was short of Aerial Displacement Assistance. It was supposed to be like some sort of assistant. Granted, it was still learning how to read Toki’s eye movements to anticipate her decisions, but so far Hotaka and by extension his A.I. had demonstrated a great grasp of how Warp-Space worked, with all the complicated equations that it involved. Soon enough Toki could use it in actual combat.
But let’s get back to the point.
Melissa wasn’t there. Keigo wasn’t here either, but Mihoko was. So was Hayasa-sensei, actually. And there was a mop of blond hair that Toki couldn’t see very well, but that she half-suspected (with a faint feeling of disbelief) of it being Mera-san.
She took a deep breath. She stepped on the stage.
“Good morning,” she said to the jury and the public in a completely even voice, not betraying a hint of her inner panic. “My name is Toki Hoshizora, of the Fukuoka Science University. Today I’ll be presenting my research on The Ion Dive and its applications to deep space exploration.”
And then she launched into her speech.
She spoke, she argued, she explained. She had a bullet-point list of details to check, of leads to plant in the jury’s mind so they would ask the question she wanted. Within five minutes, her stage fright was completely gone, and she was just speaking, speaking, detailing, like she had practiced a hundred times in front of the mirror, or at the breakfast table, or in the changing rooms, or in her shower, or in her bed looking at the ceiling late at night. She spoke with the inflections and cadence of Hoshizora but with the strong tone of Quantum, commanding attention and never faltering.
Quantum and Hoshizora and Taiyōme were blending, now. Toki wasn’t as bothered by it as she would have been a year earlier.
Sometimes the jury interjected, asked a question. Toki fired back an answer like it was a tennis match and she was on fire, her mind running at full speed, her heart beating as loudly as it did during a fight. Equations were fizzling in all direction in her brain, data and intel and cross-references ready to be snatched and used as examples.
She spoke about deep space, about what the infinitesimal part that was known and the infinite amount of what was not; she spoke of stars and supernovas and faraway planets, of galaxies and comets and solar systems. She spoke of resources, and change, and opportunities. She spoke of science, and physics, and history; of progress, of experiences, tests, and results, of how far mankind had come. She spoke of mechanics, of challenges, of pooling down funds and knowledge; she spoke of discovery and hope and limitless potential.
She spoke, and she spoke, and she spoke. She was asked questions and fired back answers, picking up steam as she went on. And for an hour, she wasn’t thinking about heroism or fate at all; she was back to being just Toki, the enthusiastic aspiring astrophysicist.
We are nothing but space dust,
Trying to find its way back to the stars
It had all started there, after all. Toki couldn’t pinpoint how or why she had been fascinated by what lay among the stars. As kid she had had a myriad of passions; the oceans, dolphins, flowers, horses, cats, witchcraft, ancient Egypt, mythology, Quirks…
But then she gravitated towards the stars, inevitably.
Maybe because they were so far; maybe because it was only by looking at the infinitely big that you had the luxury of realizing who infinitely small you were. How vast was the universe, how countless were the possibilities? The undiscovered would always outnumber the familiar and how magnificent it was; how terrifying and wonderful the realization would always be to suddenly remember that you are only a speck of dust in space and time alike. There would never be the like of you ever again.
There was a quiet sort of amazement in this, that you could not find anywhere else. A sense of helpless, awed belonging. The realization that you were so small and yet you were part of something bigger than yourself. Humankind might be alone in the universe, but as a human, you weren’t alone. You were part of the human race, with all its flaws and all its wonders. In this realization, there was also a sense of impossible freedom.
Toki sometimes wondered if it wasn’t a feeling that Meteor shared. Her father had been fascinated by the stars, too.
Stars, space, the big Unknown. Wasn’t it exhilarating and terrifying? Wasn’t it thrilling to think that it was just out there, so vast and so big that you could never grasp all of it in your hands, and that in your entire life you would forget about it more than there was to learn? It was freeing. The vastness, the emptiness of space had something reassuring. There were no chains up there. There was no sense of fate or of dead-ends and traps.
It was just… limitless possibilities.
It was something Toki could empathize with. When you realized you own insignificance, then wasn’t it the time to make yourself important? Wasn’t it the time to realize that you didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things, but you mattered, right now? There was no sense of destiny nailing you in place, no higher purpose, no benevolent god, or smirking entity bearing down on you. Space was so vast and yet so empty. Just like the world, like the future, like your own destiny. You could sink under the weight of this fear or take your own fate into your own hands.
It was a terrifying exhilaration, but it was exhilaration all the same.
Of course they should explore space. It was so vast! What was in it? Nobody knew! Big rocks. Creepy things. Sticky things. Math! Stuff on fire. Big holes. Big holes with math in them. How fantastic was that?!
So yes, of course they should explore space; because the simple fact of looking at it filled you with wonder, and it would be such a criminal waste to not reach out to touch. To open your arms and embrace the endless possibilities, that unlimited potential. To stare at the abyss and see it stare back and be amazed.
Maybe that’s why the idea of space, of the ever-expanding universe, had always fascinated Toki. Or maybe it only resonated so much with Toki because she had been born cursed with foreknowledge, at times helpful and at times as heavy as shackles. Knowing there was a universe out there to discover and explore, that the world didn’t stop at the sky and at what she could see and touch, filled her heart with warmth and hope and determination. It was easier, then, to refuse destiny. It was easier to silence the constant worry of her fretting mind, to stop the unconscious comparisons between the word and the canon one, to refuse to give in the temptation of feeling guilty for things that were worse than in canon.
It was a human flaw, to have such a self-centered view of the world; but it wasn’t how the world was. It was so much bigger. There were no rules, there were no gods, they were free.
And armed with that knowledge, it was easier to refuse to be defined by fate. It was easier to believe in free will, free choice, and freedom from the shackles of a false sense of self-defeatism. Toki was only human, and as such she had the power to shape her own future, to reach for bigger things. She would never be defeated by something as silly as fate. Maybe she would be defeated by others, maybe, but never by destiny, and never by the unknown will of some greater cosmic force.
I never believed in destiny;
The stars never whispered my name.
I grabbed my own fate with two hungry hands,
pulling and pushing and molding my life,
leaving smudges and dirty fingerprints
all over a once clean soul.
My mistakes belong entirely to me.
The stars never mapped out a path
for me to follow,
never planned my downfalls,
my triumphs.
I rule the stars, not the other way around.
I take their dust
and inject it in my veins,
I breathe in their light as
I live
I live
I live.
oOoOoOo
Toki defended her thesis and won her PhD.
More than a decade of her life had led to that point, that presentation, that impassioned speech and the rapid-fire onslaught of questions and answers: and yet, when it stopped, she almost didn’t expect it when the jury clapped and told her she passed.
She felt dizzy and a little shocked, reeling, unsure of what came next. Her throat was dry with how much she had talked. She was congratulated and then it was time to go, someone else had to present their own thesis in one hour, so they had to clear the room. Toki felt like she was dreaming. Was it done? Was it over?
Her supporters converged on her when she exited. Mihoko-san was beaming, and even Hayasa-sensei was smiling with quiet pride. Toki introduced them to each other, and they stuck a conversation easily enough. They were both nice and polite and genuinely enthusiastic about Toki’s success, even if astronomy kind of flew over their head. Watching them talk, Toki couldn’t help but think they looked like a couple of parents should look. Normal, at ease, kind.
Gods, if only her father had had better taste, she could have set him up with either of them.
… Yeah, no, terrible idea.
Neither Hayasa-sensei or Mihoko-san deserved something like that. Meteor was too unhinged to fit in with normal people. Toki didn’t know where her own moral code came from but her parents had been perfect for each other because they were both ruthless and slightly crazy. Same reason why Meteor was onto Endeavor, apparently.
Bleh.
“I can’t believe you have done it,” Hayasa-sensei smiled. “I honestly thought you too rebellious to get that far.”
“You figured that I would, what, throw the desk at the jury if they disagreed with me?”
Mihoko-san sniggered. “Wouldn’t you?”
Toki suddenly vividly remembered a researcher at Naruto Labs who had taught them math. Toki knew most of the cursus already, so she did most of her work on a single piece of paper she would just fold up and stick back in her pocket out of boredom and her lack of need for notes. Her teacher kept poking fun at it, so it led to an escalating war of attrition that ended when she handed in a test written on a corn tortilla.
“Irrelevant,” she said with great dignity. “I didn’t.”
“And you got a PhD out of it!” Mihoko-san exclaimed with undisguised delight. “Does that mean you can get called Hoshizora-sensei now?”
Toki briefly stopped. Then she turned to Hayasa-sensei and grinned.
“What a great idea.”
“I’m not going to call you sensei.”
Toki pretended to be stabbed in the heart. “Are you going to disparage my diploma so early on?”
Hayasa-sensei floundered, because if there was something he wouldn’t do, that was disparaging official qualifications. Toki’s grin widened. The idea of being called sensei had its appeal. Ooooh, the next time someone pissed her off, she would definitively brag she had a doctorate now!
Anyway. Hayasa-sensei and Mihoko-san got along well, congratulating Toki, and smiling like proud parents. They both teased Toki and soon discovered they had the same sense of humor. Really, they were made to get along.
As they left the auditorium, Toki suddenly remembered the mop of blond hair she had seen in the crowd. She craned her neck and… yep, sure enough, she Toki hadn’t been mistaken. It was Mera-san who had been sitting in the back. He wasn’t accompanied by his assistant, today. Toki was actually faintly bewildered that he had taken the time to come by.
But then, maybe she shouldn’t be? Of all the people at the Commission, or even during her childhood at Naruto Labs, Mera-san and Hayasa-sensei were the only one who had felt a sense of personal responsibility towards her. They had felt like they had a duty to stand up for her, even if they hadn’t been able to do much.
Mera-san was also the only one who had tried to fix things about the kidnapping The only one who had guessed things weren’t right, who had suspected his superiors of abusing their power… and he hadn’t let it slide, hadn’t played blind; he had actively tried to create a way out for her, even though it was against his own personal interests.
Mera-san was professional and serious, but he had a strong sense of morals, too. And he was secretly kin of softie. He could deny all he wanted, but he was so unwaveringly patient with Toki or even Kameko that he had to like them.
She waved him, and Mera joined them hesitantly.
“Mera-san! Hi! You already know Hayasa-sensei; Mera-san, this is Mihoko-san, a friend of mine. Mihoko-san, this is Mera-san, a higher-up in the Commission that I would also hesitantly call a friend of mine.”
If Mera realized that Toki had given Mihoko’s first name and not her surname, he didn’t show it.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, politely.
“Likewise,” Mihoko smiled with distant cordiality.
Mihoko-san didn’t know but she at least suspected something was fishy, for Toki to so openly distrust the system. I mean, it made sense. People didn’t usually randomly decide to hide their own child from not only the state, but also from their own employers.
“What are you doing all the way to Kyūshū?” Toki asked curiously.
“The anguish of my soul knows no rest, and I am but a slave to its damnable musings.” He paused. “Also I have a meeting in Nagasaki this evening so Fukuoka was quite literally on my way.”
“And you came to listen to me speak about space?” Toki grinned, touched.
“I didn’t stay for the whole thing,” Mera-san defended himself. “I just wanted to catch you at the end to congratulate you.”
“Aw, you care!”
“No I don’t. Goodbye.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned to the exit, but Toki caught him by the elbow, laughing. It was nice to see that Mera-san still wanted to keep an eye on her, even after all those years. She hadn’t forgotten that he had fought to have custody of her in Musutafu, just so he could allow her to run away if she felt trapped. Not many people had fought for her like that when she needed it.
“Thank you,” she said, the warmth in her voice genuine. “It means a lot that you came all the way here. And it’s kind of thanks to you that I could go with far! You were the one who gave Toki Hoshizora identity papers and legitimacy to get through high school. Well, you and fake-ID guy, I guess.”
“Fake-ID woman,” Mera-san cleared his throat, looking awkward. “It was Yoshimi-san.”
Toki gaped at him. “For real?!”
“I don’t know why you’re surprised, I told you she dealt with paper trails.”
Hayasa-sensei and Mihoko-san were both watching the conversation with great interest without interjecting. Toki wondered what they thought of Mera, and what they thought about the fact that Toki was on such friendly terms with a higher-up in the Commission. Hayasa-sensei knew about Toki’s kidnapping, and Mihoko-san knew there was mistrust between Toki and her employers.
But… That didn’t mean she couldn’t like some of them.
To like and to trust were two very different things. They interlaced more often than not, but Toki could admit that as a hero, she needed to differentiate the two. She liked people, she enjoyed working for the public: but that didn’t mean she trusted the crowd to have her back if things went south. She trusted her colleagues, she trusted her fellow heroes, but that didn’t mean she had to like them, especially Eraserhead or Endeavor. Some people she liked a lot but only trusted moderately, and some other she trusted with her life but didn’t have any meaningful relationship with.
So she liked Mera-san. He was a friend, he was reliable, he was funny and he had good morals. She liked him more than all HPSC’s members. And she trusted him almost as much as Kameko. But even then, there were parts of her life that she would firmly forbid him, because he had his agenda and she had hers, and there were crossroads where their loyalties would pull them in different directions.
It wasn’t sad. It wasn’t tragic. That was just how life was.
“I won’t keep you,” Mera-san smiled. “I have to go back to work.”
His gaze flickered to Hayasa-sensei and Mihoko-san, the two adults that were the closest to family Toki had growing up. Toki wondered what he thought of them; her mind flashed back to that time where she pretended Mera was her uncle, and then she realized that on Hoshizora’s fake koseki, Mera was still listed as her only relative. She had never changed it.
She probably wouldn’t change it.
They were not close, but it was nice to know she could rely on him if needed. And she wanted to let him know that if push came to shove, he could rely on her too.
“Alright,” she agreed. “It was nice to see you. Say hello to Yoshimi-san and to the Witch.”
Mera-san didn’t ask who was the witch. Toki was pretty sure that in some measure, everyone in the HPSC knew who was the Witch.
Maybe especially Mera-san. After all, he was one of the few in the known about how she had gone all hippity hoppity your child is now my property and landed the whole Commission in a billion-yens debt because Toki had pulled a Reverse Uno on their financial blackmail.
“Take care, Quantum.”
She waved as he left. Mihoko-san patiently waited until he was gone to slung an arm around Toki’s shoulders, raising an eyebrow:
“I thought you were allergic to bureaucrats in suits?”
“Mera-san is a special case,” Toki defended herself.
“Yes,” Hayasa-sensei said dryly. “For some unfathomable reason, he likes you. Sleep deprivation can do terrible things to the human brain.”
“Hey! I’m docking your pay.”
“For having a sense of humor? Perish the thought.”
Hayasa-sensei wasn’t wrong, though. Mera-san may be one of the very few people that Toki liked, not as Quantum or as Hoshizora but as herself.
Hayasa-sensei, Mera-san, and Mihoko-san. The only one missing was Meteor, maybe. It was kind of sad to think that in her whole journey to adulthood, the number of adults she had been able to rely on could be counted on one hand.
But the journey had led her there all the same. And she wasn’t unhappy with the outcome.
“Come on,” Mihoko-san smiled. “Let’s celebrate!”
No, Toki thought with a smile, holding her precious diploma in one hand and seeing Mihoko-san beaming at her. She wasn’t unhappy with the outcome at all.
She had lunch with Hayasa-sensei and Mihoko-san and saw them become friends ridiculously fast. Then she popped back in Musutafu to bring Mihoko-san home, and she celebrated with Sachiko, baby Hina-chan, and Melissa. They chatted, they laughed, they had fun. For a little while, Toki wasn’t a hero, just a young woman celebrating her diploma. She was already drafting ideas of CV and letters to get hired by JAXA; even making plans to start her own space-exploration enterprise with a private rocket and things like that. It was great.
When evening came, she was happy and tired and delighted. Her only plan was to have dinner with Keigo, not talk about the MLA meeting that he had been invited this afternoon, bask in praises and self-congratulation, have one round of two of spectacular sex (because she was high on endorphins and she deserved a treat), and then sleep like the dead snuggling with her husband.
The sun was going down. Toki swung by the Icarus Agency to be sure there was no emergency to take care of. She had warped in the bathroom of her office, where she kept a space change of clothes for this purpose. In a few minutes she changed from Hoshizora to Quantum, hid her eyes behind her visor, and stepped into her office a whole different person.
Hayasa-sensei, decked in his Mercury costume, exchanged a furtive smile with her but didn’t make any further comment, keeping her two personas completely separate as he gave her the summary of today’s incidents.
Kameko wouldn’t have had the same curtesy, but Kameko was currently busy doing shady HPSC business in Itoshima. Something about a heroine possibly abusing her powers to stalk her ex-boyfriend. Kameko had been sent there to assess if there was truth to those claims, and if there was, decide on a sanction. The heroine could lose her license. At the very least she would be relocated to another prefecture.
There was no notable incident to report in Fukuoka, at least. The sidekicks had done their job well. The other hero agencies had sent memos about things they would like to follow up, but nothing urgent. No big villain in the whole prefecture; hell, even the whole island. They weren’t as peaceful as Shizuoka, but they were damn close.
Psyren swung by to request a join patrol with another hero in the South of the prefecture, because she had sensed a lot of discouragement and stress in that area and suspected that they were overworked; but that was all. Everything was going exceedingly well.
Toki was wrapping it up when Keigo landed softly on the balcony, shaking his wings to straighten out his feathers. The wings were tall and dense: it had been nearly two weeks since the last time he had to shred a lot of feathers, so for once his wings were at full size. When he entered, his eyes caught Toki’s, and they exchanged a beaming smile.
Keigo had attended a little party for a charity this afternoon; something normal, that didn’t raise any red flags, except that said charity was about people suffering from “too powerful Quirks,” and that it was thinly veiled disguise for a Meta-Liberation Army meeting. And of course, that meeting had been filled with MLA-sympathizers that Hatabana-san wanted to introduce him to.
The MLA was there, and they were recruiting.
Nobody knew. Nobody knew, except Keigo and Toki. They hadn’t even told Hayasa-sensei. Toki wasn’t sure they could tell anyone yet. The MLA had infiltrated heroes, in canon, and she didn’t know if it was true in this universe too.
But it would be fine. Keigo didn’t seem alarmed. Judging by his self-satisfied smirk, his mission had gone smoothly.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Hayasa-sensei said, lips twitching. “It’s nearly time for me to go home anyway, so good evening.”
“Good evening sensei!” they both chirped.
And then, as soon as Hayasa-sensei had left and closed the door behind him, Keigo twirled Toki like a dancer, dipped her, and kissed her full on the mouth before righting her up, both of them laughing as she looped her arms around his neck.
“How was your thing?” Keigo cheerfully asked her.
“It was fine. How was yours?”
“Fine too.”
They exchanged matching grins.
“Well, congratulations. We have still—” Keigo checked the time, “—ten minutes until we’re off-duty, so what about I tell you what I learned, and then we go home and celebrate your success, Hoshizora-sensei? Or, wait. Is it Taiyōme-sensei?”
“Technically it’s both. There’s a nifty little law saying that when one identity obtains a diploma, said diploma is applicable to all the identities held by the same person.”
Keigo’s grin widened. “It’s about the hero who said he wasn’t required to know fire safety laws as a civilian when he set fireworks on his roof, isn’t it.”
“Totally.”
Keigo sniggered. He took a breath, either to launch on a report of what he had learned or to make a joke again… And then the door of their office flew open, making them jump apart like scalded cats.
“Kitakyūshū is under attack,” Hayasa-sensei said, eyes a bit wild. “Dozens of Nomu are rampaging through the city, you need to go now.”
Shit.
oOoOoOo
It was chaos.
The sun was setting, bathing the whole city in crimson; buildings were on fire, car alarms were screeching, civilians were stampeding like herds of panicked animals, and monsters were roaring while tearing through the crowd.
The second Toki warped there with her teams of hastily assembled combat-specialized sidekicks, they fell into the fight. Blazing rays of light accompanied Sunspear’s attacks, a sound like a snapping whip signaled Zero changing shape to bind an opponent, Ocelot’s growl turned into a snarl as he launched himself towards his target. Toki fired a warp-blast against the nearest monster and grabbed a civilian on the verge of being crushed, but not before seeing a flurry of red feathers raining down like crimson blades, slicing, pinning, and restraining as if each donned of its own mind.
It was beautiful, and even in the middle of a fight Toki couldn’t hold a shiver of awe. Any villain would fall in a second, faced with this kind of attack.
But their opponents weren’t normal villains. They weren’t humans. They were Nomu.
Toki hadn’t seen a real Nomu until then, but she recognized them immediately. Big humanoid figures, exorbitant eyes with no eyelids, mutations merging with one another until they looked more like beasts than like people, bared teeth…. And of course, the exposed brains in all their horrific glory.
There was no intelligence and no humanity in those eyes; they were moving, but they were like corpses. Gods, what had led to this? How could anything lead to this?!
There was no time to think. Toki, no, Quantum threw herself into the fray.
Hit, move, warp, strike; the impact fell like a pneumatic hammer each time, air and momentum warped and redirected like projectile weapons. She danced between blows, grabbed, hit, slid under a punch and retaliated with twice the savagery; she dropped in the middle of someone else’s fight to redirect a hit that could have been lethal, swapped opponents in a blink, and ran, and jumped, and hit, hit, hit.
Crap, the Nomu were strong. Quantum was a devastatingly good fighter, but even herself had to admit it freaked her out. She could be swift, light, lightning-fast, and precise, the perfect foil to Hawks’ brand of speed and efficiency with fancy feathered flourishes; and she could be hard and brutal.
She had trained to face All Might after all. It was the kind of strength she would hesitate to unleash against a human, but when her most aggressive Warp-blasts failed to make the Nomus pause for more than a few seconds, it was time to bring out the big guns.
The next Nomu was warped high in the sky, then higher, then higher; then Toki warped back to earth to continue fighting and let the Nomu fall.
Thirteen whole seconds later, there was a wet crushing impact. The Nomu splattered over the pavement didn’t get back up.
Quantum turned to Hawks to see if he had seen, but she didn’t need to: a storm of red feathers was already rolling, cresting like a wave and hauling away two Nomu in the sky as if carried by an invisible hurricane.
Hawks hadn’t even turned his head. Two primaries feathers in hand, he was flying from one opponent to another, slashing and cutting, vaulting over swipes of clawed hands and sliding under punches to strike and roll and strike again.
Untouchable as a strike of lightening, gold eyes cold and utterly focused. He kicked a Nomu towards Toki when jumping from its back to get high and strike down another opponent, and she warped the monster in the sky.
When she went back to the streets a second later, Hawks wasn’t there anymore.
He was already too far ahead, zipping between enemies at high speed. There was scream, Toki saw a Nomu with big leathery wings bear down on a civilian, when suddenly a two-meters tall wave of water crashed on the monster and forced it to back up a step. The hero who had intervened turned his few liters of water in the shape of a blade and started hacking away at the wings. It gave Toki the four seconds necessary to focus, visualize…
She tore the Nomu’s wings like you pull the wings of the fly; as easily as she had cut off All Might’s arms, more than a year ago.
The water-hero dragged the civilian away as Toki warped the wing-less Nomu in the sky. By prudence, she didn’t leave to another opponent immediately after, afraid that it would regenerate mid-flight. But those Nomu’s regeneration was probably slower, because ethe mutilated monster fell to its death like all the others.
“Quantum!”
It was the water-hero from earlier. Toki blinked, and suddenly recognized him. It was Wani, the Riptide Hero, a young man with a prickly temper and a water-control Quirk that was based in Kitakyūshū.
Toki had always known him scowling but serious. Right now, though, his eyes were wide, his hair in even more disarray than usual, blood stains and dirt were splattered all over his blue costume, and his mouth was twisted in a snarl that was half-rage and half-terror. He looked almost feral.
“Wani,” she said calmly, because even if he was older than her she was supposed to be the leader and set an example.
“Fuckers are also attacking other cities,” Wani spat, wild-eyed. “There’s those things in Musutafu, too!”
“Shit,” Toki swore. “How many Nomu are there?”
“How the fuck would I know?!”
Quantum weighed her options. The average hero wouldn’t be able to handle a Nomu, let alone many, maybe she should go there… but no, Musutafu had its own heroes, and they were all more than able to take care of the problem. And if they weren’t, well, Endeavor lived right next door.
It made no sense. Why would the League launch Nomu against Musutafu, then? All Might lived there!!! He taught at Yūei! They had to know he was there!
And what about Kitakyūshū? There was nothing important here. Except that it’s my territory, she suddenly realized. It wasn’t Fukuoka, but it was close. Close enough for Kurogiri to do some recon without being spotted by Hawks, but close enough for Quantum to come running as the first sign of trouble. Was this a trap? Bait for something else?
And wait, Musutafu was All Might’s territory. The Nomu weren’t attacking random cities, they were attacking All Might and Quantum. Did that mean that the League was aiming at the Yūei teachers? At Yūei in general? But that could mean—
“And that’s not all!” Wani kept talking, fast-paced and slightly frantic. “The Ghost Arsonist just set fire to five hospitals all over Shizuoka, too; the HPSC is issuing an emergency call to all heroes with water-Quirks. I need to go there immediately!”
Shizuoka too? That was a direct attack on Endeavor. Quantum frowned:
“If the situation was different, I would warp you there, but…”
A red light blinked in the corner of her HUD. Quantum stopped talking, sucking in a startled breath. It took her a second to place this signal, but when she did, she paled.
It was the panic button she had given to Hitoshi and Neito. They were calling for help.
The League had attacked the summer camp.
“It’s a diversion,” she breathed.
“What?” Wani barked. “For what?”
“The League is attacking the students in the mountains,” Toki replied, thinking out loud with mounting horror, “and they want the heroes to be too overwhelmed to respond.”
Shit. Toki’s mind was running at full speed. The summer camp wasn’t supposed to be attacked! The whole point of this attack had been to kidnap Bakugo, in canon, but Bakugo wasn’t there in this universe! He was safe and sound in the Naruto Labs!
Wait, hadn’t the League tried to kidnap Tokoyami too, in canon? They were looking for a hero student to recruit, to steal, something precious to rip from the heroes. But they also wanted someone they could see as belonging with them, a marginal, someone with a mutation or a scary Quirk or a—
… or a villain Quirk…
No, no, no. Toki was jumping to conclusions. Hitoshi had never revealed his Quirk to be Brainwashing. He was pretending it was just sleepwalking. It was fine, it was harmless, and Hitoshi was fine, Hitoshi was safe…!
—and then Toki remembered, with a flash of horror so strong it felt like nausea, of Hitoshi using his Quirk on Shigaraki in the mall.
Hitoshi had had no other options. Midoriya had been in danger. Someone had been in danger, of course he had to save them. But he had revealed his Quirk. Shigaraki wouldn’t remember anything after falling prey to Brainwashing, but what if he remembered Hitoshi’s voice?! What if the weird feeling Hitoshi had had about Shigaraki’s mind meant that he actually remembered the whole encounter?! What if the Yūei spy had blabbed?! What if?!
Also, the Ghost Arsonist? Dabi was in it?! Shit! She had thought he wouldn’t work with Shigaraki after the disaster of the USJ, but she had been wrong. He was collaborating with them at least, even if he wasn’t in the mountains like in canon. Fuck, what a disaster!
“I’ll warp you to Shizuoka,” she decided, extending a hand. “And then I’ll…”
And she hesitated.
Her heart was howling, screaming that she had to go rescue Hitoshi and Neito and the other students. They were her kids, and she would rip to pieces any villains who touched them. But her mind, the rational part of herself, was berating her for prioritizing them over her mission. She was the protector of this island, she had a duty towards this city too! Wasn’t Yūei able to handle their shit?!
“Go,” said Hawks.
He touched down on her right, soundlessly. There were barely a few specks of blood on his jacket, and his face cold and serious. Even in the mist of chaos, Hawks was too fast, too unpredictable, too deadly. Untouchable.
It was reassuring, to know that whatever happened, nothing could be fast enough to touch him.
One Nomu chose this instant to test its luck. The monster made a grab for Hawks, and Hawks’ blade flew like a red blur, slicing his throat clean. The flesh of the injured Nomu didn’t have to knit itself back together: a feather as long as Toki’s forearm stuck the back of its neck like an arrow, so violently that what remained of the neck gave in, and the severed head rolled at Toki’s feet. Hawks ducked the arterial spray without even having to look at it.
The whole thing hadn’t lasted two seconds.
Wani gagged, like it was the first decapitation he had ever seen. Absurdly, a cold and calculating part of Toki thanked Okamoto for teaching her to not flinch at the sight of blood. Her eyes meet Hawks, and a wordless understanding passed between them.
“Go,” he repeated. “I have it handled.”
His wings spread, huge and looming, before every feather scattered in the air like a school of fish suddenly turned predators, aiming to the enemies like living blades. It didn’t escape Toki’s notice that in the three minutes they had been there, at least seven Nomu had been killed.
Eight, she mentally rectified, not looking at the severed head at her feet.
“I’m counting on you,” she only replied.
She grabbed Wani and warped.
One jump high in the air, then another, then another, then another. It felt like tearing through the air. She warped sixty kilometers at the time, not caring about the violence of each teleportation. In seconds, she had crossed half the country.
From above, she quickly saw where Shizuoka was burning, and warped with Wani on the ground.
The Riptide Hero made a heaving sound and swayed on his feet. Quantum steadied him without looking. Warping was a violent experience when she didn’t try to minimize her passenger’s discomfort.
Wani wasn’t a weakling, though. He didn’t throw up. He took one breath, another, and then he was on his feet and walking towards the blaze that had engulfed the hospital. Toki barely had the time to read the letters on the side of the walls, and for a second she paused, seized by an awful feeling.
Why would Dabi set fire to a mental hospital…?
But she didn’t have time to think about this. She warped back up in the air, focusing on the GPS displayed by her visor, and flew to the mountains, desperately hoping she wasn’t too late.
Notes:
Why would Dabi set fire to a hospital, Toki is wondering, completely forgetting the existence of Rei Todoroki and Dabi's australia-sized grudge.
If you want to read Dabi's POV, it's here ! [LINK]
Anyway ! Are you screaming? I am screaming.
If you were wondering, the League didn't attack the first day (unlike in canon) because on the first day the spy accidentally let his phone discharge because Hitoshi and Neito were chatting and distracting Iida, who then didn't think to remind people to charge their phones.
ALSO ! The League is more competent in this world because, as Toki shaped the world to be better prepared to face villains, the villains were shaped by the experience of a world that wouldn't crumble with just brute force. Shigaraki experienced different things: he didn't have to compete with Stain's popularity, so he didn't waste enery on that. He was caught and arrested once, so he got more careful. He was caught by Hitoshi's Quirk, so he became more vigilant to his surroundings, etc.
He basically had to think in term of Tactician Player and not Tank.And that's just Shigaraki. He's not the only member of the League...
I love the tiny consequences of the butterfly effect, especially when Toki isn't responsible of it AT ALL. People are people, making their choices and following their own paths completely undependantly from her, and she's just along for the ride!Anyway. Eheheheheh OH MY GOD THE CAMP IS ATTACKED WHO COULD HAVE ANTICIPATED THAT?!
Jeez, i wonder what difference it will make if a Top hero just barge into the League attack... x)
See you next week !
Chapter 53: Fire on the mountains
Summary:
The summer camp's attack.
Fire and blood. Ashes and despair.
Notes:
Well, if internet abandons me, know i tried very hard to post this chapter...
I HAVE BEEN DEPRIVED OF INTERNET CONNECTION TO MY LAPTOP FOR THREE DAYS NOW. I AN CHOMPING AT THE BIT.
Anyway !
Funny story, in this chapter the word "knocked out" is used. But when i wrote it, being the non-native english speaker that i am, i didn't remember that the word i looked for was knocked *out*... so i wrote knocked *up*.
And then four pages later i had a moment of horrified lucidity as i realized that Toki was making her opponent pregnant instead of just rendering them unconcious.Anyway ! Enjoy!
I hope this chapter will make you yell at your screen, ehehehehe ....
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
FIRE ON THE MOUNTAINS
The forest was on fire. Even from the sky, she could see the blue flames and the smoke.
It meant that Dabi was here… or at least a double of him, if Twice had been recruited by the League, like in canon. Toki took note of it, acknowledged the issue, and then focused on more pressing matters. Her HUD pointed her towards the lodge, thanks to her GPS, and Toki warped in that direction.
There was a fight on the edge of the clearing. A dozen people. Eight kids, two pro-heroes, two villains. A huge beefy guy was fighting Mandalay, while a few students of class 1-B darted between attacks, trying to help but unable to land any significative hit. Present Mic was screeching non-stop, but his opponent was a tall individual armed with a huge bat of metal and who used some kind of telekinesis to send the hero flying away almost constantly. The few students of class 1-A who were with him didn’t fare any better.
Then suddenly, Mandalay’s opponent changed tactics. He vaulted over her, reached under a bush, and then there was a…
There was a child.
What the fuck was a child doing there?!
The villain had grabbed him by the scruff like a puppy. Everything was going too fast already: nobody had managed to stop him; nobody could reach him in time. The villain was grinning like a lunatic, arming his arm for a punch. Muscles bulged out, red and twisting like living snakes. The boy was screaming. The students were screaming. Mandalay reached out desperately.
Flash!
Toki warped onto the villain’s back and disappeared in another flash with both him and the kid.
They reappeared high in the sky, the kid securely in Toki’s arms. The villain (was it Muscular?!) let out a surprised noise. Some dispassionate part of Toki considered warping him higher, at a sufficient altitude to reach terminal velocity as he fell, and just let him splatter on the ground. That would be one less problem.
But she was a hero, and heroes didn’t kill. More importantly, Toki was Toki, and she had sworn to be better than her parents. Ending the Nomu was one thing, but this was a human being. If she could save him, then she had to.
She warped back on the ground with the kid first, to put him safely behind Mandalay; then she warped back up to catch Muscular in freefall, and blasted him with a Warp-Blast that turned him into a human canon-ball and altered his trajectory so he crashed into the telekinetic person who was still fighting Present Mic. The impact was earth-shattering, dust flying everywhere. Toki almost winced. There was going to be some broken bones there, maybe even a concussion…
… Yeah, but they had been attacking her kids. They had been about to kill them. Fuck those guys.
For a second there was silence. Toki dropped soundlessly on the ground behind the heroes and the villains. Nobody moved. Muscular and Telekinetic-Person were a heap of limbs, twitching and groaning, and the students had frozen, gaping at her.
“Sensei!” Tsuburaba croaked, voice breaking with relief.
“We’re saved,” Aoyama whimpered. Next to him, Sato swayed and sat on his heels, visibly exhausted.
“Oh thanks god,” Kamakiri of class 1-B blurted out. He was carrying an unconscious Nirengeki Shoda on his back.
Quantum sparred a second to smile at them briefly, then darted a glance to Mandalay and Mic.
“Is the kid okay?”
Mandalay had the child in her arms and didn’t seem like she was going to put him down anytime soon. The kid had a hat with tiny horns. Wait, wasn’t he a canon-character? Kota or something, her nephew, the child of the Water Hose duo? In canon, Muscular had tried to kill him too.
Holy shit, and Midoriya wasn’t there! They had been very close to the catastrophe…!
“Fine,” Mandalay said. She swallowed. “Thank you.”
“Always a pleasure to see you!” Present Mic added cheerfully. “Now, if you don’t mind…”
He turned back to the two unconscious villains, then pulled handcuffs from his belt and started restraining them. Not that it would help a lot if Muscular woke up. He could probably snap those handcuffs without issue.
Toki didn’t say it out loud, though. The students started crowding her, and she suddenly felt like a hen having to reassure a flurry of frightened chicks.
“How did you know we needed help?” Asui asked, eyes wide.
“Monoma and Shinsō both have panic buttons. More importantly, what’s the situation? Are there more villains? Where are the rest of the students? Shit, tell me at least there’s no Nomu.”
A few of the kids boggled at her, probably taken aback at the curse. Quantum was normally a cool, cheerful, carefree hero, with a hint of sweet optimism. Quantum didn’t growl, didn’t swear, and didn’t panic. But then, cocky-Quantum was good in press interviews and post-fight briefing. In combat situation, hints of Toki Taiyōme shone through the cracks.
“Everyone is in groups of four spread out in the forest,” Mandalay said. She straightened, pulling herself together, but still holding her nephew close. “We always do a nocturnal exercise in the evening. Most of them have a teacher with them, but…”
But not all of them, Quantum deduced grimly. She took a long breath. There were eight kids there: Sato, Asui, Shōji and Aoyama of class 1-A, and Kamakiri, Kuroiro, Shoda and Tsuburaba of class 1-B. It meant that thirty-two teenagers were scattered in the woods, with an unknown number of villains and possibly Nomus. Thirty-two students, so eight groups… with only Midnight, Vlad King and the rest of the Pussycats, so five pro-heroes total. Not great.
“I sent a distress signal already,” Present Mic told them. “Yūei is going to send help.”
“Not anytime soon,” Quantum said abruptly. “There are Nomu attack in Kitakyūshū and Musutafu, the League is targeting All Might and me to stop us from intervening. The Ghost Arsonist is also attacking hospitals in Shizuoka and taking all of Endeavor’s attention. We’re on our own.”
The heroes looked at each other. For half a second there was uncertainty, no one being sure of who should take command and offer a plan. Quantum was the highest ranked, but she was also the youngest and the least aware of the situation…
After a brief pause, Present Mic squared his shoulders, and asked:
“Can you evacuate the kids?”
Well, it looked like they were giving her command anyway. Or at least giving her the chance to take it, which was the same thing, really. Quantum grimaced.
“Not fast and not safely. I can only transport a few people at the same time. Warping is also violent when you’re not used to it, it’s a last resort for the injured. And while I warp your group back to Yūei, what would happen to the kids out there? No, let’s regroup everyone and then I’ll start the evacuation.”
“Fine by me,” Mandalay nodded. “We’ll wait for you in the lodge.”
“You’re a telepath, aren’t you?” Quantum checked. “Tell all of the students to fight back. I’ll take responsibility, but if it’s the League then there is at least one A-ranked threat with them. Which groups don’t have a pro-hero with them?”
“Uraraka’s group,” croaked Asui.
“Monoma’s group,” Kuroiro said. “And Awase’s, too.”
Monoma, uh? Quantum turned back to Mandalay.
“I’m going to find them first. Monoma can help me by copying my Quirk and start evacuating. Tell his group to signal themselves, I’ll try to see them from the sky.”
Mandalay nodded, and Quantum was gone in a flash.
She warped first where Hitoshi had activated his panic button, the little pin displayed in bright red by her GPS. But his group was long gone. Melissa had created a signal to raise the alarm, not a tracker, so Toki had no clue where Hitoshi was now. Blast.
And Neito hadn’t activated his panic button at all. That was either very good or very bad. Toki swore and warped in the sky to take in the situation from the sky.
Damn, there was too much happening on too vast an area. Blue flames were sizzling and hungrily devouring the trees. Someone had clearly started at least five different fires, slowly encircling the lodge to trap the students in a specific area. Heavy, purple-tinted gas was rolling with the wind, thickening the fire’s smoke. Mustard, Quantum guessed sourly. Guess that the League’s players hadn’t changed from canon.
In the dark, there wasn’t a lot of visibility even with a full moon and the light of flames. It was loud, too. The night air was filled with the sizzling of flames, and any call for help would be drowned in the noise. Sometimes you could hear cries or yells, but it was muffled, impossible to pinpoint with any certainty. There were brief flashes of light, flames or maybe electricity, but it was lost in the blaze. The chaos was total.
Toki frantically scanned the forest, but she didn’t see anyone. She didn’t even know how Neito’s group would signal themselves after being contacted by Mandalay. Maybe he would warp high in the sky, like he had taught him?
The wind picked up, making the toxic smoke spread faster. From the thickest part of the purplish cloud suddenly emerged a massive block of kanji, like a whale breaching the surface of the ocean in a desperate attempt to reach air.
HELP!
“Guess that’s my cue, then,” Toki muttered.
She took a deep breath of clean air and warped in the cloud, taking as much space and clean oxygen with her as she could.
When she reappeared right next to the wall of text, bringing with her several cubic meters of compressed air, it created a big blast. The detonation sounded like a gunshot; the shockwave blasted the toxic smoke away for a few precious seconds.
This was a class 1-B group. Tetsutetsu was standing from and center, fully turned into metal, arms spread to protect his classmates behind him. Kinoko Komori was carried in the arms of Manga Fukidashi, who had made the wall of text calling for help. A masked villain was encased in the ground up to his neck, swearing a storm. Some purple smoke was still oozing from his collar, as if coming from inside… ah, so it was Mustard, then.
“Sensei,” Juzo Honenuki said with naked relief in his voice. “Can you stop the bleeding?”
He was kneeling next to the prone form of a massive guy in a skirt… Tiger, of the Wild Wild Pussycat. With a lot of blood on his pretty outfit. Especially on his chest.
Oh, not good. Not good at all.
“He passed out.” Honenuki’s voice was trembling. “He was shot. He’s in shock I think, but I still have a pulse.”
“Not for long!” bragged Mustard, still sunk in the softened ground up to his neck.
“Shut the hell up!” Tetsutetsu barked.
He looked like he wanted to kick the smug smirk off this little bastard’s face, and frankly Toki couldn’t blame him. Her heart was pounding. She wasn’t panicking; she was too used to high-stake situations to panic, but she could feel the tension in her muscles, that supernatural awareness of every detail, like time had slowed down and at the same time was speeding up uncontrollably around you.
The fire, the danger, the number of students, the odds of the bullet hitting a vital organ, the time it took for someone to bleed out… Numbers and statistics and strategies were already circling in Toki’s head, almost too fast for her to focus. Adrenaline was a hell of a drug. She almost took a big calming breath, then remembered the toxic fumes just in time.
“It’s going to be fine.”
It wasn’t going to be fine. But the kids wanted comfort, not truth. She projected the calm confidence of Quantum.
“Honenuki, keep pressure on his wound, I’ll warp you both back at the lodge. Then I’ll go back and bring the others, too.” She paused and looked at Mustard. “The villain can stay on time-out.”
“Hey!” Mustard yelled, his voice getting a little high-pitched in sudden nervousness. “You wouldn’t leave me in the middle of a forest fire, would you?”
“You’re right,” Toki said affably. “I’ll bring you first.”
Then she removed his stupid gas mask and knocked him out. She couldn’t leave him in the forest, but she wasn’t happy with the idea of bringing him with them either.
If she had more time, she would have tried to find some sort of cave to lock him up- but they didn’t have time.
Tiger had been shot. The hero was still alive, but… He had been shot in the chest. Maybe through a lung, Toki guessed, looking at where Honenuki was keeping pressure. Maybe he had broken ribs. Maybe his lung was perforated and he was drowning in his blood. Maybe his spine was damaged. In any case, that wasn’t an injury he could shrug off.
This group was the perfect team to take on Mustard when you thought about it. Komori could choke him with Mushroom, Honenuki could trap him in the ground, Fukidashi could stun him… But Mustard had a gun. Tetsutetsu would have survived it, thanks to his Quirk, but of course the villain hadn’t aimed for him. He had aimed for the pro-hero, taking out the main threat.
Gods, Toki hated guns.
Toki warped with them in pairs. First she took the unconscious Mustard and warped back where she had fought Muscular, to put her prisoner with the two other villains (unconscious, too, but also cuffed and tied up). Then she walked inside the lodge to check if it was safe, and to memorize it as a landing point. Like an idiot, she hadn’t scouted ahead. She also warned Mandalay that she was coming with her injured colleague.
Then she went back, and got first Tiger and Honenuki, then Komori and Fukidashi, and Tetsutetsu for last. She brought them all into the lodge, keeping her cool, assuring them that the worst had passed. She was lying but they didn’t need to know that.
And afterward, she came back to the sky, searching for a sign, a call, anything.
For what seemed to stretch for hours, it was just a frenzied search. It reminded her of one rescue mission after a small earthquake, digging through rubble for people who were still alive. It was terrifying.
She had hated every second.
By some sort of miracle, she happened upon a teacher-less group of students that were crawling their way back to the lodge. Yosetsu Awase, Sen Kaibara, Jurota Shishida and Kojiro Bondo from class 1-B. They hadn’t fought any villains. They had seen a man with burn scars set fire to the forest while talking to a man in a sort of full body villain costume that also talked to himself: but they had stayed hidden and ran away as soon as they could.
Toki wished that more students had the same good sense. And the same insane luck. Because if she wasn’t wrong, that was Dabi and Twice, and holy shit that could have ended so badly.
Then Toki’s attention was attracted by a great rumble of shadow and flashes of reflected light upon metal, which, she quickly discovered upon warping above, was Dark Shadow fighting Moonfish. And pounding him into paste.
She wisely decided to stay out of it. She didn’t know how to stop Dark Shadow without risking hurting Tokoyami too.
But she managed to find Tokoyami’s group, which was honestly a relief.
“Sensei!” Ojiro screamed. “Over here!”
He looked like he was carrying something on his back, but there was nothing- no, there were clothes. That was Hagakure. Jirō was standing next to him, awkwardly leaning against a tree, avoiding putting any weight on her right leg.
Toki warped next to them in a second.
“Are you all alright?”
“Hagakure is unconscious, and we don’t know what’s wrong with her,” Ojiro said in a tight voice. “When Tokoyami attacked, she was thrown back, and… I think she hit her head.”
“If Dark Shadow hadn’t lost it, we would be dead,” Jirō said sharply. “This… this creep with the teeth, he was— None of us could do anything to even touch him, and he would have killed us.”
Toki wanted to say something reassuring, but it was a little difficult. Barely fifty meters away, Dark Shadow and Moonfish were still tearing each other apart with animalistic screeches.
It looked like Moonfish was losing, badly. But if Toki got in the middle of that before Moonfish was completely down, then the villain would use her intervention to escape. But if Toki waited too long, Tokoyami may kill him…
She was going to give it three more minutes and then she would assess the situation again. There were too many fires to put out. She couldn’t focus on a fight where no student was in danger of dying.
“I’m getting you back to the lodge,” she finally said.
“Wait! Sensei, we were with Ragdoll! When that monster attacked us, he hurt her, and then… and then, in the chaos, his accomplice took her! I’m sorry, I wasn’t fast enough! I couldn’t stop her, I had to get Hagakure and Jirō away from the fight…”
Shit, Toki had forgotten that! But in canon, AFO had kidnapped a member of the Wild Wild Pussycats, too. He had wanted her Quirk… Search, or something like that.
Oh, no, it was bad.
“It’s not your fault,” she said in a soothing voice, “Tell me what to look for. What does the accomplice look like, which way did he go?”
“He went that way.” Ojiro pointed in the direction where Awase and his group had seen Dab and Twice. Damn it. “And he looked like… a lizard, I guess? With purple hair. But he wore a red scarf, and he had a lot of knives.”
Was that Spinner?
Why would Spinner even join the League of Villain in this universe? The hero killer had never risen to the same popularity as in canon, he hadn’t shared his message online with videos or anything—
No. The coherency of the plot was a problem for later. For now Toki had bigger problems. Namely, three scared teenagers, and one teenager locked in a deadly fight with an A-ranked villain who also happened to be cannibalistic murderer. And then, after dealing with that, there were still about twenty missing students, two of them who were her students, and an unknown number of villains unaccounted for.
And that was without mentioning the fire. Or the fact that Toki had left Keigo alone to fight Nomu, fuck, couldn’t she catch a freaking break…!
“I’ll keep an eye out,” she said grimly. “Now grab my hand. I’ll be back for Tokoyami later.”
oOoOoOo
Toki hoped that the next group she would find would be luckier than Ojiro’s. Obviously, she was wrong.
She tried to track Spinner, first, unsuccessfully. But while she was doing that, she saw flashes of fire and heard the rumble of ice in the distance. When she gave up on her search for the missing Ragdoll, she went in that direction. Little Todoroki was kicking ass and she wasn’t very worried about his skills… but if Dabi was on the move, then Toki had to secure Shouto before his homicidal older brother tried to finish what he had failed to do at the USJ.
The fight was over when she showed up, and nobody was dead. That was the good news.
The bad news was that Todoroki’s group had fought Stain, the hero killer.
Todoroki, Iida, Midoriya and Kirishima had been with Pixie-Bob, the strongest member of the Wild Wild Pussycat. Her Quirk Earth-Flow could create massive beasts of earth and thus, she was the most dangerous in a fight. So the League of Villain had sent their most experienced assassin: Stain, the hero killer.
He had stabbed Pixie-Bob, then gone for her throat after she fell, paralyzed. Kirishima had managed to use his body as a shield to stop him from landing the killing blow. And then Todoroki, Midoriya and Iida had pounced on the hero killer, exactly like in canon.
It must be fate. Toki didn’t know whether she wanted to laugh or cry.
This Stain was slightly more unhinged than canon-Stain. He was literally foaming at the mouth, ranting and raging about how they were all fake, and he would purify the world by getting rid of all heroes. This Stain was also weaker than canon-Stain, and slower, which had probably saved the kids. Stain had some sort of exoskeleton along his abdomen and around his legs. He had probably suffered a spine injury at some point. He could still swing a sword deadly fast, but he couldn’t run and jump without his exoskeleton. He could actually barely walk unassisted. To neutralize him, Todoroki had encased him in ice and then Midoriya had ripped out the machinery around his legs.
“We wanted to remove it entirely,” Midoriya stammered nervously. “But the parts around his abdomen have some, um, some tubes and things going in his body, so it may be some sort of life-support.”
Toki wondered what had happened to Stain to damage him to that point. Hadn’t he fought Endeavor in January, before going missing? Why didn’t he have burns?
Then Toki remembered that Meteor had probably been there for that fight. She stopped wondering.
“FAKE, ALL OF THEM FAKE!” Stain was yelling at the top of his lungs, squirming in his ice prison.
His arms were broken in six different places, his humerus poking from the flesh. His breaths were wheezing in a way that indicated at least one internal injury. But he was still yelling, like a man possessed. It was… to be honest, it was a little terrifying.
“NO HERO DESERVES A THRONE! ALL MIGHT ABANDONNED THIS WORLD! I WILL CREATE A WOLD WITHOUT FAKE HEROES, AND ONLY THE PURE OF HEART WILL DARE TO FACE THE DEMON LORD!”
“Somebody please knock him out,” Pixie-Bob hissed.
Her face was white with pain. Part of her neck was covered in blood. It was obvious that the hero killer had tried to slit her throat. If Kirishima hadn’t rushed there and deviated the blade with his Hardening Quirk…
Gods, all those children were going to have so much trauma.
Toki was going to have so much trauma.
“We’re not bringing him back to the lodge,” Toki decided. “He’s way too dangerous. Kirishima, gags him.”
“Why me?!”
“You’re probably the only one who can do it without losing a finger,” Todoroki said dispassionately.
As if to support his point, Stain snapped his teeth, looking nothing more than a rabid animal. Kirishima gulped.
Stain was gagged. Todoroki melted his ice and Toki asked Pixie-Bob to use her Quirk to encase the villain in a prison of rock, like how Honenuki had trapped Mustard. Once half buried alive, it would harder for this guy to make trouble. And unlike ice, the earth wouldn’t melt if the fire came closer.
But well, leaving the guy alone in a forest fire was dangerous. He was way closer to the flames than Mustard had been. For extra safety, Todoroki put ice around the rock. If the fire came that far, then Stain wouldn’t be roasted alive. Weren’t those kids nice?
Iida was clenching and unclenching his fists repeatedly, glaring at Stain without a word. But he wasn’t hurt. Had he renounced vengeance? Was he waiting for a better chance? Oh, whatever. Toki decided that this particular problem could wait.
So. Once that problem was wrapped up, Toki warped the kids and Pixie-Bob back to the lodge.
And then she went back to look for students.
She popped up where she had last seen Tokoyami and Moonfish first, but to her dismay (and a faint sense of horror), there was no one there anymore.
There was nobody that she could see, although her search was only cursory. Signs of battle, for sure. Tress crushed, upturned earth, branches cut by razor-sharp blades, deep gouges in the forest floor. But no blood. Dark Shadow hadn’t killed Moonfish, then, and Moonfish hadn’t touched Tokoyami. That was good.
But where were they?!
It was like they had vanished. Who won? What had happened? If Moonfish had won, there would be blood for sure. But if Dark Shadow had won and wandered off, then where had Moonfish gone? Had he crawled to safety? Had he gone after another group?
Gods, Toki didn’t have time for this! The students were the priority, not the criminals!
She swore, then warped back into the sky.
Fuck. Fuck.
There was fire all around the forest. Not an inferno, not yet, but there were clear lines of burning woods, lazy blue flames crackling and swirling, heavy smoke reducing the night visibility even more. It had been something like half an hour since Toki had arrived. In that short lapse of time, the smoke had risen enough to cloud the moon and stars.
The scene had never looked more sinister.
Toki kept jumping, getting increasingly desperate. If she didn’t find anything soon, she would get back to the lodge and start evacuating better to save those she had already secured than risk letting them get trapped by the flames. But gods, she didn’t want to do that. It would mean giving up on all the other students, and she couldn’t, she couldn’t.
They were children. They were fifteen. They were Hitoshi’s age. Hitoshi was one of them. She couldn’t leave them. She was a hero; abandoning victims was against all her instincts.
She saw a flash of electricity, suddenly, and nearly let out a shout of relief. There! Kaminari!
She warped in the middle of a full-blown fight.
The villain wasn’t someone she recognized. It was a tall, muscular man with a face mask, screaming as he rolled on the ground to get rid of the viscous fluid he was covered with. Acid, apparently, judging by Ashido’s war cry. Several huge balls of metal were floating in the air like balloons. Sero’s sticky tape collected them in a wide swing and then crashed them on the villain just as Uraraka cancelled her Quirk, yelling for Kaminari.
Kaminari, who put both hands in the acid Mina had streaked all across the ground and discharged a storm of electricity.
The acid was a conductor, apparently. The villain crushed under metal balls had no way to run, and metal drew the lighting even more efficiently than liquid.
Game over.
Toki didn’t even need to intervene. She didn’t even have time to intervene. In spite of herself, she couldn’t help but be impressed. Maybe that villain was weak, but damn, the kids had been excellent.
“Great teamwork,” Toki commented, a little stunned, when the kids noticed her and swarmed her. “How long did it take you to come up with that?”
The four kids looked at each other. Well, the three kids, actually. Kaminari was in idiot mode, having fried his brain with that last attack.
“About thirty seconds?” Uraraka guessed. “Why, was it bad?”
Toki took two seconds to pat Uraraka’s head with pride.
“No, it was amazing. You all get the best grade I can get you for dealing with this catastrophe.”
Then Toki warped them back to the lodge.
The fire had crept closer. Toki couldn’t put off the evacuation much longer. Maybe thirty or forty minutes. Less than an hour, in any case. Then the fire would be really too close, and flames had a tendency to progress fast.
In canon, Toki didn’t remember the lodge being this cornered by the blaze. She didn’t remember this much fire, either. In canon, Dabi hadn’t barred all retreat to the students. He had started a bunch of little fires that had cut the forests into deep lines, adding to the panic. But from above, in Toki’s memories, it hadn’t looked like this.
It hadn’t looked like Dabi was penning them in the valley, around the lodge, to slowly encircle them. It hadn’t looked like he was trapping them, like he was making sure they would be surrounded.
It hadn’t looked like so… coldly murderous.
What did Dabi want? What was his motivation in this world, what was his plan?! He didn’t follow the hero killer’s principles, because the hero killer hadn’t gone mainstream. But Stain was now slightly crazier than his canon counterpart and part of the League of Villain, so maybe Dabi had embraced those ideals?
But then, why had he joined the League before Stain’s recruitment, when the USJ incident occurred? Why had he targeted Shouto so soon? Was he still targeting Shouto? Why was he more murderous in this universe? Why was he actively trying to torch forty teenagers in cold blood, instead of just uncaringly creating chaos like he had done in canon?
What was going on in his head?!
There weren’t a lot of missing students anymore. Monoma’s group of class 1-B, of course, but also Midnight’s group of class 1-A, where was Hitoshi; and then Vlad King’s group of class 1-B. And then Tokoyami. And Ragdoll.
Toki could do this.
And even if she couldn’t, she had to do this.
She kept looking. The blazing fire didn’t help visibility. Toki was starting to cough with all the smoke. The heat was unbearable; she could feel herself sweating profusely under her costume. The sky had darkened with smoke, but also real clouds created by the heated air, and Toki couldn’t even see the stars anymore. Only the full moon, half masked by the fog, was still visible. The world was just darkness, bluish flames, and the ominous creaking of the burning forest.
Nobody was calling for help. By now, everyone had realized that the villains were hunting them, so they kept quiet. Without Tokoyami and Todoroki fighting, or the crackling of Kaminari’s electricity, it seemed so silent.
It felt like being in a horror movie.
Toki tapped her visor to contact the police and get some updates with the situation in Shizuka, Musutafu, or even Kitakyūshū. But all the lines were busy. It was still panic back there.
The League had prepared this attack better than in canon.
But then, this wasn’t canon. In this world there had been no Hosu attack, so the League still had had plenty of Nomu, to use as a diversion. They had recruited the hero killer, who was an ambush predator and knew his stuff. They clearly had recruited different people than in canon, too. Like the guy Uraraka’s group had fought. And even the villains that had been canon members of the League were different. Like Dabi, whose strategy completely eluded Toki. Or Spinner, who didn’t preach Stain’s doctrine but instead kidnapped people.
They were much smarter than in canon. Or at least, marginally smarter. But they were, for sure, much more dangerous than in canon.
Was… was this universe worse than the canon one? Had Toki made things worse, somehow?
Gods, she didn’t have time for this kind of questions!
She was fretting so bad, she almost missed it. But it was luck, maybe that allowed her to see a flash of light somewhere in the west, not far from the largest wall of flames. It didn’t look like the light of a fire… it looked more like a lightning bold, almost, zipping between the trees and zigzagging at high speed before vanishing. Projectiles? Electricity?
Kaminari was safe and sound at the lodge. It must be a villain. Hunting someone, maybe.
Toki warped closer. The light came back, flying like an arrow between the trees before disappearing. It didn’t buzz or fizzle like electricity, it was some kind of… laser beam, maybe? Toki tensed. She didn’t remember anyone having a power like that in the canon, but it didn’t necessarily mean anything. She needed to be careful with that one. Distance fighting could have her as a disadvantage.
Toki warped higher in the sky for a better view, and then from above she saw three students running away through a clearing. Oh, thanks gods. She whistled to make them slow down, and then warped next to them.
They were all so badly startled that Hiryu Rin took a swing at her. Toki dodged, but only just.
“Sensei!” Setsuna Tokage exclaimed.
And then she burst into tears.
Three students of class 1-B. Setsuna Tokage, Hiryu Rin, and Reiko Yanagi. They all looked badly rattled. Tokage was crying, Rin was panting, and Yanagi was deathly silent but also deathly pale and splattered with blood.
“What happened?” Toki asked Yanagi sharply. “Are you alright?”
The girl blinked owlishly, then looked down at her clothes. She shook her head jerkily.
“It’s not mine. Monoma took the shot for me.”
It felt a lot like getting dunked into freezing water. “He what?!”
“Monoma is fine,” Rin hurried to say. He was shivering, but he looked more coherent than the two girls. “It only got his arm. He said he was going to draw the villain away so we could make a run for it.”
“Monoma can teleport,” Tokage said. Her voice trembled in equal part fear and frustration. “He’s the only one with a chance to outrun that woman, so he told us to leave, and we just did, even knowing she’s trying to kill us!”
Oh, Neito. Too damn heroic for his own good. But yes, as a warper he was the only one with a realistic chance of making it if he tried to draw the enemy away from his classmates.
Still, if his arm was injured and if he had lost so much blood… He wasn’t at the top of his game. He was in pain, dizzy, making bad decisions. Playing bait was dangerous. Toki needed to go and rescue him ASAP.
Also, his panic button was on a bracelet. On his arm. Damn. If this villain had aimed right, then Neito didn’t have any way to call for help.
“Everyone takes a deep breath,” Toki ordered. “Is the villain here? No? Good. Was Monoma alright the last time you saw him? Yes? Good. Now, one at a time. Deep breaths, and tell me what happened, and what villain I’m going to deal with.”
To their credit, the kids started pulling themselves together quickly. It was Setsuna Tokage who spoke, still crying a little, but her voice steady and her back straight.
“A villain attacked us. It was a woman, with green hair, and a long coat with a hood. She can make a bow of light appears in her hand. I didn’t recognize her. She has an accent… I don’t think she’s Japanese. European, maybe?”
That rang exactly zero bells. But then, Toki wasn’t great with faces. She had only recognized Muscular because of the context, even though he was a known criminal and she had memorized his wanted notice. A woman with green hair… Nope, she had no clue who it could be. Maybe it was a new face, like that man with the metal balls that Uraraka’s team had fought?
It didn’t matter. Wordlessly, Toki gestured at Tokage to continue. The girl took a big gulp of air.
“She said her name was Beros. She had a very calm voice, almost bored, so we didn’t realize immediately she was a villain. But then she said she bore us no ill-will but was here to make a better world, and something about how Shigaraki had promised her a shot at Endeavor if she followed him.”
Toki startled. Endeavor?! How many mortal enemies did that guy have?
“Then she made her bow appear,” Tokage continued, sounding a little shell-shocked. “She shot at Yanagi first and Monoma pushed her, but it clipped his arm. There was so much blood. We were frozen, and then the villain shot us again aiming at me. She just…. She could have killed me; she was so fast. I only survived because I used my Quirk to separate in distinct parts, but I would have…”
“That’s when Monoma told us to run,” Yanagi said softly. “He teleported next to her to hit her, she dodged, but when he teleported away she went after him alone. So we… ran in the other direction.”
Toki briefly scanned their surroundings. She needed to install some sort of night vision in her visor. Seeing everything in shades of greenish light completely screwed with her ability to visualize the space around her, and thus to teleport, so she couldn’t utilize it in combat: but it would be useful to look for an enemy trying to ambush her.
For now, it seemed they were safe. She looked back at the students.
“I’m going to bring you to the lodge and then look for him. But before that, I need you to tell me as much as you can about this villain’s Quirk. She can shoot… bullets? Lightning?”
The kids briefly looked at each other.
“She can make a bow of light appear in her hand, or rather from her hand,” Tokage finally said. “And she shoots normal arrows, but they are propelled by the same light as her bow. It doesn’t look like lightning, more like… I don’t know, laser? Plasma?”
“And her arrows change direction like heat-seeking missiles!” Rin hurriedly added.
Plasma, not good. Arrows that could change directions, not good either. They needed to hightail out of there. Toki would take them back to the lodge, then come back and look for Monoma… and hope that they had stayed in the area.
“Okay, let’s go.”
She reached out to Yanagi first… and then she felt more than she saw a movement at the edge of the clearing. All the hairs raised on the back of her neck.
Her fingers closed on Yanagi’s wrist, and she warped six meters high in the sky; and the arrow propelled by a beam of light shot right there her chest had been half a second earlier.
Beros had come back for them.
Toki warped back on the ground in a crouch to grab the two other kids and get the hell out of there. Her brain was already in combat-mode. But just as she was reaching out to them, Neito appeared, already yelling a warning. He had his two arms, Toki immediately noticed, and he looked alright: thanks heavens. But his right sleeve was torn and splattered with a lot of blood, and he was wild-eyed and panting in a way that spoke of panic.
Toki altered her plans on the fly and reached out to him too, mentally adjusting the strength of her next jump so she could warp with four teenagers. She opened her mouth to shout at Rin and Tokage to grab her arm, she just needed to touch all four of them and then they would figure out the landing when they would be out of range of the damn sniper…
The next arrow went through Neito’s back and came out of his chest like a bolt of lightning.
Time didn’t stop.
Time didn’t slow.
And yet for this fraction of second, with blood roaring in her ears so hard it drowned everything else, Toki saw everything in excruciating detail. A nightmare in technicolor, in agonizing clarity.
She saw it all. How the arrow propelled by a bold of blueish energy pierced Neito’s back and burst out of his chest in a spray of blood, before ending its course in an explosion against a nearby tree. How Neito’s movement to reach Toki turned into a stumble, legs suddenly nerveless, his entire body falling forward like a tree cut down by an axe. How Neito’s eyes went huge, the way his mouth opened in a silent gasp, the way his hands instinctively raised to his chest as if to cover the exit wound, even if it was fucking hole—
How the silhouette at the edge of the clearing lowered her bow, her shoulders loosening with the quiet satisfaction of having touched her target.
Time didn’t stop. Time didn’t slow. And yet for this half-second it felt like being underwater, like time was stretching out to infinity, like one heartbeat lasted an eternity.
Toki knew everything was going to be burned in her memory. The darkness around them. The way the dancing blue flames cast an eerie, twisted light in the distance. The crackling of fire, the silence of the forest. The suffocating heat. The burn of her lungs. The blood flying. It was too dark to see its color, but Toki saw the wetness, the spray of dark liquid. Worse, she could smell it, cooper and crimson, and she knew how much blood there was in a human body; she knew what happened when your ribcage was speared by a big caliber firearm.
“NEITO!”
Toki caught him as he fell. There was blood fucking everywhere, she could feel it seeping into her costume already, but it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but the horror, the terror, as she uselessly tried to press against the wound. It was too big, she knew it was too late already, but her whole brain was screaming. Her ears were ringing. Neito heaved a strangled, wet gasp; his eyes looked for hers, wide and terrified.
Gods, he was fifteen.
He was her student, he was hers, and he was going to—
Toki had seen people die. She wasn’t unfamiliar with death, and blood, and the feeling of helplessness that made her throat go tight. The first body she had seen had been a mass of red gore and of yellow uniform: a hero that Meteor had smashed like an egg against the rubble of a crushed building. She had been too far away to see it clearly, thankfully. But she had never forgotten.
Toki had also seen people die from up close, as a hero. Sometimes death was violent, and sometimes it was slow. Sometimes you just weren’t fast enough.
Once, a villain caught red-handed beating someone to a pulp had tried to run away in a train station and got crushed by an incoming train. His victim had been dead when Toki had gone back to save them; the last blow of the villain had caved their skull in.
There had been people Toki had pulled out from a fire, fully believing they were still alive, but the paramedic had gently told her that smoke inhalation had killed them several minutes before Toki even got there. There had been young victims of a flood, drowned, that she had dragged out of a school bus at the bottom of a river. There had been a brawl between angry thugs once, and even though Toki had caught six of them, the other four had ripped each other apart. None of them had lived until the paramedics’ arrival.
Once, Toki had held the hand of a little grandma who was bleeding out, torn open in her own wrecked car. Teleporting her out would kill her as surely as a bullet. The grandma had asked Toki to hold her hand, because she was scared. Toki had been as scared as her, and yet she had held her hand, and stayed there for the four long minutes it had taken for the old lady to die.
She had died so quietly. Toki had cried for hours.
Toki wasn’t unfamiliar with death. She had seen plenty of people die since she was eight. But it had never been—
It had never been—
“One down,” said Beros.
Time didn’t stop and didn’t slow down, but it felt like it.
Behind Toki, one of the girls let out a tiny, frightened hitch of breath. Neito heaved another gasp, wet and raspy. His heart was still beating under Toki’s hands, but there was so much blood, so much blood. She didn’t have to look at herself to know she was drenched in it.
Toki didn’t care. She couldn’t care, she couldn’t focus. The thunder of her heart in her ears was drowning everything else. The feeling of powerlessness, of sheer horror, of denial and terror and anguished wailing stuck in her throat, reached another level—
— and then it was like a switch had been flipped, and the terror morphed into murderous rage.
It came all at once, like petrol catching on fire. It was a red haze over her eyes, a physical fist clenching on her throat; and yet her vision was crystal clear. Her blood was boiling in her veins. She could barely breathe with how it burned, that rage, that hatred, that wrath roaring to life like an inferno, blinding and ravenous. It felt like something alive uncoiling in her chest, something immense, uncontainable and merciless, something that was howling in pain and despair like a wounded animal; something beautiful almost, because suddenly nothing else mattered. There was no helplessness and no fear, there was no doubt and no second-guessing. There was just pain, rage… and clear, unadulterated intent.
The world was suddenly very simple, reduced to its purest expression, and the promise of violence was thickening the air like the smell of ozone.
Toki breathed in. She breathed out.
(The first time she had felt this kind of anger, Toki hadn’t been determined enough, and Eraserhead had been too strong for her to beat. The second time, Keigo had talked her down, and Endeavor hadn’t been there for her to act.)
(But there was no one to stop her this time.)
On the edge of the clearing, Beros’ green eyes widened infinitesimally. Something in her features shifted from passivity to alarm. She reached for an arrow in the quiver at her back… But it was already too late. Toki had warped right in front of her and grabbed her shoulder.
Toki disappeared with her enemy whole. Then, in the space between heartbeats, she imagined the villain’s body falling apart like the apples Toki used to peel with her Quirk long ago, when she was barely starting to understand how to use Warp-Space for this, when the use of Scalpel was barely an outline in her mind. It was so simple. She had done it a million time. It was just a fruit. It was just a piece of matter, existing in a space that Toki could control with a simple thought.
It was so easy.
Toki reappeared in the forest, a few meters away from her point of departure.
The five disjoined pieces of what had been her enemy fell on the ground at her feet.
oOoOoOo
Toki stood still, eyes closed, for a second or maybe two.
There was a thick layer of bushes and low trees separating her from the kids, so they hadn’t seen her reappear. For them, she had just volatilized with the villain. They didn’t know, not yet. Toki should rejoin them; tell them they were safe. She should look at Neito and— she should go there and—
She didn’t move. She stood still, between the pieces of what had once been a human body.
She tried to think of what Beros’s face had looked like, of the widening of the villain’s eyes when she had realized Toki was going to kill her. Beros had been a human being. A villain, but a person. Now she was just blood and neatly cut blocks of flesh. Toki didn’t look at the corpse, at the pool of blood spreading around it: she didn’t need to. She knew what it looked like.
She took a long breath, heart pounding, and waited for the cold rush of regret, horror, self-loathing. She had just killed someone. It was wrong, it was evil. It was what she had promised herself to never do.
But there was nothing. Only a supernatural calmness, and the howling grief in her stomach.
“Monoma?” gasped Yanagi, behind the bushes.
Toki breathed in, breathed out, and straightened. She had reappeared there because it was close by, but there was thick layer of bushes and trees between her and the kids. They couldn’t see anything.
She hadn’t wanted them to see.
It hadn’t been a moment of madness, some dissociative episode. She had… she had thought about it. In that span of an instant (how long had it been? Four seconds? Maybe five? It felt like nothing at all, and it felt like an eternity), she hadn’t suddenly been taken over by another personality. It was still her. She was still Toki, and she had tried to protect the kids from the awfulness, because that’s what Toki did.
And she had just… killed someone.
Shouldn’t she be in shock? Maybe that was it. Toki felt weirdly calm. Her heart was still pounding, but her hands weren’t shaking. She didn’t feel sick. She didn’t feel horrified. She didn’t even feel numb. She was just aching, and tired, and…
“Holy crap, that hurt,” rasped Neito’s voice.
Toki jolted as if electrocuted.
For a second she was sure she was hallucinating. Maybe she was having a stroke, maybe she had lost her mind. She warped back in the clearing next to the kids, making Rin scream in surprise; and then she fell on her knees because Neito was sitting. He was covered in blood and breathing heavily, but he was sitting against Tokage, and he was alive, he was moving, he was alive.
Toki put her hands on his shoulders and then on his chest, as if compelled to touch him to be sure she wasn’t dreaming. There was a hole in his T-shirt, the arrow had gone through, and yet his skin was completely intact.
“How…?!”
Neito let out a strangled laugh and raised his t-shirt a few centimeters. There was something taped to his skin, right under his ribs. Something round and black.
The Nomu sample.
“It’s thanks to you. I knew the sample would only last a few days before being too old for my Quirk to work, so I practiced every time we had a break. And I managed to copy Regeneration this afternoon.”
Gods. It had been so close. If he hadn’t practiced… If he hadn’t had the sample of Nomu in the first place to practice with…!
Toki was going to kiss Tsukauchi on the mouth the next time she saw him.
“That’s good,” she managed to croak. “That’s great.”
She gave in, and hugged him very tight for a few seconds, squeezing her eyes shut and swallowing back tears. Neito hugged her back. He was still faintly shivering.
“I’m bringing you all back to the lodge,” she said firmly when she let go. “There’s only two groups left that I have to find.”
“What about the villain?” Tokage said, looking around them with nervousness.
Toki swallowed. She didn’t answer.
She didn’t know what she could say. I dealt with it seemed so callous. Why didn’t she feel any horror? Was there something wrong with her?
It would hit her later, probably. For now she didn’t have time to worry about this. She took Neito and Yanagi first, then warped at the lodge. She came back for Rin and Tokage a few seconds later.
Her initial plan had been to have Neito copy Warp-Space so he could look for the other students with him, but he seemed so exhausted after playing a deadly game of tag with Beros that she didn’t have the heart to ask him. He was also covered in blood, and in shock. No, Toki would not ask for any assistance from him.
She resumed her search.
The fire was getting closer and closer. What had been a large half-circle around the lodge had spread, enclosing the Wild Wild Pussycats’ property entirely. It wasn’t completely closed, there were places where the rocky terrain hadn’t burned and you could go through the blaze, but…. From above, it was obvious that someone had tried to cast a huge net there.
Someone had tried to make sure nobody would escape.
The Dabi of the canon story hadn’t been so cold-blooded. The Dabi of canon hadn’t cared about killing kids: but he hadn’t sought it out either. This Dabi, though, wanted the Yūei students to die. This Dabi had come here specifically to kill them, just like at the USJ.
Why? Why?! It didn’t make any fucking sense!
Suddenly Toki saw something move, walking toward the lodge. She narrowed her eyes, then gasped. It was Pony Tsunotori of class 1-B, using her floating horns to carry an unconscious Tokoyami and someone who appeared to be Midnight.
“Tsunotori!”
“Sensei!” Tsunotori’s voice wobbled a little. “You have to go to help the others!”
“What happened, where are they?”
Tsunotori pointed in one direction. With a sinking feeling, Toki realized it was where Awase’s group had come from and had seen Dabi, and where Ojiro had pointed towards when Spinner had kidnapped Ragdoll. The place where the villains were all headed, apparently.
“Our group was fighting with a girl armed with a knife,” Tsunotori stated, her accent thickening the words even more than usual. “Midnight-sensei’s group came to help us, and then we were attacked by Tsukuyomi who had lost control of his Quirk. Midnight-sensei put him to sleep, but in the chaos, we were attacked again. A man in a mask! He freed out opponent, who stabbed Midnight-sensei… and then he took someone! Vlad-sensei and the others chased after him, but I was tasked with bringing the injured to the lodge!”
Toki’s stomach dropped to the floor. She grabbed Tsunotori by the shoulders.
“Who? Who did they take?”
“Monoma’s friend from class 1-A, sensei! Hitoshi Shinsō!”
No.
No, it couldn’t be. Toki had briefly considered it when she had heard about the attack, because it was the worst possible scenario, but she hadn’t really believed-
Oh, gods, Hitoshi.
She tersely ordered Tsunotori to grab her arm and put her hands on the shoulders of the unconscious Tokoyami and Midnight, before warping all three of them to the lodge. The fire was closer. She had maybe fifteen minutes before evacuation would become urgent. She taped the side of her visor, waking up her A.I. to set a timer.
Then she warped back outside.
This time she didn’t bother looking around for lost students. Vlad King’s group was the last one, and if he had the kid of Midnight’s group with him, then everyone was there. If she found them, she would find everyone.
Flashing through the air in quick successive jumps, she raced in the direction Tsunotori had pointed. The mountain. Now the flames encircled the whole area, making a giant oval with the lodge slightly off-center, and the mountain at one extremity. It was steep and rocky, with abrupt cliffs, and Toki briefly wondered if it wasn’t there that canon-Midoriya would have fought canon-Muscular.
No use wondering about it, now. Muscular was safely restrained, and Midoriya at the lodge.
It was going to be a very different fight.
She found them near the top of the mountain, on a rocky ledge. It was chaos. People were screaming, blue fire was flying in all directions. Vlad King was fighting Dabi with the help of Shiozaki. Mineta and Yaoyorozu were fighting Toga; Kendo was fighting Twice; a lizard-man who had to be Spinner and a masked man who had to be Mr. Compress were fending off a swarm of birds herded by Kouda. Spinner had the unconscious Ragdoll on his shoulder.
Hitoshi was nowhere to be seen, but Tsunotori had mentioned a man with a mask, and in canon it had been Mr. Compress who had captured Bakugo, so it meant—
Toki went straight for him.
Her arrival took them aback. She heard someone swear, another cheer, someone else let out a cry of stupefaction; she didn’t listen. She went for Mr. Compress’ throat, punching him hard enough that she heard something crunch. He went down, hacking and coughing desperately; and Toki rounded on Spinner, dodging his massive sword to reach for Ragdoll.
A hero’s reflex. Victims first, always.
Spinner tried to hold her at bay. He was good, he clearly had experience with a blade; but Toki was faster. She could teleport. And she didn’t even have to wrestle Ragdoll from his grip. A simple touch was all Toki needed to warp with the unconscious woman.
She warped in one single jump back at the lodge, put Ragdoll in Present Mic’s arms, and warped back to the fight.
She had barely been gone for three seconds. Mr. Compress was still on his knees, coughing and heaving. Not going anywhere anytime soon. Spinner rushed at her with a furious yell. She narrowed her eyes, jumping back to avoid a slash. She had to get rid of him, this sword was dangerous, and he clearly knew how to use it—
Wait. Mr. Compress was further away on the ledge, but Spinner’s back was to the cliff.
Toki grinned meanly, eyes glowing as her Quirk powered up. She dodged a katana swipe, breathing deep; and then took the gravity around her, channeled it toward her center when her cardiac muscle contracted and released it in a blast when the muscle expanded…
… with a large shockwave, Spinner was blasted off the cliffside.
Thank you, Dad, for your great advice. It was much more effective than trying to warp gravity from one specific point to release it with a punch. Toki hadn’t even needed to activate A.D.A.
This attack was like Warp-Blast V2. No pressurized air, just pure energy. More powerful with less effort on her part, and with a bigger area of effect.
The most important thing, Spinner was out. One down, Toki thought; and then remembered Beros’ voice saying the same thing, with the same cold indifference, and it almost made her freeze.
It was a mistake.
“Out of the way, Mister,” said a raspy voice.
Still coughing curled up on the ground, Mr. Compress nodded and disappeared in a shimmer of light. All was left in his place was a shiny marble of greenish glass… and then Toki had to dodge the fuck away because Dabi sent a huge blast of flames towards her.
Dabi.
It was him, that motherfucker.
Toki bared her teeth, warping and reappearing with a huge blast that Dabi parried with fire. Flames exploded in all directions.
After all the running, all the fighting, the rush of terror at Neito’s injury, the ocean of hatred and the subsequent death of Beros, the frustration and the panic, Toki would have thought that she would have exhausted all of her anger. But she was wrong.
Fury roared like a wave, and Toki snarled at him. He almost looked taken aback by the pure, undisguised loathing on her face.
She disliked the character of Dabi on a matter of principle. Feared him, hated him, especially when she had started loving Keigo and had started seeing Dabi as a threat. But Dabi had just been an idea back then, something that belonged to her past memories. Not a real person. Like how she had hated Endeavor the character, but the real-life Endeavor had taken her by surprise; like how she had loathed what All Might symbolized but had grown to like the individual behind the mask.
But this wasn’t Dabi the character. This was Dabi the person and he had already hurt her. He had attacked the USJ; had burned Hitoshi and nearly killed him. He was responsible for torching all the hospitals in Shizuoka, and it would kill so many people. Dabi the individual, Dabi the real person that Toki met today face to face for the first time, wasn’t a character. He wasn’t Touya Todoroki the a tragic mystery puzzle. He was the Ghost Arsonist, the man who had hurt Toki’s people, and she hated him.
She rushed him again, appearing above and aiming for a shockwave that would crush him against the ground; but then Toga attacked her, laughing and swinging her knife, and Toki had to backflip and dodge to avoid being stabbed in the face.
She rolled to cushion the landing, jumped on her feet, was going to warp again…
And then, with a sound like a flag snapping in the wind, a huge gate of darkness opened.
Toki had never seen Kurogiri before. She hadn’t realized he looked like that. Like a void, a mass of mist that seemed to absorb light, with no body to speak of and two phantomatic glowing eyes. The gate was so dark, you couldn’t see anything, like it wasn’t part of this actual plane of existence: and Toki, whose Quirk was about dominating space, had an instinctive reaction of revulsion.
That thing wasn’t natural. That wasn’t what warping was supposed to be. That wasn’t human.
Even the Nomu hadn’t made her bristle like this, all her instincts hissing that this thing was a threat.
She had frozen without realizing. When Kurogiri’s voice came, deep and booming, all her muscles tensed up. It should be a soothing human voice, but there was something making Toki’s hairs stand up like someone had racked chalk over a blackboard.
“Forgive my tardiness. I rescued Stain. The others, I fear, were captured.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Dabi muttered offhandedly. “The others were pieces of shit, good riddance. We have what Shigaraki wanted. Let’s go.”
“Sorry everyone!” yelled Twice, running headfirst into the gate. “Not sorry at all you’re all crazy! Byyyyye!”
Toga sauntered towards the gate. Spinner climbed the edge of the cliff with a muffled litany of swears. Mr. Compress reappeared, wheezing. And then the real world rushed back him, Toki remembered with a shock of horror she still didn’t have Hitoshi back; and she rushed forward.
Dabi blasted flames around the villains, but it didn’t matter: Toki materialized behind Mr. Compress back to warp away with him—
(She was going to reappear in the sky, twenty kilometers high, and immediately let the villain go. She had no problem with freefalling, but it scarred the shit out of people, and it was exactly what she looked for. Mr. Compress would talk. He would give her the marble, and release his Quirk. Maybe it would take time, but it was okay. Toki could make the fall last for hours with successive teleportations every time they came close to the ground. She had done it before, with villains she had to scare but couldn’t or didn’t want to harm. They always folded. At some point, when you reached terminal velocity, the only thing in command was the animal part of your brain screaming for survival.)
— and Toga’s blade sank deep in her belly.
It felt like being punched hard, all her breath leaving her in a whoosh; but it also felt like ice, so cold it burned, pain like a brand shoved inside her guts. It felt like a hard impact, shocking the breath out of her. Something she could have shrugged off.
But there was a knife in her guts.
Oh, fuck—
Toga looked up at her, smiling with utter delight. Warm blood poured from the wound. The burning, icy pain spread in all her abdomen.
This half-second felt like an eternity.
Then Toki gasped, warping away without any coordination, in jerky instinctive movement of getting away. She appeared on the other side of the ledge, gripping hard at the cliffside to stand upright. Toga let out a noise of disappointment, looking at her empty hands. That was when Toki realized she had warped with the knife still embedded in her abdomen, right under her bellybutton.
Looking down at it made Toki’s head spin. She barely felt it with the adrenaline, and yet her legs wobbled, because oh fuck that was a knife stuck in her insides, shit, there was so much blood—
Gods, she needed to rip it out. No, she shouldn’t touch it. No, she shouldn’t even care, she should go back there, they still had Hitoshi…!
But her two seconds of shock had been enough. Dabi was already gone. So was Spinner. Mr. Compress was fading in the black gate. Toga gave a jaunty little wave, blew a kiss, and then disappeared too. The gate started to narrow, whisps of dark mist fading in the air.
No. No, no, no—
Toki desperately warped back there, trying to grab her, to pull her out, or maybe even trying to grab in, reach inside that warp gate that made every primal instinct in her brain hiss in revulsion… But it was too late. It was far too late. The gate closed, dissolving into nothingness even as Toki clawed at the black mist, stumbling to her knees hard enough to wheeze in pain; and then there was just empty air.
Nothing.
No one.
They were gone.
They were gone, and they had taken Hitoshi.
They had taken Hitoshi. They had stolen her brother. He was gone, he was KIDNAPPED, he was IN DANGER and she didn’t know where he was. There was a scream of sorrow expanding in her lungs, clawing its way out of her chest, burning in her throat; a wild yell, grief and fury and animalistic terror, because they had taken her brother.
Toki clamped her jaw shut and did not scream.
She did not scream because she didn’t have the time to break down. She was a hero. She was Quantum. Thirty-nine other students, seven pro-heroes, and one child still needed to be saved. She couldn’t break. She couldn’t falter. She was Quantum, she had a duty, she had been trained for this. She had to get up and keep looking, keep fighting.
But… But for a second, on her knees on that rocky ledge where she had been so close to saving him and yet had failed…
It felt exactly like watching Neito choke on his blood in the forest. It felt like watching All Might tear apart her home, rushing against Meteor with the intent to destroy him. Helplessness, and terror, and despair. Anything, anything but this, please, no, anything but this-
“Quantum,” Vlad King said very quietly, crouching at her side. “Don’t pull out the blade. I’m going to put pressure on the wound with my Quirk.”
Toki nodded in silence, eyes closed. She couldn’t trust her voice yet. If she opened her mouth, she was going to burst into tears.
Behind her, she heard the students regroup, skittish and hesitant. Some of them were scared, whispering in high pitched tones of terror and dread. Most of them were in shock. A few of them were quietly crying.
“They took him,” whispered Yaogorozu. “Oh, gods, they took him.”
“I can’t believe it—”
“What’s going to happen?”
“Is everyone else safe? Did they—”
“No, it can’t be, it can’t be—”
Toki kept her eyes shut. She focused on the pain, on the rage. She shouldn’t let the fear win. She shouldn’t cry in front of them.
Gods, she was so useless. She should have been faster. She should have been faster. Why had she frozen after being stabbed? It hadn’t even hurt that much, and yet she had still been shocked into immobility, for two whole seconds.
Two seconds was a fucking eternity. Two seconds was an unforgivable misstep. She hadn’t frozen for two whole seconds since she was nine! Hayasa-sensei had taught her better, and Hobo-san had made the lesson stick. She shouldn’t have frozen, at all. But she had, like an idiot, like an incompetent, and now Hitoshi was…
Hitoshi was…
“Can you bring us back to the lodge?” Vlad King asked after using his Quirk to create some sort of tight bandage of crystalized blood around her abdomen.
Toki swallowed. Her thought process felt so slow, like she was dragging her feet through thick sirup, and her chest hurt. Her throat was so tight. Her eyes burned.
Probably the smoke inhalation.
Still. It was no excuse. Her job wasn’t done. She had people to save here, and then she had to go and save Hitoshi. Find him, save him. She could do this. Toki breathed in, breathed out, and pulled herself together. It seemed to require a monumental effort.
She wasn’t going to fucking cry.
“No,” she rasped. “You’re staying here. The lodge is going to be encircled by the flames soon. I’ll bring everyone here, and then start evacuating to Yūei.”
“Not a hospital?”
“The hospitals are going to be saturated. The League released Nomu in the city as a diversion for All Might and me. Better to rely on Recovery Girl.”
The mention of Nomu set off a new flurry of panicked questions from the students. Vlad King tensed briefly, but his eyes didn’t leave Toki’s face. Whatever he found there made his voice soften.
“But you knew it was a diversion, and you came.”
Toki looked down at her hands, still covered in Neito’s blood and in her own. So much blood. All for nothing.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
“I didn’t do enough.”
Notes:
The part about the murder was the easiest to write, weirdly enough. Toki was 100% sure she would never kill and yet i love that she saw one of her kids get murdered and immediately her moral compass became the same as Meteor's x)
The villains mentionned that are NOT part of the canon story (Beros, Sidero, Rogone) comes from the movie "World Heroes Mission", so they're not OC. You can look them up x)
If you're lost with all that's going on with the teachers and the kids and who fought who in that chapter, here is a quick recap !
Class 1-A:
1) Aoyama, Asui, Sato and Shoji were with Present Mic (and Mandalay's group, who fought Muscular). They fought Magne, who Toki didn't reconize and mistook for a guy, and they helped Mandalay's group to fight Muscular. Toki ended both fights.
2) Tokoyami, Ojiro, Hagakure and Jirou were with Ragdoll. They were attacked by Spinner and Moonfish. Moonfish attacked Ragdoll, Dark Shadow went crazy and went for Moonfish, and Spinner used that opportunity to kidnapp the injured Ragdoll.
3) Midoriya, Todoroki, Iida and Kirishima were with Pixie-Bob, and fought Stain. Yes, basically it's the Hosu fight from canon, except with Pixie-Bob in the role of Native and Kirishima as a human shield x)
4) Ashido, Sero, Uraraka and Kaminari didn't have a teacher with them. They fought Sidero (character from the movie "World Hero Mission") and won without needing Toki's help.
5) Yaogorozu, Mineta, Kouda and Shinso were with Midnight. They found Tokoyami still hostage of his own Quirk, and Midnight put him to sleep. Then they happened upon Vlad King's group who was fighting Toga, and helped take her down. Mr. Compress attacked them from behind: he freed Toga, who stabbed Midnight, and kidnapped Shinso. Midnight and the unconscious Tokoyami were brought back to the lodge by Tsunotori from Vlad King's group: the rest of the students chased Mr. Compress all the way to the villain's rendez-vous point.
Class 1-B :
1) Shoda, Tsuburaba, Kamakiri, and Kuroiro were with Mandalay (and with Present Mic's group). They fought Muscular. Shoda was injured and unconscious when Toki found them. Toki ended their fight by knocking out Muscular.
2) Tetsutetsu, Komori, Fukidashi and Honenuki were with Tiger and fought Mustard. They took him down almost immediatly thanks to Honenuki's Quirk but Mustard had the time to shoot Tiger.
3) Awase, Kaibara, Shishida, and Bondo didn't have a teacher with them. They hid and didn't fight, but they saw Dabi set fire to the forest with Twice.
4) Monoma, Tokage, Yanagi and Rin didn't have a teacher with them. They fought Beros (character from the movie "Wold Hero Mission"). Monoma was nearly killed, and only survived because he had a sample of Nomu skin which allowed him to copy Regeneration. Beros was killed by Toki, who thought Monoma was dead.
5) Tsunotori, Shiozaki, Kodai and Kendo were with Vlad King. They fought Toga and were at a stalemate until the arrival of Midnight's group, who helped defeat Toga. They were then attacked by Mr. Compress. Tsunotori separated from the group to bring back the injured (Midnight and Tokoyami) to the lodge, while the rest of the students chased Toga and Compress all the way to the villains' rendez-vous point.
Here are some memes for the chapter! Thanks Kirumi =)
[LINK]
[LINK]
[LINK]
[LINK]
Here is a reminder that this fic has a Discord server !
Next chapter will either be what happens next (the cooldown), or a chapter of House of wisdom from Dabi's POv, with a character study and a lot of insanity. Which one do you want ? =)
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/image010.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/image110.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/image210.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/sans_t10.jpg){kind=link}
Chapter 54: Turmoil and preparations
Summary:
Time to deal with the emotions, regroup, plan, and move on to the next step.
If only fate would stop thowing tragedies at Toki for like, two entire minutes, that would be great.
Notes:
Guys i am floored by how much you liked the previous chap, THANK YOU SO MUCH !
It's the Kamino arc, one of the most important arc of the whole story, so i'm under extra-pressure to NOT fuck this up. It's great to see that it's working and you like the story !!!
Also i'm hurrying to post before my internet is cut again. Hopefully i manage to fix my wifi this week-end.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
TURMOIL AND PREPARATIONS
Everyone at the summer camp was evacuated. The police were called. An alert was given. In another world, the kidnapping of hero students would have been front-page news. Here, with Nomu attacks and hospitals on fire, it was shuffled somewhere in the middle of the pile of emergencies. Toki supposed she should be grateful it wasn’t the bottom of the list.
Recovery Girl treated the injured students. Ragdoll and Midnight were sent to urgent care, and Tiger straight to surgery. So was Toki, actually. Being stabbed wasn’t a small thing. Especially since she hadn’t exactly rested after being injured! She had tried to limit her movements, but she had still warped from the mountains to Yūei seventeen times to evacuate everyone including students, heroes, and the captured villains. Thanks to Vlad King’s tight tourniquet of crystalized blood, she hadn’t bled out, but the internal damage was serious.
It was a hole in her gut, after all.
It wasn’t fatal, but she was looking towards a minor infection at best, and a lot of antibiotics to avoid sepsis. A big scar, too, with plenty of stiches. When she woke up after the anesthesia, the doctor told her that she had been very lucky that the knife had only speared her intestines. One inch lower and she could have said goodbye to any hope of future children.
“How long did I sleep?” she said instead of thinking about it. “I need to get back.”
The doctor looked unphased.
“Only six hours, ma’am. You woke up from general anesthesia pretty quickly, but your body needs rest. And even now that you’re awake, you still need to give yourself time to heal. Your abdominal muscles were cut through, and your intestines are just stitched up. You’re in no condition to resume active duty.”
“And if Recovery Girl works her magic?”
The doctor muttered something that sounded like bullshit and workaholic, but since he allowed Toki to be discharged, she decided to let it slide.
“You’re still forbidden to do any hero work until tomorrow, even if Recovery Girl patches you up!” he warned her.
“What, not even light duty?”
“Not even that. Go home. Sleep. Do not exert yourself. That’s an order. My recommendations will be sent to your agency anyway.”
Gods, doctors were so uncooperative.
Whatever. Toki was out of the hospital bed and that was all that mattered. Her only clothes were her bloody hero costume, and a gym uniform from Yūei that Recovery Girl had the forethought to pack in a bag when Toki had been sent in surgery. Toki changed in the uniform with an odd sense of nostalgia. Gods, her hero costume looked like she had been murdered in it. Between her blood all over the belly and thighs, and Neito’s blood everywhere else… It was probably completely unsalvageable.
She felt strangely numb about it.
When she left the hospital, she was almost shocked to see the night sky. It felt like it had been forever since she had watched the sun set over Fukuoka. But it was barely six in the morning.
And yet, there was no rest for the wicked.
Toki had a job to do.
First, she texted Tsukauchi to have an update on the case. Before being carted to the hospital, Toki had managed to tell him that Hitoshi had a panic button made by Melissa Shield that could help locate him. The alarm pinpointed his location at the moment the button was activated, but not after, so it couldn’t be used as a tracking device. But as soon as Hitoshi could reset the panic button, then reactivate it again… Then they would have his location. The alert would be sent to Toki’s visor and phone, but also to Melissa’s tablet. It would allow the heroes to find Hitoshi pretty much as soon as Mr. Compress lets him out of his marble!
But of course, it couldn’t be this simple.
Tsukauchi texted her back to say that the panic button had been found one hour ago, cleanly broken in two, in the ashes of the lodge. The League had taken his panic button from Hitoshi, and then Kurogiri had probably opened a gate to toss it back at the summer camp like a taunt.
That was their best lead gone up in smoke.
Fuck.
So Toki had to rely on good old-fashioned investigation, then.
She stayed in the hospital’s lobby for a while. The reason was purely practical. She needed to charge her phone. And no, it couldn’t wait. It was still early and the sky dark, but she had so many things to check, so many loose ends to tie up.
She called Keigo to make sure everything was okay. He couldn’t be reached, too busy putting out fires all across the prefecture, but Kameko was at the Icarus Agency and assured her that everyone was safe and sound. The sidekicks didn’t even have a scratch. Kitakyūshū had been a crushing defeat for the League of Villains. Their Nomu hadn’t been able to do anything. Well, except keeping Icarus busy. And even then, it hadn’t stopped Toki from going after the Yūei students.
The Nomu attacks in Musutafu hadn’t done much damage either. There were two civilians dead, five injured, and a few heroes who had been a little banged up, but All Might had showed up and pulverized those monsters fast enough to save the city. The main disaster was that one wayward Nomu had torn the wall of a prison, and the prisoners had used the opportunity to riot. Twelve of them had escaped: only five had been recaptured.
But well, it could have been worse.
Most of the damage was in Shizuoka. Five hospitals had been targeted. The big central hospital and four private clinics. Three of them were mostly geared towards people who suffered mental breakdowns, people who recovered from addiction, people who couldn’t live unassisted. The social networks were up in arms about the fact that the Ghost Arsonist targeted the mentally ill.
In Japan, where mental illness was a social taboo and ableism was pretty normal, it enflamed the debates. Some said that the Ghost Arsonist was getting rid of people he thought weak, some said he was doing the world a favor, some said that those people shouldn’t have been draining resources the first place, some other said that it was proof that mental illness was a danger, some that it was proof that on the contrary mentally ill people were terribly vulnerable because easily targeted.
Did it change anything? Dozens of people were dead. A few had perished in the flames, but most had died of smoke inhalation. All that blood was on Dabi’s hands, but he probably didn’t care. He surely enjoyed the media coverage. Right now, he is even more famous than the League. All thanks to a few fires.
Toki wondered in which hospital Rei had been interned. She wondered if she was dead.
She couldn’t find it in herself to care.
Toki ended her conversation with Kameko and hung up, her duty done. She had given Kameko a concise report of the fight at the summer camp so she could forward it to her superiors at the HPSC, but she knew that for once, Quantum’s role as their Yūei plant wasn’t going to be their priority. The focus was on the Nomu attacks and the Shizuoka’s fires.
It was only after ending the call that Toki realized that she hadn’t told Kameko about Beros, about her death. It had just slipped her mind. It should weigh on her, shouldn’t it? Toki had murdered someone. So why did she only feel cold? Why did she only feel numb?
Toki didn’t have the luxury to argue self-defense or panic. She had been afraid, but she had been clear-headed, lucid, and rational. She had only been angry. She had only been desperate.
She had been ruthless. Not cruel, not monstruous. Just uncaring. Cold-blooded. Killing Beros hadn’t felt righteous or pleasant. It hadn’t made her feel better. It had simply been the easiest way to deal with the problem, and nothing else had mattered.
Was it how Meteor felt when he killed people? No regrets, no shame, just a cold pit of indifference?
Toki used to think it made him monstruous. What did it say about her? She hadn’t been raised in violence like he had. She was a hero, she had been taught to value all lives, to save people. And yet, killing had come to her so easily. A frantic fight, a rush of grief and despair, and all her moral considerations had flown out of the window, until all that was left was fury.
It was a disquieting feeling, something that made her uneasy, something she couldn’t quite name. Her fingers itched for a pen and her poesy notebook, for the catharsis of writing, of sharing with someone this eerie unease.
But she had no one to share it with. She didn’t even have her notebook. All she had was herself, her conscience, her knowledge that her hands were soiled with blood, and the cold absence of remorse.
War is a slippery slope.
What would you do?
become
What will you do
become
My god, what have you done?
Toki wanted to feel remorse. She wanted to feel anguish. She wanted to whine about herself and feel bad and lament, because that’s what a good person was supposed to do, was supposed to feel. The guilt made the crime excusable. The guilt meant that it had been a mistake; the guilt meant that this single action didn’t define you, that it wasn’t the kind of person you were.
What did it say about Toki, that she only felt numb shock?
She tried to think about Beros. Green eyes, green hair, long cloak. A face too round and eyes too large to be Asian. A European or an American, maybe. A calm stare, but expressive eyes, attentive and dispassionate. Beros had been a person. Maybe she had a mother, or a father, or siblings, or friends. Maybe she would be missed. She hadn’t deserved to die. Nobody deserved to die, especially like that.
And yet when Toki thought about her, all she felt was numbness. Maybe even some grim satisfaction.
Beros had tried to kill Neito. She would have killed him if he hadn’t copied Regeneration. Toki had honestly believed that Neito was dead, and—
Beros’ life had seemed such an insignificant price to pay, to satisfy her rage and dampen her despair.
Maybe Toki shouldn’t be so surprised at her lack of remorse. She always had this vicious spark in her. Ruthlessness, selfishness. When her people were hurt, suddenly Toki had no problem living with double standards. It was fine for All Might to kick and punch all the criminals he wanted, but the fact that he had harmed Meteor had made Toki hate him for more than a decade. In the same vein, Toki had started investigating Dabi with the clear intent to ruin him, even before the Ghost Arsonist was charged with any murder, all because Dabi could possibly hurt Keigo one day.
Then of course Dabi had actually harmed one of her people, as soon as the USJ. He had burned Hitoshi. And yesterday, he had been part of the team to steal him, to hurt him again. Toki tried to imagine if she could kill him. She quickly realized she wasn’t sure she wanted to answer that.
It had been nearly eight hours since Hitoshi had been kidnapped.
The sun was rising. Her phone was charged. Toki took a deep breath and left the hospital. She warped to Yūei, holding herself gingerly to avoid putting any strain on her stab wound, and reappeared on the roof.
She didn’t go to see Recovery Girl right way. She was healed, she was fine. She had taken her antibiotics. She had checked on her husband and her agency. She was mission ready.
She had no more excuses to wait.
Toki huddled against a wall to look at the dawn breaking, and then she called Mihoko Shinsō.
It was very early in the morning, but Mihoko picked up on the second ring. She probably hadn’t been sleeping. Toki wondered when the police had called. She wondered how they had told her. How can you announce something like this?
“Toki.” Mihoko’s voice was trembling. “I’ve heard you were in surgery, but I couldn’t ask anyone to tell me more. Are you okay?”
For a second Toki was silent, her throat tight, her head empty. Her eyes stung.
“I’m fine. I just got out. I’m going to ask to join the rescue mission.” There was a second of silence. Toki swallowed. “I’m sorry. I was… I was too slow. I couldn’t protect him. But I’m going to fix it, Mihoko, I promise. I’ll bring him back.”
Mihoko let out a long, unsteady breath. “I know. I know you will. If it were anyone else… but it’s you. I trust you.”
Toki tried to smile. It came out more like a grimace. The unflappable, confident mask of Quantum was slipping between her fingers.
“How are you hanging on?”
“Not very well,” Mihoko admitted ruefully. “The police called around one in the morning. I thought it was about Hajime at first…”
“Shit!” Toki swore. She had forgotten that Mihoko’s husband was a surgeon. The Ghost Arsonist had targeted Shizuoka’s hospitals, not Musutafu’s, but… “Is he okay?!”
“He’s fine,” Mihoko reassured her, “He didn’t even see any action. Anyway, the police called and— they said I should come to the station to be briefed. They’ll send a car in the morning. I can’t sleep.” There was a short, wet laugh. “I just realized I’ll have to ask Sachiko to babysit Hinawa.”
Toki swore quietly. Mihoko was right. Attracting any attention to Hinawa was a bad idea, and walking in a police station with a baby that didn’t look like her, but instead looked like two pro-heroes, was a good way to attract attention. Especially if there were journalists waiting for a good soundbite like fucking leeches.
Shit, journalists. Media coverage. Rumors, speculation. In canon the press had immediately inferred that Bakugo would be recruited by the League because he was violent, even if he had a great Quirk and was the kind of people everyone fawned over; what would it be when journalists found out about Hitoshi who had a villain’s Quirk? Shit, think, Toki, think…
“You should log into the Quirk registry and change the name of your Quirk,” she said.
“What?”
“Change the name of your Quirk,” Toki repeated. “And Hitoshi’s, too. Something like Somnambulance? It will keep the charade of Hitoshi’s limitations. But most importantly, if some reporter has the idea to look into Hitoshi to write about him… He shouldn’t be able to place the world Brainwashing in his profiling. It would— It would look bad.”
“Oh. Yes, I… I’ll do that. Good idea, Toki. Thank you.”
There was another moment of silence. Toki wondered if the noise had woken up Hinawa. Then she tried to stop wondering, because if she let herself think about her daughter… Then the fist around her throat would tighten, and maybe she wouldn’t be able to hold back tears, this time.
Toki wanted to hold her daughter in her arms. She wanted to hug her and hear her babble cheerfully, she wanted to kiss her little head full of soft blond hair, she wanted to inhale the reassuring smell of warm skin and baby soap. She wanted to be sure Hinawa was safe. Gods, Toki wanted to hold her in her arms so badly.
But she had no right to ask this of Mihoko. She couldn’t say I need to make sure my baby is okay when she had lost Mihoko’s baby.
She couldn’t, anyway. If Toki went to the Shinsō’s apartment, she wouldn’t be able to make herself leave in time. She would fold, she would cry. She would let herself be weak. She couldn’t be weak, not yet. Not until she got Hitoshi back.
“It’s going to be okay,” she whispered. She tried to make it sound like a promise. She didn’t know if she was successful, but at least Mihoko didn’t call her out on it. Toki let herself a few more seconds, the phone pressed against her ear, listening to Mihoko’s silence. “I have to go.”
“Alright. Be safe, Toki.”
She let out a non-committal noise and hung up. Then, with a slight wince of pain when she jolted her abdomen, she rose from her crouch, and breathed deeply.
The sun was up. Time to face the music.
oOoOoOo
Recovery Girl was not happy to see Toki this early in the morning and basically fresh out of surgery, but she still agreed to give her a kiss and then let her crash in the infirmary for twenty minutes.
Nedzu had called a meeting with all the Yūei teachers at eight. Toki would be there.
In the meantime, Toki took a shower to get rid of the hospital smell, then took off her ill-fitting gym clothes and changed into the civilian outfit she had put in her locker at the beginning of the term. And to think she had brought that change of clothes to screw with people’s head by planting clues about Hoshizora’s identity! It seemed so childish, thinking back about it.
She put on her civilian clothes but let the distinctive crown-like hair-clips in her bags. Instead of tying her hair into buns, she pulled it into a simple ponytail. It made her look like her father, she realized when looking at her reflection. Even with the golden-colored contacts, the resemblance was striking. She wondered if anyone would notice.
She didn’t really care. All of her little secrets about her pasts seemed so trivial compared to Hitoshi’s disappearance.
The media wasn’t hounding Yūei about their kidnapped student, yet, but it would come soon. For now, most of the focus was on the damage done to Shizuoka’s hospitals, or the terror of the Nomu attacks in Musutafu and Kitakyūshū. Yūei was famous, but the large-scale damage done to three different cities hit closer to home.
Would Yūei even need to make a press conference? Would it be required of them? Shit, would it even gather enough attention? In canon, Nedzu had used a press conference to distract the villains while the heroes gathered. Could the same stratagem be replicated here, if the public’s focus wasn’t on Yūei’s failure and a demand for explanation?
In canon, how had the League been found?
Momo had stuck a tracker to a Nomu… But wait, no it couldn’t be it. The various Nomu had been stored elsewhere, in some warehouse where AFO had evacuated the League after the attack on the bar from the heroes. And the bar had been found by the police. Toki didn’t remember the details, but it had been Tsukauchi who had found out the place and organized the operation.
Also, there hadn’t been any Nomu at the summer camp. The monsters had all been sent to Kitakyūshū and Musutafu. On one hand, it was good. It meant that the League didn’t have more monsters in stock. It also meant that nobody had stuck any tracker to a Nomu that would allow well-meaning students to try and approach the warehouse… But on the other hand, it also meant that the location of the warehouse, and even its existence, was unknown to the heroes.
Crap.
“Ah, Quantum,” Nedzu welcomed her warmly. “Come, please sit.”
Toki leveled a cold look at him. This was not the time or the place to start flinging accusations, but she knew that Nedzu knew that things would have been different if he had headed her warning. The fact that Toki didn’t want to lose time raking the rat over the coals didn’t meant she had forgotten.
Nedzu inclined his head, a silent acknowledgement. Toki glared some more, and then went to sit.
The room was fuller than Toki’s fuzzy memories of this exact meeting in canon. There were Nedzu, but also Snipe, All Might (or rather Toshinori Yagi, in his deflated form), Power Loader, Present Mic, and Vlad King. Most of the teachers did a double take at Toki’s appearance, taken aback by how different she looked out of hero costume or maybe by the absence of her usual cockiness, but nobody said anything.
“Where is Midnight?” Toki wondered, sitting between All Might and Vlad King. “Is she still at the hospital?”
“She is at the police station,” Nedzu said serenely. “Due to unfortunate circumstances, further questioning is required before she’ll be free to go.”
Toki turned a questioning look towards Vlad King, who scowled, before biting out reluctantly: “The villain she fought died. Her responsibility is questioned.”
Toki felt her blood freeze. She didn’t allow herself to react, smoothing down her face in a polite expression. With any luck, people would believe she was trying to hide shock and judgement, instead of guilt and fear.
“I didn’t get a full briefing of what happened after the evacuation,” she said instead. “I know how most of the fights went down, but afterward… I was sent to surgery immediately. Was anyone hurt? Were the villains arrested?”
“A few students were hurt, but nothing bad,” All Might assured her. “Young Shoda was the worst off with a concussion. Young Jirou had a broken leg. But otherwise, everyone was fine. Ragdoll will make a full recovery. Tiger is still unconscious, but he’s out of woods. Nobody died. It is, to be honest, almost a miracle— and it’s thanks to you, Quantum. If you hadn’t been there to rescue them from the villains, and then from the fire…”
“Five villains were captured,” Nedzu added. “Muscular, Magne, Moonfish, Mustard, and Sidero. Stain was unfortunately rescued by their warper. Four other villains escaped, including the Ghost Arsonist, and managed to kidnap Shinsō-kun with them.”
Toki didn’t let herself flinch.
“What about the dead villain?” she said instead.
“There are actually two dead villains,” Nedzu smiled.
Toki’s heart dropped to the floor. Gods, two, that meant they knew, they had to know, they had to realize. There had been Midnight’s opponent but there had also been Toki’s, and she had killed someone—
“That guy’s death wasn’t Kayama’s fault!” Present Mic burst out.
All Might coughed, and then turned to Toki to explain:
“Midnight’s group encountered a villain, Rogone. Midnight knocked him out with her Quirk. Afterwards, his body was found… partially burned. The police believe that he was unconscious when the fire reached him, thus making his death Midnight’s responsibility.”
“It was probably smoke inhalation in addition to Somnambulism,” Present Mic insisted mulishly. “Kayama-senpai is a pro, she wouldn’t overdo it.”
Toki nodded, mostly to placate him, and then she kept her voice calm and vaguely unconcerned as she asked the question that made her stomach roll.
“And the second villain?”
This time, it was Nedzu who answered.
“Beros. She was killed by one of her comrades in arms, it seems. Moonfish was found with, ah, part of her remains.”
For a second, Toki was pretty sure she had misheard.
“… what?”
The teachers suddenly seemed uncomfortable. Only Nedzu, all chirpy and dreadful, laughed like it was a good joke.
“Oh, yes! You briefly fought her, I believe. Monoma attested that she shot him and nearly killed him before your intervention. You warped with her further in the forest, away from the fight, before returning to the students. But you didn’t knock her unconscious or tie her up, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t.”
It wasn’t even a lie, which was bitterly ironic. Toki hadn’t needed to restrain Beros, because Beros had been dead when Toki had left her. And now, everyone thought that another villain had killed her? What?! It didn’t make any sense!
“What happened? Did she burn in the fire, or—?”
“Her body burned,” Nedzu admitted. “But she was dead before that! You may not know this, but Moonfish appears to indulge in acts of cannibalism. When he was arrested, he was, how can I say it? Well, he was happily munching on an arm. Since the rest of Beros’ body was burned by the fire, it was only thanks to that arm and more specifically that hand that the police was able to identify her remains.”
Toki gaped. She was uncredulous. Disbelieving. She wanted to laugh or maybe just sit down in a corner and wait for the room to stop spinning. It was… It was…
It was so fucking convenient and so colossally unfair.
She was going to be allowed to get away with it? Just like that? It was so ridiculous. Some fucking miracle of circumstances allowed someone else to take the fall, in a way that was unquestionable. Toki didn’t even have to do anything. And now she was going to get away scot-free?
Was there any fucking justice?
It didn’t matter that Beros had been a villain, or that Toki still felt no guilt about her act. What mattered was that it was wrong. She was ashamed of what she had done, as she should be; but shame wasn’t enough. People should be held accountable when they harm others. Meteor hadn’t felt anything when he killed innocent people, but it had horrified Toki, and she had wanted him to stop, to pay, to answer for it. Even if she loved him, she knew killing was evil.
It was some sort of universal rule. Death = Bad.
Toki had killed someone. Not in self-defense, but in anger, in despair, in violence. She had killed someone. This was a fact. It should matter. Beros had been a person and Toki had murdered her. The reasons, the emotions, the lack of remorse, the justifications, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the facts, and the facts were that she had done something wrong, something that should have consequences.
She opened her mouth to talk. And then she thought about Midnight being held for questioning at the police station. She thought about the rescue, about how an investigation would force her to sit out the mission.
So she stayed quiet.
“None of the villains from the League were very forthcoming,” Nedzu continued cheerfully. “Fortunately, the villain Sidero was happy to sing against a reduced sentence. Less fortunately, he was only a recent addition to their group.” That was apparently news to everyone here because they all leaned forwards, attentive.
“What do you mean?” Power Loader asked sharply.
Nedzu steeped his paws. His beady eyes gleamed under the light.
“Sidero, Beros and Rogone are from Otheron, in Europe. They were all members of a cult named Humarise, and recently freed from jail, where they purged their sentences for assisting their cult leader in the creation of chemical weapons. It appears that Beros was their leader. She convinced both her friends to join her on a revenge mission against the hero who stopped their operation and imprisoned their cult leader.”
Toki blinked, clues falling into places as she remembered what Tokage had said. Beros had been in Japan for revenge against—
“Endeavor?” she blurted out.
“Indeed!” Nedzu seemed pleased by her contribution. “Endeavor shut down Humarise a few years ago, hence those three villains’ desire for revenge. An info broker put them in touch with the League. The members of Humarise would help their operation to drawn Endeavor’s attention and would fight him when Endeavor faced the League in battle.”
“Endeavor made arrests in Europe?” All Might frowned. “I didn’t know that.”
Nedzu’s eyes jumped briefly to Toki. His serene smile didn’t waver.
“It is recent. Endeavor acquired a specialized consultant a few years ago, and it seems that his statistics improved drastically as a result.”
Goddamn fucking Meteor, once again.
Had Humarise been a canon-enemy? Toki had no idea. The name didn’t ring any bell. Maybe they had been introduced after the Dabi reveal and the end of the Jakku arc. Her past memories stopped at that point. Oh, whatever. It didn’t really matter. Of the three Humarise members, two were dead and the last one had been arrested. Their quest for vengeance had been cut short.
“As things stand, the whereabouts of the escaped villains and our missing student is unknown,” Nedzu continued. “Shinsō-kun wore a panic button, but the League apparently found out and removed it. All we can do is hope the police locate them quickly.”
“What a disaster,” Vlad King muttered.
Around the table, faces were grave and somber. More than one person nodded grimly.
“Indeed.” Nedzu’s smile slipped into a frown. “We feared the revitalization of villains, but our understanding of their plans was naïve. They had already started their war to destroy hero society.”
“Even if we could have predicted it, could we have defended against it?” Present Mic wondered, his voice bitter. “Everything happened so quickly. Organized crime had been rarer since the rise of All Might. We don’t have prepared strategies to fall back on when something like this happens.”
All Might, hunched over his desk, seemed to sag in discouragement. He had his face in his hands and Toki could almost see the dark cloud of depression hovering above him.
“I apologize from the bottom of my heart,” the Symbol of Peace whispered. “When all our students were fighting for their lives, I was relaxing at home. I am so ashamed.”
Toki let everyone ten seconds to wallow in misery. But since nobody had any pertinent news about the attack to add, it was time to get back on track.
“We need to get Shinsō back.”
It was stating the obvious, but it helped remind everyone of their current priority. Several people nodded. Snipe slapped a hand on the table:
“Yes, we do. We have a duty to our students, but it also goes beyond it. Shinsō is being used to strike a blow against the school, and from there, against the whole hero society. By kidnapping a hero student right under our nose, those villains have stolen the trust people have in us as an institution.”
“It gets worse,” Nedzu said somberly. “Shinsō-kun was specifically targeted, either for his Quirk, or because of Shigaraki’s need for revenge. If it’s the latter, then we may already be too late. But if it’s the former, then it means the League may have plans for him. While Shinsō-kun kept his Quirk under wraps during the Sport Festival, he clearly showed Shigaraki that it was Brainwashing. A Quirk that may be considered extremely villainous.”
“Yeah,” Power Loader sighed. “They would want to use that and take him from us like a chess piece.”
Toki growled, a predatorial sound that she barely recognized as her voice.
“He wouldn’t.”
“Of course,” Nedzu immediately placated her.
“We still have to consider it,” Power Loader insisted. “If they turn him over to their side, it’s over for Yūei as an educational institution. A student with a villainous Quirk defecting from out school? We will lose all public trust.”
Toki turned a murderous glare towards him. The facts were technically true, but the sentiment behind them made her blood boil in outrage. As if Hitoshi could turn on them, turn on her! He wouldn’t. He would never. It was fucking outrageous that Power Loader could say that, could consider that this was a possible path and he should be worried about it, as if their worry shouldn’t whether or not they could get Hitoshi’s corpse back from the League. Who cared about Yūei's reputation?!
Whatever expression was on her face was enough to make Power Loader go a little pale, and snap his mouth shut.
Say one more fucking word, Toki inwardly seethed. Say one more fucking word and I’ll rip your heart from your throat.
There was uneasy silence. Then Present Mic cleared his throat.
“Since we’re on the topic of trust, there’s something I want to say.” His voice was low and measured. “Now we can conclusively say… that there is a traitor among us, right?”
In the room, there was a collective hitch of breath. Everyone side-eyed the others. Present Mic slammed his fist on the table:
“I’m right, aren’t I?! Only the teachers and the Pussycats knew where the summer camps would be held!”
“Stop, Mic,” Vlad King growled.
“How could I stop? Let’s clean this place thoughtfully! Hell, maybe the traitor is among us!”
“No, they’re not,” Toki snapped.
Everyone turned towards her, and for half-a-second some weird reflex pushed Toki to adopt the condescending, flamboyant attitude of Quantum the cocky hero. She didn’t quite manage it, but her voice turned sufficiently commanding that she could see Present Mic bristle at her insolence.
“The traitor is a student,” she drawled.
“How would you know?” he snapped.
This time, Toki absolutely allowed herself to smile like Quantum, sharp, wide, and arrogant, like a provocation:
“What do you think the Commission sent me here for?”
It stopped Present Mic right in his tracks. A few others gawped, too. Only All Might, who sighed with resignation, and Nedzu, whose smile didn’t waver, didn’t blink.
“By the way, Quantum,” Nedzu asked casually, “did you made any progress with your search for the traitor?”
If he hoped to make her admit ignorance, he was out of luck. Toki had drastically narrowed down her list of suspect this morning.
“I’m down to seven suspects. Four in class 1-A and three in class 1-B.”
“What?!” Vlad King and Present Mic blurted out at the same time.
“Oh?” Nedzu’s eyes gleamed greedily. “May I know who they are?”
“Of course. They’re the seven students who were next to me and conscious when I revealed that both Hitoshi Shinsō and Neito Monoma were wearing panic buttons. Those panic buttons were concealed. Hitoshi was hiding his beneath a sport’s wristband. The League didn’t find it by chance.”
“You mean…”
“Yes. One of those seven person called them after the attack and told them about it. One of those seven students is our traitor.”
oOoOoOo
The day went on.
Midnight came back to school. She was suspended from hero work until the autopsy results came back, but nobody was going to put a hero in jail over a dead villain. Toki tried to find in reassuring, when she went to the police station to make her own deposition; but it didn’t really help.
Making her deposition was nerve-wrecking. Killing Beros had been one thing, but hiding the crime was something else. If Tsukauchi asked just the right questions… Then he would sense the lie, and the charade would be over.
Fortunately, between the students’ reports and everyone else’s depositions, Toki was mostly required to fill in some blanks, and thus wasn’t interrogated in detail.
She talked about her arrival, the first fight she had seen, the different groups of students she had found one by one. When she arrived at the point where she had found Neito’s group, she didn’t allow herself to waver.
Tsukauchi asked her to recount her fight against Beros, and Toki truthfully answered that she had warped the villain away from the children and used Scalpel to cut off of her hand (she didn’t specify she had cut way more than that), before warping back to the children. No, she hadn’t knocked out Beros, or tied her up. No, she hadn’t come back to hunt down Beros. No, she didn’t know what had happened after.
Yes, she was aware that by using Scalpel on Beros she was removing her ability to use her main weapon, archery.
Yes, she had made a judgement call and may have been emotional after seeing Beros fatally injure a student not ten second before. Yes, she knew that Scalpel was a very un-heroic attack.
Yes, the HPSC knew Toki had this attack in her repertoire. No, she had nothing else to say.
“Alright,” Tsukauchi said, looking exhausted. “Then let’s move on…”
And that was it.
If Beros had been alive, then maybe Toki would have been interrogated more. Cutting off a body part was no small thing. It was unheroic. There was a reason Toki didn’t use that move against her opponents.
But Beros wasn’t alive to complain, and nobody cared about excessive force when the perpetrator was a hero in good standing. Quantum had saved thirty-nine students; who cared if she had roughed up a villain while stopping them from actively murdering a child?
Nobody cared about the wrongs of heroes, as a general rule. And nobody cared about saving the villains, either.
It was the problem. It was the thing, the flaw, the issue. Who should have their pain empathized with and who should not, who deserved to be protected and who did not, who could be redeemed and who could not… It wasn’t judged on whether people were good or bad or whether or not they wanted that salvation. Shigaraki, Twice, Toga were all violent criminals but, in canon, they had been shown as capable of good. Twice wanted to protect his friends. Toga was empathetic and capable of tending to people’s feelings. Shigaraki called out heroes on their flaw multiple times and was probably the only character trying in his own way to reform hero society (and he was really the only canon character taking an active look at even how one would go about reforming hero society).
So why nobody was interested in saving them? Why did nobody care about Beros’ death, either?
It was simple. Who deserved to be saved was just something society chose based on its unfair standards. That was why canon-Endeavor had been offered a chance at redemption before Shigaraki, Twice, Dabi or Toga. Hell, in canon and even in this world, Endeavor had never even been punished! He had never been held accountable for his actions. Not because his actions were better or worse than the villains’, but because he has power and status in society.
That was it. That was the crux of the matter. That was why nobody looked too hard at the fact that Toki had been the last person to see Beros alive, or the fact that she had mutilated her opponent; that was why it hadn’t even crossed Tsukauchi’s mind to ask about it. That was why, in his point of view, the question didn’t have to be raised.
Because like everyone else, Tsukauchi thought that Beros didn’t deserve to be saved in the first place.
Because people got saved based upon whether they fit the mold of society or not. It was that simple. Toki fit in. Toki was Quantum, she was a hero, she was lucky, she had money, she had a good Quirk. It was enough to protect her. Beros was a villain, and that was enough to condemn her.
The rejects would never be offered the same opportunities or chance at rehabilitations that the heroes got. It had absolutely nothing to do with whether they were actually redeemable, but whether they were useful.
The villains were pushed down because they didn’t fit in. It was as simple as that. They didn’t have to be monsters. Sometimes they were just unlucky. Sometimes they were just poor and desperate. Sometimes, they were just lashing out. But they didn’t fit in, and they were punished for it.
Twice had lacked any job opportunities and suffered from some form of mental illness. Toga had been mistreated and had a mental breakdown. Mr. Compress had styled himself as some sort of Robin Hood vigilante. Shigaraki had been an abused child groomed by a monster. Spinner had been ostracized because of his appearance. Even Dabi had been a victim, once upon a time. But none of these things mattered. These people weren’t useful to society, so they didn’t deserve to be saved.
Sometimes being useful was what made all the difference. Hawks had been useful, so the HPSC had picked him up from the gutter. Meteor had been useful, so Endeavor had gotten him out of Tartarus.
It had nothing to do with who they were or what they wanted; only with how they could be exploited.
Keigo and Meteor were fine. They had gotten lucky. But how many hadn’t? How many people were left behind, because they didn’t matter, because they had no use, because it was a waste of time to extend a hand in help?
That was why nobody wondered if Beros could have been saved, if Quantum could have done more, if someone had fucked up somewhere and if the death could have been avoided. Nobody cared about Quantum’s blunders. Especially in that kind of situation, where mistakes were so easily excusable, where everyone had been fighting for their lives, where an excess of brutality may have saved the children’s lives.
Nobody cared about Beros, either. She was dead, and it was only inconvenient because that made one less witness. But no one was really interested in what had happened to a dead villain.
And so, Tsukauchi didn’t ask any more question. He didn’t poke or prod in any way. Why would he? The story seemed straightforward enough. A villain’s death didn’t need to gather much curiosity anyway. Toki’s alibi held up and didn’t even look fabricated. Moonfish was a serial murderer, with a Quirk that could slice people like carpaccio. He had been found eating Beros’ remains, and his incoherent deposition claiming that he had cut the body into more manageable pieces was taken as a proof that he had actually killed her. The case was closed.
It had taken less than three minutes.
Tsukauchi oriented his questions towards what had happened next, and Toki readily recounted the rest of the night. The fight, the hunt for the villains towards the mountains, the battle, how she had been stabbed, how she had failed to retrieve Hitoshi. She described all the villains with as many details as she could. She even mentioned the feeling of wrongness that Kurogiri radiated.
Tsukauchi thanked her, and that was it. They were done. Toki was good to go.
She was getting away with it.
She was still reeling. She couldn’t believe it. The secret felt like a stone in her stomach. Toki had killed someone. She hadn’t even done it for some imaginary greater good, or on orders, or by accident, or in self-defense. She had killed someone in anger, in despair, in terror, because she could and because it had been easy.
Maybe the murder could be blamed on the high emotions of the moment. But keeping the secret afterward was different. At any point Toki could have opened her mouth and told the truth. She hadn’t. Because it would have been inconvenient.
And yet, even if she had talked, she knew she would have still gotten away with it.
Maybe it was what left the most bitter aftertaste in her mouth. Toki knew that if she had confessed, she would have still walked out. She would have been benched for a while, maybe sanctioned: but so many people would have fallen ass over kettle in their haste to find her convenient excuses. The HPSC would have supported her. The police would have taken her side and made sure the story didn’t reach the public; but even if it had, public opinion would have probably sided with her. Heroes would have risen in her defense. In the end, Toki knew she would have just gotten away with a slap on the wrist.
Because Quantum was useful, valuable, and because Beros wasn’t.
Toki left the interrogation room feeling dirty. But the world kept on spinning. There was a job to do. People to rescue. An operation to plan. So Toki mustered an air of serenity she didn’t feel and walked out of the police station with her head held high.
Appearances must be kept.
It was still early in the day, so Toki went back to Yūei. She couldn’t muster the will to go back to Fukuoka. She wanted to hide in the school for a little while, as if it could make the rescue operation come faster. She tried to distract herself by puzzling over the files of the seven students that she suspected of being the traitor, but it didn’t really help.
She didn’t know what to think. She felt like she was walking in a daze. How could the world be exactly the same as yesterday? Hitoshi was gone, kidnapped, in danger. Toki had blood on her hands. Everything was wrong. The universe should be darker, dripping with red.
Gods, she wished Keigo was there. He would listen. He would understand.
She wished Meteor was there. He would understand better.
But Toki was on her own. So she did what she always did in a crisis; she dived into work.
She talked with Nedzu about his plans for the dorms. She browsed through the files of her seven suspects. Of class 1-B, the possible traitors were Tsuburaba, Kamakiri, and Kuroiro. Shoda had been there, too, but unconscious, so Toki had excluded him from her list of suspects. Of class 1-A, the four possible traitors were Aoyama, Asui, Sato, and Shoji.
Odds were that the spy came from class 1-A. They had been targeted specifically once, already. Toki couldn’t exclude the possibility of a class 1-B traitor, but her focus was mostly on class 1-A. It meant that it was probably one of those four.
If they were smart, they had deleted anything incriminating from their phones. Toki wouldn’t find proof so easily. She needed clues, first. Context and motives. Shoji and Asui may suffer from discrimination being mutant-types. Satō was discreet, but maybe it was cultivated facade as spy. Aoyama came from a wealthy family, so maybe his parents were corrupt. She needed to know more.
After being evacuated, the students had gone back to their family, except for the ones requiring hospitalization. Toki asked Nedzu if anything notable had been caught by the security cameras when the parents had showed up to pick up their children.
They ended up watching the security tape together in his office. It was a bust. There was nothing anormal, except…
“Wait, why was Neito picked up by the police?” Toki frowned.
Nedzu paused the video. She had the unpleasant impression that she had once again taken him by surprise.
“Ah.” For a second, the rat-bear-mouse-badger seemed honestly taken aback. “Yes, you haven’t been told. Monoma’s mother was hospitalized.”
“Yes, I knew that. Still…”
“Quantum,” Nedzu said flatly. “She was hospitalized in Shizuoka.”
It took her a second to understand, and then Toki felt all the blood leave her face.
“Gods. She’s…?”
“She was one of the victims of the Ghost Arsonist,” Nedzu confirmed, voice grave and somber. “On camera, Monoma-kun here is shown leaving with the police because they took him to a separate room to give him the news. He was allowed to go back home, afterwards, and declined my offer of having a teacher accompany him.”
Shit. Fuck. Neito. Toki let her face fall into her hands, squeezing her eyes shut. Gods, it was so unfair, all of it. Mihoko may have lost her son, Neito had lost his mom…
It felt so unreal. A few days ago, on the beach, Toki had thought to herself that maybe she should pay Neito’s mother a visit, to try and see how unwell she was, if anything more could be done, if she knew her son was living on his own and was desperately lonely. Now, Toki would never have that chance. Akari Monoma was dead, and Dabi had killed her.
Fucking Dabi. Toki hated him so fucking much. Every time he got close to her loved ones, he hurt them. Hitoshi, now Neito…!
Gods. Neito. All alone in his tiny, dirty, empty appartement. Toki felt her heart rip in two like a piece of paper. She needed to go check on him. She needed to help, she needed to do something. She should check on his apartment, ask if he needed help to deal with it, to organize the funeral or contact some extended family…
Fuck, he was fifteen, he was a minor. He had no other relatives. What was going to happen to him now? Could he even be allowed to stay at Yuei?
“Do you know who will have custody of him?”
“As an orphan, Monoma-kun automatically became a ward of the State,” Nedzu replied smoothly. “For now, in the confusion following those attacks, I expect nobody will try to force him to move away. But if no relatives are found, social services will place him in a foster home. His place at Yūei is still guaranteed, of course, but if his new family decides that the commute is too long or the school too expensive, they may withdraw him. It happened to other students in the past.”
Neito was alone. He was alone, and miserable. It had been almost twelve hours since Hitoshi had been kidnapped. Nine hours since a cop had sat down Neito, who had been exhausted and frightened and still covered in blood after being nearly murdered and had told him in cold clinical terms that his mother was dead. That his mother had been killed, killed for no reason by a maniac who liked to watch things burn.
All that time, Neito had been alone. Toki hadn’t been there. She hadn’t been there for him, she had come too late for Hitoshi. She was still lagging behind.
Everything felt so, so hopeless.
She swallowed. She forced down the rising feeling of dread and hopelessness. No, she wouldn’t wallow in misery. Toki still had work to do. Quantum still had people to save. She was strong enough to carry on.
But fuck, it hurt.
“Did any other students lose relatives in the attacks?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
There was that, at least. Toki got up and started pacing. She couldn’t stand this avalanche of disasters. She needed to do something. Anything at all.
She didn’t remember how long it had taken for the police to find the League’s hideout in canon. Longer than a day, that was for sure. Maybe two, or three. Midoriya had had time to get healed, then to sneak out of the hospital, then to take a train down to Tokyo. It meant that the League had kept their prisoner for longer than 48 hours. And this prisoner had been Bakugo, rough and rude and aggressive like a rabid animal. Now the prisoner was Hitoshi, who knew how to be smooth and charming…
But what if the League gagged him? What if they didn’t try to recruit him and gave him straight away to AFO? What if AFO took his Quirk?
No matter how you looked at it, two conclusions were inevitable. The situation was disastrous, and Toki needed to take AFO out of commission as soon as humanely possible.
Which was… going to be difficult, to say the least.
And there was also the rest of the League to consider. Toga may be a teenager, but she was faster than anyone Toki had fought: faster than Hayasa-sensei, maybe even faster than Keigo. Twice, who hasn’t done much but whose Quirk could be a game-changer. Spinner, who was somehow very good with a blade now. Mr. Compress who may not be a fighter but who had dealt the most severe blow to the heroes so far. Then there was Stain, who was grievously injured but still very dangerous. Shigaraki, obviously, who was a major threat with his Decay Quirk. Dabi, that scumbag, who was currently at the top of Toki’s shit list.
And then Kurogiri, too. Not only there was something about him that was deeply unnatural and made Toki’s skin crawl, but he was also a warper, and that made him one of the most dangerous villains in this team. As long as he was free, the League could escape. He needed to be taken down in priority.
Just like Sayuri had needed to be taken down to allow for the capture of Meteor’s Crew. The only way to defeat someone with an unbeatable Quirk was to remove the Quirk from the equation.
Toki was the only warper on the heroes’ side. She knew Kurogiri would be designated as her target. But she still didn’t know how she could defeat him. Teleporters were slippery, dangerous opponents. Kurogiri wasn’t as fast as a teleporter, and his gates took one or two seconds to open; but he was also stronger, more powerful, more versatile.
But how to take him down?
How to remove his Quirk from the equation?
How to remove—
Wait.
Holy shit. That was it, that was the solution. It would solve everything, not just for Kurogiri but for AFO, too. Removing the Quirk. Toki froze, hit in the face by an idea that was as crazy as it was genius.
If may not work. It was a long shot. But if it worked… Shit, if it worked…
“Mr. Principal. Can I ask for a favor?”
oOoOoOo
At noon, Toki quietly asked Lunch Rush to prepare Neito’s favorite food. She warped with a steaming plate of bouillabaisse to the Monoma apartment. She knew where it was, for having conducted her background check on Neito but also for having accompanied him back home once after training, back when he and Hitoshi were still two eager middle-schoolers. It seemed like a lifetime ago.
She rang the doorbell. Neito took almost five minutes to open. When he did, for a few seconds they just stared at each other.
He looked exhausted, almost haggard. He had bags under his eyes, his hair was in complete disarray, and he didn’t smell like he had approached a shower in the last twenty-four hours. There was still blood crusted on his neck and under his nails.
“Are you okay?” Neito rasped.
“I should be the one asking you that,” Toki blinked.
Neito drew himself a little taller, voice turning reprimanding:
“You were stabbed!”
“Lightly stabbed. As you can see, I’m perfectly fine! Are you okay?”
Neito’s shoulders sagged. “Not really,” he admitted.
“I brought food.”
“I… Thank you.” He blinked hard and seemed to remember his manners. “Come in. Excuse the mess.”
It was a mess. There were boxes everywhere, like Neito had been packing with no real organization, in the kind of haze that weighed on you when you acted on autopilot after a sleepless night and something like being gutted by your own emotions three times in short succession.
“The apartment is— was rented to Mom,” Neito confessed, seeing her stared at the carboard boxes. “I’m going to have to leave, the landlord will probably come knocking tomorrow. The hospital called the funeral home and did most of the paperwork, but I have to go to the notary’s office to open the succession, and…”
Toki put the steaming food on the table, then crossed the space between them, put her hand on Neito’s shoulders and drew him in a hug.
He stayed stiff for a second, and then slowly sank into it.
His breathing was fast and shallow. He was trembling. Toki tried to remember how it had felt after the death of her own mother; but her memory was full of empty spaces. She remembered a good cathartic cry, and clinging to Keigo in her bed, hidden under the sheets like it could protect them from monsters. She didn’t remember the funeral, or anything else, really.
She only remembered the guilt, gut-churning and suffocating, and the terrible feeling of being lost and adrift.
“It’s going to be okay.”
“No it’s not,” he muttered against her shoulder.
“It’s not,” Toki admitted. “But it will get better, I promise.”
It would be hard, but Neito would survive this. He would heal, like Toki had. Life would go on. And Toki would fix as much as she could.
She sent Neito to take a shower to scrub out the blood. In the meantime, she snooped around while making sure not to disturb anything.
She found the papers of Neito’s mom: her koseki, Neito’s koseki, an identity card, the apartment’s lease, some bank statements. Toki squinted at the little picture on his mother’s identity card. Akari Monoma had a round face, and light brown hair, almost blonde. She also had deep purple eyes, and she seemed… almost familiar.
Neito’s dad wasn’t on his koseki. His parents hadn’t been married, and the father had never recognized his son. Shit, was it actually Thunder Thief? Could Toki try to make her sidekick assume responsibility for his son, to avoid uprooting him? Wait, that would be an abuse of power if the request came from her, because she was Thunder Thief’s boss. Was he even the father? And if he was, shouldn’t there be some kind of process to put him on Neito’s koseki, because they had to prove they were related for Thunder Thief to be granted custody?
Toki shelved all those questions for later. Actually, no. She typed them on her phone to send them to Keigo.
And then she sent him a heart emoji.
He sent her back a picture of Fukuoka, peaceful again. And immediately after, he sent her a picture of five stray cats chasing after a bright red feather. And then, a selfie of him grinning. And then, a quick text reading, ‘are you okay?’
He had probably read the report sent by the doctor to Icarus, ordering that Toki was taken off-duty until tomorrow. Toki sighed. Then she sent back her own selfie, raising her shirt to show the bright pink scar, and captioned it ‘I lived, bitch.’ Keigo replied with a laughing emoji.
Yeah, they were fine.
Neito came out of the shower, wearing clean clothes. They heated back the bouillabaisse, filling the appartement with the smell of fish and Mediterranean spices, and ate quietly. Neito confessed that he hadn’t slept at all. He had worried for Hitoshi and Toki at first, and then after being told about his mother… It had been too much. Now, he was barely standing upright.
Toki persuaded him to call a moving company to take care of the packing. Come on, in Japan, nobody packed their own stuff before moving. It was included in the services of a professional company. They even padded the walls when moving furniture! It was expensive, but Toki would cover the cost. It was nothing compared to her income. Hell, she could even reserve a storage container right now to store everything. Neito caved.
Toki made a few calls, she helped Neito pack a bag of essentials, and then she brought him back to Yūei.
She didn’t think the League would come after him, but she would feel better if the recently orphaned teenager who had just lost his best friend and had absolutely no support system whatsoever wasn’t all alone in an empty appartement waiting to be harassed by a heartless landlord. Yūei provided little studios to the hero teachers, so they could stay there between missions. Nedzu was all too glad to give one to Toki so Neito could crash here for the day.
The rat-bear-badger seemed almost relieved, in a way. Sociopathic or not, he cared for his students. They were the only human beings he cared for.
Toki went back to making plans.
Her head was now bubbling with ideas and theories and potential strategies. She called Kameko again, this time to ask about how exactly could a student be allowed to fight in the incoming operation. Then she called Salamander to get more intel on the Shie Hassaikai. She went to borrow a laptop and dug into old files. She would get Hitoshi back, come hell or high water, and the League of Villains would be sorry for ever trying to get their dirty hands on him.
She couldn’t fix Neito’s problem as easily, though, and it made her jittery and frustrated. Unfortunately, grief was part of adulthood. You lost people. It was unfair and you had no time to brace yourself for it, sometimes. Growing up was like looking both ways before you cross the street, then getting hit by an airplane. You did your best and yet it was never fucking enough.
No, Toki couldn’t fix Neito’s problem. But she could fix something else.
At dinner, Toki woke up Neito and they both ate in the studio, unwilling to go and be gawked at in the cafeteria. Toki shared with him part her crazy idea of attack and got his agreement.
Just in case, she gifted him a strand of Aizawa’s hair, taken from a hairbrush. She hadn’t asked how Nedzu had procured said hairbrush in such a short lapse of time, or why Present Mic had been the one to bring it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
And then, late in the evening, Nedzu called everyone in a conference room.
From the window, Toki had seen a few cars enter the school, so she knew he had called in reinforcement. However, when she walked in, she was taken aback by the sheer number of pro-heroes here. Oh, there were a dozen of people in civies, probably policemen, but there were also a lot of heroes in costume. There was All Might. Endeavor. Edgeshot. Best Jeanist. Gang Orca. Pixie-Bob from the Wild Wild Pussycats. A few lesser-known heroes like X-Less, Mount Lady, Kamui Wood, Gran Torino. But also…
“Hayasa-sensei?! What are you doing here?!”
Her teacher raised the suitcase he was holding:
“I bought you a spare costume. Which reminds me to ask… why exactly was the other one covered in blood?”
“Don’t worry,” Toki assured him. “Most of it wasn’t mine.”
Hayasa-sensei stared. “That statement doesn’t exactly fill me with boundless confidence.”
All Might snorted. Without looking at him, Toki elbowed him in the gut. It was like hitting a brick wall, but All Might politely pretended he could feel it and shut up.
They weren’t at the front of the room, and All Might’s bulk hid her, but a few people were glancing in their direction anyway. Endeavor, especially, was staring. Toki suddenly felt very conscious of the fact that she was wearing civilian clothes and had her hair in a ponytail. She wasn’t Quantum right now; she wasn’t even Hoshizora. She was Toki Taiyōme.
Toki warped away with the spare suit (more exactly, in the bathroom of the studio) to put it on. It was a relief to get into the reinforced jumpsuit, to zip up the jacket, and to put her hair back into twin buns. She slid knives into the hidden pockets in her sleeves, and her belt-pouch was heavy with the reassuring weight of smoke grenades and handcuffs. When she removed her colored contacts, then put on her visor and let the HUD flicker to life, she couldn’t help but grin.
It felt like putting on armor.
Something settled inside of her. When she warped back in the meeting room, she was standing straighter. There was a newfound confidence in her steps. She was Quantum, now, and Quantum wasn’t afraid.
“Welcome, welcome!” Nedzu said cheerfully. “You’ll forgive the unconventionality of holding a strategy meeting in the school. However, time is crucial and appearances even more so. To outside eyes, it looks like Yūei is preparing to have its graduates speak in its defense after the attack. A press conference has been announced for tomorrow. But with any luck, this press conference will announce the capture of the League of Villains!”
“So you know where they are?” Endeavor asked sharply.
This time it was Tsukauchi who stepped forward: “We received a tip-off this afternoon. They’re in Tokyo, in the Korusan district.”
Toki almost jolted in surprise. Wait, they weren’t in Kamino, in Yokohama?! Why?! What kind of butterfly effect could have made the villain delocalize their hideout?
And why did it have to be Tokyo?! Toki hadn’t set a foot there since Meteor’s arrest…
“Ideally, I would have preferred to attack tomorrow,” Tsukauchi continued. “It would have been safer to assemble a bigger task force and secure a perimeter. However, our informant also specified that our window of opportunity is closing. We need to act soon.”
An informant, uh? Toki glanced at Nedzu and found the rat-bear-badger staring back at her. They both looked away.
It looked like Nedzu’s gambit about firing Aizawa had paid off, after all.
“Hitoshi Shinsō is alive and well,” Tsukauchi continued. “The League is holding him prisoner and is attempting to turn him over to their side, without success. However, they warned him that he had until tomorrow morning to accept their offer. We need to attack before that. The assault will happen at midnight. There are two buildings we have to secure. The League’s hideout and what appears to be a warehouse filled with Nomu. Our informant also specified that a third party could come to reinforce the League. Their backer is an underground crime lord, but rather… powerful.”
He paused, briefly. To Toki’s surprise, Endeavor spoke:
“The League’s backer is my case. If we fight him, I request to bring in my team.”
Oh gods. She knew Meteor and Endeavor were after AFO, or rather Soul Stealer as the underground called him, but the idea of Meteor being involved in that fight made her guts drop as if Endeavor had tossed them from the Tokyo Tower.
“We won’t have time to bring them in,” Tsukauchi answered diplomatically. “We only have a little over two hours before midnight, and we need to make the most of it. Afterward, Quantum will warp us into position, and we’ll attack. Quantum, are you mission-ready?”
He looked at her, as did all the other heroes in the room. Toki’s heart sped up, anticipation running along her spine. This was it. Finally.
She met Tsukauchi’s gaze and smiled.
It was Meteor’s smile.
“I am.”
Notes:
Toki : Wow, Hayasa-sensei, what are you doing here?
Hayasa: i was just fetching stuff for you![Four hours earlier]
Nedzu: Hello, could Icarus send me someone to stop Quantum for taking over my school?
Hayasa: It can't be that bad.
Nedzu: She's adopting a child as we speak and is looking to fistfight my staff.
Hayasa: Say no more._______________________
So! Fun thing, i learned about how the moving companies operate in japan while watching a cooking video and falling down a Youtube rabbit hole, and wow, in Japan everything is so extra. Like, the movers pack your stuff, put padding on your walls to move furniture, and even put some protection on your floor to slide boxes or even to walk on your floorboard? That's wild.
Also, did you figure out Toki's plans to deal with Kurogiri?
Because whatever you're thinking: you're wrong. There is NO WAY you have guessed her plan. I am sitting there cackling and patting myself on the back, because it's insane and unhinged and i hope you're gonna love it.
Anyway ! Some questions !
WHY DID YOU KILL MONOMA'S MOM?
I'm sorry ! But it was for the sake of the plot
Also, those of you who read "Wisdom of the fallen" know how Akari Monoma's death was twice as tragic. Neito lost a mother, but... His mother was also someone's aunt... Someone who doesn't know...Also, did you notice how Toki looked at the photo of Monoma's mom and thought "uh she is familiar", but didn't freaking reconize her?!
I mean yeah they hadn't met, but the ressemblance was strong. Poor Toki. It had been so long that this familiar face is fading from her memories...Is it realistic for Toki to be back in fighting condition so fast after beings stabbed?
IRL, probably not (althought you would be surprised how humans can bounce back from wounds that should be deadly). But in the BNHA universe, yeah.
Also, apparently the most survivable stab wounds are in the lower abdomen! I would have thought that getting stabbed there meant a major infection and then death, but apparently not? Like, even if you get shit in your bloodstream, now you can survive it with some good antibiotics. And unlike the torso (heart and lungs), or the thighs or the shoulders (major arteries), you have less chance of dying on the spot of you're stabben in the lower belly.
So. The more you know...
Will Toki finds the traitor?
Spoilers !
But i'm very proud of the way she narrowed down her list of suspects XD I actually hadn't planned for it, but it was just so perfect!!!
Chapter 55: Facing All For One
Summary:
The clock reached midnight.
Everyone sprang into action. The heroes jumped from the shadows to encircle the hideout, Endeavor’s flames flared high, Gran Torino took off. All Might crashed into the building like a wrecking ball…
And the game was on.“SMASH!”
Notes:
Reminder of how the canon battle went :
There was TWO hideout in Kamino : the bar, and the warehouse with the Nomu. The heroes attacked both. They captured everyone at the bar. Then AFO showed up at the warehouse, blowing up the place, and used his sludge-warp-Quirk to bring the League to him. He then talked to Tomura. Then All Might crossed the city in ten seconds and fought AFO, cutting his monologue short... AFO sent away the League, making clear he was sacrifying himself (but kind of laughing?), which compltetely traumatitized Shigaraki... And then we had the AFO vs All Might battle.But the wisdom battle is going to be a little different.
First because there's two locations, this time in two differents city. And second, because we have Toki. And you know, she makes ripples x)
You'll see!
I'm not ignoring canon nor strictly adhering to it, but a secret third thing (taking the small bits and crumbs canon barely spent time developing and running absolutely hogwild)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
FACING ALL FOR ONE
Kamino district, in Yokohama. Fifteen minutes until midnight. Busy streets. Unsuspecting civilians. In a warehouse, about forty Nomu were peacefully sleeping in their tanks.
In this universe, no nosy hero students were creeping around. But still, tipped off by a mysterious informant, the heroes knew of this hideout’s existence. Toki scouted the place from the sky, then went back to Yūei and warped the heroes. First Gang Orca, then X-Less, then Kamui Wood, then Pixie-Bob, and finally, Mount Lady.
In total silence, she warped back in the sky, looked at the map displayed by her HUD, and warped in Tokyo’s direction.
In the direction of the Korusan district.
The reason why both hideouts weren’t in Kamino was probably because of Hitoshi’s panic button. The informant had told Nedzu about the bar in Kamino, but the place had looked hastily abandoned, with mud and soot all over the floors. The League had brought Hitoshi here, but not long. They had been warned of the existence of the panic button, and had immediately gotten rid of it, before moving to another location.
Hence… Korusan.
It wasn’t ideal. The informant had known about the existence of this hideout but not where it was exactly, so he was only able to give Nedzu a general location.
However, a general location had been enough. In this universe, Ragdoll hadn’t been kidnapped by All For One to steal her Quirk. So Ragdoll (fresh out of the hospital, and not cleared for active duty, but still willing to do something) had been sent immediately. With her Quirk Search, she had managed to pinpoint the building where the League was hiding.
And now the heroes could get into position.
But first, Toki had to find Ragdoll. She warped in the sky further, further, until she was right above the target. She didn’t let herself think about the last time she had been in this city. She looked around until she saw Ragdoll crouched on the roof of the next building over, and Toki jumped there, warping without her momentum to land without a sound next to her.
Ten minutes before midnight, now.
“Nothing has changed,” Ragdoll reported quietly. “There are two Shinsō with them. The one closest to the wall is a double, a fake. It feels real but it’s mudded. The real one is deeper in the room, next to Toga.”
“What do they need a double for?” Toki frowned.
Ragdoll bit her lip.
“The double is… frequently destroyed. Then another is made, and they stand there, and they destroy it again. They must be talking with the clone, and destroying it each time Shinsō-kun manage to gain control of his interlocuter.”
Toki growled under her breath.
Nedzu had told the other heroes that Shinsō’s Quirk worked by answering his questions (without specifying the extent of Brainwashing) so they could plan around it and prepare for the villain’s precautions. But Toki wasn’t happy about it. Once Nedzu had casually announced that Shinsō’s Quirk was Brainwashing, she had seen the way everyone had reassessed the situation. It was obvious from the frown of a few heroes that they envisaged that this was a recruitment speech and not just a hostage situation.
Best Jeanist had even smoothly asked how they could defend themselves against this Quirk. It was only Hayasa-sensei’s hand on Toki’s shoulder that stopped her from making him eat his stupid denim vest.
Toki let out a long breath. She would make Best Jeanist regret his words later. For now… She nodded once and warped back to Yūei in four quick jumps.
Time to bring in the big guns.
She warped back with the heroes that would conduct the raid. First Gran Torino and Best Jeanist. Then Endeavor and Edgeshot. Then All Might.
And finally, Hayasa-sensei, who she warped further into the city, next to the Idaten Agency. Unlike the limelight heroes present, Hayasa-sensei wasn’t going to attack. He was going to secure back-up.
Toki warped back with the other limelight heroes, and they took their positions around the target. It was an old commercial building that appeared to be closed for insalubrity. There were some lights coming from the second stories.
The League was here.
Endeavor had wanted to bring his team, but he had been vetoed. They didn’t have time. Besides, Soul Stealer’s presence wasn’t a guarantee. And even if he showed up, All Might had already claimed the honor of fighting him, arguing that he had previous experience. Endeavor had seethed but had been forced to bow. Toki didn’t know whether she was worried or relieved. On the one hand, more support was always good.
On the other… Well. Meteor. Tokyo. A fight. All Might. It hadn’t gone so well last time.
Four minutes to midnight.
The Genius Agency, headed by Best Jeanist, controlled Tokyo. Orders had already been sent to the police to create a perimeter. The streets were emptying out. Hayasa-sensei was going to warn the Idaten agency so they could manage crowd control. Everything was falling into place.
Toki took a long breath to calm down her racing heartbeat.
In canon, the raid against the League’s hideout had happened a full forty-eight hours later, maybe even more. The League had kept Bakugo prisoner three days, almost four. It was long… But this delay had allowed the police to mobilize. This time, when the heroes would attack, they had very little back-up. The police had set an evacuation perimeter, but no SWAT team armed with guns would come in reinforcement.
It didn’t matter. The heroes had better numbers than in canon. And in this world, they had Quantum.
She was standing at All Might’s left, between him and Endeavor. They were both so tall and muscular, it made her feel like a kid. Endeavor’s flames were stifling.
“How’s Shouto?” Toki shifted on her feet.
Endeavor glanced at her, still glowering. But to her surprise, he actually answered.
“He’ll be better, once this is done.”
Yeah, as they would all. Toki took a deep breath. “And Meteor?”
Endeavor had been told to not bring in his sidekicks, as they wouldn’t have time to be briefed and join the operation. However, she had seen Endeavor send a text during the briefing, and she had a feeling that, just like her, Endeavor had judged that Meteor was already well-informed enough about the dangers of AFO.
She saw All Might turn his head slightly as if trying to listen to their conversation without showing he was eavesdropping. Endeavor noticed, too, and scowled harder.
“He’s on an underground recon mission.”
“So probably on the first train to Tokyo as we speak,” Toki guessed.
“Probably.”
“Great. Just peachy. I can’t wait.”
She may be mistaken, but she swore she saw a flicker of amusement in Endeavor’s eyes. It was weird and she decided to ignore it. Instead, she looked back at the building, and rolled her shoulders, flexing her fingers like a boxer preparing to step into the ring. She took one last deep breath and held it. At her side, All Might crouched to jump.
The clock in her HUD reached midnight.
Everyone sprang into action. The heroes jumped from the shadows to encircle the hideout, Endeavor’s flames flared high, Gran Torino took off. All Might crashed into the building like a wrecking ball…
And the game was on.
“SMASH!”
The wall blew up in rubble under All Might’s fist.
Gran Torino and Toki rushed into the opening before the dust had time to settle: Gran Torino kicked two villains in quick succession, while Toki ducked under Spinner’s blade and went straight to Hitoshi. There was one clone sitting on a chair; but the real one was hogtied on a couch, with Toga next to him playing with a knife.
There were villains everywhere. Dabi was already brandishing a fistful of flames; Kurogiri was here and his mere presence was making Toki’s teeth grind; but none of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was that Hitoshi was here, right now, right the fuck now, and she needed to get him back—
He was wearing a fucking muzzle.
Toki saw red. If she hadn’t been trained to prioritize the rescue, she may have turned against the villain and destroyed them. A primal, animalistic rage roared in her chest. How dare they touch her brother; how dare they muzzle him like an animal?!
But she was Quantum, she wasn’t Toki. She was a hero, and she knew what her mission was. So she dodged Dabi’s flames, jumped out of reach of Toga’s blade; her hand closed on Hitoshi’s shoulder; and then they were gone.
She grabbed him and warped high in the sky, following the GPS localization of Hayasa-sensei. One jump, two jump, three jump, and bam, she was there, landing on the rooftop of the Idaten hero agency. When they landed, Hitoshi let out a muted grunt.
Toki hadn’t warped the muzzle with them.
“Are you okay?” she asked lowly.
She was still holding him securely. Five seconds later, the door to the rooftop opened and Hayasa-sensei appeared, holding a shock blanket in one hand. Toki wrapped Hitoshi in it without really letting go of him. He was shivering.
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” he rasped. His smile was wobbly, but his eyes were shining. “I knew you would come.”
Toki felt her face soften. Slowly, her fingers unclenched from Hitoshi’s arms. Instead she wrapped an arm around his shoulders and knocked their foreheads together.
He was here. He was alright. She had done it. Oh, gods, she was so relieved.
“Of course I would come. Did they hurt you?”
“No, they mostly talked.” Hitoshi seemed like he was going to add something, but then he clamped his mouth shut, jaw trembling.
“You sure?” Toki checked. “They didn’t… You can still use your Quirk?”
He leveled a strange, frightened look at her. “I think so? Tell me your name.”
“Quan—”
There was a brief second of nothingness, and then Toki blinked, waking up. Hitoshi had brainwashed her for a second or two. His Quirk still worked, then. That was a relief.
“They threatened to do it,” Hitoshi whispered. “If I didn’t agree to join them tomorrow at dawn, they were going to give me to Shigaraki’s sensei. It was like you said, someone who can take Quirks. Probably the guy who made the Nomu.”
Yeah, and that’s why the mysterious informant had been so adamant that the rescue operation couldn’t wait. Toki let out a long, trembling breath.
“Good, good. You’re fine, it’s over now. Are you going to be okay while I go back and kick ass? We’re at the Idaten Agency, you’re safe. And Mercury will take care of you.”
Hayasa-sensei stepped in Hitoshi’s field of vision, calm and reassuring. As an underground hero, Hayasa-sensei wasn’t suited to a frontal assault against the League; but taking care of the victim was something he could do.
And there was no one else that Toki trusted as much as him to take care of her brother.
“Hello, Shinsō-kun. Do you remember me? We meet in Fukuoka last year.”
Hitoshi hesitated a few seconds, then gave a tiny nod.
“Good,” Hayasa-sensei smiled. “Let’s get you untied. Quantum, your fledging is in good hands, you can go back.”
Hitoshi let out an unsteady laugh. It was a good sign. Still, it took effort for Toki to let go of him, and step back. Hayasa-sensei busied himself with cutting the ropes tied to Hitoshi’s wrists. Toki looked one last time at the boy she considered her brother. But this time, it was him who smiled reassuringly.
“I’m fine. Go. Kick their asses.”
Toki laughed and threw him a lazy salute. Before leaving, though, she dug her phone out of her pocket, and typed a brief message.
“I told Neito where you are,” she informed Hayasa-sensei. “He’s at the station right now, but he’s going to warp here in a few minutes. He has strict instructions to not fight, obviously. But he copied my Quirk and Eraserhead’s. If things go south, he’s Hitoshi’s evacuation plan.”
Another hero would have frowned and glowered at the prospect of letting an unlicensed student so close to the fight, but Hayasa-sensei merely nodded. He had been a S-ranked hero, and more importantly, he had been Hawks and Quantum’s trainer. He knew that sometimes, pure pragmatism dictated the use of every resource at your disposal.
Even when said resource were kids.
Toki carefully didn’t precise that Neito was actually at Kamino’s station. Toki had asked him to go there first so he could recognize the premises and eventually warp there if needed. She had no expectation of Neito fighting anywhere in Kamino, but as a warper, he could change the tide of the battle, if he could bring fighters from one battlefield to the other in a few seconds.
If shit went south at Korusan, Neito would evacuate Hitoshi. But if shit went south in Kamino, then… Neito had Toki’s Quirk, and he knew what Meteor and Endeavor looked like. He would look for them and offer to warp them there. No matter how much of a stick in the mud Endeavor was about following the rules, he wouldn’t turn down a warper’s offer of transportation.
“Neito?” Hitoshi repeated, voice rough. “He’s fine? Everyone is fine?”
“There were some injuries at the summer camp, but everybody is okay now,” Toki reassured him.
Hitoshi’s swayed on his feet as if dizzy with relief. Hayasa-sensei was done with the ropes around his arms; the bindings fell to the ground. Reflexively, Hitoshi rubbed his wrists. He still looked a little dazed.
“I should… call my mom,” he said very quietly.
“Yeah. You should.”
Toki exchanged one last look with Hayasa-sensei, who pulled his phone out of his pocket and started coaxing Hitoshi into remembering Mihoko’s number. Toki took a few seconds to exhale and let sink in the certainty that she had saved Hitoshi.
She felt like she could breathe easier.
In canon, AFO had been able to kidnap Bakugo with his warp-puke Quirk because the warp-puke Quirk targeted people the user knew or anyone close by if Toki’s memories served correctly. Bakugo had been standing close to Shigaraki and that’s how he had been caught. But now, with Hitoshi away… Well, he was saved.
Holy shit, she had done it.
That was the great advantage that Toki brought to any battle. She could just add or remove players at will, so fast that nobody could do anything about it. In an instant, she could change the whole deck, and completely transform the configuration of the team. And of course, remove any victims from the vicinity faster than any rescue specialist. Hell, she was very aware that nobody else would have been able to take back Ragdoll from the League of Villains, back in the forest. Ragdoll hadn’t been in any state to defend herself and getting her back from Spinner would have required a struggle. But not for Toki. She just had to touch Ragdoll and that was it, game over, the victim was removed from the situation.
Having a warper in your team was just plain cheating.
And that was why taking out Kurogiri was a priority. He was the great game-changer in the League’s line-up, for now. One day Shigaraki would become even more powerful and become the main threat. But for now? For now it was Kurogiri who was the most dangerous. Toki needed him taken out.
And then… Then, she would have to deal with All For One.
She wouldn’t leave All Might alone to face him like in canon. She couldn’t, not when she knew how much pain awaited him. Not when she knew that this world wasn’t a shōnen manga, and that villains really tried to kill you, with blood and pain and bared teeth. Yagi was her friend. Yagi was someone who needed saving.
Toki had never been able to turn her back on people who needed help.
She patted Hitoshi’s shoulder one last time. Then, she warped back in the sky; and from there, Quantum returned straight to the battle.
oOoOoOo
She had been gone for less than five minutes. And yet, when she returned, all the villains were restrained. Between Best Jeanist and Edgeshot, everyone was either hog-tied their own clothes or unconscious, or both. Stain was also gagged, but wriggling like a demented snake in his bonds, and you could hear the muffled screaming even through the gag.
That was devastatingly efficient.
Gran Torino was delivering a little speech about how the police had worked tirelessly to find out the identities of the members of the League, even though Toki knew the police hadn’t done shit and everything had come from the mysterious informant. He was the one who had told them who the League members were, where their hideout was, and (when the Kamino bar had turned out to be deserted) where their secondary hideout was. In fifteen minutes they had had even more intel than what a whole police force would have managed to drag out in half a week of tireless efforts.
Thank you, Aizawa.
I mean, his role as a spy was probably shot to hell after that but thank you Aizawa. Without him, they wouldn’t have found Hitoshi in twenty-four hours.
Toki had been so scared that the League would hand Hitoshi over to AFO. It had been a legitimate worry. Maybe Shigaraki wanted to recruit Hitoshi but… His boss was another thing entirely. All For One would absolutely love having Brainwashing. Hitoshi had worked so hard to accept his Quirk and turn it into a tool for heroism…
How heartbreaking it would be if he lost it? And shit, what kind of damage could a super-villain do with a mind-control Quirk?
No time to wonder what could have been. Toki loosened her shoulders. Like a switch being flipped, she was Quantum again. The mission had to move on.
All Might smiled, taking a step towards the restrained villains. His presence made the atmosphere heavier, like the crackled before a lightning strike, strength and threat permeating the atmosphere. When you were at All Might’s side, feeling that power supporting you, it felt like a triumphant rush; but Toki had the vivid memory of standing against such a power, and couldn’t help but understand why Stain, Spinner and Toga suddenly froze in dread.
“This is the end, Tomura Shigaraki!” All Might growled.
Shigaraki snarled. The cadaveric hand on his face hid most of his expression, but this close Quantum could see his eyes, bloodshot and narrowed with fury, glaring at the Symbol of Peace with pure hatred.
“The end?” He spat. “Don’t make me laugh. I’ve just begun. Your justice, your peace… I’ll destroy your stupid lies hiding the dirt and the blood. Kurogiri!”
The warper twitched. Toki shuddered, feeling the telltale nail-on-chalkboard sensation of that unnatural warping activating… But it was too late. Edgeshot stabbed him with his paper-thin body, a precise and powerful strike on a pressure point, not dissimilar to acupuncture but with more violence.
Kurogiri made muffled sound and passed out. Twice, who was laying half against the warper, freaked out.
“Oh my god you KILLED HIM! Good riddance! MURDER!”
“He’s only asleep,” Edgeshot said flatly. “Quantum, I apologize for stealing your opponent.”
“Oh no, don’t. My method of putting people to sleep is much more aggressive.”
“I told you it was in your best interests to stay put,” Gran Torino snapped towards Twice. “The police have already determined your civilian identities. There’s no place left for you to run. Now, Shigaraki, tell us where your boss is, please.”
Shigaraki stared at Gran Torino, breathing faster and shallower, pupils narrowing to pinpricks. He looked on the verge of a panic attack, or a frenzy of rage. His shoulders were shaking, minutes tremors as if the fury was too much to contain.
“No— fuck you… Go away!”
“Where is he?!” growled All Might, bearing down on him.
The closest villains froze in fear; but not Shigaraki. Twisting furiously in his bonds, he let out an incoherent scream of rage.
“I HATE YOU!!!”
As if summoned by his voice, the space exploded around them, like the air itself was vomiting pockets of black goo; Quantum reared back with a screech that was part disgust part horror, and then the first Nomus tumbled from the black sludge.
Fuck! The warp-puke Quirk!
“It’s not Kurogiri!” she yelped. “There’s another warper!”
“Another one?!” Edgeshot yelped, battling a Nomu. “Do they grow on trees now?!”
It was immediately pandemonium, the beasts rushing to the heroes and the heroes attacking indiscriminately everything that had an exposed brain.
Damn, there were so many! Quantum grabbed two monsters and warped high in the sky, then higher, away from the city and right above a big stretch of darkness so that the monsters wouldn’t splatter on some unsuspecting passerby in the street, and then let the Nomu fall to their death at terminal velocity. She came back, grabbed another, did the same thing, then again, and again; the other heroes could only knock the beasts back and All Might could even knock them out, but Quantum was getting rid of them, and within a few seconds the whole room was cleared—
But before she was done, the villains heaved one by one, vomiting black sludge and coughing as it twisted around them like something alive. Toki realized what was going to happen even before the warping was complete.
“They’re escaping!”
Shigaraki was already gone, swallowed by the sludge. Quantum swore and grabbed the nearest villain, who happened to be Stain: and she warped as far away as she could…. Forty kilometers away in the sky.
As she had hoped, she warped with Stain alone, not the tar-like substance that seemed to be the key to AFO’s warp.
Oh, good, she thought. So distance make the warping short-circuit. Good to know.
Then Stain grabbed two knives and tried to stab her, which was less good, and Quantum had to fight a serial killer armed with multiple blades while in freefall. Getting him away from Best Jeanist had also made Stain’s bonds fall in pieces.
“Another fake!” Stain was foaming at the mouth, his crazed eyes fixed on her with an intensity that was straight-up frightening. “You can’t have me! I’ll get the world rid of you!”
Shit.
Toki was good in freefall fighting, but even then, she nearly got her hand sliced off because she hadn’t been fast enough to get away.
Normal people were at least a little disoriented when they fell, but this man had immediately launched himself in attack mode in the space of one heartbeat. And Quantum had to touch him if she wanted to inverse their fall and stop his momentum before he went splat on the concrete, and Stain did not want her to touch him, not at all. He was slicing and swinging two katanas like a demon, turning his tumble into something absolutely deadly.
Jump-jump-jump, Quantum warped in quick bursts to stay around him, trying to attack in his back, but he was fucking spinning, swinging too wide, how the hell was she supposed to catch him without betting a blade to the face?! Blast it, he was too fucking fast…
Hey. Blast it.
Quantum grinned meanly. She didn’t have to touch him, after all. She just had to knock him out. She created a warp blast, a ball of compressed air like a gunshot, and fired right into his abdomen, where all the little tubes and machinery went into his stomach. Stain’s eyes bugled out, then rolled in his skull as he fell unconscious.
Nailed it.
Quantum warped behind him (still cautious to stay out of range of any knives) to grasp him by the back of his shirt. She warped their momentum upside-down to slow down their suicide descent, and then warped them back to street level, where a police truck was waiting for prisoners.
In the street, it was total chaos.
There were Nomu attacking the heroes and the cops: dozens of them. All Might and Endeavor were leading the defense, blasting the monsters, but there were so many. And the heroes didn’t have police backup to close the perimeter. Grand Torino was ping-ponging between opponents, Jeanist and Edgeshot were picking off Nomus one after the other, but they didn’t have machine guns or deadly attacks, and the Nomu wouldn’t stay down until they were dead…
They needed to deal with this before the Nomu managed to spread into the city. But All For One was probably attacking the hangar in Kamino right now, shit…!
Someone was screaming for reinforcements. Civilians in the nearby buildings were screeching in terror as the Nomu tried to break windows. Edgeshot had moved to the end of the street to block the Nomu from running amok in the city: but it just meant the monsters were all trapped with the heroes, and it was going to be a bloodbath. Quantum saw a police officer fall down right before Endeavor incinerated the responsible Nomu (and saved Tsukauchi, who dived low just in time to avoid the clawed hand of a monster).
There were just too many Nomu and not enough heroes with powerful Quirks. If the police had had riot gear and heavier firearms, then maybe… But there was no use dwelling on it now. They had done what they could with the short time afforded to them, and now they had to deal with this, too.
Quantum couldn’t just drop Stain there, so she shoved him toward the two scared policemen who were cowering in the truck.
“Deal with that one! Restrain him and take all his knives!”
She didn’t look back to make sure they were obeying, and directly jumped into the fray.
Nomu were strong, fast, and more bothersome of all: resilient. You had to pulverize them if you wanted them to stay down. It meant that Toki had to use the same method as in Kitakyūshū if she wanted some efficiency… Gravity.
She grabbed one Nomu, warped high, and let it fall towards the city while she warped two others; then got back high as the first Nomu was struggling in the air and reaching terminal velocity, and warped him with all his momentum back in the street so he crashed right on another monster.
The one she had used as a projectile weapon didn’t get up, splattered like marmalade. The one who had taken half a ton of muscles at one hundred and sixty kilometers per hour in the face… didn’t splatter. It got up, wobbly but still snarling.
Oh well. That was still a fifty percent success rate.
Then there was a shriek behind her, and she turned back just in time to see Stain stagger outside the police truck, covered in blood.
Fuck. He had woken up and escaped the policemen. Had he killed them?! He was less than three meters away from her, holding his bloodied katana: when their eyes locked, Quantum couldn’t help but feel all her muscles tense. Shit, could she not get a fucking break?! Stain launched himself toward her, Toki threw a medium-sized warp-blast point-blank at him…
… and then Stain was hit by an invisible fist, rocketing back, his katana flying out of his grip.
He crashed against a wall much harder than Toki’s warp blast would have warranted. So hard, actually, that bricks split upon impact.
The violence of the shock made the dust fly in all directions. His head bounced back with a sickening crunch; his exoskeleton cracked, fissures bursting everywhere; little components were ejected from his life support with the shock; a metal piece near his pelvis snapped clean in two, both chunks flying away as if fired from a canon. It was so sudden and brutal and loud that at least four different fights in the immediate vicinity paused, as every head snapped toward the source of this impact like a missile.
Stain slid down the wall like a puppet whose strings were cut. He left a dark smear of blood behind him. Toki stared. This time, she had a feeling he wasn’t going to get up anytime soon.
Or maybe not at all.
The nearest Nomu turned towards Toki while she was still blinking disbelievingly at the hero killer. His snarl brought her back to reality. Quantum squared her shoulders, preparing to attack again… and then the Nomu froze, his body twisting awkwardly for a second before squeezing upon itself as if compressed in an invisible fist.
Toki understood what was going on a split second before the Nomu’s body was crushed like an empty soda can, bones breaking with a nauseating crunch and blood flying in every direction.
The mangled body fell on the floor just as Toki felt the displacement of air as someone landed next to her.
She knew who it was before turning. The grey and orange hero costume, the visor, and the hooded cloak were unfamiliar. But this bloodthirsty grin…
“Dad?!”
She distinctly saw Best Jeanist, who was fighting five Nomu at the same time but was also the closest hero, swing his head towards her incredulously. Whoooops.
“Munchkin,” Meteor smiled. It showed way too many teeth, like a tiger smelling blood. His eyes were glowing maniacally. “Would you believe me if I told you I was just passing by?”
Toki scowled but couldn’t help the way her shoulders loosened. Meteor was straight-up terrifying, but it felt good to have that strength at her back: like a childish certainty that nothing back could happen to her as long as her dad was here.
“Sampling the local cuisine in full hero costume? Yeah, right. How did you find us so fast?”
“I followed the screaming.”
Yeah, that checked out.
Then Toki remembered she was Quantum, she had a mission, and the clock was ticking. She shouldn’t be distracted by Meteor’s presence.
Her father’s gaze had already gone back to the thick of the fight. Psychokinesis flared to life, tearing the Nomu apart, or ripping them away from their opponent to fling them towards Endeavor, who incinerated them with an ease that showed that it wasn’t the first time he was faced with that kind of move. Meteor was in his element, grinning like a wolf and already stepping toward the bloodbath to have his share of violence.
Meanwhile Quantum was a top hero, with a specialized skillset and bigger priorities.
“Tsukauchi!” she barked. “What about Kamino?!”
The detective leveled a frenzied look at her. “I’ve lost contact! They must be under attack!”
He didn’t need to be precise about who was attacking them. Toki swore, then looked around for All Might. Calling his name would do no good, everyone was clamoring for support or help, so Toki put two fingers in her mouth and let out a shrill whistle.
All Might’s attention zeroed on her; in an instant he landed next to her, making the pavement crack.
“Kamino,” she said tersely.
All Might looked at the fight. Flames were blasting everywhere, textile fibers fusing in every direction. It was utter chaos. But… When suddenly Nomu started being pulled away from the more vulnerable fighters to be tossed in big piles that Endeavor set fire to without pause, it looked like the fight was turning in the heroes’ favor.
In less than three seconds, Meteor was turning the tide of the battle.
“If you’re gonna go, then hurry up!” Endeavor snarled in All Might’s direction.
All Might nodded once, sharply. At the same time, Meteor’s head snapped up, his gaze falling to Toki, then widening in comprehension and alarm… but Toki wasn’t looking at him. She grabbed All Might’s elbow, and they warped away toward Kamino.
Towards All For One.
oOoOoOo
The hangar wasn’t there anymore.
It was like a bomb had gone off. The building had been more or less pulverized, the earth upturned as a giant creature had emerged from its burrow there. The heroes were all present, but most lay on the ground as if dazed or unconscious. Not dead, though. Quantum could see them moving. The earth shifted like water around them, and Quantum realized that Pixie-Bob must have used her Quirk to protect the heroes from… whatever kind of explosion had taken out the warehouse.
The League of Villains was here, too. Dabi and Kurogiri laid on the ground, clearly unconscious, but everyone else was standing or kneeling. Toga had her knife; Spinner had unsheathed his katana. Twice and Mr. Compress weren’t up, but they didn’t look dazed or out of commission. They would need to be taken out, too.
And All For One, it had to be him, was steadily walking towards Pixie-Bob, radiating amused smugness and a potent air of danger.
Every hair on Toki’s nape stood up.
She hadn’t realized All For Once would be this tall, this massive, and that his mask would be so sinister. But more importantly, she hadn’t anticipated the sheer overwhelming threat that he radiated.
Toki wasn’t even in his field of vision and yet, AFO’s presence felt oppressive, like standing under a thundercloud. Her breath stuttered in her chest. She had only felt this instinctive terror once, at Jehda, when she had fought All Might. But this time, it was magnified by ten. Because All Might hadn’t wanted to kill her. But this man… This man was going to kill, and the lizard part of Toki’s brain screamed to get away.
Then the need to flee racketed up, because at the exact moment where All Might saw AFO, the Symbol of Peace growled. Toki suddenly felt like a very tiny bunny trapped between two rabid bears about to tear each other apart.
She let go of All Might as if scalded.
Upon arrival, Quantum had warped about five meters high in the sky; not a lot, but enough to get visibility. All Might landed heavily, making the earth shake, turning the heat of his glare like a blowtorch toward his enemy. Said enemy, who had been seemingly in the middle of a monologue, briefly paused; and then, even though the ugly black mask he wore, he gave the impression of grinning.
“How fast! I was expecting to have more time to play.”
“Playtime is over, All For One!” All Might snarled.
He threw himself forward and the two titans collided.
The shockwave cracked the ground. Everyone in the vicinity was blown away. Quantum flashed frantically left and right, collecting the injured heroes to evacuate them before they could be tossed into crumbled buildings and injured further. Rescuing the victims took priority.
She managed to seize Kamui Wood and X-Less, who were both conscious but dazed, and even grabbed Gang Orca’s collar. She warped them all high in the sky to take some distance, found a good landing point about a kilometer away, warped there, and tersely ordered them to evacuate at least two city blocks.
Nobody argued. Their briefing had clearly stated that the villain All Might was fighting was an S-ranked threat, meaning he could level cities.
Quantum went back to the battlefield to look for Pixie-Bob and Mount Lady. There was so much dust flying everywhere that she lost a few precious seconds trying to orient herself. On her left, a few meters away, she could hear All For One sighing dramatically.
“There are at least thirty kilometers between here and Korusan. I was expecting you to be longer. Fifteen to twenty minutes at least. I had plans to harvest a few Quirks and have a heart-to-heart with my beloved student. But you relied on someone else… How unusual for a lone wolf like you. Did you doubt your ability to come here quickly enough? You are getting weaker, All Might.”
“What about you?” All Might spat. “What is going on with that mask? Problem breathing? Is it your pollen allergies?”
Quantum left them with their banter. She had found the massive form of Mount Lady, partially shielded behind a wall of earth. Pixie-Bob was with her; Quantum grabbed them both and disappeared.
She didn’t transport them to the same place as the three others, though. Mount Lady and Pixie-Bob both had Quirks that could work great for shielding. If this fight played out as it had in canon, then… their strength would be needed to stop All For One’s shockwaves from ripping apart the nearest buildings. With that in mind, Quantum warped Pixie-Bob and Mount Lady to the edge of the battlefield, but no further.
Pixie-Bob understood Quantum’s plans without a word.
She looked at the battlefield, and started feeling out the earth, making the ground sinew and twist silently like water; ready to spring up like a wall if needed. Mount Lady, for her part, looked shaken up. Quantum patted her on the shoulder like Inferno would do if his little kōhai needed cheering up, and then she warped back.
Toki appeared on the battlefield as All Might rushed All For One to attack again. All For One armed a punch.
And Toki felt the danger coming like being suddenly submerged in freezing water.
The air cracked with electricity, pressure dropping, red sparks flying even as All For One’s arm distorted grotesquely. Toki’s eyes widened. The villain’s muscles bulged out in a way that was reminiscent of Muscular, but there was more than just raw physical power. Static electricity filled the air and made Toki’s hair raise; she accidentally bit her tongue.
Every animal instinct in her brain was screaming to dive for cover. Behind All For One, even the League of Villains (who weren’t in the line of fire) had frozen in terror.
When All For Once punched the air, Toki felt the impact down to her teeth.
It was as if a nuclear bomb had gone off, obliterating everything. The shockwave was aimed at All Might and so powerful that, even though the Symbol Of Peace blocked it with his hands, the concussive blast sent him flying. The deflagration was deafening. Dust flew everywhere, the earth cracked apart, and Toki was blown from her feet, so much harder than during the last attack, what the fuck, how much strength could it possibly be, it felt like being at ground zero during a missile strike…!
Toki warped high in the sky, a desperate, knee-jerk reaction to escape the concussive force that was going to blast her through a wall, and that’s how, from above, she saw that her comparison with a missive was woefully inaccurate.
It was a natural disaster.
The shockwave carved through the city like a giant knife. All Might had been blown away in a nearby building, and the strength of his own punch had barely parried All For One’s attack. Pixie-Bob threw an earth wall angled like a ramp, redirecting some of the shockwaves up, and probably mitigating some damage. But the blast was still strong enough to rip out the end of the ramp, pulverize the last stories of the nearest buildings, and then keep going--
Toki could only watch in horror as the dust rose.
The rumble of destruction hadn’t even subsided when the first screams started to be heard. Gods, it must be nearly a kilometer of the city, gutted in a straight line. A cone of destruction, with All For One at its source.
Smoke was rising. People were screaming, crying, and calling for help. Car alarms were wailing. Sirens, too. The battlefield was now a huge crater, the nearest building completely destroyed. Three, no, four buildings were crumbling; at least two others were entirely gutted, like eviscerated fish. Nobody inside could possibly be alive. An entire apartment complex was dangerously listing to the side, steel and concrete groaning so horrifically that it sounded like human wails.
“I was expecting at least a dozen buildings to collapse,” All For One mused, voice almost pensive. “Air Cannon. Springlike limbs. Kinetic booster, time four. Strength Enhancer time three. This combination works well… If that buffoon hadn’t blocked my punch…! Ah, well, he seems stronger than expected. I’ll need to run him down more thoughtfully than planned.”
He paused, as if pensive. And then he turned towards Pixie-Bob, who still had her hands on the ground where she had raised a steep ramp of earth to redirect that destructive shockwave. He gave the impression of smiling behind his mask.
“But he also had unexpected assistance to redirect my attack…”
He took one step forward. His attention had zeroed on Pixie-Bob, so heavy and intense that Toki could almost feel it like a physical thing. Pixie-Bob froze.
Toki didn’t.
Toki couldn’t, not after losing so much the last time she had let shock and fear rob her of her ability to act. She didn’t let herself have time to think. She just warped between All For One and the other woman, and prepared to stand her ground.
The S-ranked villain tilted his head, his attention shifting from Pixie-Bob to Toki; and then, terrifyingly, Toki felt his focus sharpen.
“Well, well,” All For One said, slowly, looking pleased. “I expected you to have run, but what do we have here?”
That was probably how rabbits felt when a wolf suddenly looked at them.
It wasn’t a battlefield instinct or even a feeling. All For One’s attention felt heavy and suffocating, like sudden pressure stopping Toki’s lungs from expanding and making her throat dry. Adrenaline and cortisol floored her brain, drowning out every thought process that wasn’t terror. Cold sweat broke on her back. Her heartbeat stuttered and then rocketed up frantically like a trapped animal trying to claw its way out. It felt like being dropped in tar.
It took all of Toki’s fourteen years of training to curb the visceral, instinctive need to flee.
When she had warped there five seconds earlier, Toki had had the vague idea of taking care of the League while All Might was taking care of All For One. But now her mind felt empty; she was just very small and scared in a way she hadn’t been since she was eight, watching two titans tear apart a city block in their destructive fury.
She bit her tongue so hard she tasted blood.
Unexpectedly, the sharp pain grounded her. It didn’t stop her from wanting to throw up, from wanting to run, from wanting to freeze and close her eyes and pray very hard that the predator would look away and not notice her, please, please don’t look at me please I don’t want to die—
But the pain grounded her enough to breathe. Enough to close her hands into fists before the tremor in her fingers could become a full-body shiver. Enough to look at the monster head-on… And to raise her chin defiantly.
“The warper,” All For One said with undisguised delight. “Quantum, or rather Toki Taiyōme! Did you know, when you were a child, I personally went looking for you?”
Well, that was some brand-new nightmare material, thank you.
“Your Quirk is so evolved,” All For One marveled. “So precise and yet so fast. A self-warp Quirk, with all the advantages of teleportation with none of the hindrances. My own warping Quirk isn’t nearly so elegant. On top of only being able to warp over short distances, I can only bring people to me or away from me, and only if I am already familiar with them. Kurogiri’s Warp-gate was artificially made of four Quirks, one of those being a teleportation one, and his gates require precise coordinates to open. But yours… oh, yours is truly a wonderful thing to behold.”
He took one step forward.
“I think I will take it for myself,” he purred, exuding satisfaction.
Oh, gods. Oh shit. Oh, fucking shit.
For a fraction of a second, Toki wildly considered running.
It was just common sense. She wasn’t All Might. She knew that she had very little chance of defeating All For One; to be honest, no chance at all, probably. Running was a normal reaction. Gods, she was terrified. She was terrified… but she could feel it heating up, coalescing into terrified fury and just plain fury.
The rage was late to hit, but when it did, it was like being submerged in pure mercury.
Take her Quirk? Fuck no. No way. It was her Quirk. It was her life. It was her power, and nobody could take that from her. The dread and the anger caught fire like gasoline. Blood was pounding in her ears. A growl was crawling up her throat. She bared her teeth at him.
No, she wasn’t All Might. But if they were to face each other on a battlefield… fuck, Toki wouldn’t run. It wasn’t who she was anymore. Maybe she would die but she would go down swinging and rip out his spine if she had the chance. She would kill him like she had killed Beros. She wasn’t afraid of getting her hands dirty anymore.
Ignore every instinct to flee. Remember: you are a monster too.
Toki stood her ground. So what if this villain was a being of legend with more Quirks than Toki had even met people in her entire life? She would not curl up and die. She would fight to her dying breath; she would claw out his eyes, rip out his throat, and go down screaming, scratching, snarling. She wouldn’t give up. Fuck that guy for creating Shigaraki. Fuck that guy for creating the Nomu. Fuck that guy for having killed so many people, for wanting to kill so many more. Fuck that guy for hurting her friend All Might, and for putting in danger this world she was part of.
Fuck him. Toki Taiyōme was no meek rabbit.
“It’s my Quirk,” she snarled. “It’s mine, and you can’t have it.”
oOoOoOo
When she would think back to this, Toki would realize that this was the moment when she started digging her grave.
Everything that would happen after would be a consequence of the choice she made there: not just to stand her ground, but to spit in All For One’s face, to answer his assertion of superiority with her own declaration of war. Toki didn’t do it because it was heroic. She did it because she was afraid, she was angry. She didn’t just do it because she was scared of getting hurt. She did it because, from somewhere deep in her heart, she already wanted to hurt him for what he had done.
But of course, she didn’t know that, at the moment. Neither did All For One. He thought that her show of defiance was empty, born out of fear and nothing else. He laughed. He took another step. Toki bent her knees, ready to dodge, to attack, to fight…
And then All Might emerged from a collapsed building with a roar, jumping right back at them.
“Oh, oh.” All For One didn’t seem very alarmed, but there was careful consideration in his words as he watched All Might approach. “It’s time for you to leave, Tomura. I’ll join you shortly with a new warp Quirk.”
Shit, the League! Toki had managed to forget them. It was the best time to attack them, Kurogiri and Dabi were both unconscious…!
All Might landed with a punch. All For One blocked. He riposted with another attack that made the ground tremble and wind blast everyone away, but this time Toki was ready; she jumped toward the League.
She tried to grab Kurogiri first because he was their escape plan; but tendrils of dark energy launched themselves from AFO’s fingers, and Toki had to hastily skittle back to not be impaled. She couldn’t let it touch her!
Some tendrils halfheartedly tried to grab her, but Toki realized that she hadn’t been their main target. They stabbed into Kurogiri’s torso instead, making him seize and jerk even unconscious; and then his Quirk forcibly activated, a dark gate opening behind him.
Toki repressed a shudder at the feeling of wrongness.
All Might came charging back, and All For One meet him with another deflagration that shook the earth. The two titans clashed with each other with deadly intent.
In another world, there would have been Bakugo there to delay the League, and to stop All Might from going all out. But in this world? There was no hostage to get back. In this world there was just the League… and as Toki rushed towards the villains with a snarl, they all jumped through the gate as if they had the hordes of hell after them.
(Considering the expression that Toki wore, it probably wasn’t inaccurate.)
Spinner and Shigaraki were already gone. Twice tossed Dabi in the portal like a sack of flour and jumped after him, screeching in terror. Toga was the one to try and delay Toki; the teenager rushed her, swinging a knife, her eyes narrowed in determination.
Despite herself, Toki slowed down, wary. Her stabbing was still very fresh in her memory.
Toga was fast, and her instincts were terrific. Of all the League, Toga was maybe the worst match-up for Toki because she was just so fast and slippery. Fighting hand-to-hand with Warp-Space meant appearing and disappearing to grasp your opponent where they didn’t expect it: but Toga always seemed to predict Toki’s movements. Somehow, even when Toki warped behind her, the villain always seemed to know where she was going to reappear…!
If she had more time, Toki would have found a way. She would have warped a whole block of space with Toga inside, maybe. But a few seconds were all Toga needed. Toki jumped up, Toga jumped back, and the teenager fell backward into the swirling gate just as Mr. Compress dragged the unconscious body of Kurogiri through it.
The gate vanished, and Toki nearly swore.
Damn it…! DAMN IT…! Once again, they escaped! Toki knew how dangerous they were, how even more dangerous they were going to be, and yet she had allowed them to leave! If she had stopped them… If she had caught them, then there would have been no danger of civil war, Tartarus break-out, alliance with the MLA, destruction at Jakku, or at Deika! She could have prevented a whole fall of dominos if only she had been faster!
“QUANTUM!”
Toki dodged before her brain had processed the alarm in All Might’s voice. She was lucky. The tendril of black energy stabbed into the ground where she had stood not a second earlier, vibrating with the strength of the impact, before retracting into All For One’s fingers.
Toki swallowed, throat dry, and then warped next to All Might.
No time to regret the near-miss with the League. They had bigger fish to fry, and they would stand a better chance if they fought together. To be honest, Toki felt rather reassured to have the Symbol of Peace at her side.
“You missed,” she snapped towards the masked nightmare facing them.
“We still have time,” All For One said, almost indulgently. “Don’t you want to run away, little mouse?”
Toki suddenly had a vivid fantasy of ripping off that stupid creepy mask and spitting in his face.
“Not a chance.”
All For One sighed as if she was unreasonable. His face shifted towards All Might, who was glaring at him, emitting a hatred so potent that Toki could almost feel its heat. All For One’s voice came, smooth and taunting:
“I only came to save Tomura. But if you insist on a fight, then I will. I should have expected this thirst for violence from you, All Might. In the past, your fists crushed so many of my comrades… As you were extolled as the Symbol of Peace, did you have a good view, from atop their sacrifice?”
All Might growled and attacked again. He snarled “DETROIT SMASH” as he hit, the impact’s deflagration blasting wind and dust in all directions; and Toki warped up in the sky, taping the side of her visor with her heart in her throat.
If there was a moment to use her A.I. in combat, it was now.
A.D.A. activated. Toki whispered her instructions. The cursor started blinking gold, running calculations, analyzing where Toki was looking, and predicting the amount of force she could warp.
Toki carefully didn’t look down at the destruction in the city.
She didn’t look at the wreckage around the battlefield. She didn’t look at the crushed buildings, she didn’t look down at the places that had caught on fire, at the firefighters and the paramedics rushing everywhere to try and get as many people out as they could. She didn’t listen to the screaming, the begging, the sirens, the panic, the desperate pleas. She didn’t think of how many people were caught in the crossfire, how many people were dead, and how many people would still die before the end of this fight.
She couldn’t afford to think about it.
A.DA. was blinking gold in the corner of her HUD when Toki warped back. All Might and All For One were still tearing out each other like rabid animals. The whole battlefield was ravaged and utterly destroyed, and the hits kept coming.
It was fucking terrifying.
Pixie-Bob, at the edge of the battlefield, was doing her best to contain the damage, but Toki could see from above how massive the shockwaves were and how powerfully the ground shook. The battlefield was Ground Zero, a massive crater of flattened earth in the middle of the city, expanding with every shockwave blasting rubble around. Massive debris had flown away and crashed in the surrounding buildings in a heap of rocks and concrete. There were fires, and there was screaming. It looked like a warzone.
How could they hit so hard and keep going?! How could they survive each other’s attack?! Toki knew that if she jumped in the middle of that, she would be dead in seconds. All her strength came from her ability to evade the attacks nobody could defend against. But this… This…!
Toki darted right and left, trying to attack, dodging rubbles and flashes of energy that All For One tossed in her direction almost as if it was an afterthought. He was trying to grab her more than he was trying to hit her; maybe he needed a certain duration of contact to rip out someone’s Quirk? But even All For One’s distracted attacks were more than enough to keep her away, to keep her from getting too close. Her HUD was blinking, the equation ready, and Toki couldn’t get a single hit in…!
She had rarely felt so outclassed. All Might was a hard fighter, brutally fast and brutally dangerous in a way that shocked even Toki a little because it was so far beyond human it was hard to register as a real person doing it. But All For One was matching him punch for punch, blasting air and boiling hot energy, blinding light, crackling lightning, sizzling red plasma. Powerful shockwaves were thrown, trying to carve up the city like the first attack; but each time All Might blocked, even if it cost him. Steam was starting to rise from his body.
How was he still standing? How was he still fighting?!
Toki couldn’t find an opening; she couldn’t even approach close enough to make a difference. It felt like being back in Jehda, but about ten times worse. All For One flicked away her Warp-Blasts like they were nothing. His firepower was insane. A glancing blow from him (or from All Might because gods, flickering carelessly could put her so easily in the crossfire!) could snap her like dry spaghetti.
And All Might was still holding his own! The power it too, the strength unleashed there… Toki could feel it down to her bones like electricity saturating the air. Was this One For All? Was it the power of an eight-generation Quirk, in a world where Quirks had only existed for six generations at most?
This was bigger than Toki.
This was too big for her, this was a fight of gods-like warriors, of superpowers coming from over a century of accumulated strength. She was only human; she couldn’t fight this….!
But she couldn’t leave Yagi there alone. She couldn’t run away knowing she was leaving someone behind to die.
That was only human, too.
She kept on circling, avoiding All For One’s attacks and desperately trying to find an angle. Attacking from behind didn’t work. Wait, wasn’t he blind behind his mask, in canon? He didn’t seem to have blind spots, somehow. Attacking him from behind wouldn’t work.
She needed to time her attack with one of All Might’s, so they could hit at the same moment, and combine their strength.
The fight was too fast paced for her to use Scalpel. She needed to use Warp-Force. If only she found an opening…. She just needed one opening, one good punch with all the strength of gravity behind it…!
And worse, All For One was talking. He was starting to pant, but still, condescending smugness dripped from every syllable as the villain taunted the hero.
“So single-minded, All Might. Do you really have the moral high ground, you who have wrecked so much destruction? Did it feel righteous, because your opponents dared to not be on your side?”
“Shut up! SHUT UP! You always toy with people like this… You break them. You steal from them. You destroy them. You take advantage of them and exploit them, treating them like playthings! I cannot FORGIVE IT!”
And suddenly, several things happened simultaneously.
All Might’s left hand clenched on All For One’s wrist so hard that Toki heard the bones creak, grabbing him into place for an incoming punch. Toki saw her opening and armed her own fist, heart in her throat, thinking fast. All Might’s punch was coming…
… Toki warped behind All For One with all the gravity under her, stretching Warp-Space like an elastic band to draw all the kinetic energy packed in the Earth. A.D.A. was blinking the equation in her HUD, the diagrams, all she needed to pull; and Toki warped with the force exerted by forty tons of dirt and rocks pulled towards the center of the planet at nine point eight meters per second, EC = ½ M ´ V² and then divided by nine point eight meters per second for the strength of gravity re-exerting itself upon reentry in this dimension, and…
Toki slammed her fist under All For One’s ribs just as All Might punched the villain’s face. Earth exploded outward as if a bomb had gone off, tons of rock briefly freed from gravity rocketing towards the sky before crashing back down.
Caught between the strength of a Detroit Smash and roughly one hundred and eighty-three tons of force, the villain’s body bent in two with a sick crunch.
All For One hadn’t expected it, clearly. His head was punched back, his torso was thrown sideways; his spine creaked ominously, and Toki felt at least one rib give. What the hell, one rib?! That strength could have crushed a tank like an empty milk carton, what the fuck was this guy made of?!
No time to freak out about it. All For One crumbled with a wheeze, and all the breath was driven out of his lungs. Toki jumped back, her heart thundering wildly in her chest.
For a second there was silence.
The villain’s chest was rising in short, shocked gasps, while he was lying limp on the ground.
Toki’s ears were ringing. She felt like a live wire, thrumming with barely contained manic energy. At that moment, in the heat of the battle and the terror of the fight, there was no past and no future, only this second and then the next, and betting your whole existence on it. It was dizzying. It was terrifying. It was electrifying. Toki had to clench her hands into fists to stop them from trembling.
All Might was panting, standing over his enemy. He hadn’t lost his buffed-up appearance yet, but it was cutting close, steam rising steadily from his body. His face looked thinner and more angular; the buffed-up appearance granted by his Quirk slowly fading away. There was red at the corner of his mouth as if he had coughed up blood. His hair was a mess.
Shit, Toki had never seen him so beat up, not even after Jehda.
“You,” All For One breathed.
Both Toki and All Might tensed as All For One slowly straightened into a sitting position. He coughed, and it rattled wetly in his chest, but he seemed otherwise completely fine. There wasn’t even blood on his shirt. It was a little terrifying because that had been Toki’s strongest punch, and yet it didn’t seem to faze him at all.
Worse… All For One was smiling.
His ugly mask had been pulverized under All Might’s fist. His face was a ruined mess of scar tissue; he didn’t have a nose, and he didn’t have eyes, just scars everywhere. But he had teeth. He had a blinding smile on them, all perfectly white and regular. Somehow that was creepier than if he had had fangs.
He was smiling, and his face was turned toward Toki.
“You,” he repeated, something like incredulous glee in his voice. “Oh, this is a surprise. This feat was no mere warping.”
Toki didn’t allow herself to freak out at the idea of being the target of his attention… But this had the unfortunate side-effect of triggering her snarky persona, switching on like a defense mechanism. Without any input from her brain, she drawled:
“Well, I’m no mere warper, Evil Potato Face.”
The villain’s smile briefly flickered with annoyance, before turning into a grin. Toki’s insolent snarl froze on her face. A chill of foreboding ran along her spine.
All For One was laughing.
“No wonder you seem so worked up about something, All Might! Of course, this must be nostalgic for you, isn’t it? This is why you’re parroting the speech from the previous holder of One For All, the one who chose you and gave you your Quirk… Nana Shimura. Ha! Did you pick a successor that reminded you of her? How sentimental!”
It took a second for Toki to understand. Why was All For One talking about All Might’s successor? He hadn’t met Midoriya. He couldn’t know about Midoriya, with the care All Might and Toki had both taken to hide the boy. Then who did he believe to be…
Oh. Oh, no.
Toki swallowed. Next to her, Yagi draw in a sharp breath. All For One’s blind face was still turned towards her, grinning, and she fought to keep the dread off her face even as she felt the beginning of more panic creep up her throat.
He thinks it’s me. He thinks I’m the Ninth.
Shit.
Notes:
ARE YOU SCREAMING YET ?!?!
Fucking love how Toki, shiny warper with a big mouth and an even bigger attitude, is so great at making people drew completely wrong conclusions about her. I'm thinking Nedzu, Endeavor, even All Might watching Quantum crash in their lives and immediatly thinking "oh she's a spy" "oh she can't possibly be Toki" or "oh she must want revenge", and later having to recalibrate their expectations.
And then there's AFO, who's taking it to whole other level.
The next chapter is going to be just as intense!!!!!!! Be prepared !
------------------------------------
Anyway, i'm anticipating some questions, sooooo...
Why two distinct locations? Why not Kamino for both the warehouse and the hidout, like in canon?
Well, because the League originally went to the bar... then their spy in Yuei told them Hitoshi had a panic button. So they freaked out, removed the button, and then moved elsewhere. They only other hideout Shigaraki knew was in Korusan, so they went there.
Logical.
Also, since Horikoshi likes to name places after Star Wars planets, the district of Tokyo where the League has their hidehout is named "Korusan" after the planet Corusant!Also, and unexpected consequence of the League hideout being in Korusan and the Nomu hidehout in Kamino was that Gran Torino couldn't join the fight because it's too far away.
Why the change in the compositions of the team attacking the warehouse and the hideout?
First change was Best Jeanist. Since i placed the hideout in Tokyo, and it's Best Jeanist's city, then it would make no sense for Best Jeanist to go elsewhere.
Second change was the Wild Wild Pussycat. In this universe they are all alright and they all felt like they need to make up for the summer camp, so they all volonteered to participate. Ragdoll was of course the perfect scout. And PixieBob and her Earth Flow was a better option than Jeanist to restrain the Nomu.
Third: X-Less. He's only mentionned in the anime as participating in the raid, but in the anime he was with All Might's team and not Jeanist. I thought "well since the Number Three hero isn't at the warehouse, they need additional firepower" and shuffled X-Less with the Kamino team.
Fourth: Hayasa-sensei. Well he was here and he had a role, as an underground hero, which was to evacuate the victim while the limelight heroes were wrecking shit up, soooooo... yeah he had to be at Korusan.
Here is a reminder that this fic has a Discord server !
Here are some memes for the chapter! Thanks Kirumi =)
[LINK]
[LINK]
[LINK]
[LINK]
[LINK]
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/image111.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/image011.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/image211.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/girl-a10.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/image310.jpg){kind=link}
Chapter 56: The Kamino battle
Summary:
“The shockwaves until now were to wear you out, not kill you,” All For One continued bragging. “It took longer than expected, I’ll admit. But this wasn’t wasted time. This battle will burn into so many peoples’ memories. People who lost their loved ones because you weren’t strong enough to stop me. Take a good look at the wreckage you caused!”
“At the wreckage I caused?” Yagi bit out. “Did you suddenly develop amnesia?!”
“I was simply answering your violence in kind. I would have been happy to just talk.”
“Yes,” Yagi hissed, looking murderous. “I would have liked a battle of wits, too, but it’s a shame you came unarmed.”
Oh, good one.
Notes:
THIS IS IT PEOPLE !!!
Are you screaming? I am screaming.
Sometimes when i'm write i'm like:
Me, running through the field while holding a stick that's on fire: WHO CARES ABOUT CANON ANYWAYAnd sometimes it's like:
Me, crying as I watch AFO's speech for the fifth time in a row: I know I'm tweaking what he says anyway but I need to follow what canon said or else i'll die
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
THE KAMINO BATTLE
All For One thinks I’m All Might’s successor. He thinks I’m the Ninth holder of One For All.
It was insane. It didn’t make sense. Had he truly mistaken her Warp-Force for super-strength? Hadn’t he realized it was just warping, just augmented and— yeah, of course he thought it was One For All. For heaven’s sakes, a few months ago Toki had even thought to herself that with her new heart and A.D.A., it was like three Quirks stockpiled together. Of course the Big Bad would come to the exact same conclusion.
Shit, shit, shit. Toki opened her mouth to blurt out the truth, to say he was delusional, to say it wasn’t her, to get this apex predator’s dangerous attention away from her at all cost… and no sound came out.
She couldn’t do it.
If she said it wasn’t her, then he would look for someone else. He would look for a child with All Might’s power, and he would go after them.
He probably already suspected a student in Yūei to be the successor. How long until the clues fell in place, and he guessed it was Midoriya? Maybe he even already had him in his sights. Then he would come after the boy, and… Sure, Midoriya was the protagonist and he had Main Character Immunity. But this world wasn’t a shōnen manga. It was the real world, and in the real world, an evil murderer wanting to kill a fifteen-year-old boy was not good.
Toki couldn’t do it. She couldn’t throw a teenager to the wolves to save her own skin. Next to her, All Might was frozen, probably thinking the same thing as she did. Toki briefly touched his wrist to dissuade him from interjecting, not taking her eyes off the enemy. When she spoke, her voice was even and steady.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
But she had been silent too long, betraying the fact that she at least knew something, and she was painfully aware of it. As she expected, All For One chuckled.
“I don’t believe you. I don’t even need to use my lie-detection Quirk for this!”
Oh, gods, he had a lie-detection Quirk. Great. Fantastic. This day was just getting better and better. All For One looked pleased with himself.
“Your haste to rush to All Might’s help betrayed you. As for his choice, oh, of course, it makes perfect sense! You are similar to her, aren’t you? Nana Shimura…”
“Don’t you dare sully my mentor’s name with your filthy mouth,” All Might snarled.
“Why not? She was a woman of no skills whose ideals got ahead of her. She was an embarrassment to me, the one who created One For All. Do you want me to tell you how she sniveled and cried as she died?”
“ENOUGH!”
All Might primed his arm for another punch, All For One’s arm twitched, and Toki let out a shout of alarm— but it was too late and something exploded violently.
The deflagration was huge, deepening the crater that the battlefield had become, even briefly blinding Toki as she warped in the sky to avoid the concussive blast. Fuck, how many of more surprises was All For One hiding?! Each time it was like a massive bomb, making the ground shake and buildings collapse. It was superhuman and he tossed out those attacks like candies! How much more could Toki dodge?
How much more could All Might take?!
This shockwave hadn’t been the worst, but at point-blank range, it had been enough to send All Might flying in the sky like a ragdoll. Toki warped in his trajectory and snatched him mere seconds before he impacted a news helicopter circling the fight. Fuck, that had been close, too close.
“Focus!” she whispered urgently as she warped them both on the ground. “He’s goading you! Don’t fall for it, he’s trying to get inside your head!”
“I know,” All Might growled. “He did it last time too.”
He looked at Toki and she jolted back in shock when she realized how hard he was panting. Part of his face had lost its buffed-up appearance, revealing sunken cheeks and gaunt features. The wisps of steams rising from his body were bigger. Some parts of his costume were hanging limply on a torso that had lost its musculature. He looked halfway All Might and halfway Yagi, and Toki realized with a nauseating lurch of horror that he only had a few good hits in him before pooping like a sad balloon animal.
It was too fast! He shouldn’t be so close to his limit yet!
But then, Toki realized that he had been fighting Nomu all day yesterday, hadn’t he?! Which meant that All Might had already been tired before this fight. And this fight had all the raw power of a nuclear strike. Of course it was draining All Might’s strength quickly.
In this world, Yagi had two lungs, and a longer time limit. But maybe it wasn’t enough to make a difference. Or maybe he had just used it as an excuse to push himself harder. Now, with how things were going, in just a few hits… He would be done.
“Quantum,” All Might whispered. “What he said…”
“I know,” she cut him off. “I already noticed it. You’re not as subtle as you think you are.”
I know who your successor is. I know who your student is, the one whose Quirk is so eerily similar to yours, who you care so much about. I know who All For One really wants.
But we are not giving him Midoriya.
All Might held her eyes for a second, then bowed his head. He knew what she was suggesting they do. He knew how incredibly dangerous it was; and yet, he didn’t have any solution.
There was no solution. There was only the fight, even if it seemed a hopeless one.
No. Toki mentally berated herself. It wasn’t hopeless. This wasn’t the canon world. Things were different, she had changed things.
In canon, this had been All Might’s last stand because All Might had been alone. Heroes had cleared the field and ran distractions, but the bulk of the fight had been shouldered by All Might alone because All Might was always alone, and people were used to never giving him any support.
The idea that standing alone at the peak was the only way to be strong… This was what Toki had been chirping away, day after day, ever since starting her hero work.
Maybe some people thought it admirable to be able to achieve victory on your own. But Toki saw it as a sign of failure. A lack of trust from All Might, in the people he saved; a lack of trust from the other heroes, in All Might himself who didn’t let them prove themselves, so they didn’t even try. Toki didn’t want to be a hero nobody trusted. The individual could not achieve anything by themselves. They couldn’t raise themselves, save themselves, nor change the world by themselves. People needed to reach out to each other. That was why they lived in a society, not in isolation in the jungle or the mountains. They were not meant to be alone.
By being the only one to carry the mantle of the Symbol of Peace, All Might had shielded everyone else from the darkness. But this wasn’t meant to last. Bringing out the light wasn’t a one-person task. Nobody was meant to be alone, even those who could bear it.
This was what it meant to be human. It meant being able to take an empty world and fill it with each other. That was how they could take the bones of an empty universe and forge a warm hearth fire humanity could use to keep back the night.
This was what it meant to be human. To face the monster and to say no, it won’t run. I may be afraid, but I am not alone.
Yagi and Toki, or rather All Might and Quantum, both faced All For One.
They could win. They had to win. It was possible; hell, it was even probable. All For One didn’t look completely unscathed either, Toki couldn’t help but notice with some relief. His ugly mask had been pulverized. There was dirt all over his clothes, and specks of blood on his collar. He stood more carefully, mindful of his broken rib. His breathing was deeper and wetter. He wasn’t in as bad shape as All Might, on the surface, but he was still injured.
Now, if Toki could injure him more…
Well. Only one way to know. Toki taped the corner of her HUD once again, and a golden cursor started blinking. Now, she couldn’t say her instructions out loud, but if she stared intently at her target, A.D.A. would pick up her intentions and then…
She couldn’t use Warp-Force. Well, she could, but it wouldn’t help. All For One had withstood a Detroit Smash, and Toki couldn’t unleash a more powerful concussive force. But Warp-Force wasn’t the only weapon in her arsenal. She had another, a far deadlier one. A move that had already taken out All Might once, and that could hopefully take out someone just as strong as All For One. If it worked.
Gods, it had to work.
“You didn’t expect me to figure it out, didn’t you, All Might?” All For One said smugly. “I knew you had to look for someone to pass on One For All in that ridiculous school, but I expected you to pick a student, not a teacher. I wonder, is it because you knew you were running out of time? Did you know that you wouldn’t live long enough to see those children graduate?”
“He really likes to talk, doesn’t he?” Toki muttered.
It made All For One twitch, as if annoyed by her refusal to cower. But it was too late now. Toki’s fear had gone from petrified stillness to manic babbling. Keigo would have been better at firing quips and dropping puns, but hey, Keigo wasn’t there. Instead of his witty one-liners, AFO would have to settle for Toki and her rudeness.
“I can’t fault your choice!” All For One continued. “Warp-Quirks are so elegant and so useful. Such a contradiction with heroism, to have a Quirk allowing you to run away and nothing else! But running won’t save either of you now. I’ll kill you today, All Might, and then I’ll take back that Quirk from your successor.”
“He really does like to talk,” All Might stage-whispered at Toki.
She snorted, loudly, with a hint of hysterical laughter. Her heart was beating so hard she could feel it in her throat; she didn’t know whether she was snarling or grinning, but she felt crazed, terrified, furious, and euphoric all at once.
All For One twitched in annoyance again. This time, it crept into his voice.
“Did you pick a young top hero because you didn’t want to follow in your mentor’s footsteps and leave an untrained student behind, All Might? How shameful. Nana Shimura would roll over in her grave if she knew how pathetic you became… Oh, right, I completely forgot I didn’t leave you enough of her to bury. My mistake.”
All Might tensed, the smile sliding from his face. A growl rumbled low in his throat, promising murder and violence. Toki held her breath.
This was going to be a fight to the death, wasn’t it?
They were cornered. If they left All For One in any state to fight or just to plan a fight in the future… He would come back and kill them. Kill All Might first, and then kill Toki, and take her Quirk, and use it to kill people…
“Do you hate me, All Might?” the villain asked conversationally. “I hate you too. You took so much from me. That’s why I want you to die screaming, just like your mentor. I’ll give you the ugliest, most gruesome death I can.”
Dark energy and red sparks fizzled around the villain’s arm, power gathering, a low buzz of electricity vibrating in the air. Shit, it was going to be another shockwave, and a big one this time!
“But let’s stop talking about emotions and start talking about reality! Springlike Limbs, Kinetic Booster times four, Strength Enhancer times three, Multipliers, Hypertrophy, Rivet, Air Walk, and Spearlike Bones… You look tired, All Might. Do you think you can take this and walk away unscathed?!”
Yeah, no. Toki just had to look at the bone protuberances and the canon-like appendages growing on All For One’s arm to know it was trouble.
“The shockwaves until now were to wear you out, not kill you,” All For One continued bragging. “It took longer than expected, I’ll admit. But this wasn’t wasted time. This battle will burn into so many peoples’ memories. People who lost their loved ones because you weren’t strong enough to stop me. Take a good look at the wreckage you caused!”
“At the wreckage I caused?” Yagi bit out. “Did you suddenly develop amnesia?!”
“I was simply answering your violence in kind. I would have been happy to just talk.”
“Yes,” Yagi hissed, looking murderous. “I would have liked a battle of wits, too, but it’s a shame you came unarmed.”
Oh, good one.
All For One looked annoyed. Toki couldn’t blame him. She didn’t know where and when Yagi had learned to trash-talk his opponents, but it was great. Much better than their heart-to-heart in Jehda.
“I’ll teach you some respect, All Might. Now, I am done playing. In order to kill you, I’ll use the ultimate combination of Quirks!”
The arm had finished shifting. It was now big and monstrous, bigger than All For One himself, with flesh and bones and metal and chunky red crystals interwoven to form something that looked halfway a canon and halfway a closed fist. Toki could feel the air depressurizing, the electricity rising.
Shit.
This was going to be a big shockwave, maybe even bigger than the one that had torn the city! Toki grabbed All Might’s arm, ready to warp them away to dodge…
“Oh?” All For One smirked, aiming at them. “Can you really accept running away? Don’t you have people to save?”
All Might tensed, and Toki froze. The malice in their enemy’s voice, this triumphant glee… Oh, no.
She knew what was behind them even before turning.
It wasn’t an angle of the battlefield that Pixie-Bob was covering. One of the buildings had been pulverized. Trapped in the rubble, half hidden behind a collapsed wall, was a woman who was staring at them with terrified eyes. Mount Lady was climbing the debris to reach her, but she was still too far away.
Keigo could have caught both with his feathers, but Toki was just a warper. In the span of one heartbeat, she could only pick one location. She could only save one person.
The civilian couldn’t move, Mount Lady wouldn’t be fast enough, and All Might wouldn’t dodge because that was the only way he could save both. None of them would escape this. None of them could run away. Three targets, one heartbeat to move. It was up to Toki, and she could only pick one.
And then, in a blinding flash of clarity, she suddenly realized that there was a fourth target on this battlefield.
“I’ll take away from you everything you protected until now!” All For One exclaimed with sick glee.
He struck.
The shockwave was massive. It was at least twice as strong as the one that had torn Kamino apart. Toki knew, she just knew, that nobody could survive a hit head-on. Nobody except All Might, and even then, it would hurt. It would hurt so badly that he wouldn’t be able to walk away from this unscathed, it would drain the remainder of his strength. This would be the beginning of end.
But All Might wouldn’t dodge, because that was who he was, that was what he did. He stood his ground. He saved people.
All Might would save Mount Lady and the civilian, even at the cost of himself, because he was a hero and heroes put their lives on the line. He would do it. Toki could trust him to do it.
And that meant that for half of a second, Toki had an opening.
She couldn’t let All For One touch her. She didn’t know if he needed prolonged contact to take a Quirk, but she didn’t want to find out. Any skin-to-skin contact meant becoming Quirkless and giving the enemy the ability to escape any prison and to bend the laws of physics to his will, which meant that any skin-to-skin contact meant death.
Fortunately, All For One wore clothes on his whole body, which meant Toki only had to avoid his hands.
Even more fortunately, Toki didn’t need skin to skin contact to use Scalpel. She only needed a touch, even an indirect one, as a way for her to direct her Quirk. She only needed one touch and a few seconds of focus…
Or the help of A.D.A.
Toki warped right behind All For One, crouched low, hands already reaching out. The A.I. in her visor, who had followed her line of sight during the previous three minutes, immediately highlighted in gold the specific target Toki had been aiming for.
All For One started to turn. He started to reach toward her.
But it was already too late. He had been too confident, bracing for a punch that he could survive while having no idea of what Quantum was actually capable of. He was turning, he was reaching, but it was already too late for him.
Toki grabbed his ankles and warped away.
With both legs cut at the knees, All For One fell flat on his face.
oOoOoOo
Toki warped right where she had last seen the trapped civilian and realized at the same time that the shockwave had stopped. She dropped the amputated legs behind a piece of rubble so as to not freak out the civilian. She could pick that up later.
Dust and smoke were still drowning the battlefield. Toki didn’t turn to look toward All Might. Instead, she grabbed the gaping civilian, trying to smile as reassuringly as possible:
“It’s going to be all right. I’m bringing you to safety. You’ve been very brave.”
The woman was crying. “All Might… Is he okay? And Mount Lady?”
“Of course,” Toki told the woman. “Hang on, just a few seconds.”
She had a good grip on the woman and warped away. She didn’t let herself look towards the battlefield, even if she dearly wanted to. Prioritize the rescue, Hayasa-sensei’s voice murmured in her head. Always prioritize the rescue.
She landed on the road where she had sent Gang Orca and the others what seemed like a lifetime ago. Now the road was crowded with paramedics and firefighters trying to douse a fire in a nearby building, and Toki nearly wrapped on top of an ambulance. That was convenient.
Toki put the injured woman in the arms of a befuddled paramedic and warped back in the next second.
She reappeared right where Mount Lady had been. The heroine had been slammed against a pile of rubble by the shockwave and was unconscious, but she was alive. It was proof enough that All Might had blocked the attack. Heart in her throat, Toki took the injured heroine in her arms and then looked up.
Toshinori Yagi was standing, gaunt and skeletal.
Oh, no.
Toki closed her eyes for half a second. Even if she had injured All For One, the price was so high. This was… This was exactly what she had wanted to avoid.
This was the nightmare scenario of the Kamino battle that she had tried so hard to not let happen. All Might being beaten. Yagi being hurt. The crowd losing faith in their protector. Everything Toki had done, she had done to avoid this outcome. Climbing the rankings, fighting Yagi, pushing him into semi-retirement, becoming a teacher at Yūei to watch his back… She had done everything to avoid this. To avoid the situation where he gave his all, where he gutted himself to protect the public, and it wasn’t enough.
Gods. She could have cried.
But she didn’t cry. Quantum couldn’t cry. The mission wasn’t over; the fight wasn’t over. Yagi’s secret had been revealed, and yes, it was terrible, but it didn’t matter, did it? As long as they still drew breath, they could figure this out. Yagi… All Might wasn’t dead. They could still win. They had to win, they had to live, and then Toki would figure out the rest afterward.
She warped Mount Lady exactly where she had warped the civilian, pushed her in the arms of the exact same baffled paramedic, and then warped back on the battlefield. She was breathing hard. How long has it been, five minutes? Ten?! Gods, she was fucking exhausted. It had to end soon.
All For One hadn’t gotten up yet, so Toki fixed her attention on All Might and immediately regretted it. He looked… He looked terrible.
He was thin and gaunt, chest heaving with labored breaths. His hair was a mess, covered in dust and spiking everywhere like a scarecrow’s, so different from All Might’s carefully slicked-back hairstyle. There was blood dripping down his chin. His hands were bloodied too, skin lacerated, fingers bent and twisted. The sleeves of his costume were torn, revealing thin arms faintly trembling with overexertion. His whole costume hung limply on his frame, at least three sizes too big for him in this weakened form.
“Shit,” she whispered. “I’m sorry.”
Yagi coughed and smiled at her. It was a little wobbly but genuine.
“Don’t be. I still have some strength in me. I’m saving it to cave his skull in.”
“I’ve been such a bad influence on you,” Toki marveled.
There was a growl and their attention snapped back to All For One.
The villain was getting up. His pants were soaked in blood, as was the ground under him; but he had somehow grown some sort of prosthesis out of bones and what looked to be, weirdly enough, big chunks of blood-red crystal. Or maybe crystallized blood, like Vlad King?
Whatever it was, it formed two rough appendages that only vaguely resembled legs. The cocoon grew from his knees to the ground, but also encased him almost to his waist. Toki was suddenly reminded of Stain’s prosthetics that doubled as life support, except that Stain’s exoskeleton had been relatively sleek, conceived to allow him to fight. All For One’s fakes legs looked more like tree trunks, or elephant feet. It had to be terribly heavy, and to consume a lot of energy to maintain.
When All For One took a step, it made the earth tremble.
Oh, he was pissed.
“Well done.” He was trying for smooth condescendence like he had before, but there was an undercurrent of pure fucking rage making his voice drop in a snarl. “You sacrificed your mentor to get one good hit? You’re already ahead of him. When he sacrificed his mentor, he didn’t manage more than to run away.”
The aura of fury around him felt like a storm cloud, dark and rolling, potent with lightning begging to be unleashed. Toki refused to be cowed. At this point, it felt like her tolerance for overpowered bullshit had raised exponentially.
She raised an eyebrow, channeling cocky Quantum at her best, projecting sleazy arrogance with everything she had. And then she winked at him.
“Yes, I’m pretty great, I know.”
At her side, she could see Yagi twitch with something that may be horror, or maybe incredulity.
It didn’t matter that All For One was blind and couldn’t see her wink. What mattered was the attitude. The absolute sheer fucking insolence. Hayasa-sensei would have an aneurysm.
All For One growled. If he had eyes, and looks could kill, Toki was pretty sure she would be dead. Oh, well. He had already wanted to kill her before. That didn’t change much. She could freak out about this when the adrenaline would drop.
“No matter,” All For One bit out. He took a breath and smiled, wide and sinister. He turned to All Might, “I’ve landed my own blow to you. Now your weak form is exposed, All Might! Your true self, hollow cheeks and sunken eyes, with none of the strength of the so valued Symbol of Peace. Now the world will see your weakness, your lies! The faith that the people so foolishly gave you… This is the first thing I’ll take from you.”
It was true. The helicopter news was still circling overhead. Toki’s heart sank.
All Might had prepared for his retirement. That had been the whole point of the fight at Jehda, of getting out of the ranking, of letting other heroes shoulder his burden. All Might was supposed to retire this year, because his two years after Jehda were up. The announcement would have probably come right after the Billboard Chart. And it was a good thing! The transition of power had been prepared. The fall of the Symbol of Peace wouldn’t be a cataclysm in this world…
And yet, it would still shake Japan.
All Might may not be the Number One anymore, but he was still a pillar of their society. A Symbol. For him to be weakened, unmasked on live television… It would shake people. They would lose some of their faith in him; they would lose some of their faith in the system.
But Yagi didn’t crumble.
He was still standing straight. His blue eyes glowed with defiance and determination. His hand closed on a fist near his heart as if ready to punch the villain again; and when he spoke, his voice carried, deep and unafraid.
“Even if my body rots and grows weak, even if you reveal this form to the world… I remain the Symbol of Peace. My heart, my determination… This is not something you can steal a single piece of!”
This was Yagi Toshinori, weak and maybe dying, with no muscles and no lies left: but this was All Might’s confidence, All Might’s courage, All Might’s faith.
He did not have the hero’s booming voice, but he did not need to. He exuded such an aura of determination, of steady confidence, that it felt almost as if was radiation his own light. He was blinding.
Toki stood straighter, too, as if this radiance was infectious.
All For One clicked his tongue with annoyance. Toki tensed, preparing for an attack. But instead, the villain smiled cruelly.
“Well, All Might. If you insist on claiming that I cannot rob you of your resolve, then maybe this will not hinder your determination either.”
He raised one finger, like a teacher asking for the attention of the class. With a jolt of fear, Toki realized what he was going to say, what he was going to reveal, what he was going to use to hurt Yagi, just like in canon…!
“Did you know that Tomura Shigaraki is Nana Shimura’s grandson?”
There was a beat.
Yagi’s eyes slowly widened. He was suddenly white as a ghost. All For One smiled, wide and satisfied, as if feeding from the horror he had inflicted on his enemy. He looked so smug, so delighted by Yagi’s pain.
“I kept thinking about what could break you,” All For One drawled. “You have no family, but Nana Shimura had one. The foolish woman tried to hide them. I killed her husband too fast… But she had a son, and this son had a child, Tenko Shimura. My prize. My pride and joy. I took him, I shaped him. I watched him as he murdered his own family, and then turned all his love and adoration towards me.”
Yagi shook his head, as if in denial. All For One laughed. Some of his anger seemed to peel away, replaced by a cruel, sinister delight. He’s enjoying this, Toki thought with disgust. Not just torturing Yagi but relieving the memories of hatching his plan, of concretizing it.
“And you didn’t know a thing! I made him, not a mere pawn, but my successor, molded after my desires and ambitions. His mind and his soul are mine. One day, I’ll also possess his body to reach higher levels of power. My student, my future self, carved from the flesh and blood of your beloved mentor.”
Toki flexed her fingers, preparing to attack again to shut him up. But All For One’s fingers twitched, too, red and black lines ready to emerge and strike, and Toki was suddenly excruciatingly aware that Yagi was frozen at her side.
If she moved to attack, then what if All For One attacked him?
Yagi wouldn’t be fast enough. He was too shocked, too horrified. If Toki left his side again to attack, what if All For One decided to use that opportunity to kill the weakened Yagi? The bastard loved monologuing, but even he wouldn’t pass up the perfect opportunity to murder his most hated enemy…
“Then, I created opportunities for you and Tomura to meet!” All For One continued gleefully. “How it amused me to know that you were fighting the only living relative of your beloved teacher! This was such a wonderful game. Did you smile with pride, when you defeated him, not knowing a thing?”
Yagi shook his head. His hands balled into fists; Toki noticed he was almost trembling.
“Lies,” he breathed. “It must be all lies.”
“It’s the truth. You realize it, don’t you? This is absolutely something I would do!”
Yagi was breathing faster, now. He wasn’t the kind to fall into a panic attack, but he looked gutted, horrified, destroyed. Toki grabbed his wrist and squeezed it, hard. She didn’t take her eyes off their enemy, glaring at him with so much hatred it was a wonder he wasn’t incinerated by it.
“Shut up,” she spat. “What kind of sick bastard would do that?!”
“A sick bastard who enjoy it,” All For One replied easily, smirking.
It felt like he was making a whole performance of it. Toki suddenly understood that it was exactly that. It was a performance, a show, aimed at Yagi but also at her. It was punishment for Yagi, a way to hurt him… but it was also a threat to Toki, spelling ‘this is what happen to my enemies’ in blood-red letters.
It was a warning of what was to come, if All For One believed her to be the successor. Hell, it wasn’t even an if, at that point. Not only did he believe her to be the Ninth, but she had also amputated his legs. All For One wasn’t going to let her go, even if by some miracle he realized she wasn’t the new holder of One For All.
All For One was letting her know that he would come for her loved ones. Toki had pissed him off. He wanted her dead. He wanted everyone she loved dead, or twisted so badly they would wish to be dead. Toki swallowed uneasily, clenching her fists.
Gods, Hinawa.
And not just her daughter, but all the people she considered hers, all the people she loved and wanted to protect. Keigo. Dad. Mihoko, Hitoshi, Neito, Melissa, Hayasa-sensei, everyone--
“Well, All Might?” All For One said smugly. “Where is your smile now?”
Son of a bitch. You know what? Fuck this.
This wasn’t about All Might making a last stand. This wasn’t about All Might being the fated power destined to defeat the bogeyman. There was no higher power, no fate, no mangaka deciding that the only person who could stand up to this monster was a hero of legend. This wasn’t a fairy tale. This was about a psycho recounting his crimes with glee to hurt the depowered, old, vulnerable Toshinori Yagi; and Toki was done with it.
She was a top hero. She wasn’t going to sit on her hands and wait for All Might to save her. She wasn’t a damsel on distress. She didn’t need a knight, she needed a sword.
“Why don’t you pick on someone your size?” Toki snarled.
He turned towards her; and she warped right into his face with a massive Warp-Blast. This was her fight, now.
The Warp-Blast wasn’t enough to hurt him, but it made him jump back, wary of the force she could unleash. His hand snapped toward her, trying to grab her shoulder; but Toki had already warped above. She didn’t have the time to focus on one body-part and hope A.D.A would guess her intentions, not if she had to watch out of his hands and his shockwaves, so she muttered ‘arm’ low under her breath and let A.D.A highlight it in gold on her visor. She dived into attack once more.
This time a shockwave was blasted her way, straight up. Less damage to the city, but the news helicopter circling the battlefield was sent careening into the night sky. Toki didn’t have time to spare more than a passing glance, hoping that the pilot would manage to regain control.
Keeping pace with All For One required complete focus.
He wasn’t very mobile, especially with his new legs (ah!) but he compensated for it by being unbelievably strong, constantly keeping her under wave after wave of rapid-fire attacks. One single instant of inattention and she was dead. Shockwaves, powerful blasts, strikes of lightning, walls of fire, spears of bones; every attack cracked the ground, every attack could crush her like a bug.
Toki’s power came from calculations and carefully measured use of resources, but All For One fought like All Might; like a force of nature. The air was dry with dust, the smell of smoke and ozone permeating the atmosphere as if a thunderstorm was going to break out. The sheer strength, the sheer power--
It was too fast paced to prepare a new Scalpel attack. Hell, Toki knew with absolute certainty that the number of heroes who could keep up with that speed could be counted on one hand. Damn, if only she had Keigo with her, to tag-team him, distraction and then attack, misdirection and swift take-down…! But she didn’t have Keigo, so she was going to have to do with what she had; and what she had was Yagi, who only had one smash left in him. It wouldn’t be enough. If she could only have more breathing room…
Then All For One suddenly tensed and dodged, quick as lightning; but even then, a monstruous fire tornado fire crashed onto him from the sky.
Reinforcement, fucking finally! Toki warped away just in time, reappearing next to All Might, crouching down and her heels skidding in the dust.
The explosion was massive. All For One must have thrown a shockwave to block the blistering heat and the hungry flames, but it wasn’t enough to snuff out the fire. Holy shit, the power was staggering. Inferno wouldn’t be able to create something like that, and Toki wildly reassessed the power level at play here.
Unfortunately, All For One survived. But still, when he jumped away from the pillar of fire, his suit was noticeably singed, and he looked very displeased.
Endeavor landed next to All Might, making the ground shake.
Lighter on his feet, but radiating the same level of lethalness, Meteor dropped from the sky right next to Toki. His hood was pulled up, shading his face, but his bloodthirsty grin seemed to gleam under the moonlight. He had lost his visor somewhere. His eyes were glowing in the shadows of his hood, like smoldering embers.
Then he saw All Might’s sorry state, and it wiped the smile clean of his face. Him and Endeavor both. Endeavor looked shocked, then incensed, almost as if he was going to start yelling indignantly right there and now. But Meteor… Toki was right next to him, and at this moment, she saw the calculation pass in his gaze.
For half a second there was something cold and dark in his expression, the intense focus of a predator seeing prey injured and vulnerable.
Toki shifted her stance. Meteor’s gaze snapped back to her. His expression smoothed back into casual smugness. With a lurch of horrified understanding, Toki realized where exactly she had drawn inspiration for her cocky Quantum persona.
“What took you so long?” she barked.
“Sorry,” her father drawled. “There was traffic.”
“Meteor,” All Might said, warily. Then, with a tiny bit of relief: “And Endeavor. Weren’t you both in Korusan? How did you get there so fast?”
“I sent them a taxi,” Toki chirped in.
Endeavor let out a low growl, like the rumble of a pissed-off dragon. He was still facing All For One, but his eyes were on All Might, taking in his bedraggled appearance, and he radiated so much horrified fury that his flames had nearly doubled in size.
“All Might. What the fuck is up with you?!”
“Language,” Meteor and Toki said at the same time.
They looked at each other in dismay. Yagi raised his hand to his mouth to hide a cough, and probably an amused twitch of his lips. Endeavor’s glare turned straight-up murderous.
“Interlopers,” All For One said with annoyance.
The brief second of levity vanished. All four heroes tensed, facing the threat.
Toki noted with some satisfaction that All For One looked worse for wear. There was dirt and dust and blood and sooth all over his once pristine suite. His mask was in pieces, with only the bottom still attached to his neck. With all the dust and smoke, it was hard to see, but he leaned weirdly to one side. Endeavor’s blast may have worsened his injuries. He had at least one rib broken, and probably some damage to his spine too. Also, his leg-shaped appendages had grown bigger and more cumbersome, reducing his mobility even more.
“I didn’t expect any more heroes to arrive so fast. You must have either abandoned the battlefield in Korusan… or you must have taken care of the Nomu in less than five minutes. That is very impressive. Worthy of the new Number One. But then, you received help too, didn’t you?”
His blind face turned to Meteor, and his smile widened. Toki barred her teeth and snarled, but Meteor only returned All For One’s gaze, eyes narrowed, face unreadable.
“What an unexpected shift in loyalties, Dragon Eyes. But then…” All For One turned to Toki, and he laughed, soft and low in his throat. “… but perhaps not surprising.”
Apparently Meteor didn’t like All For One looking at his daughter any more than Toki liked All For One focusing on her father, because his ember-like eyes flashed dangerously.
“Are we going to stand there and talk all night?”
“You’re right,” All For One agreed, voice dropping cold. “My revenge doesn’t concern you. Stay back, or you’ll be destroyed. All Might can’t save you anymore.”
Endeavor and Meteor made the exact same face of disgusted indignation at the idea of being saved by All Might. A small corner of Toki’s mind reassessed their romantic compatibility.
“Like I would need his help to turn you to ash, All For One,” Endeavor growled. “I am the Number One hero. And I’ll be the one to end you.”
“Yes, the new Number One,” their enemy drawled. “This is your chance to measure up to your old rival. Are you going to run away defeated now, All Might?”
Yagi took a deep breath.
Gradually, with steam rising from his body, his muscles swelled again. Slowly, slowly, like his body was gathering everything it had left; and yet, inexorably, like the existence of weakness was unthinkable. Steam and electricity crackled around him. The presence, the pure charisma that had made him into a Symbol, radiated from him like electricity saturating the air.
All Might was back.
“I apologize for this moment of weakness, Quantum,” he said. “Thank you for having my back.”
His voice wasn’t loud, but it was deep and growling, carrying far. The vibration made Toki’s hairs stand up on her nape. She could feel the threat radiating from him like a physical thing. All For One’s smile faded, his jaw clenching, his condescending smugness slowly receding into wariness.
All Might’s muscles weren’t completely back. Steam was steadily rising from his body. His hair was a mess. He was covered in grime and blood. His face hadn’t buffed-up and his smile was nowhere to be seen, revealing emaciated features and a glare so cold that even Endeavor seemed a little disquieted. But he radiated power, something so intense that it bordered on the otherworldly or the inhuman. Toki almost took a step back.
She had forgotten how fucking scary All Might was when he was pissed off.
“But I’m alright now,” he growled, low and dangerous. “And I am far from being defeated.”
They all attacked all at once.
oOoOoOo
All Might had never fought with Toki or Meteor, but ironically, he had fought against both of them at some point and so he guessed perfectly how they were going to attack.
Endeavor blasted massive streams of fire, somehow covering both long-range and short-range as he tried his best to absolutely fucking incinerate All For One. Meteor was darting in and out of his reach, pieces of rubbles and metal whistling through the air as they rained on their enemy with deadly force, the atmosphere bursting with invisible shockwaves as Psychokinesis crashed like a battering ram against every deflagration All For One tossed their way. Toki danced between the attacks, aiming for close-range. When All Might charged to get one good punch in, everyone parted like the Red Sea for the impact, before descending into a frenzy of attacks once more.
The battlefield was drowned in smoke and fire and raining rubble. It was blistering hot. Toki was parched, panting hard, the thunder of her heart drowning everything else. Fuck, she felt so alive, so terrified and elated and bloodthirsty all at once. It was exhilarating.
And All For One wasn’t smiling anymore.
He was hitting back at a frantic pace, emitting large-scale attacks almost constantly just to try to keep them at bay, blasting spear-like bones and harpoon-shaped crystals from his legs to desperately try to keep Toki from grabbing him again. He had taken to floating in the sky to compensate for his lack of mobility. Getting tossed around by the shockwaves seemed an acceptable price for him to pay to be able to dodge All Might’s next smash.
He knew that if any of them landed one good hit, he was done for. The others would rip him apart.
A.D.A. was still blinking gold in Toki’s visor. She was targeting All For One’s arms and he knew it, now, he was anticipating it. At one point he unleashed a massive shockwave all around him, blasting away all three of his other opponents… and when Toki warped right into his personal space to avoid the concussive force of the explosion, he turned and nearly grabbed her by the throat.
Even as he did so, knives-like bones exploded from his hand like shrapnel from a grenade.
Toki dodged the attack by millimeters as she warped, wrenching her head sideway to avoid getting stabbed in the face. But even then, when she reappeared at a safe distance, she knew he had gotten her. Her visor was cracked to hell; one of the shards had even pieced it, sinking deep in her brow; the blood streaming down her face completely blinded her right eye.
At least she fucking hoped it was the blood blinding her, and that her eyes hadn’t been hit.
She removed her visor hastily, letting it fall to the floor. Her hands were shaking. Fuck. No visor meant that A.DA. was down. It meant that the enhanced versions of both Scalpel and Warp-Force were out of commission.
As Toki climbed back to her feet, panting, there was a brief pause in the fight. After that last shockwave, everybody was circling the villain again, breathing hard, reassessing, looking for an opening. All For One kept them in his field of vision, tense and wary.
His smug confidence was gone. Now he was fighting for his life, and he knew it. There was red all over his chin and his shirt’s collar because he had vomited blood after being hit by one of All Might’s smash. He was wheezing with every breath and stood almost hunched over. Most of his skin was red, and the side of his face was awfully blistered. With the dust violently flying in the air, it must have felt like being flayed alive.
Three pieces of rubble that looked like thin steel bars were stuck in him, like arrow sticking out of the flesh of a hunted boar. He tore out two. The third one didn’t budge, so he just snapped it. Meteor had kept his enemy under a constant rain of weaponized debris; it was a small wonder that only three of his projectiles had found their marks.
Toki was faintly astonished that All For One was still capable of moving. He should have been killed ten times already. His resistance was inhuman.
But he was still moving. His suit was in tatters, one of his arms was covered in blood. His other arm, the intact one, the one Toki had been targeting all along, was transformed into a monstrous amalgamation of flesh, muscle, and crystals. He had been using it to punch back, and every impact made Toki felt like she was hit by a car, even at a distance. If Meteor’s Psychokinesis, All Might’s Smashes, and Endeavor’s Flashfire hadn’t mitigated the concussive blasts, they would all be long dead.
“T— Quantum,” Meteor barked. His eyes didn’t leave All For One. “Are you okay?”
“Yes,” she coughed. “I’ll get him next time.”
All For One turned his head in her direction. If he had eyes he would have glared; but as it was, he just bared his teeth. Toki noted with some satisfaction that he had lost a tooth. His voice was little more than a snarl.
“You may have taken my legs, you insolent child, but I won’t let you get close enough to try again.”
No shit. He must have noticed that Toki avoided direct hits. She had relied on All Might for distraction and support because, on her own, she simply couldn’t compete against a powerhouse like All For One. Her thing was evasion and quick takedown.
It was harder to manage when your opponent had been warned against it.
“You’re injured,” Endeavor growled, not looking at her. He was the closest, so he kept his voice low. “Your face, and your shoulder.”
Toki couldn’t feel a thing with adrenaline, but she winced anyway, cautiously touching her face. The shard that had struck her brow must have gone deep. It was pissing blood; she had to keep her right eye closed. Her depth perception was now shot.
Was she disfigured?! Gods, maybe. Those pieces of bones were big and sharp. If she hadn’t worn a visor, she would probably be dead or at least blinded. Fuck, considering the strength of the explosion, if she had been hit head-on, then the knife-like bones would be embedded in her skull.
Toki then looked down at her shoulder, and her eyes went huge went she saw the piece of bone embedded in her arm. She hadn’t noticed it before; but as she saw it, she suddenly could feel the agonizing burn. It was as big as a butcher knife, and it had gone through her muscle. Shit, she could see it poking on the other side.
“Yeah,” she said faintly. “That’s going to hinder my mobility, sorry.”
Endeavor frowned, briefly glancing at her. “You can step back.”
“Yes,” Meteor agreed, smiling ferally. “He’s not going to live for much longer.”
All the heroes were a little worse for wear. Meteor had had a close encounter with a shockwave and didn’t use his right hand anymore, probably dislocated or broken. Endeavor had nearly been impaled by those spear-like bones, and had a deep gash on his side and his leg.
All Might was the most injured. He looked just a few minutes away from deflating completely, and he had lost even more muscles. The sleeves of his costume were torn, revealing thin arms and the pale scars above his elbows where Toki had once amputated him.
But they were all standing. Toki wasn’t going to give up after a little scratch.
“No, don’t worry. I still have a few knifes up my sleeve.”
Endeavor paused. “I think you meant cards.”
“She does not,” All Might called from the other side of the battlefield.
“I do not,” Toki confirmed, pulling out a long knife from the hidden pocket in her sleeve.
She saw Meteor’s grin widen. Twirling the blade in her fingers, Toki bent her knees, ready to jump back into the fray. Fighting without using her left arm was complicated, but she could do it. It wasn’t even her dominant hand.
Besides… Even with her arm injured, Meteor’s wrist broken, Endeavor overheating, and All Might two seconds away from deflating… They were still collectively in better shape than their enemy.
They knew this, and All For One knew this too. That was why he was now focusing on unleashing indiscriminate large-scale attacks to do as much damage as he could, hoping that the shockwaves would reach the city and force his opponents to focus on that and not on him. But with three heavy hitters, they managed to block him without stopping their own attack. All For One was trapped. He looked wild and furious like a cornered animal.
“Well, this is an interesting alliance,” he spat. “All Might and Endeavor, fighting together. And Dragon Eyes… Meteor. Are you sure you’re backing the right side? You and I are very much alike, you know.”
Meteor barred his teeth at him: “Yes, I realize that.”
“Doesn’t that trouble you?”
“Why would it? I share most of my genome with sewer rats.”
Endeavor snorted, a quiet noise that only Toki heard. All For One gritted his teeth, and then insisted, his voice urgent and faster, with an undercurrent of mania. He had lost. He knew it. He was just stalling for time. Toki was standing back, but the three others were circling him, cornering him.
“But surely it disturbs you, doesn’t it? You don’t belong in their world. Don’t deny it. There’s too much darkness in your heart. Do you really think they’d still accept you if they knew your past? They’d be disgusted by you. You and I are the same, deep down. We hunger for freedom and power. At the end of the line… There’s nothing stopping you from being just as evil as I am!”
“Sure there is. I’m stopping me.”
“But in your heart you crave—”
“Honestly,” Meteor scoffed. “I crave sashimi right now and I’m not blowing up cities over it. Yes, I know murder is satisfying. However, I have decided to not murder people anymore, and I think that’s very sexy of me. Look at me. With a little self-restraint, you might have had what I have.”
All For One let out a wordless snarl of frustration. His focus swung between Meteor and Yagi, both flanking him and creeping closer and closer, both refusing to be discouraged by his words. Toki saw the exact moment where All For One zeroed on Endeavor, picking him as his next target.
“Endeavor. You think you’re so untouchable, now, with your new attack dog. But did you know that—”
Unlike All Might or Meteor, though, Endeavor had zero interest in listening to what All For One had to say.
“JET BURN!”
They all converged on All For One at once, like wolves going for the kill.
This time there was no holding back. All For One was fighting with a strength born of fury and desperation. Jagged red crystals burst from the ground; a massive shockwave blasted the battlefield with the strength of a freight train. It collided with Psychokinesis like a battering ram, and then a pressurized wall of flame that pulverized everything in its path.
Toki warped in front of All For One, in the way of All Might’s punch, knowing All For One had expected her to warp behind him; she sunk her blade in his ribcage for an inch before the ingrown red crystal blocked it, but Toki had already warped away…
Just in time for All Might’s fist to collide in All For One’s face like a locomotive.
“UNITED STATES OF SMASH!”
The shockwave of that impact blasted everyone off their feet.
oOoOoOo
In the end, Toki wasn’t sure who delt the final blow.
It was probably All Might, with that last punch. But everyone else had played their part. All For One’s right arm, the one with all the mutations to give it super-strength, was charred past recognition. The hand was little more than charcoal. All For One’s body was burned all over, red and blistered. The other arm was completely dislocated, crushed like an empty soda can. His crystalized fake-legs had fallen to pieces when he had been knocked unconscious, revealing bleeding stumps at his knees. The knife that Toki had sunk into All For One’s guts had been pushed deeper, like a spike hit by a heavy hammer, so viciously that it was probably nailing him to the ground. There was blood everywhere.
Honestly, Toki didn’t even know if All For One was going to survive this. She kind of didn’t want him to.
The battlefield was dark with smoke and dust. Toki was breathing hard. Her head was swimming a little. She sat down, because the only alternative was to collapse ungracefully and then pass out. She hoped she hadn’t lost too much blood. Head wounds hemorrhaged something crazy.
She tried to speak and had to try twice with how parched her throat was. The air was so hot that even her eyes and nose felt dry. When she managed to make a sound, her voice was barely a croak.
“Is he dead?”
Yagi, thin and gaunt, was standing above his enemy. His breathing was loud and labored. It rattled his lungs on every exhale. His right arm hung limply, broken and bleeding.
The last whisps of steam were escaping from his body. Toki knew he would never be able to call on his power reliably again.
“Inconclusive,” Yagi answered laconically. “Probably not. But definitely unconscious. Hopefully dying.”
Meteor let out a low swear. The last blast had sent him careening toward a pile of rubble and he must have landed painfully, because he was limping as he approached, holding his ribs with a wince.
“He’s still breathing?! Is there nothing short of decapitation that will stick?”
“And even then I would probably stick his head in a jar of salt,” Toki joked. “With a stake through his heart, just to be safe.”
Meteor snorted. Then his gaze turned calculating. “You know, it would be safer to kill him.”
“He’s unconscious,” Endeavor growled. “It would be murder. You can kill him in self-defense when he inevitably wakes up and try to escape.”
“Promise?”
“No. Shut up, Meteor.”
Still, Toki didn’t miss the fact that Endeavor gave both her and Meteor a quick once-over before bristly walking to Yagi. Of the four of them, Endeavor was the least injured. Go figure. That was what it meant to be a powerhouse. Everything that came close to him was incinerated. He wouldn’t have had to deal with shrapnel of bones.
Endeavor and Yagi started talking, voices low. They were less than three meters away from her, but Toki was too exhausted to try to eavesdrop.
There was annoyance but also gravity on Endeavor’s expression. His arms were crossed and he was glowering, but he didn’t seem as intimidating as usual. It took several seconds for Toki to realize that it was because Endeavor had turned off the flames. To avoid overheating, or out of consideration for Yagi, who was bare from his heroic mask too? A few months earlier Toki wouldn’t have envisaged the latter, but… Seeing Endeavor conferring lowly with Yagi without yelling, after fighting by his side without trying to upstage him… well. It forced her to reconsider her prejudices.
Urgh. Thank gods he was an ass. She wouldn’t be able to deal with it if she ended up liking Endeavor of all people. It was bad enough that Meteor was screwing him.
The smoke was starting to clear a little. Endeavor looked up, and then glared. Distantly, Toki could hear a news helicopter. Oh, good. It hadn’t been blasted to hell by AFO’s shockwave then.
“Meteor,” Endeavor called, raising his voice, “If you want to avoid journalists taking pictures, now is the time to leave. The visibility isn’t good enough yet, but it’s a matter of minutes.”
“Oh, good idea,” Toki blinked. “Wait, I’ll take you to a hospital.”
Her father made a face. “No need. There’s plenty of ambulances around. I’ll just have to pretend to be dying and find some gullible sucker to stich me up.”
“Dad.”
Meteor laughed, a rough sound full of warmth and exhaustion. He patted her hair one last time.
“I’ll be fine. I’ll find you later.”
Toki mumbled an agreement. Meteor raised his head, nodded briefly at Endeavor, and then stared at All Might. All Might stared back.
They didn’t talk. They didn’t move. There was tension between them: the weight of years of resentment and hatred. And yet… A silent understanding seemed to pass between them. Meteor inclined his head, turned on his heels, and vanished into the smoke like a ghost. It a blink, he had disappeared.
It was unfairly dramatic. It was also very cool.
Toki may be a little bit concussed.
“Quantum.” Yagi walked to her, his steps heavy. There was exhaustion etched in every line of his body. He looked… Well, in addition to looking like death warmed over, he looked deadly serious. “Quantum,” he said, very quietly. “After this… All For One will come after you. You’re his new target.”
“We were all instrumental into taking him down!” Endeavor bristled.
How did he still have the energy to rant and yell? Toki was ready to keel over. It wasn’t as bad as it had been after Jehda, but it was certainly ranking close second in her topmost exhausting fights. Shit, it probably hadn’t even been an hour since she had rescued Hitoshi. She felt as if it had been an eternity.
“It’s not that,” she sighed wearily. “All For One think I’m All Might’s student.”
She had almost said successor and had swallowed back the word at the last second. Yagi briefly glanced at Endeavor, as if uncertain; but Toki stood her ground. Yes, she was telling him. He was the Number One. Dickhead or not, he was the best line of defense she was going to have.
That strategy wasn’t a bad one. When she had been pregnant with Hinawa, Toki had shamelessly hung out around the Number One hero to have his protection. She wasn’t above doing it again with a different Number One. Besides, Endeavor had a personal stake in this mess, now. Toki’s family included Meteor.
“So?”
Toki swallowed. She glanced at All Might, and then avoided his gaze, looking straight at Endeavor instead.
“So, he gave us a speech about hunting down All Might’s mentor, killing her, killing her husband, stealing her grandchild, raising him to be a villain, making him murder his own family… with the end goal of wearing him like a skinsuit when he gets bored of watching him commit evil acts. All For One did all that just to destroy this woman’s life and everything she loved. Because he’s obsessed with All Might, and she was his teacher.” She swallowed. “And now he thinks I’m his student.”
Endeavor stared at her. There was no incredulity, no objection. He just stared, face suddenly pale and unreadable, and she knew he got it. What it meant, and for who.
She averted his gaze and looked at the ground, blinking very hard to clear her vision. The right side of her face was sticky with coagulated blood. She was so tired that she shouldn’t be able to be afraid, and yet… She could feel it, like cold sweat pouring down her back. The cloying fear. The dread.
Toki had so many vulnerabilities.
She had her agency, she had Keigo. Hawks was a talented pro-hero, but he wasn’t invincible. He was fast but he wasn’t a powerhouse, and he could be beaten, he could be killed. The League still had all their High-End Nomu, didn’t they? In canon, Hawks would have never have been enough to kill Hood. The canon-League had wanted a show, but what if in this universe they just wanted to kill him? They could. They could kill him, with Hood or even Dabi or Shigaraki…!
And then there was everything and everyone else. Hinawa, baby Hina-chan, so little and fragile. She was supposed to be hidden, but her birth name was still Hinawa Taiyōme, and All For One had known Toki’s name. What if he learned of Hinawa’s existence? What if he already knew?
And what about Meteor? What if All For One sent assassins? What if he didn’t send assassins but pretended he did, and then fabricated evidence to have Meteor tossed back to jail? To Tartarus, where All For One himself would be locked up?
What about the other kids? Hitoshi, Neito, Melissa? What about Hayasa-sensei? What about Kameko? What about Sachiko? What about everything and everyone that Toki loved? All Might had pushed everyone away to survive his war against his enemy, but Toki couldn’t do that. She couldn’t live without her people, she couldn’t live all alone with just heroism and nothing else; she couldn’t. She needed her family, but if her family was in danger… If Toki couldn’t protect them, if she was putting the at risk…
“That’s why you didn’t want to mention it in front of Meteor,” Endeavor quietly said to All Might.
Because Meteor would have then killed All For One right there. And then the three other heroes on scene would have had to deal with that clusterfuck. Toki may have covered for him, maybe… But probably not. Endeavor was uncertain. But All Might wouldn’t have lied.
And Yagi knew it would have been a poor way to repay Toki for her help, if he tossed her father in jail again.
“There is no solution,” All Might whispered. “When he persuaded himself that she was his next target…”
“All For One is going to be locked in the deepest level of Tartarus,” Endeavor bit back. “He’s not going to be able to launch any retribution strike from there.”
“He has contacts everywhere,” Yagi insisted.
“There are solutions. Witness protection, and…”
Toki suddenly shook her head, and cut them both: “No, wait. There is no need to panic. I have an alternative.”
Yagi looked grim. “Quantum, I cannot ask you to do this.”
“What? No, I’m not going to throw your actual student under the bus. How am I expected to take a look at myself in a mirror ever again if I go to the bogeyman and tell him to go and kill a fifteen year old boy instead of me? No, I have a plan.”
Yagi didn’t look like he believed her, but Endeavor narrowed his eyes. His tolerance for insanity had probably skyrocketed since meeting Meteor.
“Talk.”
“Well, it’s simple. I just need All For One to have something else to focus on. Something more important to him than his obsession with All Might. Since he’s a narcissist, the only thing more important to him is… Well. It’s himself.”
“So?”
Toki grinned like a lunatic. “We’re going to take his Quirk.”
Notes:
The great fun of writing overpowered characters is that they can do shit like this [waves towards the entire chapter].
ANYWAY!
Spoilers for manga readers ! I love how in canon, (during the War arc) the "Endeavor VS AFO" fight goes badly because Endeavor is distracted by AFO's monologue, who tells him about Touya. But in Wisdom, Endeavor doesn't let AFO time to talk and thus robs him of his advantage xDAnd... Meteor being Meteor. I saw a good post about this on Tumblr, but it boiled down to this : the best character development is when the antagonist doesn't really change. Like no, he still sucks, he's just on our side now.
Also, i fucking love when the previous antagonist has the same personality traits as before but framed as good things now that theyre on the Good Side. Like, "cold and calculating" becomes "unflichingly practical" when you need someone to push the big red button, and "hair-trigger temper" is now "takes no shit". Mmmmmmh very delicious.
Here is a reminder that this fic has a Discord server !
Here are some memes for the chapter! Thanks Kirumi =)
[LINK]
[LINK]
[LINK]
[LINK] (ok that meme isn't from Kirumi, it's mine xD)
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/legs10.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/kamino10.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/visor10.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/sans_t10.png){kind=link}
Chapter 57: The smokescreen
Summary:
In another world, some nosy hero students would crawl back home, having saved their friend but nearly broken the law. But in the world, the saving hadn’t been entrusted to children. The adults had stepped up and done their job. All Might, but also Endeavor, Toki, all the other heroes.
Toki could rest, finally, and stop worrying about All For One. There was still the League out there, true. But with All For One down, and Keigo on the MLA case… maybe they could be taken down before they could become a real threat. Maybe. In any case, wasn’t Toki allowed to savor her victory?
Notes:
And here we are ! How did Toki steal AFO's Quirk? x)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
THE SMOKESCREEN
After the Kamino Battle, it took a while for things to settle down.
The smoke and the dust had hidden most of the fight, but every newspaper plastered on its frontpage the same image of the aftermath: a depowered All Might reaching out a hand to Endeavor, and Endeavor reaching back, both standing above their downed opponent. Quantum, kneeling in exhaustion in the background, didn’t quite manage to fly under the radar… But at least the spotlight was mostly focused on the new Number One coming to rescue the former Number One.
The picture was Award worthy. It really looked as if All Might was entrusting something to Endeavor. In reality, Yagi’s knees had wobbled, and Toki had yelled at him to not faceplant dumbly on the ground, at which point Endeavor had reached a hand to steady him.
Anyway. Toki’s face was patched up by a paramedic. All For One was brought to an armored ambulance designed to evacuate villains.
Someone from the HPSC showed up to supervise the administration of the sedative.
It wasn’t odd by itself: but the HPSC’s operative made sure to make a show of it and hand the sedative themselves to the paramedic. The sedative was injectable and came from an unlabeled bottle in a locked suitcase, the kind you used to transport sensitive police evidence. In an extraordinary coincidence, the suitcase was in plain view of several candid shoots.
At the moment, nobody questioned this. But later, this would be remembered. It was the only unusual thing in the process of securing a downed villain… And thus, it overshadowed plenty of other things, not unusual by themselves, but oh so convenient.
A hero had to escort All For One in the ambulance and to the prison. Since Endeavor’s Quirk wasn’t suited to rescue and he was the least injured hero, the task fell to him. Nobody questioned this.
Quantum followed Endeavor to the ambulance to watch All For One being loaded into it, still unconscious, still hooked to plenty of life-support device. She gave the ambulance a cursory and distracted glance. Endeavor barked at her that she should get her face stitched up instead of dithering. Quantum fired back some quip, and then warped away. Nobody questioned this either.
The armored ambulance’s doors were locked shut behind All For One and Endeavor. The camera in the car was switched on. The ride towards Tartarus was four hours long. Nobody entered or exited the vehicle during that time, but Endeavor’s bulk hid part of the camera’s frame for the entirety of the ride. Nobody even noticed it. But if they had, they wouldn’t have questioned this either.
The most important part of a crime was to not leave any trace.
All For One’s unconscious body reached Tartarus. Surgeons and doctors stitched him up. His burned arm was amputated at the elbow. His fractured one was salvaged, but so damaged that the range of motion of both his elbow and his shoulders was more than halved. As for his amputated legs, well… that kind of thing didn’t grow back.
All For One slept on. He was heavily sedated. Everyone more or less hoped that between his injuries, the delayed medical care, and the drugs in his bloodstream, maybe he would just never wake up. Human bodies had given up after less.
But this wasn’t All For One’s story.
All For One’s story was over already. This was Toki’s story. This was her tale. This was her victory.
Toki got her shoulder looked at, then had her face cleaned and then bandaged. The nice paramedic who took care of her also informed her that she would have a small scar cutting through her eyebrow, unfortunately. She had been very lucky that her visor had taken the brunt of the damage. If she hadn’t worn eye protection, she would have lost her eye.
Hell, the shard of bone would have probably gone through her skull.
A scar wasn’t very glamourous, and Toki knew that she would probably face some pressure from her PR agents and from Kameko to disguise it with make-up, even under her visor. Male heroes could afford to look rough and rugged, but female heroes were supposed to be pretty. Quantum, especially, was supposed to look untouchable. A scar on her face, no matter how small, kind of ruined the illusion.
Still. It was a very small price to pay for that victory.
Toki tried to help with rescue operation, but Hayasa-sensei arrived on scene and firmly informed the heroes in charge of coordinating the rescue that Quantum had spent the last sixteen hours awake, and forced her to go back to Musutafu to rest.
At first, he had wanted her to get back to Fukuoka. But Toki still had to bring Hitoshi back to his mom. Also, she didn’t feel comfortable leaving Musutafu without being sure of what was going to happen to Neito. So she absented herself to go and fetch her little fledglings, who must be very worried on their own. Nobody questioned this. Nobody noticed that she hadn’t said where she was going exactly, and nobody wondered where she disappeared afterward.
Gods, Toki was so good at this committing crime thing.
Anyway. That’s how it ended. Things got done. Plans came to fruition. The villain was taken away and locked up, hopefully to never see the light of the day again. And everyone else got their happy ever after.
So, nearly five hours after the battle, as the sun was rising, Toki ended up on the roof of the Idaten Agency with Hitoshi and Neito. They both looked utterly exhausted. But there was some vindicative satisfaction on their faces. They had won, and they knew it.
“Do you want to go back to Yūei?” Toki offered Neito. “Or would you rather stick with me? I’m going to give Hitoshi back to his mom, and either crash there or go back to Yūei afterward.”
Hitoshi threw Toki and oblique look, because if she brought Neito back to the Shinsō’s apartment, it meant letting him meet Hinawa. But that was Toki’s call, and he didn’t argue with it.
“I wouldn’t want to impose,” Neito protested weakly.
“You’re not.”
“Of course you’re not,” Hitoshi added, almost indignantly. “You’re my best friend. You came all that way to help! My parents probably want to thank you!”
But Neito was still proud, still hesitant, not wanting to be indebted to them. Toki was familiar with the sentiment. When you had nothing and no one, it was scary to ask for help, because disappointment cut so much more deeply.
“Come on,” she said softly. “I owe you for your help with All For One. It would make me happy to pay you pack.”
It seemed to do the trick.
In the end, Neito accepted to come with them back to the Shinsō. He was tired, too, and the perspective to go rest somewhere safe and surrounded by allies was obviously more appealing that waiting all alone in that tiny studio loaned by Nedzu. Humans weren’t meant to be solitary creature. Neito clung to a veneer of politeness, but after the day he just had, it was clear that he really didn’t want to be alone.
So Toki brought both Neito and Hitoshi to the Shinsō residence and they all ended up crashing there while Mihoko-san was smothering them with affection.
It also meant that Neito met Hinawa. He did a double-take when he saw the baby, but thankfully didn’t say anything. Toki had his fatigue to thanks for that. If Neito hadn’t been so tired, she was absolutely sure he would have been mocking and smug and teasing for hours, like always when he found out a new secret to poke fun at.
But he was exhausted. Hell, they were all exhausted.
Even Hinawa was tired and fussy. She was too young to understand what was going on, but she was intuitive, like all babies. She knew everyone had been stressed, anxious and frightened, and it had frightened her. When Mihoko burst into tears after embracing her son, it was enough to send Hinawa wailing, too.
Thus, Toki ended up soothing her daughter while Mihoko was crying over her son, and Neito ended up sobbing over his own mother and being drawn in a group hug, and… yeah, it wasn’t a very dignified moment at the Shinsō residence.
But everyone was okay.
Everyone was safe and sound.
It had been nerve-wracking and exhausting, but they had done it. Toki had done it. Kamino had happened and it hadn’t gone worse than in canon. It had even arguably gone better.
(Would it fair to draw comparisons with what could have been? This universe wasn’t the one she had read about in a manga so long ago. This world was real. This life was real, those people were real. My Hero Academia was a snapshot of what could have been, if the world had gone on and Toki had never done anything, never acted, never been born. It wasn’t where she was. My Hero Academia was a story grown on a foundation that was now two-decades gone. An alternate universe, if you will. Would it be fair to draw comparisons, when things were so obviously different?)
In another world, some nosy hero students would crawl back home, having saved their friend but nearly broken the law. But in the world, the saving hadn’t been entrusted to children. The adults had stepped up and done their job. All Might, but also Endeavor, Toki, all the other heroes.
Toki could rest, finally, and stop worrying about All For One. There was still the League out there, true. But with All For One down, and Keigo on the MLA case… maybe they could be taken down before they could become a real threat. Maybe. In any case, wasn’t Toki allowed to savor her victory?
She slept like the dead. She absolutely deserved it.
When she woke up, the sun was high in the sky. It was almost noon. She had slept more than six hours, holy crap.
Hajime Shinsō had come home somewhere in the middle of the night and was keeping watch over his wife and son. Toki almost had a heart attack when she padded out of Hinawa’s room and saw Hajime in the living room. She had forgotten that his Quirk was No Sleep. He looked even more like a zombie than usual; his eyebags could rival Mera’s.
Toki whispered a good morning, and they had breakfast quietly in place of lunch. Toki hadn’t spent much time with Hitoshi’s father, but he wasn’t bad company. Quiet, with a wry sense of humor like his son.
Also, Hajime’s coffee was the most horrible thing she had ever tasted.
If felt like an energy drink mutated into smoked tar. It was absolutely coffee, but it tasted nothing like coffee should. Toki wasn’t a big fan of coffee, she usually preferred cappuccino or other fancy drinks with milk, whipped cream, and occasionally caramel. But this was a whole new level, and after the initial am-I-having-a-stroke sip she was reluctantly impressed. That shit could focus a corpse into doing calculus. Gods, Keigo would love it.
“The recipe is top secret,” Hajime smirked at her.
“Come on! It’s for a gift!”
“No. I don’t trust you to not give it to someone with a heart condition.”
“I have a heart condition.”
“You don’t. Your new heart could power a small factory. I would know, I’m the one who stuffed your ribcage with it.”
Toki stuck her tongue at him and resolved to steal at least one Thermos of this stuff to bring it to Fukuoka. Maybe she could reverse-engineer the whole thing. And then probably astral project her metabolism into a non-planar geometry, but that was a problem for future Toki.
“I didn’t think to ask, but why was Monoma with you?” Hajime asked after a beat. “Mihoko said he had nowhere to go. Are his parents…?”
“Yeah. His father isn’t in the picture, and his mother was hospitalized in Shizuoka. She was killed yesterday. He has no other known relatives.”
“Damn. What will happen to him now?”
Toki raised an eyebrow. “Worried I’ll saddle you with another child?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Hajime shrugged. “You know I don’t really live here. But this is different. Hinawa is your daughter and we’re merely babysitting. To gain custody of a kid… It’s not the same. People with villainous Quirks rarely get granted that chance. Mihoko tried to have a foster license, but her application was rejected.”
Toki scowled, like every time someone accused Brainwashing of being a villainous Quirk. Then she winced, because frowning pulled at the wound on her eyebrow and that stung. But she knew Hajime was right. People had preconceptions. And such a Quirk was very dangerous.
There was also the fact that, after being kidnapped, Hitoshi would be under scrutiny. The authorities wouldn’t allow his mother to adopt another kid, not when her home could be in danger. Which also made Toki realize that Mihoko would have a much harder time hiding Hinawa from the world, now, if her name was famous.
Damn.
“What are you going to do, then?”
There was no judgement in Hajime’s voice. Only polite curiosity. He didn’t think it was her role to solve this, he only wondered what she had planned to go on. It was nice to speak with someone who was so removed from her problems.
“I’m not sure yet. There is a system in place, of course, group homes, orphanages. But it’s not a good place to grow up. Not the safest either. There’s also the possibility that the living situation the system put Neito in will disturb his schooling, which meant that he would be pulled from Yūei. Neither of us want that. I’m going to find an alternative. But it means giving custody to an adult, and… Well, I have to find one.”
“You’re an adult.”
“Yeah. Ideally I would take him. I have a foster parent emergency license; it goes with my teaching license. But it’s meant for emergencies. For a longer placement, I would have to be either appointed by a judge, or designated by a parent, or to be an actual relative.”
Hajime looked at her, utterly neutral. “Are you sure you want to do this? Having custody of a child is a big responsibility.”
It was. Toki took the time to consider her answer, before nodding decisively.
“I know. I still want to. I would do the same thing for Hitoshi or Melissa. They’re mine.”
“You’ve known Hitoshi and Melissa for years. Monoma has only been your student since last December. It’s been less nine months.”
I killed someone for him, Toki thought. It doesn’t matter that I haven’t known him very long. He’s mine all the same.
“So? I like him. Honestly, within three months of knowing him I was ready to burst out the adoption papers. He’s a brat in the exact same way I was.”
Hajime hid a smile behind the rim of his cup.
“So you’re going to petition for emergency custody?”
“That’s the plan. I’ll make it an official Icarus request, even. But for long-term placement… I will ask him if has someone in mind, first. I’m only twenty-two, and an active hero; I won’t be a judge’s first option. Or even their second, or third. But if Neito wants me to, I would still like to offer my name anyway.”
They finished their coffee. Toki made her neck crack, and then got up from her chair.
“Can you keep an eye on Neito for me? I need to pop back to Fukuoka to make sure I’m not needed, and pick up a hero costume that’s not covered in blood. I’ll be back in an hour.”
“Sure.”
“And…” Toki hesitated, then fathered her courage. “Could you tell Mihoko-san that in the next few days… I’ll want to spend some time with Hinawa, and have my father meet her?”
Hajime paused. They stared at each other for a few seconds, unmoving, while the coffee grew cold. Toki could almost hear the silent conversation, complete with incredulous hitch in their voices.
But isn’t your father a mass-murderer?
Yes, but I trust him.
Are you sure?
I am. Do you intend to stop me? Hinawa is still my daughter.
Mihoko is not going to be happy.
I know that, and I’m ready to explain myself to her. It doesn’t change my decision.
She trusted her father for this, at least. Meteor was a ruthless killer, but he was loyal to his family. Toki could rely on him. And now, more than ever… she needed to rely on him. She needed to take that leap of faith, because now the enemy was looking at her, and Toki had so much to lose. So much to protect.
“I’ll pass along the message,” Hajime finally acquiesced, strangely reluctant.
“Thank you.”
Toki warped away. But just before disappearing, she saw a shadow moving in the hallway, someone too tall and too thin to be Mihoko. With a hint of self-consciousness, she wondered which one of the teenagers had woken up and eavesdropped on the entire conversation.
Kids were so nosy sometimes.
oOoOoOo
The net was abuzz with the news of All Might’s weak form.
The news helicopter had captured most of the fight, but when Toki had taken the lead and All For One had blasted a shockwave in the sky, it had pushed the helicopter away. It meant that afterward, nobody had seen the standoff, Meteor and Endeavor’s arrival, and the following fight. Oh, Endeavor’s flames had been seen from afar, but with the smoke and the dust, the cameras hadn’t captured a good global view of the battlefield. There were a few shots of Endeavor and All Might and even All For One, all massive and slow enough to be followed by cameras, but Meteor and Quantum were just blurs in the background. With any luck, the presence of Meteor would stay discreet.
The only good pictures were from after the fight, when the smoke had started to dissipate, and All For One had been lying on the ground defeated. All Might had been thin and emaciated again, but he still had a bit of his charisma, some embers of his Quirk burning in him. Endeavor had seemed a giant next to him.
And Quantum, well… Quantum had been sitting in the background, at a cautious distance, because her knees were a little too weak to support her.
So, unsurprisingly, Kameko blew a fuse that Toki had missed her chance to stand side by side with both Numbers Ones, like a worthy successor.
But hey, the news helicopter had captured the first half of the fight. Scrolling through the videos, Toki had to admit that she didn’t look too pathetic, even if she had only landed one hit in the entire fight. Fighting side by side with All Might against an enemy that had held the Symbol of Peace at bay was no small feat. It clearly showed Toki wasn’t just a teleporter but could fight against true powerhouses. Most videos had cut the moment where Toki had amputated All For One’s legs, because it was bloody and violent, but some hadn’t, and everyone was screeching in the comments about how amazing it was to use Warping that way.
There was even a meme of All For One falling flat on his face.
Toki downloaded the funniest version she could find, and sent it to Yagi’s phone, just for a laugh. What? You had to treasure the funny memories, or else this job was too depressing.
Cutting off someone’s legs was a big deal, though, and several persons pointed out that it could be classified as excessive brutality. However, considering that this villain had eviscerated Kamino Ward and killed probably hundreds of victims in that incident, those dissident voices were quickly shut down. They weren’t wrong, though: Scalpel was a dangerous tool. There was a reason Toki didn’t use it against people, usually.
But the public’s opinion was overwhelmingly positive. People were shaken by All Might’s weakness. The strength of Endeavor had reassured them, and it was Endeavor standing victorious next to All Might that the people would remember the most; but Quantum flashing around the battlefield fearlessly, standing against an enemy stronger than herself and dealing a crushing blow in defense of All Might… People would remember this, too.
Kameko expected a big jump in the ranking. Hell, maybe Toki could even snatch the Number Two spot from Keigo. That would be funny.
“You know, if you decided to merge your statistic to be marketed as a team…” Kameko tried.
Toki made a face. Fortunately, she was saved by a familiar voice.
“Come on, Kameko-san, right now is really not the moment to aim for the Number One spot,” Keigo drawled, opening the balcony door and stepping in the office. Toki tried really hard to not lit up when she saw him. “People are scared, and we don’t have a back wide enough to reassure them. Let Endeavor deal with the heat! It’s his specialty!”
Kameko sighed dramatically: “But think how cool it would look on my resume if you reached the Number One spot at age twenty-two!”
Keigo and Toki absolutely ignored her. Keigo was crossing the office, Toki was meeting him halfway, and when they collided in the middle of the room, squeezing each other in a bone-crushing hug. Keigo’s wing wrapped themselves around them, enclosing them into a soft cocoon of silky red feathers.
“Oooh, yeah, I’m getting the hint now,” Kameko coughed. “Well, I’ll go third-wheeling somewhere else. Quantum, don’t forget to submit your paperwork!”
There was a small thud as if a feather had been stuck in the door behind Kameko like an arrow, nailing it shut. Toki laughed quietly. She grabbed Keigo’s face between her hands and kissed him, and when they parted for air, Keigo’s lips chased her for a second taste. Even after they parted, they didn’t step back immediately.
It was a long while before they separated, Keigo’s wings opening up to let the rest of the world rush in.
“I missed you,” Toki smiled helplessly. “It’s been forever.”
“It’s been forty hours.”
“Yeah, that’s forever.”
Keigo snorted, and then his eyes softened. He raised a hand, touching the bandage on Toki’s brow, his eyes attentive and worried.
Neither of them had ever had a major injury before. Bruises and scrapes, mostly, but they were too fast to take heavy hits. Keigo favored long-range and Toki vanished before impact. When they had to block an attack, they usually had time to see it coming and deflected rather than parry, thus avoiding a contest of strength. Most of their success came from the fact that they had built their reputation on being untouchable. They were just too fast.
But they weren’t the fastest people around. Sometimes they meet threats that were just too big. Toki had been stabbed yesterday, and nearly lost an eye today. It put things into perspective.
“Are you alright?”
“Yeah. My shoulder got the worst of it. I’m also covered in bruises, and aching everywhere, but I’m fine.”
“And the stab wound from yesterday?”
“Completely healed, thanks to Recovery Girl. Shame I can’t ask her to treat my shoulder and my face. Recovery Girl has volunteered at Kamino’s hospital, so she’s not free to give out preferential treatment. I have to wait my turn.”
Keigo frowned a little. His hand hadn’t left Toki’s face, his thumb carefully brushing the corner of the bandage taped to her brow.
“It looks pretty small, at least.”
“Yeah. It’s small, but deep. The shard of bones he used as a weapon went through the skin and the muscle, and even nicked my superciliary arch, apparently. If I hadn’t worn a visor, it would have gone through my skull and killed me as surely as a bullet to the head.”
For a second, Keigo’s eyes went cold. As if weighting the probabilities, assessing a danger that wasn’t there, planning the best way to eliminate a threat.
Hawks were bird of prey, after all.
It wasn’t obvious at first glance. Hawks appeared as a flamboyant asshole, or a cool guy, or an all-around chatty and relaxed individual. Someone warm, kind. But when every single mask fell… At his core, Keigo was quiet and solemn. Analytical and quick to think on his feet, but also grave and calculating. He didn’t have the same blood-curling fury that Toki could feel churning in her guts when she was angry, but he had the same coldness, buried deep down.
Canon-Hawks had killed a friend in cold blood for what he thought was the greater good but was in fact just fear and practicality. Toki knew that her Keigo could do the same, too. He had it in him to kill, just like her.
“Does it hurt?” Keigo asked quietly.
Toki thought of how she would feel if Keigo had been stabbed, if Keigo had fought All For One and taken shrapnel to the face, if Keigo had bandages covering his shoulder. She would feel sick with worry. She would feel guilty of not being able to protect him. She would feel angry at whoever had done this.
Hell, she had been trying to destroy Dabi since day one, and Dabi hadn’t even touched Keigo yet.
“No.” She covered his hand with hers, lightly, trying for reassurance. “The shoulder is worse, but even that wound was taken care of.”
“When they showed the footage on TV, your face was covered in blood. It scared the shit out of me.”
“My visor took most of the damage. It bled a lot, but… It’s just a little nick. It will be hidden by my visor anyway.”
Still, Toki was a little chagrined that the perfect symmetry of her features was going to be ruined. Maybe it was vain of her, but… She liked being pretty.
In canon, Hawks had had a massive scar on his neck and face following his fight with Dabi. Endeavor had had a big scar, too. Neither of them had been ashamed. But it was different for female heroes. There was an emphasis on sex-appeal, not on roughness or toughness. Some women marketed themselves as tomboys unafraid of scars, like Mirko for example, but Toki didn’t dislike her softness.
She liked who she looked like. She didn’t want the fresh reminder of her own vulnerability splashed on her face for everyone to stare at.
Whatever. She would survive. It was just a little nick. It was a badge of honor, the proof she had been skilled and that she had been lucky. She wasn’t going to complain. If All For One had aimed lower, he would have gouged out her eye. What was a little scar compared to that?
“There’s something I should tell you,” Toki suddenly said. “But first off, Neito’s mom was killed by the Ghost Arsonist yesterday. He has no other relatives, so unless someone claims him, he’s going to end up in the system.”
“You want to get emergency custody,” Keigo guessed. “Sure, go ahead. Poor kid, that must have been one traumatizing evening. His bestie kidnapped and his mom killed the same night? Yikes.”
“Yeah. Also, uuuh…” Toki coughed. “Well, if nobody steps up or anything, and it goes to a judge having to decide his placement… I would like to offer my candidacy for adoption. It probably won’t be granted, because I’m young and all that, but. I want to try. He should have someone who want him.”
Keigo blinked.
“Are springing up a whole-ass child on me?” he asked incredulously.
“Don’t make it sound like that!” Toki sputtered.
Keigo sniggered and propped up his visor on his forehead to watch her better. His golden eyes were shining brightly, crinkling up in amusement, but his smile was fond and genuine.
“I’m joking, I’m joking. Well, this not how I considered having a second kid, but I know you basically adopted all of those children already. To be fair, if anything had happened to Mihoko-san, I would have accepted adopting Hitoshi right away; not because we owe his mom, but just because he’s one of your fledglings.”
“Oh. Good. I mean… Thank you.”
“Meh, don’t thank me. Besides, of all your fledglings, Monoma is the one I like best. He’s basically an honorary Taiyōme already. He’s got daddies issues, a cool Quirk, a pretty face, and a maniacal laughter.”
“W-what?! I don’t laugh maniacally!”
Toki pretended to sputter in indignation, but her smile betrayed her. Some lingering tension was uncoiling in her shoulders. Gods, it felt good to have Keigo back, to joke and banter and finally feel like she was home, she was safe, the fight was over.
She had been so afraid and so angry, back there, but now she was here, and suddenly the obstacles didn’t see so unsurmountable. She breathed more easily. A knot in her chest was loosening. Keigo didn’t have to do anything. He was just there, he was there and he was happy to have her back, and it was enough. His voice, his look of fondness, the undisguised tenderness in his eyes, his blinding smile.
Gods, did Toki look as smitten as he did? Were they both so obvious?
She didn’t care. It didn’t matter anymore if they weren’t as discreet as they had thought themselves to be. What mattered was that she was back home, and it made Keigo look so incandescently happy that it shone in his eyes and from under his skin, a joy that bubbled like champagne through Toki’s blood as if through osmosis. The two of them together again, world wide open for the taking.
Nothing bad could happen as long as they were together.
She took a long breath, gathering her courage. Joking was all well and good, but there was something important Keigo had to know. After all, by becoming the target of an immortal villain, Toki was putting their whole family in danger.
“There’s something else,” she said quietly. “Something bad. When I used Warp-Force against All For One, he thought it was super-strength. He called me All Might’s successor.”
What was great with Keigo was that he understood how she thought. Some of her coworkers could predict her body language, some of her friends could guess where her reasoning would lead her. But Keigo read her mind.
“He thought you had All Might’s Quirk?!” he said with disbelief. Then, with a second shock. “Shit, the kid you told me about, the one who break his limbs at Yūei…”
“Yeah. All For One mentioned doing horrible things at All Might’s predecessor and mentioned that this person is the one who gave All Might his Quirk. He used those exact words. And then he called me the successor. Which mean that… There is a transferable Quirk, a Quirk of immense power, and All For One is after it.”
Keigo looked at her, unimpressed. “And you didn’t correct him, because the actual successor is a kid. Right?”
Toki shrugged. That was pretty much what had happened. Keigo groaned, rubbing his forehead:
“Can’t fault you for that. I would have done the same. But shit, being targeted by that kind of enemy is not good.”
“Tell me about it. I want to introduce Hinawa to Meteor, just in case.”
“Oh, good. I mean, I like the Shinsō, but since their son was just kidnapped, your dad is a safer bet. You know, ideally, if you make your father babysit and that he moves in with Endeavor, that would be two top heroes protecting our daughter.”
“Hey, you can’t prostitute my father to gain a second bodyguard.”
“He’s doing it all by himself already! I’m just saying we could nudge him further in the right direction.”
Toki wrinkled her nose with disgust. Okay, she could admit that Endeavor wasn’t the worst, but she would never be thrilled with the fact that of all the people her father could have started a relationship with, it had to be the grumpy guy with lot of responsibilities who also happened to have a history of domestic abuse.
Also she still had trouble wrapping her mind around the fact that the Todoroki family was seducing all the members of her entourage. What the hell? Since when were they all thirst traps?
“Do you believe that All For One would go after Hinawa?” Keigo asked after a beat, frowning. “His obsession is All Might, not you.”
“Not me yet,” Toki muttered. “You didn’t listen to his evil monologue. He described in graphic detail what he did to the family of All Might’s mentor for shits and giggles. I didn’t know the woman and I will have nightmares about it. It’s insane. I mean… He kidnapped her descendant to raise him as a villain, just to spite All Might.”
Keigo’s eyes narrowed. He knew what Toki was thinking. He knew who she had thought about, when All For One had bragged about going after the vulnerable children just to hurt their heroic relatives. Of course he knew, he was Hinawa’s father.
“So we can’t let that happen. Is that why the HPSC got involved into the injection of that top-secret sedative? Did you call in a favor and poison him?”
Toki blinked: “How do you know about the injection?”
Keigo mimed zipping his lips. No snitching. Damn it. He had probably learned it thanks to his feathers, but who had been talking about it? Especially in Fukuoka!
Wait, unless he had called Inferno or Salamander for intel…
“Keigo. I need to be told, factually, all you know and by consequence everything that All For One could know about this injection.”
Keigo looked at her through narrowed eyes, considering. He knew the advantage of keeping secrets. He was a good spy; he was the best spy. All knowledge could be dangerous to give up. But something in Toki’s expression must have convinced him. He leaned against the desk, and sighed.
“I don’t know much. Whatever it is, it’s just referred as ‘the sample.’ There was no paper trail until yesterday, and even then, there’s just the barest minimum. Something was confiscated from the evidence of one of Inferno’s case; a box labelled as containing Trigger, and maybe linked to one of Salamander’s investigation of the local yakuza. Someone from the HPSC came with a helicopter to pick it up. Then the same person showed up in Yokohama and gave the paramedic a sedative held into the same case as the confiscated evidence. Thus, it was obviously not Trigger… and probably not a sedative. That’s all I know.”
“Good,” Toki breathed. “Perfect. Do you think there is a chance that if All For One has… health complications, he could link it to that injection?”
“Unless he has suffered brain damage? Obviously. Why would anyone bother to inject him sedatives when he was already in a coma? Also, the helicopter wasn’t discreet. It screams urgency rather than discretion.” Keigo paused, and smirked. “So, what was in that injection? What did you do to All For One to keep him away from us?”
Toki grinned from ear to ear.
“Oh, there was nothing in that injection. It was a placebo. The whole thing is a smokescreen to hide what I really did to All For One.”
oOoOoOo
(Twelve hours earlier.)
Toki explained her plan. Both Endeavor and Yagi looked at her like she had utterly lost her mind. Well, Yagi looked at her like she had utterly lost her mind. Endeavor was making the same face most people did when confronted with Quantum’s special brand of craziness, which was an expression that started with ‘what the fuck,’ evolved to ‘why me,’ took a turn in ‘why god,’ and then escalated into ‘god is dead, and this is punishment for my sins.’ To his credit, Endeavor was climbing that curve better than most. He must have had some practice dealing with insane bullshit.
“That will never work,” Yagi said disbelievingly.
“And even if it does,” Endeavor said, tone extremely dubious, “All For One will figure out what happened, and he will come after a teenager.”
“Not if we use a bait!” Toki countered. “Salamander is investigating some yakuza who are fabricating a drug capable of erasing Quirks. I’ll call the Witch, tell her to ostensibly confiscate a vial of evidence taken from the yakuza case, and there will be a whole pantomime where the HPSC will make a show of injecting that vial to All For One while claiming it’s a sedative. That will look fishy as hell. And if All For One investigates, he will find traces of a real drug-dealing ring capable of erasing Quirks! And he will think they are the ones who took his Quirk.”
“And if the yakuza can’t erase Quirks?”
“Well, it doesn’t matter, does it? They are trying to, which automatically makes them suspicious. All For One doesn’t really care about their innocence, he will just look for a way to reverse what was done to him, and when he realizes he can’t, he will only look for a guilty party.”
It may be cruel to use the Shie Hassaikai as bait. But honestly, it was a better option than let All For One rampage, or worse, let him come after Toki’s family.
“Then it could work,” Endeavor said slowly, considering. “Especially if heroes take down those yakuza soon after. All For One will find proof that this drug exists, but he would have no way to access a supplier or a way to reverse-engineer it. All he will have… is a guilty party utterly out of his reach. And a problem more pressing than his revenge.”
Toki gestured at Endeavor, as if to say ‘see? He gets it!’ But Yagi still looked unconvinced. Worse, he looked worried. Reluctant, too.
“It may not work, Quantum.”
“We don’t have another solution,” she fired back. “As long as he’s alive, he will hunt you down… and then hunt me down… and then someone else, starting with my students. There’s no way out. It needs to stop. Either with this, or with his death.”
They looked at All For One’s unconscious body, a few meters away. In a matter of minutes, the police and the journalist would swarm the place. They were all thinking the same thing.
Toki wondered which one of them was going to be stubborn enough to utter the evidence out loud.
“Heroes don’t kill,” Endeavor said, slowly. “Not if they can avoid it. And certainly not in cold blood. Tartarus can hold him; there’s no need to go further.”
Toki was suddenly vividly reminded of Beros’ eyes, wide and startled. Of the way she had been warm and solid when Toki had grabbed her, of the way her body had fell into separate pieces with just a muffled thud and a splatter of blood, hidden by the darkness. Because Beros had dared to hurt a kid that was Toki’s. Her people, her family.
Meteor would have understood. But Meteor wasn’t there.
Toki took a long breath. Time for a leap of faith. She pitched her vice very low, staring at Endeavor, and said:
“I have a daughter who is eleven months old. Do you think I’m willing to take that risk, when it’s not my life on the line but hers?”
Overhead, the news helicopter was still circling. Endeavor and Toki stared at one another in silence; him with shock, and her with cold determination.
Endeavor had children too. He had failed them, and pretty spectacularly at that, but he loved them. Worse, he had seen them in pain, seen them hurt. He had lost one. He had grieved Touya and been angry about it, felt guilt about it, had been destroyed by it. He understood that fear. Even if he didn’t understand Meteor’s fury or Toki’s rage, he understood how it felt to be so afraid that nothing mattered by the need to destroy what threatened what you loved.
Endeavor looked away first.
“Fine,” he bit out. “Let’s try your plan.”
Thirty seconds later, the police and paramedics started to arrive. A few minutes later, it was the journalists. Without needing to concert themselves any further, Yagi, Endeavor and Toki all went to play their role.
Toki sent a text to Neito. The HPSC envoy came and injected All For One with something. Endeavor was tasked with escorting the prisoner to Tartarus. Toki got a good look at the inside of the armored ambulance. Endeavor placed himself in a way that would hide part of the camera.
Toki warped to an agreed upon meeting point, on a rooftop, near the Kamino train station.
Hitoshi was safe and sound in the breakroom of the Idaten Agency, with Hayasa-sensei. But after dropping off Endeavor and Meteor in Kamino, Neito hadn’t gone back to Korusan.
It was part of the plan he had agreed to when Toki had briefed him, back in Yūei. Sure, at first that plan had been made to take out Kurogiri’s Quirk, but… eh. It was adaptable.
“Ready?” Toki asked him.
Neito squared his shoulders and took her offered hand. “No, but let’s do it anyway.”
Toki warped them in the ambulance.
Endeavor didn’t move, still strategically positioned so his bulk hid a big chunk of space next to the unconscious body of All For One. The villain was covered in bandages, an oxygen mask on his mouth, strapped to the stretcher by what looked halfway a straightjacket and halfway a life-support device.
Normally there would be two armed guards and maybe a paramedic in the ambulance with him, but Endeavor had told the police to not bother. He could easily do the job of two armed guards, and the paramedics were more needed here. It wasn’t exactly irregular, anyway. In this world of supervillains, there were many instances where paramedics refused to assist a villain, especially when they could be saving civilians instead. That was why the life-support system integrated into the prisoner’s stretcher was designed to be able to inject drugs or administrate an electric shock to restart a heart.
But the important thing was… they were alone in that vehicle. The driver was separated from them by two inches of metal. There were no witnesses.
Neito took a long breath and put his hand against the only patch of uncovered skin on All For One’s broken arm.
“Remember,” Toki whispered quietly. “Just like with the Nomu.”
“I know,” Neito breathed. He had closed his eyes, brows furrowed in concentration. “The different Quirks are not squished together, they are… swimming in space, almost like a galaxy. It will be easier to pick them out separately. But there’s so many… Oh, wait. I have a healing one, do you want me to use it on you?”
Toki shook her head. “No. Focus on the main Quirk. We only have until we arrive to Tartarus.”
And so, for the next three hours and a half, Neito focused.
It had taken him hours, when he had first obtained the Nomu sample, to copy one of the mish-mashed Quirks. Not only because they were smashed together, but because finding the right one was tricky. Neito had a hard time identifying Quirks by touch. His mother had been better at it, but his mother was dead. And Toki didn’t need to identify someone’s Quirk, anyway. She knew what kind of Quirk had All For One. What she needed was for Neito to copy it. To copy the ability to give and take Quirks.
To copy it, and then use it to steal the original.
It was insane. It was crazy. It was dangerous and ridiculous. All For One and One For All also had some subconscious, extra-dimensional pocket mental plane where you could see the soul of Quirks. In canon they had only been able to see the soul of people connected to either of those two Quirks (canon-Midoriya had been able to see All For One inside of Shigaraki in battle, for example) so since Neito had neither, he should be safe… but here was the key-word: should. Toki had no certainty, no guarantee.
It had never been done. It may not even work.
And the real kicker? They only had less than four hours to pull it off.
Neito concentrated. Endeavor watched. Toki warped in an out of the armored truck, keeping track of their progression. She didn’t want to find herself right outside of Tartarus, more than eighty kilometers away from her nearest landmark. She would look like a total idiot. A totally incompetent criminal, too. Also she would get both Neito and Endeavor into trouble and that was… not great.
So. They waited. Neito did his thing. Toki sporadically warped back out to keep track of their progression and memorize landmarks.
Endeavor kept watch, although Toki caught him almost nodding off a few times. Without his flames, he looked exhausted. It made him look more like Enji Todoroki, the man who had shown up in Fukuoka to ask Toki to come back, rather than the Flame Hero Endeavor. Toki was almost tempted to strike a conversation, to ask about how her dad was doing, to say something. But she bit her tongue and let Neito work.
It was long.
It was boring.
It was so tense Toki was starting to feel faintly nauseous.
Every second, she expected Neito to jerk back, screaming that All For One’s ghost had possessed him or had stolen his Quirk. It was nerve-wrecking. And yet… she was the one who had suggested it. She had no right to give up or get scared.
Toki knew the risks. She had told Neito about them before they left for the rescue operation. When she had briefed him at Yūei, she had told him her plan, she had mentioned all she knew about All For One’s power and how dangerous it would be to copy it. She had told him about the specters inside a Quirk, although she had made it sound like speculation rather than certainty. She had warned him. She had asked him multiple times of the dangers.
But she had still asked for his help.
At the time, she thought she would have more time. She thought that she would just have to steal a little body part, then have Neito take his time to copy the Quirk, and then steal Warp-Gate from Kurogiri, who would be kept sedated somewhere in the meantime. The plan had been created to take down the warper, not the bogeyman.
But hey. Good thing the plan could be versatile, too.
The seconds ticked by. The car kept on driving. Periodically, a radio switched on, and Endeavor grunted the code for All Clear. The knot of anxiety in Toki’s guts kept tightening.
Finally, when they were less than half an hour away from their destination, Neito let out deep breath and straightened.
His brow was damp with sweat. When he brushed his bangs back, his hand was trembling faintly. His eyes were bloodshot as if he had stayed awake all night. Toki bit her lip, and didn’t allow herself to doubt her decision. She had offered him the idea… but he was the one who had accepted it. She had made sure he understood it was a lot. She had given him four different occasions to back off, she had told him multiple time he didn’t have to do it. And yet, Neito had made his decision. The fact that Toki didn’t like seeing him in pain didn’t mean Neito couldn’t handle it.
It was his choice to make.
“Found it,” he rasped. “It’s the center of the galaxy. It feels like a black hole. Go figures. I didn’t try to copy it, yet, but I can do it. The hardest part is done.”
Toki let out a deep breath. She exchanged a look with Endeavor, and they both nodded. They had gone so far already. It was too late to change their mind.
“Do it.”
Neito squared his shoulders, and reached out. He touched All For One’s arm once again, just a lightning-quick brush. Then he breathed deep, and this time he grasped the injured arm much, much more firmly.
And just like that, it was done.
oOoOoOo
(Now.)
“… and then I took Neito and left,” Toki concluded.
“Holy shit,” Keigo whispered, eyes wide. “You didn’t take the chance to steal more Quirks? A healing one would have done a lot of good.”
“The whole plan is banking on the idea that only the original Quirk was erased. Stealing more Quirks would have put a dent in that strategy. Better not to risk it. Besides, maybe he lost all his Quirks when the original one was taken? I have no idea.”
Keigo conceded the point with a shrug, and then grinned:
“So wait, does that mean that Neito has the most powerful Quirk in the world?”
“Oh, no. His Quirk can only allow him to copy a Quirk for a few minutes. I didn’t want to test and see if he kept a stolen Quirk after that the copy allowing the theft in the first place faded away. Who know, maybe the Quirk would have just… bounced back to its rightful owner.”
They both grimaced when they imagined that scenario. Trying so hard to copy All For One’s Quirk, and to steal it… Just to have it go back to the villain six minutes after. What a waste.
“The plan was to use Neito’s copied Quirk to take the original and immediately give it to someone else,” Toki explained. “And that’s what we did.”
“Oh? And who did you give it to?”
Toki sighed, and rubbed the nape of her neck.
She trusted Keigo. She trusted him more than anyone. She trusted him with all of her secrets, with her life, with her future. She was a hero because of him. She had picked this path to be with him.
But this was bigger than her.
One For All, and All For One… Two sides of the same coin. Two powers bigger than a single person. Two powers too big for this world, that were not meant to be wielded by mere mortals. Fighting with them, fighting against them… It felt like going against a natural disaster.
Toki wasn’t a powerhouse. Maybe people like Endeavor or Meteor could stand up against monsters of that caliber with their head held high. But Toki could only evade and ty to stab her opponent in the back, and if the swift take-down didn’t work, she could only run. The trick she had developed to fight All Might were just that, tricks. It entirely depended on tools and the assistance of her A.I.
Toki was strong. She knew she was strong. And yet she also knew this was bigger than herself.
Those cursed Quirks were weapons of mass-destruction and should be treated as such. Treated with care, treated with caution. Treated like secrets. Treated like live explosives.
“Sorry,” she smiled. “This is a secret between Endeavor, All Might, Neito, me, and the poor sap we burdened with the task of keeping that cursed Quirk safe.”
Keigo raised an eyebrow but didn’t push further. He knew the advantages of keeping secrets. Just like he hadn’t told her of what he was doing when the HPSC had tasked him with infiltrating the League, before Toki managed to get him off that mission; Toki knew it wasn’t safe to tell him about what she was doing to move against All For One.
“That’s fair. The less people know about it, the better.”
“Exactly,” Toki agreed with relief. “Honestly, four people in the known is already too much. We’ll probably give the Quirk to someone old and dying as soon as we find a volunteer.”
Keigo wisely didn’t argue that All For One was too good of a weapon to pass. He knew that Toki knew it too. But the benefit of getting rid of that Quirk vastly outweighed the risks of having it fall into the wrong hands.
Also, Toki still had All For One’s amputated legs, carefully hidden in a fridge, in the morgue in Yūei's basement.
Yes, Yūei had a morgue. Toki wasn’t going to think about it too hard. It was convenient, and that was all she was going to say on the subject.
Officially those dismembered legs were evidence in the case of the League of Villains… But unofficially, Toki was considering taking a sample of skin or bone and integrating it into some sort of support item for Neito, if he ever wanted to have this in his arsenal. Maybe a ring with a shard of bone in the inner layer, in contact with his skin.
Ah! One ring to rules them all. It would be funny.
Yes, it was kind of hypocritical to think about giving away that power, after working so hard to make it disappear. So what? Some powers were too dangerous for simple mortals, that was true. But Toki’s fledglings deserved the best. And of all her students, Neito was the one who was already neck-deep in this conspiracy. He merited compensation.
“Do you think I should have killed All For One?” she asked, suddenly.
Keigo didn’t even hesitate.
“Yes.”
“Wow, how ruthless of you.”
Keigo shrugged. He didn’t seem very bothered by it.
“I know it’s not very heroic. But you and I, we weren’t just trained a heroes. We were raised as soldiers, too. Okamoto didn’t make us learn how to handle dead bodies to prepare use for failed rescues operations. Our desensitization to death had a purpose.”
“The HPSC doesn’t do wet work anymore,” Toki frowned.
But they both know that even without launching full-scale assassinations, the HPSC had plenty of ways to get their hands dirty. That was why S-ranked heroes existed. Heroes who would be protected if they killed in the line of duty. Heroes who were allowed to be murderers. How fucking ironic.
“Let’s be honest, we both know it’s going to happen someday,” Keigo said gently. “If we’re lucky, it will be in the heat of a battle. If we’re not, it will be in cold blood, because more lives are on the line and we have to prioritize the greater good. But… we were trained from a young age, molded to value competence and efficiency above all else. We have the HPCS’s trust. From the beginning, we were pushed to reach the Top Ten. And the Top Ten heroes are automatically S-ranked. You can see where this is going. One day, someone is going to need to die because letting them live is too dangerous, and… they won’t ask someone who could falter. They will ask someone who can do it; someone who never fail. They will ask us.”
Toki closed her eyes, and put a hand on her face, feeling young and stupid. When Keigo said it like that, of course it made perfect sense. But…
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” she confessed.
Part of her had known. Part of her had always known. When Mera-san had dangled the deal in front of her, and she had thought it was too good to be true. When the President had told them about the assassinations conducted by the HPSC in the past, and Toki had realized that they were too deep to turn back. When the President had asked Toki to fight All Might, off the books, as a favor, and she had briefly wondered how heartless Genmei-san was, to agree to have the Symbol of Peace mutilated just to prove a point.
Part of Toki had always known, but she had never really stopped to think about it. She had been happy to skirt around this realization, happy to pretend there was no chance of it ever happening. After all, she was part of the Good Guys, wasn’t she?
She was a good person, wasn’t she?
“I thought about it,” she confessed. “I thought about killing him, but he was unconscious, the new helicopter was filming… Dad wouldn’t have stopped me, but All Might and Endeavor would have.”
“Too many witnesses.”
“Yeah. But if I had had the chance, I would have… I would have done it. I wouldn’t have felt bad about it.”
“I probably wouldn’t have felt bad either,” Keigo admitted.
Toki closed her eyes. She almost told him about Beros, about the actual blood on her hand, about the crime she had committed in the dark and that nobody knew about, the crime she had been allowed to commit and allowed to hide, and how fucking unfair it was.
Almost.
“If I had killed him, would it have made me a bad person?”
“Probably not. He’s so evil that it cancels out.” Keigo smirked, something small and a little self-depreciating. “You know… Of the two of us, I think I’ll be the one who get his hands dirty first.”
“What? Why?”
Keigo reached out with a hand, tapping her collarbone with the tip of a finger:
“Well, isn’t it obvious? Different skillset. I mean, when we started training, I’m pretty sure you were destined to the underground, and I was going to be the flashy one…”
“You are the flashy one!”
“Toki, you emit flashes of light when you warp.”
That was actually a good point. Toki pouted. Keigo grinned at her, and continued:
“But then you turned out to be a pig-headed idealist who love to argue, and I turned out to be an amazing liar who can sense vibrations with his feathers. So you took the role of the main fighter, and I learned how to be a spy. And if there was dirty work to do, well… It’s probably going to happen in a spying mission, not in a straight fight.”
Toki made a face (and then winced, because once again, it pulled at her wound) and rubbed her nape in an unconscious self-soothing gesture.
The worst thing was that Keigo wasn’t even wrong. Hawks and Quantum had been trained the same, to be as strong as each other. But Quantum had been encouraged to learn kickboxing, judo, breakdancing, and Hawks had been encouraged to join a chess club, to learn the language of flowers and various cyphers, or to learn how to play music to familiarize himself with air vibrations. When they fought together, they could both hold their own, but when they needed to go all out, it was Toki who took point and Keigo who ran recon and support. It was a good system. It worked. It suited their strengths.
Toki had noticed the patterns… but she hadn’t thought to transpose them to a bigger scale.
She hadn’t thought about how well-suited Hawks was to underground, because he appeared to be simplistic and flashy, but was such a skilled spy. And she hadn’t thought how Quantum was the exact reverse, the one you would expect to be sneaking around and thus the one you would watch for, while in reality Quantum was excellent at providing distraction.
Shit, this was exactly what she had done with All For One, after all. She had yelled ‘notice me, not the actual successor,’ and he had fallen for it hook, line and sinker.
“What if…” Toki paused, and gulped. “What if I killed someone who wasn’t All For One? That would make me a bad person, wouldn’t it? If the victim wasn’t inherently evil?”
“Well, if you killed it self-defense…”
“What if it’s not in self-defense? Killing All For One wouldn’t have been self-defense. It would have been murder, because I would have taken a life in anger. In fear. If I killed someone like this… I wouldn’t be any better than Meteor. There is no goodness in killing someone, even if you do it to protect someone else; not when it’s born out of a selfish impulse. Maybe not even when it’s for the greater good. It’s just death! It’s wrong! It’s not something a hero should do. We should be better than this!”
I should be better than this! she wanted to add. I shouldn’t be the kind of person who kill, and even if I did, I should feel bad about it, I shouldn’t be so cold, I should feel guilt, it shouldn’t be easy to forget. What value has life if you can not only destroy it so easily, but not even care?!
But the words got stuck in her throat. Toki clenched her jaw and stayed silent.
For several long, long seconds, Keigo looked at her. Toki stared back at him, almost pleadingly, and wondered what he saw in her face. She was afraid of what he would ask. She was terrified that he would ask her what she meant, terrified that he would guess what had happened, and then Toki would have to open her mouth, and either admit the crime or lie to him. She didn’t know which was worse.
“Does it matter?” Keigo said.
“… What?”
“Would it matter if you killed someone in battle?” Keigo’s voice was quiet and even. “If you killed an enemy, even if you could have avoided it, but you did it anyway… It would be a terrible thing. But would killing that person make the world safer? Would it make you safer? You, or someone you love?”
“I… I don’t know. Probably?”
“Then it’s worth it.”
“But what if it wasn’t?” Toki insisted, almost desperately. “What if was a mistake?”
“Then you make it worth it,” Keigo answered, steel in his voice. “You can’t afford not to. You made the call. Maybe it wasn’t the right one, but you can’t take it back so you can’t afford to think it was the wrong one. You got back home alive. You saved who you needed to save. That’s all there is to it.”
Toki understood, suddenly, how canon-Hawks had shouldered Twice’s death so easily, with no flashbacks or remorse or trauma, even if he had genuinely liked Twice. Because he had to believe it, too. He had to believe that it was worth it.
Even if it was wrong, even if he knew it was wrong, he had to convince himself that it was the right call. He needed to convince himself that it had been worth it.
But it hadn’t, had it?
Toki thought of Beros, and the way her arrow had pierced Neito’s chest. She thought of All For One, and the glee in his voice when he had described what he had done to Tenko Shimura. She thought of a Quirk stolen, of a life taken, of crimes committed in the dark.
She thought of Meteor’s bloodthirsty grin and the way his eyes glowed in the dark when he was ready to kill someone, and she wondered if that was the last thing Beros had seen. She felt a little sick.
She hoped Keigo was right. She hoped it was worth it.
Notes:
The idea of stealing AFO's Quirk was in the works for a while. It was actually first foreshadowned in the chapter "Encounter at the mall", when Toki ponders about Kurogiri and thinks "The only way to defeat someone with an unbeatable Quirk was to remove the Quirk from the equation".
Also, the whole idea of stealing AFO's Quirk came to me thanks to someone's comment in this fic, about Monoma copying All Might's Quirk!
It was more than a year ago. I think the exact comment was "Hey, so like, if Monoma can copy quirks, even OfA : can he pass it on? Like if he has OfA copied and someone ate his hair, would OfA pass on? Would he have created a 2nd OfA? Or would it disappear after the 5 minute mark?"
Except that i read it too quickly and i read AFO instead of OFA and i was struck by inspiration. So whoever you are, person whose username i didn't think to save for posterity: THIS PLOT-TWIST IS DEDICATED TO YOU. YOU'RE AMAZING. THANK YOU.Also if you want to read more about Monoma being an absolute menace with AFO, then i encourage you to read "to escape what's inside me" by DivineProjectZero !!!!!!
Chapter 58: Time heals all wounds
Summary:
“Hey Dad. Remember when I said that I would give you some time to prepare to the next big surprise?”
Meteor caught sight of Hinawa and stopped dead in his tracks.
“Surprise,” Toki finished lamely.
Notes:
I'm posting this in advance because tomorrowi'm leaving for a murder party. Basically think a cross between giant Cluedo and an escape game. Never done one of those before, so i'm impatient!
Anywayyyyyy here is the chapter x) And there's a moment many of you were waiting for with impatience... ehehehe.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
TIME HEALS ALL WOUNDS
The next day was slow. The rescue efforts were mostly over. Everyone was getting back to their feet, going back to their normal lives. The shock was slowly dissipating. Yūei gave the promised press conference to publicize the successful retrieval of their kidnapped student, and refused to answer any questions about All Might’s weak form.
All Might announced his retirement.
He did a quick speech, about how he had planned to retire in three months anyway, but his health couldn’t allow him to delay it any further. He emphasized that he had full confidence that the other heroes would keep up the good work and ensure Japan’s safety. He personally thanked Endeavor and Quantum (and yeah, that had been a surprise) for their assistance.
And that was it, he was done. The Symbol of Peace was officially retired.
It was the end of an era.
All Might had been an institution. He left behind him a big, empty space. It could have been worse. There were now structures put in place to pick up the slack, policies instituted to make sure insecurity didn’t rise, measures taken to prevent criminality rather than hope that All Might’s intimidation factor would be enough to make the would-be-villains cower. But even if All Might had retired three months later and kept his weak form a secret, his disappearance from the public scene would have shaken Japan. All Might was more than a person. He was a part of their culture.
Yūei announced that they would put in place a dorm system. Nedzu privately contacted Toki to tell her that Aizawa would resume his functions as Yūei teacher in September. Nobody quite knew yet whether Toki would stay the homeroom teacher or not, but Toki herself had a feeling that Nedzu kind of wanted to give her the boot. Well, she was preparing a little speech to defend her post. Like hell she was letting a horrible teacher like Aizawa become the mentor of her fledglings.
But that didn’t happen right away.
What happened first was this: Toki and Neito had a talk about his future. Neito admitted, voice tight, that he would love for Toki to get custody. Even if it meant moving to Fukuoka. He didn’t want to be placed with strangers, and every distant member of his family that the administration would find would be strangers.
So, Kameko transmitted Toki’s request for emergency custody of Neito Monoma, as a hero petitioning a public service by the medium of the HPSC. The request was granted. It would be revoked as soon as an official guardian could be found, but for now, Neito didn’t have to worry about being put in a shady group home.
As Neito’s guardian, Toki signed him up for the dorms system. That way, if whoever ended up having custody of him wanted to take him away, they would have to remove him from the dorms system first, and good luck with that if Neito didn’t want to. He would have Nedzu on his side.
After Nedzu, Toki called Yagi, to ask him if he was alright. And then she called Melissa, to tell her that Yagi had sounded a bit down and maybe she should keep an eye on him, so he didn’t mope too much. The poor man had basically lost a big part of his life, as well as his precious anonymity, all in one scoop. He needed people in his corner.
And then after Yagi, Toki wavered for nearly thirty seconds, and she called Hayasa-sensei to ask for two weeks off.
Usually, after a disaster, Toki was itching to get back to work. She needed to do something. But right now, Icarus could function without her and it would have been downright irresponsible to abandon the teenager that she had just taken responsibility for. So, for next two weeks, Toki wasn’t going to be Quantum. She wasn’t even going to be Hoshizora. She was going to be Toki Taiyōme and protect her people. Neito, Hinawa, Hitoshi, Keigo. Even Meteor.
It was a daunting task. Toki Taiyōme mostly existed in the liminal spaces between Quantum and Hoshizora, these days. But it needed to be done, and, well, Toki couldn’t deny that there were parts of being a Taiyōme that she missed.
(Like belonging to a family, for example.)
So Toki asked for a vacation to help settle down things. Since she had been punched, stabbed, and nearly blinded, Hayasa-sensei had been overjoyed that for once she wasn’t trying to get back to work as soon as she could physically crawl out of a hospital bed. He granted her vacation immediately.
“You aren’t back to Fukuoka yet, right, sensei?” Toki asked after.
She was sending an email to the head of HR of her Hoshizora work, to ask for two weeks off too. The guy was snippy and was asking for a reason. Toki bluntly wrote ‘acquiring custody of a minor following the violent death of relatives in recent events’.
That shup the guy pretty quick. And now her civiliansona had her vacation too. Nice.
On the phone, Hayasa-sensei made a pensive noise.
“No, my train is tomorrow. I went to see my sister in Tokyo today. Why?”
“I’m going to book a fancy hotel suite, so I don’t impose on Mihoko-san any longer. You should come up. There’s someone I would like you to meet.”
“The kid you adopted?”
“Yep. And another kid, too.”
True to her word, Toki booked a fancy hotel suite with two bedrooms and a private gym, not far from the Shinsō’s apartment.
She loved the Shinsō, really, but she couldn’t impose forever. Besides, it was good for Neito to have his own space (until the dorms were completed at least). For the foreseeable future his only mission was to finish his summer homework, pamper Hinawa, and occasionally come with Toki and Hitoshi and Melissa to a cat café to pet kittens and eat sweets. He didn’t have to worry about being a guest, only to catch his breath.
Meanwhile Mihoko was hovering over Hitoshi, barely letting him out her sight. It annoyed Hitoshi, but at the same time, Toki noticed that he didn’t exactly shrug away from the offered comfort.
It definitely annoyed Hinawa, though. She was used to being the center of attention. Toki took to distracting her daughter by carrying her around everywhere. But hey, she wasn’t going to complain about it. She so rarely had the occasion to spend the whole day with Hinawa, doting on her, talking to her, listening to her babbling.
Which was a chance to take back her own daughter for a few days… and introduce her to the people who would protect her, if Toki got murdered by All For One in the near future.
One of these people was Meteor. But another, just as important, was Hayasa-sensei.
So. That’s how her old teacher met her daughter.
To no one’s surprise except maybe Neito, Hayasa-sensei melted like a sugar cube left in the rain when he met Hinawa. Yeah, he pretended to be tough and rigid and strict, but Hayasa-sensei was secretly a mother-hen. He liked kids. He especially had a soft spot the size of Siberia for the two terrors he had raised, so of course he would adore the tiny miracle of cuteness that Keigo and Toki had managed to produce.
“Well, hello, Young Miss,” Hayasa-sensei cooed when Toki put the toddler in his arms. “You look just like your mother!”
“Mama eye!” Hinawa beamed.
“Exactly. What a keen intellect too!”
Hinawa, who loved meeting new people and being the center of attention, preened like a baby peacock. Toki smothered a snort of laughter.
Hayasa-sensei didn’t stay long. But Toki introduced him to Neito, and they spoke a little about Icarus. Mostly Hayasa-sensei poked and prodded at her plans to protect Hinawa. He approved of the secrecy, but he was of the opinion that Toki should keep her daughter close. On that point, they agreed to disagree.
Some part of Toki agreed with him, and maybe that was why she tried to change the subject instead of trying to persuade him.
Because she knew that leaving Hinawa with the Shinsō wasn’t a plan as foolproof as it had been when she had originally made it.
Maybe letting Hinawa with the Shinsō would save her if villains came after Icarus. But then maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it would even put her in danger if the League came after Hitoshi again. It seemed to be Hayasa-sensei’s opinion. The Shinsō had been a good idea as long as they flew under the radar and could remain hidden. But now that they were a possible target, putting Hinawa with them was needlessly dangerous.
And yet, Toki couldn’t think of anyone else.
She couldn’t leave her daughter with strangers. If the Shinsō were out, the only people she knew who could blend in with civilians were Sawayomi (with whom Toki hadn’t kept in touch) and Sachiko (who had neither the mean nor the desire to be saddled with a child). Keigo had no civilian contacts on his end. Their other options would be to bring Hinawa with them, to raise her themselves and with the help of friends and family in Fukuoka… but everyone they knew was connected to heroics. It would be dangerous. Flying under the radar wouldn’t be an option.
And sooner or later, there would be a leak. Toki and Keigo could kiss their secrecy goodbye. Toki had made an enemy of the League, but Keigo was infiltrating the MLA. They couldn’t allow themselves to offer their enemies their vulnerabilities on a silver platter.
And… what about Mihoko and Hitoshi? They had been raising Hinawa for almost a year. They loved her. What kind of monster would take Hinawa from them, would tell them that when they lost their safety they had also lost Toki’s trust? Toki couldn’t do that. She refused. She trusted the Shinsō with her life.
And yet there was the undeniable fact that the anonymity which had granted them safety, which had granted Hinawa safety, was gone.
Even if the League never went after Hitoshi again, the Shinsō had gained an undesirable notoriety. People knew their names, because Hitoshi had been on TV as ‘the kidnapped kid’. Hajime’s coworkers would pay more attention. So would Mihoko’s neighborhood.
And people would notice they had a second child. A child that looked nothing like them, a child whose identity was secret and who appeared nowhere on their koseki.
In a world where Quirk-trafficking was a real worry, people were suspicious of parents who had children who didn’t look like them. Especially if the kid was raised in secrecy. Especially if the kid also had very desirable Quirks/traits… like, for example, functional wings, the rarest and considered most attractive animal mutation. It was the reason why Mihoko couldn’t put Hinawa in a daycare or hire any babysitters.
Losing the secrecy wouldn’t just put Hinawa in danger because the League could target Hitoshi. It would put Hinawa in danger because people would notice her existence and barge into Mihoko’s life to demand answers.
Yes, Toki could see why Hayasa-sensei was worried. She was worried too. She knew Keigo would raise the subject soon.
She knew that even Mihoko must have realized it.
And yet she had no solution.
So she holed up in her hotel suite with Hinawa and Neito, went to the gym, did paperwork, and tried to plan for the future. For the last ten years or so, she had utterly focused on the Kamino battle, on All Might, AFO, and their destructive grudge. Now, this affair was settled, and it was time to think about the battles to come. The League, Dabi, the MLA… Hinawa’s protection. The Shinsō’s protection. Neito’s future.
Gods, there was so much to do. It was faintly overwhelming.
At least Neito was good company. He was also surprisingly good with kids. He listened to Hinawa with utter gravitas when she babbled, giving her his total attention. He never snapped when she pulled at his sleeve to attract his attention. He told her funny stories to make her laugh. He showed her magic tricks like making a coin disappear with a wave of the wrist or pulling the right card from a pile. Within twenty-four hours he had her wrapped around his little finger.
“When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time around younger children in my neighborhood,” he confessed with a rueful smile. “I was the oldest, so I was the designated babysitter.”
“That’s where you learned the magic tricks?” Toki inquired, genuinely curious.
“Kind of? My grandfather showed me. It helped give me a reputation, and keep the kids in line, you know? Unfortunately, I was a braggard as a child, and I couldn’t help but show the secrets of my tricks. It killed the mystery. I learned better, since then, but think of the awe I could have inspired among a crowd of toddlers if I hadn’t showed them how I kept finding coins behind their ears!”
Toki sniggered. Neito smiled, too, and then looked away.
He had his summer homework open in front of him, but he had barely touched it. Toki was keeping an eye on him while pretending to prepare lessons plans for September, while in reality she was discreetly reading “Parenting A Teenager For Dummies.” Hinawa was dozing off among the mountain of plushies that Toki had brought from Mihoko’s appartement.
Neito looked tired. They all looked tired, after the last two days, but Neito had big eyebags and a constant air of exhaustion hanging around him. Last night, Toki had heard him tossing and turning almost until morning. He didn’t seem to sleep well.
“He raised me,” Neito suddenly said. “My grandfather. My mother… she was a singer, you know? An artist, with a very busy life. She didn’t have time for a kid. When I was little, I thought she was my aunt, or a cousin. It was a shock to learn she was my mom.”
Toki didn’t quite know what she was supposed to say to that.
“Your grandfather isn’t around anymore, is he?” she asked softly.
“No. He died when I was in elementary school, and I moved there, with my mom.” Neito hesitated, throwing Toki a furtive glance. “She tried her best. She loved me, in her way. When I lived with my grandfather, Mom used to come to the beach with me about twice a year, to ask me about my day. She always apologized to not taking me with her, but she said it wasn’t a life for a child. She was right, and I didn’t blame her. I loved her, too, but… I didn’t really know her.”
“Did you grow closer, when you moved with her?”
Neito shook his head.
“No. It’s stupid, you know? I thought we would have the time, but neither of us really tried.”
Toki frowned, unpleasantly reminded of her own mother. Sayuri hadn’t tried, either. As soon as Toki had started protesting, rebelling… Sayuri had been looking for a replacement.
“She should have tried more. Didn’t you live together?”
Neito shook his head again: “She rarely spent more than two consecutive weeks there. She still travelled a lot, so she mostly paid a nanny to look after me. I was busy having fun, making friends. Part of me didn’t want to be the one to make the first step. If she wanted to be a mother, then she had to try. But she didn’t, and I didn’t either, and… And then, right before my last year of middle school, she collapsed. Her manager put her in rehab. It turned out she was taking drugs to hide the fact that she had stomach cancer. She barely ate. When she came home before being interned, I almost didn’t recognize her. She looked like a skeleton.”
There was a long silence. Slowly, uncertainly, Toki put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“It feels like it,” Toki muttered. “It’s my savior complex. All heroes have one.”
Neito laughed weakly.
“I know. Still… Of all the people involved, you’re the least to blame. Actually, you’re the one I’m the most grateful to. I owe you a lot.”
“Come on, it’s not…”
“It is. And I don’t just mean the thing about sparring me the trip to an orphanage or trusting me with that mission at Kamino.”
“Please never mention it to anyone, I could get into a lot of trouble for that.”
She had made Nedzu believe that she needed to borrow Neito only to act as a taxi from Korusan to Kamino if things went south. Not that she really needed his permission, but she knew that if she vanished with Neito without the go-ahead, Nedzu would believe it was another kidnapping and blow a gasket. So she had politely asked for his assent, and the rat-badger-bear had given it.
And then Toki had told Neito about her real plan, which was to get her hand one some of AFO’s DNA, use Neito’s Quirk to copy the ability to take Quirk, and use that to take the Quirk of Kurogiri as soon as he was captured. Toki intended to be the hero on duty in the police truck escorting Kurogiri to jail, so she would have had ample time to warp out, pick up Neito, warp back in, and let him play with his new Quirk until he managed to steal Warp-Gate.
Of course that plan had been fucked as soon as Kurogiri had escaped, but the idea had been salvageable enough to be adapted to their new prisoner… And so, Toki had brought Neito to All For One himself.
The plan had worked, but boy that had been nerve-wrecking.
And bordering on illegal. No, scratch that, probably illegal. Certainly illegal. Neito had used his Quirk with a hero’s agreement, but he had used it on a prisoner unable to consent. And actually, what was the stance on the law about Quirk theft? Was Quirk theft even a crime? It should be a crime. Was it?
Oh gods, Toki had made a small child commit a crime on her behalf.
The only good thing was that Endeavor and All Might were both on it, so if it ever came to light, Toki could throw them under the bus to clear Neito’s name and her own. Yes, that seemed like a rational plan. Good job.
“I also meant about the summer camp,” Neito said, and Toki’s smile was instantly wiped from her face. “You saved my life. It was… Everything went wrong. I barely managed to save Setsuna, and then I— I didn’t plan ahead, I just reacted. I panicked, I was too slow.”
Toki shook her head, vehemently:
“It wasn’t your fault. Shit, Neito, it was your first villain attack, and against an experienced mercenary! You couldn’t be expected to…”
“But still! I had the most powerful Quirk out of anyone, at the summer camp. I had your Warp-Space, I had Regeneration, I had a speed Quirk— And yet I barely did anything. I almost died. I couldn’t save Hitoshi. I felt so terrified back there. I was sure I was going to die. But then you appeared and saved the day! It was kind of fantastic.”
Toki felt sick. She tried not to think of that moment, of the arrow going through Neito’s chest, the horrible wet rattling of his lungs as he gasped for breath, the way terror had morphed into burning, murderous rage, how Beros’ eyes had widened…
She shouldn’t think about it. It was done, it was over. All she could do was try to make sure it never happened again. That she never did it again.
“I was still too late to save Hitoshi,” she muttered.
“But you saved me. Hell, you saved all thirty-nine of us, and you even ended up saving Hitoshi at the end. Take the win, Quantum-sensei.”
Toki huffed with amusement. “I think you can call me Toki. Hitoshi and Melissa both do it, anyway.”
Neito made a face. “It’s going to take some time to get used to.”
So. The day passed, slowly. Calls were made. Toki got her destroyed visor sent back to Hotaka with a fruit basket and a hand-written apology asking him to please salvage the A.I. and reinstall her in a new visor.
And then she logged back on the Discord server. She needed some cheering up.
________________
> NotOnFire: I’m just saying!
> NotOnFire: There is something so beautiful about reaching out to the monstrous with intent to touch it gently. To risk the sharp teeth and the lethal claws, to defy fear and revulsion, and choose to be delicate with something that can be, and often is, incredibly brutal.
> PikaPika: …
> PikaPika: Please don’t go inside the tiger cage
> NotOnFire: but I would pet those tigers so gently before they mauled me to death!
> NotOnFire: 😭
> EndeavorSucks: Oh thank GOD this is about tigers
> PikaPika: what else would it be about?
> EndeavorSucks: NOTHING
> NotOnFire: … you thought it was about monsterfucking, didn’t you
> EndeavorSucks: NO
> EndeavorSucks: I hate you
> Megamind: wait, we can pet tigers?
> Megamind: huge kitties can be pet??????
> EndeavorSucks: yes, but only once
< Antares: what the fuck is going on
> PinkIsPunkRock: STARS! Welcome BACK!
< Antares: hi =)
> PikaPika: welcome back!
> PikaPika: Moxie and Megamind kept us updated but we were worried
> EndeavorSucks: how’s Phantom?
< Antares: he’s fine, he’s resting
< Antares: ANYWAY
< Antares: why does @NotOnFire wants to get mauled to death by tigers?!
> NotOnFire: I have a new job!!!
< Antares: …. is it at a zoo?
> NotOnFire: yes! how did you know?
< Antares: oh gods
> NotOnFire: I’m joking x)
> NotOnFire: I sell tickets. Nobody lets me pet the animals.
> EndeavorSucks: thank fuck.
> Megamind: so we *can’t* pet tigers??? i need answers people
< Antares: you could pet Ocelot, but you need to buy him dinner 😜
> PinkIsPunkRock: Ocelot… oh, that’s your sidekick who looks like a tiger!
> Megamind: 🐯
> Megamind: KITTY
> PikaPika: i dare you to say that to his face
> Megamind: … Not Kitty.
> PikaPika: better.
< Antares: xD
< Antares: so what’s new? I need happy stuff to distract me from the fact that life is depressing and my inferiority complex will never heal. And also from the fact that I just petitioned the very scary Administration for custody of a whole-ass teenager and I’m not ready to be a teenage mom
> Megamind: exchange with my mom
> Megamind: I love her, really, but she’s kind of overbearing right now.
> EndeavorSucks: can you blame her?! You were kidnapped!!!!
> EndeavorSucks: if you were MY child you would be wrapped in bubble-wrap
> Megamind: don’t you dare.
< Antares: HAPPY STUFF. I asked for happy stuff not reminders of those terrible 24h that halved my lifespan please.
> EndeavorSucks: er
> PinkIsPunkRock: oh, something funny happened to me
> PinkIsPunkRock: I met a woman today at work, and she was like “i’m mrs saito, soon to be mrs haruna” and I was like “aww, that’s lovely! are you getting married?”
> PinkIsPunkRock: and without blinking she hit back with “nah i’m divorcing the cunt”
> PinkIsPunkRock: a legend tbh
< Antares: 🤣🤣🤣
< Antares: Thank you I needed that
< Antares: more!
> NotOnFire: well I know a bunch of stupid animal-themed jokes now
> EndeavorSucks: like what
> NotOnFire: well my coworkers said I had to stop acting like a flamingo! The nerve!
> NotOnFire: so I had to put my foot down.
> EndeavorSucks: …
> EndeavorSucks: you know I think monsterfucking was preferable to that joke
> NotOnFire: 😁
________________
OOoOoOo
The day after, Toki finally gathered her courage and decided to have her daughter meet Meteor. Somehow, it didn’t go quite as planned. She was hoping for a quiet meeting at Meteor’s apartment (which would also give her a chance to see where he lived and maybe snoop around). However, her plans were thwarted almost immediately.
Toki blamed the Todoroki family and their genetic allergy to minding their own business.
“Oh yeah, your father is at the Todoroki’s house,” Neito told Toki when she announced she was going to call Meteor.
Toki narrowed her eyes. “What? Since when? Why?! And how do you know that?”
“I’ve been texting Shouto. He’s complaining about being stuck at home, so he’s distracting himself by telling embarrassing stories about Endeavor to Meteor. He said I was welcome to come whenever, and I kind of want to take him up on that.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. He’s good company. Awfully socially stunted, but he doesn’t poke in my business and he’s in awe of my charisma.”
“Right,” Toki drawled in a tone that hopefully conveyed her skepticism.
Neito puffed up indignantly:
“Hey, don’t doubt my charm! There’s the reason why the Business Course is marketing me as a Casanova.”
Toki absentmindedly wondered if it wasn’t genetics inherited from Thunder Thief, and then she wondered what kind of excuse she could have to steal Thunder Thief’s hairbrush and run a DNA test. Now she even had good reason to look for genetic matches with Neito, since she was looking for a relative to take custody.
“Has Little Todoroki realized you’re flirting yet?”
“… It’s not my fault he’s dense. So! Back to your problem. Do you want me to tell him that you need a dramatic reveal and that you would like to use his siblings as a convenient human shield?”
Toki rubbed her temples. She almost said no, because what she wanted to discuss with Meteor was kind of private. But… Having the Todoroki as human shields wasn’t a bad idea when you thought about it.
“You know what? Yes, let’s do that.”
Keigo’s joke about Meteor moving in with the Todoroki may not be such a stretch, after all.
“How did he get there anyway?” she couldn’t help but scowl.
So, apparently, Endeavor (who was back to work) had mentioned to Fuyumi that Meteor had been injured. None of his injuries were serious, of course. Meteor only had a sprained wrist, two broken fingers, and some minor internal bleeding. It had been easily fixed by the paramedics.
But it meant that he had a brace on his right wrist and a splint on his left hand, was benched for a week, and forbidden to even think about sparring. For some reason, that had resulted into him being invited over to the Todoroki home.
Officially Fuyumi had been moved by the tales of his injuries. Unofficially, Toki was pretty sure that Endeavor had found a way to assign a bodyguard to his house to protect his family while he was tidying up the mess of Kamino.
Endeavor was supposed to patrol there for a few days, but that meant leaving Shizuoka undefended… And he must have realized that the Ghost Arsonist was specifically targeting him and his family, by now.
Meteor was probably using that opportunity to charm the Todoroki children in hopes of being invited to stay the night and make the most of his booty call.
Damn it, Dad.
Well, it didn’t matter. The Todoroki house was as good of a place as any to organize this meeting. It was private, it was safe, and there would even be Neito and Shouto to run interference if Toki needed an explosion in the background as a distraction.
Maybe all the drama from the Todoroki family actually came from the house. It attracted dramatic reveals and emotional outbursts. Had the Todoroki ever looked into an exorcism?
Toki went to their house anyway.
She brought Neito with her. He wanted to see Shouto. Talk, train, maybe even flirt, just see a friend to get his mind off things. She couldn’t say no to that.
Toki kept fearing that Neito would collapse and burst into tears, like Toki would do if Mihoko-san or Hayasa-sensei or Meteor were killed, but after the big cry he had had the first night, Neito had seemed to be… more or less fine. Sad, and solemn, and maybe a little more fragile, but back to normal. He seemed to be processing things. He wasn’t in shock, he wasn’t in denial, he wasn’t angry.
He seemed just… lost. Clinging to Toki almost unconsciously, because she was the only familiar element in this uprooted world he found himself in. This world where he was now an orphan, and even if the fact had sunk in, he still didn’t know how to deal with it.
It uncomfortably reminded Toki of her grief after her mother’s death. She had been sad, gutted even, but even if she cried in Keigo’s shoulder at night, she didn’t allow herself to show despair during the day because a part of her had been unconsciously persuaded that she didn’t deserve it.
Did Neito not want to share his grief because he thought he didn’t deserve it either? Because he was a hero in training, and his mother had been killed by a villain? Survivor guilt was a powerful thing.
Neito would heal, like Toki had healed, but nothing would ever be the same. There would be scars. There would be bitterness. Some part of him would always look for closure, and yet shy away from it because of how frightening the idea of reopening the wound was.
At one time in my childhood
there was a scream of sorrow
that never came out.
It had been over a decade, but Toki still felt so much guilt over Sayuri’s death. She had adored her mother and had been so bitterly disappointed by her. It had ended so awfully, with no possibility of closure. Maybe that was why the tangled mass of confused feelings in her chest had never had a chance to be put to rest. Love and admiration turned to dismay and shock, turned to desperation and bitterness, turned longing and anger, turned rage, turned guilt, turned grief.
Neito’s mother was like Sayuri. Akari Monoma had loved her child… but she hadn’t cared enough to put her his need before her wants, and hadn’t even had the decency to hide it. Just like Sayuri.
Toki and Neito would have to carry it forever, that knowledge that they hadn’t been worthy of unconditional love.
In truth, Neito was lucky. He had had his grandfather. And then later, his mother’s sickness as a convenient excuse to explain why she couldn’t be around him. He knew that Akari Monoma had discarded him, but he still had been loved. He still had had family and friends to raise him, he had never depended entirely on his mother. He had known from the very beginning where he stood with her. There had been no betrayal of his expectations. Disappointment, yes, because what child wouldn’t wish for his mother’s unconditional love? But it had been expected. It hadn’t come from nowhere.
Toki, on the other hand, had lost it all in one evening when she was seven years old.
It had taken her a while to understand it. Her mother had never stopped being kind. But she had stopped being around. She had stopped being patient. She had stopped listening to Toki, giving her time and attention. She had stopped being a mom. Sayuri already had her eyes on another prize. And Toki hadn’t wanted to see it, hadn’t wanted to realize it, but… It had been true all the same.
Toki had to look her mother in the face and know that even though Sayuri had liked her, loved her even, her mother had already moved on. Sayuri had decided that she didn’t want to be Toki’s mom anymore. As if it was something that could be taken back, as if it wasn’t such a cutting, horrifying betrayal.
The good thing is that I survived you.
The bad thing is that
you were something to survive.
Sayuri had loved her daughter, until that love had required a sacrifice from her. Then she had let go as if scalded.
But Toki hadn’t been a burden Sayuri was allowed to put down. Toki had been a child, barely more than a baby, and she hadn’t understood why her mother suddenly didn’t love her anymore. She hadn’t understood why her mother didn’t want to speak about her Quirk and all its potential, why her mother didn’t have time to read her bedtime stories, why her mother only hummed distractingly when Toki tried to talk to her, instead of paying attention like she used to.
Was that how Touya Todoroki had felt when his father had pushed him away? The pain had cut so deep. For Toki it had turned to paranoia, to mulish resolve, to crying herself to sleep in silence, to a frantic desire to escape. Toki’s first instinct had always been to flee. But if she had been violent and cruel, that pain would have surely turned to anger. If her first instinct had been to fight, then what? What would she have become? Children felt so much. Trauma shaped them easily. Yes, maybe Toki could understand how Dabi had come to be.
That didn’t mean she could excuse any of the shit he had done.
Toki had been hurt, too, but she wasn’t barbecuing people over it.
It had been years now. It didn’t hurt as badly. And yet… Somehow, the pain had stuck, like a phantom ache on a broken bone that had never been set right. Toki had tried to stop loving her mother, to try and protect herself. She had never really managed. For children, forgiveness is almost unvoluntary.
Even if she knew what her mother was, what she would do, how little she cared… Toki had never stopped wanting Sayuri’s love. It was kind of pathetic, wasn’t it? Toki would never have been able to get it.
That door had been closed to her as soon as Sayuri had made herself a replacement.
Because that’s what Hikari had been, a replacement. Toki had never taken the time to wonder what would happen after Hikari’s birth if everything went according to plan. If Sayuri gave birth, if the heist went on without a hitch, if everyone could go on with their criminal lives. But part of her had already known, back then, that Sayuri wouldn’t take Toki back with her. She would leave with her new baby, cuter and more docile, and abandon Toki with the Crew, because at least her father wanted her.
But if Meteor hadn’t loved Toki, what then? What would have Sayuri done? Tolerated Toki’s presence but shuffled her to the side to make more room for the new baby, bringing her along like some unwanted package? Would she have cared about Toki’s pain, then?
Or would she have just cared about the inconvenience it would cause her?
You did this to me, Mom. I was a kid. I didn’t deserve that. What a horrible thing it is to look into your mother’s eyes and see her love for you vanish.
How am I supposed to live with that?
Neito would heal, like Toki had healed. He would probably deal with it better. He didn’t have to wrangle under control a feeling of betrayal. He felt guilty, but he wasn’t responsible for what had happened. It wasn’t his fault if Akari Monoma was dead. It was no one’s fault but Dabi’s.
Dabi, who had been looking to kill Rei Todoroki. Ugh. That was going to be a fun conversation to have.
Toki was not looking forward to that.
Whatever. Toki went to the house, with Hinawa in her arms and Neito at her side. Shouto was the one to open the door to them. He looked at Hinawa, blinked, nodded his head as if it made perfect sense, and then stepped aside to let them in.
“Everyone is in the kitchen.”
“Really?” Toki said, surprised. It was the middle of the afternoon. “Why?”
“Natsuo is stress-baking, but he doesn’t know how to cook, so he needs all the help he can get. Hopefully nothing is on fire yet.”
“Fair enough.”
They came in. Shouto led them towards the kitchen, and indeed, Toki could hear the noise of conversation and the clink of containers. Her father’s voice rang clear and cheerful, apparently bickering with one of the Todoroki kids, and Toki had to suppress a sudden and irrational burst of jealousy.
She had no right to feel envious if the Todoroki family had apparently adopted Meteor. After all, hadn’t Toki done the same, finding a place with the Shinsō? They shouldn’t begrudge each other for finding other people to love. They shouldn’t begrudge each other for filling the void they both had left.
Toki had lost her mother at age seven, more than a year before Sayuri’s death. She had lost her mother the day Sayuri had brought her to Tokyo to drop her on Meteor’s doorstep, to make Toki his problem instead of hers. All the time they had spent together afterward had been tense and stifled, tainted with the knowledge that even if Sayuri still treated Toki with fondness, she had given up on her all the same.
But Toki hadn’t been all alone back there, because her father had loved her.
Her father had loved her, even when they had never met before. She’d treated him with distrust and wariness for months, and yet Meteor had loved her all the same. Oh, he hadn’t been a perfect father: he had ignored her wishes, trying to force her to a mold she didn’t fit, never fucking listened to her. But he had never not cared. Always, from the moment Toki had meet his eyes for the first time, he had loved her. Toki had known even then that even if Sayuri abandoned her, Meteor wouldn’t have.
And then she had betrayed him.
Could she blame him for finding new people to care for? She had done the same. They had both rebuilt themselves anew in the wreckage of her betrayal. Toki could only be grateful that they both had space in their lives for each other: that she was willing to give him a second chance, and that her father was willing to accept her back.
With any luck, he would be willing to accept Hinawa, too.
Toki breathed deeply, and advanced.
She stopped in the living room, mostly because Hinawa had enough of being carried and was wriggling to be put down. Not that Toki couldn’t wrangle a toddler, but Hinawa was almost one year old, and she was heavier. Besides, since it was too hot for her to wear a sweater, Hinawa wore a tank top that revealed her wings, and two additional limbs flailing around made it a lot harder to keep a good grip on her.
“No, don’t wander off,” Toki instructed her daughter, crouching down to look her in the eyes. She softened her voice. “There’s someone I want you to meet. You’ll be nice to him, right?”
“kay!” her daughter grinned at her.
“You’re the best, babyfeathers.”
“Munchkin?” came her father’s voice, pleasantly surprised. “Is that you?”
Neito and Shouto made themselves scarce just as Meteor came out of the kitchen. He had a splint on one hand and a brace on his other wrist, but both were moderns and sleek. The brace looked almost like a compression glove, mostly hidden by his long-sleeved shirt. With the summer’s heat, Toki couldn’t fathom why he would wear that: until she realized that Meteor was moving more slowly than normal, not quite carefully but still more deliberate than his usual languid steps.
Ah. He was hiding his injuries.
She looked him over, suddenly worried. He didn’t… He didn’t look hurt. But predators didn’t broadcast their hurt to the world, did they? They hid it. Just like Meteor did. But when you knew it was here, you couldn’t not notice it.
Long sleeves to cover the bandages, a studied languidness to hide the discomfort of moving. His hair was tied up in a messy bun because he probably hadn’t been able to brush it to smooth silkiness yesterday.
Toki didn’t comment. Everyone coped with vulnerability in their own way. She could understand wanting to hide your weakness from the world.
So Toki kept her mouth shut. She rose to her feet, and grinned nervously.
“Hey Dad. Remember when I said that I would give you some time to prepare to the next big surprise?”
Meteor caught sight of Hinawa and stopped dead in his tracks.
“Surprise,” Toki finished lamely.
Hinawa perked up at Meteor, her little wings fluttering excitedly. Toki could see the exact moment where her daughter clocked in the glowing orange eyes, because her face lit up with excitement. She grabbed the edge of Toki’s pants to pull excitingly, pointing at Meteor and babbling, while her fuzzy feathers fluffed up in delight.
Toki ruffled her hair with tenderness, and then looked back at her father. He was still frozen in place, his expression wiped blank in shock. He didn’t even look like he was breathing.
Toki swallowed back a spike of anxiety.
“So… Dad, this is Hinawa, my daughter. Hinawa, this is your grandfather.”
From the kitchen, she heard Natsuo’s voice say “holy shit, what?!” and then a sound like a rolling pin hitting someone’s skull, immediately followed by a low hiss of “shhhhhh I want to hear the rest!”. How nice to know that she provided free entertainment to the Todoroki.
“Oh,” Meteor whispered. He crouched down very slowly, reaching a hand towards her. “Hello, Hinawa.”
The toddler went right up to him and took his hand with all the fearlessness of a baby that had never met someone mean in their entire life. She patted his wrist brace with an enquiring noise. It turned to a worried stream of exclamations when she realized he was injured, and then Hinawa looked up at his face, at his glowing orange eyes, and suddenly remembered why she had been so intrigued by him in the first place. She beamed at him with all the brightness of a thousand suns.
“You’re like me!”
Meteor’s entire face briefly crumbled, and then shifted to an expression of wonder.
“Yes,” he replied, his voice impossibly gentle. “I’m like you.”
oOoOoOo
Hinawa had never met anyone who refused to pick her up when she raised her arms and imperiously ordered to be carried. Later in life, she would probably be a spoiled little shit. But for now, she was just bossy and adorable, and had everyone cooing over her in adoration in less than five minutes.
Fuyumi apparently had toys for little kids. She used one of the unused rooms of the estate as a storage area for things she brought home from her job. Broken toys, abandoned plushies, even a wonky trampoline. Fuyumi seemed to have a bit of a hoarding problem. Hinawa was thus gifted a bunch of miniature cars and a distressed Titania doll, and had the time of her life playing in the big living room.
Neito and Shouto disappeared to read, or train, or whatever. Fuyumi and Natsuo went back to the kitchen, and this time Fuyumi politely closed the door to give the Taiyōme some privacy. And the Taiyōme, all three generations, ended up together, sitting on the carpet of the living room, the two older generation watching the younger one play with the toy cars.
Toki was low-key fretting, anxious to fill the silence but not daring to. She risked a glance at her father, opened her mouth, closed it. Meteor was watching Hinawa with an undecipherable expression.
“She looks just like Torii.”
Toki blinked. “Who’s Torii?”
Meteor took a long breath. “My sister.”
Toki reeled back in shock.
“Your sister?!”
She barely managed to not sputter you have a sister?!, but somehow her incredulity must be palpable. Meteor glanced at her, and something in the tense line of his mouth softened.
“I had a brother, too. Hikaku. They both died long before you were born.”
Torii and Hikaku. Toki swallowed, her chest suddenly tight. Torii and Hikaku. Those names by themselves didn’t mean anything to her, but her mother had named her Toki and her brother Hikari, and it couldn’t be a coincidence. It was Sayuri who had picked the names, Toki knew: but she had always assumed that Sayuri had done it alone, because she liked how it sounded or something trivial like this.
She hadn’t realized that Sayuri had named her children after her husband’s family.
It felt a little like missing the first step on a staircase, this brief sensation of freefall, the shock, the surprise, the difficulty to regain your bearings with an upturned sense of balance. It had never occurred to Toki that she may have an extended family, that even her name could come from something. It had never occurred to her that she may have a family history, that she may have roots, that maybe her past was stretching beyond Meteor and Sayuri, or that Meteor and Sayuri’s pasts could stretch beyond each other.
“They both had blonde hair,” Meteor continued quietly. “Like our mother. But Torii also had small, golden-brown dragon wings. And the orange eyes, of course.”
“Oh.”
Toki looked at her daughter, and tried to imagine someone with her coloring, but with leathery wings and Meteor’s smirk.
“Yeah,” she said lamely. “But she looks more like Keigo than like me.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. When you look at her, it’s obvious she’s a Taiyōme. How did you manage to keep her hidden?”
Toki absentmindedly picked up one of the discarded toy cars, fidgeting with it nervously.
“Remember Hitoshi? My other student? I met him when he was a baby. Before being picked up by the HPSC, I saved him and his mother from a car accident. We kept in touch. She’s the one looking after Hinawa. She is a civilian, she flies under the radar.”
“Not so much since her son was kidnapped, I bet.”
Toki groaned. “Not you, too. Can we not talk about it for now?”
Meteor looked like he was ready to argue, his eyes glinting with that familiar sharpness that preceded a pointed remark… but Toki saw him make an effort to swallow back whatever snarly reply he was ready to say to emphasize his point. Instead, her father chewed on his cheek for a second, before saying in a stilted voice:
“Thank you for telling me.”
Like Toki telling him about his granddaughter had never been a sure thing. Like Toki could have decided to never let him know he had other living relatives. Like she may not have wanted him to really know her, and the people she now called family.
As if she wouldn’t have cared, if he was alone.
Toki felt about two inches tall. Impulsively, she reached out to touch his wrist.
“It’s not that. I just… I wasn’t ready. I needed more time. It’s a big secret. I…”
She almost said I trust you, but swallowed the words back. She trusted Meteor with some things: with Endeavor and with hero work and with the possibility of rebuilding their relationship. But she didn’t trust him with everything. She loved her father… but she also didn’t really believe in his inherent goodness or in his trustworthiness.
That was something they would need to rebuild. Maybe it would take years. Maybe it would never come at all.
Toki didn’t really want to think about it.
“… I’m not used to trusting people,” she finished, hesitantly. “We all have secrets we’re used to keep.”
Like how apparently Meteor had had a family before. A sister, a brother… His mother had been blonde. Had the glowing orange eyes come from his father, then? And what about the dragon wings that his sister had, did they come from his father, too? Did the slit pupils come from him also? Did that mysterious grandfather have an animal mutation Quirk?
But Meteor didn’t start speaking about his family. Instead, he suddenly coughed, a little awkward.
“Ah. Yes. Enji mentioned that you knew.”
Oh, Endeavor was Enji now. Great.
Then Toki realized what Meteor was refereeing to and winced. Oh, so they were finally going to talk about it? Today was a day for big reveals, apparently. She shrugged, uncomfortable.
“I figured you would tell me when you were ready. If it means it’s important to you, then of course you shouldn’t have to tell me immediately. Or at all. It’s private.”
Meteor raised an eyebrow.
“That seems like an unfair standard. You introduced your husband to me on the first day.”
“Well, that’s different. Unless you eloped with Endeavor and didn’t tell me…?”
Her father laughed at her joke and shook his head:
“Fat chance. Can you imagine it?”
Toki tried to imagine it and scrunched her nose. Nope, she couldn’t imagine it. Her father was too dramatic and theatrical to elope without telling anyone. Besides, Endeavor had a serious traditional vibe. He would at least ask for Toki’s blessing.
Also why the fuck was she thinking about it?!
“I should have told you anyway,” Meteor said, sobering up.
“Why? Endeavor didn’t tell his kids, as far as I know.”
“His kids don’t want to know,” Meteor said absentmindedly. “He will tell them if they ask, but he doesn’t want to impose on them. There’s also the fact that Fuyumi is still hoping that her parents get back together.”
Yeah, there was not even a snowball chance’s in hell of that happening.
“But you wanted to know,” Meteor continued, staring at her with unhabitual seriousness, and a hint of softness in his voice. “You wanted to know about me, and I kept quiet about it. I’m sorry.”
“You’re entitled to your privacy,” Toki awkwardly protested. “Besides, we had so much to talk about. It’s normal to want to space up the heavily charged topics. And believe me, the fact that you’re banging the Number One hero is a hell of a charged topic.”
Meteor snorted, “True. I guess I didn’t want to make you… uncomfortable.”
“Why?!”
He gestured vaguely, which clarified exactly nothing. Toki blinked at him.
“Because he’s a guy?” she hazarded.
Meteor cleared his throat: “Yes, sure. Let’s start with that.”
“Well, I don’t care. I mean I didn’t know you were gay, or… whatever. Since you married Mom, I kind of assumed you weren’t, but it’s alright if you are.”
“Sayuri was actually the exception,” Meteor told her a little sheepishly. “All my other relationships were with men.”
Toki absorbed that and quickly reassessed about a dozen facts, and yeah, suddenly when she looked at it from that angle, a lot of things about Meteor just made sense.
Uh.
“Whatever,” she settled on saying. “It’s not like I’m straight either.”
Her father looked surprised, then relieved, and then amused. Toki leaned back against the couch, fidgeting with her hands. Meteor’s smile slowly morphed into a frown.
“You don’t like him, do you?”
“I don’t not like him,” Toki defended herself. “He’s been perfectly nice to me, and even good company. A little stuck-up, but not bad. I respect the hell out of him as a hero. I may even grow to like him, in the future.”
Endeavor was a dick, but Toki also knew that she was pathologically unable to hate people she made an effort to know. Just like she had loathed All Might but liked Yagi, she snarled at Endeavor but she would probably build some kind of friendship if Enji Todoroki, if only because they both loved the same people.
It didn’t mean that she had to be happy about it.
“It’s just…” She hesitated. “Everything about his family is a red flag, starting with his wife’s mental breakdown and ending with the massive burn on his son’s face. That’s without mentioning the fact that he’s still very much married. My concerns are culminating with the fact that he’s your boss and until recently he had you microchipped! That isn’t an imbalance in power, it’s a fucking catapult.”
She knew her father could take care of himself. She knew that if it came to a fight, Meteor was more than able to make Endeavor forget how it felt to eat solid food. But it wasn’t the point. The point wasn’t that Meteor was dangerous, it was that he was also vulnerable, and she wanted him safe.
“Aw, Munchkin.” Her father poked her on the nose. “Worried about me? Don’t be. I’m much more dangerous than he is.”
Toki inhaled, ready to start a long rant… And then she realized that everything she could tell, Meteor probably knew anyway. He knew, and yet he was still there. He had come back after nearly escaping, in January, and he hadn’t left since. His decision had been taken a long time ago.
She sighed, and rubbed her forehead, feeling foolish.
“I know it’s stupid,” she mumbled. “You can take care of yourself, and he obviously likes you.”
Meteor grinned: “Oh, obviously, uh?”
Toki rolled her eyes.
“He managed to find me. That’s not easy. And… He fought tooth and nail to get you free, just so you could have the possibility to leave if you wanted. He’s trying to make things right, even if he has to fight the entire system for that. Yes, he likes you.” Then her smile slipped from her face, turning in a frown. “But even then… I worry, alright? I’m just wary of all his baggage. He has an history of domestic abuse, did you know?”
“I know,” her father said soberly. “He told me. But he’s changed, and so did I.”
Toki took a second to wrap her mind around the fact that Endeavor had told Meteor about his family. She had suspected, of course. When she had talked to Endeavor in Fukuoka, he had said that he had warned Meteor about the risks of their relationship. She was pretty sure that if Meteor and Endeavor had had that kind of talk, then the Flame Hero must have also come clean about his poor track record with romantic relationships.
And yet it was a little staggering all the same, to hear Meteor say it. It was huge for Endeavor to confess something like that, and to offer it of his own volition, too.
“Yeah,” she finally said. She cleared her throat. “I mean, if he’s a dick, I will disembowel him, obviously. But otherwise… It’s your business.”
Her father laughed and ruffled her hair with affection. Toki grumbled, but she leaned into the touch anyway. She closed her eyes, and tried to let go of her tension.
Yes, Endeavor had been an abuser, and yes, that would always make him dangerous. But Meteor had been a killer, and didn’t that make him more dangerous? They both could hurt each other terribly, but they hadn’t. They wouldn’t. They respected each other, they liked each other. They were also devoted to each other, to the point where Meteor had forsaken his shot at freedom to save Endeavor’s life, and Endeavor had weighted all his power and his reputation just to free Meteor, remove every scrap of control he could have over his life, to allow him to make his own choice and leave if he wanted.
Meteor and Endeavor were both dangerous people, bordering on toxic. And yet, considering who they were, being involved with each other may actually be the healthiest option.
Urgh.
“You’re taking it rather well,” Meteor commented, sounding almost cautious.
Toki made a face, looking away from him. Sure, she was taking it well now, having gone past the point of existential horror, passed over the hills of horrified fascination and justifiable concern, and ascended over the valleys of confusion and despair. That didn’t mean she was delirious with joy about it.
“I had time to get used to the idea,” she evaded. “Is that why you didn’t want to tell me? Because you were worried that I would freak out?”
Meteor rubbed his forehead. Toki had the very strange realization that he was avoiding her gaze because he was embarrassed, and she stared at him in mute stupefaction.
“I was also concerned that you could see it as a way to replace your mother,” Meteor finally said.
Toki stared harder.
“Believe me, it did not cross my mind at any point.”
Meteor’s shoulders loosened. “Oh. Good, then.”
For a while, they didn’t speak. Hinawa had moved on from toy cars to the dolls and plushies. There was a big squishy ball that must have an interesting texture because Hinawa was fascinated by it, pulling and stretching at it endlessly. Her little wings were all fluffed-up in enthusiasm. Keigo’s wings did that, too, when he was especially happy. It was less visible because he had control over his feathers and soothed them back in order quickly, but when he was in a good mood, he always seemed fluffier.
“It’s really serious, then?” Toki suddenly asked.
She had figured already that it wasn’t just a booty call. If her father and Endeavor had just wanted to blow out some steam, there were safer people to do it with. But for Meteor to mention an equivalence to Sayuri, the woman he had been married to… that was different.
Meteor looked at her, and his face softened.
“Yeah. It’s really serious.”
Toki groaned and flopped on the ground with a dramatic sigh. She wasn’t surprised. And yet, having the luxury of plausible denial had been nice as long as it lasted.
“Whatever,” she mumbled. “I’m not going to blow a gasket about who you hold hands with, anyway. I just don’t want any details, please.”
Her father grinned sleazily, and yep, that was absolutely an expression that Toki recognized as one preceding trouble.
“Oh, we did more than hold hands.”
She put her hand up, gesturing for him to stop: “No, absolutely not. As far as I am concerned, you only frolic about merrily holding hands.”
Meteor sniggered, and Toki half-heartedly whacked him on the knee.
“I’m just annoyed because the Todoroki keep infiltrating my entourage,” she grumbled. “Seriously! You, Sachiko, Neito… What’s up with that?”
“Well, they are good-looking,” her father mused.
“It can’t be all there is to it! Once is an accident, twice a coincidence, but three times is a pattern! I swear, under no circumstances I will ever introduce Natsuo to Melissa. The danger is too great. Maybe there’s something in the water here.”
Meteor smirked at her, his ember-like eyes glowing ominously. He leaned on his hand, managing to make the gesture look graceful and casual even with splinted fingers.
“I do have a theory, actually. Most people wouldn’t be able to sustain a relationship with a Todoroki because of the metric fuckton of drama and trauma that comes with the family. But everyone around you, Munchkin, has to constantly put up with your own special brand of bullshit, and the maturity that comes with that makes the Todoroki seems pretty normal in comparison.”
Toki gaped at him, still lying on the floor.
“No. Just… No. Absolutely not. Let’s go back to the theory where it’s just that they’re mind-blowingly attractive and everyone around me has an eye for beauty.”
“I’m not sure I would phrase it like that, but whatever makes you happy, Munchkin.”
“Ugh,” Toki muttered, putting both hands on her face. “Unbelievable. Todoroki, tsss, more like Thirstyroki.”
Meteor laughed at her. Toki groaned and pretended to swat at him. Hinawa, who had lost interest into her plushies in the meantime, wandered back to them and started happily babbling gibberish. Sometimes, though, she enunciated one clear sentence, with perfect elocution. It was mind-blowing.
Meteor made thoughtful noises and nodded his head as if listening to an actual conversation, and Toki couldn’t help but beam at him. Her father and her daughter, getting along.
Mihoko-san had once mentioned that babies of Hinawa’s age rarely were so advanced. Hinawa had almost twenty words of vocabulary, she could walk, she could play, she communicated clearly with adults. And she was only eleven months old! Usually those kind of milestones happened between fifteen and eighteen months old. Hinawa was still a baby, but she absorbed knowledge and understood things faster than most toddler. She had probably inherited the high number of neural connections that most telekinesists had.
Toki watched her father and her daughter for few seconds, smiling softly, and then laid her head back on the floor and looked at the ceiling.
So… Meteor and Endeavor’s thing was serious.
Wow.
She had some trouble wrapping her mind around it. Meteor was super-intense in everything he did. Meanwhile, she couldn’t imagine Endeavor being affectionate. Hell, she didn’t want to imagine that, thank you very much. It was already a little boggling to remember the fondness and the respect in his voice when he had spoken about Meteor, back in Fukuoka. Or even to remember the ease with which he had bantered with Meteor, and the tiny smirk at his lips, back there when they all had dinner together.
But if Meteor said it was serious, then Endeavor was going to stick around. She wondered what that would look like.
Then she remembered the way Meteor and Endeavor had snarked and smiled at each over during dinner. She thought about the wordless understanding they had when they fought together, and how they worked as one like a well-oiled machine. She thought of Meteor fearlessly patting Endeavor’s arm as he laughed, and Endeavor allowing the contact with the casual ease of someone who unquestionably trusted Meteor to guard his back. And then she realized she had a pretty good idea of what it would look like already… and it didn’t look bad at all.
She let out a big, dramatic sigh.
“Well, you could do worse, I suppose.”
“Thank you for this glowing commendation,” her father said dryly.
He was now making a bear plushy levitate and Hinawa was running after it as fast as her two little legs could go. It was like playing with a kitten and bit of string.
“You’re welcome,” Toki grumbled. “Although Keigo is going to be insufferable.”
“Really?” Meteor blinked. “Why, what does he have to say about it?”
“Endeavor is his favorite hero, so he thinks that you managing to snag him is the absolute proof that the Taiyōme have, and I quote, ‘exceptional taste in men’.”
Her father was still wheezing with laughter when Fuyumi left the kitchen to invite them for tea.
Notes:
This chapter is the first one of the Todoroki Arc. The name sucks, but unfortunatly it's the most accurate one. Basically Toki is on vacation and she's going to get to know the Todoroki and their drama. It will be a slow-paced arc, sorry. With lot of family-feels and reflection, and near zero combat.
Anyway ! Next week, no chapter. I'll be posting the first one-shot of a series of smutty stories in the Wisdom-verse, so it doesn't count as a chapter x)
Also: i'm on my fourth draft of my SI-Renly fic. I can't get the tone right. I know several specific events or scene that i want to put in it, and yet i'm hopelessly stuck. It's terrible. Especially since i still want to write medival fantasy.
One day i'll probably write my original story out of sheer frustration xDANYWAY ! Hope you enjoyed it! See you next week for the smutty OS, or in two weeks for the next chapter of this fic !
Chapter 59: About duty
Summary:
The first time she met Endeavor , Hinawa looked at the Flame Hero, mouth agape as her eyes went up, and up, and up. Toki realized with amusement that Endeavor, who was a mountain by normal standards, may be the tallest person Hinawa had ever met.
And then baby Hina-chan closed her mouth, narrowed her eyes with determination, and raised her arms:“Up!”
Endeavor blinked. He looked at Toki questioningly. Toki smiled pleasantly while trying to convey a cold warning with the weight of her gaze. She hoped that her silence spoke volumes that words never could.
Those volumes included sequels with Death, Destruction, and Torture.
“Up!” Hinawa repeated imperiously.
Endeavor looked at Meteor, then back at Toki, spreading out his hands a little helplessly. The Number One hero, frozen in place by a toddler.
Notes:
OMG this is chapter 59 ALREADY ?! Jesus fucking Christ. Alright, i can do this. This fic is just becoming more and more massive.
ANYWAY !
This was supposed to be a slow-paced chapter with nothing important in it except for Toki reflecting on the necessity to save the villains. But then i started writing and shit started happening x) Hence Hinawa meeting Endeavor, or a whole of other stuff x)
Those of you who read "wisdom of the fallen" won't be surprised by the reveal about Monoma's identity.
For those of you who don't read it... It will come as a shock xD
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
ABOUT DUTY
The issue with taking a vacation was that you ended up with a lot of time to think.
Toki thought about her agency, about her plans, about Yūei, about Keigo, about the MLA… about the League. She had to think about the League. About every single member, from Toga to Shigaraki to Compress or Spinner. She had to think about Dabi. She had to think about her fear, her anger, her hatred. She had to think about her feeling of powerlessness. She had to think about her duty.
And no matter how much Toki tried to avoid it… she had to think about Beros, the woman she had murdered.
It had been wrong. Killing someone was always wrong, sure: but more than that, on a personal level, Toki had betrayed her principles. Everything she had done… Betraying the Crew, signing up with the HPSC… she thought toying the line of morally gray was fine because there was that final line she would never cross, and it made everything okay. If she never killed anyone, then Toki couldn’t be a bad person. It was simple.
But she had killed someone. How was she supposed to live with it? How was she supposed not question everything?
She couldn’t even tell anyone. Toki knew that if she came clean, the HPSC would find a way to make it right. Worse, Toki would let them. She didn’t want to go to jail. She wanted to keep on fighting, teaching, learning, being close to the people she loved. And so, Toki knew that she would let the HPSC protect her.
But that didn’t mean she was happy about it.
Shit, maybe they would claim it was for the greater good. Toki hated that phrase. Whose greater good? That kind of excuse felt empty and bitter. It tasted of lies and hypocrisy. The greater good. Riiight. Was it the justification they had given to Lady Nagant when they had ordered her to kill people?
Probably. In canon, that was why Hawks had killed Twice, after all.
But canon-Hawks had been wrong to do that. Just like Toki had been wrong to kill Beros.
How ironic, that in this world, Toki was the one who had blood on her hands.
blood on your hands, they say.
as though it stops there,
at your wrist, like a glove.
as though you could do this
and there could be any part of you
that wasn’t stained or dripping.
When she had left the hospital, Toki had thought about canon-Hawks and how he dealt with the guilt of having killed someone. If he had even felt any guilt at all, or if he had been able to rationalize it away. And some part of herself had wondered, would it have been better if somehow she had killed Beros as a hero, as Quantum fighting for Japan, and not as Toki Taiyōme howling in grief?
Maybe it would have. Toki could have blamed the system. Some of the responsibility would have been off her shoulders. Toki could have rationalized that she had been the instrument, but that the decision had been out of her hands. It would still have been evil, but that evil wouldn’t have been hers…
No. Toki knew herself. She probably wouldn’t have been able to convince herself.
You were not free of sin simply because you judged yourself to be. It doesn’t matter who aimed the gun, you still chose to shoot knowing what it would cause. Could you say that you weren’t a murderer because time would have killed your victim anyway? You had to take responsibility for your actions. Not having many options wasn’t the same as having no free will.
Toki was too stubborn to not take responsibility for her own actions.
Toki had liked the character of canon-Hawks, and still, she could admit that murdering Twice had been fucked-up. From a narrative standpoint, yeah, it made sense. Canon-Hawks was supposed to be a tragedy. The whole reason why Toki was a hero to begin with was to save her Keigo from becoming canon-Hawks because canon-Hawks’ life was doomed from the start.
In a story, it would make sense that he would fail to save his narrative foil. Besides, canon-Hawks had been good at his job, and his job had been to make the heroes win. In that vein, going for the killing blow worked! Twice had been dangerous. Putting him out of commission had probably saved a lot of people.
And yet, it had still been wrong to kill him.
The story of canon-Hawks and canon-Twice was a bitter pill to swallow. It was a tale of justice against mercy, of duty against compassion. Not just because canon-Twice had been kind towards canon-Hawks, and canon-Hawks had exploited it anyway for the sake of his mission. It was sad because murdering someone, especially someone you knew, was killing a part of yourself.
The kind of heroism that asked a hero to do these things was inhumane. It was the kind that expected people to kill the child in themselves, kill the friend, kill the compassion. Was it heroic to have to kill these things inside of you to enact justice? Was it right to kill the mercy and compassion, the benevolence, the sentiment for others, all the things we associate with being human, for the sake of doing what we believe is right?
Toki killing Beros wasn’t like canon-Hawks killing canon-Twice. It wasn’t a betrayal. There had been no friendships, no hand extended in help and repaid with a knife. It had only been a fight. It had only been violence.
But it had also been murder, and… wrong.
Toki could offer no excuses. She could barely give a reason. She had been hurt and afraid. She had been angry and she had been grieving. She wanted Beros to disappear.
Not because Beros was dangerous (even if yes, she had been). Not because it was necessary to save the other students (even if yes, it had helped).
The real reason Toki had killed, was that she had been in pain and lashing out.
Beros had been in a cult. She had gone to prison. She may have blood on her hands, but she had certainly suffered, too. Maybe, in another world, Toki could have helped her. Maybe Toki could have saved her.
But Toki had killed her instead.
The problem with heroism was that you were supposed to save victims, not villains. But sometimes the villains needed saving too. The villains needed their voice heard, the villains were suffering… and sometimes, the villains were trying to enact change. That was what had brought the League of Villains together in the first place. In canon, they would all end up as tools for All For One’s plans, of course. But their origin wasn’t a desire to hurt people, it was a sense of injustice they needed to rage against.
Tomura Shigaraki, or rather Tenko Shimura, had been beaten and then abandoned. Toga Himiko had been mistreated, called a freak and a monster because of her Quirk. Twice, Jin Bubaigawara, hadn’t had the means to get out of poverty because of a combination of bad luck, mental illness, and lack of support. Spinner, Shuichi Iguchi, had been a shut-in, hateful and bitter after years of discrimination. Dabi… Touya Todoroki was… well, Dabi was an entitled brat, sure, but he had also been an emotionally abused child.
Of course, trying to enact change by hurting innocent people wasn’t the way to go, and it was easy to condemn the League of Villains because of it.
But the issues they rebelled against existed. Even with Toki’s efforts, even with All Might’s speech to inspire people to be kinder… There was still discrimination, poverty, imbalance, cruelty. No society could be perfect. There would always be someone hoarding power and money somewhere, there would always be people willing to step on others to make themselves taller.
It was an unfortunate consequence to the existence of any structure and thus any society. Well, maybe a completely horizontal structure of power would solve those issues, but it was too utopian to contemplate. Like ideal communism or something. It wouldn’t last. It was too easy to misuse and abuse. Besides, in all honesty, the amount of violence it would take to create that kind of systems seemed counterproductive. Sure, you could make an argument that the violence needed to change was proportional to the violence the state and capitalism enacted to sustain themselves, but Toki wasn’t interested in making a revolution.
Toki wanted reform. She wanted kindness, and justice. She didn’t want to burn the system to the ground, either to start anew or to fulfill some need for enraged catharsis.
She just wanted to save people.
But to do that… to really do that, to save all the people, and not just the good victims… then Toki needed to remember that the League had a point. She needed to stop reacting, and instead start listening.
The villains hurt innocent people. But innocent people were already being hurt. Tenko, Toga, Touya, they had all been innocent at some point, until one day they turned the pain inflicted on them onto those who supported or ignored their abuse.
They had been hurt, but nobody had saved them. It was only when they had fought back, that suddenly violence was unacceptable. What kind of message did it send? Was it only fine when only the right kind of people suffered?
The short answer, the real answer, the bitter answer, was yes. Villains didn’t count. Nobody wanted to feel bad for villains, nobody wanted to see them as people. That was why Beros’ death had flown under the radar, that was why nobody had even tried to find out the truth.
Beros shouldn’t have been killed. She had been Toki’s enemy, but that did not mean she deserved death for it.
Toki hated what she had done. She still felt numb about it, but she also felt… Shocked. Horrified. Furious, mostly. Against herself, against the world, against Beros even. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, and she didn’t know what to do. Hiding from Neito in the bathroom, she had cried her eyes out in the shower every evening for three days straight.
Gods, she had killed someone. She had killed someone. It wasn’t who she was supposed to be! If she could do it all over again, she would do things differently, she would manage to find another way, she would… She would…
But she had done it. She had killed Beros. Murdered her, really.
She didn’t even know if she regretted it. She was frightened of it, horrified, furious, heartbroken. And yet… and yet, did she feel guilt? Did she feel self-disgust? She wasn’t sure. Nothing made sense. The world felt weirdly off-balance when she tried to take a step back.
When you took a life two people died, them and the person you used to be. But it was done, now, and Toki could only look at her bloodstained hands and wonder.
The person I used to be is already dead. Who will I become now?
She could still show mercy and compassion, of course. She would still save people. But Toki had cut that option off from Beros, and that meant that in the future, she could do the same for other people. Look at them, and decide they weren’t worth saving. Look at them, acknowledge them… and kill them anyway.
Gods, it was so fucked up. Toki was supposed to be better than this. She was supposed to save people. She just wanted to save people, and instead— instead, she had—
Fuck.
There must be a way to make things better, right?
Briefly, Toki considered admitting the crime. The rescue operation was done, the Kamino battle was over. If Toki was suspended, then it wouldn’t change the fate of Japan. With the turmoil stirred up by All Might’s retirement, the fact that Quantum would leave the scene for a few weeks could fly under the radar.
But that was it, wasn’t it? It would just be a few weeks. Toki wouldn’t go to prison. Toki was powerful, Quantum was useful. The HPSC would send her back in the field within three months, tops.
If Toki wanted to make up for what she had done, then she needed to get off her ass and make amends by herself. Save more people to balance things out, maybe.
Save more people like Beros, specifically.
Save the villains.
Toki’s plan so far to deal with canon, and more specifically with the League in canon, had been to take them down swiftly. Eliminate the threat. She had targeted the Ghost Arsonist for this reason, to take him down quickly, because she didn’t care about his sad backstory but only about the danger he posed.
No more.
The swift take-down was still an option, obviously. It would always be an option. But now Toki was going to think, and strategize, and make it not her first option, maybe not even her second or her third. Because she knew what she could do to an enemy now, if she gave into her fear and her rage… and it frightened her.
She would not kill anyone ever again.
“Good morning, Quantum-sensei…. I mean, Toki-sensei. Urgh, I mean, Toki.”
Toki hid a smile behind a fake cough. At least Neito was trying.
“Good morning, Neito. What’s up?”
Neito looked at her, and minutely raised an eyebrow. Toki suddenly realized she had spread papers and notes pretty much everywhere on the table. On her laptops were open multiples tabs on the police database and the HPSC’s database and the highly secure Tartarus database. She was obviously doing Quantum-related work.
Damn it, she had sworn she would slow down on the hero work this week.
“Sorry,” she said sheepishly. “Let me sort out this mess, and then we’ll get breakfast.”
Neito looked above her shoulders and raised an eyebrow. Fuck, he had seen Toga’s file.
“You’re looking up the League?”
“Not… exactly.”
All Might’s semi-retirement two years ago and his little speech about being kinder to each other had helped to change things. There were more charities, there was more awareness. But it wasn’t enough. And that’s how some villains… had still ended up as villains.
Habits were hard to change. Two years of baby-steps may have helped a lot of people, but it hadn’t reached those who had already hit rock-bottom. It had helped people who could have been villains, but it hadn’t saved those who were already villains.
Toki didn’t have access to Aizawa’s report as a spy among the League, but she had access to the names he had given. The real identities of all the villains who had joined the League. It wasn’t hard to do some digging.
It wasn’t hard to find out that Toga had run away from home during her last year of middle-school, three years ago, long before All Might’s little speech. It wasn’t hard to find out about how Jin Bubaigawara had been fired with no justification seven years ago, and then hadn’t managed to find another job because of his bad record and his habit of talking to himself that made the managers sneer. It wasn’t hard to learn that being related to notorious criminal (his grandfather) had cost Sako Atsuhiro his job as a magician in a theater, eleven years ago, leading him to become a street performer, and then a villain out of necessity. After the free Quirk use law, he could have gotten out of villainy, maybe… But apparently he had been constantly in trouble with the police a few months back, almost as if they persecuted him. Maybe they had discovered his relation to his criminal grandfather too. Point was: Atsuhiro had had no chance to get out.
Villains were wrong because they were hurting people, but hero society was wrong because they, too, were hurting people. It just wasn’t televised.
(Like how Quantum had killed Beros. Quietly, in a fit of rage, with no consequences. With no fucking consequences.)
“Not exactly,” Neito parroted. “Then what are you looking into, exactly?”
“Not sure you’re in the right headspace to hear it.”
It was early morning. The city was just waking up. They had no plans for the day. Toki planned to pick up Hinawa in a few hours. Maybe they would go back to the Todoroki residence if they weren’t sick of Toki’s face yet. Endeavor was done patrolling in Yokohama and should resume his normal patrols, which meant he didn’t have any credible excuses to ask Meteor to hang out near his home anymore. Which wasn’t a bad thing, because Meteor was supposed to rest. That was what happened when you were injured.
Yes, Toki knew it also applied to her. No, she would not accept constructive criticism.
“Try me,” Neito shrugged.
“Fine. I was thinking about how villains were once victims and should be saved too.”
Neito scowled. “You’re right, I’m not in the right headspace for it.”
The death of his mother was still too fresh. Neito may not have been close with his mom, but she had been his mom, and he had loved her. Toki couldn’t find it in herself to resent him for his anger. The League had hurt Neito deeply, personally. There was no shame in not wanting to help them.
And yet…
“Were villains really victims?” he asked after a beat.
You’re too kind, Toki wanted to say. Even if Dabi killed your mother just a few days ago, you’re already ready to ask if people like him need help, ready to provide it. You’re too kind, Neito. Was I ever so kind?
“Most of them.” Toki hesitated. “They weren’t born like this. Some people have a predisposition to violence, but… it never comes all at once. It’s gradual. Some opportunities are closed to them through no fault of their own, or because of youthful mistakes they can’t shake, and they slip through the cracks.”
Neito chewed on his cheek a few seconds. She could see him wanting to reject the idea, and yet she could also see that he couldn’t.
Neito knew what it was like to slip through the cracks.
“You think that’s happened to them?”
“I’m pretty sure, yeah.” Toki thought about who she could use as an example. “For example… Himiko Toga was mistreated by her parents and peers until she snapped. She loves blood, but it doesn’t make her a monster. She didn’t start killing until she was pushed past her breaking point. Did she not deserve to be protected when she was a child? It’s because society failed to protect her, to give her alternate coping mechanisms to deal with her Quirk or resources to escape her life at home, that she ended up where she is.”
“And it’s because she ended up where she is that you had a hole in your guts a few days ago.”
Toki snorted. “Yeah, I guess so.”
The thing was… Saving villains was also about saving their future victims. But it should also be about saving them, about keeping in mind they were people, not rabid animals to be put down. They deserved to be helped.
The moment you started dividing people into categories of who was worthy of being saved, and who wasn’t, people were already going to be lost. If the function of heroes was to save people, and they weren’t saving a good chunk of people, then they’re not doing their job.
So many villains wouldn’t exist if someone had reached out a helping hand towards them.
“But they’re not victims now,” Neito said, flatly. “They make victims.”
“Yes,” Toki sighed. “It’s bad to hurt innocent people. It’s bad even if you’re trying to use your violence for a good cause to make a better world, which is what every idealistic villain thinks to justify their actions. People who have nothing to do with it don’t deserve to get dragged into a conflict. However, the fact that the villains are the ones to point out the flaws of society doesn’t make those flaws irrelevant.”
She almost said you cannot just dismiss the legitimate criticisms of villains outright because of the faceless imaginary people that are also being caught up in their rebellion against society, but swallowed back the words in time.
For Neito, it wasn’t faceless imaginary people. His mother was dead. It was very, very real.
“I’m sorry,” she blurted out. “I shouldn’t burden you with that. It’s unfair to you.”
“But it’s true,” Neito frowned. “Villains are people. They don’t stop having feelings and concerns and humanity just because I hate one of them.”
Toki smiled with fondness.
“That’s very mature of you. But you know, you don’t have to be the one to personally save the people who hurt you.”
That was a lesson Midoriya should learn, too. Especially in regard to Katsuki Bakugo. Midoriya hadn’t mentioned it, but Toki didn’t think a few months had been enough to forget Kacchan. In canon, they had been… well, not close, but basically obsessed with each other.
Toki absolutely believed that when Yagi had pushed Midoriya to change schools, Midoriya had said yes just to persuade Yagi to not get Bakugo in even more trouble.
Saving the person who wronged you was very noble. But it shouldn’t be an obligation. It shouldn’t be some masochistic burden you forced yourself to carry.
Neito sniggered, and then sat down next to her. His eyebags looked a little better. Maybe he had finally had a good night of rest. It had been three days since his mother had died. The shock was receding, ceding place to bitter acceptance. The world went on, and you had to move with it.
Neito’s phone pinged. He looked down at it, and then up at Toki. He suddenly looked a little nervous.
“We’re invited to the Todoroki house again. Your father will be there, too.”
“Again?” Toki muttered.
She would have thought for sure that he wouldn’t stick around, now that Endeavor was back to patrol his own territory.
But then Toki realized that her father must also be bored out of his skull, with nothing to do but twirl his thumbs. He was banned from training, he couldn’t patrol… Toki didn’t think Meteor had any friends outside of the Endeavor Agency.
Oh, whatever. Toki smiled, and rose to her feet.
“Well, how can I say no when one of my students want some company? Let’s have breakfast, then we’ll pick up Hinawa, and then we’ll go. Maybe I’ll exploit my dad for babysitting so I can pop back in Fukuoka for lunch and seduce my husband.”
Neito sniggered, but he didn’t oppose her plan.
oOoOoOo
Going to the Todoroki house became a daily occurrence, and slowly, Toki found a comfortable rhythm.
She didn’t often take vacations, so it was a novel experience. She spent a lot of time with Hinawa. She didn’t have to worry about patrol. She missed Keigo, but she always found the occasion to slip away at lunchtime to wait for Keigo at their penthouse or in one of the small restaurants he favored. They spent time together, and then Toki returned to Musutafu; to Hinawa, to Meteor, and to her little fledglings.
Neito spent the first days quiet and sad, but then slowly got back on his feet. Toki brought him to cat cafés, they went shopping, they walked along the beach.
Almost every day, though, they ended up to the Todoroki house. Sometimes Neito went to train with Shouto, or they read together in silence in Shouto’s room. There were times when Toki popped her head in the room and saw Neito dozing off in his chair, making up for his insomnia.
For Toki, spending time at the Todoroki house also meant spending time with Meteor, who was hanging out unsubtly around the Todoroki estate.
It continued even after Endeavor’s return to the prefecture. The only difference was that sometimes they crossed paths with Endeavor when he came home in the evening.
The first time it happened, Hinawa looked at the Flame Hero, mouth agape as her eyes went up, and up, and up. Toki realized with amusement that Endeavor, who was a mountain by normal standards, may be the tallest person Hinawa had ever met.
And then baby Hina-chan closed her mouth, narrowed her eyes with determination, and raised her arms:
“Up!”
Endeavor blinked. He looked at Toki questioningly. Toki smiled pleasantly while trying to convey a cold warning with the weight of her gaze. She hoped that her silence spoke volumes that words never could.
Those volumes included sequels with Death, Destruction, and Torture.
“Up!” Hinawa repeated imperiously.
Endeavor looked at Meteor, then back at Toki, spreading out his hands a little helplessly. The Number One hero, frozen in place by a toddler. Toki took pity on him:
“She’s not going to bite. She just likes high places.”
Endeavor sighed and then, to Toki’s surprise, he actually picked up Hinawa, making her shriek in delight. His grip was firm but careful, like someone who had handled children a lot before. He knew what he was doing.
Hinawa immediately tried to perch on his shoulder. When Endeavor good-naturally let her do it, the toddler then tried to raise to her tiptoes to see if she could reach the ceiling. She was batting her little wings for balance, repeatedly slapping the back of Endeavor’s skull. He endured it with a long-suffering look.
(Toki was going to ignore the soft, affectionate sound Meteor had made at the spectacle.)
So… there was that.
Hinawa quickly lost interest in Endeavor, like any normal toddler who would be asked to pick between the Number One hero and a stack of colored crayons. But in the rare occasions where they ended up in the same room, Endeavor was always careful about the small child toddling in his house; cautious and deliberate.
Toki could see the way all the Todoroki children were watching him from the corner of their eyes, as if bracing for a catastrophe. But she could also see the way Meteor, watchful and attentive, never tensed when they were in the same room.
She didn’t say anything. She took note of the household dynamics. She drew her own conclusions.
Toki still had trouble getting used to the fact that her father was so comfortable in Endeavor’s house, but she wasn’t going to be weird about it. She was a guest, she knew how to behave. Besides, this arrangement allowed her to keep an eye on the Todoroki, to provide Neito with company, to keep Hinawa entertained, and to catch up with her Dad. She even got to eat free food that Fuyumi and Meteor cooked.
She wasn’t going to say no to free food. Especially when it was chicken.
The kitchen in the Todoroki house was pretty nice. It was big, for one thing. Modern, spacious, with an open counterspace and a big kitchen island. There was an oven with four induction hobs, a substantial fridge filled with items labelled with post-it notes (more specifically, post-it notes which say NOT NATSUO’S, NOT NATSUO’S, NOT NATSUO’S on everything but a sad dying salad in a plastic container which has a sagging little post-it note reading I AM NATSUO’S DIETARY SHAME), a large microwave (labelled “the next person to microwave fish in this kitchen will die”), several cupboards of cups and cutlery and plates in pretty colors, a sink, an electric kettle, and three shelves with a crazily-comprehensive row of coffee and tea items. On the counter, there was a massive jar of candies with a sticky note on it “It’s for your own good dad” in blue ink. Under it, someone else had written “please put them away,” and under that the first person had written “no” with a smiley face.
Toki still didn’t know what it meant and at this point she was too afraid to ask. But she was allowed to have candies from the jar, so… having an answer wasn’t strictly necessary.
The Todoroki had a nice kitchen. And with Meteor and Fuyumi bantering as they cooked, they also had two chefs, and delicious meal at every lunch. It was a nice change from Toki’s diet of prepackaged food eaten on the thumb.
“You know, with all the take-out that we used to eat at the hideout, I would have thought that you couldn’t cook for shit,” she told her father.
“For shit, certainly,” Meteor sniffed. “Perhaps not for money. I think I might be good at it if practiced instead of being forced to improvise with what I have in hand. As it is I suppose I’m competent.”
“He’s too modest,” Fuyumi assured Toki. “He’s a good cook. His only flaw is to always deviate from the recipe.”
“You hear that Munchkins? It’s my only flaw.”
Toki didn’t dignify that with a response. It was bad enough that she had to stand there and experience that shit in her real life.
“Wait, wait, back it up,” Neito interrupted, eyes gleaming with interest. “Can we go back to the hideout part? Did you have a villain lair?”
Meteor opened his mouth, caught Toki’s narrowed eyes, and paused.
“… No?”
“A villain lair would be cool,” Shouto commented.
Natsuo snorted: “For the aesthetic, I suppose.”
“Oh. Yes, that too, but I was mostly thinking about being off-grid and thus evading the property tax.”
“I have some good advice on tax evasion if you want,” Meteor offered, smirking.
Toki tried to be the voice of reason, but it turned out that everyone wanted to hear about tax evasion. And also, Meteor had been right. He actually had good advice.
Toki would need to have a quick word with Kameko about Icarus’ budget.
Anyway. Hanging out at the Todoroki estate was nice. It allowed Toki to relax, and it forced Neito to interact with other people and get out of his shell without being overwhelmed. Everyone was kind and supportive. Even Endeavor was nice about how Toki was invading his house, even though someone private like him was probably annoyed about having guests in his space.
But it was nice. It was friendly and she felt safe. The only thing missing to make her happy was to have Keigo here. She saw him at lunch, and every evening (one of the many advantages of warping!), but it wasn’t the same.
She wasn’t lonely, though. Far from it. It was a good occasion to catch up with her Dad. The setting was more private than the restaurant where they used to meet, and there was something a little disarming into seeing him adopting the Todoroki kids. Well, adopting the whole Todoroki family, really.
When Endeavor came home, it wasn’t rare for Meteor to follow him to the gym or to his office, bickering and bantering like two old friends.
In one memorable occasion, Toki even got to see Meteor and Endeavor spar.
They were both powerhouses. It was impressive. They chased each other at a breakneck speed, flying through the air and raining down flames and rubble on their opponent. They were going easy on each other, Toki could tell, but even then, they kicked and punched with a strength that made her wince. Meteor nearly took a fistful of flames in the face and was thrown into a wall. Endeavor got a roundhouse kick in the chin that made his entire fire-beard flicker.
But the whole point of that spar was that Meteor had put in places traps (with the help of Shouto, Neito, and even an intrigued Natsuo) so at one point Meteor managed to place Endeavor right where he wanted, and then he made the ground under the Flame Hero crumbled… Right above a pit filled with slippery, dirty, slimy motor oil. Endeavor went down with a lot of undignified flailing.
It looked like something right out of a cartoon.
Meteor laughed his ass off. Toki was too far to hear them, but she could see the mirth in his face, the fearless delight in his body language. Then Meteor offered his opponent a hand up, and Endeavor took it. From a distance, Toki couldn’t hear what they said; she could only see that Endeavor looked like he complaining.
But the Flame Hero still took the offered hand and let Meteor haul him to his feet. It wasn’t something that he would do for anyone.
And the first thing Endeavor did once on his feet was to check Meteor for injuries, even tilting his head to the side to look at his neck where the flames had grazed him. Meteor let him do it, rolling his eyes, as if Endeavor’s hand wasn’t right next his throat… Shit, if that wasn’t a sign of trust, Toki didn’t know what else it could be.
Okay, she could admit Endeavor wasn’t that bad. Not when the first thing he did after a fight was to make sure Meteor was okay.
The second thing Endeavor had done afterward had been to push Meteor in the pond of motor oil, though.
Toki still cracked up thinking about it.
“You absolute asshole,” Meteor was cheerfully saying when they got back to the house. “You’re such a sore loser. I can’t believe you pushed me.”
“My hand slipped,” Endeavor said, completely unrepentant.
They were both covered in greasy motor oil. Fuyumi had to slap a hand on her mouth to stop either a helpless laugh or a scream of horror at the thought of having to mop that up. Natsuo and Shouto hadn’t had the same courtesy, though. They took one look at their father, and they burst out laughing.
So… It was going well.
Yes, Toki didn’t want to become complacent. But she couldn’t deny she liked this. The time off, the rest… and hanging out with the Todoroki. Their family was a disaster, but Toki liked disasters. She wouldn’t have known what to do with normal, well-adjusted people anyway.
They made it work. Fuyumi liked Meteor, for some godforsaken reason. Also, she was always available for free babysitting.
Shouto and Natsuo were less enthusiastic about Meteor’s presence, but they tolerated him pretty well. Toki had expected them to bristle and distrust any friend of their father, but somehow Meteor had managed to smooth-talk all of them into liking him, however begrudgingly. They weren’t exactly friendly, but neither of them was hostile, which was… well, pretty miraculous, when you knew how prickly Natsuo could be.
Toki wasn’t jealous anymore. But she couldn’t help but feel a pinch of melancholy, sometimes, when she watched Meteor banter with Fuyumi in the kitchen. She had seen how easily her father got along with the Todoroki kids. In hindsight, it made a lot of sense. Meteor was a caretaker at heart (although he was a violent, unhinged, murderous caretaker) and so was Fuyumi, so they bonded easily. Meteor was also a resentful son of bitch with a cutting sense of humor, so he also got along with Natsuo. He was also perceptive and intuitive, and he understood Shouto while letting him have his space.
He liked the Todoroki family. He had adopted them, like Toki had adopted the Shinsō. Of course he had. Meteor had always liked jumping headfirst into danger, and the Todoroki family was all but bursting with tension.
Yes, even if Endeavor had changed, even if that change had happened earlier than in canon, even if they were all better than in canon. They weren’t alright.
None of them were alright.
It hadn’t escaped Toki’s notice that the only time she had seen Endeavor and Natsuo in the same room, they had barely said two words to each other through the entire evening.. It hadn’t escaped Toki’s notice either that Shouto had seated himself as far as his father as he could. Or that Fuyumi had been briming with happiness each time her brothers laughed, as if it was an exceptionally rare occurrence.
The Todoroki family was better than in canon, but the damage had already been done.
Endeavor was trying. Toki didn’t really need to monitor all their social interactions to realize that. She had caught more than once her father texting Endeavor about how to support his children without being overbearing, like for example how he should offer textbooks for Natsuo instead of a more personalized gifts, or how he should offer to design a training course for Shouto but make sure it was a program Shouto could practice anywhere, even away from home… That kind of things.
And, okay, it was… ugh, it was the last word Toki would usually employ for anything Endeavor was part of, but it was kind of endearing.
Endeavor was also exceedingly helpful and polite to Toki, which was a little wild. But actually, she could understand. Meteor tried to charm the Todoroki kids because he was banging their Dad. It would make sense for Endeavor to do the same.
Ew.
Whatever. Toki wasn’t going to dig her heels and throw a tantrum about it. Oh, sure, she knew Endeavor’s history was complicated. She couldn’t forget about his past. But she wasn’t going to be difficult about Endeavor just for the sake of being difficult. Hating your single parent’s new significant other was so cliché. They were both consenting adults, they could do whatever they wanted. Safe, sane, consensual, all that jazz.
Toki just wanted to never, never know anything about it, please.
Besides, being in good terms with Endeavor was very useful. It gave Toki access to the Todoroki estate, which was great to train, and hang out, and provide a secure location if one day Toki needed a fortified place to hide or to extract Hinawa if all of Musutafu went up in flames. It allowed to monitor the Todoroki family: to be available if Endeavor ever fell again into old patters.
But there was also the fact that Endeavor was a great hero.
He had good advice. When they made small talk, nine time out of ten they ended up talking shop and he had good insight on pretty much all the ongoing cases in his prefectures. He had good contacts and readily offered Toki to introduce her if she needed a foot in the door. When watching a hero fight on TV, Toki could easily analyze the combat and the Quirks used, and it was nice to talk to someone who had the same analytical mindset.
Also, Endeavor knew a lot about her. Not just her, Quantum, but her as Toki. Sometimes it was mildly freaking her out, like how he had absentmindedly guessed that she had a sweet tooth or how she preferred tea over coffee, or even how she knew how to fight with a staff, without Toki ever giving a hint that she could.
But sometimes it really came in handy.
“Monoma’s mother was Akari Monoma?” Endeavor asked her on the sixth day.
He had asked Toki for a quick word in his study. Meteor had followed them, mostly because he was a busybody and couldn’t mind his own business. Toki frowned, briefly looking at her father in askance, but Meteor only shrugged. He didn’t know what it was about either.
“Yes,” she drawled with a hint of suspicion. “Why, did you know her?”
“I happened upon her when I was investigating your disappearance.”
“What?” That was completely unexpected. “What could Neito’s mother have to do with the fact that I went missing?”
Endeavor looked at Meteor and said: “Akari Monoma could identify other’s people’s Quirks by seeing them as lights.”
It meant absolutely nothing to Toki, but Meteor jolted, eyes wide. “Holy shit, really?! You found them?!”
“I found one,” Endeavor scowled. “And nothing came of it anyway.”
Toki frowned harder, not appreciating feeling left out: “One of what?”
Endeavor looked at Meteor again.
“One of Sayuri’s sisters,” Meteor announced her bluntly.
Toki gaped. Her mother had had a sister?! Or rather, sisters, plural? How had Toki never known that? She wildly combed through her memories of her mother, but Sayuri had never mentioned any family besides the Crew… But then Toki hadn’t questioned her about it either. She had been too young, too self-centered like children often were.
Wait.
“Are you saying that Akari Monoma was Mom’s sister?! It would mean…”
She didn’t finish her sentence, mind reeling. It couldn’t be true, that was too big. And yet, Endeavor nodded.
“Monoma is your cousin, yes. Of course, we’ll need a DNA test to confirm it, but I’m sure of it.”
Toki put a hand on her face. What the fuck. She had a cousin. Neito was her cousin?! She had relatives?! Living relatives?!
It had never occurred to Toki that she may have more family than her mother and father. It was kind of the same shock that she had felt when Meteor had mentioned having a brother and sister, or the fact that his mother had been blonde. Disbelief, incredulity. Her brain was struggling to come to terms with the idea that the abstract DNA carriers that made up her ancestry were actual, real people, with faces and colorings and maybe even mannerisms that echoed hers.
Shit, Toki had never even met Neito’s mother. She had thought about it, but she had never taken the time. There had always been something more important to do. Now Akari Monoma was dead, and she had been Toki’s aunt. Holy shit. Toki tried to remember what Akari had looked like in her picture. Chestnut hair, purplish eyes, something familiar… And then with a nauseating lurch of her stomach, Toki realized that if Akari had seemed familiar, it was because the shape of her face was the same as Sayuri’s.
The only reason Toki hadn’t made that link was because she hadn’t remembered her own mother’s face with enough clarity.
Toki took a shaky breath, and then looked at Meteor in disbelief:
“Is that true?”
“Yes,” her father confirmed. “Sayuri had two sisters. They all went into the system very young and they never found each other again, but one of the sisters could identify Quirks as lights.”
“And the other?”
“She could turn invisible.”
Toki paled, thinking of Hagakure. Holy crap, did she have a second cousin?!
“It’s a more common Quirk,” Endeavor frowned. “More than four hundred people have an invisibility Quirks of some sort in Japan alone.”
Okay, so maybe Hagakure wasn’t her cousin. Still, Toki should steal some DNA and do a test. Or, better yet, volunteer to be the teacher in charge of convincing Hagakure’s parents to accept the dorm system. That would give her a chance to look at Hagakure’s mother.
“So I had two aunts and an unknown number of cousins this whole time,” Toki said woodenly. “Is that it? Do I have any other relatives? Do either of you have any more revelations to make?”
Meteor snorted. “No, that’s it. There’s no one else.”
“What about my grandparents, then?” And that was utterly mind-blowing to use that phrase. Toki had never thought about having grandparents. “The ones who put Mom and her sisters in the foster system? Can they be tracked down or something?”
Meteor looked at her for a second. She wondered, abruptly, if he was thinking about his own parents, this set of second grandparents that Toki had never known.
“No. They’re both dead.”
“I guess that’s why their children ended up in foster care, then,” Toki muttered absentmindedly.
If she had been more attentive, she would have noticed the quick glance exchanged between Endeavor and Meteor. But since she was still reeling from the revelation that she had relatives, it flew over her head.
“Holy shit I’m Neito’s cousin,” she repeated in disbelief. “It means that I can get custody! That’s like twenty percent of my problems solved!”
“You’re welcome,” Endeavor said dryly.
Toki rolled her eyes, but she was grinning.
Enji Todoroki may be a dickhead but he could be kind, deep down. It gave her hope for the future at least.
oOoOoOo
The DNA test was conducted this very evening and confirmed what Endeavor had said. Neito and Toki were cousin through the maternal line. Toki told the news to Keigo first, who jokingly said that really, the next kid needs to be planned for, stop springing surprise children at me. Then, she told Neito over dinner and they both got to freak-out about this while filing the forms for Toki to get granted custody.
It wouldn’t be an immediate process. There would be interviews and investigation. But it was enough to make Toki’s emergency custody a more secure thing, right now. And in a few months, maybe a year, Toki would get custody. She was rich, a hero in good standing, with no criminal records and a close bond with Neito, she had everything on her side.
Fuck. Now she really couldn’t come forwards about what she had done to Beros. If people found out, then… it wouldn’t just be Toki who would be in trouble. She would lose her shot at being an adoptive guardian.
Shit.
Beros was dead. Toki could never fix it. Hell, part of her didn’t want to fix it, part of her didn’t regret it, because she had hated Beros. She had hated that woman with a burning intensity that she could still feel scalding her throat. Toki had wanted to kill her.
But wanting and doing were two very different things.
Toki had taken a life, and she needed to pay for that decision. Even if it had saved Neito and the other kids. Being a hero meant that you bore a responsibility for everyone’s lives, not just the ones you could save.
Toki needed to do better.
It wouldn’t fix what she had broken. It wouldn’t save Beros; it was too late for that. But Beros would have died for nothing if Toki didn’t fucking learn from what happened, and took steps to make sure that would never happen again.
Saving the victims. Saving the villains. Saving everyone, even those who didn’t want to be saved, even those who wanted a fight to the death. Toki was strong enough to do it, so she should. She had to.
No pressure.
Toki was quietly making a list of ideas and hypothesis to investigate at the end of her vacation. She still popped back in Fukuoka regularly, but it was to eat lunch with Keigo and chat about how their days were going. They didn’t have time or privacy enough for Toki to start telling him about her plans to go after the League’s members all by herself, or her to investigate Tartarus to reexamine closed cases and try to reach out to those that society had condemned to a slow death in that hellhole, or to finance a program to rehabilitate convicted felons.
It required an emotional vulnerability that Toki couldn’t quite muster over a shared plate of teriyaki chicken.
They still talked about work, of course. Their investigations, their leads. Keigo told her about the MLA. It was hard to realize that his invitation to Hanabata’s party and subsequent recruitment had happened just a week ago, the same day as the summer camp attack.
“It’s way bigger than what you thought,” he told her, face grave. “When you said there was a recrudescence about their ideals, you were just seeing the tip of the iceberg. The MLA isn’t being rediscovered; they have always been there, and they’re preparing to return.”
Toki swore. Well, she had kind of known, but it was still bad news. At least they hadn’t merged with the League of Villains yet.
“Are you sure? Preparing to return would mean having an organization, numbers, a good leader, plans, goals…”
“They have all this, Toki. Fanatics of Destro’s book kept recruiting and making plans ever since the downfall of the original MLA. They have a new leader, whose name is Re-Destro. I have no idea who he is, but with a name like this, he’s probably connected to the original Destro. Probably his great-grandson or another direct descendant.”
Not surprising. Although there were no stories about Destro ever having children, the guy still had been the very first advocate for Quirk marriage. Yuck. Toki grimaced.
“Great. So the MLA has gone underground instead of dying. I mean, I knew the resurgence of their ideals was a little too-well organized, but I had no proof.”
“It’s worse than that,” Keigo frowned. “The MLA has steadily recruited more and more disgruntled people as time passed, claiming they were oppressed, and that the MLA would liberate them. It’s more than a terrorist group. It’s a cult. They worship the word of Destro like it’s holy. They have rite of passages, codes, their own laws, their own cities. It’s massive, it’s insane. When they are integrated among the rest of society, the believers live in clusters, taking their cues only from each other and automatically rejecting any information not vetted by their Supreme Leader… It’s like a sound box that amplifies their bias and prejudices.”
“Like American religious cults,” Toki muttered.
Keigo stared at her. “What, is that a thing?”
“It was mostly a pre-Quirk thing, but yeah. Cults in America got less common when Quirks emerged, but those who stayed are hardcore. Let me tell you about the Mormons sometimes.” She paused. “Wait, wasn’t Destro American?”
“Born in Japan from a Japanese mother and an American father. Raised in America because Quirks weren’t as regulated, and came back to Japan at age thirty-three to ignite his glorious revolution.”
Toki squinted, “By any chance, did he live in Utah?”
“How do you know?”
“Sixty-two percent of the population in Utah is Mormon. I guess he did get his inspiration somewhere.”
Granted, Toki wasn’t an expert in cults and stuff like that, but she had had few chats with Melissa about how she knew people in cults when she was in middle-school, and nobody batted an eyelash because the Mormons were an accepted sect. As if it made their methods less chilling.
Nobody woke up in the morning and say, “I have a great idea…why not join a destructive religious cult?” No, people didn’t just decide to join a cult. They were targeted, seduced, isolated, and then assimilated. It was fairly easy to be lured into a sect by well cultivated indoctrination methods, as well as manipulating other communication approaches, not to speak of the power of brainwashing. It could start slow, with just a little chat, a job offer, a favor owed. You grew close, you felt understood. Your other friends didn’t get you, didn’t understand your anger or your loneliness; not like your new friends, who made you feel so validated.
Yes, it was easy to get lured in a cult. And when you were in, when the cult had all your friend, all your money, all your perspectives for the future… well, not only it was hard to leave, but it was also hard to imagine leaving. To get out of your comfort zone, take a step back, and realize that the bullshit they spoon-fed you was wrong.
“So,” Toki breathed. “The MLA is recruiting, but instead of being like Neo-Nazi resurging from the Trump election, they’re actual comic book Hydra hiding in the shadows until they overthrow the government. Okay, walk me through it. What are their numbers, their plans, their leaders?”
Keigo took a long breath and explained.
The MLA was invisible, but they had been very active. They had money and resources. They had public speakers, like Hanabata and his political party, preaching free Quirk use and eugenics. But also quiet spoken folk, concerned neighbors or teachers who gathered friends to express concerns about how their children’s needs weren’t accommodated or how their talents weren’t recognized. Their message was spread to thousands of people.
They owned property. A lot of it, actually; enough to have entire training facilities completely off-grid.
They trained people. They trained warriors, at the same level as pro-heroes, but hiding in plain sight with the sole goal to take down the government ‘when the time is right.’ Sometimes, as a training exercises, those warriors hunted down villains and killed them to steal their money, or, if the villain was strong enough and willing enough, to absorb them in their ranks. The MLA had done so quite a lot, apparently. They had their claws in the government and could make people vanish to offer them a new identity in rewards for good services. They even had heroes on their payroll, to share their views and cover their crimes.
Nobody had noticed it. Even with the recrudescence of the MLA’s rhetoric when the free Quirk use law had been voted, nobody had taken the threat seriously. It seemed so ridiculous.
Shit, if Toki hadn’t had canon-foreknowledge, she wouldn’t have seen the clues for what they were, either.
Not everyone in the MLA even knew what their goal was. The organization had different levels. It was like a pyramid scheme. At the lowest level, you had the least information. It made it easier for the new recruits and the sympathizer to think it was safe, to think there was nothing incriminating into going deeper. But the more you implicated yourself… the more you rose in the ranks… then, the more you were indoctrinated, trusted with insider knowledge, given responsibilities.
At the bottom of the ladder, there were the simple sympathizers. They were people who had read Destro’s book and made friends among other members of the MLA but weren’t really in the know yet. They donated to the money-laundering apparatus of the Army, they attended meetings. Then, if they had attended multiples meetings, they really started to talk about their ideals. Then, they showed an interest in the beliefs and philosophy… and the higher-up started targeting them.
Slowly, the sympathizers were introduced to more radical ideas. Almost nobody ever balked. They all showed their willingness to commit. They were already too deep, believing themselves enlightened, understood, intellectually superior for seeing the world for what it really was. It was a self-delusion so complete that they could not see where it began and ended, could not root it out, could not destroy it.
That’s how the recruitment began.
And so, they were told about the fact that the MLA still existed. They were told about how cool it was, that the organization still lived, how noble their ideals, how pure their faith, how inspiring the community. That was when the trap snapped shut. Because the followers became part of the MLA… and then, as a natural progression, maybe even all by themselves, they came to the logical conclusion that since the MLA was so great, then why no pursue the original MLA’s goal?
Why not take the country by force, to impose their rule to all? After all, they were inherently superior, they had found illumination. Wouldn’t it be a blessing, to share their wisdom with all of Japan?
And then they learned that the MLA was preparing for their glorious return.
You would think that learning about your unknown Supreme Leader’s intention to ignite a civil war would frighten people. And yet, when Keigo talked about the people who had meet, people who knew, he only described serene faces, radiant smiles. The cultists weren’t manic or demented. They were… they were just so persuaded of their own righteousness.
“How did you find all that so fast?” Toki blinked. “You attended one party.”
“It was a very interesting one,” Keigo defended himself.
“I just mean, even if you stuck your feathers on everyone, there’s no way they discussed all that near you!”
Keigo snorted. “You would be surprised.”
Keigo had lucked out. His contact in the MLA, the politician Hanabata, was actually a very high-level commander… which mean that Hawks’ ascension though the ranks (and the secrets) of the organization had been fast-tracked.
Hawks should only be at the pre-introduction level. Normally, the MLA would try to feed him more radical ideas and see if he accepted them, if he kept their meetings secrets, if he could be trusted.
But Hanabata wanted to tell him more. The politician had hinted at the MLA’s existences several times. He wanted to go to the next level of the pyramid scheme as fast as he could. Why? Oh, it was simple. Not only Hanabata wanted the glory of bringing in the Number Two hero… but he also wanted to reinforce his army. With All Might’s retirement, the MLA wanted to make a move soon, and they would need all the firepower they could get.
“How do you know that?”
Keigo grinned. “Hanabata argued about it with another high-level commander in the middle of the party.”
“Holy shit, really?” Toki boggled.
“Well, not in the same room as me,” Keigo admitted. “The other commander pulled Hanabata in a deserted office to have a chat, and I was five doors away. But I had stuck three feathers to Hanabata, already; fresh ones, barely detached. I heard everything with perfect clarity.”
“… Wow.”
Keigo was such a better spy than her. It was insane. His Quirk was a complete cheat-code; some days, Toki was almost jealous. Oh, she loved Warp-Space, but Fierce Wings was so versatile.
“Wait,” Toki realized. “After All Might’s retirement, after Kamino… Did Hanabata try to contact you again?”
If Hanabata wanted to recruit Hawks because of his power… then seeing All Might’s fall may have pushed the MLA’s timeline. Endeavor had also demonstrated a lot of strength, and so had Toki. Which meant the MLA, who was preparing to fight them, had more incentive to recruit a strong hero like Hawks.
Keigo’s expression darkened:
“Yes. They were also very interested to know if you would join.”
“Er…”
“Yeah, that’s what I told them. Actually, I told him that you’re too proud to follow anyone, so even though you may agree with Destro’s ideals, you wouldn’t be able to completely embrace his vision because you’re too individualist and self-righteous. Like how you defend Quirkless rights because you were briefly Quirkless. The point being that no matter how much the MLA is right about the superiority of your inherent power and yadda yadda, you won’t submit to their enlightenment because you would rather stay focused on your issues.”
Toki made a face.
“Wow. Way to paint me like a jerk. And they bought it?”
“Absolutely.”
“I don’t know whether to be impressed by how you managed to swing that, or offended they bought it.”
“Be impressed. Hanabata made some noise about being worried that it would drive a wedge between us, which I think is code for ‘will you able to fight Quantum when you’ll work for us?’… But I just laughed and told him that if push came to shove, we would never oppose each other. Cue to a little anecdote, all fabricated of course, about how we once played a baseball game at school, and you were willing to go harass the teacher to force him to change the boys-versus-girls rule, just to avoid being on the opposite side of me.”
Toki nodded in approval. The anecdote may be fabricated, but it totally could have happened. The best stories had a grain of truth.
“So he think that if he recruit you, he will recruit us both?”
“Yeah. On the good side, it means he won’t approach you. On the bad side, he’s going to overly focus on me. I think I’m going to have a speed-run introduction to the next levels. It may take weeks. I fully expect to be spied on or be given confidential information and let the MLA get away with crimes that a real hero should stop. Or to be ordered to recruit people.”
They both stayed silent a few seconds, weighting that possibility.
“You could back out,” Toki offered.
But she knew he wouldn’t. Hell, if their roles were reversed, she wouldn’t either. The MLA was a threat, and Keigo had a chance to help take them down by collecting invaluable intel. Intel that could help heroes, saves lives. Like hell he would back out.
“No,” her husband predictably shook his head. “As far as I know, I’m the only person who got this far inside without being brainwashed into a follower, which mean I’m the only person who can warn the heroes and help coordinate a counterstrike. I’m in too deep now. I can’t back out. I need to be initiated so I learn who is in charge and what their plans are.”
Just like in canon, Hawks would be their sole spy. Alone and without allies, surrounded by cultist who would kill him at the first misstep. Toki swallowed.
At least in this universe, the League and the MLA hadn’t been merged. Keigo wouldn’t have to befriend and betray Twice. He wouldn’t be under the threat of Shigaraki’s Decay or Toga’s knife.
He wouldn’t be at the mercy of Dabi’s flames.
“We need to tell the President,” Toki finally said. “This has gotten too big for us.”
Keigo nodded grimly. “Agreed.”
(And they both knew Genmei-san wouldn’t allow Keigo to back out of this mission.)
Notes:
Toki is having a hard time dealing with Beros' death. Ironically, it's not so much about her death as it is about how this death, this action, damaged Toki's image of herself. She believed that she was too good to kill, literally: too morally good but also too physically skilled, too perfectly in control.
Oh, Toki. Just because you're good doesn't mean you're perfect.
Anyway !
Been a while since i did this but here is the fic rec of the day :
"Inheritorverse" by bard_linn, Kir (Kiraya).
The Plot: Izuku has All For One's Quirk, and uses it to give Quirks to Quirkless children. That's how he meet All Might. In the background, Bakugou goes to therapy. Or, alternatively: if BNHA had some common sense.
I loves the idea of an adult stepping in and saying "your heart is in the good place children, but adults can and will help", and then adults actually helping. So Izuku get support, and training, and perspective. Bakugou get a reality check, therapy, and character developpement. The plot still moves on, but the kids being better adjusted causes plenty of fantastic ripples!
What can i say? I'm in the mood for fix-it stories x)
Chapter 60: The Yuei dorms
Summary:
“You want to make Aizawa the homeroom teacher of class 1-A, again?” Toki scoffed. “You know he isn’t suited to the role.”
“Hey!” Present Mic protested.
“No, no,” Nedzu said, smiling serenely. “Let’s hear what Quantum has to say.”
Notes:
And i'm baaaack !
So, first thing first, i'm giving back credit where it's due : part of Toki's rant against Aizawa comes for the fic "18 reasons why Aizawa is a bad teacher", by Mirrond. BECAUSE HELL YES. This fic takes the facts and dialogs of canon and then makes All Might yell about it.
It's great. And so true!I mean, i like the Dadzawa that the fandom made up. But canon-Aizawa, even if he ends up *liking* the kids and even occasionally being nice to them, is an absolute douchebag with balant favoritism issues, and A BAD TEACHER.
Canonically, we never see him teach anything to the kids. The necessary annoncements are given with reluctance, the actual teaching (whether it's theorical like choosing hero names, or practical like finding your ultimate moves) is pawned over to someone else.
Just, what the fuck man.Anyway. Enough ramblings. Dig in !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
THE YUEI DORMS
“You want to make Aizawa the homeroom teacher of class 1-A, again?” Toki scoffed. “You know he isn’t suited to the role.”
“Hey!” Present Mic protested.
“No, no,” Nedzu said, smiling serenely. “Let’s hear what Quantum has to say.”
Aizawa, sitting on his chair next to Present Mic, stayed completely silent. It made Toki fume. She would have preferred him to snap back and argue. It was jarring, to juxtapose Hobo-san’s brutality with Aizawa’s placidity. Like it was supposed to make her feel bad for being the aggressive one.
She couldn’t believe she was here, in the middle of her vacation no less. Why had Nedzu asked for a meeting? For that? Well, if he needed someone to remind him the fact that badly, Toki wasn’t going to refuse.
“I know you’re a competent hero,” Toki told Aizawa. She paused. “Well, presumably.”
“Glowing praise,” Aizawa answered dryly.
“That’s the best you’re gonna get. You’re a good fighter and a competent spy, apparently. But you’re an horrible teacher.”
“Your experience date from ten years ago,” Present Mic argued. “Aizawa isn’t the same person.”
“It was eight years ago, actually. And I should hope so. But that doesn’t mean he’s a good teacher anyway. What I said still stands. I even looked into your students of the past two years…”
Meaning that she had asked Melissa what she had thought of Aizawa’s teaching methods and had received exactly the expected feedback. Melissa held a big grudge.
“…and you sucked,” Toki continued. “You taught them not to trust authority figures, you pointed out their mistakes without ever offering any way for them to improve, and the rare times where they told you about their difficulties in training, you told them to figure it out themselves. As for personal difficulties in class, none of them ever came to you about it because they knew they would be at best ignored and at worst sanctioned.”
“They’re training to be heroes,” Aizawa fired back. “I’m not here to coddle them.”
“You are here to coddle them. Your job as a teacher, especially as a homeroom teacher, isn’t to be an opponent to toughen up, but an ally for them to rely on. If you’re so desperate to see them struggle and suffer, you can just sit back and wait for the next League of Villains’ attack.”
Okay, that may have been a little too far, Toki realized as Aizawa’s eyes narrowed. Still, she stood by what she said.
“Aizawa nearly died fighting the League,” Present Mic snapped. “Defending his class!”
Toki’s eyes stopped on the scar under Aizawa’s eyes, and she nodded:
“I know. That’s why I’m saying you’re a good hero. But outside of a combat situation when it’s just you and the kids… Well, do you enjoy what you’re doing? Because the kids sure as hell don’t.”
“They’re not here to enjoy themselves. A teacher is supposed to run the class, no entertain it!”
Toki scoffed:
“Yeah, well, you don’t run your class. You ignore it, you neglect it. You pawn it off when you can, and you only do the bare minimum necessary to still be considered the teacher of it. The class at USJ was supposed to be taught by Thirteen, the hero names were supervised by Midnight… The only time you did some teaching yourself, it was for your so-called Quirk Assessment test, which was biased and useless, and only served as an opportunity for you to humiliate the kids and doctor their results as an intimidation tactic.”
There was a short silence. Nedzu steeped his pawns in silence. Present Mic turned to Aizawa.
“You doctored the results? Why?”
“So he could put the person he liked the least at the bottom of the list, regardless of actual ability,” Toki said unprompted.
Present Mic opened his mouth, closed it, and then looked back at his friend.
“Okay, you’re on your own now.”
Aizawa hunched his shoulders and burrowed his head further down his scarf, like a tortoise hiding in their shell. He was still avoiding Toki’s gaze, though, even as he retorted grumpily:
“They’re going to be heroes one day. They will face deadly situations and injustice daily. They should get used to it now, in a… safe setting.”
Toki growled. “Exactly. They are going to be heroes. They aren’t yet. They’re not heroes, they’re not sidekicks, and more specifically they’re not your sidekicks to boss around and growl after if they don’t exhibit professional competency. That Quirk assessment was unfair and everything you said during it was horrifying from a pedagogic point of view.”
“I was just giving them a wake-up call!” Aizawa bit out.
This time Toki sputtered indignantly:
“What? Okay, first of all, you made them miss the entrance ceremony. You could have done your stupid test anytime, but you picked then. In the span of minutes, you prevented the kids from knowing anything about the school’s resources, faculty, and layout, and you immediately ostracized them from their peers. That’s not a wake-up call. That’s an intimidation tactic. And then, you little speech about the utility of your test? It was completely bonkers.”
“It wasn’t…”
“It was,” Toki barreled on, raising her voice. “You spat on their school and dissed their lack of Quirk training, like it was the students’ fault for attending subpar middle-schools. Do you realize how fucking ridiculous that is? The schools are told to measure their student’s growth without counting on Quirks because it’s physical education. Not Quirk education. Your drivel made you sound like some Destro-paid demagogue that was yeeted into our times. Was your goal to wrong-foot the kids and make them ill-at-ease?”
Aizawa hunched his shoulders even more. That basically meant yes. Now there were just his eyes peeking over the edge of his capture scarf, glaring sullenly at a point next to Toki’s shoulder like a scolded child.
Gods, Toki hated that. He was in the wrong here! Why was he acting like he was the damn victim?!
Nedzu cleared his throat.
“Quantum does have a point. I know you wish to protect the children, Aizawa. Especially as they’re training to be heroes, walking a dangerous road with none of the experience or strength that this life require. But you’re not suited to teaching.”
“Was hiring me a mistake, then?” Aizawa asked, voice very even.
Nedzu hummed, pensive:
“No, I don’t think so. You may not be able to give the children what they need, but being a teacher made you realize what they needed in the first place. It wasn’t a waste of time. Besides, why do you assume I’m regretting it? I knew from the very beginning that you would be a harsh teacher. I gave you free reign over your classes anyway. I was aware it wouldn’t be sustainable. That’s why Midnight and Present Mic were always available to assist you, after all.”
Wait, Nedzu had known?
Of course Nedzu had known. Toki didn’t know why she was surprised. And even though the sociopathic badger made it sound like he had let Aizawa be a terrible teacher on purpose Toki had to admit that… yeah, it hadn’t been catastrophic. Melissa hadn’t learned anything from Aizawa, but he hadn’t irreparably sabotaged his students. Only made their lives difficult.
“But it was a fun experiment!” Nedzu concluded cheerfully. “The children’s grades didn’t suffer, and some of them even performed better under pressure. Hiring you wasn’t a mistake. We all walked away from this experience wiser, don’t you think?”
Aizawa shrugged without a word. Present Mic looked like he wanted to say something but managed to hold himself back at the last second. Nedzu smiled at them, before turning grave again.
“However… Quantum is right. With class 1-A targeted by villains, things can’t carry on like this. Putting more pressure on them isn’t the right thing to do. They need a more nurturing approach.”
They all looked at Toki.
“What?” she scowled. “I’m extremely nurturing.”
She managed to not add fuck off at the end of the sentence, but just barely. She could see Nedzu holding back a snigger. He raised his paws in peace:
“I know, I know. You did a good job with class 1-A. They trust you and those trying times, we need trust. We can keep our current arrangement. You’ll stay their homeroom teacher. As for combat training, well, it will be shared by All Might, yourself, and Aizawa. I’ve also taken note of your idea to mingle class 1-A and class 1-B and rotate their teachers, so once in a while Vlad can take over for class 1-A and Aizawa will supervise class 1-B.”
“That… that sound good.”
“Excellent!” Nedzu chirped. “It means there’s no need for more paperwork.”
At that point Toki realized there was no pile of paper on Nedzu’s desk. If he had planned to renegotiate her employment contract, he would have prepared a new document.
That rat bastard had planned this for the beginning. He never really had any intention to reinstall Aizawa as class 1-A’s homeroom teacher.
Well played.
Toki wavered a second on the edge between amusement, disbelief, and anger. In the end, she let out a huff of breath, and sat down sprawling on a chair.
“That meeting could have been an email.”
“I’ll keep that in mind for next time,” Nedzu said agreeably. “Now, let’s talk about the next order of business… The dorms.”
And they moved on, as simple as that.
Yūei was, like in canon, implementing a dorm system. The whole building had been built in a week, thanks to Cementos and a few other construction-oriented heroes, as well as a handful of professional crews handpicked for their trustworthiness.
The security was pretty good. Of course, nothing could really be safe as long as Kurogiri was working with the League, but… Yūei had a warper on their side now. There was even an apartment for Toki if she wanted to take residency there. She declined, of course, but still took a key.
What? That was one more safehouse. For free, even.
All that was left was to convince the parents to let their kids live at Yūei. Considering that said kids had barely made it out of the summer camps, it wasn’t going to be a piece of cake. Toki was already wincing, imagining Mihoko’s reaction.
Technically, Yūei was more secure than a civilian’s house. But… being away from your child was anxiety inducing, too. Toki understood why some parents would rather remove their kids from Yūei, remove them from the danger altogether. It was instinctive, natural, visceral. Screw everyone else, my baby comes first. But now that the League of Villains had their sights on class 1-A, who could say if they would leave the children alone if they left the hero course?
All the teachers were asked to go and convince the parents. Vlad King and Midnight, as well as All Might, would take care of class 1-B. Toki, as the other victor of the Kamino fight, would go with Eraserhead and Present Mic to approach the parents of the students in class 1-A.
Yep, it was non-negotiable. Apparently Eraserhead, once he was cleaned up, shaved, and his hair brushed, did manage to project a non-nonsense kind of seriousness that Toki (a young woman barely out of teenagerhood herself) couldn’t achieve on her own… and Present Mic, because his popularity and cheerfulness balanced out Aizawa’s grumpiness.
Toki also had a feeling that Present Mic was supposed to act as buffer between the two of them.
Which wasn’t a bad idea, really. Present Mic was loud and theatrical, but he was more astute and subtle than she gave him credit for. His whole over-the-top gimmick was just that, a gimmick. Just like cocky Quantum was part of Toki’s personality, but it wasn’t who she really was. Present Mic used his loudness to deflect and distract. When he dropped the mask and just became Yamada, he could be quieter and attentive.
Anyway.
Now that her vacation was over, Toki had gone back to Fukuoka. She had offered to Neito to bring him when she went, but between hanging out at the Todoroki’s house, visiting Hitoshi, or even settling in the dorms in advance… Neito would rather stay in Musutafu. Besides, Toki would visit basically every day.
School would resume in a little over a week, at the beginning of September. The dorms were almost ready. All was now needed was to persuade the parents.
Toki made an official note that she was Neito’s guardians and as such didn’t need convincing. She also informed Nedzu that she could probably convince Endeavor to let Todoroki join the dorm, too. She knew him personally. It was easily a conversation that they could have over dinner, instead of making an official visit.
All Might told Nedzu that having previously met Midoriya’s mother, he would like to be the one in charge of approaching her. But afterward, All Might also told Toki that he would like her assistance. When he would visit the Midoriya residence, he would give answer to some of the questions Toki had. She was pretty sure it meant that All Might was going to spill the beans about One For All to Inko. About time.
As for Hitoshi… well, it may be cowardly, but Toki requested that All Might accompany them when it would be time to approach Mihoko.
She would need all the help she could get.
________________
< Antares: so… @Megamind, tomorrow I’m coming to your house to try and persuade your parents to let you live in a dorm.
< Antares: what are my odds of success?
> Megamind: low.
> Megamind: but if you manage it I would be so grateful.
> Megamind: Mom has started asking if I’m sure I want to be a hero. I can feel an argument coming. Maybe tonight, if Dad comes home and blow things up
> EndeavorSucks: your dad starts fights?
> Megamind: nah
> Megamind: but my mom is walking on eggshells currently so SOMEONE has to go for the throat at some point
> Megamind: we’re pretty straightforward in my family, so my mom avoiding an argument is weird
> Megamind: usually, when we disagree, we TALK
> Megamind: right now she’s avoiding that because she know she’ll lose. she knows I’ll do whatever it takes to be a hero.
< Antares: =)
< Antares: I’ll bring reinforcements
< Antares: ANYWAY!
< Antares: what’s up people?
> EndeavorSucks: well, @NotOnFire stole a snake at the zoo
> NotOnFire: I DID NOT
> NotOnFire: I forgot I put it in a coworker’s pocket as a joke, it’s different
> PikaPika: you what?!
< Antares: 🤣
> Moxie: holy shit xD
> Moxie: and they didn’t fire you?
> NotOnFire: my coworker also admitted that he had stuffed a carboard bow full of live crickets in my desk to it would spring open when I opened my drawer, so… no, I’m not fired.
> NotOnFire: we should have been both fired!
> NotOnFire: but the manager was crying with laughter so we got a free pass
> PikaPika: I would have laughed too xD
> PikaPika: oh! Speaking of manager!
> PikaPika: my manager gave me next Friday free. So if anyone is okay, we can schedule a new D&D session!
> EndeavorSucks: 🔥🔥🔥
> EndeavorSucks: YES
> Megamind: hell yeah
> Moxie: count me in!
> PikaPika: sweet.
> PikaPika: I’m sending a PM to Pink and Phantom to ask if they’re interested too
> PikaPika: also, Endy, are you sure it won’t conflict with your schedule?
> PikaPika: I know you said that you sometimes had unexpected work to do on Friday
> EndeavorSucks: yeah, when people start their weekend and realize their fridge is broken x)
> EndeavorSucks: but no worries!
> EndeavorSucks: Just to make sure no one schedules appointments on top of my D&D sessions, BUT ALSO to avoid any chance of my coworkers figuring out when I’m playing D&D, I always block sessions out on my calendar with the appointment title:
> EndeavorSucks: “Conflict Resolution Seminar”
> EndeavorSucks: It’s not a lie, I’m discussing with a small group how to resolve conflict.
> EndeavorSucks: Not my fault that the answer is often violence.
< Antares: xD
> NotOnFire: Bro I love you but if I saw in the communal calendar that one of my coworkers had attended thirty conflict resolution seminars over the last year then I would immediately assume they had committed innumerable acts of workplace violence and management was too scared to fire them
> Megamind: I’m going to put that in my own schedule too
> Moxie: 🤣
> Antares: look at what you’ve done. You’ve influenced the fledglings again.
________________
Quantum, Present Mic and Eraserhead visited the parents of class 1-A, one by one, to convince them to trust Yūei with the safety of their children.
In canon it had gone pretty well, from what Toki remembered. But well… she had to admit to herself, now, that maybe her memories of canon weren’t as complete as she would have liked. When she was little, it had all been crisp, clear, and linear. Now… the clarity was still there, but the timeline was fuzzier. She had forgotten some events. Her memories of Before were now twenty-two years old. Of course she was bound of forget some things.
Anyway. Seeing the parents was more emotionally taxing than Toki had anticipated.
Some were very nice. Uraraka’s parents were easily convinced. They wanted their daughter safe, and in a way, dorms were way more secure than a run-down studio seven train stations away from the school. Kaminari’s parents had had close call with villains in their youth, too, and thought the dorms were a smart idea (even if Kaminari’s mom cried). They also thanked Toki for being such a good teacher, which was very flattering and a little embarrassing.
Yaoyorozu’s parents didn’t even seem to understand the danger. They were just happy their daughter was finding her way in life, and that she had finally made proper friends.
Hagakure’s parents were the picture of politeness and readily agreed to let her live in dorms (also, Hagakure’s mother absolutely didn’t notice Toki swipe a sample of hair). Sero’s parents, Ojiro’s and Asui’s were more of the same. Aoyama’s parents showered Toki with praise for her actions at the summer camp and agreed to the dorms without a second of hesitation.
Mineta’s father looked a little too long at Toki’s nonexistent cleavage but was also very cheerful and gave his accord without difficulties.
Shōji’s mother was a quiet, soft-spoken woman who made Toki’s swear that she would keep her son safe, but still looked pale and very sad when she agreed to let Shōji live in the dorms. Kōda’s parents were the same, and so were Tokoyami’s. Sad, worried, but rational and almost resigned. They knew what the most logical option was.
Some others parents were more difficult.
Kirishima’s parents were up in arms about the fact that their son had fought the hero killer, and nearly watched Pixie-Bob have her throat cut. They needed to rant and vent and make their worries heard. Eraserhead looked constipated the whole time, but Present Mic and Quantum nodded, smiled, soothed their worries. It took nearly an hour, and Kirishima looked very embarrassed at the end of it, but they gave their agreement.
Ashido’s parents grumbled a little, too, but apparently their daughter had already convinced them by arguing that if they refused, then she would run away and become a vigilante. Toki tried very hard to not smile. That was so Ashido!
Sato’s parents were bakers. They were used to quiet and safety. They complained and ranted for a while… but they were resigned, because they had actually contemplated pulling Sato out of school and had bitterly realized it would hurt him more than it would protect him. A transfer to Isamu Academy (the closest hero school) wasn’t possible this late in the year, and all the other hero school were so far away that it would require Sato to live in dorms or rent a studio anyway.
Jirō’s parents were loud and extraverted. They ranted and raged for a while before letting themselves be convinced. After all, Jirō had been injured at the summer camp. They only relented because Present Mic managed to charm them, but it was a long battle.
Iida’s family was… well. There was just his mom, now. And she had a very pinched expression when she listened to the teachers’ arguments.
“I already lost a son to heroics,” she said plainly. “I don’t want to lose another.”
“Mother!” Iida squealed.
His mom ignored him and turned to Toki. Her lip was trembling, but her dark grey eyes were hard, and unflinching.
“This is what I would normally tell you. But… You’re Quantum.”
“I am.”
She could feel Eraserhead and Present Mic staring at her, but she didn’t turn her head. She was looking at Iida’s mother.
Tomomi Iida, née Tomomi Hayasa, had eyes like steel. The exact same eyes as Hayasa-sensei. Toki unconsciously straightened.
“Minato told me about what you did for Tenya. This is twice now that you saved my son. I know he’s in good hands with you. Minato was your teacher, wasn’t he?”
“He basically raised me,” Toki admitted.
Tenya Iida did a double-take. His mother smiled, but her eyes were still hard.
“I don’t know if I can trust Yūei. But I can trust you. I leave my son in your care, Quantum.”
No pressure.
oOoOoOo
The next day, the only three families left to visit were the Todoroki, who Toki planned on visiting privately, the Midoriya, and the Shinsō.
Toki and Yagi started with the Shinsō family.
There were several reasons why Toki had asked Yagi to come with her but had refused Eraserhead and Present Mic being present. The first and foremost being that Hinawa would be there. Yagi already knew about her daughter’s existence, so he wouldn’t be surprised… but Toki didn’t want strangers finding out.
The second reason was… well. Toki knew Mihoko would freak out. Hitoshi had been kidnapped. Of course his mother would be reluctant to send him back to Yūei, never mind living in dorms.
Toki understood it. She was a mother too. She tried to imagine what she would feel if Hinawa was taken, and she had to fight a wave of anxiety. And then she imagined having to let Hinawa leave, let someone else watch over her baby only days after the kidnapping… Yes, Toki would understand if Mihoko said no. It was an instinctive, natural reaction.
But logic dictated that letting Hitoshi live in the dorms was the safest option. Toki knew it, Hitoshi knew it, and Mihoko knew it too, to some degree.
And the third reason…
“Oh my god,” Hitoshi said hollowly. “You’re All Might.”
Toki grinned.
The third reason she had for visiting the Shinsō with Yagi was that she had deduced from Hitoshi’s lack of screaming in the last few days that he hadn’t had a good look at All Might’s deflated form on national TV. So he hadn’t realized that Small Might was actually Yagi, the guy who had been hanging out with them and Midoriya at Dagobah Beach for months during Toki’s pregnancy.
It was Toki’s sacred duty as his unofficial older sister to tell him and watch him have seizure.
“Indeed I am, Young Shinsō!” Yagi smiled.
“You were All Might all this time where I was forced to move garbage on that beach?! The Number One hero, the Symbol of Peace, was watching me when I was making a total idiot of myself for funsies in that dump?! You saw me get tangled in that rotten hose? And when I tried to carry a TV but nearly broke my foot? And when that pile of garbage collapsed near me and I screamed like a girl? Oh my god, you saw me put a crab in Midoriya’s collar.”
“I also saw you faceplant in seaweed,” Yagi helpfully added.
From where she stood, Toki could see Hitoshi’s life pass before his eyes as his soul died on the spot.
Yeah, it was exactly as funny as she had expected it to be.
They made introductions. Toki picked up Hinawa from her playpen and introduced her to Yagi, who cooed with delight and said that the baby looked exactly like her mother, which of course made both Toki and Hinawa preen proudly.
And then came the actual parents-teachers conversation.
Like Toki had predicted, Mihoko was reluctant to agree to the dorms. She was even reluctant to let Hitoshi attend Yūei. He had been kidnapped right under their noses! But, as Toki argued, there was no other solution. Yūei was the most defensible place.
Well, that, or the Icarus Agency in Fukuoka.
It wasn’t arrogance. Their agency may not be fortified like Yūei, but it had been chosen to be defensive, and more importantly it was protected by the best heroes around: Quantum and Hawks.
Some would say that Endeavor may be a better deterrent. Honestly, the Endeavor Agency was stuffed to the brim with efficient combatants and incredible powerhouses. But having a defensible base of operation wasn’t about being the best warrior, it was also about being the more versatile hero… and for that, neither Meteor, Endeavor or even All Might could compare to Icarus.
After all, Icarus had Hawks.
Toki was aware that she, herself, was a very, very good hero. Clever, efficient, flashy, precise, and yet capable of great destruction. But she was only a warper. She was, at her core, someone made to flee who had turned into a frontline hero. Quantum was good, but she wasn’t the best.
Hawks was the best.
It was just an indisputable fact. He had a profoundly adaptable Quirk that gave him strength, sensory abilities, flight, and the ability to physically multitask on a scale that would completely overwhelm an entire team of heroes. Not only was he gifted, he also had the competence to utilize his abilities to their fullest extent. He could effortlessly run missions without any backup or support, and just as effortlessly shoulder the responsibility of spearheading an entire sprawling operation with hundreds of personnel involved.
He was charming and clever and could work the cameras and the media in the spotlight, get the public opinion on his side just by batting his eyelashes. But just like he was sincere and optimistic, he was also ruthlessly logical. His façade of arrogance was only a face, hiding his true level of intelligence and pragmatism. He could also operate entirely undercover. He may not be as good as Toki with disguises and alternate persona, but he didn’t need to. Ditching his wings was enough to make him entirely invisible.
Hawks had no flaws and no weakness. He was idealistic and encouraging, like a leader should be, but always happy to play support. He avoided direct confrontation and always looked for a non-violent solution first, but when it was time to fight, he never lost. He was constantly better informed than many spies. He was his own underground network. Nothing could take him by surprise.
(Well, Toki could. But she was a special case.)
Basically, Fukuoka would be safe because Hawks would be there. When Toki and Keigo had moved there and started their career at eighteen, the city had been… not quite a dump, but still unsafe. And yet, today, not even four years later, it was one of the top ten safest cities in Japan.
Yes, the Shinsō would be safe in Fukuoka. Toki let herself daydream a little about it, of collecting her scattered family, and bringing them back with them on her turf, in her home, safe and protected…
But the Shinsō weren’t interested in moving so far away. So Yūei it was.
And Yūei meant… letting Hitoshi live in the dorms.
It would be different if Hitoshi didn’t want to be a hero. It would be different if he was a civilian, if he was a frightened victim, if he wanted to hide. But Hitoshi, even if he had been scared, and would have every right to be traumatized, didn’t want to hide. He wanted to keep fighting.
He had already been fighting every step of the way.
Even when he had been kidnapped, he hadn’t lost his head. He had fought: first with his fists, and then with his wits. At no point it had crossed his mind to roll over and give up. The kidnapping had terrified him, but he had kept his cool. He had negotiated with the villains, he’d kept them talking, he hadn’t panicked. He hadn’t really been in control of the situation, far from it… but he hadn’t been out of his mind with fear. Even when he had been tied up and gagged, he had been planning, assessing.
Mihoko argued that maybe they could just lay low. Hitoshi could be homeschooled. And Toki argued that maybe the villains wouldn’t come after Hitoshi again, but maybe they would. Not making waves wasn’t enough to hide when someone was actively looking for you. You had to fully disappear and go into witness protection or stand your ground and fight back.
Besides, Hitoshi wanted to be a hero. One way or another, he would find his way back to the fight. As a teacher but also as his friend, Toki wanted to make sur that it would be on Hitoshi’s terms, not the League’s.
The dorms would be a veritable fortress. Nedzu had pulled all the stops. But the kids would also be allowed their privacy. They could also go home on weekends if they told the school in advance. A teacher would drive them from the school to their home and then back. For Hitoshi, though, Toki would do it herself. Warping was faster and more reliable than cars.
Fuck cars. They were death traps.
The conversation was mostly going back-and-forth between Mihoko and Toki, with occasional interjections from Hitoshi or (when prompted) from Yagi who sprouted reassurances in the right places. Steadily, Mihoko was losing ground.
Finally, she turned to her husband:
“What do you think?”
Hajime Shinsō was calmer about the whole thing. No, calmer wasn’t the right word. He was more pragmatic, maybe. He had weighed the pros and the cons in advance. He was surgeon, and as such, he was more used to death and high-risk situations than Mihoko. He knew sometimes you had to pick your poison.
“I think it’s Hitoshi’s decision.”
“Hajime…”
“Mihoko,” her husband interrupted her. “Hitoshi wants to be a hero. Yes, it’s dangerous, but we knew that from the beginning. We knew he would risk his life. He knows it too. If he still wants to pursue this path, then we have to support him. There is no other option. Would you rather leave him to fight on his own?”
Mihoko looked away.
In the end, she caved. She wasn’t happy about it. Amendments and concessions had to be made, to allow Hitoshi to visit his parents but also to allow Mihoko to come to Yūei herself.
Mihoko didn’t raise the subject of Hinawa’s guardianship and Toki didn’t either, but it was the elephant in the room. They knew that the Shinsō family would be under scrutiny and needed extra-protection to stay invisible: not only to protect Hitoshi, but also to protect Hinawa. Hajime mentioned that he was going to look into transferring to another hospital. Mihoko reluctantly agreed that with Hitoshi living in a dorms, she was going to sell the apartment and move closer to the school.
“You could also move closer to Shizuoka,” Hitoshi mentioned. “Endeavor lives there. And Meteor, too.”
Mihoko made a face: “Is that supposed to convince me?”
“Aw, come on,” Toki whined. “He’s not that bad.”
“He’s very polite,” Hitoshi loyally agreed. “And he’s kind of funny.”
Mihoko turned sharply to her son: “You’ve met him?!”
Hitoshi’s expression shifted to ‘oh shit’ faster that she could blink. “Er, yes. When I was visiting Todoroki.”
“What? When were you going to tell me?!”
“… I was saving it for your deathbed?”
After that, good luck trying to convince Mihoko to move to Shizuoka. But she didn’t scalp Hitoshi on the spot or come back on her decision to allow him to move into the dorms, so Toki was going to count that as a success.
And then, it was time to visit the Midoriya.
________________
< Antares: I’m going to need back-up on this one
< Antares: if you have the number of Broccoli-Boy, coach him through it
< Antares: tell him an All Might autograph is on the line
> Megamind: roger
> Moxie: roger
> NotOnFire: wait, what, who’s getting an autograph?!
________________
Toki didn’t know what she had expected from Inko Midoriya. Maybe reluctance. Probably tears.
Almost certainly tears, actually. Her son’s tendency to waterworks had to come from somewhere.
In canon, Inko had wanted to pull her son out of Yūei. But in canon, Izuku had nearly lost the use of his arms fighting Muscular (which hadn’t happened there)
In canon, the kidnapped student had been held prisoner several days. It hadn’t happened here. With the rescue happening twenty-four hours after the kidnapping, the news barely had time to pick up on it. Most of the journalists’ focus had been on the Nomu attacks, or rather on the Nomu themselves. And well, there had also been the Ghost Arsonist and his murder spree when he had burned five hospitals. That had been a shitshow.
Damn, with the recrudescence of interest into the Ghost Arsonist, soon enough people would wonder which hero was tasked with the investigation. Icarus would be in the spotlight. Great. Exactly what was missing from Toki’s life. More nosy journalists.
But back to the point.
Toki and Yagi meet Inko Midoriya. She was a short, plump woman… yeah, she was fat. It wasn’t a bad thing. She was round, quiet-spoken and wide-eyed. Her green hair was straight and neatly combed, without any of the rioting curls of her son. She even dressed in muted colors. Everything about her was soft and non-threatening.
Toki tried to remember her own mother, but the memories slipped between her fingers like smoke.
Sayuri had sharp features. Or rather, she had a sharp gaze. She’d had deep purple eyes, the only one of her features that Toki hadn’t inherited. Besides their hair color, mother and daughter had always looked similar. Sayuri had brown hair just a shade lighter than Toki’s, and she had had the same round cheeks and the same nose as her daughter. It wasn’t something Toki remembered observing, but she remembered Nono remarking on it, once upon a time.
Toki didn’t really recall what her own mother had looked like. There wasn’t any picture to remember her by. After learning that Neito was her cousin, Toki had taken a second look at the picture of Neito’s mother. Even then, she hadn’t managed to recreate Sayuri’s face in her mind.
Toki barely remembered bits and pieces. Long hair. Delicate hands. Legs that walked fast, forcing Toki to scramble to catch up. A musical laugh. Sayuri had a nice voice. She used to read bedtime stories to Toki, before she started misbehaving. Sayuri always knew everything, all the time. She was observant, she was patient, she doted on her daughter.
Sayuri had been kind, soft, charming, and dedicated, but there had always been a core of cold ruthlessness in her. Toki simply hadn’t noticed until she ended up on the wrong side of it.
Inko Midoriya didn’t have an ounce of cold ruthlessness in her at all. She was nervous, sweet, and timid, and Toki could absolutely see Izuku in her. They had the same mannerisms. It was kind of cute.
They exchanged pleasantries and platitudes. Inko Midoriya offered them tea and sweets. All Might declined, but Toki wasn’t shy and stuffed the biggest muffin she could in her mouth.
And then, before even talking about the dorms, Yagi took a deep breath, and started talking.
“Midoriya-san. The school already sent you notice of this, and I am here to talk to your about Yūei’s dorms system. But before that, I would like to congratulate you. You raised the most heroic person I have ever meet in my life.”
Both Midoriya started stammering and blushing. Toki used the distraction to steal another muffin.
“You see,” All Might continued, “I met Young Midoriya a little over a year ago, when he was Quirkless. And his determination inspired me. This is why I started training him for the Yūei entrance exam… and this is why I entrusted my Quirk to him.”
Inko Midoriya froze. She glanced at her son, who was avoiding her gaze, and repeated:
“Your Quirk…? I don’t understand.”
“It’s alright. You see, my Quirk is called One For All. It is a stockpiling power that can be given from one to another and has been passed on through several generations. Everything starts with the tale of two brothers…”
And All Might told her.
Toki knew the story already, but it came from her memories of canon. It was different, to hear it told for real.
All For One, who built his empire in the dawn of Quirks. The seemingly Quirkless brother, who was given a stockpiling Quirk out of love, or out of a desire for control, no one could ever know. The brother passed his power to a successor along with the task to stop All For One. One generation, then the next, over and over, a never-ending game of cat-and-mouse with All For One as the cat and the One for All holders as his prey… until All Might came along and crushed his enemy six years ago.
But All For One survived, unbeknown to him. When All Might had entrusted his power to Izuku Midoriya, he had thought that he was only giving him his Quirk, not his mission. But unfortunately, All For One had survived. And even though the man by himself wouldn’t ever be able to fight again, his legacy was still alive. Tomura Shigaraki, born Tenko Shimura, was carrying his master’s will. Just like Izuku Midoriya carried All Might’s.
“So I have to defeat him,” Midoriya the younger said grimly.
“Actually you don’t,” Toki chirped in. “When we fought, All For One convinced himself that I was the Ninth holder. So you’re safe. I’ll be your human shield.”
Midoriya the younger seemed horrified.
“What?! I can’t let you do this!”
“You can and you will,” All Might said firmly. “Quantum is the strongest hero of this country. I want you to become a new Symbol of Peace, but only when you graduate. In the meantime, please let the adults handle the danger.” He paused and looked at both Midoriya. “Please trust us.”
Izuku snapped his mouth shut, looking torn. His mother looked from Toki to All Might, eyes wide and shiny with tears, her hands clenched into fists. Her shoulders dropped in discouragement.
“When you came here,” she said softly. “I was going to tell you no.”
“Mom!” her son squealed.
Inko Midoriya shook her head, her lips trembling.
“I’m sorry, but… I watched your fight on TV. As a regular citizen, I’m very thankful. But as a parent, I was scared. Izuku looks up to you. If his path leads to a future filled with blood like this… I think staying Quirkless and watching heroes from the sidelines would have made him happier.”
Toki bit her cheek and didn’t say anything. But she thought about Midoriya leading his friends during training, about the way his face lit up when he scored high on a rescue test, about how open and honest his expression was when he was asked for help during an exercise. About how tall he had stood in the mountains, next to the defeated Hero Killer. She thought about how well Midoriya fit in Yūei, about how happy he was growing stronger side-by-side with other future heroes…
You’re wrong.
You’re wrong, Midoriya-san. Safety and happiness are two very different things. Your son may have been safer if he had become a Quirkless analysist or something. But… I may not have known Izuku a lot… but I can still see how he shines when he’s in the thick of the action. He’s still a kid. He’s still clumsy and he can do better. But he’s good. He’s motivated. He’s inspiring. He’s strong. He has room to grow, but what is already here isn’t just self-sacrifice and luck. There is a spark. There is something that shines as brightly as Melissa’s hope or Keigo’s optimism.
There is faith, and you would do him a disservice if you tried to stifle that.
But Toki kept her mouth shut. It rarely went well when you told a parent that they were wrong about their child. Toki knew it well. In her own experience, mothers could be so irrational, and prone to escalate things drastically.
“This was what I thought,” Inko Midoriya said, her voice a little wobbly, her gaze fixed on her knees. “All Might… Quantum… I am sorry, but you weren’t there when the villains attacked my son. I don’t want him to attend Yūei any longer. If he really wants to be a hero, he can go to another school.”
“Mom!” Izuku jumped to his feet, looking horrified.
But his mother took a long breath, and raised her head again. There were tears in her eyes, but she wasn’t crying. Her expression suddenly made Toki remember the face of Tomomi Iida, the mother of Tenya Iida, when she had said that she had already lost a son to heroism.
“This is what I thought,” Inko repeated, a little louder. “But now that you’ve told me how Izuku came to get a Quirk… I realize now that his safety won’t be guaranteed elsewhere either. He’s already walking in your footsteps. If I remove him from the school where you are teaching… he will have no one to support him.”
The tears started rolling down her cheeks. Toki froze and exchanged a glance with Yagi. He was as still as a statue, too.
“It is too late, isn’t it?” Inko sobbed. “Izuku… You’re already walking a path where I can’t do anything to protect you, aren’t you?”
Midoriya the younger swallowed, wide-eyed like a bunny caught in a car’s headlights. Then he steeled himself.
“I’m sorry Mom,” he said very gently. “I love you. I’m thankful. But I need to learn from heroes… from those specific heroes, really. And I don’t want to be alone when I do. I’ll have my friends with me, but I would like you to keep supporting me, too.”
Would you rather let him fight on his own? Hajime Shinsō had asked. This was kind of the same question. The problem wasn’t to let Izuku fight or not. The problem that was he would fight, and the choice was only between standing with him or walking away.
Toki could see the understanding wash on Inko’s face. The heartbreak. And, immediately after, the resignation.
Toki would have thought that she would felt better about winning the argument and convincing the mother of a student to let them join the dorms. But she felt almost dirty, instead.
It wasn’t fair. Mothers who loved their children shouldn’t have to say goodbye to them.
Inko Midoriya cried softly and quietly. She cried like someone who was used to bawl loudly and emotionally, and whose emotions were suddenly dried out and exhausted. She cried like someone who understood how hopeless it was, and yet couldn’t hold the tears at bay.
Tomomi Iida wouldn’t have cried like this.
Sayuri wouldn’t have cried like this, either.
But Mihoko would have. Mihoko was a civilian, someone who didn’t use violence, who was unfamiliar with a life littered with death and brutality. Mihoko was kind, and soft, and used to be able to keep her children safe.
And yet she had to come in terms with the horrible realization that it wasn’t the kind of life that her son was going to have.
Inko cried, and then she dried her tears and signed the agreement for the dorms. Yagi was kind and apologetic. He promised personally that he would watch other Izuku, protect him, raise him up, even if he had to give his life to do that. At this point it was getting too emotional, so Toki started growling that if he pulled another suicidal stunt like this, she was going to have him microchipped.
The banter came easily. It lightened the atmosphere. When they left, the emotional moment had passed, and everyone had calmed down.
And the only family left to visit was the Todoroki.
oOoOoOo
Toki made that house call on her own.
She had a feeling Endeavor wouldn’t be hard to persuade. He was a hero; he knew how to be pragmatic. Granted, he was also a parent, and parents could be… irrational. But Endeavor wasn’t the kind of person who thought his hero-in-training son needed to be coddled. He was slowly shifting his parenting methods from hardcore training to a hand-off approach, but he was still on the ‘tough love’ side of the spectrum. The dorm system would allow the children to be safer but also to train longer and have an easier access to multiple teachers. It was a great opportunity.
If Shouto said no, then Endeavor would back him, of course. But if Shouto said yes, or even that he didn’t care, then Endeavor would sign up in a heartbeat.
Toki called ahead, to warm him she was swinging by his house. Endeavor told her when he could be there. In the meantime, Toki went there anyway. She had a semi-permanent invitation and she wanted to see if Fuyumi was down for some sparring.
It was Shouto who opened the door to her, though. He looked at her, and immediately said, his voice placid as always:
“If this is about the dorms, my old man will only be there in an hour.”
“I know, he told me. I wanted say hello to your sister.”
Shouto blinked at her. “Fuyumi isn’t home. Natsuo is, but he’s playing videogames right now.”
Toki squinted, trying to guess if that meant that the timing wasn’t the best and that she should come back. Shouto was sometimes pretty hard to read.
“I can come back later?” she offered awkwardly.
The boy looked at her a few seconds, then stepped back, opening the door wide.
“No. Come in. I have to talk to you about something.”
“Oh? Is it about school?”
“No. It’s about that fact that your father is having an affair with mine.”
Toki choked.
So, it turned out that a few days ago, Shouto and Neito had eavesdropped and her and Meteor, when she had introduced Hinawa to him. And they had overheard Meteor admit to her that he was sleeping with Endeavor, and… well, the whole conversation, actually.
Crap.
Kudos to Neito. He had completely managed to fool Toki, she had no idea he had spied on her and was now living with the burden of knowing that Endeavor was banging Toki’s dad. He hadn’t let a single thing show.
The fact that he had discovered that he was related to Toki may have distracted him a bit, actually.
Shouto had kept quiet, too. He hadn’t told his siblings. But he had been tense, now that Toki was thinking about it. Well, that explained his moodiness at least. He had probably been thinking about what he had overheard over and over… and now he wanted answers.
Which was why they were now face to face, staring at each other in the deserted living room.
Toki would like to preface this by saying she hadn’t signed up for that shit. She didn’t want to involve herself in the Todoroki drama. They had far too many problems. Shit, she was barely resolving to try and save Dabi instead of beating him up with a crowbar for what he had done to Hitoshi and Neito. She didn’t want to touch Dabi’s daddy issues with a ten-foot pole. And now she was going to explain to Dabi’s little brother that his father was gay? Why the hell had she ever do to deserve that?
Was Endeavor even gay? Meteor was apparently bi. Or pan. Or demi? Hell, maybe he was even ace. Sex-positive asexual people existed.
Whatever. She didn’t want to involve herself in their family issues. It was over-the-top and made her cringe, but it also made her feel raw and frightened because the pain they all bore was very real. They were real people, with real pain and real scars, and knowing the details of their suffering felt like an invasion of privacy. Toki wanted to squeeze her eyes shut and not know these things. She wished she hadn’t learned them, that she would never have to look any of the Todoroki children and be so excruciatingly aware of the scars they bore.
It felt voyeuristic to know that their father used to beat their mom. It felt obscene to know about their shameful secrets. It wasn’t right. It shouldn’t be tossed in the open so casually.
It felt like Toki should be ashamed: ashamed to know it, ashamed to put words on it, ashamed to drag it back into the open.
It wasn’t a story. The Todoroki were real people with real trauma. Shouto was a real person with real trauma. And Toki didn’t want it shoved down her throat because unfortunately, some of the Todoroki family issues uncomfortably echoed some of her own issues.
But… here she was.
Shouto made tea. It was almost incongruous, but Toki was glad to have something to do with her hands. She thanked him when he passed her the teacup, and then awkwardly cleared her throat.
“You know, that’s a conversation you should have with your father, not me.”
Shouto thought about it, and shook his head.
“No. I want to understand. Neito said I shouldn’t jump to conclusions, and that I should ask you my questions first.”
Ugh. Thanks, Neito.
“Alright,” Toki said with resignation. “Ask away.”
Shouto hesitated. His eyes flickered to Toki’s, then back to their tea. He hadn’t touched his drink, either.
“Is it true?”
“Yes.”
Shouto pinched his lips, and stayed silent a few seconds. Toki resisted the urge to fill the quiet with nervous chatter. Instead, she fidgeted with her teacup, and waited for him to speak again.
“Did he,” Shouto started, then stopped. “Was it. I mean. How?!”
Wow. Loaded question. Toki winced.
“Not sure. They became friends, and then— I guess they became close. I don’t know how it happened either. I just know it’s there. And… Somehow, they genuinely like and respect each other.”
Toki suspected that it was way deeper than just liking each other, but she wasn’t going to open this can of worms just yet. She wasn’t ready. Meteor said it was serious. She was going to take his word for it.
Shouto looked down at his teacup. His shoulders were tense and rigid.
“You said that he has… a history of domestic abuse.”
Fuck. Toki cringed and felt her face heat up. She looked at her feet, throat tight. She didn’t want to talk about it like this.
She had said to Meteor that Endeavor had a history of domestic abuse, as if one clinical sentence could encompass all the ugliness and pain of years of torments. It seemed so callous. Toki hadn’t meant for Shouto to hear it, especially spoken so casually.
She swallowed back the irrational urge to apologize.
“Yeah. He admitted it to my face. Although I don’t know the details.”
“What do you know?”
Toki bit her lip.
“Not much. I know he drove your mother to a breakdown. I’m guessing he was like that towards you, too, and that’s why you have a complex relationship with your Quirk. Because it comes from him, especially the fire side.”
From the corner of her eye, she saw Shouto scowl down at the table. He didn’t look angry at her, but there was something tight in the line of his spine, like coiled tension that couldn’t flow out.
“Nobody ever knew,” he finally bit out. “Nobody ever cared. How did you find out?”
Future foreknowledge, essentially. If she hadn’t had her memories from Before, then she would have been like the rest of the masses, willfully blind to the abuse that the Number Two hero inflicted on his own home.
It was a human flaw, to want to believe that your protectors were infallible. As long as Endeavor put away criminals, everybody had been happy to give him privacy. Nobody had thought that someone who did so much good could also do terrible things.
“Well, I didn’t exactly find out. I never had proof, just clues. I met you. I met Fuyumi. There were signs that you weren’t at ease with him, with his legacy. I did more digging and discovered that your mother was interned. And then I made a hypothesis, by imagining the worst in him. But I had no proof. It’s not visible unless you’re actively looking for it. It’s just that…” She shrugged. “I was. Looking for it, I mean. And when I confronted him, he told me it was true.”
“You were looking for it,” Shouto repeated slowly, eyes narrowed.
Toki hesitated.
“You know my dad was in jail?” At his nod, she pursed her lips. “Well, Endeavor got him out. In conditional liberty. So my father was microchipped and had a shock-collar. He couldn’t own a bank account, couldn’t leave, couldn’t get any help if he needed it. So I looked into Endeavor because I was afraid that he would be the kind of person to abuse his power on someone who couldn’t defend themselves.”
Shouto’s fingers tightened suddenly on his teacup. He knew what she meant. When he spoke, his voice was cold as ice.
“Did he?”
Toki sighed deeply, her shoulders dropping.
“No. Not on him, at least. He may have many sins to carry, but it’s not one of them.”
Shouto contemplated that in silence, and then frowned. “You know, maybe it was a tactic of your father to let Endeavor lower his guard and then escape.”
“Endeavor wouldn’t fall for a strategy like that.”
“I don’t know, he’s pretty stupid.”
Toki snorted. Endeavor was indeed pretty stupid, when it was about Meteor. Emotionally compromised, like Keigo had said. But she shook her head:
“That’s not it either. Meteor nearly escaped a few months ago and he still decided to stick with your old man, just because. There’s no long-term plans in the work. They just— enjoy each other’s company, I guess.”
Shouto made a face like he had bitten in a lemon.
“Yeah,” Toki said with commiseration. “I know.”
“But why?!” Shouto looked so bewildered by it. It was almost funny. Toki smiled, even as she shook her head helplessly.
“It kind of makes sense? They are both very similar. They’re driven, uncompromising, ruthless, selfish. They’re attracted to power and danger. They’re obsessive and loyal. Your father finds Meteor funny and charming, and my father admires Endeavor’s sense of honor. They just… click, I guess.”
Shouto ruminated on that information for almost a minute. The tea was getting cold. Neither of them had touched it.
Yeah, learning that his father was seeing someone (fucking someone? dating someone?) must be a shock for Shouto, and Toki didn’t blame him for needing a few minutes. Hell, she had needed a few minutes too.
But they made sense, the both of them. Meteor and Endeavor. Reluctantly, Toki could see what they saw in each other, what drew them together. They were similar, except in the ways they completed each other. Endeavor had made Meteor care about protecting strangers, and… well, considering Meteor’s good standing with the Todoroki children, he may have something to do with Endeavor not completely fucking up his job as a parent.
They were similar, not in their qualities but in their flaws, too. And Toki was reminded of an old quote, something she had never written in her notebooks but remembered all the same.
We don’t fall in love with people because they’re good people. We fall in love with people whose darkness we recognize. You can fall in love with someone for all the right reasons; that love can still fall apart. But when you fall in love with someone because your monsters have found a home in them, that’s the kind of love that owns your skin and bones. Love is found in the darkness; like a candle in the night.
Yeah, Meteor and Endeavor’s relationship made sense. They were cut from the same cloth, and somehow they must have recognized that in each other. They could have hated each other and become mortal enemies. Maybe, in another world, they would have. But in this word, they had become allies, and then friends: and then…
Whatever.
She hadn’t liked it, at first. Endeavor wasn’t a safe person to be around. But Meteor wasn’t, either, so really, what kind of metric was that? Besides, they could have brought out the worst in each other, and instead they had both changed each other for the best. She should be grateful for that.
It wasn’t perfect, but then nothing worth having ever was.
“And you’re okay with it?” Shouto said suddenly.
“Not at first. But now, well, yeah.”
“My old man is sort of— weird.”
Toki snorted: “I sure hope no one in their right mind would call mine normal.”
Shouto tilted his head, as if to acknowledge she had a point. He hesitated a few seconds, and then insisted:
“But you’re not… worried. About my father. His history.”
“If he tries anything, I’ll kill him,” Toki said calmly.
Shouto threw her a wide-eyed look of surprise. Toki didn’t back down, calmly staring back at him without blinking.
She would have killed Endeavor, back then at the Icarus Agency, if Keigo had told her that the Number One hero was abusing his power. And now… and now, Toki was bitterly aware of what she was capable of doing in her anger and her grief.
“But no,” she continued after a pause. “I’m not worried. You saw them together. They’re friends. They’re equals. I know your father’s history, but he changed. He isn’t the same man. What he did back then, he wouldn’t do it now.”
And if he did, well… Meteor wasn’t Rei. Meteor wouldn’t take any shit. He was proud, fierce, ruthless. Toki had no trouble imagining him escalating rather than folding. If one day they argued for real, there would probably be some massive property damage. She hoped Endeavor was insured.
“If anything, you should be worried about Endeavor,” Toki added as an afterthought. “He’s the one dating a mass-murderer.”
Shouto considered the question, and the shrugged:
“I guess it evens out.”
Toki couldn’t help but let out a bark of laughter at that. Yeah, that was a way to look at it, alright.
“I don’t understand it,” Shouto finally said. “I can accept it, but I don’t get it. I can’t imagine anyone feeling that way about my old man. Is it the same for you?”
Toki thought about it.
She thought about Meteor and Endeavor as they fought All For One, moving as one and covering each other’s weaknesses without needing to pause, to talk, or even to look at each other. She thought about Meteor’s passion and fury, about ember-like eyes glowing with mania and a toothy grin promising violence; she thought about flames and icy blue eyes, about a voice like thunder and flames so powerful they were named after the deepest level of hell. She thought of a building crumbling, of rage, blood, and desperation, of hatred, of ambition, of cruelty. She thought of how much you could sacrifice to your selfishness.
I will not have you without the darkness
that hides within you;
and I will not let you have me
without the madness that makes me.
If our demons cannot dance,
neither can we.
“No,” she said pensively. “I think I understand it.”
Notes:
Next chapter in three weeks !
Next week is a chapter of "folly of the wise" (so, smut), and the week after that is a chapter of "house of wisdom" about Enji Todoroki, because i miss his POV very much.
And happy holidays/merry christmas to y'all !!!! =)
Chapter 61: Preparing for the next step
Summary:
Sometimes Toki felt like a bright and colorful pinata while God was a thirteen years old birthday boy whose parents had just announced their divorce.
Notes:
I was sick like a dog yesterday, so today i am recovering and feeling like i've be hit by a bus. I am posting that chapter and going back to sleep.
Anyway. So much is happening in that chapter, guys, i couldn't find a good summary. Mostly becaus eit would ruin the surprises, plural x)
Enjoy !
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
PREPARING FOR THE NEXT STEP
All the students of class 1-A were in the process of moving to dorms, as did all the students of class 1-B. Their parents had all said yes. School wouldn’t start back up before September, in a little over a week, but everyone was already unpacking and personalizing their rooms.
Toki helped move furniture around and used the opportunity to ask innocent questions to the students. If their parents were going to call them often, if they weren’t too anxious, if they needed some help.
She also used that chance to try to swipe the phones of the students she suspected of being a spy. Sometimes she managed, sometimes she didn’t. But what was important was to watch their reactions. If the traitor was supposed to fit in with their classmates, then they probably didn’t own a burner phone or another communication device that would seem unusual. They must use their phone. After all, texts and calls were easy to delete, and who would find it weird to have teenager glued to their screen?
So Toki tried to swipe their phones and observed.
Keigo was the better spy, of course. He would have clocked the traitor within five minutes. But Toki had been trained by Okamoto, just like he had been. She knew what to watch for and was sure to not be seen watching. She knew how to detect fear, lies, and discomfort to draw her own conclusions.
Of class 1-B, only Tsuburaba was distracted enough to let her take his phone. He was annoyed when she told him he had left it on the table, but he seemed more embarrassed than anything. In class 1-A, both Asui and Sato completely left their phones unattended without a care. They even thanked Toki for giving it back to them. They either weren’t spies, or they used another method of communication.
Shōji kept his phone in his pocket at all times. So did Kamakiri and Kuroiro of class 1-B. The test was inconclusive, overall. Toki would have to try later, maybe during a training exercise.
Aoyama, though, when Toki innocently told him that she heard buzzing and maybe he had gotten a text… his smile went slightly fixated, his pupils narrowing in an unconscious reflex of anxiety.
And that was enough to make Toki pay a lot more attention to him.
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe he had argued with his parents and didn’t want to talk to them on the phone. Maybe he had a stalker. Maybe he was waiting for bad news, had a family member in the hospital, or something like that. There could be a hundred explanations.
But Aoyama looked at his cellphone like it was a bomb, and yet he was terrified to let it out of his sights.
It was… something to consider, at least.
She didn’t share her conclusions with Nedzu. She didn’t want to give him some bias while he was protecting the students. It was better for him to look to his own suspect. If they both objectively suspected the same person over different things, then it increased the likelihood of having caught a good suspect, but they needed objectivity for that. So Toki was keeping her observations for herself… for now.
Instead, in the last days of August, just before school resumed, she dove headfirst into hero work. She even snagged a team-up with Inferno to bust out a little gang of villains in Kyoto.
It was nice to get back home, to come back to her usual patrol grounds and banter with her sidekicks. She had missed Ocelot’s jokes and Thunder Thief’s over-the-top flirting. It was great to bicker with Hayasa-sensei over his spreadsheets full of notes about ongoing investigations, some of them bordering on conspiracy theories. It felt like home.
Toki wondered, sometimes, what home was supposed to be.
I am homesick for a place
that I am not even sure exists.
One where my heart is full
and my body loved
and my soul understood.
Home. What a strange thing to think about, what a strange thing to try and remember. Was it the place where she grew up, the safety, the familiar sounds? But it had ended when she was six. She barely remembered it. She had found her home else elsewhere, since then. Was it in Naruto Labs? She had been happy there. But it wasn’t home. Neither was Yūei, or Mihoko’s appartement, or even her own penthouse in Fukuoka. It wasn’t even Icarus Agency, although it came close. It was… It was…
Home was the people she loved. Keigo, Hinawa, and Meteor but also Hitoshi, Mihoko, Hayasa-sensei, Neito, Kameko, Melissa. Their smiles and laughter, the feeling of belonging. It was in their stories, how their and hers bleed together, how they inspired her to become who she was.
And, maybe home was also herself. Toki had survived a lot, had lost a lot, and still kept on thriving. Even alone she had been able to stand tall. She was stronger than four walls. Home was found within, deep down.
Allow the frost to kill the things that must die.
Seasons pivot and shift
and yet you are alive.
Toki had roots in Fukuoka but also in Musutafu, Tokyo, and even in Shizuoka. It was fine. It was home. She was happy there.
She was happy.
Oh, everything wasn’t perfect. There was still the League. Shigaraki, Toga, Dabi. Other villains, other problems. A multitude of issues to solve, of tragedies to prevent. Toki would be in the Top Ten at the next Billboard Chart, and she could already feel the crushing weight of that responsibility. But… Things weren’t bad. She had found a good balance. She had saved the people she needed to save, averted a big catastrophe, and found support among friends.
Honestly, things could be way worse.
Of course, thinking about her relatively good luck was tempting fate. And so, it shouldn’t have surprised Toki, when Keigo came to her in the last days of August, and bluntly told her that he needed to get closer to the MLA.
Great.
Keigo needed to make progress. He needed to show some commitment. If he didn’t do it of his own initiative, then Hanabata would push him to do it, and he would do that by asking something specific from him; something Keigo couldn’t anticipate. Something dangerous. Maybe he would ask him for a secret from the HPSC, or some blackmail material on a hero, or to ignore a crime. Maybe he would ask him to kill someone, like canon-Dabi had done to canon-Hawks.
Point was… Keigo would be asked things that could get people hurt.
Toki could see his point. It was better for Keigo to do something of his own initiative, something that made Hanabata believe that Keigo was committed and that there was no need to ask him to prove himself even more. The issue was that proving that for Keigo to prove he was committed, he needed to give something to the MLA… which meant giving ammunition to their enemy.
So what could Keigo give to them, that wouldn’t actively help them?
The MLA wanted to recruit people. The MLA wanted to weaken heroes. The MLA didn’t actually want liberation and freedom, or else they would have jumped on the bandwagon of “free Quirk use” when the bill had passed. They wanted power. They wanted money, land, means, and support items. They also wanted, more than anything, a devoted cult of follower at their beck and call, drinking their every words.
They wanted manpower. So Keigo suggested that he recruit people.
It didn’t have to be anything crazy. A few civilians, pointed at those inoffensive meetings lead by undercover MLA agents posing as concerned parents speaking about discrimination against children with strong Quirk, or annoyed business-owned who wanted to promote their employees based on their innate talents and not a political agenda promoting some fake equality. But then, Keigo would also have to recruit someone strong. Someone that the MLA would be grateful to have. Someone that would become one of their warriors.
Someone that could be a spy.
And the thing was that Keigo knew exactly who to ask.
After all, it was someone who had the perfect backstory to pose as a powerhouse disillusioned with the system and bitter against the hero industry. It was also someone with an extremely strong Quirk and a hunger for power, for victory, that extremists like the MLA would love to exploit. It was also, more importantly, someone young, someone who seemed vulnerable, but who could have a secret support system. It was…
“What the hell,” Toki said incredulously. “You want to send King Nitro undercover?! Lord King Emperor Napoleon Complex Explosion Bloodbath?!”
Bakugo. Bakugo as a spy. Bakugo as a teenage spy infiltrating one of the biggest terrorist organizations in Japan, with one single hero as his point of contact, and plenty of deluded sociopaths trying to groom him into becoming the walking bomb part of him already was.
Sometimes Toki felt like a bright and colorful pinata while God was a thirteen years old birthday boy whose parents had just announced their divorce.
Keigo had the gall to nod, looking very pleased with his demented suggestion:
“Think about it. King Nitro is already training to be a hero. This can be a test, like what Okamoto did to us.”
“Yeah, except that he didn’t send us to deal with terrorists who would be all too happy to kill us if they found us out! It’s not training, it’s a real mission, with real risks! He’s a teenager!”
Faced with her outrage, Keigo lost his smile, looking at her with considering golden eyes that revealed nothing. But still, he didn’t waver.
“He’s got the skills.”
Toki boggled at him: “Yeah, to fight! Not to lie and spy on people! He’s explosive and angry and has no skills to misdirect and hold back his temper. Also, I repeat, he’s a kid! He’s… He shouldn’t…”
It was wrong. It was unethical. It was dangerous. Bakugo was insanely strong and skilled, but Commission’s protegee or not, Bakugo was a fucking teenager.
No matter his flaws, his temper, his brutality, or the fact that Toki thought he had the personality of a garbage container stuffed with dynamite, Bakugo was a teenager and that meant he couldn’t and shouldn’t shoulder the responsibility of an adult. He didn’t have the same clarity of discernment, he didn’t have the experience, he didn’t have the maturity. He was a kid, he was supposed to be kept safe. He was supposed to learn, and grown, and… and…
“He doesn’t even have his provisional license yet!” she finally bit out.
Keigo smiled, a little ruefully. But his eyes were calm and almost cold, assessing, solemn and observant. Calculating.
“I know. That’s what I’m banking on. I want him to flunk the exam, be noticed as a walking bomb with a powerful Quirk but no respect for the rules. Then I’ll ostensibly chat with him, send him to the MLA with instructions to pretend to be the worst version of himself, and have him say to the higher-ups that I sent him their way. Two birds with one stone. I get credit for recruiting a powerhouse, and we get a second spy.”
Toki was suddenly reminded of who Keigo was. She rarely remembered, because they were so in sync, they were always on the same wavelength. But, sometimes, their priorities or their moral compass diverged, and the collision was always brutal. Toki had always been the passionate one, and Keigo the pragmatic one. Toki was the frontal fighter, but Keigo was the spy. The strategist, the double agent, the liar, the thief.
The assassin, eventually. If Toki couldn’t stop it.
Keigo was optimistic, protective, idealist, hopeful and kind and clever and plenty of thing that had always made him shine like the Sun in Toki’s mind. He was so bright; he was so brilliant. But Keigo was also ruthless. Not emotionally ruthless, like Meteor who could level cities and not care; not ambitiously ruthless, like Endeavor who could turn his own home to ashes and barely notice… but pragmatically ruthless. The kind that could level cities or burn a home to ashes, but more than that, plan for it.
It made Keigo so much scarier for it.
Keigo would always, always try to minimize the damage, always trying to save everyone… but when he decided that this path required a sacrifice, then he would do it without hesitation. Not for his own ambition, not for his selfish desires, not for himself, and not for Toki either. He would do it for a nebulous greater good. For a goal that he couldn’t really define. And for the abstract concept of a better future, Keigo could kill.
Keigo would kill, one day.
And Toki looked at him, at the understanding and the resolve in his gold eyes, and she knew he was aware of it. He knew what he was asking, he knew how it sounded. But he was saying it anyway, and he wouldn’t back off.
They had been raised to be soldiers, not heroes. Child soldiers. They would never be able to shake that off.
“It would work,” Keigo said, quietly. “You know it would.”
It would, and Toki hated it. The trap was simple, but clever. Elegant, almost. It was the kind of misdirection that she could have come up with. Hell, maybe Keigo had drawn inspiration from her own strategy of using Neito to hide the theft of All For One’s Quirk while using pre-existing intel to hide the lies under a veneer of truth.
It was a good plan. It could work, and the fact that it made sense is what she hated the most. As a new recruit of high-school age, Bakugo wouldn’t be involved in anything crazy, but he would be noticeable. The attention put on him would take some heat away from Keigo.
But—
Toki bit her lip, her instinctive rebuttal colliding with the cold analysis of the cost and benefits of such a move. But, more importantly, with the fact that it was Keigo’s idea, and Toki had never been able to tell him no.
“He’s fifteen,” she repeated softly. “He shouldn’t have to.”
Keigo looked at her, calm and solemn. The argument didn’t even make him blink.
“I would rather ask someone else,” he agreed. “I would rather not need him… But someone is going to have to do it. Someone who is young and must look influenceable. The job needs to be done. Better Nitro than someone unprepared. At least Nitro can take it.”
Being able to endure something does not equal an obligation to withstand it, Toki wanted to argue. But it wasn’t something that Keigo would understand. Toki wouldn’t have listened to that kind of argument either.
From a very young age, they had been trained to think that backing out was an unforgivable weakness.
“He shouldn’t have to protect us,” she argued hotly. “We should be protecting him!”
“He’s a hero like us. We can’t carry the whole world on our shoulders, we have to ask for help sometimes.”
“We shouldn’t ask for help from children!”
Keigo shook his head.
“Ideally, no, we wouldn’t. But if we must, then who else are we going to ask? He’s not a civilian. He’s trained. More importantly, he’s prepared. Moreso than those kids in Yūei, I think. Nitro knows how the real world works. He knows how our world works.”
Not just the real world, but the world of heroes. What lied behind the camera flashes and the rankings, behind the glamorous magazine covers and the epic fights. The grit, the dirt, the blood, the exhaustion, the never-ending paperwork. Of course Bakugo knew. He was now one of them, wasn’t he?
He was one of them. People like Bakugo, people like Hawks and Quantum had been… They weren’t children. Not really. They were heroes-in-training. They were half adults already. They couldn’t be classified as civilians anymore.
Hell, even Toki herself, who tried to be the voice of reason here, didn’t really see Bakugo as someone who should be sheltered from danger. She had unconsciously classified him as a fighter already. Her main argument against Keigo’s plan was that Bakugo would be a bad spy, not that he shouldn’t be a spy at all.
And what the fuck did that said about her own moral code?
“He’s fifteen,” Toki repeated again, a little helplessly.
But she knew that this argument didn’t have the kind of finality that would end the debate. Bakugo was fifteen, it was a fact, but it wasn’t a reason to dismiss him. His youth didn’t mean he couldn’t handle pain or danger. After all, at age fourteen, Keigo and Toki were fighting a disgraced hero in an abandoned parking lot to learn the meaning of pain. At thirteen, they were taught corporate espionage. At twelve, they moved bodies in a morgue.
At six, they were learning that no heroes would come and rescue them, and they had to save themselves.
So the fact that Bakugo was fifteen didn’t mean shit. If anything, he was older than they both had been when they had been taught their hardest lessons.
“It’s going to be someone,” Keigo said very gently, “I know he’s young. It would be better if it was someone else, someone older… But Nitro can help.”
And they both knew what Bakugo would choose because when they had been in his shoes at Naruto Labs, they knew what they would have chosen, too.
Shit.
“I’ll protect him, you don’t have to worry about that,” Keigo added, tone still gentle for her. “I won’t involve him very deeply. I just need him to make noise to divert attention from me. He won’t see anything ugly or be noticed by the higher-ups. I’ll keep him out of the real danger, but I need his skills just like you needed your student’s skills at Kamino. You kept him safe, didn’t you? But you still relied on him.”
Toki opened her mouth, and no sound came out. She felt like she had been slapped upside the head with a fish. Fuck. He was right.
She had done the exact same thing at Kamino.
She had asked for Neito’s help, first by bringing Endeavor and Meteor to the battleground and then by robbing All For One of his Quirk. What was different this time? It was the exact same thing. An adult hero requesting the assistance of a hero-in-training, a teenager, putting them in harm’s way, to win a dangerous fight faster with less victims. It was the same set-up and the same pay-out. The well-being of a single students weighted against the possibility of avoiding hundreds if not thousands of casualties. Toki had made that choice, hadn’t she? Just like Neito had done it.
Then why couldn’t Keigo do the same? Why couldn’t Bakugo?
They were the same age as Toki and Neito. They were in similar situations. Bakugo would even have even more time to think about it, unlike Neito who had been pressed by the urgency of the situation, and still emotionally compromised by the death of his mother.
Toki swallowed. She wanted to cry out about Bakugo being a kid, but it was a stupid argument. It was just a way to make her feel better about herself. But her hands were already bloodstained. She had red in her ledger. She had made the exact same choice, not so long ago, and had not thought twice about it.
What moral high ground could Toki claim, here? She had none.
She rubbed her eyes with an exhausted sigh. Fuck. She hated this idea already, and Keigo hadn’t even started it.
“Do you think it will even work? You’ve meet Nitro. One insinuation of villainy and he’ll blow up. Or worse, if they try to appeal to his ego, he may end up recruited for real.”
“No,” Keigo said decisively. “He won’t. He knows the stakes. You didn’t talk to him much, but I did. This kid knows who he is and what he wants. Villains won’t be able to recruit him.”
Toki thought of canon-Bakugo and how the League had tried to make him join, too, and grimaced. If she hadn’t known the canon-story, she would have doubted it. But if both canon and real-world-Keigo were of the opinion that Bakugo would stay true to his conviction… Then she would believe them.
Some days, she wondered what threshold of bullshit she would have to reach to stop blindly trusting every word out of Keigo’s mouth.
“Let’s say he doesn’t believe them. Will he be able to make the MLA believe he’s willing to be recruited anyway? For all his flaws, Nitro doesn’t strike me as a skilled liar.”
“He doesn’t have to be. He’ll blend in perfectly. If you want someone to act like a Quirkist person with superiority complex, your best bet is someone who used to be a Quirkist person, while still having their superiority complex.”
Toki scowled. It made sense. She hated it anyway.
And yet she was going to get along with the plan. She had lost the argument even before it began. There was a reason why Keigo had always won the game when they played chess.
oOoOoOo
Keigo needed her to warp him to Naruto Labs every day for two hours, so he could brief Nitro and train with him in preparation for the License exam. Toki agreed readily.
Bakugo said yes to the plan.
Of course he was always going to say yes. Bakugo… King Nitro… whatever his new name was… he had never met a fight that made him want to back down. The option of refusing hadn’t even crossed his mind, Toki would bet.
She wanted to shake him and make him say no. She wanted to forbid it. But it wasn’t her place. Keigo had been right. Bakugo wasn’t some civilian. He wasn’t even a student like the kids in Yūei. He was a sponsored pupil of the HPSC. He was their kōhai, like Toki had been Inferno’s, and to shuffle him to the side like a liability would be an insult and a misuse of resources, all at once.
So Toki let it happen.
She didn’t see Bakugo and didn’t try to. Better to keep plausible deniability and all. She also felt stupidly, terribly guilty. She didn’t even know why. If Bakugo knew, he would be infuriated that Toki felt bad for letting him contribute to a mission. He would see it as her looking down on him, or something.
Keigo talked to Titania. They had planned to have Bakugo take the next provisional license exam, but not to pass it, only to provide opposition to the actual contestants. It didn’t change much in their plans to enter him as a contestant if he voluntarily flunked.
The only big change was that Keigo would come daily to Naruto Labs to train Bakugo, instead. Not just to teach him to fight, but also to teach him to spy.
If Okamoto hadn’t been posted in Tartarus, then he would have been the one to do it. That would probably have been a disaster. If anything, Keigo may have a better chance to reach Bakugo. Toki had a feeling that Keigo, or rather Hawks, could understand Bakugo in a way that Okamoto wouldn’t be able to. Hell, Keigo even managed to understand Bakugo better than Toki.
Maybe it had to do with his own hero persona. The identity of Hawks, the mask he presented to the public, wasn’t the facade of a virtuous and principled hero. Not like Best Jeanist, for example, who had in canon tried to ‘fix’ Bakugo’s attitude. No, Hawks wasn’t like that. He was known as the bad boy of the hero industry. Quantum and Hawks both had a confidence that bordered on arrogance, but only Hawks dialed it up to eleven, adopting a cavalier attitude that easily came off as abrasive and rude to the more stalwart newscasters.
Hawks knew what it was to be treated as brash and not polished enough. But unlike Bakugo, he knew how to play it, how to use it to get underestimated, how to make it a tool instead of having to work against it.
So that’s what he was going to teach Bakugo, hopefully.
It was weird to imagine Keigo taking Bakugo under his wing, though. But then, imagining Bakugo bonding with any kind of mentor figure was already kind of weird.
But somehow, apparently, they got along? Bakugo respected Keigo’s skills. And Keigo, well. He was more laid-back than Toki and didn’t mind the grouchiness of his new student as much as Toki would have. Besides, he always had had a soft spot for people who hate the world but want to save it anyway, especially when they pushed far past what would have marked the limits of their Quirk in someone else’s hands. Flying higher, pushing further.
Toki could understand it.
Bakugo’s skills with his Quirk, and his unyielding determination to reach his full potential, probably reminded Keigo of himself. Just like Fierce Wings had required more than a decade of practice to become the weapon it was today, so had Explosion. Bakugo had turned a one-trick pony gift into a whole fucking cavalry squadron, through a combination of creative ingenuity and relentless practice. His precision was wild, he could fly, he could use flashbangs and rapid-fire smaller blasts as easily as heavy explosions.
He would be a powerhouse. He would be a great frontline hero. That had always been Bakugo’s desire, and that was what his canon-counterpart had chased.
Maybe Toki was just worried of what kind of person Bakugo would become, if he also learned how to lie and defect and do things in the ways of the underground.
He would never be like Hawks, who juggled between limelight and underground, presenting a shiny façade to hide the ruthless intelligence. He would never be like Salamander or Hayasa-sensei either. He wasn’t discreet enough. Nor could he be like Sumire. He wasn’t as nice and he couldn’t pretend to be unthreatening to hide in plain sight. What other underground hero did Toki know? Ariel, maybe? Yeah, right. Bakugo didn’t have a hope to be as sneaky and light on his feet as Ariel.
Maybe he would be the same kind of underground hero as Meteor was, though. A powerhouse hiding in the shadows.
…Wasn’t that a disquieting thought?
On the other hand, giving Bakugo skills for underground missions didn’t mean he would go underground later. Maybe he would stick with limelight heroism. The money, the fame, the commercials, the televised fights, the fans, the merch, the journalists, the interviews…
Or maybe he would rather go underground to avoid journalists.
Not that Toki hated journalists. But she was aware that some people weren’t suited to public speaking. Bakugo, especially, struck Toki as someone naturally suited to the task as the average orange was for use in a game of basketball. Yeah, that was probably an apt metaphor. Bakugou would speak to reporters like an orange bounced. Flatly, with dull thudding noises, and while giving the distinct impression he was about to explode everywhere.
… Aaaand Toki’s train of thought was getting off-track, once again.
Bakugo’s usual teacher, Titania, had apparently readily rearranged her lesson plan to make room for Keigo’s teachings. She was very accommodating. Was it the zen attitude? It was bordering on the uncaring. If Toki had been Bakugo’s teacher, she would have blown a gasket. Toki didn’t know how Keigo had spun the truth to convince Titania to let her student fail at the provisional license exam. Had he told her that he was planning to make Bakugo a spy? Had he told her who he wanted to spy on? For now, the MLA case was so confidential that nobody had been told, except for the President.
That hadn’t been a fun conversation to have, by the way.
Genmei-san wasn’t one of Toki’s friends. They respected each other and counted on each other, but Toki didn’t trust her, and she knew Genmei-san wouldn’t count on her for personal matter either. There was too much bad blood and tension. But they respected each other, and they knew they fought on the same side.
They were allies.
And so Toki and Keigo had reported their finding about the MLA to the President during a confidential meeting, and she had listened to them, stone-faced and her eyes cold as ice. She had slapped the operation under a seal of secrecy and vowed to start purging the HPSC of any potential spies. Keigo had all liberty to act as he saw fit to infiltrate the MLA. It was of utmost priority that he learned their number, the identity of their leaders, their strategies, their weapons. If the MLA had the goal and the means to start a civil war, then they had to be stopped before blood was spilled and people got hurt.
Just before leaving, though, Toki had looked back to the President. She had looked very old, then, and very tired.
Anyway.
There was still a few days before school would resume. Toki still enjoyed her free time, but part of her was already counting the days until work resumed and the real world rushed back in. She was bracing for impact. She had so much to do. Getting up to date with what her agency had been up to, training with the sidekicks, preparing Melissa’s work-study… Getting involved with the Shie Hassaikai case, to make every trace of Quirk-erasing drugs disappear, even if Toki didn’t even know if Quirk-erasing drugs were a thing in this universe… Getting definitive custody of Neito… Helping Mihoko and Hajime move (they had decided to sell their old place and move in a more secure neighborhood, just in case) once Hitoshi would be in the dorms…
Oh, and of course, fixing what damage she could in the Todoroki drama.
Okay, first of all, originally, Toki didn’t want any part in that trainwreck. She still didn’t! It wasn’t her job to play peacemaker in the Todoroki home. Endeavor had been a piece of shit to his kids and that was something he had to fix all by himself.
But she didn’t want the family to tear itself apart, either. She wanted them to be happy, all of them. Because they deserved it, and… because Meteor liked them.
Meteor liked them. Meteor liked Endeavor. Meteor trusted Endeavor and was loyal to him with the same kind of blind unquestionable loyalty that he had shown the Crew in the past. And Endeavor treated him with respect, with the kind of casual companionship and unthinking ease that only both trust and familiarity could give you, and…
Well.
Toki wasn’t an expert on romantic relationships. Her dating advice mostly boiled down to the fact that you should never date someone for the sake of dating someone. You should be good friends, if not best friends with your partner. If you couldn’t go to your partner for personal advice, if you were afraid to call your partner out on something, if you couldn’t laugh and have fun with your partner, or if your conversations were only ever performative affection, you didn’t have a good relationship.
No, Toki wasn’t an expert on romance. She had only ever dated one person, and she was usually blind to other people’s affections. But she knew what a partnership looked like.
It didn’t even have to be romantic in nature. It was about trust, and respect. And sometimes, when you layered love and affection over it, then it turned into something else. But it was first and foremost trust, ease, comfort. It was about liking someone not just because of who they were but for who you were with them. And… It felt weird to say this about her father, of all people, and Endeavor of all people, too, but… they were good for each other.
They had complementary flaws and complementary qualities. They could have made each other much, much worse, but instead they made each other better. Toki couldn’t claim to understand it.
But she wasn’t going to fight it.
So yeah. Toki wanted to help the Todoroki family. Even freaking Endeavor deserved to be happy.
Of all the family, Endeavor was the person Toki had the hardest time to figure out if she liked him or not.
For Dabi, it was simple. Toki hated him. He had hurt Hitoshi, he had hurt Neito, he was a threat, and Toki wished he was dead. She had sworn to try and save him and she would, but she still hated him. She would live hating him and, if she was unlucky, she would die hating him. It would never change. No matter how tragic his backstory was, Dabi had hurt her family. He had dared to touch what was hers. She fucking hated him.
Dabi’s siblings were different. Shouto, Fuyumi, Natsuo… They were good people. Kind, nice people, who had welcomed her in their house even if she was basically an intruder. Yeah, even prickly Natsuo. Toki liked them. She was a little jealous of them, because it was obvious that Meteor liked them like children of his own Crew: but it wasn’t their fault. Toki didn’t blame them for that. It was fine. So yeah, Toki liked them. Especially little Shouto, so deadpan and quiet.
But Endeavor? Boy, what a fucking disaster. Toki had no clue if she liked him or not.
You would think that it would be easy to figure it out. It wasn’t. Endeavor was a hero, and a good one. Enji Todoroki was something else. He was both the guy she owed a lot to, and the guy who had done things she loathed, while also having a stern personality she didn’t like, and a deadpan humor that she did like (albeit reluctantly). Where could she even start to unravel that?
She didn’t dislike Endeavor as a person. She appreciated what he had done for Meteor. She respected his skills as a hero. She enjoyed talking strategy with him and could relax in his presence. She knew he would keep her father safe, her husband safe, her daughter safe. She also admired the fact that he was trying to atone for what he had done to his family.
But she also knew he had abused his family.
He was better now, true, but the abuse had still happened. And… it was something she didn’t quite know what to do with. If Endeavor had still been a bad guy, then she would have wrecked his shit. But now he was a good guy, so… was she supposed to let it go?
Part of her wanted to let it go because it would be simpler. He wasn’t a bastard anymore, so it shouldn’t matter, right? Endeavor was a good ally. He was someone she trusted at her back, he was someone that her father liked and that, despites her best efforts, Toki would end up liking too because that was just how she was. She always had a blind spot when it came to the people she loved.
And yet, she wondered if it was cowardly to do so. She wondered if she should keep judging him on who he had been, in addition to who he was now. Would it be unfair? Was it her place?
After all, she had accepted her father back in her life. She had forgiven him. And Meteor had done way worse than hurting one family. He had killed about a hundred people. And unlike Endeavor, who deeply regretted his actions, Meteor didn’t feel a shred of self-loathing.
What was Toki supposed to feel, then? Was she entitled to forgive Endeavor for his sins? Was it hypocritical not to, because she had forgiven someone who had done worse? Was she allowed to forgive him, when she hadn’t been victim of his abuse, when she barely knew the extent of it?
She knew he had ignored Fuyumi and Natsuo, and that he had trained Shouto harshly. Abused him, actually. Endeavor didn’t have to beat him black and blue for it to be abuse. To push him, to yell at him, and isolate him was enough. It had probably hurt. Quirk training to be a hero wasn’t without pain. But it couldn’t have been that bad, really, right? Because Shouto could take it. And Endeavor had known Shouto could take it. After all, he had already demonstrated once that he would back off if it was too much. He had done it with Touya. Given up, moved on, and decided that his child’s life was more important than training.
But the kids hadn’t known that. All they had known was that their father was hurting their little brother.
What the fuck was she supposed to feel about that? As a person, as the daughter of the man he was dating, as a keeper of the peace, but also as a hero who was supposed to step in when crimes were committed?
The Todoroki really made everything complicated.
But Toki wanted them to be happy. And to be sure they could be happy, first Toki needed to make sure they were safe.
And to do that… Oh gods, she really wanted to avoid that, but… She needed to get a lock on Dabi and bring that issue to light before it turned into a shitshow. The reveal should not be on Dabi’s terms, if only to preserve the faith that the public had in the heroic system.
But to catch Dabi, she would need to investigate Touya. She would need to research him, to analysis him, to understand him. She hadn’t been able to figure out what made him so crazy. Could it just be his father’s rejection? Natsuo and Fuyumi had been in the same boat and they hadn’t turned into raging maniacs.
Toki would need to interrogate Rei Todoroki. There was no way around it. The woman was the person who had spent the most time with Touya in his whole life. She had also been the only one old enough and mature enough to really see what was going on: unlike Fuyumi, Natsuo or even Shouto.
Rei would know. She would know how young Touya, the boy that Endeavor had loved and that Natsuo defended so fiercely, had slowly turned into the kind of person who burned children alive. Rei had been there when Touya had started burning himself, right? So she must have seen at least the beginning of this destructive spiral. She must have the answers.
The trick was to ask the right questions.
… and to secure a meeting.
“Fuyumi. Sorry to bother you, but, hum, remember when I asked you to introduce me to someone?”
Fuyumi blinked, putting down her book, and then narrowed her eyes. She remembered the circumstances of that promise, too. Toki had told her it was about the Ghost Arsonist, back then.
“Yes?”
“I have questions for your mother.” Toki paused, because that sounded kind of bad, and clarified: “About Endeavor, mostly.”
She didn’t want to say it was about Touya because Fuyumi would have made the connection. Still, Fuyumi paled a little.
“Why?”
In conversation, during those few days of vacation, Toki had learned a lot about the Todoroki family. Most of those things, she had learned in their silences.
She had learned that Endeavor was most at ease when talking about hero work. She had learned that Shouto sucked at video games, but Fuyumi and Natsuo were very good at them (both Toki and Neito regularly got their ass kicked at Mario Kart). She had seen how careful and fond Endeavor was with his daughter, how deliberate and tentative he was with Shouto, and how quiet he was with Natsuo. She had noticed that some evenings, Endeavor didn’t go home and stayed at his agency… or maybe at Meteor’s appartement, although Toki hadn’t asked and didn’t intend to.
She had noted that Endeavor didn’t train with any of his children, never, not even Shouto. She had noticed that when Shouto asked questions about hero work to his father, Endeavor always offered to train him: Shouto always said no, and Endeavor always back down. And she had noted how no one was surprised by this.
Toki had learned who they were, all of them. All those little inconsequential details that made them unique, and weird, and people.
She had learned Endeavor had a sweet tooth and that even if he never said to his kids that he loved them, he remembered precisely what they liked, to buy them gifts or arrange his schedule even before they would need to ask. She had learned how much attention Shouto paid to details and how completely he could miss the bigger picture. She had gotten her nails painted by Fuyumi, and had learned all about her favorite colors, her favorite flowers, her favorite games: why she had always wanted to be a teacher, how much she liked kids, or even the fact that she wanted to have a dog later. She had learned that Natsuo had broken with his girlfriend a few months ago, that none of his friends knew he was related to Endeavor, and that he often fumbled when having to deal with kids. She had also discovered that Natsuo laughed exactly like his father, a rough bark of warm amusement, and yet they never laughed when they were in the same room.
And she had learned that that Rei Todoroki was like a ghost in this house.
Fuyumi and Natsuo regularly texted her. Shouto wrote her letters. Endeavor called her some evenings, staying away on the patio and pitching his voice low so nobody could hear. But none of them talked about Rei to each other.
Rei lived in the same city, the same neighborhood even. When Natsuo wasn’t here, it was often because he was at her house. Sometimes he spent the night. Fuyumi went to see her mother, too, but less often.
Shouto never went. Neither did Endeavor.
Rei Todoroki’s presence was something huge and heavy in this house, but it was all about negative space. The lack of photos. The way everybody skirted about her name in conversation. Her bedroom, always closed, with sheets over the furniture.
Yes, Toki had snooped around. Touya’s bedroom with the little butsudan and the photo of a sullen little boy with his father’s eyes had been depressing, but the door hadn’t been locked, as if people still went there to visit, to pay their respects. Rei’s door had been squeaky from disuse and there had been dust everywhere in the room. It felt like a tomb.
It had made Toki think about the kitchen, where Fuyumi and Meteor spent so much time bickering over recipes. That room… It was wide and spacious, and not what you expected in a traditional house like this one, where the kitchen was supposed to be out of sight. The kitchen must have been torn down and remodeled, becoming that modern and luminous space that Toki had immediately liked, even if it didn’t quite fit the traditional vibe of the house. The kitchen had been changed, as if whatever had been in that old room had needed to be erased.
The old kitchen was where Rei had burned Shouto, and where Rei had broken. That room and that event were oh-so-carefully hidden, never mentioned, never alluded to. Just like Rei herself.
So, when Toki asked Fuyumi to see her mother, more specifically asking to see her mother about Endeavor, she knew she was upsetting a long-standing balance.
“I have questions only she can answer,” Toki said truthfully.
Fuyumi squared her jaw. “About my father? Did Natsuo say something?”
“No, Natsuo didn’t.” She saw Fuyumi open her mouth to ask more questions and decided to beat her to the punch. “Your father told me that— You know what? It doesn’t matter. What matter is that he’s my dad’s best friend, and that you’re all targeted by the Ghost Arsonist, so I need to understand his past better… and… I need to talk to your mother.”
Fuyumi didn’t look surprised when the Ghost Arsonist was mentioned. She must have put the clues together, too. Shouto’s attack in the USJ, the hospital burning… The area that had been the first to catch fire was the one where Rei used to be. If Rei hadn’t moved out a week ago, she would be dead. Dabi had aimed for her.
Fuyumi knew what it meant. Endeavor must know it, too, and probably Shouto. The only one who probably hadn’t noticed that trend was Natsuo, because for him all villains blended together, and anything to do with heroism was spitefully ignored.
“You think it will help you catch the Ghost Arsonist?”
Toki hesitated.
“I’m not sure. I know who he is, and what his grudge is. But it stems from something that happened ten years ago at least, and… I need to speak with someone who know what your father was really like back then.”
“I could tell you,” Fuyumi countered.
“You were a kid. And no offense, but I doubt Endeavor would have confided in you.”
Toki had tried to gentle her voice, but Fuyumi’s eyes still flashed hot and furious for a second. Yep, that was the exact same glare as her father. Toki briefly wondered if she glared like Meteor when she was offended.
“I’ll ask her,” Fuyumi finally said. “But if she says no, you’ll do without.”
“Fair enough.”
oOoOoOo
Rei didn’t say no.
It seemed to bother Fuyumi a little. Toki quietly apologized for upsetting her, but talking to Rei was necessary for her investigation. It was enough to make Fuyumi’s shoulders drop in resignation, and the subject was closed. That evening, after dropping Neito to her appartement, Toki waited for Fuyumi a few streets away, and they walked to Rei’s house.
Fuyumi was fretting, Toki could tell. She had already told Toki at least twice that her mother was fragile, that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to speak about her husband, that even if Rei had said yes Tok should back off if Rei started being scared or to shut off or just seemed uncomfortable. Toki almost retorted that Rei Todoroki was out of the hospital and not made of glass.
And then she realized that the reason Rei had been in the hospital had been a mental breakdown because she had been traumatized.
Endeavor hadn’t just abused his children, he had also abused his wife.
Weirdly enough, Toki hadn’t realized it before. She had just… She just hadn’t thought about Rei. It was short-sighted of her, but when she pictured Endeavor’s abuse, she only imagined what it must have been for Shouto. She thought of Okamoto’s dismissive words, or Aizawa’s brutal beatings, or the sting of Quirk-overuse while training with Hayasa-sensei. She thought of training, she thought of pushing yourself past your limits, and she thought well, it couldn’t have been so bad. Because Endeavor wouldn’t push his masterpiece too far. Shouto had been precious to him, even only as a tool.
But Rei… It was different for Rei.
Rei hadn’t been precious to Endeavor. Rei wasn’t related to him by blood, she wasn’t a child that he wanted to protect. She was an adult, an adult who was supposed to take care of the domestic side of things and was failing. Someone who could be considered responsible for what went wrong. Someone to blame. Someone to take his anger out on.
It was strange how Endeavor beating up his son hadn’t really registered in Toki’s mind as abuse, because it was training, so it was normal. But the idea of Endeavor beating his wife, his civilian wife, made her stomach churn.
“I’ll back off,” Toki ended up promising. “I’m not going to harass her if she doesn’t want to talk.”
Fuyumi side-eyed her. She looked terribly anxious, twisting her hands as if resisting the urge to bite her nails.
“You know, you’re probably imagining something terrible,” Fuyumi blurted out. “But Mom and Dad are friends now. They have been writing and calling each other. They’re good. They’re fine. Maybe they’re even going to get back together!”
Toki inwardly cringed. Oh, honey, no.
“It’s just that Mom was very fragile for a while,” Fuyumi continued, looking away. “When she was in the hospital, there were days where she didn’t want to see us. Ten years ago… It wasn’t a good time for her. She was very sick. It wasn’t her fault. I just don’t want her to revive bad memories and— backslide.”
“I’ll back off,” Toki repeated. “If she can’t give me answers, I won’t press, I promise.”
“Good. Okay, then.”
They walked in silence. Rei’s house wasn’t very far but it was still a good walk. The distance was enough that if either Rei or Endeavor went out for a stroll, they wouldn’t see each other… But you could go to one house to another without needing to take the car or a train. Toki wondered if it was voluntary to facilitate the shared custody of the kids.
Wait, did they even have shared custody? Shouto was the only minor, and he clearly lived with his father. Did Rei even have parental rights, even if she was out of the hospital? Toki hadn’t dared to ask.
She still didn’t dare. That would have been callous.
The sun was still up, but the sky was already dark with clouds. It had been hot and humid for a few days now. They were due for a summer storm. One day of heavy rain, furious wind, and thunder crashing like the end of the world, and then the sun and the blue sky would be back. Still, Toki’s neck always prickled uncomfortably when a thunderstorm was coming.
Maybe because she was grounded during that kind of weather. Or maybe because Keigo was grounded, more so than her, and she unconscious awareness that he wouldn’t be able to come and help her if she needed him sat heavy like a stone in her stomach.
Or maybe because thunderstorm had always made her feel powerless. Like she had no choice but close her eyes and hang on, facing a force that she couldn’t outrun or outsmart. Something that could only be endured, making yourself small and praying to be spared.
Toki wondered if that was how it had felt, for the Todoroki children, to grow up in Endeavor’s house.
She knew who Endeavor was today. That didn’t mean that she couldn’t see shadows of who he had been. The temper, the growls, the tendency to bellow and yell. Mostly he did it at Meteor, who fired back cutting sarcasm with the same bite. But Toki thought of that massive stature and that raised voice, towering over a little kid the same age as Hinawa, and—
She didn’t hate Endeavor. She knew he had done things that deserved hatred. Things that she didn’t know if she should be able to forgive him for.
Those things had created Dabi.
Endeavor had changed. He didn’t want to be that person anymore. But Toki was bitterly aware that the people you have been never quite died. They withered and warped, and you could wear them so thin that they became transparent, but they never went away. Not quite. You never got to stop carrying them on your back.
And sometimes, when you were backed into a corner, when you were weak, or you were wavering… They found their way out.
Part of Toki would always be that selfish and cruel little thing, backed in a corner, who had sold her parents out to heroes. Part of her would also always be that terrified child, watching the catastrophe unfold without being able to stop it. Just like part of Meteor would always be that monster grinning like a shark while he made people scream.
And part of Endeavor would always be that man, who called children tools or failures and didn’t care for their pain. Part of him would always be that man who screamed at his cowering wife, who banged his fist on the table and made his children flinch, who could punch his son so hard he puked and would only scream at him that he was weak. It was there. It would always be there.
It would be wrong to judge someone only for the worst part of them. That was why Toki could still love Meteor even if he was a sociopath, or love Keigo even if he ended up becoming a murderer. That was why she could probably end up liking Endeavor at one point.
But she knew. She fucking knew, and she couldn’t ignore it. The pain, the flaws, the consequences that were still ongoing.
What a mess.
“We’re here,” Fuyumi said.
The house was nice. Small, but with fresh paint, and flowers at the windows. Blue amaryllis in the garden, forget-me-nots, hydrangeas, poppy, bluebells… All shades of blue, white, or purple. It was very pretty, but also cold. Especially with the oncoming storm darkening the sky. It made everything seem more sinister.
Toki looked at the lawn and couldn’t help but think it was too neat, in addition to being so cold. If it had been her house, she would have let the wildflowers run free, with orange and red and big splashes of yellows. Bright colors. Sunflowers, maybe. And dandelions all over the lawn.
“Are you coming?” Fuyumi called, a hand on the door’s handle.
Toki took a deep breath and followed her inside.
Rei Todoroki was a small woman. It was the first thing Toki noticed, and for a second she was thrown. She had expected someone graceful and willowy, yes, but tall like Shouto, or maybe like Fuyumi. Instead Rei was maybe ten centimeters shorter than Toki herself.
Gods, a picture of Endeavor and his wife side by side must be almost comical. He must have two heads on her, at least.
“Welcome, both of you,” Rei said softly. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, miss…”
“Taiyōme,” Toki introduced herself after a second of hesitation. “Toki Taiyōme, Todoroki-san.”
Rei gave her a piercing glance which immediately made Toki break into cold sweat. Was Rei aware that Toki was Quantum? Had Toki just disclosed her secret identity to her? Or was Rei recognizing the name of Taiyōme from her husband’s stories? Rei didn’t comment, luckily. Toki had no idea how she could have reacted if Rei had asked about who she was.
But Toki quickly came to understand that it wasn’t Rei’s style. Unlike her husband and children, Rei was soft-spoken and polite, almost excessively so. She sat them down, then immediately offered tea and idly commented on the weather. The conversation shifted to flowers, and it took Toki almost five minutes to realize that even when Rei filled the silence, she stuck to utterly neutral statements.
Everything about her was bland, neutral, as if trying to be invisible. Toki wondered if it was due to her abuse.
But Rei… didn’t look like an abuse victim. She wasn’t pale, wan, and sad looking. She looked like a normal woman, with a demure attitude and a tendency to fade into the background. Toki couldn’t help but mentally compare her to Endeavor, then to Meteor, and had to bite her tongue to stop herself from wincing.
No wonder that marriage had gone up in flames.
Endeavor’s personality was volcanic, intense and burning. Meteor thrived at his side because he reveled in the challenge, the fury, the brutality of the heroic lifestyle and the constant high stakes they juggled with. He flourished under pressure and in a violent environment. He was made for this. Rei, who liked the quiet and politely changed the subject when asked about her passions, would have burned out. She couldn’t keep up. She would have suffered to try to keep up.
Toki tried to imagine Rei in Meteor’s place: snarking at Endeavor, calling him an idiot, taunting him, snapping pens out of his hand and poking fun at his reports until Endeavor’ beard flared up… and she couldn’t. That wasn’t who Rei was. And thus, she couldn’t imagine Rei making Endeavor engage in intense debates during two hours about such-and-such case, or making him laugh. She could picture them cohabitating: but she couldn’t imagine them walking the same path, side by side.
That was no excuse for Endeavor’s past actions. Even if he hadn’t liked Rei, they had still been married. He had owed her respect and protection. Besides, from familiarity and companionship was often born, if not friendship, at least trust! So yeah, there was no excuse for his abuse.
But Toki could see why Endeavor had clicked with Meteor… and not with Rei.
Which was a very disquieting thought that she would no share with anyone, ever, thank you very much.
“Mom,” Fuyumi finally said, hesitantly. “Like I said over text… Toki wanted to ask you some questions, if you’re up for it.”
“Yes, you told me,” Rei said serenely.
“You can still change your mind, Mom.”
Rei smiled. Toki saw something a little firmer in her attitude, a hint of steel in her eyes.
“It’s okay, Fuyumi. I know what this is about.” She turned to Toki and added, “I would rather speak to you privately, if that’s okay.”
“Oh, hm, of course.”
Fuyumi looked thrown, but obediently followed her mother’s wishes. She said goodbye, Rei accompanied her to the door… and then it was just Toki and Rei, sitting down with their tea.
Outside, the thunder rumbled in the distance. The sky was now almost completely dark.
Toki cleared her throat. Her palms were moist. She felt more uncomfortable than she usually was when interviewing witnesses for a case. Probably because this wasn’t just Quantum’s case. This was also linked to Toki’s life. The life of one of her students, of one of her friends, and of her father’s (ew) boyfriend.
“I should start this by saying that I’m also the pro-hero Quantum, and that I’m in charge of the investigation of the Ghost Arsonist. But I’m also… I know your family personally. I’m Shouto’s teacher, Fuyumi’s friend, and I’m… er…”
“Ryūsei Taiyōme’s daughter,” Rei achieved. Her voice was still soft and serene, with a hint of amusement.
Toki nearly did a double take. “You’ve met?”
“No, but Enji talks about him constantly.”
Enji, talking constantly? About Meteor? To Rei? Shit, Toki had no idea. She knew they talked, but she didn’t think they were really friends. Wait, had he told her everything?! She was still his wife, after all!
“Well,” she edged, “they are friends.”
“Toki-san, please. I know he’s Enji’s lover, there’s no need to pretend.”
Oh, well, at least that cleared up the question of Rei knowing or not what Endeavor was up to. Although Toki was a little taken aback by how bluntly Rei had phrased that.
And also by the fact that Rei seemed to find the whole situation funny.
“Yeah,” Toki coughed awkwardly. “That. I mean, there is that. And, also, I want to know exactly nothing about it, please.”
Rei hid a polite smile behind her teacup, as if amused by Toki’s embarrassment. For a few seconds, Toki was busy wrangling her blush under control. It was one thing to know about it, it was quite another to talk about it about the wife of the guy that her father was fucking.
Outside, a few droplets started falling, and then real rain. The thunder rumbled, still far away but getting closer.
“Fuyumi wasn’t very precise about what kind of questions you wanted to ask,” Rei finally said, looking hesitant. “I thought it was about Enji and Taiyōme-san’s relationship, but… since you already know about it… it seems I was mistaken.”
“No, it’s not about that.” Toki paused. “But I have to ask, just in case… You know? And you’re okay with it?”
“I am,” Rei said serenely. “We both need to move on. We both know out marriage only exists on paper now. It would be pointless to lament and stay stuck in the past. Enji is happier now, and so I’m happy for him.”
Toki nodded awkwardly. She didn’t really understand that, but— well, it wasn’t her marriage. Rei could do what she wanted.
“So what did you want to talk about?” Rei asked with curiosity.
“Ah. Yes. It’s about…” Toki steeled herself. “It’s about your life, and your family’s, since your marriage and up to about ten years ago.”
Rei swallowed. There was hint of unease in her gaze before her face was wiped blank and neutral. Like a porcelain doll, an ice statue. Undecipherable.
“Why?”
And here lid the crux of the matter. To lie? To tell the truth? Once Toki pronounced Touya’s name, it would be over. The cat would be out of the bag. Toki wouldn’t be able to take those words back. Even if she stayed as vague as possible, at some point someone would make the connection between Toki investigating the Ghost Arsonist, and Toki asking pointed questions about Touya Todoroki.
But then, wasn’t it better? The truth needed to come out. Rei was the key witness in this affair. And by telling her what she was looking for, Toki was increasing her chances to be told relevant information. She didn’t want Rei speaking about her own abuse, or Rei talking about Shouto’s abuse, or even about Touya’s abuse. She wanted to learn about how Touya worked, about what he thought, what he had been looking for, and how it had been denied to him. She wanted to learn what foundations had created Dabi.
Endeavor had played a part. But this was much larger than him. Touya had been his own person. He couldn’t be reduced to Endeavor’s neglect. Toki needed to learn who Touya had been, in his entirely.
“Because I need to learn who Touya Todoroki was.”
Rei’s breath hitched. The hand holding her teacup turned white with the force of her grip.
“It has been a while since someone has said that name.”
Toki narrowed her eyes. “Is that a no?”
Rei’s shoulders dropped in resignation. When she spoke next, her voice was weaker, something terribly resigned making her breath tremble in her throat.
“No, it’s not. I knew it was only a question of time. I knew ever since Shouto was attacked at school, and mentioned how his enemy had taunted him, called him fragile. He couldn’t have realized. He was too young, he doesn’t remember. But I do. As soon as I read his letter, I understood.”
Toki stared.
She had prepared for Rei to be in denial. She had prepared for Rei to focus on telling Shouto’s tale rather than Touya’s. She had even prepared for Rei mooning over Endeavor and trying to defend his actions. She had in no way imagined that Rei already knew.
“To be clear, you mean that you know that the Ghost Arsonist…”
“… is my son, yes.” Rei’s voice broke a little. “Touya. I understood even then, but I was only sure when the hospital burned down.”
Wow.
“You knew he wanted to kill you?” Toki sputtered.
Rei smiled ruefully: “You underestimate how much that child hated us.”
For a moment, Toki was stuck speechless.
From her memories of the Before, Touya had been a brat and an emotionally neglected boy with a tendency to lash out, but he hadn’t been evil. His family loved him. Endeavor, especially. In canon, he had been completely incredulous when Dabi had revealed his identity, because to him Touya had always been a good person, an innocent person, and it was impossible to reconcile this image with the reality of Dabi the murderous villain.
“That’s why you here, aren’t you?” Rei asked calmly. “To know who Touya was? To be able to predict him. To be able to s-stop him.”
Her voice shuttered. Had she wanted to say, ‘to save him?’ Did she believe Touya could be saved?
Did she hope that Toki wanted to save him?
“Yes,” Toki answered. “I know that Endeavor was an abusive asshole who treated his family like shit. I know he married you to have a kid who could be a hero, to have Shouto, and that all the other children were pushed aside for him. I know it must have been horrible to live like this. But neither Natsuo or Fuyumi or even you are out there killing people about it. So I need to understand why Touya became Dabi. What he wants, what he’s trying to get, and if he can get in a way that doesn’t include homicide. If he can be saved.”
“And if he can’t?” Rei whispered.
Toki looked at her, trying to decide what the frail woman in front of her needed to hear. What did Rei want? Should Toki tell her that she would keep trying, and let the body count rise? Should Toki tell her that she would tell the truth to Endeavor and let it destroy him, as punishment for his past? Should Toki tell her that their whole family deserved each other, and fratricide or filicide or parricide was clearly the only way it could go?
Because that wasn’t what she planned on doing. None of that.
“If he can’t,” Toki said simply, “then he will die.”
Outside, the faint drizzle of rain was turning to a downpour. It made the atmosphere of the house feel strangely oppressive.
Rei closed her eyes. She looked like an ice statue. Beautiful, and so cold. Hard, and yet brittle, as if one single blow could shatter her.
“Alright. I’ll tell you. I only ask that you don’t judge me too harshly.”
Toki frowned. “Why would I? It wasn’t your fault.”
Rei’s laugh was dark and bitter.
“Oh, Toki-san. It was never only Enji’s fault. I was the one in the house while Touya slowly killed himself. Enji ran away, but I’m the one who sat back, and watched.”
Notes:
YES WE ARE GOING TO HAVE REI'S STORY MWAHAHAHAHA
Also, about Bakugo, Toki couldn't quite put on her finger on what felt *wrong* about it but... Here it is :
The key-difference between Toki asking Monoma for help and Keigo asking Bakugo for help is this who they both see the teenager in question.
Toki asked a friend. She asked her student, but more importantly someone she loves. Someone that she wants to protect, but that she can treat like an equal. Because Toki is very much like Meteor, someone who function with a pack mentality, someone who can't conceive not having the back of the people you care for.
Keigo isn't Bakugo's friend: he's his hierarchical superior. Bakugo is indeed under his protection, but not as a student, a member of his pack or anything like that. Bakugo is a soldier, and Keigo, while not being actually his commanding officier, has power over him because he is older and more experimented.Toki asked her friend for his help, but Keigo isn't asking a friend. He's activating an asset. And that's the difference.
But since the results were the same (a teenager asked to assist heroes), Toki doesn't think she has room to argue.
Here are some memes for the chapter! Thanks Kirumi =)
[LINK]
[LINK]
Next chapter next week !
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/image012.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/image112.jpg){kind=link}
Chapter 62: Rei's tale
Summary:
“I made him that way,” Rei whispered. “Enji and I, we made him that way. We promised him the world, and then tossed him away when he proved himself too weak. Instead of raising him up, we pushed him down. Enji, his father that he idolized, turned away with disdain. And me, the mother who was supposed to care for him, I flinched away from his touch in disgust.”
She closed her eyes, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“It was our fault. We did this to him. Something in Touya had always been soft. We killed it, and it was rotting.”
Notes:
HEREIT IS! Rei's tale. If you haven't read the OS in "house of wisdom" about Dabi (link here) then go check it out after reading this chaper, and compare their POV. It's kind of wild.
I'm postin this as i'm doing my bag because i'm going skiing for three days !!! So excited, i love skiiing !!!
Anyway, i'll preface this by saying that I use the first chronology published in the manga (Touya dies, and then Rei hurts Shouto) instead of the revision Horikoshi published later (Rei hurts Shouto, Touya dies while she's interned).
Also Toki is not a good narrator in this chapter. She is wrapped in her righteousness because she's scared and instinctively want to distance herself from the narrative. She will be better once she had had time to reflect on it.
And now... Dig in!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
REI'S TALE
The rain was falling, a constant noisy pitter-patter against the windows. The wind was whistling faintly, and thunder was rolling in the distance. The storm was close. The house felt as if it were cut off from the world and placed into a pocket of space where time didn’t exist and where there was only Toki, Rei, and the story being told.
Toki didn’t quite know what Rei’s tale would be. She remembered the manga, although she now acknowledged that some details were too foggy in her memories. The fact that she hadn’t remembered the date of the USJ attack was proof that her memories weren’t infallible. She didn’t remember the dialogues, and she even had a few uncertainties about the chronology. For instance, had Rei burned Shouto before or after Touya’s presumed death?
So Toki hoped that Rei’s story would give her a better image of how things had gone. How Touya, the beloved son, had turned into a homicidal maniacal. It would be the key to learn how to make him stop wanting to kill Shouto and Endeavor. How to slap some sense into him and stop him from stalking his father and starting fires to provoke him. How to guess what Dabi wanted from this destructive spiral, and how to divert him towards a more acceptable goal. Like therapy, or maybe a hand-written apology from his shitty father, or even being punched repeatedly in the face until he apologized to Shouto.
Toki didn’t know what Dabi wanted, deep down, and that was what stopped her from predicting him, thus preventing her from stopping him. She needed to know how his obsession had started, so she could go back to that root and find a solution here. And maybe… Maybe she would also find a way to reason with him.
A way to make him stop peacefully. A way to save him.
She didn’t want to. She wanted him dead. But she had sworn she would at least try, and she owed it to herself. And if not to herself, Toki at least owed it to Beros. To Endeavor, who had been nothing but decent to her and who certainly didn’t deserve to have to deal with the grief of losing a son a second time. To Shouto, who had had a fucking horrible life, who deserved the truth, and who really didn’t need another horrible family member. Even to Fuyumi, who had probably grieved her brother and was so nice that she would probably be happy that he survived, even if he was a monster now.
So yeah, Toki had to try and save him. She had to.
Toki had asked for permission to record the conversation, and Rei had given it. Toki’s phone was sitting on the table between them, the screen blinking with a red dot showing that it was recording. Toki tried not to think about the fact that the only other audio file recorded in that device was a piece of blackmail on the HPSC.
“It was an arranged marriage,” Rei began. “I always knew I wouldn’t marry for love, not in a family like mine where status is everything. I was relieved that they picked Enji for me, in a way. He had a stable situation, he could provide for us, and he was polite and attractive. So, we wed… and we weren’t unhappy. Touya was born, then Fuyumi. Things were goods. We weren’t in love, but even then, we were content. We trusted each other. Enji laughed. He was awkward and careful with the children. Touya was his pride and joy, with his powerful Fire Quirk. But after the diagnostic— When Touya’s Quirk started hurting him—”
Rei shook her head, pressing her hands together as if to ground herself. She wasn’t looking at Toki anymore. Her eyes were fixed on something distant, as if seeing the past from afar.
“Touya had inherited Enji’s Hellflame, but not his resistance to fire. He was only resistant to the cold, like me. The doctor said he had a weak constitution, but we both knew the truth. His Quirk wasn’t suited for his body. Being a hero would kill him. It would kill him horribly, painfully, and that was something that neither of us could bear. We loved Touya. It broke our hearts to see him in pain.”
“So Endeavor stopped training him,” Toki muttered.
“Yes. He didn’t have a choice! Touya couldn’t be the heir Enji wanted. But for Touya, it must have been such a cruel disappointment. There was no other solution, of course. But still. Even before the birth of our other children, even before Touya understood that he would never be a hero… He had to come to terms with the fact that he had been basically disinherited, through no fault of his own.”
Wait, what?!
“Disinherited?” Toki repeated, almost shocked. “Did Endeavor say that?”
“Well, no,” Rei admitted. “But it was obvious. Touya was our first born.”
And for a second Toki experienced a weird flash of cognitive dissonance, because on one hand it made complete sense, it was her culture, it was normal; and on the other hand, coming from her canon-foreknowledge based on the view of a western-raised girl, it completely blindsided her.
As a reader of the manga in her past-life, Toki had never once thought about the law of inheritance and the importance of the firstborn son, because this wasn’t really in her culture. Being the first-born… It was a plot-device in Edwardian romance, it was a thing of the past… not something real and certainly not a solid element of worldbuilding. It wasn’t written in the story. She had never thought it even existed in the plot of the story.
But this world? This real world, where she had been born and where she had grown up, this world of superhero that was still inherently Japanese, filled with traditional Japanese values? The birth order was important. Being the first-born son was important.
Unaware that Toki was having a small crisis, Rei continued:
“The name, the family paper, the direct lineage, the duty of taking care of his family, the house… It was all supposed to be Touya’s. But Enji replaced the natural birth order system by his own values, based on skill and natural aptitude for power. It wasn’t exactly normal, was it?”
Toki repressed a hysterical chuckle. This was the 23rd century, and here was a woman candidly telling her that it was abnormal that skill was taken in account before the birth order of siblings to know which one would inherit. And the worse was that that woman wasn’t wrong. Not in this society, not in Japan, not in the social class of the rich and traditional elite.
They still adhered to the traditional “ie” family system, where preserving the family lineage was an inherited job. The eldest had responsibility. The younger children were freer, but the eldest had a duty.
“Some would argue that it’s not that weird,” Toki said weakly.
Rei pursed her lips. “Maybe. But it’s not traditional. That’s not how things are supposed to be done. It was for his own good, but… Of course Touya felt betrayed.”
Because the first-born was the heir. That was Rei had called Shouto. Not the Masterpiece, not the future hero, not even the child Endeavor wanted. The heir. The one who, by law and custom, would get everything. The one that society expected to be raised to follow in his father’s footsteps.
Holy shit. It suddenly made so much sense. Touya’s struggle wasn’t against his parents for crushing his dreams of a life beyond what they and their society’s established roles provided him. Instead, it was the opposite. Touya’s parents had been ready to shake up the established family formula and to free Toya from many of the obligations of firstborn son’s duties. But Touya hadn’t been ready for that. He hadn’t been ready for any of that newfangled modern sensibilities nonsense. According to tradition, Touya’s role and life should have been set and secure.
Being a hero wasn’t just about being important to his dad, for Touya. Being a hero was intricately linked to being a successor, being the heir, his whole identity. And that was what Endeavor had taken from his son.
“And I guess that’s what broke him?” Toki asked warily. “Being passed over as an heir?”
“There was more than that. But… yes, essentially.”
From a westerner’s point of view, Endeavor’s plans to have a perfect child could be framed as a eugenic ego-trip. But from a traditional eastern point of view, where arranged marriages were common and legacies had to stay within the family, Endeavor’s plan wasn’t weird. Well, the goal of surpassing All Might was weird! But the arranged marriage and the idea of a successor from his bloodline… It was perfectly normal. Expected, even. Endeavor not having kids, or having kids and not passing his legacy to them, would have made eyebrows raise. People would have wondered what stopped him. If he was gay, if he didn’t trust his children…
Toki had heard a few criticisms like that aimed at other top heroes, like Shishidan or Crust. Even All Might had been targeted by a few remarks like this.
Powerful people, nobility if you will, were expected to pass down their legacies. To students, sometimes, but if they had children then it was passed down to them. So, Endeavor needed an heir. Japan, as a whole, expected his child to be his heir. His own child, Touya, had been raised with the expectation of inheriting his kingdom. By the time he could walk and talk and meet other children in kindergarten, he must already have known who his dad was, and what he was going to be passed down to him.
Fuck. How had Toki not thought of that?!
“It didn’t happen all at once,” Rei continued. “Slowly, our perfect home fell apart at the seams. Enji hid his disappointment well. It wasn’t hard for him to pretend to be too busy to train Touya anymore. But I— I couldn’t manage my own feelings. Maybe Touya saw pity in my eyes, or worry, something, but he knew there was something wrong. I felt like it was my fault for giving him my weak constitution, and I started… I stared ignoring him. I found excuses, I put on the TV instead of reading him stories, I pretended that Natsuo needed more attention than him, I found excuses. Touya was a smart child. He knew that I was rejecting him. I was trying… But when I looked at him, all I could see was my failure as a mother.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” Toki couldn’t help but say.
Rei let out a humorless laugh.
“Wasn’t it? Enji may have created the problem, but I only aggravated it. Before getting married, I had no agency at all in my life, you see. But after marrying Enji, I had too much. He handled me all that power and money and the full run of our household, free to do whatever I wanted. But it paralyzed me. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid of failing some invisible test, and I was even more afraid of people noticing I was in over my head. I wasn’t in control, but instead of resolving the situation, I was only trying to appease the tension. Begging them to be quiet and nice, instead of wondering why they were all lashing out.”
Rei took a long steadying breath. When she looked at Toki again, there was something almost pleading in her gaze.
“Enji was the one who discovered that Touya was still training in secret, six months after telling him to stop. I hadn’t even noticed the injuries. But Touya was covered in burns. Enji was horrified. He realized that Touya hadn’t given up on training to be a hero, and I think— I think it terrified him. How could he protect Touya from himself?”
She paused, and sighed.
“I was scared, too, but I was hoping it would pass. I hoped that one day, Touya would hurt himself too much and would let go. I know it was cowardly. I didn’t want to have to do anything, because I didn’t know how to reach my own son. Touya had already guessed that Enji wanted a child strong enough to succeed him. So the only way to make Touya understand that it couldn’t be him was for us to try again. That’s how Natsuo was born… Then Shouto.”
Toki bit her lip. For a second, she hesitated, because that was a really intrusive question. But she needed to know.
“But you wanted them? Endeavor wasn’t… He didn’t…” She floundered.
Rei blinked, and then blushed.
“No, I mean yes, I very much wanted them. I have always wanted several children. The only child Enji wanted was Touya. I was the one to insist for Fuyumi. I also wanted to give them another sibling, even before Enji decided to have a new heir. We both wanted those children. No matter how bad Enji got later, he never forced me. Never.”
Toki raised her hands as if in surrender:
“Okay, okay, I believe you. I just had to make sure.”
Sexual abuse was pretty common in abusive homes, after all. But Rei shook her head, cheeks still red.
“He never… Enji only got physically aggressive after Shouto’s birth. We didn’t… We weren’t sleeping together anymore at that point.”
Because they already had the Masterpiece they wanted. But Toki wondered, what if Shouto hadn’t been born with dual-colored hair? Or what if he had turned out to be Quirkless? What if Endeavor had still needed an heir, even after becoming an abusive husband?
Would he have raped his wife then?
Toki wanted to believe he wouldn’t have. But some cold, pragmatic part of herself knew that Rei’s refusal wouldn’t have stopped him. And the notion was sickening. There was always something utterly terrifying in the notion of rape.
But it hadn’t happened. Thanks to every divinity around, it hadn’t happened. Rei had been lucky.
Toki thought of Dabi and clenched her jaw. Even if he wasn’t a rapist, Endeavor still had left too many scars, left too much damage behind him. He could try to atone as much as he could, but he would never be able to fix everything.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Rei said. She still looked a little mortified, but some confidence had come back in her gaze, and she meet Toki’s eyes without wavering. “But Enji wouldn’t do that.”
People always said that about those close to them. He would never do that, it isn’t him at all, I can’t imagine him doing something so horrible! But sometimes, he did. And denial never made the crimes less real.
“Did he hit you?” Toki asked bluntly.
Rei went pale, this time, but she didn’t lower her gaze.
“He wouldn’t have forced me,” she repeated. “I said no a few times, and he always respected it. Brought me tea or books, gave me space, offered to cook so I could rest. When we were first married, he even said that if I wasn’t— I mean, he looked into fertility clinics in case I didn’t want to be… intimate.”
Toki thought of the faint undercurrent of disgust and horror in Endeavor’s voice when he had said ‘I would never!’ back in Fukuoka. She had believed him. She still believed him. Endeavor wasn’t a rapist.
But he could have been one. He could have been one so easily.
And even if he wasn’t, then he would have still forced Rei to carry his children. And that was maybe even worse than being raped.
Being pregnant and giving birth was kind of like being a small car accident: it had a big effect on your body. Most of the time you walked it off with some minor hurt and pain, like a knee that always clicked or a back that ached when it rained. But… Sometimes you could die. Sometimes you survived, but were never the same.
It was something that shouldn’t be done lightly, and never unwillingly. Pregnancy wasn’t a small thing. It lasted nine months, it messed up your hormonal levels and almost all of your organs, and you took months to recover, sometimes years. It was massive, invasive, dangerous, something that robbed you of your bodily autonomy. Something horribly violating, if it was imposed to you against your will.
Even if Endeavor hadn’t held Rei down and raped her, even if everything had been done in a lab and as clinically as possible, the end-goal had still been to treat her like a breeding cow, like a thing, like life-support for a fetus that could possibly kill her. Even if the sex was consensual, what if the pregnancy wasn’t? Then wouldn’t it be worse? Wasn’t that monstruous, too?!
Toki breathed in, and then breathed out.
“But you wanted to?” she still checked.
“Hum, yes. He is—” Rei blushed again. “He is easy on the eyes.”
Toki made a face. “You’re not the first one to say that.”
Seriously. Keigo, Meteor, Kameko, even Hayasa-sensei thought so! Either Toki had shit taste, or she really needed her eyes checked, because she couldn’t see the appeal.
“I imagine,” Rei said with a hint of fondness. “I know you’re worried, because what I’m telling you isn’t— I know it doesn’t sound good. Especially when that person…”
Rei paused, looked at the phone recording, and smoothly recovered:
“… When that person is someone you know. But Enji only became violent in the last three years or so before my breakdown. Before, he was distant and cold at worst, and before that… Before Shouto’s birth, when Touya wasn’t enraged by his brother’s existence… Then things were good. We weren’t in love, but we were friends. We were friends for ten years.”
Toki bit her lip and made the deliberate choice to believe Rei.
It was a conscious effort, born of pragmatism. She didn’t have the time to dig into what could have been, to look for a lie, or for a bias. She needed to take what Rei was telling her at face value. Well, there it was. Endeavor hadn’t raped his wife. He hadn’t forced her to have children she didn’t want, either. Maybe he would have, but he hadn’t. Toki was going to overlook the fact that it hadn’t happened by sheer luck and move on.
She was here for Dabi, not Endeavor.
What had happened in the past was out of her reach. The Endeavor of the past had changed, saved himself, and that was good. But Dabi was still stuck back there, a decade in the past, and it was him that needed saving.
And that was why Toki was here, wasn’t she? To try and fix things. To try and save people. Even those she hated.
“Alright,” she finally said. “Let’s move on.”
oOoOoOo
The rain kept on falling outside, a downpour that made the sky dark as night, with distant flashes of lightning in the distance. Rei looked at Toki with pensive grey eyes, probably guessing what she thought of her, of her husband, of her marriage. Probably guessing that Toki wasn’t going to drop the matter of Endeavor’s abuse, too. But Rei didn’t raise the subject.
Instead, she took a long breath, and continued her tale.
“Touya knew. He knew that these two brothers meant his own parents had given up on him. So he started lashing out. Enji was always at work, and he never realized. But I was in the house all day. I could see how it ate him. He was hurt, he was in pain, he was desperate… It made him angry and hateful, and I was so scared.”
Toki frowned, and clarified: “Scared… of him?”
“Yes,” Rei admitted, looking almost pleading. “He was becoming aggressive and volatile. Violent. Dangerous. Constantly lashing out at me, at Fuyumi, at Shouto, destroying vases and breaking plates. He had brutal meltdowns that left him gasping on the floor. But I just— I waited for Enji to come home in the evening to handle him. What kind of mother is scared of her own child? I loved Touya, I really did. He was my son. But he scared me. He made me so angry, so frustrated. I felt so helpless. I didn’t understand his obsession with training… How could he want something that hurt him so badly? We were removing the burden from him, for his safety! Why was he still chasing it? I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. At least Enji tried to explain it was for his own good, but I just… I just looked away. Touya— He must have felt like I was ashamed of him.”
“Were you? Ashamed of him?”
“No.” Then Rei hesitated and lowered her eyes. “Yes. Maybe? I don’t know. I was ashamed of myself. I felt miserable and inadequate. I had wanted a big family so my children could love and support each other, but once they were born, I realized I was at loss about what to do with them. I neglected them. Touya, but also Natsuo and Fuyumi. They were so calm and docile compared to Touya; it was easy to brush them off. I tried to make them keep quiet about their issues, so Enji wouldn’t guess how lost and incapable I was a mother.”
Toki shook her head, protesting instinctively:
“I’m sure you tried your best.”
Motherhood was complicated. Toki was terrified of it, terrified of failing Hinawa, and she wasn’t even the one who did most of the raising. Of course Rei had been lost and frightened, all alone with four children, two of them with incredibly powerful Quirks! It was a lot of expectations for someone who had never been prepared for it.
“It wasn’t enough,” Rei whispered. “I shouldn’t… I’m ashamed to admit it, but I shouldn’t have had children. Not so many, not so fast. I don’t know what I was trying to prove. My— My therapist said I may have projected on my children my own issues with my parents. They had always been so controlling. When Enji offered to marry me, I jumped on the occasion too fast. I imagined I would have this perfect life, leisure and easy, that I wouldn’t have to worry about anything. I thought that children would fill this emptiness in my heart, that caring for them would make me feel like I was fixing something in my life. But it didn’t work.”
Her voice broke. She sniffled, and when she spoke again, there was a tiny tremor in her tone. Toki would bet anything that Rei’s hands were fisted so tight the knuckles were turning white.
“I didn’t know a thing about babies,” Rei whispered. “I was unprepared, I was lost. Raising them was exhausting and it wasn’t fixing anything. I just brought into this world children that I didn’t properly care for. In a way, I used them worse than Enji did. He wanted a strong heir, and at least he was upfront about his standards. I never was. I just lied and lied, trying to be a good mother and failing, blaming it my own kids, spiraling even deeper every day…”
Rei paused with a big trembling breath. Toki almost offered to take a break, to let her gather her thoughts, to drink some water and pull herself together. It wasn’t an easy story that she was asking Rei to tell.
But Rei didn’t pause for long. She inhaled deeply and looked at Toki again. Her eyes were clear and dry.
“It didn’t happen at once. It took years. But it started with Touya’s diagnostic and escalated from there. The tension in the house. Touya’s burns. And… my own mental health, deteriorating until the breaking point.”
“You didn’t seek treatment?”
“How could I?” Rei said simply. “I had been so sheltered that I didn’t even know that mental illness existed. As a child, I had been taught to repress my moodiness and nothing else. When I had my breakdown, Enji reached out to my parents, did you know? But when they learned of what had happened, they disowned me. That’s why I was interned in the first place. Enji didn’t want me in his house and my parents refused to take me back.”
Toki scowled. Assholes. But Rei only shrugged. She didn’t seem very bothered by her parents’ callousness: as if it was to be expected, really. Toki wondered if there had been a lot of lost love there. If Rei had been that eager to escape her parents’ house with a marriage, then maybe not going back to them was blessing.
“My mental health didn’t degrade all at once. It took years, starting from when Touya was five. But the more time passed, the worst it was. In the last year, it was… bad. I tried to put on a brave face, but I was losing it. Little things were adding up. Small failures. A feeling of inadequacy. Lies and excuses, pilling on top of each other. Enji’s reproaches, his anger, the dread when he came home. And denial, so much denial. I persuaded myself that if I pretended hard enough, I could force everything to be fine. I could force Touya to be normal. I could force my husband to be happy. I could force myself to know how to be a good mother. I just had to pretend hard enough. But everything was spiraling out of control.”
Toki frowned, and repeated: “Everything?”
“It felt like it anyway. And… I was so afraid of Enji realizing that I was failing at the task he had entrusted to me.”
Toki hesitated, not sure how to ask if Endeavor was already abusive by that point. Awkwardly, she cleared her throat.
“I take that he didn’t help you.”
Rei sighed, shoulders slumping in resignation.
“No,” she confessed. “He didn’t even notice my issues. He was… in his own head. Always irritated, slamming doors, coming home late, avoiding Touya, being angry at avoiding him. It added to my anxiety, feeding my paranoia and my exhaustion. Everything was too much. I couldn’t keep track of so many kids, I hated the sound of their crying, I wasn’t a good enough cook, and when one child got angry it spread to the others like wildfire… It reached a point where I had a meltdown every week or so. I used to cry on Shouto’s shoulder as soon as Enji had left, because pretending that everything was fine in front of my husband was taking all my strength. I threw up every morning. I skipped meals. I was losing my hair.”
Rei touched her hair, almost self-consciously. Then she shook her head, self-deprecatingly, looking away from Toki and to the window. Outside, the storm hadn’t abated.
“I was barely holding it together. I was hiding it from Enji and the children, but it was— I was in a bad place, mentally. I was too depressed to do anything, and yet too anxious to stay in bed. It constantly existed in a haze of exhaustion and frayed nerves…. I didn’t even know why. I didn’t have a word for it. My family had always been too conservative. To talk about mental illness, or even acknowledge it, was unthinkable to my parents. I guess I absorbed that mindset. Once I started losing it… I had no frame of reference for what was happening to me. I thought it was my fault. I thought that I wasn’t trying hard enough.”
Toki didn’t say anything. In Japan, mental illness was still heavily stigmatized. Toki remember the public’s reaction when Dabi had torched several hospitals geared toward the care of the mental ill and the addicts in rehab. How dismissive the public had been, how vindicative.
Toki wasn’t really surprised to learn that there were people who denied the existence of mental illness altogether.
“Of course, I pretended I was fine,” Rei continued ruefully. “It was the only thing I could do. The mood swings, the dissociation, the intrusive thoughts, the paranoia, the depression… I thought it would pass. I refused to admit I needed help. And by refusing to see it, I also refused to see that Touya needed help, too. That child… He had really inherited the worst of both of us. Enji’s hubris, my instability, and our hatred of feeling weak. It— It was destroying him. None of us noticed… None of us wanted to see.”
Rei swallowed. Outside, a bolt of lightning speared the sky. Toki counted the seconds. It took twelve for the thunder to rumble, the sound almost frighteningly loud.
It took almost thirty for Rei to start talking again.
“Touya was an attention-seeker. Destructive, loud. I thought the only way to handle that was to ignore him. I didn’t want to reward what he did… the tantrums, the aggressivity. But by doing so, I left him all alone to deal with his pain. I see it now. I should have… I should have done something to stop him from hating us.”
Toki hesitated. “He hated you?”
“Maybe not at first. But he resented us. All of us. Enji pleaded, he begged, he told him again and again that Touya could be anything he wanted, and we would support him, and that there was more to life than being a hero… But for Touya, it only sounded like rejection. As his mother, I should have comforted him. Enji is bad with words. He didn’t know how to tell his son that he loved him. He probably didn’t know it needed telling.”
Toki suddenly realized that yes, it was very probable. Endeavor wasn’t very demonstrative. But more than that, when he was faced with emotional vulnerability, he tended to freeze, run, or flare-up. None of that would have appeased Touya.
Touya had needed reassurance. Because had been silently told that he was a failure, not just as the son of a hero, but also as a first son. Endeavor had denied him the life that he was promised on first breath.
How scary was it to not have any of the security and sense of place in the world written out for you? Where do you turn to when your blueprint is ripped away so harshly, and you are not offered an alternative?
His parents telling him that it was for his own good must have sounded like lies. Touya hadn’t been Dabi-the-psychopath yet. He had been a little kid, and all he had seen was that they were taking his birthright from him. Endeavor would have needed years of constant reassurances to make him understand.
But Endeavor hadn’t done that. Endeavor hadn’t even thought about it.
“It’s not his fault,” Rei defended him, as if reading Toki’s feelings in her eyes. “Enji is… Enji is intense, Enji is strong, too strong. He knows that his love is a dangerous thing to have, too. Like barbed wire. Sometimes distance is the only way to show his care, because it’s the only to put us outside of the blast radius. He didn’t know what to share with his children outside of training, and training was exactly what was destroying Touya.”
Toki made a face, unconvinced. Yeah, training was dangerous, and of course Endeavor had been worried about more of his kids being injured. But he could have approached things differently. He could have tried not to be a hero, but to be a father. To spend time doing normal things, civilian things. He could have tried to be just Enji Todoroki, instead of being Endeavor.
But caring for small children… being a dad… loving someone… It was frightening. Vulnerability was frightening. So Endeavor had run away. He had dropped the children like hot potatoes as soon as they started having emotional needs. He had abandoned them, and hidden behind the excuse of his work, to avoid being a father.
Like a coward.
(Toki didn’t think about Sayuri, and the way her tenderness had turned to indifference the moment Toki had dared to not be the perfect little doll. It wasn’t a comparison that she was comfortable making, so it was easier to pretend it didn’t exist.)
“So,” Rei breathed. “It should have been me. It was my role, to be a mother, to be a comfort. I should have reassured Touya that he was still loved, it was my job, that was why I had married Enji in the first place! But I didn’t. I barely spoke to him. I didn’t know what to tell. Natsuo and Fuyumi were still small, and neither of them had a strong Quirk, so they didn’t understand his obsession. As for Shouto… He was just a baby. But it was him that Touya hated the most. Even before he got his Quirk, Shouto showed signs of inheriting both mine and Enji’s power. He could be the perfect hero, the hero Touya couldn’t be. The heir that Enji wanted.”
Rei rubbed her wrists in a self-soothing gesture. Outside, the thunder rumbled again. It sounded more distant this time. The atmosphere wasn’t any less tense, though.
“The first time Touya tried to burn Shouto alive, he wasn’t even three months old.”
Toki was so taken aback that she couldn’t help but blurt out: “What?!”
A beat too late, she remembered that there had been something like this in canon. A manga panel of Touya flinging fire towards his siblings.
But it was different to hear it from someone who had been there. It was different to hear it like that, Touya tried to burn Shouto alive.
“Touya must have been eight years old,” Rei continued lowly. “Enji had found burns on him, again, and was pleading with him to stop… I came with Shouto in my arms, Natsuo and Fuyumi following me. Touya was saying something about the other kids in school, about how he needed to become a hero. Then he burst into flames, grinning, crying, laughing, and launched fire at us. Enji tackled him and he said it was probably an accident. Maybe he even persuaded himself. I know Fuyumi and Natsuo were too young to really get it. All they saw was Enji being rough with Touya. But I could see my son’s face. He was aiming for Shouto, and that glint in his eyes… He looked— desperate. Hateful.”
Like Dabi, Toki thought. Like nothing mattered but destroying what hurt him. Like the heat and the pain and the screaming were making happy.
She thought of Hitoshi’s torso covered in skin graft, of the grave of Neito’s mother, and she felt sick. No amount of empathy for Touya’s pain as an abandoned child could make up for the sheer rage she felt about the destruction he had wrecked.
“Afterward,” Rei said evenly, “Enji separated Shouto from the other children. I allowed it. Touya, Fuyumi, and Natsuo thought it was because Enji only cared about their youngest brother, and it didn’t take much effort for me to persuade them they were on the right track. In a few years Enji would make that a reality, anyway. Shouto was his heir, and the others were dismissed. And it was easier for me… to make them believe it was their father’s favoritism at play, instead of my fears.” She pinched her lips, and admitted, voice lowering to a whisper: “But I was afraid. I was so afraid.”
“Of what Touya could do to Shouto?” Toki wondered.
“Of what he could do to everyone, including himself. He was already so destructive. I was losing control. I never had it in the first place.”
Toki pursed her lips, not wanting to cast judgment. But isolating Shouto had been a cruel thing to do to the kid. He must have grown up so lonely.
“Why not separate Touya from the others, instead? Sending him to a boarding school, somewhere with a course for students with strong Quirks, to create distance between him and Endeavor?”
Somewhere like Naruto Labs. Sure, it hadn’t been all sunshine and rainbows, but the people here had been professionals. Touya would have received the help he needed, and being cared for by people who didn’t baby him would have also made him feel validated.
Validation had been sorely missing from Touya’s life, from what Toki could guess. Attention-seeking children with self-destructive tendencies didn’t become better if you ignored them.
They just learned that nobody cared about their pain.
“It would have been simpler,” Rei acknowledged. “I even talked to Enji about a boarding school. But he said that Touya needed the family. I think Enji was hoping that… If Touya stayed with Fuyumi and Natsuo, they would show him how to grow up happy without chasing fruitless dreams. He hoped they could show him how to live as a civilian. Enji couldn’t do that himself. I called him a coward, running away from the son he didn’t know how to reach, but it was hypocritical of me. He was running away, but so was I.”
Poor kid. Toki hated Dabi, but she couldn’t help but feel a pang of pity for Touya. The realization that he was a tool to Endeavor, and more than that, a useless tool, must have been such a horrible betrayal. And then Rei had been scared of what was happening, and removed herself from the situation too.
Toki wanted to reach out his hand to that child and take him out of that place of horror, and yet knew the child was already lost.
“And the other kids?” Toki asked. “Were they safe from him?”
Rei nodded, slowly.
“Natsuo and Fuyumi… Touya wouldn’t have hurt them. It’s cruel to say, but they weren’t important enough to hurt. I was selfishly glad for it. They could take care of themselves, but they could take care of Touya, too. And I could hide behind Shouto, pretending that he was my second chance at being a good mother. I had neglected my other children for so long, I always felt like they were judging me. It was driving me insane. Shouto didn’t judge me, at least. He was such a sweet baby, gifted with the perfect Quirk. If he turned out to be a great hero, then all our past suffering wouldn’t matter.”
Toki thought of Endeavor, of how ruthlessly he had chased after the Number One spot, as if it could fix everything in his life. It seemed that Rei had had the same mentality, in a way. Her lips curled in contempt.
It was only a second, before she smoothed her face back to neutrality, but Rei saw it anyway. She smiled ruefully.
“You must think me a terrible mother. You aren’t wrong. I was selfish. It wasn’t Natsuo and Fuyumi’s job to take care of Touya, it was my job to take care of them, all of them. But I abandoned them. I let them down, for years, because I didn’t know how to care for them, so it was easier to pretend everything was fine.”
Toki didn’t quite know what to say to that. Of course Rei had been overwhelmed, and of course she was allowed to freeze and fuck-up things. It was human to make mistakes.
But if Toki had been her shoes… she couldn’t help but think that she would have been stronger. Not for her, but for the kids. She would have fought back, she would have tried to fix things, to save her kids.
But she wasn’t Rei. Rei wasn’t her. Everyone had different limits, and a different kind of bravery. Toki had to refrain to judge. It wasn’t her place.
“Did Touya… try to kill Shouto again? What happened after their separation?”
Rei hesitated, briefly.
“He was caught trying to sneak in the west wing, where Shouto was, at least twice. I don’t know if he would have— I think he would have. Maybe I’m too pessimistic. But when Touya caught a glimpse of him by the window or in the hallways, his eyes burned with hatred.”
Toki thought of the USJ, and of the burn scars all over Hitoshi’s chest and she knew Rei was right. If Touya had had the chance to kill Shouto in his home, he would have taken it.
Ten years later, he still wanted to.
oOoOoOo
Outside, the storm was still raging. The curtain of rain was denser than ever, sometimes disrupted by the howl of the wind or by flashes of thunder. It wouldn’t last long (no summer storm ever did) but it was still a little chilling. Nothing made you feel small like elements unleashing their fury on the world.
That, and being trapped in a small room with someone telling you family secrets.
“Still, life went on,” Rei continued after a pause. “We managed. Years passed and Touya seemed to calm down. He never attacked me again, but he still used his fire when he was angry. Flames burst from his arms and hands if I was touching him. He never did it with Natsuo or Fuyumi or their nanny, only with me. I could see the challenge in his eyes… ‘Yes, that’s fire, what are you going to do about it?’ And I froze, every time. Like a weakling. Like a coward.”
Her lips twisted bitterly.
“No wonder Enji was so angry at me. He always hated cowardice. And Touya started to notice. Enji and I, we… We weren’t at rock bottom yet, but there was no harmony between us anymore. There were… arguments. We tried to hide it from the children, but they knew.”
And children absorbed what was going on around them like sponges. Toki took a long breathe.
“I imagine that it scared them.”
“It scared Fuyumi and Natsuo.” Rei swallowed. “It made Touya angry at me, mostly. He heard his father yelling and thought that I was doing something wrong. He couldn’t fathom that Enji could be… lashing out too.”
Toki chewed on her lip a second, and then asked hesitantly:
“When you say lashing out…”
Had Touya seen his father beat his mother, and absorbed that, too? Was it why Rei thought Touya hated her: because Touya had absorbed from his father’s actions the mindset that his mother was disposable, unworthy of respect, an acceptable target for physical violence?
It could be. An abusive home was often physically abusive. It rarely stopped at yelled arguments. Toki may have let down the topic of rape, but she wasn’t going to forget the fact that Endeavor had clearly abused his wife. There was a reason Rei couldn’t bear to see his face.
“He didn’t beat me,” Rei said evenly. “Mostly, he screamed at me.”
He didn’t beat me. Toki thought of what she remembered of the manga, of Rei on the ground after being pushed or backhanded. Endeavor may not have left bruises, but shit, there had been abuse anyway. It wasn’t hard to imagine Endeavor angry, to picture him screaming in her face and calling her worthless… or to think that he would shove her out of his way.
“Would Natsuo and Fuyumi confirm that?” Toki asked lowly.
“I would ask you to not talk about my private issues with my children,” Rei said evenly.
Your children are allergic to minding their own business, Toki almost replied. I absolutely expect them to air their dirty laundry at dinner any evening now. It’s a small miracle that we made it nearly two weeks without it, and I think it’s mainly because Endeavor takes great care to come home after dinner so Natsuo can avoid him. Do you really think that asking me to avoid a sensitive topic is going to stop your dumbass kids shoving my face in said topic when their fancy will strike?!
“I am just asking because it’s relevant,” she said instead. “And after what you said to me, I have a right to be a little concerned.”
They both looked at the phone that was still recording. Toki almost considered turning it off, to be able to say out loud ‘the guy who beat you is fucking my dad.’
“I understand,” Rei said, softly. “But it’s alright. People aren’t the same in different circumstances. What happened then… You can’t judge him on that.”
Toki’s eyes narrowed.
“But something happened?”
Rei paused. Clenched her jaw. Toki could see her visibly steel herself, smoothing her face back to perfect neutrality.
Outside, the thunder roared loud enough to make the windows shake.
“He yelled,” Rei said in an even voice. “He accused me of being incompetent, of being weak, of doing bad things on purpose. He pushed me out of his way. At the end… He backhanded me twice, in the span of four months. That’s all.”
Toki pursed her lips. Even then… Endeavor was twice Rei’s size. Rei must have been terrified when he got into her face and roared threats. Maybe he didn’t slap her or kick her like a dog, but so what? That was still physical aggression, that was still intimidation, that was still abuse. It was wrong. If Toki had been there, she would have done something.
Someone should have done something, someone should have stopped it from happening, and it was fucking unfair that it had happened in the first place.
“Are you here for Enji, or for Touya?” Rei asked calmy. She must have found Toki’s pause a little too long. “I know my husband’s faults. But we are not here to discuss them.”
Someday, those faults would need to be discussed about, though. Someday, Enji Todoroki would have to pay for what he had done to his wife. Even if he was good now, even if he was kinder, even if he regretted.
The harm had been done, and it deserved reparation.
But Rei was right. Toki was here for Touya. Not for his father. She raised her hands placatingly:
“Alright. Sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed. I’m just concerned. Let’s go back to Touya. You said he was getting angry with you as a way to side with his father?”
Rei let out a long sigh. Her shoulders loosened, some tension leaving her frame. Curious, how making her talk about Touya made her look vulnerable, but when talking about her husbands she looked braced for a fight, ready to defend him…
How strange, that Rei could want to defend him.
But then, wasn’t that hypocritical of Toki, to judge Rei for still loving someone who had hurt her? Rei had been friend with her husband for ten years before he turned into a monster. And after those three or four years of hell, then a decade in the hospital, somehow Rei and her husband had reconnected and were now friends again. They called each other on the phone and talked for almost an hour in soft hushed voices, and sometimes Endeavor even smiled when he spoke. Was it so surprising that Rei didn’t want to reopen old wounds, and would rather keep the good thing she had managed to salvage from the disaster?
Toki loved her father, too, even if he had hurt her. And her father loved her, even if she had hurt him. They had only been a normal family for a year, and then Toki had ruined everything for the next fifteen years: but they had managed to forgive each other and become close again. It wasn’t so crazy. People changed.
Endeavor had changed. So had Rei. They were allowed to move on, too.
“Yes. I avoided Touya as much I could,” Rei was saying. “The way he looked at me, sometimes, it gave me chills.”
“How so?”
“Maybe it was my delusions speaking, but I was always expecting him to explode. It felt like we were both playing pretend. He pretended he didn’t hate me and I pretended I wasn’t treating him like a bomb. As soon as he threw a tantrum, I dropped him. Fuyumi and Natsuo may not have noticed… But Touya couldn’t miss it, how I avoided his gaze, his touch, even his presence, just because it was too bothersome and frightening to deal with him. Some days I was struck by remorse, treating my flesh and blood like that. But… I could see it in his eyes, the desperate need for something to burn, for someone to hurt.”
“To hurt you, specifically?”
Rei hesitated, then shook her head.
“No. Maybe. But Touya just needed the pain to feel alive. His, or someone else, I don’t think it made a difference to him.” She hesitated again. “But he would have preferred to hurt Shouto, if he could.”
“Because Shouto was his replacement.”
Targeting Shouto stemmed from the fact that Endeavor was absolutely obsessed with Shouto and held him in high regard because of his ‘superior’ quirk. So, if Touya could kill someone Endeavor deemed better than even All Might, then Touya would have proved Endeavor wrong. He would have proved that he wasn’t a failure.
It was so fucked up. Everything in this family was fucked up.
“Yes. And because he was… It’s terrible to say, but he was my favorite, too. Shouto was so young: he hadn’t seen our home fracture. He didn’t remember the good times, so he had no point of comparison. He wasn’t sad about his father always being at work, or worried about me having mood-swings. He was just happy I was there. He was so young. So sweet and innocent. I hadn’t made any mistakes with him, and he adored me. That’s why I loved him best. It was such a thrill for me to finally succeed at being a mother!”
Rei shook her head self-depreciatingly.
“I tried to be good to Natsuo and Fuyumi, too, but they remembered my past mistakes. They were… They were also close to Touya, too. I always had this unarticulated fear that if push came to shove, they would just stand back and watch as their brother turned on me. Because if he screamed accusations at me, he would be right, after all. He would be right, and they would see it.” Rei winced, guilt all over her expression. “It was my paranoia speaking, imagining my children were double-faced like that: but there were days where it felt so real, I couldn’t even meet their eyes.”
Rei paused, and Toki had the fleeting thought that she was probably glossing over Endeavor’s part in her downward spiral. Touya may have been lashing out, but Endeavor had been lashing out, too.
And… Maybe more than the physical abuse, the thing that drove Rei crazy was Endeavor yelling at her for not protecting Touya, when she knew that she couldn’t protect him. Not unless her husband stepped up. Endeavor had been accusing her of the very thing she felt so guilty about but had no solution to. It had to hit hard.
“When Touya was thirteen…” Rei continued, more hesitantly. “I saw burns on his arms again, and I understood he had never stopped training. I remember that day, how I was sick to my stomach with fear and horror. That was it, I had slipped. Normality was sliding through my fingers again. I tried to confront him once, as softly and as non-threatening as I could, terrified he would lash out. Of course, Touya… Touya rejected me.”
“He attacked you?” Toki guessed.
Rei swallowed, looking at the ground in shame.
“He didn’t physically attack me, but I knew he wanted to. I knew that the next time, he would. And after that… I couldn’t even look at him. I couldn’t forget how he had looked in that moment, with his face twisted and almost unrecognizable, his eyes filled with hatred. He looked unhinged. He looked like Enji had, in the worst moments. I was horrified by my own child. He was a stranger in my own house, like a violent animal that I didn’t know how to calm down. And the worse part… The worse part was that he knew it. He knew it, and it disgusted him. His own mother thought him a monster and a failure. Of course it hurt him, it must have been like a knife to the heart. How could he not hate me?”
Her voice broke. She sniffed quietly, wiping her eyes, and Toki tactfully looked away while Rei composed herself.
She couldn’t offer any comfort. Touya had hated his mother, probably. If he hadn’t then, he certainly did now. That was why he had burned down that hospital, hoping to kill her.
That was why Neito’s mom was dead, caught in Dabi’s rage like hundreds of others.
It was such a waste.
All of it, such a waste. Endeavor, Rei, their children, all of them. From the very beginning, it had been such a tragedy. A story of selfishness, of miscommunication, of cruelty and despair. Not of good against evil, but of need against need against need, until the catastrophe was too strong to be stopped.
Touya had had the odds stacked against him. Through no choice of his own, he was born to a father who ignored him the moment his Quirk started failing, and a mother who blamed him for the discord of her household. As if it was his fault. He had been born weak, born wrong, and discarded for it. With no support, no friends, no help. Just— left behind.
Of course Touya would never let it go. Toki understood, now.
She couldn’t accept it, couldn’t excuse it, could barely even understand it because it was so selfish and foreign to her own way of thinking. But she could see it more clearly, now that she knew how it had happened. The source of that rage. His father, his future, and his identity has been stolen for Touya. It had ripped a hole in him. A hole filled with hate.
And maybe someone stronger or kinder could have moved past that: but Touya hadn’t been kind or strong.
He had been angry.
It all came back to Endeavor, in the end. He had been the one to take this from Touya, which Toki could justify; but he had also been the one to let his child suffer without help, which Toki couldn’t excuse. That pain and festered in hatred, and now…
Now they were there.
Toki didn’t hate Endeavor. But she knew who he was. She knew there was something brutal and ruthless in him, something capable of violently hurting others and only feeling indifference, something that had fascinated Meteor and had brought them close together. She knew Endeavor had principles, honor, and integrity. But she also knew he had no identity outside of his work. He was obsessed with it: the challenges, the structure, the fights, the never-ending duty. That was all he could do, that was all he was.
There was no room left for his family in this kind of life.
And Rei… She had been Endeavor’s victim, too, but she had also contributed to her son’s misery. She had abandoned him, too. Rei had been angry at him for not simply giving up on his Quirk training and his attempts to earn his father’s love: because it was easier to blame Touya for not giving up, than it was to confront the root of the problem, which was Endeavor’s toxic attitude.
“I made him that way,” Rei whispered. “Enji and I, we made him that way. We promised him the world, and then tossed him away when he proved himself too weak. Instead of raising him up, we pushed him down. Enji, his father that he idolized, turned away with disdain. And me, the mother who was supposed to care for him, I flinched away from his touch in disgust.”
She closed her eyes, tears rolling down her cheeks.
“It was our fault. We did this to him. Something in Touya had always been soft. We killed it, and it was rotting.”
oOoOoOo
Rei’s tale didn’t end well. Toki had known it, of course. But it still was so awful to hear.
Touya would die three days after his argument with his mother. Rei hadn’t spoken with him even once in the meantime. Touya continued to train and his mother continued to pretend not to see it. Rei told that herself didn’t know what she was hoping would happen. She had known it would end terribly. But she had been scared and angry, so she had never dared confronting him.
Just like she had never dared to confront Endeavor, to force him to step up, to help, to stop this madness.
Endeavor was the only one who could have stopped it, it was becoming clearer and clearer. Touya had learned that Endeavor’s love was conditional, and while Touya had called him out on that, he also still craved that love and tried his best to meet his father’s standards. Victims of abuse sometimes still loved their abusers, even while acknowledging the damage.
Touya had kept trying, until it killed him. He could have been saved, and he could even have saved himself, if only… if only…
But he hadn’t been saved. His family couldn’t. His father wouldn’t. Touya himself hadn’t. And in the end…
“Touya died,” Rei said woodenly. “He wanted to show some new moves to his father, but Enji refused to come to his hiding place to watch, probably because he didn’t want to encourage him. We still don’t know what happened exactly. The only certainty we have is that the whole forest burned down. Fifteen civilians were killed, a dozen more injured. Some part of me still wonders… If Enji had gone, would it have been better? Could he have saved Touya from his own fire? Or would it have made it worse? I don’t know.”
That was the tragedy. You could never know. Maybe Endeavor going there would have saved Touya. But maybe it would have decupled the catastrophe: maybe Endeavor would have seen his son died under his eyes, maybe it would have destroyed him even more. Maybe he would have died, too.
Nobody could know. Nobody would ever know.
“Touya’s death destroyed us,” Rei breathed. “Natsuo started thinking it was his father’s fault, that he had pushed Touya somehow— and he wasn’t really wrong. Natsuo was so young, he couldn’t know how to grieve. He wrapped himself in anger and resentment. Fuyumi tried to fix it, to make things right, but that kind of wound can’t be healed. Shouto… Shouto had never really known Touya, but he was the most impacted, because… Well, because of Enji and me. I felt sick with guilt and horror, and tried to smother him as if it could somehow redeem me. And Enji—”
She cut herself off, seeking the right words. Toki didn’t press her. She knew what Touya’s death had done to Endeavor. The canon-story had been pretty clear that Shouto’s abuse had started around the same time.
People were pretty stupid when they were hurt or angry, and they were extremely stupid when they were both.
“Enji was crushed,” Rei whispered. “He didn’t believe it, at first. He looked for Touya for days, refusing to believe he was dead. He’s the one who found the little piece of bone that was left. A fragment of jawbone. That was all what was left of him. Our child. Enji’s son, his favorite. The only one he had wanted. It was the first time I saw him cry. We put the children to bed and then… We just held each other as we cried.”
Rei blinked back tears. Toki had to look away, her own throat closing up. She couldn’t imagine that kind of grief, of losing you own child. Of loving them so much, and then just having a piece of bone left.
No wonder it had broken Endeavor.
“I didn’t think things could go worse after that,” Rei said in a chocked-up voice. “But they did. Enji worked for days, he barely ate, I was terrified that one day he would just collapse and let himself die. I was terrified. But I should have known better. Enji wasn’t that kind of man. He didn’t collapse, and he… He turned that pain into anger. Anger against villains, against me, even against Shouto. He was afraid of Shouto following Touya’s path because he was too weak, so he started training him harder. He was always so angry. I think he was mostly mad at himself, refusing to confront his pain, but I know it’s no excuse for how badly things deteriorated.”
She looked at Toki, and Toki forced herself to keep her mouth shut and not to ask about how exactly things had deteriorated. About what had Endeavor done, about what he was guilty of.
It wasn’t why she was here, and it wasn’t what Rei wanted to tell her anyway.
“My mental state went from bad to worse,” Rei continued. “I was seeing Touya everywhere. And Enji was becoming worse, too: angry, violent. He used to yell, but it was just to vent. But after Touya’s death, Enji wasn’t the same man. He could feel the hatred in his voice. He wanted me to hurt as badly as he was hurting, and my apathy made him enraged. He screamed at me, he… He even hit me.”
Rei paused and swallowed. She couldn’t meet Toki’s gaze. She looked almost lost for words.
“I don’t know how we got there,” Rei whispered. “I think back to when we were happy, I think back to when we were still friends, before Shouto’s birth, and… I don’t understand how it got to that point. In a few years, everything had completely crashed down. It was like we were both different persons. He was a monster, and I was— I was a ghost. I wasn’t even me anymore. I felt like walking through life in a perpetual feeling of dissociation.”
“And that’s when you hurt Shouto,” Toki murmured.
“Yes,” Rei confessed, briefly closing her eyes in shame. “It was a few days after Touya’s death. I felt cornered, as if everything was going to blow up. As if, somehow, they would all see how worthless and dangerous I was as a mother. They would punish me for Touya’s death, for Enji’s anger… for Shouto, innocent victim caught in a crossfire. Even for Natsuo and Fuyumi, who hadn’t done anything wrong besides being born. Raising my children after what had happened felt unbearable. I felt like I was going crazy.”
Rei swallowed. Her voice went a little unsteady, a little more choked-up.
“One day I threw boiling water at Shouto. I only saw his blue eye, his red hair. I don’t know if I was seeing Enji in Touya’s features, or vice-versa, or both. I just wanted the nightmare to get away. And then Shouto was screaming…”
“I know,” Toki told her, because she didn’t want Rei to go through the pain to describe it. “I know. And after that, you were interned.”
“Yes. Going to the hospital was a good thing. But it was too little, too late. Too late for all of us, but mostly too late for Touya.”
“Being interned sooner wouldn’t have saved him.”
Rei smiled, sadly. “Maybe not.”
For a while, there was silence. Rei seemed to be lost in her memories, and Toki was silently contemplating the future.
Such a waste. All of it, such a waste.
It would have been simpler if Endeavor had beaten Touya, or had pushed him to train until destruction, or had just been unapologetically evil. That way, it would have been easier to point at him and say he was the true villain of the story. It would have been so clear-cut, black and white. The big evil man responsible of Touya’s downfall. But Endeavor hadn’t been evil. He had been a coward, but he hadn’t been a brute: not to Touya. He had been a loving father, at some point.
Touya was the only one of the Todoroki children to have known Enji Todoroki as a loving father, actually. All the others had only known Endeavor. The hero, the fighter, the man who treated them like tools.
Touya was the only one to have Enji Todoroki as a father, and thus he had been the only one to lose him. And he had never gotten over it, which was why he was now slaughtering people left and right.
Dabi had spiraled deeper and deeper into madness, like a wild dog driven frenzied by the scent of blood. But it wouldn’t have happened if someone hadn’t given him his first taste.
Endeavor had not just stopped paying attention, he had rejected Touya completely as his son. And Rei had sat back and watched, giving it all her tacit approval. They had made him to fit a mold that they had taken away from him afterward: leaving him floundering, abandoned, not fitting anywhere in the family, and told again and again that it was his fault for being weak, while also refusing to let him show he was strong.
Dabi had made his choices, and bad choices, but he had been kind of nudged into the wrong direction. When you’re in a bad place… if you don’t have support… it’s hard, almost impossible, to get out. Inertia, habit, despair, it all pushed you deeper and deeper. People who were never taught or given any healthy, constructive outlets for their emotions will often find unhealthy, destructive outlets. That was just how the human psyche worked. You couldn’t repress everything forever.
That was what had made Dabi, Toki suddenly understood. It wasn’t that Touya had choosing deliberately not to stop lashing out: it was that the original need hadn’t been met and Touya kept going further and further in response to that. From self-harm to assault, from arson to murder: deeper and deeper into violence until he got what he wanted.
Shit. Toki realized it, now: Dabi would never stop. He wouldn’t, because the original need hadn’t been met. So he was going to keep pushing. As long as he didn’t have what he wanted, he wouldn’t stop: not if he was beaten, not if he was negotiated with, not even if he was begged. He would not stop, because the need for validation was the only thing still keeping him alive.
Which meant that Toki couldn’t make him stop.
“Do you have what you wanted?” Rei asked.
Toki realized the rain had stopped.
“I…” She hesitated. “I think so.”
“You know how to stop him, then?”
Toki sighed, and rubbed a hand over her face. What a loaded question. She knew what would make Touya stop: but the frustrating thing was that it wasn’t something she could provide.
For years, Touya had been screaming to his father, see me! value me! don’t reject me! I’m not weak! I’m your son, your firstborn son; you made me, I’m here, I’M RIGHT HERE, stop dismissing me, stop thinking I’m nothing! Why can’t you SEE ME?!
Endeavor had never acknowledged it. Endeavor may not even have noticed it. Especially after Shouto’s birth. Toki would bet that he had become so obsessed with his Masterpiece that the rest had faded in the background.
But Touya was still screaming. And some day, Endeavor needed to answer.
“I know what he wants,” Toki finally said. “I don’t know how to get it.”
“He wants us to pay,” Rei sighed mournfully.
The rain had stopped. In the silence, it seemed that nobody dared to speak too loudly. Toki let out a long, deliberate breath.
“No. He wants you to validate his pain. He wants you to see him, to understand his fury and tell him he’s right to feel it that way. He wants you to regret. He wants you to hurt as much as he hurts, but most of all, he wants you to fix it.”
“But we can’t!” Rei said, distressed.
Toki grimaced. She had gone into this meeting to find Touya’s weakness, to try and find a way to make him let go of his obsession with his father. But she had gone about this all wrong.
Dabi wasn’t going to stop. Not until he got what he wanted. He wouldn’t be misdirected, distracted, reasoned with. He was too obsessed. Endeavor’s rejection wasn’t just a sore spot like she had believed: it was the core of his existence. Nothing could soothe him or calm him… except getting what he was after.
“You can’t,” Toki agreed lowly. “I can’t, either. Shouto can’t, and neither can Fuyumi or Natsuo. We don’t matter to him. But… I think Endeavor can reach him.” She paused, and muttered: “Actually, I think only Endeavor can reach him.”
Saying that Touya (or Dabi, whatever) needed to move past his beef with his father… It wouldn’t work. It put all the responsibility on Touya to ignore or repress or deny his attachment. Toki couldn’t rely on that.
First of all, it made it sound like it was highly unnatural that a child would ever be angry that the person who was supposed to love and protect them suddenly dropped them like a hot potato. Dabi was fucking insane, but Endeavor was the one who had created the situation in the first place.
And second of all, it meant that the whole resolution would hinge on Touya letting go. On Touya being the bigger person. On Touya giving up.
And it was not going to happen.
Touya was not going to change course: not when spite was the only thing still keeping him alive. Which meant that if he couldn’t save himself, then someone was going to need to save him. Someone was going to have to reach him.
Only one person could reach him.
Toki had approached this all wrong. She had been thinking about Touya needing to move on without fulfilling his emotional needs, because the way Touya expressed his emotional needs was crazy, insane and brutal. But those needs weren’t stupid. Deep down, all of it came from the fact that Touya had been disinherited on what he saw as a whim. All of it came from the fact that Touya had been legitimately wronged, at some point.
Fixing that wrong wouldn’t erase all the pain Touya had endured and all the pain Dabi had inflicted, but… couldn’t it be a start? Couldn’t it be worth a try?
Toki had sworn to herself that she would try, after all.
She still didn’t want to do it. She still whished that this asshole was dead in a ditch. But even if Dabi was a fucking sociopath and he had killed people: was it reason enough to not try and save him? Meteor was a sociopath and a murderer too. It hadn’t stopped Meteor from redeeming himself and becoming a functional member of society.
And who had made it so? Endeavor.
Endeavor had stepped up for Meteor, and it had stopped him from killing. Why couldn’t he do the same for Dabi? After all, he was the only one who could do this. And didn’t he owe it to his son? For all the shit he had put him through?
Touya would never be the first-born son Endeavor wanted. So what? He was still his son and Endeavor needed to acknowledge it. To apologize, to promise to do better. To ask Touya what he wanted in life, to promise to support him.
The issue, now… was that this message of hope, acceptance and love and whatnot… well, it needed to reach Touya.
And Touya was now Dabi, who was a few sandwiches short of a picnic and would either start monologuing and dancing to ignore Endeavor’s speech or would throw a homicidal tantrum when all his bottled feelings would explode. No matter how you approached this… There would be violence.
And probably fire. Lots of fire.
Fuck.
“What are you going to do?” Rei whispered.
Toki let out a deep, preemptively exhausted sigh. Damn the Todoroki and their issues. Damn them all.
“I’m going to try and save him, obviously. Why do you think I came here in the first place?”
Notes:
Was Rei abusive?
"Rei was abused by Endeavor and/or her parents" and "Rei gaslighted her children" are two statement that can (and should) coexist. Abuse survivors are filled to the brim with coping mechanisms and not all of them are healthy.
I see Rei as someone who, when she married, mostly wanted to escape the stiffling atmosphere of her parents' house. She was not equiped to take care of other people, especially not children, and especially not while resisting the toxic attitude of her husband. It was inevitable that she fractured under pressure.Is Rei mentally ill?
In Wisdom, she is (as are Touya and Shouto, both on the autistic spectrum). In canon, it's not confirmed. But in any case... Rei was fragile. Too fragile to stand against Enji.Did Rei see Touya instead of Shouto when she hurt Shouto?
The headcanon that she poured boiling water over Shoto's face because she saw Touya, not Endeavor (or BOTH of them), is a headcanon very dear to me. It was in a corner of my mind for years. Actually, since i saw that canon episode where Dabi burns alive a bunch of villains because they don't meet his standards. The 'Dabi is a Todoroki' theory was already out by then, and i thought: "hey, i wonder how fucked up it must have been to live in the same house as that guy" and then... it spiralled.So, Rei's trauma stems in great part from Touya's destructives tendencies. And since Touya's issues come from his father, well, we can all happily blame Endeavor for thoughfully fucking up his whole family !
Would Enji rape his wife to get another child?
Toki thinks so. Rei doesn't. That's the beauty of a biased narrator x)
Horikoshi confirmed that although the relationship between Enji and Rei was physically and verbally abusive, it was never sexually so. But what if he had needed another child?
I think it would be 50/50 chances for canon-Enji. Coercision, not violent rape: but still icky in terms of consent. For wisdom-Enji, though, the stats are much lower. In "wisdom of the fallen", Enji and Rei had planned to use fertility clinics if Rei didn't want to sleep with him. So the sex was always an option but not an obligation. The children, though, were a duty.
And isn't being forced to carry a pregnancy a violation just as bad, if not worse, than an actual rape?Is Dabi a villain or a victim?
Both?
Canon shows it well (especially in the manga, during the Shouto VS Dabi fight in the War Arc). Dabi and Shouto both could have turned out very wrong, because they were both cold, angry, dismissive, lashing out, but not evil. But Shouto got love and care as he joined Yuei, and became kind. Dabi got rejection and dismissal, especially after running away, and became bitter.
Both had the potential for good and bad, and were shaped by their choices, but also their environement. Dabi was a selfish cruel kid, but he didn't *have* to become a selfish, cruel man. He made bad choices, inexcusable ones: but you have to remember that he wasn't offered a lot of good options either.
That doesn't mean you can justify what he's done. Toki doesn't. But she understands how he got here.
Anyway if you want to read a great fic about Rei, her flaws and her hopeless situation, i recommend the one-shot "A Means, A stage" on AO3. It's a very good read.
Here are some memes for the chapter! Thanks Kirumi =)
[LINK]
[LINK]
[LINK]And here is the Discord's gem about this chapter xD [LINK]
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/image013.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/image113.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i15.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/image311.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/parral10.png){kind=link}
Chapter 63: The wrong way to put out a fire
Summary:
You can’t be Quantum about this, Keigo had said, and he was right. Quantum was Toki, but Toki was more than Quantum. She was more than her suit, her cocky attitude, the cheerful insolence and the calm faith in her abilities. She was more than her mask, and more than her duty. Quantum was a hero, and a damn good one. She knew how to prioritizes, how to relegate her feelings to the background.
Toki couldn’t do that.
Toki was Quantum. She was a hero. She tried to do good things and be a good person. But Toki was also a Taiyōme. She was her father’s daughter, with Meteor’s fury and his bloodlust. She was her mother’s daughter, too, with Sayuri’s coldness and her unflinching resentment. Toki had the best and the worst of both her parents.
And she fucking hated Dabi.
Notes:
Yes, i shamelessly stole that title from canon. It seemed fitting.
Anyway ! A few of you caught it but last chapter, Toki was a really unrealiable narrateur because she refuses to sees the parrallels between Touya's issues and her own (neglect, abandonment, self-destructive Quirk, etc.). So she doesn't know why but she felt anxious and defensive listening to his story, and part of her want to lash out and blame the parents. Part of her ferociously want this story to have a blameless child as a victim, because that would be fair, that would be validating, that would soothe her own unhealed wounds after Sayuri's neglect.
But Dabi's story is not Toki's. And thus, Toki doesn't get the catharsis of a story with the same angish as her own and yet a simple resolution. No, instead Toki get a total mess where everyone filled the family with their own issues while staying blind and deaf to the toxic atmosphere, and a neurodivergent obsessive kid who built his entire identity around violence and unsatisfied anger.
Toki WANTS Enji to be the only one at fault. But he isn't. Everyone is at fault for making Dabi, even Dabi himself. And only Dabi is to blame for what Dabi did afterward.
It's just hard to accept for Toki, especially when she's in a mindset where she feel like he HAS to fix things to atone for her own sins.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
THE WRONG WAY TO PUT OUT A FIRE
Saving Dabi required Endeavor’s help, but enlisting Endeavor’s help required to tell him the truth. It was ironic since Toki had been trying so hard to investigate Dabi discreetly. Her only objective was to do so without involving Endeavor.
Damn it.
Toki knew it would wreck Endeavor to learn Dabi’s identity. Enji Todoroki was as sturdy as a mountain but beyond his gruff exterior, he loved his kids. It was a distant, clumsy sort of love, blanketed by guilt, fear, and loneliness. Grief, maybe. Probably.
It was all about the negative space, the things they didn’t talk about. Touya was dead, he was the one that Endeavor had failed to save. It must have destroyed him both as a hero and as a father. To think his son was alive… to think his son hated him, wanted to kill him, wanted to kill everyone he loved because there was nothing but rage and cruelty in him…
To think it was his son, but at the same time it wasn’t, it was some monstruous vengeful spirit wearing his face—
Yeah. That would be a punch in the gut for anyone.
To know you had hurt someone you loved… it was a special kind of pain. One that Toki knew all too well. But to learn that this person you had hurt, now loathed you, wanted you to die, was coming to kill you and worst of all, when you realized that you deserved it—
It was deeper and more desperate. It had wrecked Endeavor in canon. It had cut him to the bone. And now, in this universe where Endeavor cared more…
Toki didn’t want to tell him. It was going to hurt. It was going to hurt so much. Toki never wanted to hurt people. She hated doing it.
And besides that, it wasn’t strategically a good thing. Endeavor was the Number One hero. He wasn’t a Symbol like All Might had been, and the hero industry didn’t rely on him as much as they had with All Might, but… Endeavor was important. He was strong, he knew how to lead, he had experience. People relied on him. Civilians, but also heroes.
And they needed him. There was the Shie Hassaikai to destroy. There was the MLA still hidden in the shadows. There was the League, who was quiet for now but would inevitably come back. They needed Endeavor, and they needed him strong, determined, and ready to fight.
An emotionally compromised Number One was not what the country needed right now.
Toki had always known that the Todoroki would have to learn who Dabi was, if only because his body would be identified. But she had hoped she could make that reveal as painless as possible. It would really soften the blow, if they were told the truth and they could reunite with him. Reunite with Touya, saved and willing to reconcile, and not have to see Dabi whose eyes were full of hate and poised to strike.
It would hurt Endeavor to face Dabi. But it would also hurt all of Endeavor’s children. All of them. Shouto, Natsuo, Fuyumi; they would all be shocked, hurt, and betrayed.
It was never easy to learn that someone you loved was a monster. It would be easier for everyone if Toki brought in someone who was already repentant, rather than someone who wanted to barbecue all of them. It would be easier if she brought a monster who at least didn’t hate them.
Too bad that it wasn’t in the cards.
So, Toki needed to bring Endeavor on board. But… she could also postpone it, a little.
There was no rush. Unlike in canon, Dabi didn’t have access to national broadcasting, a good platform, or a situation where faith in heroes was shaken. He couldn’t do his dramatic reveal anytime soon, so Toki didn’t have to rush into that particular crisis just yet. She could solve the more immediate problems first.
Telling the truth to Endeavor would start a crisis and begin a frantic search for Dabi. She didn’t have the time for that. There was the Shie Hassaikai to arrest, the MLA to uncover, and Garaki’s Nomus to destroy. It was going to be hard enough without adding the Todoroki drama on top of that.
So she couldn’t tell Endeavor. Not right now, not when she was still figuring out what to do, and how to tell him. Because yeah, Endeavor was going to need to be involved if there was even a slim chance to make Dabi stop… But there was also a very high chance that, even if Endeavor stepped up, it would fail. That Dabi would rather die in a blaze of glory or in a fit of righteous anger.
Dabi was absolutely the guy that would kill himself to spitefully make his family suffer.
The next day, Toki left Neito at the Todoroki residence and entrusted Hinawa to Fuyumi (with Meteor hovering in the background), and then went to Fukuoka. She asked Keigo to take an hour off patrol, pretty please, and they meet in one of their favorite spots, on top of a skyscraper.
And she told him the truth about Dabi.
Keigo stared.
“When you said that you had a conspiracy theory about the Ghost Arsonist,” he said faintly, “I expected something along the lines of him being some washed-out candidate of the sponsorship program or maybe a distant relative or Hellmaker. I wasn’t expecting something like ‘oh, he’s the son of the Number One hero.’”
Toki laughed uneasily. “Whoops?”
“Whoops?” her husband repeated, incredulous. “WHOOPS? This is not a ‘whoops’ situation. We are far past whoops. ‘Whoops,’ is a distant speck in the rearview mirror. We are solidly in ‘oh fuck’ territory, and I expect you to act like it.”
“Oh, believe me, this is my ‘oh fuck’ face.”
Keigo let out a bark of almost hysterical laughter and sat down heavily. Then he put his head in his hands.
“Shit. Shit. If this come out… Endeavor’s credibility is going to take a blow. Faith in heroes will waver. Heroes are supposed to keep people safe, to be above reproach. They can’t… Fuck, if people learned about your father or mine, it would be bad, you know, and what they did was in the past. It had time to blow over. But Dabi is active now, and he’s actually one of the most deadly villains active today, and… Damn. How did that happen?! How did the son of a hero become a villain?”
Toki took a long breath. “Remember when I told you Endeavor was a shitty dad?”
Keigo raised his head, startled, and then his mouth flattened in a hard line.
“He beat him,” he said quietly.
Toki smiled ruefully and shook her head. “Oh, no. Endeavor did indeed beat one of his sons, but it was Shouto, and for training. He also smacked his wife around, in the last three years when his marriage went to shit. But Touya? Touya never got a bruise from his father. No, he got something way worse.” Her lips twisted, “He was the favored son, and Endeavor stopped paying attention to him.”
“… what?”
Toki told him the tale of Touya, cherished child who had one day been thrown away like expired food. And if her tone was bitter, she knew that Keigo understood.
Touya had had a big house, money, safety. He never had to choke on the guilt of not being able to save the people his parents were hurting, or to worry that one day his mother would abandon him on the sidewalk to starve. He never had to go hungry, to be afraid of being beaten, to be called worthless and filthy just for existing. Compared to Keigo and Toki, he had had an idyllic childhood.
And he was the one who had fucking ruined it.
Yeah, he had been in pain. He had been hurt. He was still hurting. It was very sad. But that didn’t make anything he had done fucking acceptable.
It just made Toki want to bash his skull with a baseball bat.
Oh, she would absolutely punch Endeavor in the face, too, for treating his own son like shit, for abandoning his own child just like Sayuri had basically abandoned Toki. But what Touya had done… and his motivation for doing so… It was so petty!
Toki hadn’t really had the time to mull it over, at Rei’s house. But after thinking about it, and recounting it all to Keigo? Thinking about the rich brat who decided to go on a murder spree because he was denied a toy wasn’t a sympathetic tale, even if you added the neglect and the betrayal on top of it. It made her so fucking enraged.
She had it worse than him! Keigo had it worse! But they weren’t killing people over it! All that pain and suffering just because Dabi was a selfish, entitled, cruel, violent little brat…!
What an asshole. Dabi had a sad childhood, but that was no excuse. Oh, Endeavor was going to bemoan that it was all his fault (even in his remorse, he was self-centered), but all those deaths? They were on Dabi’s hands. He was the one who had decided to kill innocent people. He was the one who had burned Hitoshi, murdered Neito’s mom, and all of that for what?! All those victims, all that collateral damage, all of that for what?!
Because Mom and Dad didn’t love him enough?!
Who the fuck did he think he was, to think that being miserable as a kid gave him the right to hurt people?! To hurt Toki’s people?
Toki had promised to try and save him. She would try and save him, and she would do her best. She was a hero, and she had sworn to do better. But some tiny, vindicative part of her hoped that Dabi would die.
She spitefully hoped that he would die screaming.
She told Keigo the tale. The golden childhood ripped away, the selfish streak, the obsessiveness. Endeavor’s own obsession with having a perfect heir. Rei’s mental breakdown. Touya’s volatile anger, building up until the explosion.
And now, Dabi.
“So now he’s on a murderous rampage because he’s obsessed with Endeavor,” Keigo said slowly.
Toki scowled. “Yeah. I mean, he’s still stuck on what was denied to him as a kid: a father who cared for him. It’s not wrong for him to want that. He was entitled to it. But he doesn’t have the emotional intelligence to know how to get it back. So he’s messed up. He’s lashing out. He has been for twenty years, give or take.”
Keigo looked half-pitying, half-disgusted. Toki understood the feeling. Even if she felt bad for little Touya who had been so lonely, so angry, so sad… She couldn’t help but want to snarl at his cruelty and his selfishness.
“And you’re going to take him down,” Keigo finally said. “Aren’t you?”
“Well, I’ll try. First, because he’s a major player in the League. He’s their only long-ranged fighter, and he can cause so much damage. If he’s taken down peacefully, it’s honestly one less worry. But also…”
She hesitated, then. The words stayed stuck in her throat.
I killed someone. I killed someone because I was angry and lashing out, because I was afraid and grieving. Because I was rash, and selfish, and because I could. Because it was easy. I killed someone, and even if it horrifies me, some monstruous part of me doesn’t regret it. Does that make me a monster, like him?
And if I am a monster… If we’re all monsters in disguises… Isn’t it hypocritical of me to condemn a villain for the same crime I committed? The only difference between us is that I got away with it.
“Taken down peacefully,” Keigo repeated. His golden eyes were undecipherable. “You want to try and bring Dabi to the Light Side of the Force, then. You think he can be… what, saved?”
“Meteor was!”
“Meteor wanted to. I doubt Dabi does.” He paused, looking at her almost calculatingly. “Is it because he’s a Todoroki? He got special treatment because of who is family is?”
Toki let out a long breath.
“It’s, in part, because he’s the most dangerous member of the League,” she said carefully. “They aim at the system, and it’s making them clumsy. But Dabi has a target, and the system is only a way to get to at it.”
In canon, the villains had had beliefs. Even Shigaraki had had convictions and dreams about enacting change. The League had formed around that. But Dabi? Dabi wanted to destroy society just to hurt one person. He didn’t have a vision, a dream, or even a hope. He only had an enemy.
That’s what made Dabi so dangerous. Because it gave him focus. Toki hadn’t forgotten that in canon, unlike Shigaraki, Dabi had reached his objective. He had weaponized the media and used his own story to crush faith in the heroes. He had effectively horrified the public and tarnished Endeavor’s image forever. He had also driven the man to despair, and violently hurt his family. It was all he wanted.
Of all the League of villains, Dabi was the most self-centered. The most heinous, the most unstable. The most obsessive. The most self-destructive.
But he was also the most dangerous.
“In part,” Keigo repeated neutrally.
“It’s also in part because he’s a Todoroki,” Toki admitted reluctantly. “It gives me a way to reach him that I don’t have with the other villains. And… I kind of owe Endeavor.”
Enji Todoroki had saved her father. Toki should at least try to save his son.
“It’s kind of unfair, isn’t it?” Keigo frowned. “The League are all villains, but only one of them got special treatment, because of who his daddy is.”
Toki clenched her fists, growling.
“I know. Believe me, I know. He’s the one who deserves it the least. I hate his guts. But he’s the one I can throw a lifeline to, so I will. What’s the other option? Should I say that since I can’t save the others, I’ll all let them die, even the one I could have saved?”
“Maybe they won’t die.”
“They will,” Toki said darkly. “You know some of them will, at least. Shigaraki, Dabi… They’re like Hellmaker. People like that aren’t interested in being taken alive. All they want is the world to burn.”
Keigo’s eyes softened, kind and sad. He knew. They had both seen death in their line of work. But Toki had mostly seen victims she couldn’t save. Keigo had also seen villains so blinded by their need to destroy that they killed themselves.
The cruel thing was that most of the time, those villains had also been victims, at some point. They had been hurt, and it had ripped a hole in them: something dark and foul and filled with hate, a hate that needed to pour out somewhere. It was good to want to save them.
But sometimes the only way to save them was to stop them.
“What are you going to do, then?” Keigo asked. “To make Dabi stop obsessing over Endeavor?”
Toki rubbed her forehead. That wasn’t exactly an easy question.
“Ironically, the only thing that would make Touya stop obsessing over his father, is his father’s attention. Or rather, his father’s attention is necessary for his family to heal together.”
Keigo’s eyebrows raised very high on his forehead. “You think that’s an option? And I thought I was the optimist!”
“I don’t know!” Toki exclaimed, throwing her hands up. “It would have been enough when he was ten, eleven, or even thirteen. Now? Ten years later? I have no idea if it’s enough. But that’s all I got, alright? That’s what would give him closure.”
“And once Dabi had closure and both parties established that they love each other and the family is finally together, then Dabi can finally heal,” summarized Keigo.
Toki nodded. “In a perfect world, yes. But Dabi isn’t just Touya, Dabi is ten years of festering rage and villainy. What could heal an infection and save the patient, isn’t the same thing that can heal gangrene.”
The metaphor made Keigo frown. He knew, like her, that when the infection had spread enough to cause gangrene, there was only one possible solution to try and save the patient. Amputation. Cut the rotten flesh and destroy it.
Toki hoped that she wouldn’t have to translate that metaphor to the Todoroki family.
“That’s why I can’t do it without telling Endeavor,” she finally said. “Only once he finally sees his son, Touya can move on. Not because he would forget about his father… because, let’s be honest, that’s never going to be an option… but because he’ll be secure enough to form relationships outside of his family. Basically, the need for validation that has been denied to him as a child would be fulfilled, and he would finally be able to mature and to look beyond that need.”
For a long moment, there was only silence. The sky was blue and clear. Down on the ground, there was the faint noise of traffic and the brouhaha of a busy city. It was the familiar background noise of Fukuoka that Toki could recognize with her eyes closed. It was peaceful, it felt like home.
Toki didn’t know why she felt so empty.
“Toki,” Keigo said very gently. “I know you will try. I know Endeavor will try. But you have to promise me that you’ll cut your losses. Some fights aren’t worth it. There are times when you have to kill someone to save them.”
Keigo’s eyes were dark and strangely sad. Toki bristled a little.
“I can do it.”
“Maybe.” There was no judgement in Keigo’s voice. “I know you feel like you have to save him, because he’s the only one you can save. Because you’re a hero, and saving people is what you do. But that doesn’t mean you should. This is the man who burned your little brother. He murdered your aunt. He’s threatening your father’s family. At some point you can’t be Quantum about this, you can only be Toki.”
Toki didn’t flinch when Keigo referred to the Todoroki as Meteor’s family, although part of her wanted to. He was right, and she knew he was right. That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt a little. Some things were too personal to be looked at with objectivity.
You can’t be Quantum about this, Keigo had said, and he was right. Quantum was Toki, but Toki was more than Quantum. She was more than her suit, her cocky attitude, the cheerful insolence and the calm faith in her abilities. She was more than her mask, and more than her duty. Quantum was a hero, and a damn good one. She knew how to prioritizes, how to relegate her feelings to the background.
Toki couldn’t do that.
Toki hated Dabi. She understood him better, now, but she still hated him. It had started because canon-Dabi mutilated canon-Hawks. In the end, even if those events didn’t come to pass, it was too late now for Toki to have a clear head about this. She had hated Dabi for the danger he posed to her family long before he laid his hands on Hitoshi, and ever since she had only hated him more.
If she had been someone else, maybe it would have been easier to listen to reason. Maybe it would have been easier to be calm and let compassion wash away the loathing bubbling in her chest each time Dabi was mentioned. But that couldn’t happen. Dabi had hurt her people. Her family.
Toki was Quantum. She was a hero. She tried to do good things and be a good person. But Toki was also a Taiyōme. She was her father’s daughter, with Meteor’s fury and his bloodlust. She was her mother’s daughter, too, with Sayuri’s coldness and her unflinching resentment. Toki had the best and the worst of both her parents.
And she fucking hated Dabi.
“I don’t want to be the kind of person who kill when faced with another choice,” she said stubbornly.
“You don’t have to be the one who save those who hurt you, either,” Keigo fired back. “And he hurt you. He hurt your fledglings. I understand that. You think I would let him live if he had singled a single hair on Hinawa’s head? Your family is bigger than mine, but it all boils down to the same thing. We keep them safe.”
Keigo wasn’t a Taiyōme by blood, but he had the instincts of a killer too. Born of a murderer, carrying the traits of a bird of prey, and raised a child-soldier… It was in him. That destructive potential had always been in him. Toki had dedicated her life to protect him so it wouldn’t be exploited, but…
But she knew who he was. That was why she loved him, too.
Toki let out a long breath, feeling bone-deep tired. She wanted to do the right thing, the good thing. She had promised herself. She just wished it was easier.
“I have to try, alright?”
“I know.” Keigo smiled, and his wing shifted so his feathers brushed her shoulder. “I love you for that. But if you can’t? I want you to know it’s okay.”
Toki blinked, a little thrown.
“If I can’t, he dies.” She hesitated. “By my hand, probably.”
She wanted him dead: she wasn’t sure she wanted to kill him. But if it had to happen, then… Then it had to be Toki. It would have to be her, because she couldn’t let it be Endeavor. It couldn’t be any of the Todoroki. It would be too cruel.
And it certainly wasn’t going to be Keigo. Never, as long as Toki drew breath.
“Yeah,” Keigo acknowledged seriously. “I know, but if someone has to die… better him than you.”
“Better no one, ideally. By definition, death is bad. Failure is bad.”
“It is,” Keigo agreed. “We don’t usually fail. We can’t. But sometimes all our options are bad. Picking the least bad one isn’t failure. Even if it meant someone dies. As long as that someone isn’t you.”
Toki smiled down at the city at their feet and reached out to take his hand. The leather of his gloves was warm. His fingers, when they squeezed her hand back, were steady and strong.
“I promise I won’t let him kill me.”
“You fucking better.”
oOoOoOo
Two days before the end of summer holidays, and the beginning of the new term of school, Toki’s own vacation came to an end. She logged back on the account of Toki Hoshizora for her online, part-time work, and started by asking to change her schedule. If she was going to be a homeroom teacher and a heroic teacher and a full-time hero and Neito’s primary guardian, she was going to need more flexibility for her deadlines.
Unfortunately, the lab was reticent to work with her. So Toki shrugged and just quit.
She had so much going on in her life that it was better to take a break from astrophysics than to lose time and energy on a job she didn’t need. Hoshizora could take a break. Quantum and Taiyōme had enough on their plate.
And then… She went back to Quantum’s life. Patrol, mostly. Quantum had been gone two weeks. That was already too long. Time to get back on the streets. Neito still spent his days with the Todoroki, at least, so she wasn’t very worried about leaving him to his own devices.
Not very much, at least.
She must have asked him a dozen times if he was alright. But hey, could Toki really be blamed? She felt responsible. Neito wasn’t just one of her fledglings, he was hers, too. He was literally family. Hell, she was his legal guardian. She was thinking about turning her office in her penthouse into a bedroom for him, because when he would be out of Yūei for holidays or stuff, then he would live with her. It was a big thing.
The Shinsō or the Todoroki would be glad to welcome Neito, but it wasn’t their job. Neito was Toki’s. She had to take care of him.
It was weird to not go and have dinner with the Todoroki family anymore. But it was nice to go back to her penthouse in Fukuoka and sleep in her own bed. It was nice to work, too. To see her sidekicks, to parkour all over the city, to say hello to fans in the streets, to check out how things were and what was going on.
Meteor went back to work pretty much the same day. His cast was finally removed. He had to keep the brace on his right wrist for one additional week, but still, he had sauntered to the Endeavor agency like a workaholic. Toki only hoped that he was going to use his newly healed hand to work, and not to climb Endeavor like a tree.
Urgh. She needed to bleach her brain.
Fortunately, work provided adequate distraction.
There would always be work for a hero. Accidents and the like, of course, but also turf wars and bullying that could turn nasty when you factored in the fact that everyone had superpowers. Ironically, even though the statistics of villainy hadn’t risen much, the streets were less peaceful. Everyone used their Quirks a little more freely now, and… as much as it could be good, giving more employment opportunity, it also created more trouble. Simple disputes blew up faster. Property damage had gone up.
In short, there weren’t many criminal wreaking havoc for the hell of it, but there were a lot of contrite high schoolers accidentally destroying shit. And, occasionally, grown men using their power to posture and intimidate each other, until one of them blew up… Sometimes, literally.
Toki tried to be philosophical about it. You win some, you lose some. She would take destroyed trash cans and a couple of bruises for a dozen people, rather than have a guy with a color-changing Quirk living under a bridge because he couldn’t find a job. Chaos was part of human nature. It was dangerous for people to use their Quirk carelessly but in the end, it could be even more dangerous to just stifle them indefinitely. Not just for them, who would never learn carefulness but for society, as a whole.
All of them suffered if those who could use their gifts were denied the chance to do so.
Yes, it was unfair that some people got to show-off flying, instant-repair, tornado-making hand-waving cool stuff, while other people got stuck with a cactus for a head. Maybe there had been some fairness in the old system, where the guy who could fly was forced to stay stuck on the ground by law, just like the guy with a cactus for a head.
But the world wasn’t fair. And it shouldn’t always be.
After all, if some people had wings and others didn’t, and the government wanted to enforce ‘fairness,’ then no one would have wings. Because wings couldn’t be redistributed, they could only be broken. Likewise, a government edict couldn’t make people smarter or more capable, but it can impede the growth of those with the potential. Wouldn’t it be fair if, in the name of equality, we scarred the beautiful, crippled athletes, lobotomized scientists, blinded artists, and severed hands of musicians?
So, in the past (and in canon), people were forbidden to use their Quirk in public, except to serve said government. It wasn’t necessarily safer to teach people to repress their Quirks instead of taming them, it was just easier. And most of all, it seemed fairer. It saved everyone a headache.
And nobody really cared about the lost opportunities, as long as there was order.
But the free Quirk use law had changed that. And yes, it made more work for heroes. More trouble, more dangerous civilians, more situations where you had to deescalate things. More actions, less high stakes, probably less glory in the evening news… But there were also less people driven to crime by hunger, anger, or desperation. Less frustration, less feelings of being stifled and unjustly treated. More opportunities, more creativity. Even the most pathetic Quirk could find a use, and now that using it wasn’t a crime anymore plenty of people with no skill and no other recourse had made themselves a niche without having to resort to villainy.
So. Routine resumed.
Toki patrolled the whole morning. She was with Thunder Thief, Ocelot and Sunspear, and the bickering provided the kind of background noise that she hadn’t even realized she had missed. They were all patrolling on different levels (Toki zapping from rooftop to rooftop, Ocelot moving through back alleys, and Sunspear and Thunder Thief walking in the open streets), but their coms were filled with chatter, as usual. It really felt like home. Toki couldn’t stop grinning.
“I’m just saying,” Thunder Thief claimed, raising his voice to cover Ocelot’s sputtering protestations over the coms, “The classic police-issued model of handcuffs is garbage. The hinge is…!”
“Must you always criticize everything?!” Sunspear exclaimed.
“It’s a gift. Besides, are you telling me you aren’t concerned with the reliability of your professional equipment?”
“I never had a problem with my handcuffs!”
“Didn’t you lose your keys last week?” Ocelot pointed out innocently.
“Whose side are you on?!”
“Being able to get out of handcuffs isn’t something you pick on the first try,” Thunder Thief reluctantly agreed. “But people with some practice can slip them off just like that! Imagine arresting a recidivist and them bailing on you. You’ll feel pretty stupid after that.”
“Please, it can’t be that easy.”
“It is. Do you have any idea how many times I had to get out of handcuffs? I can do it in ten seconds now.”
Ocelot, Sunspear and Quantum all paused.
“I thought you were never arrested?” Toki blinked.
“What do you mean arrest— Ah. Yes, absolutely, that’s why I was getting out of handcuffs, I was arrested. Ah ah.”
There was a beat and then everyone groaned. Sunspear even punched Thunder Thief in the ribs, making him squawk in protest. Toki squeezed her eyes shut.
“Ew, why did I ask?”
“It’s the triumph of hope over experience,” Sunspear said with resignation.
In the coms, Ocelot sniggered, and then immediately sobered. “I hear yelling in the park behind the Raijin school. Quantum…?”
“Yep, going to check it out.”
The job never stopped.
Patrol continued just fine. A brawl between teenagers, an argument between neighbors, a fire in an appartement caused by a kid trying to show off his firework Quirk to his friends for his birthday party (that was going to be one unforgettable birthday at least), two car chases, one cat saved from a tree, and five trash-cans cleaned later… Toki was caught up on all the gossip of the agency. It was good to listen to her friends’ chatter about what they had been up to while she was gone. Of course, she knew most of it already from Keigo, but they had also told her some hilarious anecdotes that her husband missed.
A calm patrol like this was also the perfect moment to think about strategy. Part of Toki’s brain was always absentmindedly pulling loose threads and contemplating the future, trying to unravel such-and-such plot-twist, to anticipate what fate and AFO were going to throw at her.
She had lessons plans to finalize. The kids were going to attend their provisional license exam soon; she needed to keep an eye on that and look for the traitor. Maybe needle Aizawa to learn more about what he had seen and heard during his spy sting with the League. Any intel was good. AFO may be in jail, but Toki needed to keep an eye on the League and to try and remember how canon had gone. She had to try to investigate in that direction to determine if the real world would go in the same direction. MLA was Keigo’s case, so she didn’t have to poke her nose into their business (yet) but keeping an eye on things wouldn’t hurt.
And she also needed to get ahead of the Eight Precept case.
It was still Sir Nighteye’s case, but Endeavor had apparently made inquiries to join the investigation. Nighteye was digging in his heels, unhappy to surrender his work to the agency of the Number One hero. Toki suspected that Nighteye was trying to build up Lady Siam’s reputation by having her arrest big criminals. Ending a drug ring and a yakuza group and an emerging villain powerhouse at the same time would probably slingshot Lady Siam in the top twenty of the next Billboard Chart. For now, Siam was only ranked in the sixty-something. It was very respectable for a young hero, especially one who didn’t have the support of the HPSC, but if Nighteye wanted his protegee to become a Symbol… then of course he was going to reach for more.
But they didn’t have the time to let Nighteye micromanage everything to take down the yakuza in a way that would satisfy his control-freak tendencies.
They needed the Shie Hassaikai taken down quickly so the League wouldn’t have time to connect with them, and so AFO wouldn’t find any trace of their research that would make him realize that what had happened to him wasn’t caused by their Quirk-erasing drug. It needed to happen fast.
It was a good thing AFO still hadn’t woken up from his coma. Barely two weeks had passed from the Kamino Battle, and he had been pretty damaged, so Toki wasn’t very surprised. With any luck he would stay in a coma for years. Or maybe awake in a vegetative state? She could hope, at least.
Eh. AFO turned into a legume, trapped in his brain with the Vestiges of the people whose Quirks he had stolen, haunted by ghosts playing saxophone horrible wrong or singing nursery rhymes in creepy voice to drive him insane. That was a funny image.
Maybe he wouldn’t manage to possess Shigaraki, in that state.
Wait, would he even manage to possess Shigaraki, if he didn’t have his Quirk anymore? Without it to make a bridge between their subconsciousness, was All For One going to leave his successor in peace?
Holy shit, what if the new holder of All For One established a mental connection with Shigaraki instead?!
No, no, back it up, Toki shouldn’t start waving around big theories like that when her only basis was some half-forgotten canon-knowledge. Quirks didn’t often get passed around like this… well, except for One For All, and that was a special case. Better not to make assumptions. She should focus on what was certain, instead of crazy hypothesis.
But, first things first: taking down the Shie Hassaikai.
Patrol, work, and the usual stuff. While apprehending criminals and listening to gossip, Toki also mentally adjusted her schedule to be class 1-A’s homeroom teacher without neglecting her duties to Fukuoka, but she also had a duty to hop around the country to help civilians and team-up with heroes outside of the Kyūshū island. It wasn’t easy to manage.
But it could be done. She managed to swing by Kyoto in the afternoon, after seeing on social media that Inferno would be there.
Just like her, he was wandering the prefecture to get more visibility and remind would-be-villains that he was here. It wasn’t hard to find him in the city, and they fell into step as easy as breathing.
It was great to see Inferno again. They had a blast fighting villains in a parking lot like delinquents, and there was even a crazy chase across the city to catch a runaway car. Inferno had a brand-new move with fire wrapping around his lower body and propelling him like the tail of a comet. It was obviously inspired from Endeavor’s fire-propulsion technique, that he had used during the Kamino battle.
“It’s a pretty cool move,” she noted appreciatingly.
“I know,” Inferno preened. “It was inspired by Endeavor, but I made it more elegant.”
“Yes, yes, you’re the best. But you better have some seriously fireproof pants.”
Inferno laughed, and shook his head fondly. “My support department hates me. I need to replace my costume at least once a month. When I debuted at Endeavor’s agency, there was a mad scramble to upgrade the fireproofing of their material, or I would just incinerate all my clothes in the middle of a fight.”
Toki grinned from ear to ear. “Wait, did you ever have to rescue someone buck naked?”
“Not recently,” he deadpanned.
Toki burst out laughing. He shoved her playfully, and added:
“It started a trend at the agency where people always gave me clothes as a gift. Burnin’ always got me horribly gaudy underwear. But Kidô must have my measurements, he always got me perfectly fitted shirts. I kind of miss it, it was very practical. I always had something to change in at the agency.”
“Do you want me to bring back that trend?” Toki smirked. “I could get Hawks and Salamander on it, too. Oh, and maybe Majestic.”
“You’re joking, but Salamander gifted me an apron for my birthday. He says that seeing me cooking shirtless offends him on a fundamental level.”
“Well, he’s right. That sounds a bit unsafe.”
“Quantum. I set myself on fire for a living.”
“… Good point.”
There was a brief silence, easy and companionable. Toki almost asked about the Shie Hassaikai.
What came out of her mouth was completely different.
“Do you miss it?” Toki suddenly asked. “Working for Endeavor, I mean.”
She knew the yakuza were supposed to be her next priority. She just… couldn’t stop thinking about the Todoroki. Endeavor, Dabi, the whole mess. The abuse. The hardness in Rei’s eyes when she had mentioned it.
Toki didn’t dislike Endeavor. He was someone Meteor loved, that meant that he was by default one of her people too. But she knew he had done bad things.
She just… didn’t know how to feel about all of it.
“Oh, yeah,” Inferno hummed. “I mean, he had so many resources. He was an amazing mentor. And the whole agency was great. Endeavor isn’t just a workaholic with a burning need to close cases, he also hires every workaholic with a burning need to close cases that he runs into. Some of them at the scene of the crime they just committed, if he thinks he can keep them honest. It’s pretty admirable.”
“Wait, he hired criminals before?!”
“Vigilantes,” Inferno corrected. “He arrests them, they get sentenced to community service or a heavy fine, and then he hires them without caring about their records. Except for the receptionist Kiriko, who was just a good old-fashioned arsonist. He arrested her the week I joined the agency, and within a year she was hired.”
“I had no idea.”
Inferno shrugged. “Why would you? It’s not an official HPSC-sponsored program. It’s not even public knowledge. It’s just that if you look into the personal civilian background of some sidekicks, you’ll notice they have a criminal record.”
“So Meteor wasn’t the only criminal he rehabilitated,” Toki muttered.
“Well, he was the first real criminal, yeah. The first murderer, the first Tartarus inmate, the first S-ranked villain. But they were other lawbreakers before. Endeavor knows the world isn’t black and white. What matters isn’t the purity of their immortal soul. What matters is only if they can help. I think Meteor’s criminal record barely phased him. Endeavor is one of the few heroes who has no reluctance with working with villains, whether they’re redeemed or not.”
Toki digested that for a few seconds.
That explained why Endeavor had had consultations with Meteor in Tartarus. That also explained why he had pushed for conditional liberty and felt confident that he could handle a villain at his back. That also, weirdly, explained why Endeavor had considered Meteor a person, and had even become friends with him, rather than to hide behind the insurmountable barrier of the categorization between heroes and villains.
No other hero did that. Meteor would have never gotten out of jail without Endeavor. It hadn’t been a question of opportunity, of luck, or even about a peculiar case requiring Meteor’s specific expertise. It had been about Endeavor. About Endeavor’s willingness to look beyond the appearances, and about Meteor’s response to that.
Urgh.
“Why did you leave if it was so wonderful?” Toki finally asked.
Inferno shrugged again.
“Why do kids move out of their parents’ house even when they’re in good terms? I wanted to see new things. I wanted to be more than one of his sidekicks. I wanted to do my own investigations, have my own contacts, get out of his shadow. Have my own space, you know? Stretch my wings.”
“I can get that,” Toki nodded. “But was he good to work with? I mean, not just as a boss, but as an individual.”
Inferno side-eyed her. “Are you worried about your father again?”
Toki made a face.
“No, not really. Those worries were definitely put to rest. But I’m just wondering how he is, you know, in general. I’ve teamed up with him once. I’m teaching his son. One of my friends is dating his daughter. I have a feeling we’re going to see a lot more of each other.”
“Oh.” Inferno smiled, a little wistfully. “You know, you could probably get along really well. He’s not very funny, I’ll give you that, but… I think you’ll come to appreciate the man he’s behind the growls and the flames. The relentless problem-solver, the unshakable idealist, the brutally analytical boss. The man who’s never satisfied.”
Toki thought about that. Inferno wasn’t wrong, she had seen those facets of Endeavor before, and she had respected him for it, as a hero. But… She had also seen the clumsily contrite father, who awkwardly tried to take as little space as possible in his own home. The reliable fighter, who could go toes-to-toes with the Symbol of Evil without fear.
The man who checked Meteor for injuries with a frown of worry and laughed at his joke before pushing him in motor oil with a grin.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to say that we would get along really well,” Toki muttered. “But… He’s not that bad.”
And she didn’t want to hurt him. But she was going to have to. She was going to need to. It was inevitable. The whole Dabi situation couldn’t be solved cleanly. And it couldn’t be solved without Endeavor’s involvement, either.
What a mess.
It was a problem for another day. She steered the conversation away from Endeavor. She and Inferno talked some more about work. Inferno made her laugh to tears when he narrated how Salamander had caught a cat bulgar he had been chasing for a while. In the end, the poor fucker had been cornered during a wild chase… and fallen spectacularly into a storage unit. Inferno was even a little choked up when he recounted the story.
It turned out that said storage container had been purchased by Salamander before the chase and had been mutilated to include a hole in its top, covered with a tarp. The idiot had fallen, literally fallen, right into that shitty trap. Salamander and Inferno had both been so charmed by this that they’d named the mission Operation Wile. E. Coyote.
Toki had suddenly the urge to tell Inferno about the MLA, about Keigo’s plan to enlist Bakugo’s help; about Beros, and the blood on her hands; about Neito, their newly discovered connection; about how in-over her head she felt. It was irrational, but she wanted someone to take a little of that burden, to lighten the load, and she trusted Inferno. She trusted him more than Endeavor, more than Meteor; not as much as Keigo, but she didn’t feel the need to protect him like she didn for Keigo. Inferno was older than her, and he had always felt like a senpai, an older brother, someone who could protect her.
She wanted to tell him. She didn’t.
She was a professional and she could keep secrets. Even when they were so heavy, even when it was exhausting.
So Toki didn’t tell him. What would be the point anyway? He couldn’t help. And if one day he could, then Toki knew she only had to ask, and he would provide whatever assistance was necessary, no question asked.
That was what friends were for, after all.
oOoOoOo
School would resume tomorrow. Toki had already helped Neito move in the dorms completely. She had offered to help Shouto, too, but he wanted to spend his last day with his siblings; Fuyumi had planned to bring them all to see a movie.
That day was pretty calm. Toki patrolled, and then she had lunch with her father.
It was just like they used to do before the Kamino Battle, to get to know each other in a neutral setting. It had been two whole days no that she hadn’t seen him, since they had both resumed work, and… it was a little jarring, after spending two weeks basically always together. Toki wouldn’t say that she missed him, but… she had liked their lunches.
It was a little weird to meet each other in public, a restaurant, like two strangers having a business conversation. Especially after eating so many meals in the Todoroki’s living room or bickering while doing the dishes. But it was also kind of nice.
Like a Taiyōme family tradition. One that didn’t involve murder.
At noon, Toki warped back in Shizuoka, near a fancy restaurant that Meteor had picked. She hastily changed into a civilian outfit that was more suited to the oppressive heat than her hero costume, and then joined Meteor on the terrasse. He was always the first to arrive. This time he had barely bothered removing his hero costume. The armor and the utility belt were absent, as was the visor, and he had tossed a jacket over his t-shirt to look more polished. He also wore sunglasses indoors, which should make him look like a douchebag but only gave him a mysterious look.
He was blending in perfectly, not a hair out of place, and yet he also managed to attract attention. At least three waitresses converged on him when he made a show to look around. Toki wondered if he had always had that effortless charisma, and if she simply hadn’t noticed when she was little. Even as a kid, she had remarked that he always commanded attention when he entered a room.
When Toki slid in her chair, he raised his sunglasses on his head to smirk at her, and she couldn’t help but roll her eyes with fondness. Always so theatric.
“Munchkin.”
“Dad. How is your hand?”
He took a pair of chopsticks in his left hand and made them twirl between his fingers, before vanishing them like a magician. You wouldn’t believe he had his cast removed only yesterday.
“Good as new. What have you been up to?”
Toki told him about patrol and the latest gossip at her agency, and how all the sidekicks had collectively pranked Kameko by replacing her tea with catnip. The joke had actually backfired a little because it turned out that Kameko liked catnip. No, it was horrendous to drink… but you could smoke it.
It turned out that stoned-Kameko was very relaxed.
It also turned out that Hayasa-sensei, having to manage a stoned-Kameko and the paperwork that not-stoned-Kameko usually managed, had given the sidekicks the dressing-down of a lifetime. Sunspear still cringed thinking about it.
(Toki wondered if Hayasa-sensei had also laughed hysterically in his office afterwards. She would bet he had. Under his stiff exterior, Hayasa-sensei had a healthy sense of humor. He had to, to survive cohabitation with Toki and Keigo for their entire childhood!)
When Meteor was done sniggering, he tried to top that with a story of his own agency’s gossip, but of course Toki’s was better. At some point they started hypothesizing about what their various acquaintances would be if stoned out of their mind. Their conclusion was that the Endeavor Agency would probably be a fire hazard, but it may be worth it, just for the chance to make Burnin’ tell stories of her youth. Apparently she had been a ballet dancer and had worked in a farm, and both things were so at odds with what Toki imagined of the sidekick that she refused to believe it without tangible proof.
By the time their food arrived, and they started eating, Toki and her dad had moved on other topics, fortunately, or else Toki would have ended up very tempted to just put cannabis in the Endeavor Agency’s ventilation system.
You know, for science.
“Can I ask your expertise as an underground hero?”
Meteor raised an eyebrow, looking intrigued. “Sure. What about?”
“Yakuza.”
Yep, she was still thinking about the Shie Hassaikai. And if she had an expert on hand, why not use it? Hayasa-sensei was a good underground hero, true, but he didn’t have the same kind of inside knowledge that Meteor did.
“That’s new,” Meteor blinked. “What do you want to know?”
“What are yakuza today, I guess. They’re supposed to be something from the past, but they’re apparently still around. So did they die out, did they transform, or did they become villains?”
“Depends on the yakuza.” Meteor leaned back against his seat, voice pensive. “The underlings usually turned to villainy. Their actions didn’t change, but the labels did, and they stuck with it because villainy gave them more respect than the affiliation to an outdated system.”
Toki thought about that old gang she was still after, the Firelights, in Kyūshū. The ones who came from an old yakuza family. They were indubitably villains now, but their organization was more like a mob than a traditional villain crew.
“But not all yakuza changed,” she said.
“True,” Meteor agreed. “People raised with the old values, though, that’s a different story. They are the minority, but they keep the legends of yakuza alive. The code of chivalry, the rituals, all of it. It’s harder for him to make money, though, because they lost much of their intimidation factor when everyone around them started being able to fight back. And heroes are watching them, which really hinder them. They need secrecy to be able to operate. You won’t find them openly robbing banks, but you may find them laundering the money.”
Toki drummed her fingers on the table, pensive:
“Mmmh. Did you hear about the Shie Hassaikai?”
Meteor narrowed his eyes: “That’s not one of your cases.”
Toki was choosing to think he said that because the Shie Hassaikai were located far away from Kyūshū, and not because he was stalking her.
Although it was entirely possible that Meteor had looked up that case in particular. Endeavor was pushing to get involved in that case too… And if it came to storming the base of a powerful villains, Meteor would probably be on site. Damn.
“It’s not,” Toki sighed. “It’s Sir Nighteye’s. It’s the agency of…” she took a breath, because yeah, he was never going to let her live this down, “… my great rival.”
As expected, Meteor lit up in glee. “You have a great rival?!”
“She’s the one who declared us rivals! I didn’t ask for it!”
“But you’re not protesting the title!”
“Well, that would have been rude,” Toki huffed indignantly. “… and if I avoided it, I would look afraid of being beaten in our non-existing competition.”
Also, it was kind of flattering to have someone meet you and immediately declare you the best standards to which they could measure up. Especially when that someone was Lady Siam: loud and over-excited, true, but also charismatic, strong, radiating an aura of righteousness reminiscing of All Might’s.
Still, Meteor seemed to find it hilarious. Toki pouted and stole a piece of beef in his bowl in retribution.
“As it happens, I know of the Shie Hassaikai,” Meteor finally said, growing serious again. “They laundered money for me, before my arrest. They were more Sayuri’s contacts than mine, to be honest. But they did the job.”
Toki made a face. Somehow it didn’t surprise her to learn that her mother rubbed elbows with mobsters. Meteor was too wild and disrespectful. But Sayuri knew how to become exactly what was expected of her, to present a mask so perfect that you didn’t even realize she had more facets until the day you ended up on the wrong end of her displeasure. Sayuri was the perfect spy, the perfect chameleon. She belonged everywhere.
And then Toki thought of her mother’s demands and how she used to look through Toki, not at her; how Sayuri had wanted more, hadn’t even been happy with the utter devotion of her own child; how Sayuri was the member of the Crew how hung out the least at the hideout… Toki amended her previous thought.
Her mother had been a chameleon, but Toki didn’t think Sayuri had been happy like that. Sayuri could fit in with any entourage and in all situations. She could fit in anywhere… and yet, she didn’t belong anywhere.
“But they changed a lot since then,” Meteor continued. “They are the perfect example of old values losing their strength, and the yakuza family turning to plain villainy. Their new boss even employs a relative of Vicious.”
“What, really? Vicious, the villain that Endeavor arrested?”
Meteor glowered. “The human trafficking one, yes. Look up Rikiya Katsukame. He has a Quirk too similar to Vicious’ to not be related. I think he’s one of his bastard sons.”
Toki almost asked why Meteor talked about Vicious as if he had several bastard sons, then she remembered that Vicious deals in human trafficking and multiple rapes had occurred in his business.
She clenched her jaw and didn’t ask.
“You kept track of all of Vicious’ relatives?”
“Endeavor did.” Meteor hesitated a fraction of second, eyes calculating. “It was part of our original deal, that nobody involved would be able to weasel their way out. Every rat that left the ship was caught, and even brought down the groups they had joined for protection. Only three people managed to avoid the fallout: all of them victims. One of them was Katsukame. He hadn’t been involved in Vicious’ dealings since his father sold him to a fighting ring at age ten.”
“He was sold?”
“Yes. He managed to buy back his freedom after a few years, which means that his buyer took all his money and kicked him to the curb when he ended up too injured to fight. That must be when the yakuza picked him up.”
Saved after being left for dead by his abusers, huh? If that guy was one of Overhaul’s underlings, that would explain his undying loyalty.
Frustratingly, Toki didn’t know much about Overhaul’s forces. She had Inferno’s notes, but she remembered almost nothing from the canon. The Eight Precept Arc hadn’t been one of her favorites, so she had mostly glossed over it. She remembered Eri, she remembered the Quirk-erasing drugs, she remembered Overhaul and his final fight against Midoriya in canon. She recalled that Overhaul had cronies in bird masks and that the supporting characters had fought them during the raid, but… yeah, she would have been completely incapable to name even one of them.
Great.
“You’re going against them?” Meteor frowned.
Toki shrugged, “Yeah, probably.”
Meteor opened his mouth, then seemed to think better of it, and closed it. He chewed on his tongue for a few seconds, and finally said:
“I could help.”
“It’ll be fine. I’ll have Inferno and Siam and plenty of people. Don’t worry.”
“… Alright. Be careful.”
Toki was startled by his easy acceptance, but not as much as she would have been two weeks ago. She smiled, grateful, and diverted the conversation away from the yakuza and their dangers.
Yeah, she would be fine. She would have plenty of support, and the Shie Hassaikai would be taken down more easily than in canon, if more heroes teamed up against them. Sir Nighteye didn’t want to bring Endeavor on the case and would probably argue that they already had a fire-type hero with Inferno, but he couldn’t refuse Toki’s help. Besides, Lady Siam and Inferno would both be happy to have her support.
So Toki wasn’t too worried. She wanted to tackle this quickly. As fast as possible, too, because not only do the yakuza need to be eliminated before AFO starts investigating the loss of his Quirk, but also because there was a very high probability than, like in canon, the yakuza were abusing Eri.
Did they even have Eri in this universe? Probably, because Salamander had said that they were working on something to do stuff about Quirks… but Salamander had only hypothesized that the Eight Precept were making a Quirk-erasing drug. He hadn’t found proof. And if the yakuza had had Eri, anyway, would they even need to try and kidnap Eraserhead, like they had tried to do?
Toki didn’t know how close to canon the Eight Precept were. Maybe they were exactly like in canon; but maybe they were wildly different, impacted by the butterfly effect in ways Toki couldn’t have imagined.
Maybe seeing Melissa be an awesome Quirkless hero had thoroughly disintegrated Overhaul’s quest to destroy Quirks because he had realized that the hero-mania permeating this country had infected even Quirkless people. Maybe the yakuza boss who had adopted Overhaul hadn’t given him his granddaughter to experiment on, because for some reason there had been a better nanny available.
Maybe Eri hadn’t even been born. She was supposed to be, what, four? Maybe her mother had been waylaid by traffic block on the night she was supposed to get laid, because said traffic block was caused by a villain chase that hadn’t happened in canon, but had happened there because Toki or Keigo, freshly debuted and jumping all over the country, had decided to shake things up in the prefecture.
Toki couldn’t know. This world wasn’t canon. This world hadn’t been canon since Toki had been born.
She had to treat canon like a trusted source who suffered from memory problems, in a way. Take clues but do her own digging. Adapt. Not form any preconceived ideas. Roll with the punches.
Anyway. They ate, they chatted about their cases. After lunch, they both went their separate ways, back on patrol in two different cities. Meteor went back to Shizuoka; Toki had decided to patrol Musutafu, to check things around Yūei just in case.
It was always kind of weird to see Meteor go, slinking like a predator like he used to do as a villain, and yet moving in the light with the kind of self-confidence that came with legitimacy. It had been a little over six weeks since Toki and her father had reunited, and she still managed to be taken by surprise.
At least it was a nice surprise. A few years ago, she would never have imagined ending up there, sharing lunch in Shizuoka with her father, a hero. She had Endeavor to thank for that.
Still, she had also Endeavor to thank for many problems in her life. Like what happened that very evening.
The day had been going great, so Toki should absolutely have expected something karmic to happen at one point. That was just how the word worked: when you felt like you were on top of things, obviously shit was about to go down.
And, like so many dramatic things in her life, it came from her entanglement with the Todoroki family.
It was late in the afternoon, but still early enough in the evening that Toki hadn’t left the prefecture to go back to Kyūshū. She had caught two shoplifters (and let one go, because he was stealing baby food for his toddler at home, and that was just sad), stopped three altercations, and prevented about a dozen accidents, but nothing groundbreaking had happened, so she was directly wrapping up her patrol by taking the long way around the Shinsō’s neighborhood.
Her phone pinged halfway through, though. She looked at the contact and raised her eyebrows very high. It wasn’t someone she had ever expected a text from.
> The Flamed And The Frozen: Hello, Quantum. I need assistance.
Toki considered the text a second. Then she changed the contact to Strawberry Shortcake.
To preserve her privacy and the anonymity of her various heroic or civilian contacts, Toki only saved their numbers with nicknames. Hayasa-sensei had once commented that reading through her repertoire felt kind of like having a stroke. Toki thought he was prissy because he was registered as Not-Dad in the folder “family.” The alphabetical order put him under Honey <3, and right before Senpai (The Hot One). Sure, it wasn’t very dignified. But Hayasa-sensei should be flattered to even know about her little system. There weren’t many people who could browse through Toki’s phone and not immediately be put in a chokehold.
Toki had even saved Endeavor’s number in her contacts, in the folder for “family,” under the name That Fucking Asshole. She didn’t like the guy, but he was one of Meteor’s. That made him family. Urgh.
< Me: sure, what for?
> Strawberry Shortcake: I talked to my siblings.
Toki stared at her phone. For a moment, it didn’t compute. She had been so focused on the Dabi situation that she had completely forgotten there was another minefield in the family: and when she remembered, her stomach dropped.
Shouto had told his siblings about Meteor fucking their dad.
Shit.
< Me: about what?
> Strawberry Shortcake: they want to talk to you.
< Me: Shouto
< Me: what have you DONE
> Strawberry Shortcake: I was honest
< Me: Why?!
> Strawberry Shortcake: I go back to school tomorrow so I was hoping to not be there for the cool-down
> Strawberry Shortcake: The risk was calculated.
Toki growled under her breath. It would have been simpler if Shouto had kept his mouth shut. It was just a little lie! It wasn’t bad!
… Although she knew it wasn’t completely exact. No lie was without repercussion. Or rather, it wasn’t the lies that caused problems, but someone finding out the truth later on.
And someone always found out the truth. Always.
At least today, the Todoroki siblings were safe and sound at home and Endeavor wasn’t there. Toki would rather not imagine the explosion if they had found out during a crisis, in front of their father.
< Me: Let me guess. The risk was calculated, but you are bad at math?
> Strawberry Shortcake: Natsuo is yelling
> Strawberry Shortcake: do something.
< Me: what did you say to him?!
> Strawberry Shortcake: I don’t see how the progression of the conversation is of any interest. I requested assistance. As a hero, aren’t you obligated to provide it?
< Me: GOD
< Me: I kind of want to wash my hands of this and let your father deal with it.
< Me: he deserves the karmic retribution
> Strawberry Shortcake: You were very helpful when I had questions. Why can’t you help my siblings too?
Shit.
Toki really didn’t want to play peacekeeper in the Todoroki home. Their trauma was very real, raw and suffocating in a way that echoed Toki’s own bad memories in a very uncomfortable manner.
She knew the Todoroki now. She had spent time with them, she liked them. And they had always, always avoided talking about Endeavor. They knew it was an explosive subject. They had never talked about him, or their past, or Rei, or Touy… and it had been good. It had been simple, and quiet.
It had made the house feel nice. Feel a little like a home, like a place where Toki was happy to come back every day.
Why couldn’t things stay simple like this?
Who was she kidding? She knew why things couldn’t stay simple. Because Endeavor wasn’t just the guy who happened to date (for lack of a better term) Meteor, he was also the guy who had hurt the Todoroki siblings for years. Now he had lied to them, for months, in their own house. The Todoroki were right to feel betrayed when learning that their very married father had been bringing home his booty-call and hiding the truth from them. The fact that they felt betrayed was going to bring back to the surface every ugly thing Endeavor had done to them in the past, and… there were a lot of those.
Toki was not going to be afforded the luxury of avoiding their drama any longer. It wasn’t an option. The Todoroki issues (and especially the ones about Enji Todoroki’s romantic life) were now the Todoroki-Taiyōme issues, and somehow Toki was already neck-deep in this whole disaster.
Damn it.
< Me: are you guilt-tripping me?
> Strawberry Shortcake: Neito said it works.
< Me: … it does.
< Me: shit. I’ll be here in five minutes.
< Me: but as soon as school resumes, I’ll make you write an essay on the merits of discretion and diplomacy.
< Strawberry Shortcake: Thank you.
> Me: Don’t thank me yet.
Toki took a deep breath. She disconnected her visor, signaling the end of her patrol. It was ten minutes early, but hey, she had done so many hours that she really didn’t have to worry about filling out her quotas.
She warped back in Shizuoka. Back to the drama of the Todoroki family.
Great.
Notes:
So much stuff happening in this chapter! We get foreshadowing for the next arc, and then for the Shie Hassaikai arc. We learn a surprise info about Kiriko, Endeavor's receptionist! You will know her if you read "wisdom of the fallen". We get some quality content about Meteor! We gets talks about yakuza!
And of course... more Todoroki drama incoming.In case you haven't noticed it, about the title of this chapter... The wrong way to put out a fire is to ignore it.
Here are some memes for the chapter! Thanks Kirumi =)
[LINK]
[LINK](Also, sorry to disapoint, but this arc will only deal with the "tame" Todoroki drama. The Dabi reveal will happen later, because it will need several chapters of its own xD If you hoped for a complete resolution... you're going to hate to wait AT LEAST until chapter 80 ! xD)
![[LINK]](https://i.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/image014.jpg){kind=link}
![[LINK]](https://i.servimg.com/u/f15/14/74/72/16/image114.jpg){kind=link}
Chapter 64: Old bruises and aching scars
Summary:
“Sorry,” Toki said lamely.
That’s what she had been saying for the past five minutes. For someone who had played absolutely no part in his train-wreck, she felt like she was apologizing a lot. Endeavor was going to owe her so much for this.
Notes:
I nearly forgot to post today because my missing kitten came back and he's limping. My poor baby. My tiny Bandit!!!!
Anyway.
I realized as i wrote this chapter that the first chapter of the Todoroki Arc is called "time heal all wounds". But the last chapter of that arc is called "old bruises and aching scars." So basically Toki starts this arc hopeful about healing her trauma and everyone having a happy ending, and in the end she realizes the struggle is never over. Sometimes, time and good will aren't enough.
The pain is numbed, never erased.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
OLD BRUISES AND ACHING SCARS
Family therapy wasn’t something that Toki had ever thought about. Ironical, considering that she didn’t know a single individual coming from a healthy, normal family.
I mean, Hitoshi had been raised by his mom all alone, with multiple miscarriages, and his dad loved him but it was a completely acknowledged fact that he loved his job more. Neito’s mom had been an addict, and sick, and Neito had been raised by his grandparents before basically having to raise himself while his mom was either on tour or shut down in rehab. Melissa’s parents had had a marriage of convenience, which her mom had broken off when she had found out that their baby girl was Quirkless. Sachiko hadn’t spoken to her parents in years and low-key carried the guilt of being a burden to them. Keigo was best left unmentioned.
And of course, Toki herself had put her dad in jail and her mom in the grave. So, you know.
Yeah, Toki didn’t know even one family that was normal. That hadn’t shocked her. Actually, knowing a normal family would kind of be an abnormality, in this crazy world, with the crazy life that she led.
But even by her fucked-up standards, she knew that the Todoroki family had quite the chip on their shoulder.
And yet she was here. Because Meteor had thought that screwing Endeavor was a good idea, because Endeavor had become an enthusiastic participant in this trainwreck, because becoming a Yūei teacher meant that Shouto was Toki’s responsibility, because Shouto was also friend with her two fledglings, because Sachiko’s girlfriend had a gift for finding trouble… and also, mostly, because Toki was a hero.
It meant she had a habit of getting involved into stuff that shouldn’t concern her.
That’s what had led her there, in the Todoroki’s living room, bombarded by the questions of a tearful Fuyumi and an angry Natsuo. How long as it been going on? Is it true? When did you know? How did it start? Who started it? Were they already together the first time we met Meteor? Why did they tell you? Does our mother know? Is it really true?!
Toki didn’t have the answer to most of those questions. All she could do was let them rant and vent. Especially Natsuo. And let me tell you, it was kind of a strange experience to have someone who didn’t have Endeavor’s height or muscle loom over her with Endeavor’s intimidating glare and jawline. She had never seen Natsuo angry before.
And right now? Natsuo was pissed. If he had a fire Quirk, he would be flaring up like his father. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Shouto was utterly unfazed. And Fuyumi… well, she wasn’t crying, but her voice was unsteady, and she was visibly upset.
“I was hoping Dad would get back with Mom,” Fuyumi confessed, voice trembling a little. “Part of me never stopped hoping for us to be a family again.”
“Sorry,” Toki said lamely.
That’s what she had been saying for the past five minutes. For someone who had played absolutely no part in his train-wreck, she felt like she was apologizing a lot. Endeavor was going to owe her so much for this.
Natsuo let out a disdainful snort.
“Don’t be. We never were a family.”
“We were!” Fuyumi protested. “We were happy, you just don’t remember it because everything started to go wrong after you were born.”
“Oh?” Natsuo sneered. His knuckles were white with how tightly he was clenching his fists. His voice was almost a growl. “So it’s my fault now?”
Fuyumi backpedaled:
“No! I mean… When you were born, Touya got worse, and then Mom and Dad did it too, until…”
“Oh, great, blame Touya now! It’s not like he can defend himself, now! Because he’s dead! He’s dead, and it’s the old man fault!”
“You know it isn’t true! Dad wanted Touya to stop training, and…”
“He’s the one who made Touya so desperate to train! It’s his fault! He’s the one who started it all. He was an abusive piece of shit, don’t you dare pretend he was innocent.”
He glared at Fuyumi when he said it. Toki may be mistaken, but it seemed that for a fraction of a second, Natsuo’s eyes shifter to her, silent and very uncomfortable witness to this new crisis, as if to check that she was listening
Resignedly, Toki realized that she wouldn’t escape a scene.
But before she could open her mouth to try and redirect the conversation towards the topic at hand, or even acknowledge that Endeavor had been a flaming piece of garbage to his children during years, Shouto shifted at her side. When she looked at him, he was looking at Natsuo with narrowed eyes.
“He never raised a hand against me outside of training.”
Toki boggled at him. What, Shouto was defending Endeavor now? What kind of parallel universe was this?!
“Yeah, right,” Natsuo sneered. “He still treated you like some mindless tool not allowed to have an opinion. And what about training? I saw how wrecked the dojo was, once!”
“The training was meticulously designed to not damage me. It was modeled after the programs used to train young Olympians in the pre-Quirk-era. My worst injury was a broken arm, and it was because I got dizzy and fell while practicing, not because he hit me.”
“Does it make it fucking okay?! He punched you so hard you puked, he made you train until exhaustion, he isolated you, and the way he treated us all, and— and— and everything?! You think it was okay? You think it was fine?!”
Shouto looked away. There was a long, tense silence.
“… No.”
“Damn straight it wasn’t,” Natsuo growled.
Toki let out a long breath. She needed to calm him down, but she didn’t know what to say. For once, she had trouble choosing her words. She floundered.
She remembered Rei’s story. She remembered the steel in those grey eyes, the sadness, the regret. Endeavor had mistreated his entire family. All of them. And he had no excuses for choosing to do that, just like Dabi had no excuses for what he was doing as a villain. No excuse at all.
What can you say, when you’re faced with something like that? What can you tell to someone who’s rightfully angry at having been treated like trash for years? There was no way to sugarcoat it.
“I’m sorry for what happened to you in the past,” Toki said very deliberately.
Natsuo glowered at her. He was working himself in a slow fury, a storm brewing up behind his eyes, every word dripping venom.
“You’re sorry?!” he spat. “You don’t even know the half of it. You would rather not know, and just let it go, let him start over and forget the past because it’s convenient!”
“That’s not what I said,” Toki replied evenly.
But Natsuo wasn’t really wrong. Toki didn’t hate Endeavor. She knew he had been a bastard, but he wasn’t anymore, he was atoning. He hadn’t done anything to her, personally. On the contrary, he had been pretty good to her. He had been good to Meteor. He had even been nice to Hinawa.
So yes. Toki wanted to move on, wanted to forgive. And she felt bad about it, because clearly, the Todoroki kids weren’t ready for it.
“Oh yeah?” Natsuo growled. “Well, do you know what he’s done? He was a piece of shit. He was a piece of shit to all of us. He treated Shouto like a tool; but the other kids, the rejects, the failures…he discarded us like trash. I didn’t care; I almost never saw him, he was basically a stranger. But our brother Touya… He wanted so hard to be loved, to prove his worth. And that shitty old man kept telling him he was worthless, over and over, until Touya torched himself on Sekoto Peak.”
Touya isn’t dead, Toki suddenly wanted to say. Touya is alive, and he burned Hitoshi, he killed Neito’s mom. Even before that, he terrified your mother. He was a selfish, cruel piece of shit, and he still is. He isn’t dead. Your brother still walks this Earth and his path is littered with ashes and blood. Would that make you happier? Would you be relieved to learn that your father is innocent of that crime, and that the monster was Touya all along? Would you be fucking happy then?!
She couldn’t say that. It wasn’t her place. And how the hell was she supposed to drop that bomb in a conversation anyway? Besides, Natsuo didn’t really want her to reply. All he wanted was to vent, to rage, to grieve.
But Fuyumi shook her head violently, and blurted out:
“That’s not true! Touya’s Hellflame was hurting him. Dad stopped training him as soon as he realized. Touya wanted to keep training anyway…!”
“… because becoming Endeavor’s successor was his purpose! Because he knew he would be worthless in the eyes of his own father if he failed!”
“You’re lying!” Fuyumi snapped back. “Dad begged Touya to stop. He told him to make friends, he offered to find him a hobby, to help him join any sport club, to buy him any toys he wanted. Touya was Dad’s favorite! He was always Dad’s favorite! Dad just wanted to keep him safe!”
“IT DIDN’T WORK!” Natsuo roared. “It didn’t fucking WORK! You can cry all you want that he tried his best but he didn’t try enough, he didn’t, and now Touya is dead and he didn’t save him!”
Toki shifted uncomfortably. She wanted to scuttle back and leave. She felt like an intruder. It was different, to listen to this in a middle of an argument, instead of being given this information by Rei in a calm setting. It felt… voyeuristic. Bad. Painful.
Seeing people in pain had always made her ache, but this wasn’t just sadness: this was grief and rage, a decade-old fury that had never been soothed. Old wounds that still ached. The Todoroki had lost their brother and it had never been acknowledged, Endeavor had probably never apologized, and how the fuck were they supposed to move on?
For a second Natsuo and Fuyumi just glared at one another, panting, furious. Fuyumi’s hands were balled in fists, trembling on her lap. Natsuo was gripping the tabletop so hard his knuckles were white, and Toki could see the way his jaw clenched almost painfully, as if it could help his shallow back his rage.
Shouto was motionless, but he was looking at his brother like he was a complete stranger.
“You think Endeavor care about anything but himself?!” Natsuo growled, still glaring at his sister. “He was always a selfish, self-absorbed, violent piece of shit. He yelled at Mom constantly. He hit her.”
Fuyumi bit her lips, blinking back tears:
“It wasn’t…”
“He did,” Natsuo snarled. “HE DID! What, just because he didn’t punch her in the face, you think it doesn’t count?! She was half his size! He grabbed her and shook her, he pushed her away and she fell down; he threw her into furniture to get her out of his way, and, and… Do you think that just because he didn’t slap us or kick us like some drunkard, it wasn’t violence? WAKE UP! Remember how he growled at us to fuck off, or when he called us failures? How he threw glasses and plates on the floor when he was pissed, and we all just froze because we were terrified?! We still flinch when he reaches to grab us! Mom can’t stand to be in the same room as him! You think it doesn’t count? So what if he didn’t go out of his way to attack her?! It was still wrong! It was still horrible, and we were trapped with him, and he hit Mom! He hit Mom, and he told her that everything wrong was her fault, over and over, until she believed him and broke down!”
“Natsuo,” Shouto said flatly. “Stop it.”
Fuyumi was looking down, tears falling on her cheeks. Toki suddenly realized what Shouto was seeing, how familiar the scene must be: a tall, large man, towering over a crying woman. Once she had made the comparison, Toki couldn’t unsee it.
Judging by the way Natsuo jerked back, he couldn’t unsee it either.
“Sorry,” Natsuo said after a tense silence. “I shouldn’t yell at you.”
“You shouldn’t,” Fuyumi said, very quietly. “Cutting each other to pieces isn’t going to help.”
“That’s pretty rich,” Natsuo bit out, “when we’re talking about the guy who gave us all the knives.”
There was a short, heavy silence. Natsuo was glaring at the table. Fuyumi sniffed and hastily wiped her cheeks. Shouto looked over to Toki.
Toki realized she was holding her breath, and let it out very quietly.
She knew this story. She knew it already: she had heard it from Rei herself. And still, Toki thought of Endeavor —so tall, so large, incredibly massive and intimidating and brutal— and how tiny Rei was compared to him. She thought of the bruises even a careless shove must have left. She thought of how frightening it must be, to be short and scared and living in the same house as a monster.
It wasn’t training. It wasn’t justified. It was just terror. It was wrong, and sick.
Toki wanted to move on, but some things still needed to be answered for.
But this wasn’t the time or place. Especially now, with Natsuo so angry, with Endeavor not even here to apologize. Shit, it wasn’t even the right subject. Toki wasn’t supposed to let the Todoroki siblings air all their grievance. She was just here to convince them that Meteor shouldn’t be blamed for these whole mess.
They had verged a little off-topic, apparently.
She breathed in. She breathed out.
“Are you done?” she said to Natsuo. He glared at her, but she cut him before he could speak: “I came here because Shouto asked me to tell you about my dad. I didn’t come here because you need an emotional punching-bag. What Endeavor did was wrong, I know that, but it’s a separate issue that the one I actually left patrol for.”
Natsuo bristled, but Toki could see him make an effort to swallow back his annoyance. He let out a long breath, and slowly, deliberately, the tension in his shoulders uncoiled.
“Yeah,” he bit out. “Sorry for lashing out at you. I’m just… angry.”
“In general or at the situation? I can guess why you would be angry in general. But I don’t see why the situation pisses you off so much. It can’t be that he’s dating a guy.”
Natsuo glared hard at the table and Fuyumi shifted uncomfortably in her seat, avoiding looking at her brother. Toki narrowed her eyes.
“Is it?” she asked sharply.
“No,” Natsuo scowled. “It’s just one more fucking lie, why does it matter?”
Toki sensed that there was more to it than just one more fucking lie, but she decided to let it slide… for now. Leaning back against her backrest, she raised an eyebrow:
“Is it that he’s not divorced? I mean, your parents are separated. I don’t think you call that cheating, unless you’re pedantic about it.”
“It’s not that either!”
“So what is it?” Toki asked frankly. “It can’t be that you’re worried about Meteor. If anything, you should be worried about Endeavor,” Toki added as an afterthought. “He’s the one dating a convicted felon with an actual body-count.”
Natsuo clenched his jaw, and continued glaring at the table. Fuyumi looked away. Shouto, unhelpful, was staring at the distance in his best imitation of a rock.
“Dad should have told us,” Fuyumi muttered.
Natsuo sneered dismissingly:
“Like we care about his stupid love life.”
Toki raised an eyebrow. Yeah, right.
“If you don’t care, why are you so angry about it? Did you want him to be alone and miserable forever?”
“Of course not!” Fuyumi exclaimed. At the same time, Natsuo growled: “Maybe!”
They both looked at each other in shock.
“How can you be okay with him moving on?” Natsuo said accusingly.
“I’m not! I had always hoped that Mom and Dad would get back together, you know that. I’m just… I can’t be angry that he’s happy, you know.”
“Well, I fucking can! It’s so— It’s so… It’s unfair!”
“So you would rather for him to be stuck in the past?” Fuyumi snapped back. “To be miserable, to punish himself over and over? He’s changed. I know it doesn’t make everything go away, but… it’s not going to fix anything. It isn’t right to want him to suffer for what he did when he’s not the same person anymore.”
Natsuo set his jaw. He looked so much like his father: Toki wondered if he knew that. She wondered if he hated that, too. But Natsuo also looked like Fuyumi, like Shouto; like his mom, probably. He had a shorter nose, a softer jaw, bigger eyes. Less jagged angles, less charisma, less crushing loneliness, less barely contained violence.
But still. He looked so much like his father. When he was angry, but also when he was sad. When he was almost pleading.
Toki realized she recognized this expression from the one Endeavor had worn in Fukuoka, asking her to come back, asking her to forgive Meteor.
“I know,” Natsuo swallowed. “I just…” He closed his eyes. “Sometimes I look at him, and I think… He’s the only person who hasn’t suffered for what he did to us.”
And there was no answer to that.
oOoOoOo
Toki ended up going on the patio to get some fresh air, and let Natsuo and Fuyumi talk. Mostly it was an excuse to distract Shouto. Shouto didn’t have the same history with his father as did his siblings, and it was obvious he really didn’t want to be in the middle of their argument.
So Toki snatched him and went out while Natsuo and Fuyumi growled and snapped at each other. She sat at the edge of the terrasse with Shouto, and awkwardly tried to talk about class. If the silence went on too long, she could hear the whisper of Fuyumi and Natsuo’s conversation behind the door. They weren’t yelling anymore, but sometimes their voices rose. So Toki kept a constant stream of chatter, until Shouto stopped being so tense and quiet, and managed to drag him into a halfway decent conversation about architecture. Shouto was studying igloo and ice sculpture lately.
Toki sometimes had trouble connecting with normal teenagers. Well, connecting with civilians, rather. She could be cocky Quantum, act cool, be friendly: but when you went past the superficial level, it was hard to find common ground. Toki’s life had shaped her in a way that sheltered people couldn’t really understand.
But Shouto could.
Shouto wasn’t very chatty. He was downright weird sometimes. He didn’t get any pop-culture references and figures of speech didn’t really click for him. But he was straightforward, almost painfully so. He was genuine, and honest, and even a little funny. He had the most deadpan humor ever. And he knew how to listen.
So Toki knew how to talk to him, without having to be cocky Quantum. Being trained by Endeavor may not have been very different than being trained by the HPSC, deep down. The obvious conclusion to draw from it was that Endeavor’s training couldn’t have been that bad.
The less obvious conclusion, and the one that Toki was not going to examine too closely, was that training with the HPSC may have been a little… rough. And that being set apart like this maybe hadn’t been a good thing.
But whatever.
They talked about architecture and then about training. Toki pulled out her phone to show him videos of parkour, or flying, or martial art. She didn’t let herself pause too long. Natsuo and Fuyumi weren’t done talking.
It was almost an hour later that the patio’s door slid open soundlessly, and Natsuo large figure appeared. It was almost dark outside. Shouto tensed. Toki paused the video of herself doing a backflip that she had been showing to the teenager. Natsuo shuffled his weight on his feet, looking uncomfortable.
“Fuyumi is making dinner,” he finally said. “I don’t think I can handle seeing the old man right now, so I’m leaving.”
Shouto frowned. “Don’t. Maybe he will stay at the Agency tonight.”
Toki waved her phone. “I can even make sure of it. I’ll just text him to stay out of your hair.”
“Why would he listen to you?”
Toki blinked at him. It hadn’t really occurred to her that Endeavor wouldn’t listen. So far, the Flame Hero had been excruciatingly cautious about respecting other people’s boundaries. She knew he was going to respect her wishes.
But it occurred to her that Natsuo may not have the same experience as her.
“Well, firstly: I’m a strong, high-ranked hero that he respects as a professional. Second: I am stronger than him and I can kick his ass anytime I wish. Third: he’s banging my dad, so he’s desperate to stay in my good graces.” She paused. “In case it had escaped your notice, that is also why Meteor is trying so hard to make you like him. I mean, he actually likes you. But he started paying attention because of your father.”
Judging by Shouto’s and Natsuo’s look of shock, then dawning realization, then horrified understanding, it hadn’t crossed their mind until then. Natsuo looked like he had bitten in a lemon.
“Whatever,” he grunted.
“Hey.” Toki softened her voice. “I mean it. My father likes you. He likes talking with you and being able to make you laugh. He cares. It’s true. It’s not— It wasn’t a lie or a plot. It’s genuine. Don’t… don’t punish him for that.”
Natsuo squared his jaw, and looked away.
“Whatever,” he repeated, stubborn. “I just don’t want to see the old man tonight.”
Toki almost insisted. In the end, she didn’t.
She opened the text app on her phone, and the history of her conversations with Meteor. She started a new message and typed ‘warning: high emotions at the estate for Shouto’s last evening with his siblings. Keep Endeavor away.’ Then she taped send. After a second of consideration, she immediately typed a second message ‘with WORK. Keep him away with WORK.’ And hit send again.
Meteor replied with an angel emoji. Toki made a disgusted face at her phone. Gods, her father used emoji. Why. Couldn’t he type text like a normal person? Also, who allowed him to have an angel emoji? He was the further thing from angelic!
Oh, whatever. She rolled her eyes and put her phone away. She didn’t care, she didn’t know, and she didn’t want to know.
When she raised her head, Shouto had disappeared inside the house, but Natsuo was still hovering awkwardly a few meters away.
Natsuo was a good head taller than her. All the Todoroki were all just unfairly tall. Especially when Toki was sitting and he was stranding. She had to crane her neck to look at him. It made it hard to remember than all the Todoroki sibling here were younger than Toki. Fuyumi was maybe a few months younger, but Natsuo was what, eighteen? Nineteen? That was at least four years younger. He was closer to Melissa’s age than to Toki’s.
Fuck, he was a kid, too.
“How could you handle it that well?” Natsuo suddenly blurted out. “You know what Endeavor did. What he is.”
Toki looked at him levelly.
“A wife-beater. An abuser. A monster. Is that what you want me to say?”
Natsuo flinched. And then he scowled at her, as if angered by the fact that those words could get a rise out of him.
“Yes.”
“Then yes, I know. If I had known sooner, I would have stopped him.”
That was a lie. Toki had known sooner, but she hadn’t stopped him. She had thought… Well, she had found excuses. She had forgotten. She hadn’t had proof. She had other priorities.
She had been a fucking coward.
There had been no right way to handle this. It was too late, it had happened. Toki should have stopped it from happening in the first place… well, except that that shit had started when Touya had been five, so logically Toki had been around four. Now Endeavor was atoning, or at least trying to, and what was Toki’s role in this? Try to make everyone sit down for a conversation? That wasn’t going to happen.
Fuyumi and Natsuo’s screaming match was mortifying from the point of view of an intruder, but the only alternative to it was silence. The screaming had to happen at some point. It just wasn’t a conversation they were going to be able to have civilly, because abuse wasn’t civil.
“Is he still one?” she asked after a beat. “All of those things.”
She knew the answer, but wanted Natsuo to say it. He had to realize it, because he scowled… And then he sighed, and his shoulders dropped.
“No,” he admitted with great reluctance. “He’s acting like a decent human being. He’s actually asking us what we want instead of brute-forcing his way.”
“I take it that he didn’t, before.”
Natsuo shook his head. He passed a hand through his hair, sighing, and looking suddenly very tired.
“No. He did what he wanted and expected us to fall in line. Well, except for Fuyumi. She was never expected to be a hero, so she never was a failure.” His voice turned bitter. “Sometimes I wonder, if she’s the only one of us that he actually loved.”
And it made him jealous, probably. And angry. Because if Enji Todoroki could love his daughter, then why couldn’t he love his sons? Why hadn’t he saved Touya, why hadn’t he valued Natsuo, why hadn’t he treated Shouto like a human being instead of a weapon?
Because if Endeavor could love his daughter, then that meant he could always love his children, even when he had been an abusive dickhead. And it was so horribly, so heartbreakingly easy for a child, to conclude that the problem wasn’t the abusive parent: it must be themselves.
(Toki did not think of Sayuri, laughing and beaming at Meteor; she did not think about her mother patting her rounded stomach with tenderness and musing about the name she would choose for her new baby; and she did not think about the sick feeling in her belly, the first time Sayuri’s eyes had passed over her own daughter like she was furniture.)
Toki didn’t think about Sayuri. This wasn’t about her. This was about Natsuo, who needed someone to talk to, and probably to vent a little bit. So Toki scooted over and patted the patio next to her, inviting Natsuo to sit down. After a brief hesitation, he did. It made Toki a little more comfortable, to not have him looming at her from above.
“You know he’s changed, but that didn’t change your opinion of him,” she said quietly. “Did it? You’re still angry at him.”
“So what?” Natsuo said, defensive. “I’m right to be angry. I deserve to be angry. And he deserves to pay. He should suffer for what he put us through.”
Toki grimaced.
She wanted to say Fuyumi’s right. She wanted to say you can’t keep hold of all that hurt, you need to let it go, it’s hurting you too. But she knew it wasn’t so simple. Letting go of your emotions was such a useless advice. Letting go how? Putting it down where? It clung to you. It wasn’t something you could control. You had to let the grief run its course.
And for some people, it was longer than for others.
“Hurting him… It’s not going to fix anything.”
“It’s not about fixing things. It’s about…” Natsuo hesitated, and shook his head. “He took so much from us. Our childhoods, our happiness. He took it from us, for years, with no remorse. Why is he the only one allowed to be happy now? We deserve it more than him, and we’re still left there, dealing with the damage he did to us. It’s unfair that he gets to move on and we don’t, we can’t.”
Toki couldn’t believe she was going to have to take Endeavor’s side in this. Devil advocate and all that. Yes, she liked Endeavor and she was going to take his side against Dabi, but it was Dabi. Here, now, it was Natsuo. That wasn’t the same thing.
It made her feel like a gigantic hypocrite. Because in Natsuo’s story, Endeavor was the bad guy. It was unquestionable.
“He hasn’t forgotten you,” Toki said as gently as she could. “He’s trying. You know that. It’s just… He’s allowed to have a life outside of you.”
“Is he? Is he?! He took our lives, but it wasn’t even enough?”
There was no good answer to that. Toki spread her hands helplessly:
“I don’t know what you want me to say, Natsuo. He’s your father. I know he hurt you, and it’s horrible, and I’m sorry it happened. I’m sorry. Maybe nothing will ever fix it. You would be within your rights to never forgive it. But Endeavor is trying to be better. You don’t have to forgive him, but you have to see it, at least. It’s a good thing he became the kind of person that can grow attached to other people. It’s a good thing.”
“It’s not fair!”
“I know,” Toki sighed sadly. “I’m not asking you to forgive him. He’s still the man who abused you. He’s also the man who wants to atone for it. You have to decide what you want to do with him, but you won’t find what you’re looking by refusing to acknowledge who he is now: even if that person doesn’t fit your memories anymore.”
Natsuo looked angrily at the courtyard, and the garden further back. The sun was going low. It wasn’t quite sunset yet, but the sky was darker, hinting at darker hues.
“I’m not going to forgive him. Never.”
“So you do want him to pay?”
“Maybe! I don’t know! Would it be so wrong?”
No. Toki thought so, at least. Sometimes you needed catharsis to get over your pain. Sometimes it wasn’t just the pain that needed validation, it was the righteous anger, too.
Of course it was always better to forgive, to heal. But did that mean that past abusers were automatically owed forgiveness? Was forgiving morally good? Not necessarily. And then, incidentally, it meant that seeking any retribution wasn’t necessarily morally wrong. You could remain a good person if you refused to forgive those who had harmed you. It didn’t matter if that person changed: your pain hadn’t.
You just… had to know where to stop. That was what Dabi hadn’t understood. Sometimes people deserved punishment: but indefinite suffering was just evil.
“I can’t,” Natsuo repeated after a long pause. “I’m trying, okay? We can have a civil conversation now. We can talk like adults. But I’ll never forgive him. I can’t, I’m not like Fuyumi and Shouto.”
Toki blinked:
“I wouldn’t say Shouto has forgiven him, either.”
The youngest Todoroki wasn’t angry and resentful like his brother, but from what Toki had observed, there was still a cold distance between him and Endeavor. They barely talked, as if constantly walking on eggshells around each other.
“He says he hasn’t,” Natsuo admitted, voice low and bitter. “But he’s thinking about it. And it makes me so furious. Not that Shouto is doing it, but that the old man could think that he deserves it. That he could change now, and not fifteen years ago when it could have saved Touya! It’s not fair that he can change now, after all that he did to us.”
Toki swallowed, thinking about having this exact same conversation about her own father, and with Endeavor of all people. What had she said, back then? He did change. And maybe that’s what I’m the angriest about. What was so wrong with me that he couldn’t be better for me?
Toki understood Natuso’s anger. The rage, the grief, the loathing, the feeling of unfairness, of betrayal, of inadequacy. She knew the feeling.
She knew it all too well.
“I know. It’s terrible that he couldn’t change for you.”
Natsuo scoffed, almost dismissingly: “But…?”
Toki shook her head.
“There’s no but. It sucks. That fact that he changed now makes it almost worse, because it means that he could always change, and just choose not to. That all the pain he inflicted, he did it knowingly, even though he could have done otherwise. It sucks. It’s terrible. The fact that he’s better now doesn’t change the fact that for most of your life, he wasn’t. Even if he becomes a fucking Saint, it won’t ever wash the blood from his hands.”
Natsuo looked at her strangely. Toki had the weird realization that, maybe for the first time, Natsuo was seeing her. Toki Taiyōme, the daughter of a villain named Meteor; and not just Quantum, the hero, the teacher, the weirdo who happened to be related to Endeavor’s new friend.
She may have been a little miffed about it, in other circumstances. Natsuo had known who she was for weeks now. But in retrospective, it wasn’t that surprising that he hadn’t really paid attention until then.
Natsuo was very much like his father in that regards. He wasn’t just selfish, he was self-centered. He focused on what impacted him directly and shoved everything else away as irrelevant. For Endeavor, it meant that everything that wasn’t related to his hero work was dismissed and scorned. For Natsuo, it was the reverse. Everything related to hero work offended him, and he refused to pay any attention to it.
He refused to see Shouto’s training as anything else that a chore that his brother was forced to do: Natsuo probably didn’t know about Shouto wanting to do rescue work, or about the fulfillment Shouto found into pushing his limits. He refused to think about Fuyumi enjoying using her Quirk. He didn’t conceive Endeavor and Enji as two separate identities: for him, his father and the hero were one and the same, both angry and violent and untrustworthy.
And it also meant that Natsuo had never looked at Quantum and thought of her as a person, too. As someone who had a past, who had family issues like him, and someone he could empathize with. Or rather, someone who could empathize with him.
“Your father was a villain,” Natsuo said. “It hurt you. He hurt you. How do you do it? How did you forgive the harm he’s done?”
What a loaded question. Toki shook her head and let out a humorless laugh.
“Do you think he’s the only one with red in his ledger? I put him in jail. Not just in jail, but arguably the worst prison in Japan. All his friends died or deserted him. My mom died, my brother died; I may as well have killed the both of them myself.”
Natsuo’s shock was plain on his face. He started stammering an apology. Toki herself was almost taken aback by what coming out of her mouth. The words, the callousness of it all. She had never dared to say it loud before today. I may as well have killed the both of them myself.
That was her origin story. Not being a teleporter, not being picked up by the HPSC, not meeting Keigo. It was this. Naively turning her family to the system, and watching them be slaughtered for her stupidity. Betraying them, and having to bear their blood on her hands her whole life.
Was it any wonder that she had become someone who saved people, afterward? Even subconsciously, she had wanted to balance the scales. She had wanted to fix things. She had hoped, desperately, that somehow it would fix the gaping pit of despair in her guts.
“I destroyed our family,” she said, more quietly. “Because I wanted to stop him. I destroyed it all: my father’s family, his Crew, his life. I did it. It was me. And you know what? All the pain I caused him didn’t erase the suffering he inflicted as a villain. All it did was making me miserable, because causing him pain wasn’t helping me. Because he’s my Dad, and even when he was a monster, I loved him.”
She knew Natsuo loved his father too. That was the most unfair thing with abusive families: no matter the extend of the harm done, a part of you would never stop feeling for them. Sometimes you managed to walk away and cut ties cleanly: but most of the time, you didn’t. You couldn’t.
Natsuo still cared. In canon, watching pre-redemption Endeavor fight against the Nomu had been a never-wracking experience for all three Todoroki siblings, and Endeavor hadn’t even started atoning then. Now… Now, in this universe where things were much more complex, Toki had no doubts that Natsuo still loved his father.
And that it made him even more angry, both at Endeavor and at himself.
“So yeah,” she said after a pause. “It sucks that my father did bad things. It sucks that so many people were hurt. It sucks that he chose to change, too: because he changed too little, too late, and I had to face the fact that I didn’t matter enough to my father to get though the effort when I was a kid. It sucks that Endeavor of all people managed to put him on the right path. It sucks, everything sucks and it’s unfair.”
She swallowed. Her eyes stung, and she blinked twice to clear her vision, looking in the distance towards the park. But she didn’t cry. It would take a lot more to make her cry.
She breathed out, and then turned her head to look Natsuo in the eyes.
“But he’s my Dad. He matters to me. So I’ll take that second chance, and I’ll grateful for it.”
“And that’s it?” Natsuo frowned, frustrated. “Everything is fine, suddenly?”
“Well, no,” Toki had to admit. “We’re always going to butt heads. There will always be things we can’t talk about because the memories are too bitter or too painful. We argue. We yell. Sometimes I want to punch him in the face. But… we get the chance to make new memories. He’s willing to change, and I’m willing to accept it. It just means— I want him in my life. It’s just that simple.”
Natsuo thought about it. For a long minute, there was only silence on the patio. The crickets were singing. The world felt very vast, and Toki felt very alone.
“It’s not like that for me,” Natsuo finally said. “I don’t want him in my life, and I’m never going to forgive him. I appreciate that he changed, and that he makes Fuyumi happy. I can accept that he’s tolerable now. But I can’t… I can’t deal with him being happy when I’m not. I know it sounds awful. But I’m not going to be happy for him.”
Toki shrugged:
“That’s your right. Just… don’t take it out my father. It’s not his fault he has horrible taste in men.”
Natsuo made a face:
“Urgh. You can say that again. What the hell does he see in him?”
Toki considered her answer. They’re very similar was the truth, but it would only set off a new rant. Meteor admires him would only make Natsuo scoff. So, in the end, she just shrugged:
“Same thing your father see in mine, I suppose.”
Natsuo blinked, and shook his head. “They’re both clearly insane.”
But it was said with bewildered resignation rather than scorn, this time, so Toki decided to count that as progress.
“Are we done, then?” she asked hopefully.
Natsuo sighed, and then got up to his feet before offering her a hand up. Toki took it, and he hauled her to her feet.
“Yeah, I guess. I just have to… process it.” He paused, awkward. “Thanks for coming and defusing the situation, by the way. And sorry for unloading all our baggage on your lap. It won’t happen again.”
Oh, buddy, Toki almost said commiserating. That is clearly a lie. That story is far from over, and we’ll be lucky if we can keep the shouting matches in the single digits.
But instead, she said out loud:
“Don’t sweat it. I’m just happy I could help.”
oOoOoOo
Toke texted Meteor that he should steer clear of the Todoroki house for a little while. She didn’t add context and he didn’t ask for it. He had probably guessed what had happened, anyway. Now they just needed to make the tension calm down and dissipate.
So the Todoroki kids were going to ponder what they had just learned, and not tell anyone. And Meteor was also going to ponder what he had guessed, and not tell anyone. And Toki, too, was going to keep her mouth shut.
Hilariously, Endeavor was going to be the only person to not know that everyone knew.
That could be very funny, when someone would accidentally mention it at the dinner table. Ah ah.
Well, that wasn’t Toki’s problem anymore. She had done all she could for them. She hoped that they weren’t going to kick out Meteor the next time he would come to visit, but… well, he wasn’t going to have many excuses to visits anymore, now that he was healed. So maybe they would all have time to cool down.
At least everyone knew, now. It wasn’t going to blow up unexpectedly. Toki had to find a silver lining to that disaster.
So now, she supposed that the next step was… well, fixing whatever was wrong with Dabi. Which wasn’t going to be easy, because he was ten pounds of crazy in a five pounds bag: but Toki had sworn to herself that she would try to save the villains, too, so she had to try. Even if she hated that particular villain.
… Later. Much later. Seriously, Toki needed a break from the Todoroki drama. Please.
She warped back to Fukuoka. Straight to her penthouse, actually: she was done with patrol, and it was late enough that she didn’t have any reasons to go back to the Icarus Agency. Besides, all she wanted right now was to snuggle against her husband and not have to think about all her problems.
“I’m home,” she said.
“Welcome back!” Keigo called from the kitchen.
It smelled really good. Toki walked there, guided by her nose, and blinked when she saw Keigo heating up something on the stove. He was even wearing an apron, that they rarely used (because neither of them was a good cook), but which was dead useful to avoid staining their clothes with sizzling sauce.
“You’re cooking? What did I do to deserve that?”
“Don’t get your hopes up, it’s just leftovers from that noddle place we went last time.”
“It smells good and you look hot in an apron,” Toki claimed, joining him at the counter. “My hopes are satisfied. Anything I can do to help?”
“Nah, I’m done. Pass me the bowls?”
They ate on the couch, with the TV on but the volume low, distractingly keeping an eye on the news while they wolfed down their dinner. Between Keigo’s fast metabolism and Toki’s own bottomless appetite, they usually ate for three, maybe even four. Today was no exception. When they ordered take-out, they usually ordered for ten people. It lasted them one or two evenings, at least.
Toki told him about the Todoroki drama. Natsuo had been the most vocal but Fuyumi had been shaken, too. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t the fact that Endeavor was seeing someone that had shocked them. It wasn’t even the fact that he was seeing a guy, or Meteor in particular. It was just the fact that Endeavor had grown enough to reach out, to care about other people outside of his job, that stung.
He hadn’t been able to do that for how own kids. He was suddenly getting his head out of his ass twenty years too late. Of course it was bound to upset his children.
“You really are fated to get involved in their bullshit,” Keigo wondered. “Maybe it’s a curse.”
Toki thought about Dabi, and made a disgusted face.
“Urgh, don’t tell me.”
Keigo picked at his food for a few seconds, and asked, in a more subdued tone:
“So, Endeavor really was a bastard to his family, uh? I mean, with Touya, you can say it’s the kid’s fault for being instable, but… It went beyond that. He really was bad to them.”
“Abusive husband who drove his wife to a mental breakdown, neglectful father who told his kids to their face that they were failures.” Toki hesitated, and added, reluctantly: “Pretty brutal trainer, too. Not the scale of Hobo-san, because he didn’t actually damage Shouto. But still… It was rough. It must have been traumatizing for a kid as young as Shouto was. Especially since he was all alone and not allowed to be close to his siblings.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
Keigo pushed around some of the chicken in his bowl, but it wasn’t in either of their nature to leave a plate unfinished. He sighed, and resumed eating. It wasn’t until after swallowing his mouthful of noodle and chicken that he spoke again, his tone fatalistic and resigned:
“Well, I was kinda expecting it, after we talked last time. At least he didn’t beat the kids. Except Shouto, but that’s not weird, in training.”
“Yeah. But…” Toki frowned. “He hit his wife. And the way he treated the kids… that’s still abuse. He was still violent.”
“He’s not anymore, though.”
Toki threw him a warning glare: “It’s a recent development. He was that kind of person for ten years.”
“Wasn’t your father a murderer for longer?”
“We’re not talking about my father, we’re talking about Endeavor. Meteor never lied about who he was. But Endeavor did.”
“He never pretended to be a good man,” Keigo defended him.
“Keigo.”
Her husband deflated like a pierced balloon.
“Yeah. I know what you mean.” He sighed, and rubbed his forehead. For a moment, his shoulders slumped in discouragement. Then he straightened, and held Toki’s gaze. “But that doesn’t change all the good he did. I’m not going to stop respecting him.”
“Even if he beat his wife?”
“Even then,” Keigo said firmly. “I’m not going to pretend it didn’t happen or that it was justified. Just like I’m not going to pretend that he didn’t neglect his children to the point where the sociopathic one decided to go on a murder spree. The way Endeavor acted with his family… It was wrong, and that’s something he has to atone for. But Endeavor is also the man who saved so many people, constantly, for nearly thirty years now. He’s also the man who saved me. He’s the guy who taught dozens of sidekicks, worked tirelessly to make the world safer, and never gave up his sense of honor. He’s also, and that’s maybe the most important thing, the man who realized he was wrong, and took steps to change. That’s impressive, too.”
Toki sighed, and shoved a piece of chicken in her mouth. She agreed with Keigo, but— it bothered her. It felt cowardly, to let Endeavor off the hook him so easily. It felt like she had done something wrong, somehow. Like she had wronged the Todoroki kids by not being able to despite their father.
It would be simpler if she could just dismiss Endeavor as a piece of garbage as soon as the label ‘abusive guy’ was stuck on him. But people weren’t labels. People weren’t products fit for consumption that you could classify as good or bad. Endeavor was many things, in addition to being an abusive guy. He was hard-working, devoted, honorable, stubborn, analytical, intelligent, proud, selfish, attentive. He was also not abusive anymore. Even if he could never fix the harm done… He was aware of it, he was working on it, he was regretting it.
If Fuyumi wanted to forgive him, it was her right. If Shouto wanted to move on, even if he never tried to have a closer relationship with his father, that was his right. If Natsuo refused to ever forgive him, it was his right too.
And if Keigo wanted to forgive Endeavor, it was his right, too.
Toki didn’t quite know if she could forgive him, not yet. But she would. She knew she would. It had worried her, at first. Was it a moral failing on her part to be willing to move past the flaws of someone? To learn that they had done something terrible, something that people were still hurt about, and decide that she was fine with it?
But in the end, it was her choice. Just like it had been her choice to forgive Meteor.
Toki couldn’t ask Natsuo to move on, just like she would never dream of asking Meteor’s victims to move on, either. She couldn’t erase their pain, and she couldn’t dictate how they would live with it. But… You don’t have to forgive someone to let them atone, or even to let them participate in society.
Meteor was a better person, now. Endeavor was a better person, too. For Toki, what mattered was who they were now. She could acknowledge that they had been awful without staying stuck on that. And yeah, maybe Natsuo would have found it comforting if Toki had immediately and definitely condemned Endeavor for his flaws, refusing to look past his sins, condemning him without a second glance. Maybe it would have made Natsuo feel vindicated, or supported.
But Toki couldn’t give him that.
It was sad, it truly was, because Natsuo was hurt: and Toki wanted to soothe and help everyone who was hurt. But even as she could understand Natsuo’s anger, she couldn’t share it. She didn’t hate Endeavor. She may even tentatively like him.
It didn’t feel fair. But human relationships were always complicated. There was some margin between total condemnation and unconditional acceptance. Toki could condemn what Endeavor had done but accept who he was, just like she could hate what Meteor had inflicted on others in the past but still love him no matter what.
Yeah. It was complicated.
But Toki had never expected anything to be simple with the Todoroki family.
“Besides,” Keigo added with a shit-eating grin, “he’s nice to look at.”
Toki rolled her eyes, and tried to bit back a grin. They were back on familiar terrain. She pretended to scoff:
“Please, he’s average at best. He just has muscles.”
“Are you blind?” Keigo gasped. “That jawline! Those eyes! That death glare! I can fetch my Endeavor fanarts if you want to check.”
“Oh my gods, you still have that?!”
“I also still have the dakimakura.”
“I will burn that thing.”
They bickered some more, light-hearted banter chasing away the depressing weight of their previous conversation.
Toki didn’t know if, in Keigo’s place, she would have accepted so easily the revelation of her hero’s past. Toki had a tendency to get angry very fast and to hold a grudge when she found out people had lied to her. But Keigo was… well, in a sense, he was more forgiving. In a way, all that mattered to him was that people’s actions were a net positive. Just like he had easily accepted the HPSC’s dissimulation of their past assassinations, because it was for the greater good; just like he had accepted the harsh training and the fact that the HPSC had practically bought him. Endeavor’s past was a bad thing, Keigo knew that and didn’t shy away from it. But he accepted it, weighted it against the good he had done, and concluded that it didn’t overshadow the positive impact he had had on people’s lives.
Toki didn’t fully understand his logic. It wasn’t how she thought of things.
But to each their own. After all, Toki’s own reasoning had pretty much led her to the same point, hadn’t it? She felt annoyance rather than resignation like Keigo, but in the end, just like him, she had reached the stage of acceptance.
So. Whatever. Time to move on.
“What about your project?” Toki asked as they finished eating. “Your little explosive fledging?”
Keigo snorted.
“He’s doing fine. He’s never going to be a good liar but he’s a great actor already.”
Toki squinted:
“Aren’t those synonyms?”
“Nope. Lying is saying untrue things to people’s face while looking innocent, but acting is putting a performance. Kameko is a good liar and a bad actress. She can bullshit people like no one, but ask her to pretend not to care about cats or money, and she will slip in five minutes. You are a talented actor but a terrible liar. You can alternate between five different personas at least: but if you have to look someone in the eye and lie to them, you always feel bad, and a perceptive person will notice it. See?”
Not really, but Toki could see his point.
“So you think King Nitro will manage to pretend to be someone else.”
“I think he’ll do brilliantly. Acting isn’t about saying thing you don’t believe, it’s about putting yourself in a mindset where your priorities shift. You can do that without changing your personality. Nitro-the-villain will be an angry, ambitious brat who is utterly self-centered and feel threatened by any attack on his sense of superiority. Nitro-the hero also is an angry ambitious brat who is utterly self-centered and feel threatened by any attack on his sense of superiority. The difference is in how they express it and how they react to it.”
Toki made a non-commitative noise.
It wasn’t illogical. Quantum and Hoshizora were the same person, just not the same persona. Both were idealistic and nerdy and cocky. You just had to wriggle the cursors to adjust the ratio of cockiness and nerdiness, and it created an immediate contrast that was enough to completely blindside people. But Toki had always done that intuitively, and… she didn’t know how someone as blunt as Bakugo could do it.
But if Keigo said he could, then she wasn’t going to question him.
“I still don’t like the idea of sending him spying.”
“I know. I’ll keep him safe, I promise. I just need him to be there to give credence to the idea that I’m a believer, I won’t let him get too deep.”
It wasn’t really a question of going to deep, it was a question of Bakugo getting involved in the first place. It was also, although Toki was still having trouble making sense of her conflicted feelings on the subject, a question Keigo thinking it was acceptable to involve Bakugo in the first place.
Toki had done the same thing with Neito, first when she had asked him to transport Meteor and Endeavor from Korusan to Kamino, and second when she had used him to steal AFO’s Quirk. She knew that. She had put a teenager in harm’s way, and she had no ground to stood on. But… After thinking about it for a while, she had finally found why it had bothered so much when Keigo had said he planned to ask the same of Bakugo.
It was because Bakugo didn’t have personal stakes in it.
If anything, Keigo would say that asking an emotionally compromised teenager was worse. And maybe it was! But the thing was, when Toki had asked Neito for his help, even if they had both been worried and grieving and furious… It had made sense. Not because of who Neito was but because of who he was to Toki. He wasn’t just her student, he was also her friend, and she trusted him. He was her family, he was part of her Crew.
That was the difference. Toki had asked her friend for his help, but Keigo wasn’t asking a friend. He was activating an asset.
And that’s what made Toki’s hackles raise up.
It wasn’t often that Keigo made her angry, or hurt her, or made her feel betrayed. It basically never happened. But when it did… Well, it was the tiny things. They worked so well together, they understood each other so perfectly: it was no wonder than the slightest friction felt so abrasive.
Toki loved Keigo. But she wasn’t blind to his darkness, either. She knew he was a liar. She knew that, in another universe, he would have easily become a killer.
Maybe an even better killer than Toki was, because Keigo wouldn’t have killed for love or for anger, but only for the greater good. With no horror, with no regret. Like the person in front of him wasn’t a human being at all, only an obstacle to eliminate.
Keigo… Hawks… would always have this chilling potential.
But Toki knew that: Toki had always known that, and she loved him anyway. She had made Keigo the center of her life, almost involuntarily, when she had been a child. And she wasn’t going to change her mind now.
Until we have seen someone's darkness,
we don't really know who they are.
Until we have forgiven someone's darkness,
we don't really know
what love is.
So yes, Toki knew Keigo had decided to bring Bakugo in his mission because, in that dispassionate way of his, he had calculated the odds and weighted his options with the tools at his disposal, and Bakugo had been categorized as a tool, not a civilian. And it was wrong. Toki didn’t like it.
But she understood it.
She wouldn’t have done it. Not unless the situation was considerably worse. Toki would always call on the people she trusted first: but maybe it was a flaw. She had done it before, and it had worked: but what if Neito hadn’t been the right person to call? What if Toki had needed a heavy hitter with no ties to Yūei? Would she had dared to call Bakugo? Or would she have only thought of it if she had befriended him first?
What was done, was done. There was no use crying over it. And since Toki’s plan at Kamino and Keigo’s plans for the MLA were ending up the same (a teenager asked to assist heroes), Toki didn’t really had room to argue. Right?
Besides… the main thing that reassured her, was that it was Keigo. If someone had to use Bakugo as an asset, then Keigo was a safer option than… the President. Or worse, Okamoto. At least Keigo wasn’t so removed from reality that he would send a teenager do an adult’s job. Keigo was always going to be right in the thick of the storm with his asset, not just side by side but in the front, taking the brunt of the waves to protect his partner.
And in the end, Keigo was starting to like Bakugo. So he would end up in the same position as Toki, when push came to shove. He would ask a teenager for help, but by doing so, he would also ask a student, a friend. Not simply an asset.
“Are you going to continue his lesson when the school start again?” Toki suddenly asked.
She had been transporting Keigo to the Naruto Labs every day, early in the morning, for two hours, in the last two weeks. But soon school would start again. Bakugo wasn’t homeschooled, he went to the local high-school. He wouldn’t have two hours free every morning anymore.
“No,” Keigo sighed. “If you have some free time, I’ll go during lunchtime instead. I want to try and help him out until the very last moment.”
“And after the provisional license exam, you’ll stop all contact with him?”
“I’ll pretend to meet him for the first time at the exam, and then I’ll get in touch infrequently to pretend to nudge him towards the MLA. But it can’t be too often or too blatant… and yeah, I’ll have to stop all my training of him, because I’m fairly sure that once I tell Hanabata that I’ve started recruiting of my own volition, he’s going to have me watched.”
Toki winced. She remembered Keigo saying that being watched was a necessary step to climb higher on the MLA’s hierarchical ladder, but that didn’t mean she had to like it.
“So he’ll be on his own.”
Keigo levelled a grave look at her:
“We’re all on our own, at some point.”
“True,” Toki sighed. “We have to tackle our next big mission. You, the MLA; and me… a bunch of yakuza.”
Keigo laughed, and patted her thigh:
“You’ll do fine,” he said with absolute confidence. “You never fail.”
His faith was reassuring, and his grin was infectious. Toki smiled, shaking her head with fondness, and joined their fingers.
She hoped he was right. Between the Shie Hassaikai to take down, and the Todoroki drama still simmering, Toki would need all the luck she could get.
Notes:
Hilarious Discord conversation after reading that chapter xD
Next chapter in four weeks. Yes, four. Next week, i'll post a chapter of House of Wisdom, then another chapter of Folly of the wise (yes, the collection of smutty one-shots). And then i'll take a two weeks break =)
Oh, and also...
Fic rec of the day: "#fantheflames" by adastrad.
The Plot: to annoy his father, Shoto gets Twitter and start shitposting about EndHawks. Things snowball from there. Shoto hadn't expected Hawks to be so on board with trolling Endeavor, after all.It's funny and lighthearted but sometimes you fall through a a trauma subplot like a rotten floorboard, beause even if Endeavor tries to do better, bad stuff still happened and forgiveness isn't in the equation yet. THAT BEING SAID, i just died laughing with how clueless Shoto is about the massive torch Hawks is carrying for his father, and how the internet ran with it, and how his horrified classmates are trying to stop him from finding out about the hashtag that Shoto started in the first place.
Chapter 65: Back to school
Summary:
Time to go back to Yuei and into the plot!
Notes:
I'm back !
A lot has happened since i last posted. I'll try to stick to my update schedule (one chapter of the series each Friday), though!
If you're interested in my life: i'm going to quit my job, i sent a couple of CV, had one interview, wasn't called back, sent another couple of CV and used a family friend to put my name at the top of the list while internally cringing because i'm not sure i want this job and i'm not sure i want to use family connections to get it BUT THIS IS A RUTHLESS WORLD SO IGUESS I DID.... and now i'm waiting for a call, an offer, something.
Also i lost the motivation to write ANYTHING and instead of writing i am aimlessly scrolling on Pinterest for decoration ideas of my future hypothetic house that i do not have the money to buy.
ANYWAY!
Here is a quick reminder of what happened in the last chapters:
After defeating AFO at Kamino, everyone went home to lick their wounds. Toki especially took several weeks of vacation so she could take custody of Neito Monoma, orphaned after Dabi's attack on Shizuoka's hospital. It was also a chance for Toki to spend some time with her father... and introduce Hinawa to him.
Coincidently, it was also a chance to get dragged in the Todoroki drama, ending up meeting Rei to investigate Dabi, and listening to the angry rants of every single Todoroki children. At least now everyone is getting along... Hopefully.Also, for those who haven't binged the fic in a while and have forgotten about the chat names:
Antares is Toki
SpicyWings is Keigo
Moxie is Melissa
PhantomOfTheOpera is Neito Monoma
Megamind is Hitoshi
PinkIsPunkRock is Sachiko
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
BACK TO SCHOOL
School resumed. Toki became a teacher again. And the first lesson upon the start of the semester was… homeroom class. Obviously.
Toki checked on the kids, how they were doing, if they had concerns for the next semester, if they were settling well in the dorms. She explained this semester’s program. Not enough to Iida’s taste, clearly (he always had a hundred questions about the schedule, down to the minute), but enough to allow the kids to have a clear picture of what to expect in those next few months.
Basically, like in canon, the students would pass the provisional license exam and then would be allowed to have work studies with pro-heroes. Unlike what had happened for their internship, where agencies had sent them invites, this time the students were expected to reach out and ask a hero for a place. Usually those work-studies took place in second year, which let the students two years to foster connections with various agencies… But things were changing.
Officially, the first-year students would be allowed to get work-studies because they were deemed strong enough. Thus, they would pass the provisional license exam in first year, to allow them to have the opportunity to work with pro.
Unofficially, Nedzu (and Toki agreed with him) thought that the kids needed to have their License as soon as possible, so they wouldn’t be legally in trouble if they fought back the next time a villain attacked them.
There was also the matter of explaining to the class that their schedule was going to evolve and include classes with the kids from 1-B. Oh, and also that Eraserhead was back on the school roster but wouldn’t be their homeroom teacher.
That made quite a few hands raise in the air questioningly, but Toki just told them that if they wanted personal details about Aizawa’s life, they could ask him.
Everyone lowered their hands after that. Ah.
After explaining to the kids what a work-study entailed, Toki let them discuss among each other, and moved from one desk to another to ask everyone if they felt comfortable going back to where they had had their internship, or if they had their eye on some other agency… or if they would rather not take part on a work study this semester, which was completely acceptable.
A few students seemed relieved to hear that it wasn’t mandatory. Curiously, Aoyama was part of them. Toki would have thought that someone as flashy as him would love to hog the spotlight some more.
Mmmmh.
She wasn’t jumping to conclusions. She couldn’t afford to, not with stakes so high. Maybe Aoyama just wasn’t keen on doing additional work. He was firmly on the lower half of the class rankings, after all. But… It was odd. It didn’t fit him.
Toki was taking note of it, that was all.
A few other kids didn’t want to do it. Sato thought he wouldn’t be able to keep up with the workload, for example. Kirishima cried that he wouldn’t have the time because he needed to join a study group and get his grades up. Mineta hadn’t had a great experience at his internship and was wary to get back to the pro-hero world so soon.
“You went with Uwabami, didn’t you?” Toki remembered.
She hadn’t managed to stop Mineta from picking a female mentor. Ideally she would have pushed him to accept Kamui Woods’ offer, as a specialist in restrain and capture, as well as a fairly straight-laced guy, Kamui would have given Mineta good advice.
Mineta wasn’t the horrible little gremlin that most fanfics from Before depicted. He was an immature kid who talked about boobs and butts with all the crude confidence of a young teenage boy trying very hard to mask a huge inferiority complex.
Sending him to Hound Dog had apparently helped him a little (at least, more than Midoriya) because since their consultation Toki hadn’t seen Mineta try to grope any girl. She would have made him regret it if he had, anyway. But Mineta still talked loudly and pretty crudely about girls when he had a male audience, as if trying to impress them. And he had mostly accepted Uwabami’s offer because of her looks, Toki was sure of it.
However, Toki had agreed with his pick because Uwabami wasn’t a bad choice. She didn’t fight much (like Mineta, whose body type wasn’t suited to it), her Quirk was on her head, and she had to adapt to it (like Mineta, too), and Uwabami was good with public relationship. Which mean she could give Mineta advice on how to not be creepy.
“One of her snakes bit me!” Mineta whined.
… Or she could do that.
“Did you deserve it?” Quantum said inflexibly.
“No!”
She stared. Mineta deflated like a popped balloon.
“… Maybe.”
Toki almost did a double-take. Three months earlier, he would never have said that. Was it progress? She narrowed her eyes.
“What were you doing, exactly?”
Mineta squirmed uncomfortably. He was blushing, and avoiding her gaze. In the end, he muttered reluctantly:
“Not respecting her personal space. Which I will not do again.”
“Because…?”
“Because I like being alive?” Mineta hazarded.
Not exactly the answer Toki had been expecting, but it would do. Mineta was still gross and creepy in his comments, but since his actions were better, Toki wasn’t going to go on the warpath right away. She could ask Hound Dog to see him again (which she would), but she didn’t have to tackle the problem herself. After all, she had bigger problems.
Like Hagakure’s costume being nakedness, or Yaoyorozu having no chest support, Kirishima not having a shirt, and Midoriya still using punches instead of kicks. Granted, in this timeline his arms weren’t as damaged as they were in canon, but Toki still internally cringed imagining the strain on his tiny shoulders. Midoriya was beefy, but he was short. He would never be a bodybuilder. His body wasn’t suited to it.
Maybe Toki could borrow some of Hayasa-sensei’s spreadsheets from Naruto Labs, to explain why someone with a short stature and great flexibility like Hawks wasn’t going to follow the same training regimen as someone like Endeavor. Maybe then Midoriya would stop trying to puff himself up and punch thing like the lovechild of All Might and a miniature Brussel sprout.
In the end, only a little over half the class wanted to look for a work-study. She took the name of those who weren’t sure they could manage to snatch a place at the agency where they had their internship, or those who wanted a change of scenery. She would take the list back home and think about good mentors to recommend them.
Todoroki gave his name. That was a surprise. Toki threw him an oblique look, and lowered her voice.
“You don’t want to get back to Endeavor’s agency? Was it… bad?”
If Endeavor was being a dick again, she could totally push him from a rooftop.
Shouto tilted his head on the side, looking pensive. After a pause, he shook his head.
“The old man isn’t a bad teacher. It was the most agreeable time we ever spent together, probably because we both acted like we weren’t related at all.”
Toki blinked. She didn’t know whether that meant that Endeavor was absolutely shit at being a father and knew it enough to act entirely professional during the internship, or if Shouto only associated father-son bonding time with pain and thus didn’t recognize it when it was nice. She didn’t know which one would be worse, actually.
“But you don’t want to go back?”
Shouto shrugged: “I wouldn’t mind. But I want to see what I can learn from other heroes.” He glanced at her, very briefly. “Rescues heroes, ideally.”
Ah, yes. Endeavor didn’t do much rescue, did he? Toki nodded, mentally shuffling through her list of heroic acquaintances. The Wild Wild Pussycat, maybe? Not Gecko, that was for sure… Not Inferno or Salamander… Maybe Basalt? He had a Quirk shaping his environment.
Oh, what about Wani? He had a water Quirk! Yeah, maybe Wani would be good. He fought a lot but he was also one of the best recue heroes to have on hand when there was a flood or a fire.
Midoriya was okay to go to Gran Torino again but wanted to keep his options open. Toki thought that as long as she kept him away from Sir Nighteye’s toxic brand of entitled bullshit, things would be fine. Iida wanted to work with someone other than Mr. Brave, although he profusely apologized and insisted it was in no way his mentor’s fault.
Yaoyorozu had loved her internship with Fat Gum and wanted to go back there. Uraraka had liked studying with Gunhead, but didn’t necessarily want to go back at the same agency. She wanted to work with a frontline hero, but forging new connections would interest her, too.
Tokoyami had liked studying with Hawks, and dearly wanted to show him his new moves. But since Hawks was infiltrating the MLA, Toki gently told Tokoyami that his mentor wouldn’t be very available in the next weeks, so maybe he should look into another agency. Maybe Majestic? He used his Quirk to fly too.
Asui had liked interning with Oki Mariner, but they had told her they wouldn’t take more students until next year. Summer was always a crazy period for smugglers, so it was understandable that Oki Mariner didn’t want to risk kids getting caught in a serious fight.
Kaminari was uncertain. He had liked his internship, but he hadn’t seen any action. Mostly he had learned about paperwork, which had been… very boring.
“But I have the time to think about it, right, sensei?”
“Well, realistically, you have about a week.”
“So I have the time?”
Toki resisted the urge to roll her eyes. She knew Kaminari had ADHD, thankfully, or else she would think he wasn’t taking it seriously. One of the most overlooked symptoms of ADHD was time blindness, and with it there was only three times.
The Past, which was usually poorly remembered. Right The Fuck Now, the only time that was real. And the Future, which may never come, so do not trust (next week might as well be ‘in a billion years after the sun goes cold’).
In a week, for other students, meant it was something you had to start preparing for today, or at least outline the project in preparation. In a week, for Kaminari, just meant later so not important.
“Give me a list of what you want to get out of a work-study. You have to do it today.”
“Aw, not fair, sensei!”
“Today, Kaminari!”
But well, all this stuff about a work study may not even pan out. They could only look for it after getting their provisional license, or rather if they got it. As Toki warned them, it was a difficult exam.
“So, I’m leaving you in the hands of Vlad King for your first heroic class today,” Toki concluded as the homeroom class drew to a close. “Mostly, you’ll talk about your current fighting style, and get ready for tomorrow’s class… about Ultimate moves.”
Several students cheered.
Toki had to admit that Ultimate moves seemed like a badass name. But hey, it was just a name. An Ultimate move wasn’t, unlike what the name could suppose, an over-powered attack that could end the fight. It was just… a defined form of attack that you can rely on. Quantum’s Scalpel was an Ultimate Move, but so was her technique of teleporting high in the sky with an opponent, or even the Warp-Blasts. It just needed to be reliable.
As the saying went, “I do not fear the one who practiced ten-thousand kicks once, but I fear the one who practiced one kick ten-thousand times.” It was the same principle. An ultimate move could be as simple as a punch, as long as your form was flawless, unique to your style, and that it’s strong enough to guarantee you a win.
Most heroes, if not every hero, had at least a dozen Ultimate moves. Some of them were purely defensive, others aimed to subdue the enemy, and others were just big strong hit to deal a lot of damage. But they were all engrained in the user’s muscle memory, which meant that it was an attack that they couldn’t fudge… While also being unique enough that it was part of their brand.
And the brand of a hero, the way they were making themselves known to the public, was incredibly important. Heroes didn’t just have to fight, they had to reassure the public. They had to inspire trust, or they were nothing more than vigilantes. So the kids had to work on some special moves, if just to help with their brand.
So.
The class ended. Toki left the kids in the goods hands of Vlad King. And she went back to the Icarus Agency to start her actual workday.
More specifically, to push to be assigned to the Shie Hassaikai case.
The Shie Hassaikai were, technically, only under surveillance. There wasn’t enough to justify a raid on their headquarters, which was also well-hidden. But Nighteye’s agency (who was in charge of their case) was suddenly under a lot of pressure to deliver. The HPSC demanded results. Endeavor’s agency was pushing to intervene personally, which in turn made Inferno’s agency bristle and push Nighteye to prove they didn’t need Endeavor’s personal intervention in their territory. The Icarus Agency trying to pressure Nighteye to let them join the case must be the cherry on the cake.
Ehehehehe. Toki wondered if that vein on Nighteye’s forehead was pulsing yet.
The intricacies of bureaucratic red tape meant that Kameko was doing most of the heavy-lifting. By phone calls. Or by emails. It bothered Nighteye prodigiously, which meant that Kameko was beaming. She was always so happy when she was creating trouble for someone.
If she hadn’t joined the HPSC, Toki was about 99% sure that Kameko would have become either a con artist or a mob boss. Or both.
But applying all that pressure was working. Nighteye didn’t know why the Endeavor’s agency and the Icarus Agency were suddenly sniffing around his case, especially this one (the yakuza were things of the past, after all). But it made him guess that something important was connected to the Shie Hassaikai, and it needed to be discovered fast. Two yakuza had been arrested already. Low-level thugs, but they knew the headquarters. Toki supposed that Nighteye had used his Quirk on them to get an idea of what the headquarter looked inside, so he could prepare a frontal assault.
Would they go with a frontal assault, like they had in canon? Toki wasn’t sure. After all, in this world, there was no Quirk-bullets (yet). Maybe there wasn’t even Eri. Maybe Sir Nighteye wouldn’t be able to get a warrant. Heroes could break into someone’s home, wreck shit and arrest people without a warrant, but then good luck making charges stick. Any Quirk use or act of violence from the villains could be classified as self-defense. Unless, of course, that the heroes found indisputable evidence of a crime. In canon, that had been Eri. Rescuing the girl had been Sir Nighteye’s legal excuse to crack down on the Shie Hassaikai.
Here? With no Eri, or at least no one knowing Eri existed yet? Yeah, that was going to be harder.
So maybe there wouldn’t be a frontal assault. Maybe there would just be more and more arrests, until Nighteye had captured all Eight Bullets and then Overhaul himself. But that would take time. Time that Nighteye was pressed for.
Toki was going to bet on a frontal assault, then. Something quick and decisive.
Besides, a big fight would make the frontline hero of Nighteye’s agency shine… and since Nighteye’s goal was to push Lady Siam to the top, then it would make sense for him to prepare an operation that played to her strengths.
Like wrecking shit.
Let’s be honest, Lady Siam was an incredible fighter. Toki was a warper, so of course she knew she was more deadly and more powerful. But Lady Siam had feline agility, cat-like reflexes, and enhanced strength. She skipped and twisted around like a dancer or a gymnast, jumping so high you would believe she was mounted on springs. Her tail corrected her balance when she turned on her heels at high speed, with her long hair flowing like a banner behind her, fast and precise and deadly and with her whole face lit up in delight during a chase. She seemed invincible, untouchable, as light as a feather and as fast as an arrow… up until all that strength twisting and evading and bouncing around suddenly impacted the enemy dead-on, and then BAM. Pavement cracked; walls broke apart, roofs caved; rubble flew in all directions.
Sure, Lady Siam didn’t punch as strongly as All Might (no one could), but Toki had seen a video of her stopping a car bare-handed. The only other person she knew who did that on the daily was Endeavor.
Toki wondered what it would be like to fight Lady Siam. Probably a lot like fighting All Might, except Siam was prettier, more cheerful, and would try to dodge instead of taking the hits head-on. It wouldn’t be a teeth-grinding match of stamina like with All Might. It would be a game of cat-and-mouse, thrilling and dangerous. They would chase each other like lightning all across the city, until one of them slipped and the other saw an opening.
…. That could be a very, very interesting fight.
Incidentally, Toki went on social media to like a few of Lady Siam’s posts… and offhandedly mention that she could kick her ass. Just because she could, no reason. Certainly not because she wanted to fight her. Oh, no. It was just pragmatic! Her Great Rival was surely going to pick up the gauntlet and then harass Nighteye to make Quantum visit, just so they could turn a join mission in a competition.
“I think that’s cheating,” Keigo commented, leaning above her shoulder to watch what she was doing on her phone.
“Cheating is what losers call strategy.”
“Mmmh.” She could hear his smile. His voice dropped to a purr, lips brushing against her neck. “Are you nearly done?”
It was late and they should go home. Still, Toki kept her eyes glued to her phone, not really paying attention to the way Keigo’s wing folded around them, or to the way her husband was reading above her shoulder, or the way his breath tickled her neck.
“Almost, I promise. Oh, wait, Lady Siam just posted something on Instagram… Not that I follow her or anything.”
“Uh-uh.”
It was a selfie, in a gym. Toki squinted. In the picture, Lady Siam was flexing, raising a dumbbell that was at least the size of her head. Holy shit, was it photoshopped?! That must be thirty kilos at least. And she was lifting that with one hand?! What the hell!
“Hey, look at that caption!” Toki realized. “She wrote ‘try and give me a challenge!’. Do you think it’s directed at me? Do you think she’ll harass Nighteye on my behalf?”
Keigo huffed in amusement, “I think you should stop talking about how to best annoy Nighteye when I’m trying to seduce you. Unless you’d rather I left you to your online stalking?”
Toki immediately let the phone fall face-down on her desk:
“My goodness, how boring!”
Behind her shoulder, she heard Keigo snort. She leaned back with a dramatic stretch, looking over her shoulder at him with a small grin.
“I don’t know how anyone could find this interesting at all. Whatever shall I do with my evening now?”
“I have an idea,” Keigo deadpanned.
Toki laughed, and when Keigo dragged her in a kiss, she looped both arms around his neck and warped them straight home without even having to open her eyes.
oOoOoOo
________________
> EndeavorSucks: so kids, how is it to be back to school?
> Moxie: pretty nice. I may have to break with my girlfriend though.
< Antares: WHAT?!
< Antares: why wasn’t I told?!
> Moxie: I just decided it!
> Moxie: we get along great in a lab, it’s true. But outside… meh.
> Moxie: we kind of argue about stupid suff. Like her not paying attention to me like a girlfriend, or being rude to people… or me not being obsessed with inventions like she is…
> Moxie: we didn’t speak all summer and I barely noticed? So you know, not a good sign.
> Moxie: and apparently she didn’t notice either, so…
< Antares: … damn.
> EndeavorSucks: not cool.
> Moxie: Yeah. In a way, I feel like we’re not really dating. Or rather it’s like my brain is dating her brain. So we’re having a lot of fun in the labs, don’t get me wrong, but she never thinks to hold my hand.
> Moxie: we’ll be better as friends (if we can even stay friends: Mei kind of forgets everything not labs-related).
> Moxie: Mostly because nothing will change except that now I have better thrusters in my mecha-boots, and I know how to kiss with tongue.
> PhantomOfTheOpera: TMI.
< Antares: it’s too bad it didn’t work out. But you’re okay, right?
> Moxie: yeah, yeah, don’t worry senpai =) you won’t have to dry my tears during the work-study!
> Moxie: what about you @PhantomOfTheOpera and @Megamind? How is school?
> EndeavorSucks: oh yeah, and you’re in dorms right?
> EndeavorSucks: I would have loved to have dorms when I was in high-school
> EndeavorSucks: utter and amazing chaos.
> PhantomOfTheOpera: nah it’s pretty tame
> Megamind: for now!
> Megamind: there’s a guy in my class (let’s call him Broccoli) who broke a door by accident.
> Megamind: ON THE FIRST DAY.
> Megamind: he’s apologizing frantically every time someone mention it. Apparently it can happen if he’s startled.
> Megamind: so a few other students had decided to stalk him and try to startle him
> Megamind: the structural integrity of the building WILL NOT resist Halloween if it goes on…
> PhantomOfTheOpera: the superiority of my class is that we’re not suicidal maniacs
> PhantomOfTheOpera: mostly we watch movies or anime
> PhantomOfTheOpera: im watching ‘avatar the last airbender’
> EndeavorSucks: what’s that
< Antares: good stuff and a classic
< Antares: 14 yo me was addicted
> SpicyWings: lol same
> SpicyWings: I had a crush on Zuko
< Antares: everyone has a crush on Zuko
> SpicyWings: yeah
> SpicyWings: it’s the bad boy aesthetic
< Antares: no, it’s the tragic backstory
> SpicyWings: THE AESTHETIC
< Antares: THE BACKSTORY
> SpicyWings: you liar I know you thought he looked good
< Antares: ….
< Antares: SO Phantom what do you think about it??!!?
> PhantomOfTheOpera: i think it's a good thing Suki taught Sokka feminism in season one bc if she didn't it would've been up to Toph and I don't think Sokka could've survived that lol
< Antares: 😂
> Megamind: I’m starting a new anime too
> Megamind: Death Note
> Megamind: It’s amazing and I’m loving it
< Antares: you would
> Moxie: oh yeah I love Death Note! It was my first anime!!!
> Megamind: really?
> Moxie: L/light is the funniest fucking pairing in the world bc it is so embarrassing for both of them
> Moxie: light is gripping the bathroom sink & crying like ‘he’s not even cute i don’t even like all his weird bullshit and cutting remarks and genius deductions and the way he knows me better than myself i’m straight i am straight’
> Moxie: meanwhile L meets a hot guy who is kind of obsessed with him and can keep up with his mind games and he’s just like shrug. he’s PROBABLY a serial killer but literally what else am i doing
> PhantomOfTheOpera: xDDDDD
> EndeavorSucks: maybe I’ll give it a try then! xD
________________
Toki liked all of her students equally and she didn’t discriminate between them. She was the homeroom teacher of class 1-A, but everyone was welcome to talk to her about their problems, or ask for help or training. I mean yeah, her fledglings were her favorites, but that was different. Hitoshi was like a little brother to her. Melissa and Neito were… not quite siblings, not kids, but they were hers anyway.
Found family, Toki thought with a smile. They didn’t have to fit in neat little category of parents and children, they just had to fit together. And they did.
So yeah, Toki liked all of the kids. No matter their class, she liked teaching them, congratulating them, helping them, seeing them progress, making them beam with pride or bounce impatiently before an exercise. They were just at this age where confidence boomed into maturity, and it was kind of rewarding to see them grow, change, transform so fast from children to young adults. They were cheerful and maybe a little childish, and yet focused and hardened like adults. Toki could relate. So yeah, she liked teaching the kids.
Weirdly enough, the one she was the most ambivalent about was Midoriya.
And it had nothing to do with the fact that he was the main character.
Midoriya was too painfully earnest, sometimes. Personality-wise, Toki thought that it came from being under-socialized and ostracized most of his life. He missed context clues, he spoke too loudly or muttered his thoughts without thinking of how rude it was, he was so desperate to be liked that he gripped any show of affection with both hands, and yet so terrified to be noticed that he let go as scalded as soon as he realized it. He was intense and yet overly emotional, and… for someone who had learned to compartmentalize and prioritize at a very young age, like Toki, it was weird. Like she could never really guess his real level of emotional investment and thus could never meet him on his level. It tripped her up and she didn’t like it.
It wasn’t really Midoriya’s fault. He was an extreme extrovert who had never learned to respect other people’s personal boundaries, because he never had a chance to meet people who didn’t immediately push him away. Right now, Midoriya was kind of learning the basic socialization skills that most of his peers had learned at age five.
Hey. Funnily enough, Toki wondered if Bakugo didn’t have the exact same issue. His emotional development had kind of veered off-course at five, too, when his entourage had put him on a pedestal, and he never had formed any meaningful bonds because he had angrily pushed everyone away.
… Gods, those two were made for each other. And therapy.
Anyway. So Midoriya was a problem child. He was tripping over his feet in his haste to catch up. And he did, and it was good! But life-long isolation left marks. Midoriya didn’t welcome good news with a smile or a cheer, he exploded in joy; just like he didn’t take a distracted refusal with politeness, but with utter and genuine hurt. He was kind, too kind. But he was also tender, hurting, life soft skin that had never built any calluses and got flayed raw by any friction. It was all or nothing with him: he was sometimes completely numb to direct cruelty but flinched at the silliest things.
It was getting better. He was learning. But he was still… very, very emotional, as if personally invested in everything. It just worried Toki, sometimes, how much he could hurt for really trivial things. She was kind of at a loss, for this.
Maybe he should talk to someone? But Hound Dog clearly hadn’t helped. And All Might was a human disaster, with his own issues to boot.
Urgh. Taking care of teenagers was complicated.
There was also the issue of Midoriya’s Quirk, too.
Funnily enough, Midoriya’s issue with his Quirk was directly linked to Midoriya’s personality. He didn’t know its limit because he didn’t know himself. How could anyone be expected to learn to wield a knife, when they had never bothered to learn how to wield their own body?
… Okay, that metaphor was maybe a bit weird.
The point was that Midoriya didn’t know how to use his Quirk because he always waited for external inspiration, and never thought about what would work best for himself. That’s why Midoriya had such a hard time mastering One For All. And not just because it was powerful! Because he also genuinely didn’t have the self-awareness, the self-knowledge, and the self-confidence to know how to adapt this new tool to himself.
That was why, in canon, Midoriya had constantly emulated others. It was easier to use a patchwork of ideas and moves stolen from other people, than to build his own moves and thus his own identity from scratch.
That was why he punched things like All Might. That was also why, now that he used Full Cowl to jump around, his moves looked a lot like Ojiro’s acrobatics, or like Hitoshi’s free running, or like Ashido’s parkour. Bounce, bounce, swing, roll, quick on his feet and lightning-fast, but close to the ground.
In canon, he would have looked to Bakugo’s moves, with big jumps and aerial maneuvers, and it would have suited him perfectly. But without Bakugo in his life, he had drawn inspiration from elsewhere.
That was this, the flaw, the issue. Midoriya tried, he tried very hard to be good, but for him, goodness and worth was found in others, and more specifically in other heroes. Not within himself.
It was… It was kind of sad, really.
Midoriya was a sweet kid, kind and always eager to please. His Quirk was cool. And Toki liked scrappy fighters who bounced on walls like feral balls of ping-pong. But she wasn’t sure how to handle that one. How do you help a child build up not only the confidence, but the self-affirmation that they had been denied for ten years? That wasn’t something you could solve with a Talk No Jutsu, a good cry and a hug. Or even a fight with everyone yelling about their feelings, shōnen-manga style.
Toki could just… be a teacher.
Though, it wasn’t such a little thing. Hayasa-sensei had been her teacher, and Toki wouldn’t be half the person she was today if not for him. They never had a heart-to-heart; they never had talked about her feelings or her issues. Hayasa-sensei had been there to train her, and he had done exactly that.
But he had been here. He had believed in her. He had supported her. That had been a lot, back then. That had been enough.
For the next heroic class, Toki paid extra-attention to Midoriya.
In heroic class, the teachers rotated. Class 1-A was taught by Vlad King, Aizawa, All Might, and Quantum, with occasional guest appearances of Cementos, Ectoplasm, Midnight or Present Mic. When it was Toki’s turn, this time she was sharing with Ectoplasm and Cementos. Until now, Toki hadn’t been paired with Aizawa. She wondered if it was deliberate.
Probably.
Class started easily enough. The whole class went to Gym Gamma. Cementos created steep platforms to separate the kids, and Ectoplasm made a bunch of clones to work individually with each student. They had all started yesterday with Vlad King, so they all knew where they were going or what to work on, more or less. Toki decided to go to each student one at the time, to offer advice or, if they struggled too much, remove them from the physical training and work on Quirk-analysis until they had a breakthrough.
Ashido had things well in hands, and Cementos had given her good advice. Iida already had an Ultimate move with his Recipro Burst, so he was working on that. Asui was working on her agility, Kirishima was focusing his hardening on his fists, Sero was trying to use his tape like a lasso, Todoroki was trying to use a fire-whip, Uraraka was trying to make herself float… Everyone was progressing. Everyone had an idea of what they wanted to do.
Well, almost everyone.
Unsurprisingly, Midoriya was already practicing punches, but he didn’t really seem sure of himself. In this world, his arms weren’t as damaged as they hadn’t been in canon (after all, he hadn’t fought Muscular!), but he had broken his bones enough time to remember the pain, and how crippling it was.
He wasn’t thinking of an alternative to punches, because unlike what had happened in canon, he didn’t need it. Or rather, it wasn’t a medical emergency. But the same problem would arise, sooner or later.
“Midoriya, do you want to make your ultimate move a punch?” she asked bluntly.
“Er, I guess?”
“Why?”
“B-Because All Might—”
“You’re not All Might.” Toki’s voice was gentle, but firm. “He’s built like a tank. You’re short. Even if you gain a ton of muscles, you’re not going to have his stature. Your shoulders won’t be as strong, and you already broke your arms a few times. There is more than one way to apply strength. You should find something that works for you.”
Midoriya rubbed at his nape, embarrassed. “Yeah, I know, but… I don’t imitate him that much. Do I?”
“You scream ‘Smash’ when punching things.”
“It helps me focus!”
“Does your All Might phone case and ringtone help you focus too?”
Midoriya started sputtering indignantly, bright red. Toki sniggered, and charitably decided to not tease him further. She grew serious again.
“You’re not him. Your power is your own. Even if…” She waved a hand, unwilling to say ‘even if it’s his Quirk’ out loud. “That doesn’t mean he’s the only blueprint you should draw inspiration from. There are other heroes with enhanced strength around. Why not look at their ultimate moves?”
“Like Death Arms?” Midoriya hesitated.
Well, technically yes, but it wasn’t an example that suited Toki’s need. Death Arms’ Quirk was located in his arms. Mostly he threw heavy objects, but sometimes he also punched walls or opponents. Not the example Midoriya needed to follow.
“I’m mostly thinking about people whose Quirk enhance their whole bodies,” she edged. “Like Mirko or Lady Siam. They also use their strength to boost their agility and they move a lot like you with your Full Cowl.”
Midoriya lit up: “You think so?!”
“Absolutely. You should look them up. You’re shorter than All Might, so use it. You can become more mobile, more flexible.” She paused, pretending to think. “You have good balance, and I know you can jump pretty high. Have you thought about adding some gymnastic moves to your style, and switching to kicks?”
Midoriya considered it, looking thoughtful. But he liked the idea, Toki could tell. She could see his eyes going distant as he contemplated the logistics, could see his lips moving as if silently muttering, could see the way a tiny smile was forming.
“It would work well with Full Cowl, would free your arms to carry injured civilians, and it will be a unique signature move,” Toki pointed.
And that was what Midoriya was having trouble with. Being unique. Not just using other people’s moves because he admired them, but building his own style, making something admirable about himself.
Toki wanted to shake him sometimes. What was so hard about putting yourself first? But she knew it was a stupid question. Self-respect and self-love were skills. It was unfair to expect Midoriya to learn them in ten months, all alone, while his peers had had ten years and multiple people to help them learn.
“I like the idea of having my arms free to carry people,” Midoriya admitted. “But now that All Might is retired, wouldn’t it be reassuring for people to see someone use his moves, to remind them of him?”
That was a good point.
“Maybe,” Toki said noncommittally. “Or maybe people would be more reassured because you’re coming to save them, with your whole heart, and not trying to be someone else.”
The boy nodded gravely, and then looked at her with a wince.
“I don’t know any kicks.”
“That’s okay. You didn’t know any punches when you started, right? I use a lot of kicks in my fighting style, I can help you out. I’ll show you a few moves. Practice on your own and see what you’re more comfortable with. You don’t have the same body-type as me, so it’s going to be something you have to figure out for yourself. Then I’ll help you develop that particular style. You can probably do high jumps and kicks from above, but if you would rather stay close to the ground… we’ll work with that too.”
Midoriya looked a little overwhelmed.
“I don’t know if I can do all that in time for the provisional license exam…”
The exam was during the second week of September. Pretty early in the terms, sure, but it left ten whole days to the kids to train. Their usual lessons had shrunk to the bare minimum so they could spend the majority of their times polishing their Ultimate Moves.
“It doesn’t have to be very complex,” Toki assured him. “It simply needs to be recognizable as yours.”
Midoriya didn’t look very reassured, but he still squared his shoulders with determination.
“I’ll do my best, sensei!”
Aw. He was cute. Toki had to resist the urge to pat his fluffy hair.
“I’m sure you will. The exam doesn’t really test how classy or elegant your style is. Only how comfortable you are with your own abilities, and if you can be trusted with civilians in danger.”
The job of a hero was to save people from danger. Crimes, accidents, natural disasters, man-made disasters... The exam would test this. Toki remembered her own test, or Melissa’s. The students would be evaluated on a multitude of abilities. How they reacted in high-stake situations, how quickly they could assess risks, how good they were are at gather information and make decisions… But the most visible skill was always how fast the candidates could move and fight, lead people, reassure victims, manage crowd control
Every year the exam was different. Toki didn’t know what this year’s exam would look like. But she knew the students’ fighting abilities were always especially scrutinized. There would probably be a straight-up battle at some point. It would be messy and chaotic: nobody would have time to plan.
The kids would have to rely on instinct: and so, they must be able to have their Ultimate moves ready. Even if it was as simple as a kick.
“Come on, let’s start with something simple. Long distance jumps and sharp turns in quick succession. Then we’ll add some kicks to that. Can you jump to the ceiling, bounce back to that wall there, and then land on that spot next to Cementos?”
Midoriya grinned.
“No problem. I had to do something like this with Gran Torino during my internship, when I first mastered Full Cowl.”
This time Toki didn’t resist the urge to pat his hair.
“Great! Come on, Dekiru, let’s blow their mind.”
oOoOoOo
The week passed slowly. Patrol, class, paperwork, training, one or two interviews… Toki went to Musutafu regularly, and she made a few quick patrols around Shizuka. She even saw Endeavor from afar, although she didn’t linger or try to approach him. She didn’t want his sidekicks to get a good look at her an realize who she was. Meteor deserved to make that reveal in his own time. After all, they were his coworkers.
So Toki didn’t approach Endeavor.
She didn’t go back to the Todoroki house, either.
She didn’t text or call Fuyumi or Natsuo. She hadn’t been close to them before squatting at their house for two weeks straight, so it wasn’t really weird: but after living with them, and then having this very emotional conversation on the last day… It felt strange, to cut all communication. It felt like she had done something wrong and was cut off. Which was stupid, because Toki could text them anytime and just chose not to, so in a sense she was the one creating the distance.
It was weird. She felt nervous. She kind of wanted to ask how they were doing, how they were taking it, if things had settled, and at the same time she didn’t dare. She had already gotten way too involved in their business.
It was uncomfortable. She knew how it felt, to not be what one parent wanted you to be, and to be discarded for it. To be replaced. To look into your parent’s eyes and see them look through you, towards their own goals and ambitions, as if you weren’t even there. She knew how it felt, to be trapped in that house, and to suffocate under the weight of the guilt, of the feeling of not belonging, of being too powerless to stop something awful from happening.
She knew it, and she knew that the Todoroki siblings knew that feeling, too. And so, she knew they would feel like her the unfairness, the staggering cruelty of seeing the one who had hurt you change, become someone better, be happy. It cut like a blade, this knowledge that things could have been better for you, but the adult that was supposed to take care of you hadn’t thought you were worth the effort.
Toki was happy that Meteor had changed. She was glad. She was grateful. She had been so tired of feeling guilty and alone: it had been a relief to put it down, to forgive, to accept this second chance.
But what of the anger? She had gotten closure for the pain, but what about the rage? What about the bitterness she had spat at Endeavor back in Fukuoka; what about the indignation about the fact that she hadn’t been enough, as a child entirely dependent on her parents, to warrant love and safety?
It was petty to still be angry, deep down, even as she had forgiven her father. She knew it was petty. But… they were healing, and now that the fear and the pain had been soothed, after the relief came the nagging feeling of frustration. Like an itch, buried down and that Toki didn’t dare to look at, didn’t dare to scratch.
Meteor had apologized for not listening to her, back then. It had helped, because in a way, that what had hurt her the most as a child.
But he hadn’t apologized for changing. He hadn’t apologized for being able to change, and choosing to change for someone else, fifteen years too late.
So yeah. Toki understood the Todoroki’s anger. Even if they forgave their father’s abuse (which, in Natsuo and Shouto’s case, they hadn’t), then forgiving him for changing too late in was a different matter entirely.
It’s funny. Sometimes you have an easier time forgiving someone for doing something wrong, than forgiving for doing something right.
Because people apologized for doing bad things. They never apologized for doing good things. They weren’t supposed to. Why would they? You were supposed to be happy for them. Being hurt by that a good thing was your own damn fault. It was petty, was selfish, was wrong. It didn’t deserve an apology, and that’s why Toki wouldn’t get one.
And that’s why she didn’t want to think about it. She didn’t want to think about how it ached. She was lucky enough to have her dad back: couldn’t she just focus on that, on the good part, and leave the dark parts of her story behind?
But things would never be that easy. Not with who Toki was, not with who Meteor was, and not with the mark they had left on each other. They shared the same blood, the same streak of ruthlessness, the same passion, the same rage. The same potential for destruction. Of course things would never be easy. Of course some things would always hurt.
And yet… that didn’t mean it was worth throwing the towel.
Toki knew she would have to work for it if she wanted to stay on good terms with her father. They would both have to work for it. Just like the Todoroki needed to work for it too. For Natsuo, it wasn’t worth the effort, and he had a right to make that choice. But for Fuyumi and Shouto… if they wanted to move on, they had to accept that Endeavor had moved on, too. Even if it seemed unfair.
“Did Endeavor notice something?”
Meteor shook his head, “No. But since school started and everyone is busy, they didn’t manage to see each other very much.” His eyes were calculating, “So the kids figured it out and blew up?”
Toki still meet her father for lunch. They talked, they bickered. Sometimes they argued. It was fine. They were both putting in the effort. Some families were allowed to form an indestructible bond and draw comfort from it effortlessly. For the Taiyōme, it would require constant work to smooth down the jagged edges. But it was alright.
Toki was allowed to be angry at her father. But she was also allowed to love him. She was allowed to call him on his bullshit, to joke with him, to like spending time with him. It was her right. He was one of her people, and she always had a hard time letting go.
“Pretty much,” Toki confessed. “Shouto figured it out the first day. He overhead us. He sat on that reveal until the end of the holidays because he wanted to leave for the dorms immediately after and avoid the fallout.”
Meteor snorted, then sobered up.
“How did they take it?”
“Shouto is bewildered but ultimately doesn’t care. Fuyumi hoped her parents would get back together and is heartbroken. Natsuo is just pissed about everything.”
Her father let out a deep sigh, her rubbed a hand over his face. He looked tired.
“That’s what I expected.”
Toki hesitated. She knew Meteor liked the Todoroki children. But apparently none of them had contacted him afterward. You would think that Fuyumi at least would have asked for confirmation, but… well.
She guessed that he wasn’t very welcome at the Todoroki estate now.
Toki bit her lips. She wasn’t enthusiastically supportive of Meteor and Endeavor’s relationship but she knew they cared about each other. And that Meteor cared about the Todoroki kids. And that their anger had to hurt. She wished she could help, but… She didn’t really know how.
“Give them a week or two to calm down. Fuyumi wants her father to be happy, she’ll come around.”
Meteor raised an eyebrow. “Natsuo won’t. He was thinking of moving out already.”
Was he? Toki hadn’t known that. She tried to remember what had happened in canon, if Natsuo had lived at the Todoroki estate or not and drew a blank.
“If he wanted to, he would have,” she finally said.
Her father waved a hand:
“He wanted to move in with his girlfriend when he reached eighteen, but they broke up, and he doesn’t want to live alone or with someone he can’t trust. Believe me, if he was dating someone he would have packed his bags and left to live with them already.” He paused, thoughtful, “He’s seeing a girl, but they’re not dating yet. I wonder if this will push it to ask her out. Apparently she’s in a different course than he is, and a little older or something like that. He finds her a little intimidating.”
A little older? Intimidating? Gods, if Natsuo was seducing Mirko or Lady Siam, Toki was going to riot. Enough Todoroki had weaseled their way into the beds of her entourage.
“How do you know so much about Natsuo’s love life?!”
Meteor rolled his eyes: “I talk to him, obviously.” He paused, and amended, “Well, talked. Apparently.”
“He doesn’t blame you,” Toki muttered. “He’s just pissed that Endeavor gets to frolic merrily holding hands in a flowery meadow, while Natsuo himself is still bitter and angry.”
She saw her father mouthing incredulously, ‘frolic merrily holding hands in a flowery meadow,’ and then shake his head with baffled fondness. Toki hid a smile by taking a sip from her glass. Then she grew serious again.
“You’re not surprised?”
“No.” Meteor glanced at her. “I know Endeavor doesn’t have a good relationship with his children, and why. They managed to get along when they thought they were all miserable because of their past. But now…” He shrugged. “He’s happy and they feel cheated.”
Toki chewed on her lip. She thought of her own resentment, buried deep down and shamefully. She was angry that her father had become better for someone else, and not for her. But she knew she was wrong to be angry about it. She knew it was her problem, and not something she had any right to take out on Meteor.
Natsuo’s anger was different. It was Natsuo’s right to never forgive his father. But forgiveness had little to nothing to do with redemption. You can become good and never be forgiven, just like you can be forgiven over and over again and still be a piece of trash. It made her feel so tired, to think of how complicated people were, how hateful.
Why did hurting each other always came to people so easily?
Toki wished people would just be kind to each other. It would be so much simpler, if they could be kind. If there was a way to heal that didn’t require more hurt, in either direction. For Endeavor, for Natsuo… For Dabi, too.
Damn Todoroki and their drama. Damn every single one of them.
“Are you okay?” she asked tentatively.
Meteor sighed, and then straightened.
“Of course. Don’t worry, Munchkin, I’ll survive.”
The waitress came to take their order, and they both tacitly dropped the subject. When the waitress left, Meteor oriented the conversation towards the latest office gossip instead.
Toki hadn’t known how much gossip there was in the Icarus Agency until she had asked Keigo, who had laughed in her face and told her that Kameko was having an affair with Thunder Thief. And that was only the tip of the iceberg! With his sensitive feathers, Keigo picked on all the conversations in the building, and boy did he have some stories. Toki was shocked.
And also, she didn’t know why the idea of Kameko having no-string-attached sex with Thunder Thief made her blush like an idiot. She hadn’t been able to look either of them in the eyes the whole day.
Apparently Kameko was living her best shoujo life at the Icarus Agency. At least four different sidekicks brought her flowers on a monthly basis. That was why her office always felt so bright and lively! Toki used to think that Kameko was the one who bought flowers for her office, holy shit. But no, of course not! It was the boys fluttering around her that covered her in small presents and compliments. And apparently Hayasa-sensei was on it?! He gave her compliment and gifts in plain view of the other sidekicks just to encourage the competition!
This was ridiculous. Damn it, if they started losing efficiency because Kameko was busy making a harem, Toki was going to kill her and turn her into a furry carpet.
I mean, it probably wouldn’t happen. It had been going on for years now, and the Icarus Agency was working perfectly well. But still! Toki knew that Kameko loved chaos, but if one day all the office romance drama blew up in their face, that would not be pretty.
Meanwhile Meteor was (as always) on top of the gossip at the Endeavor Agency, like how Kiriko the receptionist was trying to set up together two of the sidekicks to make them tone down the ridiculous blustering when they were on a mission together. Or how Burnin’ was harassing Endeavor to be assigned to the Shie Hassaikai case (even though the case hadn’t been given to their agency) so she could see Inferno again.
Although Meteor and Endeavor kept their relationship secret, a fair number of the sidekicks at their agency apparently suspected or had downright guessed the truth. Toki pointed out that Endeavor could get in serious trouble over that, but her father just waved a hand and told her he had weaved a narrative convincing enough that those who knew were also persuaded that the whole affair had only started after Meteor’s release.
Toki opened her mouth to ask how he had done that, and then realized she didn’t want to know. At all. Really, she had all the information she needed about her father’s love life being talked about by his colleagues, thank you very much.
Ew.
Whatever. The conversation shifted to other topics. Meteor offhandedly offered to train, one of these days. Toki hesitated but declined. She said some excuse about being busy, but the truth was…
Maybe she wasn’t ready.
She loved her father, and in some measure she trusted him. But was afraid of the emotions that a fight would bring to the surface. Bitterness, for having lost so much time. Rage, for not having been important enough to him to change, back then. Resentment. Sadness.
Fear.
Fear of being transported back in that moment, the building crumbling, her father yelling, people screaming under the bombardment of rubble. The splatter of red and gore, the people who got hit by boulders and then fell down unmoving. Toki had seen a lot of death and a lot of violence since that day, she had participated in a lot of death and violence, but somehow it still haunted her nightmares. Seeing her father suddenly becoming Meteor and knowing that if he saw her she wouldn’t be spared his fury.
No, she wasn’t ready to train with him.
Toki wanted to, but she wasn’t ready. Maybe one day she would. She would like the chance to do so, she would like the companionship, the complicity, the support. But… She couldn’t have it yet. It would take time.
They ate, they talked. When it was time for them to part ways, they bickered over who would settle the bill. Most men were offended when a girl paid for their meal out of some fragile masculine pride, but Meteor got offended on the principle that she was his baby and he should provide for her: which was even more ridiculous because she was richer than him and she hadn’t been a baby in a long time. In the end they split the bill in two.
They were still bickering about it when they left the restaurant, and climbed to a rooftop where Meteor had stashed his hero costume. Since he still had a wrist stuck in a brace, Toki lent him a hand to buckle his armor. Mostly it was a pretext to nitpick at the design.
Not that there was anything wrong with the design, of course. But she loved arguing and her father loved escalating, so once they were going… they could pick up a lot of steam.
But before they ended up squabbling over the exact shade of orange used in the highlights of Meteor’s costume (was it closer to fire-orange like Endeavor’s suit, or tangerine-orange like Quantum’s jacket?), Toki’s phone rang. Since almost all of her contacts had personalized ringtone, she knew who it was immediately, and picked up immediately.
“Yagi? Is there something at the school?”
Meteor paused and looked at her. He didn’t know Yagi was All Might but the mention of school must have picked his attention. On the phone, All Might let out a short laugh:
“No, don’t worry! Everything is fine, you don’t have to rush back. Oh, I apologize, are you already in Fukuoka?”
“No,” Toki said slowly, darting a glance to her father. “I’m in Shizuoka. What’s up?”
There an infinitesimal pause where All Might probably processed why she was in Shizuoka, and hesitated. If he was calling about something secret, that was the moment where he would have made up some story about just wanting to talk about the kids’ homework. Toki hadn’t put the phone on speaker, but Meteor could absolutely eavesdrop the conversation if he wanted.
But Yagi must have decided that it didn’t need to be kept secret, or that Meteor could be trusted, because he powered on.
“I just received word from Tartarus. All For One is awake.”
Toki sucked in a breath. So did Meteor. Although it was probably for different reasons.
“And?” Toki asked tensely.
“And,” Yagi said, dark satisfaction radiating from his voice, “he had to be sedated because he was having a panic attack. He kept yelling about something being gone.”
Toki grinned. It probably wasn’t a nice grin, judging by the way Meteor stared at her. But fuck, she deserved this.
She should feel relief. But instead, it was a petty, giddy, dark sense of exultation that filled her chest. Not just ‘oh, I’m safe’ but ‘fuck yes, eat shit you scumbag, I WON.’ She had done it. It had worked. Her plan had worked, and the Big Bad Wolf had lost his biggest weapon.
Now he had a much more pressing problem than trying to hunt down Toki. He had lost his Quirk. He was powerless. Fuck yes.
I have done it. I have done it, IT WORKED. Fuck canon and fuck Horikoshi, I just wrecked the Boogeyman’s plan. FUCK YES.
“Thanks for telling me,” she said almost giddily, “I’ll pass the message along to Endeavor.”
“Don’t forget to celebrate.”
“Oh, believe me, I will.”
The victory wasn’t there yet. There was still Tomura Shigaraki. The doctor, who could optimize Shigaraki’s Quirk. Machia, the gigantic monster that could tear through Japan. Dozens of Nomu. The MLA and their thousands of brainwashed cultists. And of course, AFO losing his Quirk didn’t mean he had lost all the other ones.
But AFO had lost his main weapon. It was sweet when a plan worked perfectly.
“Do I want to know?” her father asked with curiosity when she hung up.
Toki smirked at him;
“Nope. You really, really don’t.”
Notes:
So Melissa broke up with Hatsume! Don't worry, they're still friends x)
Also in this chapter i'm cocking Chekov's gun towards Natsuo's girlfriend. Just so you know. x) She won't appear for a while, but... I'm planting clues for when Toki will meet her!
Special dedicace to Fic-a-holic-Phantomchick who suggested on the Discord server the idea of Kameko living her best shoujo life with a whole harem in the background. I thought it was hilarious and added it to the story xD
To be fair most of the stuff suggested to me on Discord is hilarious. Like the thing about "oh, EndeavorSucks is dating a nutcase he founds on Grind? It's probably Dabi! Would he get a monetary reward if he want to the police and revealed all his kinks?", because i'm still not over it xD
I'm not confirming it but i'm not denying it either !!Anyway!
Next week i'll post a spicy OS in "love is the wisdom of fools (and the folly of the wise)" about a surprise pairing!
Here is the calendar by the way :
15/03/24 FOLLY OF THE WISE - surprise pairing !
22/03/24 WISDOM - Aizawa’s apology
29/03/24 WISDOM - The provisional license exam
05/04/24 HOUSE OF WISDOM - King Nitro's license exam
12/04/24 WISDOM COMES TO US - Bakugo, the HPSC protege
19/04/24 WISDOM - Preparing the work-studies
26/04/24 HOUSE OF WISDOM - Chisaki and Shigaraki, heirs of darkness
EDIT : I GOT THE JOB ! Not the one my family wanted me to get, but the one i wanted on my own merits! I GOT THE EMAIL 24h AFTER POSTING THIS CHAPTER, i'm so happy !!!!!
Chapter 66: Aizawa's apology
Summary:
To her dismay, Aizawa actually cleared his throat, as if hesitating to engage in conversation.
Toki didn’t tense. She consciously relaxed her shoulders and turned towards him, ready for another argument. So she was surprised when Aizawa took a long breath, then said stiffly:
“It had been brought to my attention that I haven’t properly apologized for my conduct when we first meet.”
Notes:
If you saw the title and went "N-NANI?!" ... well, you and Toki both xD
Also, if you're one day stuck with no inspiration, here is the miracle cure !
- Pet cats
- Have a cup of tea
- Quit your job and moves 100 km away.
In other news, not only i had a breakthrough while driving home, i also got a new job (better pay, better hours, better files, more challenges!!!) and i'm gonna move, so the next weeks are gonna be chaotic. Wish me luck !!!!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
AIZAWA'S APOLOGY
“The Nighteye Agency folded,” Kameko announced Toki. “If they don’t have sufficient motive to conduct a raid in two weeks, they’ll hand over the case to the Inferno Agency. Meaning there will be a raid, whatever happens. Inferno already called to coordinate the attack, and he requested you.”
“Of course he did,” Toki preened. “I’m amazing.”
Kameko raised an eyebrow:
“I’m thinking it has more to do with the fact that this request came through their HPCS agent. It’s not Inferno who wants results, it’s Genmei-san, isn’t it?”
“It can be both,” Toki cheerfully retorted. “She gets a drug-trafficking ring shut down, I get to hang out with my beloved senpai and assuage my superiority over my great rival. Win-win.”
Hayasa-sensei snorted. “I watched videos of your great rival. She has you beat in physical strength and agility.”
Toki stuck her tongue at him.
“I’m not listening to you. She’s my rival and I will beat her. Plus, I’m faster.”
“It won’t matter much if she cracks your skull.”
“Whose side are you on?!”
Hayasa-sensei pretended to not hear her question and passed her a file. No surprise, the first page was a spreadsheet. It detailed Toki’s schedule, the number of arrests and case closed, as well as her popularity. It took Toki a few seconds to understand what she was looking at, though.
“My arrest record isn’t as good as it was last year. So is my rescue record.”
“Because you started teaching.” Hayasa-sensei tapped the line listing her hours patrolled. “It cut your time of patrol.”
“Yeah.” Toki frowned. “Not ideal. But hey, look, my popularity is at an all-time high! Shit, I have Hawks beat. That’s never happened before!”
“That has more to do with Kamino than with your workload. You know, you’re neck to neck with Hawks right now. If you keep up your patrol time… or if you close a big case… You’ll probably be Number Two at the next Billboard Chart, in two months.”
Toki glanced at Kameko. So this was what the meeting was about, and why Keigo wasn’t there.
“Do we want that?” she asked. “It’s an honest question. For you, it doesn’t make such a difference. Whether the Number Two is Hawks or me, it’s still Icarus.”
Hayasa-sensei and Kameko glanced at each other. Then Kameko shrugged:
“It’s true, but… You should try to take it anyway.”
“Hawks has more drive than you,” Hayasa-sensei added. “He will climb back to the top next year, and probably stay there for the years to come. You? I doubt you’ll try as hard as him. Also…” He hesitated. “If you ever take another break for your studies, or to have another kid… Climbing back to the top will be even harder.”
“So it’s now or never,” Toki summarized.
“Pretty much, yes.”
It was true in more sense than one, Toki thought, looking back to the spreadsheet without really seeing it. Her canon-knowledge stopped after the Dabi reveal, which would happen in a few months. If canon ran its course, next year the country would be plunged in a civil war, and rankings wouldn’t matter. Of course, if Toki played her cards right, next year the threat of the League would be eradicated, society reformed, and the country safe for a long while… which ultimately meant that the rankings wouldn’t matter very much anyway. Not to her at least.
So yeah. If Toki wanted a chance to become Number Two, that was now or never.
Did she want that, though?
Toki had never been interested in the popularity contests and stuff like that. She liked the visibility, she liked having people know she was there for them and that they could count on her, but that was the whole extent of it. Climbing the ranking had been a way to make the HPSC happy, to challenge herself and Keigo, and to increase her pay. But… Making the HPSC happy wasn’t really her priority, and money wasn’t an issue anymore.
And as for the competition with Keigo… well, okay, she still had that. She still loved that. It was a thrill. But it was only a thrill because it was fun. She didn’t want the stakes to suddenly make things serious.
“What does Hawks think?”
Kameko groaned. “That’s why we’re having this meeting without him! Because I knew you would chicken out and imagine that you’re stepping on his toes or something!”
“Well, you want me to steal his place.”
“No!” Kameko jabbed an index finger in Toki’s sternum. “I want you to win this place, so Hawks has to beat you to take it back. He knows that, he’s okay with that. Think of all the heated, furious sex you’re gonna have after the ranking ceremony.”
Hayasa-sensei made a face. “Can you not?”
Toki directed a shit-eating grin at him:
“I don’t know, that’s a pretty good argument, sensei.”
He rolled his eyes. Kameko growled, bringing back Toki’s attention to her. The cat-lady had crossed her arms, glaring. If she had a tail, it would have swished with agitation.
“Hawks knows you can beat him. He’s just never going to ask you to do it or to not do it, because he’s a pro and he know that’s not up to him. Can’t you just try?”
Toki sighed.
She didn’t dislike the idea of being a top hero. Being Number Two would be good for their brand. It also meant that her retirement pension would be higher. But it would mean more commercials, more merchandize, more interviews. More work. It would have been easier to let Keigo take the brunt of that burden. He like the popularity more than she did.
“I’ll try, alright?”
“Excellent. Now go and teach. Don’t you have class?”
And indeed, she had.
This class actually made Toki a little nervous, because it was training (again)… supervised by herself, Cementos, and Eraserhead. This would be the first class she shared with Hobo-san. She wasn’t sure how to feel about it.
She didn’t hate Aizawa. Or at least, she didn’t think so. She respected his skills as a fighter and she was a little impressed by how efficient he had been as a spy. She didn’t think that what he had done to her in the past justified to fire him, although she justified being distrustful of him. And of course, she thought he had an attitude complex and was a shit teacher. Why had Nedzu re-hired him? Favoritism?
It wasn’t like Aizawa actually taught anything to the kids. There was a reason another teacher was always there for their heroic lessons. Aizawa sucked at explaining things, paying attention, or even advising the kids.
Maybe the fact that he was such a passive teacher was a boon in disguise, actually, because it meant that he wouldn’t meddle with Toki’s lessons. He would stand back and let her do her thing without interfering, and they wouldn’t have to interact at all. Toki wasn’t going to provoke him or anything. But he got her hackles up. She couldn’t really help it.
Even though she knew she was immature about it, and that she should get over it, she still wanted to bristle whenever he opened his mouth.
Did that make her a hypocrite? After all, she had advocated for Nedzu to not punish him for what he had done to her under Okamoto’s orders. And Toki had always seen herself as someone… maybe not forgiving, but not unnecessarily resentful, either. If she said to others to keep their peace, then shouldn’t she be able to get over it, too?
She had forgiven Meteor. Meteor, who had murdered dozens of people, who didn’t regret it at all, who was allowed a fresh start and the protection of the Number One hero. Why couldn’t she forgive Aizawa, who didn’t actually kill anyone? Aizawa, who had felt enough guilt and remorse for his actions to confess them unprompted, and accept punishment from Nedzu? Aizawa, who had done something to atone, who had taken a dangerous mission to make penance, and risked his life in doing so?
You know why, a selfish little voice said in her mind. You forgave Meteor because you love him, and you want him back in your life. You refuse to forgive Aizawa because you don’t care about him. It’s not about right and wrong, just about your selfishness.
That wasn’t really helpful.
Toki took a breath, held it, and then slowly let it go. She was selfish. She could live with that. It shouldn’t stop her. Deep down, it didn’t really matter, did it?
It was just one tiny inconvenience, one ridiculously small emotion in the vastness of the universe. Relativize, Toki. Endless other solar systems spinning in the silence of the vacuum; unimaginable planets; twinned stars burning and turning in complement like the celestial analogue of herself and Keigo. Wasn’t it nice to think about? Somewhere out there— at a distance of a magnitude greater than her tiny meat brain could conceptualize, in a direction she couldn’t begin to fathom— a billion-billion coincidental collisions of atoms had dragged an inconceivably gigantic mirror of the two of them into being.
There was comfort in that. The universe found balance. Equations leveled out. Gravity kept them all twisting through the darkness one instant at a time.
Breathe in, breathe out, and move on.
oOoOoOo
For all of Toki’s worries, though, class started… pretty good. Aizawa was there, of course, but after a polite salutation, they both kept their distance. Cementos created raised platforms for the kids, and Toki started going from one student to the other to offer advice or criticisms.
Aizawa just stood near the entrance and watched his colleagues teach. Because apparently he had never planned on helping or getting involved.
Typical.
Toki rolled her eyes and ignored him, focusing on the students instead.
So far, so good. Everyone was working hard, and Toki could see several distinctive styles starting to emerge. Uraraka, especially, had something that really resembled a Meteor Shower. Pretty basic, but as long as it got the job done, who cared?
After helping Aoyama with his navel-sword and talking for a bit to Kaminari about his insistence that he could use his Quirk for distance attacks (which Toki agreed with, she just thought that he shouldn’t neglect his hand-to-hand just because he could make something flashy), she approached Shoji to discuss his ideas. Shoji’s Quirk was pretty versatile, but for an Ultimate move that required strength, Quantum was mostly counting on Shoji’s musculature. He was one of the taller and probably the physically strongest person in class 1-A. By making several arms and punching with all of them in a flurry of blows, he could deliver quite the formidable attack.
Quantum finished her rounds with Hagakure. She had been low-key dying to analyze her Quirk because it couldn’t just be invisibility. Hagakure had to bend the light around her, or else you would be able to see the food she ingested. So Hagakure didn’t have a mutation, she had an emitter Quirk, and she probably had some measure of control of it. Case in point, she was trying to refract the light for her Ultimate move, instead of just bending it around her.
“So you do bend light,” Toki said with satisfaction. “That means you could bend it around your clothes! Because, please, please reassure me, you aren’t actually naked in your hero costume. Right?”
“I can’t bend it more than a few millimeters,” Hagakure admitted. “So the clothes have to be skintight. And it requires a lot of focus so I can’t really… do it instinctively. But I have clothes! I have a kind of leotard made from my hair, and some socks with a padded sole to protect my feet. When I was accepted, I went to a hairdresser that made my hair grow two meters long and then cut it, and I sent it all to the Support department.”
Toki was pretty sure she knew that hairdresser. It was the guy she had come to when she had been in Yūei and had needed to cut all of her hair to pass as a boy for the Sport Festival. Because a pixie cut was cute, sure, but Toki had wanted her hair back afterward!
“Nice,” Toki approved. Then she paused. “… and you never lose your clothes? Putting them somewhere and— not managing to pick them up?”
Invisible clothes would be so easy to lose.
“The inner layer is colored,” Hagakure confessed. “It helps. But… Yes, I think I’m going to lose at least one sock at some point.”
“Mmh.” Toki thought about it. “You’re only fifteen, you have time to practice and grow. But next year, when you’re more secure in your mastery of your Quirk, maybe we should focus on bending the light more around your body. You could disappear with your clothes, which would be useful if you’re dressed as a civilian and need to jump in action. But it would also allow you to wear a visibly costume, with actual armor, and become invisible with it.”
“That would be great!”
They talked some more. Toki was very curious about the full scope of her student’s abilities. If Hagakure’s light-wave manipulation extended across the entire EM spectrum, she secretly had the most over-powered Quirk in the universe. She could give people severe sunburn with UV light, radiation poisoning with X-rays and above, manipulate radio waves, see in the dark with infrared! And if she could work out how to separate the electric and magnetic fields inherent in the waves or even the quantum nature of wave-particle interactions… Damn.
So Toki was a tiny bit disappointed when Hagakure told her that she could only bend visible light.
“I was tested for the X-ray and stuff when I was a kid,” Hagakure told her. “My mom’s Quirk is to emit X-rays and she had… Well, it can be dangerous when a kid uses that carelessly.”
Toki had the wild thought that Hagakure’s mom may have given cancer to a dozen people. Shit, a kid playing with their Quirk could irradiate all of their classmates twelve times a day, every day.
… Better not to think about that too deeply.
“What about UV light?” Quantum asked curiously. “Have you ever gotten a sunburn?”
“I don’t think so? But I thought it was because light didn’t hit me…”
“We’ll test it,” Toki grinned. “If UV light doesn’t touch you either, it means you can bend it like normal light. But for the moment, let’s stick with the visible spectrum. You’re trying to refract it in a flash, right?”
“Yes! Like that burst of light that you do when you warp, except that I want mine to be more focused. Like a flashbang!”
Quantum squinted. “Or a laser?”
“Maybe… Oh, you think Aoyama-kun could help? Wait! Maybe we could even make a combo move! AOYAMA-KUN! I HAVE AN IDEA!”
So Quantum ended up pairing the two and continued her tour. It didn’t take her long to finish and go back to the gym’s entrance, where Aizawa was standing lounging against the wall. Still not doing anything, apparently.
Hitoshi was the closest student, but he was speaking with Cementos, so Aizawa was clearly not involved into Hitoshi’s work. Which was really a shame, because Hitoshi was the only student that Aizawa could have actually helped right now, with advice for his capture weapon for example.
Whatever. So Aizawa was useless as a teacher, so what difference did it make?
She had known it already, and clearly Nedzu had, too. That was why Toki was giving this lesson. Even in canon, this training had been supervised by other teachers! Aizawa was here to act as an emergency brake if some kid with an overpowered Quirk started acting up in a way that could put his friends in danger, but Aizawa wasn’t really expected to teach anything to children.
She almost avoided him altogether by starting another tour of the gym. But in the end, pride held her back. If she made it obvious that she was avoiding him, then it would leave the explicit implication that not only was she uncomfortable, but that she was willing to back down in the face of her discomfort. That’s not a move she was about to make.
So she leaned against the wall, not quite next to him but not very far either. Like coworker sharing the same space to watch over the students. She would let pass five minutes of heavy silence and then she would get back to the kids.
But to her dismay, Aizawa actually cleared his throat, as if hesitating to engage in conversation.
Toki didn’t tense. She consciously relaxed her shoulders and turned towards him, flipping through the possible scenarios of that conversation in her head at lightspeed. Was he pissed about Toki outing him as a spy to Nedzu? About her pushing for his dismissal? About her dissing his teaching methods? Did he want to establish boundaries? Did he, maybe, want to talk about a problem a student was having?
Aizawa had taken a step towards her but hadn’t come closer. He was hovering in her periphery, slouching almost aggressively. If it had been anyone else, Toki would have thought he was holding back the urge to shuffle awkwardly.
She raised an eyebrow, and maturely swallowed back some quip about him looking constipated.
“What’s up?” she asked lightly instead.
She wasn’t really expecting an answer. So she was surprised when Aizawa took a long breath, then said stiffly:
“It had been brought to my attention that I haven’t properly apologized for my conduct when we first meet.”
That wasn’t what Toki had expected. She blinked, taken aback. Of all the scenarios she had considered… that hadn’t been one of them. Two hours ago, she had just been thinking about how she hadn’t forgiven him. And now he was saying sorry? Seeking forgiveness?
She frowned, wondering what his end-goal was. Had Nedzu put him to this? Doubtful. Yagi, then? Maybe Present Mic?
“There’s no need to play nice. I don’t require empty platitudes to be able to work with you.”
Aizawa’s eyes widened a fraction; for a blink, he looked almost stricken.
“You think I don’t regret it?”
Toki opened her mouth, then closed it. Was it a trick question? Because no, she didn’t think he regretted it. He hadn’t acted like it at any point. He had been polite, he had been distant, he had been grumpy, but he hadn’t been… remorseful.
I mean, he probably felt a little bad, or else he wouldn’t have confessed to Nedzu. But feeling bad about fucking-up in the past was very different from regretting the harm done to someone else.
“I do,” Aizawa said, glaring at the ground. “I do regret it.”
Toki frowned. “You didn’t give me that impression.”
“I was avoiding you to give you space,” Aizawa bit out. “I was trying to be respectful and to give you time to…”
He paused. Breathed in, breathed out. Toki could see the muscle in his jaw work as he swallowed back what he wanted to say, the instinctive defense he was trying to spit, and consciously reign himself in.
“No, that wasn’t it,” he finally said. “The truth is that I was ashamed. I was avoiding you because I was afraid of what you could say, and angry at myself. Which was another mistake on my part. I should have thought of you, not of me. I thought— It doesn’t matter what I thought. I am sorry.”
Toki scoffed disbelievingly. She didn’t believe him. She didn’t even want to believe him. That just wasn’t the kind of person Hobo-san was, shit teacher and petty bully, uncaring of the harm done.
No, she didn’t want him to be sorry. She wanted him to be pissed, resentful, annoying... not remorseful. Remorse would throw everything off-balance. It was scary, to admit that he could be sorry, because it would mean acknowledging there was something to be sorry for. It meant accepting that not only Hobo-san had been cruel, but that Toki had been hurt by his cruelty.
It made Toki felt anxious, tense, trapped. She hadn’t been a victim. She hated revisiting that period of pain and weakness. Couldn’t they just… move on, forget it had happened? Couldn’t it be simpler to just glare at each other for the rest of their lives and never dig any deeper?
Toki shoved her hands in the pockets of her jacket and scowled at him.
“Sorry for being caught, I suppose.”
Aizawa looked even more constipated. Toki almost felt bad for making it harder for him (it would have been more gracious to allow him to walk away with dignity), but then, to her surprise, Aizawa straightened and then bowed to her in apology.
Toki froze, almost horrified.
What the actual fuck?!
“I am sorry for everything,” Aizawa said stiffly as he straightened. “I can’t justify my brutality from back then. I persuaded myself that you deserved it, for being associated with Okamoto, for being a brat, for needing to be taken down a peg. But the truth is that I was angry, and you were convenient. And I am deeply sorry for everything I did.”
Fuck. Had anyone seen Aizawa bowing? She furtively sneaked a glance, but everyone was still working. Thanks the gods.
Now she just had to deal with Aizawa himself. Cool, cool, cool.
“I… I mean…”
Toki snapped her mouth shut. It wasn’t often she was at a loss for words. She shifted, feeling suddenly self-conscious and uncomfortable. It would have been easier if they had just aggressively ignored each other.
What was she supposed to say to that?!
Hobo-san wasn’t supposed to change. Him being a dick and Toki being angry at him being a dick were supposed to be constant in her life. If he changed… If he was sorry…
Well, firstly, it meant that he saw what he had done as bad, too. It meant that he saw Toki as a victim, which made her bristle and want to snarl at him. She had been hurt, yeah, but she had fought back. He didn’t have to grovel like that. What he had done had been messed-up and brutal, but it had been training, not abuse.
And secondly… It meant that Toki didn’t have the moral high ground anymore. It meant that if Aizawa was a new man, kinder and nicer, then hating him for something he wasn’t anymore unfair. Toki should smile, accept his apology, forgive, and move on. Doing otherwise would just be petty.
And yet she was still pissed. No, more than that, she was almost angry.
If Hobo-san changed, then Toki’s attitude needed to change, because sneering at good person suddenly made her a bad one and… and suddenly she felt wrong-footed. It made her feel defensive, almost attacked. As if even her feelings were wrong. But how do you adapt to the guy hitting you suddenly being the good guy, and your hostile demeanor making you the asshole?
“You should apologize to Hawks too,” she said to gain some time.
“I know,” Aizawa sighed. “I will.” He looked briefly constipated again. “I used to think that being a good hero would make up for my faults, but I understand now that I must start by acknowledging my mistakes, apologizing, and atoning properly.”
Toki was reminded of Endeavor, suddenly. His blindness, his selfishness, the slap in the face he must have gotten when he had realized how much he had fucked-up his own kids, and how no amount of ‘being a good hero’ was going to fix it.
Damn. She nearly laughed out loud, bitterly. Well, now she really understood how Natsuo felt.
She had wished that Natsuo could accept Endeavor’s apology, move on, forget, because everybody would be happier that way, but what about Natsuo’s happiness? Anger wasn’t a bad thing. Anger kept you warm and strong when nothing else could.
It was hard to give it up, no matter how nice the people around you suddenly decided to be. Not when that anger was now a part of you.
Toki had thought she was over it. She was willing to work with Aizawa, wasn’t it enough? And if she was snippy and annoying with him, well, that was just that he rubbed her the wrong way. Nothing personal.
But the truth was that even if Toki had moved on, she had never forgotten what happened. The wound has healed, but the scar ached. If you poked at it, it was enough to reignite the embers of fury in the pit of her stomach. Toki could work with him and be professional. She could even smile and be cordial. But she still held a grudge. She still refused to trust him.
And now… And now Aizawa was apologizing, and she didn’t know what she was supposed to do, or to feel.
Of course she was pissed. She had every right to be pissed! This was exactly what had happened with Meteor. What was it about her that made people treat her like crap, then leave, and miraculously become better people when she had lost all relevance to their lives?
“I’ll have to think about it,” she finally said. “I… I hear what you said, but that’s not going to be enough. You still suck as a teacher. And I still don’t trust you.”
Aizawa looked away.
“That’s fine,” he said gruffly. “I haven’t earned it yet.”
oOoOoOoO
Talking with Aizawa had seriously rattled her. Toki was all too glad to escape Yūei to go back to work.
Aizawa was sorry. Toki should forgive him. It infuriated her that she hadn’t automatically granted that forgiveness: like it was some moral failing on her part.
Of course she was allowed to be angry, but that anger was supposed to stop. She shouldn’t be pissed that Aizawa had moved on and changed. Just like she shouldn’t be annoyed that Meteor had moved on and changed. In fact, part of her was happy for them, because she was always glad to know that there was a less cruelty in this world…
But people changing now didn’t erase the harm they had done in the past. The harm they had done to her, specifically.
And she felt bad for thinking that, because… It made her think about Natsuo.
For Natsuo, it was unfair that Endeavor got to move on. It was unfair because Endeavor didn’t deserve it, in his mind. He didn’t deserve love, happiness, companionship, peace, and whatever Endeavor would get now that he had broken from his toxic mindset.
Toki knew where Natsuo’s anger came from. She didn’t judge it unfounded. But…
But she couldn’t help thinking of Dabi, and how angry he must have been that his family had moved on after his death; and she couldn’t help but draw comparisons. Maybe it was unfair to Natsuo, but they were brothers, weren’t they? They were parallels. Like their anger, like their resentment, like their selfishness.
What was the point in hating Endeavor for being better? Honestly, wasn’t it a bit disturbing to treat a basic human need, like being loved, as a reward you could get for good behavior? Or more accurately; for never being bad in the first place? Like, once you fell from grace, you were damned for eternity, you would never be forgiven and you would never deserve to get better.
If redemption was unacceptable, if bad behavior could never be forgiven, what was the alternative? Because it sure seemed like Natsuo would only accept justice in the form of indefinite suffering. And in Toki’s opinion, indefinite suffering was evil.
It had been easier to judge Natsuo from afar when her own issues didn’t echo his.
Because now Toki was faced with the exact same problem. What right did she have to refuse to let Aizawa be better? What right did she have to refuse to accept his apology? Even if she never trusted him or liked him, she had no right to withhold from him the acknowledgement of maturity. He had grown, changed. He was better. She may not like him, but she shouldn’t deny this.
And she shouldn’t say he didn’t deserve love or acceptance or a second chance because of his past sins.
Which meant that the morally good thing would be to forgive him.
But fuck, she didn’t want to. It was petty, but she wanted to glare and sneer and sulk. She wanted to ignore the issue until it went away on its own.
She didn’t want to be an adult about it.
Thinking about Aizawa was depressing. She needed to clear her head. Even without having her astrophysicist job to think about, she had plenty of other worries to focus on. Like her dad, her students… her daughter.
So she went to visit the Shinsō, say hello to Mihoko-san and play with Hinawa a little. It was a chance to visit their new place! The Shinsō had moved into a smaller appartement, but more brightly lit, and with a separate studio where Mihoko could paint. It was a nice place, but Toki couldn’t help but miss their old flat. It had felt… well, more like a home.
But maybe it was just nostalgia talking.
Anyway. They ended up talking for a while. Toki knew she couldn’t really mention Aizawa to Mihoko without making her freak-out, but still, it was nice to chat a little about things definitely not related to hero work.
In the flow of conversation, Mihoko mentioned that it would be wise to schedule an appointment to a doctor for a check-up. After all, Hinawa was almost one year old. Even if she was in good health, it would be good to check if she met the appropriate milestones.
Toki made some enquiries and learned with pleasure that the Medical Heroine, Erika, the one who had followed her pregnancy, specialized in pediatric care now. She still had her heroic license, and worked in her hero costume to make it clear that she used a Quirk… but she dealt with civilian issues now. More specifically, babies and kids. For Hinawa’s check-up, Toki scheduled an appointment with Erika. Since it turned out that one of her patients that evening had cancelled, she was lucky enough to get the appointment the very same day.
At which point Toki called Keigo to ask him if he wanted to come and see their daughter get vaccinated, and her husband very bravely told her that he was busy.
Keigo hated needles. Ahahah.
Anyway. So Toki brought Mihoko and Hinawa to the doctor’s office herself, and they meet with Erika. If she was surprised to see Toki with a guest instead of her partner, Erika didn’t show it. She launched straight into the examination.
Hinawa was as fine as a baby could be. A little on the small size, but it was to be expected since she had the bird-like bone structure of her father. She was given her vaccinations, didn’t even cry, and was happily distracted by a few candies. Then came the time to talk about developmental milestones.
Intellectually, Hinawa was more advanced than babies of the same age. She could toddle and craw like a one year old baby, but she could understand people and babble a vocabulary closer to the one of a two years old.
Erika asked if Toki or ‘her partner’ had developed as fast because it could be genetic. Toki felt a little bad to not know the answer. She doubted that Keigo’s mother had kept track of his development as a toddler, or even if she would have noticed. As for Toki… Sayuri would have known, but would she have told Meteor? He had been pretty uninvolved when she was a baby.
And even if he had been told, did Toki really want to reopen old wounds by asking about it? So far, they had deftly avoided mentioning Sayuri.
“I don’t know, but I think so,” she offered instead. “Hinawa’s father has a telekinetic Quirk, with all the brainpower it implies. My father has a telekinetic Quirk too, and I inherited the neural mutation, if not his power.”
Erika hummed pensively, making a note in her chart.
“Then it’s likely that Hinawa inherited that. If it’s the case… She will keep learning faster than babies her age. You can expect her to be at the level of a six years old by the time she’s four, but after that, her Quirk will come in and divert a lot of her energy. She’ll start developing at a more sedate rhythm. She’ll seek out intellectual stimulation more than her peers, so make sure she isn’t overwhelmed. Too many noises, too many ideas, too much pressure. She should be allowed to play on her own and learn to use her imagination instead of the problem-solving centers in her brain.”
Mihoko hummed and seemed to mentally make a note, but Toki was still stuck on ‘her Quirk will divert a lot of her energy.’ She hesitated briefly, and then blurted out:
“But you don’t have a way to know what her Quirk will be, right?”
Erika paused. “No, we don’t,” she said cautiously. “We can x-ray her foot to see if she’s Quirkless, but that’s about it.”
Toki shrugged.
“I don’t care if she’s Quirkless.” Then she paused, and reluctantly backtracked. “I mean, I would, of course, but— what matter is that she’s healthy. I had issue with my Quirk when I was little, so I wondered… Well. If you can’t tell what her Quirk will be, there’s no point, in the end.”
She hoped that Hinawa wouldn’t have a heart too weak to support her Quirk. But even if she did, then the obvious solution would be to not train to the point of organ failure. Besides, maybe Hinawa wouldn’t even have to train. Maybe she wouldn’t want to be a hero.
Toki and Keigo had already talked about it and decided they were fine no matter Hinawa wanted to be… except a vegetarian. Keigo drew the line there. No way a child of his would refuse to eat chicken.
What a dweeb. Toki loved him.
Also, Toki had no idea how she would deal with a teleporting toddler. That sounded like the stuff of nightmares. The only way Sayuri had managed to keep control of her daughter was with emotional blackmail, isolation, and the implicit threat of abandonment. All things that Toki would never use on her daughter. Trying to keep an eye on Hinawa, if she turned out to be a warper, was going to be hellishly complicated.
Oh, well. That was a problem for future-Toki.
The visit ended. Everyone went home.
Toki went back to Fukuoka for hero-work.
Not patrol, this time, but interview and commercials. Kameko had apparently snagged a good merchandizing deal and Toki, or rather Quantum, had to play her part. She didn’t hate it exactly, it was always a little thrilling to be the center of the attention, but after a while, projecting so much cheer and cockiness became exhausting.
Toki regretted having cut her Hoshizora work. Math was a good thing to focus on when she didn’t want to think about how complicated people were. Damn, she should immerge herself into equations more often! But she had quit her Hoshizora job to work on her thesis. She had all she needed to present the Ion Dive, anyway. She had hoped to get another job, maybe in one of the JAXA labs… But after getting her PhD, she had just— never applied anywhere. There had been Kamino, and then Neito, and then back to school, and… it had been relegated to the bottom of her priorities.
It had been months since she had pondered her old dream of going to space.
When the issues of canon are solved, she promised herself. When the League is dealt with, the MLA stopped, and the Shie Hassaikai are arrested.
One thing at the time.
She had no idea where the League was, or what they planned to do. In canon, it was the Shie Hassaikai that had looked into an alliance with them, and only because the League had impressed them by escaping All Might. In this world, though… The League may have escaped, but they hadn’t fared as well as they had in canon. The kidnapping stunt had lasted less than a day. Stain had been arrested. The defeat of AFO hadn’t been a near miss... it had been a complete and absolute victory. When everything was said and done, the League looked like they had been in over their head the whole time, and AFO had been pulverized while coming to their rescue.
It wasn’t a good look.
But Toki shouldn’t dismiss the possibility of an alliance so fast. The League didn’t look good to the public, true, but they still had their info broker, right? In canon, hadn’t he been the one to put them in touch with the Shie Hassaikai?
And there was also Dabi. The League hadn’t really dazzled the public with their competence, but Dabi had made waves. In a morbid way, Dabi had impressed people. The hospitals on fire, the mountains, the trap… Dabi had been the big player of the game.
Maybe the Shie Hassaikai wouldn’t come to work for Shigaraki, but for Dabi.
The irony would be amazing. Dabi wasn’t a team-player, so coming to him for an alliance had no way to end well. Maybe he would roast Overhaul to a crisp? That would solve quite a few problems. Or maybe Shigaraki would take it as an insult, and then instead of allying with the Shie Hassaikai, the League would dissolve into infighting? That would also solve a lot of problems…
Not that Toki actually whished anyone dead. Not really. But Dabi… Dabi was really a thorn in her side. The fact that he was Touya would become known at some point, and Toki cringed in advance. It would be so horrible for the Todoroki. But would it be worse to learn it when Dabi was an unhinged maniac wanting to kill them, or to learn it in a morgue while identifying his body?
There was no good solution. There was no happy ending. All Toki could do was to try and soften the blow.
One way or another, the Todoroki would learn about Touya, and have to live with that.
Just like they had to live with the fact that Endeavor, their abuser, was now a better person. Which, of course, was difficult to accept because they didn’t want or need Endeavor to change. They, and more specifically Natsuo, just wanted him to face the consequences of what he had done so that they would feel like what he had done mattered. Not an illogical need. But maybe an unfair one, because asking for punishment instead of betterment was cruel.
And yet sometimes you need that punishment to move on. Sometimes you don’t know what to do with the betterment. Sometimes you don’t want to get better, because your anger is messy and poisonous but it’s yours. You won it fair and square.
It was a mess.
“Hey,” Toki asked Keigo suddenly during patrol. “How do you feel about me supplanting you and becoming the Number Two hero?”
“A little proud, a little annoyed... very turned-on.”
Well, that settled it.
“And how would you feel about Hobo-san apologizing for kicking us around? Like, a full-blown apology with a bow and all?”
“…. A little proud, a little annoyed, very weirded-out.”
Toki groaned. “Yeah, that’s my problem too.”
Keigo’s eyebrows rose in surprise.
“You mean he did? Uh... I didn’t see that coming.”
“Me neither.” She hesitated a second, and then sighed deeply. “Would you accept his apology?”
“Me? Oh, yeah. First, I would tell him how much of a dick he was so he would know what to apologize for. Then I’ll accept that apology and make him bow and scrape for years to earn my forgiveness. Oh, also I would use my newfound sway against him to make sure he never gets a chance to get close to you or Hinawa.”
Toki blinked. That… That was actually a good plan. She had been operating on the assumption that it was kind of a ‘all or nothing’ scenario, where she either refused Aizawa’s apology and spitefully carried on a grudge, or she accepted his apology, granted him forgiveness, and was thus morally obligated to become his new bestie.
Ironic. For once, she had been the one going too fast, and Keigo was the one to remind her to go slow.
But Keigo was right. It wasn’t like Meteor’s situation, where she had loved him and wanted him close in her life. Aizawa was nothing to her. She didn’t owe him shit. If he wanted to grovel, all Toki owed him was an acknowledgement.
She was completely entitled to keep her distances and even dislike him on a personal level. All his apology would change was the fact that she would now know that Aizawa was aware that he had been wrong to hit her in the past, and the tacit agreement that he would be better.
Also, Toki could totally use that leverage against Aizawa to make sure he became a better teacher. She could force him to read ‘teaching for dummies’ or to attend seminars about how to communicate properly with teenagers. Aizawa would think it unbearable but would bravely carry on in the name of atoning for his sins, and Toki would get the a marginally less horrible colleague. Win-win.
“Maybe you’ll have the chance,” she said lightly. “I told him that he needed to tell you he was sorry, too.”
Keigo snorted. “Am I allowed to sock him in the jaw when he does?”
Toki thought about it, and then shrugged.
“Take it up with him.”
“Oh, believe me, I will.”
oOoOoOo
Toki’s next class at Yūei was with class 1-B.
Toki didn’t have them as often as class 1-A, since she wasn’t their homeroom teacher, and she enjoyed her lessons with them all the more for it. Class 1-A was filled with students with possibly destructive Quirks. The only advantage of having Aizawa on the staff, for Nedzu, had been to saddle him with all the kids that needed to have an emergency STOP button. Aizawa was shit at teaching, but he could stop a catastrophe in its tracks with a glance. That was a good skill to have when your students could explode their bones, destroy their stomach, create a nuclear bomb, turn into a huge raging shadow monster, dissolve a man in acid, or…
Yeah, you know what, maybe Toki should give some leeway to Aizawa. Holy shit, he really had some pressure there.
Class 1-B, on the contrary, didn’t have really destructive Quirks. So to beat their flashier peers, they needed to get inventive, creative, sneaky even. Toki loved that. Oh, they were powerful alright. Shiozaki, Honenuki, Shishida… they all had really strong powers, the type of Quirks that would make them great frontline heroes. But the others had to get crafty.
Like Reiko Yanagi, whose telekinesis was fairly weak. She could only move small objects. Toki had once briefly wondered why it wasn’t just named Minor Telekinesis, at some point.
It turned out that the answer was that it should be, but Yanagi thought it was boring and had renamed it Poltergeist because she was a nerd. The way she could move objects arounds like they floated was clearly reminiscent of various stereotypical paranormal activity. And you were allowed to name your Quirk something cool! That was why Dark Shadow was called Dark Shadow instead of like Bird Shadow or Sentient Bird Friend or something. Yanagi, who loved horror movies and spooky stories, had chosen a name that fit her.
Her hero name, Emily, was also clearly a reference to the American horror/drama film The Exorcism of Emily Rose. It kind of fit her… although Toki would have loved a more badass name like Exorcist.
But apparently Yanagi didn’t share her sense of flair. Meh. Nobody was perfect.
Anyway! Poltergeist, by itself, wasn’t a very strong Quirk. Yanagi could move a great number of small objects, but she had a hard weight limit. The total mass of what she used her Quirk on couldn’t exceed the weight of a single person. She was trying to push that limit, finding exactly how much she could use… but Toki was really cautious about playing with the maximum amount of mass that your Quirk could mentally handle. That was where mental focus hit the physical limitations of your body. For Yanagi, it manifested with crippling headaches.
For Toki, it had been a heart attack.
But Yanagi worked around her limits by being creative. She couldn’t increase the mass of what she manipulated, but she could manipulate the velocity of her projectiles. Right now, she was working into turning a tiny piece of rock into a bullet-like projectile. No need to use a whole boulder to crush an opponent when you could basically make a gun out of any piece of gravel.
Toki also advised her to see if she could manipulate non-solids, like gas or water. Maybe the volume she could manipulate would increase if the mass was less. It would be good practice. But also, manipulating water was a very sought-after skill in rescue scenarios. After tsunamis, earthquakes that made pipes burst, fire… Water was always everywhere.
As for the gas, Toki didn’t really need to give an example. She knew Yanagi remembered the summer camp attack, and how frightening Mustard’s Quirk had been.
Anyway.
Toki continued her tour, pleased to note that everyone already had a solid idea of their Ultimate Moves. Unlike class 1-A, class 1-B didn’t overly focus on flashiness, even if it was tempting. They worked with what they had. And what they had, mostly, was polyvalence.
Neito, for example. Copy wasn’t that strong on its own. To use it in a big fight, Neito needed to be resourceful and to adapt on the fly. Less so when he had Warp-space in his pocket, but still!
Toki stopped to chat with Neito about his ideas for an Ultimate Move. So far Neito had three. One with his own Quirk, that he called the Copy-Slap (exactly what it said on the tin), and two others with Warp-Space, that were more or less imitations of Toki’s own moves. Neito avoided frontal combat, so he had drawn some inspiration from Toki’s style of dancing and evading his opponent.
“Oh, that reminds me!” Toki realized. “I have something for you.”
Neito perked up. “A knife?”
“A what?! No, absolutely not. You’re spending too much time with Melissa! No, it’s…” She looked around to check that no one was listening, then dug in her pocket and gave a tiny cloth bag to Neito. “It’s this.”
He eagerly opened it, and then his eyebrow rose. He upended the little bag in his hand, letting a small silver ring fall in his palm. The ring was clearly made for a man, thick and square, but still slim enough to not be cumbersome.
“Wow, Toki,” Neito deadpanned. “I didn’t know you felt that way. But of course, I’ll accept your proposal. Out of curiosity, how rich are you?”
Toki swatted him.
“Don’t be a smartass.”
“No, I’m serious. I mean, I already have your Quirk and I know where you keep the deed to your home. I just have to seduce your husband and then I can steal your life.”
“Put it on, you infuriating idiot.”
Sniggering, Neito slipped the ring on his finger. For a second nothing happened, and then his smile slid right from his face. He stared at the ring in shock and horror, and then hastily removed it to peer at it urgently. He was trying to see the inside of the silver circle, where the metal touched his skin.
Toki knew what he would see: five little white dots, evenly spaced, incrusted in the metal in a way that put them on Neito’s skin while also hiding them from any outsider’s gaze. Five little pieces of bone.
Five little pieces of All For One’s tibia, more exactly.
Neito seemed to be a little bit in shock. He was still staring at the ring as if it was going to bite him. Toki cleared her throat uneasily. She had tested with Neito the fact that he could copy a Quirk from a piece of bone, of course. Unlike skin or hair, bones didn’t degrade as fast and retained enough of DNA to activate Neito’s Quirk even after a long length of time. The tests had been quick and clinical, with Toki giving Neito several samples that he hadn’t enquired about (Toki had simply asked Kameko if she had contact in a morgue in Fukuoka!) and they hadn’t really spoken about it after.
For Toki it had seemed obvious. The main weakness of Copy was that it didn’t hold the copied Quirk for long. Neito had been able to remedy that by keeping a piece of someone’s DNA on him at all time, and he had taken to collecting people’s hairs almost compulsively, swiping the most unexpected Quirks from his sleeves during training. But hair started breaking down within a month. Nail clippings lasted longer, although Neito was reticent to use them, which Toki completely understood because ew, gross, but not much.
Bones, though… Bones could last years.
And Toki just happened to have amputated All For One of his legs, including not only toenails clipping but also two entire tibias, with all his fucked-up DNA of serial-killer with an overpowered Quirk. Hence, a ring. With bone fragments.
“I take it that it works.”
“It does.” Neito swallowed and looked at her. “If I use that…”
“If you use it, someone will guess what really happened to All For One’s Quirk,” Toki interrupted him. “So I would rather that you never use it. But if you need to? Then I would rather that you have it.”
“I would rather have your Quirk than his.”
Toki grinned: “I’ll give you more jewelry if I ever happen to get a bone removed.”
Neito let out a bark of nervous laughter. But, to Toki’s relief, he put the ring back on, flexing his fingers a few times and then letting his hand hang limp. The ring was small, discreet. Nobody would ever guess that it gave Neito the same power as the Bogeyman of hero society.
“Should I keep that for an Ultimate Move?” he said dryly.
“A secret move, maybe. Please don’t use it during the provisional license exam.”
“You know me. I’m the very soul of discretion.”
Toki rolled her eyes with fondness. Then, seeing Vlad King approach, she seamlessly oriented the conversation to Neito’s use of Warp-Space, and how he shouldn’t completely copy Quantum’s moves to make his own style.
Anyway. After Neito, Toki moved on to the next student, who happened to be Sen Kaibara. He was practicing with Itsuka Kendo. Both of them had physical Quirks, her with giant hands and him with rotating limbs.
Their powers were pretty straightforward and there wasn’t a lot of room for progression. It wasn’t like they were going to spontaneously sprout a third arm or something. So mostly, Toki’s advice boiled down on how to diversify their skillset. They were both melee combatants, but that didn’t mean they should ignore everything else.
Kaibara wanted a long-distance attack, so Toki thought about it and suggested a slingshot. Kendo wanted an attack a little more sophisticated than SMASH, so they discussed her options on how to style a punch. Better posture, running beforehand or not, following with a second punch: how to be efficient, when you had to look cool. Appearances could be a hindrance when you had to care about them as much as heroes did.
Then Toki moved on to the next student, Tsuburaba, who had his moves nailed down but who wanted advice on his hero name. Toki suggested Atomostere, because it was a play on atmosphere, but it included the terms for both air and solid in them. Awase overheard and wanted some advice too. His hero name was Welder, and it worked just fine… But there was already a hero named Melter, so he didn’t want to sound unoriginal. Toki started rattling of ideas, like Ionic or Compound. Or even Steelworker, which was basically his hero name with extra pizzazz.
The one Toki wanted to absolutely change his hero name was Honenuki, because Mudman was lame. Maybe something like Submerge or Diver? Although Pitfall would work best. But sadly, Honenuki wasn’t interested in changing his name. Lame.
Shiozaki’s name, Vines, was also pretty good. But the girl confessed her first choice had been Maria. She had decided against it because it felt sacrilegious. To each their own opinion.
Shiozaki was the last student Toki coached for the lesson. She had a few good moves lined up, and she just needed the extra-practice. It was different in the gym, without an opponent. There was also the fact that sometimes Shiozaki tended to get distracted by her own monologue about faith, evil, goodness and whatever, which Toki awkwardly tried to point out without making the poor girl have a mental breakdown about sinning by vanity.
Whatever. Unlike class 1-A, class 1-B didn’t have a lot of child-sized time bombs, so it made for a refreshing change. Even Togaru Kamakiri, the mantis-like heteromorph with anger issues, was manageable and listened to adults when they gave advice. It was a nice change.
She wished she could watch them pass their provisional license exam too, but class 1-A and class 1-B would go to different testing sites, and Toki had to be with class 1-A. She was their homeroom teacher after all!
And, if she remembered correctly, hadn’t Toga tried to infiltrate the exam? She and impersonated a student from Shiketsu… Damn it, Toki didn’t remember the name of the victim. And considering her awful track records at recognizing canon-characters, she probably wouldn’t be able to identify the disguised Toga even if she put all the exam’s participants in a line-up.
Smoking out a shapeshifter was not an easy task. Especially when you weren’t even sure that the shapeshifter would be there in the first place! Toki couldn’t know if Toga would still try to come here, with how canon had changed. Maybe the League would try to keep quiet? Or maybe they would double down, feeling humiliated by All For One’s capture.
Better safe than sorry, then. Toki was going to work on the assumption that the League would try to make a move, because this exam would be the first chance to get all of class 1-A away from Yūei’s protection. As a teacher, Quantum would be within her rights to ask for additional protection.
Maybe she could get Psyren to accompany her. Psyren’s Quirk wasn’t fool-proof, especially in a crowd where so many people had so many emotions: but if Toga’s bloodlust was just a tad stronger than the student’s anxiety, then maybe Psyren would ping on it. It was worth a try.
Wait, no. Toki couldn’t get Psyren here, because Keigo and Bakugo would be here. Psyren couldn’t read minds, not exactly, but with an empathy-based telepathy she would absolutely notice that the two knew each other and were acting a script. What if Psyren was a spy? Or what if she wasn’t, but still mentioned it at some point, while Keigo was under surveillance by the MLA? Or what if she believed that Bakugo was a friend of Keigo, and approached him by chance later, blowing his cover and putting him at a risk?
This was getting really complicated. And she hadn’t even solved her issues with Aizawa yet…
Speaking of which. Maybe she should get to it. Aizawa was on the list of teachers who would go with her to escort the kids to their provisional license exam. They should talk now, or it was going to be a very long and very awkward bus ride. Especially if Yagi was sitting in the middle glowering at Aizawa the whole time.
So, after the lesson, Toki went looking for Eraserhead.
She crossed paths with Midnight, who was cold but polite (as usual), and then with Present Mic. Since he was Aizawa’s friend, Toki was blunt and asked him for directions. Mic yelled a little too loudly in stupefaction… but then he promptly guided her to the residential area where the teachers had studios.
Aizawa wasn’t in the studio, though. Mic gleefully kicked open a vent in the hallway. The grate clattered on the floor. Aizawa, who had apparently been napping inside, jerked awake and banged his head on the top of the aeration conduit.
Toki stared.
“ERASER!” Present Mic hollered with way too much enthusiasm. “YOU HAVE A VISITOR! SAY HELLO!”
Aizawa slowly raised a dead-eyed stare to Toki.
“Quantum. Good morning.”
He had never exuded energy or enthusiasm, and most of the time he hadn’t exactly exuded cleanness either… But right now he looked like he had spent the last four day on patrol non-stop. He smelled like it, too. Toki’s eyebrows rose very high.
“I can come back.”
“I’m fine,” he grunted, extracting himself from the vent.
“Are you sure?” Toki said dubiously. “You look like death warmed over, refrozen, defrosted, and then thrown in a plastic bowl.”
Present Mic cackled like a hyena, and then turned on his heels: “Well, I’m off! Don’t kill each other or there will be paperwork!”
“Like I would get caught,” Toki muttered under her breath.
A beat too late she realized it was a little morbid. Also, judging by Aizawa’s face, it was not actually comforting.
For a few seconds, they watched each other in silence. Toki raised her visor on her forehead, meeting the other’s eyes without barrier, and then shoved her hands in her pockets to stop herself from fidgeting.
“I thought about it, and I accept your apology.”
Aizawa’s shoulders didn’t loosen. He bowed his head, stiff and wary.
“Thank you.”
Toki took a deep breath.
“I accept it, but that doesn’t mean I forgive you. It just means I acknowledge you’re sorry, and that I’m willing to give you a second chance. If you’re still the same piece of work you were eight years ago, I reserve the right to stab you.” She paused. “Again.”
Aizawa nodded stiffly. “I expect nothing less.”
Toki rolled her eyes, uncomfortable. She didn’t like his rigid politeness. It was like he expected her to explode, like she was the dangerous one, like he was the victim here. It was annoying. Unsettling, even.
Then she realized that since he was trying to earn forgiveness, maybe she could just ask him not to do that.
“And don’t act like a noble martyr. You don’t have to walk on eggshells around me. I won’t blow a fuse if you’re still a sarcastic asshole. Actually, I would prefer it: it’s freaking me out that you’re treating me like I’m made of glass.”
Aizawa’s lips twitched briefly upward. “Any other demands?”
“Be yourself and be nice.”
“Which one?” Aizawa deadpanned. “I can’t do both.”
Toki snorted, more from surprise than from anything else; but it made Aizawa relax infinitesimally. So, a point in her favor, maybe?
Being nice was probably a foreign concept to Aizawa. The thing about him was that he didn’t actually hate kids. He just completely sucked at interacting with any human being outside of a crisis situation. Kind of like a feral cat living in a dumpster. He could totally be rehabilitated, if he was dunked in twelve successive baths and slowly introduced to other living creatures.
And no, Present Mic didn’t count. Present Mic was clearly insane and additionally had been completely blind to Aizawa’s douchebag tendencies for two decades.
“Alright, don’t be nice,” Toki capitulated. “But you have to do something for me, and I’m not taking no for an answer.”
Aizawa squinted warily. “What is it?”
She dug a hand into her belt pouch. It was actually as big as a handbag, and it was crazy how much shit you could put there. Once, she had used it to transport four kittens she had to bring to a shelter. She would never forget the face of the secretary when Quantum had opened her satchel… But the point was: her pouch was big. Big enough to carry a book.
Toki grabbed ‘Teaching for dummies,’ and solemnly put it in Aizawa’s hand. He read the title… and immediately made a face.
“You’re the fourth person to ask me to read that.”
Toki grinned. She distinctively remembered Yagi reading the same book at some point, a few days ago…
“Was one of them All Might?”
“Yes.”
He looked so annoyed by it that Toki couldn’t help but laugh in his face. Aizawa glared at her, and even if some tiny part of Toki bristled at the unconscious feeling of threat, she was also kind of pleased that he wasn’t so worried about pissing her off anymore.
“Take his advice, then,” Toki smirked. “When he drops the Golden Retriever act, he knows what he’s doing.”
Aizawa looked unconvinced… But he kept the book.
Notes:
Owf. Talked a lot about forgiveness and ressentement in that chapter. Also talked about other stuff (please notice how i obsessed over the 1-B students xD), but mostly forgiveness and ressentement. Those feelings are always so messy.
Unsurprisingly, Toki chose forgiveness. Or at least the begining of it, which is acceptance. Now... It's up to Aizawa.
Speaking of Aizawa !
Fic rec of the day: "You Want It Darker" by Mrs_Chunks.
The Plot : after discovering a villain with a mind-control Quirk that make people kill themselves, Aizawa needs Shinso to help him catch the killer, and ends up dragging him down the road of Underground Heroics.A great fic, with lot of feels, lot of snark, and Aizawa being a total Disfonctionnal Garbage-Shaped Human Disaster. There's also some smut because EraserMic is a horny couple. This story kept me up all night. It's darker than what i read usually (it's a murder mystery story, and Aizawa's POV is much more cynical than my usual fluffy tastes) but it's just SO GOOD.
Also one of the rare fic where Hitoshi Shinso has a good, caring mom !
The less said about his terrifying father, the better.
Chapter 67: The provisional license exam
Summary:
The day has come. A wild King Explosion Murder appears!
Notes:
I'm back !
This is my last day at my job. It feels weird. Tonight I'm leaving for a whole other city.
Weird.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
THE PROVISIONAL LICENSE EXAM
The day of the provisional license exam had come.
Class 1-B would pass the exam in a testing site in the West, at a two hours bus ride. They would be escorted by Vlad King, Present Mic, and Ectoplasm. Meanwhile class 1-A would pass the exam near the school, in the Dagobah National Stadium. The stadium was more like a whole complex. Part of it was still an open stadium, but part if it contained a fake city for hero exams and training.
After all, not all heroes owned a training room in their agency, or even owed an agency at all. And even if they did, they couldn’t test their more destructive moves in enclosed spaces. Thus, to avoid the use of untested maneuver in the field (aka the ‘I never tried this, but it seems like a good idea to use it in the middle of a real fight’), the HPSC maintained this stadium. You had to pay a fee to book the place, though, and it was monitored by the HPSC, who was allowed to dictate how you could use the space. For those reasons, most heroes preferred to use abandoned neighborhoods.
Class 1-A was escorted by Eraserhead, and All Might… Or rather, Yagi. Toki, Quantum, didn’t ride the bus with them. She came straight from Fukuoka.
And she brought Hawks.
It wasn’t rare for a license exam, either provisional or definitive, to enlist the help of a hero to play the role of a villain. That was going to be Hawks’ role today. Like Gang Orca had done, during the canon-exam.
Ostensibly, Hawks was doing it because he was curious to see Quantum’s students. Unofficially, of course… He was doing it to be able to pretend to recruit Bakugo for the MLA.
But before that, Toki warped them both inside the stadium to check it out, and to say hello to old acquaintances.
“Mera-san! Oh, and Yoshimi-san, too! What’s up?”
Mera raised a hand in a wave. His hair still looked like a mop, and he was kind of slouching, but his eyebags hadn’t reappeared. Yoshimi was next to him, her dark purple hair up in a sensible bun, wearing a black suit with a hot pink lapel. The color was so vivid that it almost made Toki squint. She didn’t know the HPSC staff could dress in other colors than black. Granted, the first time she had meet Yoshimi, the woman had had a pink tie, but… It was just a discreet rose-colored tie.
This was not discreet.
Maybe Yoshimi manifested her progression in the hierarchical ladder with more and more eye-searing fashion statements.
“Nice jacket,” Keigo commented with a small grin.
“Thanks!” Yoshimi said cheerfully.
“You know that black is traditional, right?” Mera-san asked in the long-suffering tone of someone who had already had this argument seven times.
“I’m not the Grim Reaper,” Yoshimi fired back.
“Are you sure?”
Yoshimi rolled her eyes good-naturally, and Toki watched them with fascination. It was always a trip to see them interact. Yoshimi reminded her a little of Kameko, with that cheerful steamroller energy, but sharper and more subtle.
“Here to make the kids sweat, Hawks?” Mera-san raised an eyebrow. “This year, quite a few high-ranked heroes offered their service to play villains. Gang Orca is in another site, and there’s also Shishido in the North.”
“I was curious,” Hawks admitted with an easy grin. “Am I going to be their only opponent, by the way?”
“No, there’s going to be one hero per arena, and we have seven arenas. Death Arms and Gunhead are somewhere around, but the others aren’t there yet. You’ll all be called to the briefing room in fifteen minutes, when the kids will be sent to change in their hero costumes.”
“So, what’s the exam going to be?” Toki asked with curiosity. “How are you going to thin out the competition? My bet is a messy fight.”
That was how it had gone in canon. Although the set-up for the canon-exam had already been used in this universe, they would have to do something slightly different than a free-for-all dodgeball game.
“Too messy,” Mera said grimly. “It will be a race. With a twist, however.”
“A twist?”
“Teamwork!” Yoshimi grinned. “Each contestant will be given a token. To start the race, they must form a team with at least five different tokens. The twist is that students of the same school will be given almost all the same tokens, so they won’t be able to form an all-Yūei team for example.”
Toki nodded approvingly. Teamwork, on-the-fly assessment of their allies, adaptability, humility, and focus whilst under pressure. Those were good qualities to judge if a student was ready to become hero material.
“Why a team of five?” she asked anyway. “Is it a relay-run or something?”
“No, nothing like that. The team will all depart together, and cross an arena designated as their running track. A city, an aquatic setting, or so on. There’s seven in this stadium, so we’ll be able to run several races simultaneously… But no, it’s not a relay-run. The kids will pass or fail as a team, and they will be judged not only by their speed crossing the track, but also the number of victims they rescue during that time. See, each area is filled with actors from the Help Us Company, pretending to be injured. The competitors have to find the exit, be fast, but also assist civilians, fight a villain, and coordinate with each other.”
“I see,” Keigo murmured. “And since they will pass or fail as a team, they can’t just get together to have the right combination of tokens, then immediately go their separate ways, to focus on individual scores. It’s in their best interest to help each other out.”
Yoshimi pointed fingers gun at him: “Exactly!”
“Question,” Toki suddenly said, narrowing her eyes. “What does ‘save civilians’ entail in a race? Do they have to carry them to the finish line, or just dig them out of the rubble, do some triage, and then move on, like in a real combat-situation where they would be pressed for time?”
Mera and Yoshimi raised an eyebrow, both making the exact same face. Some tiny corner of Toki’s brain wondered what would happen if she mentioned to Kameko that those two would make a cute couple.
“Of course they will be judged on what they would do in a real situation, Quantum.”
“Mmh. And do they know that, or are you just going to say, ‘race and rescue,’ then see who thinks like a school student trying to score points and who thinks like a hero-in-training trying to be efficient?”
Yoshimi’s smirk widened a little, which made her look eerily like a cat who had just eaten the canary, and Mera looked like he was biting back a smile.
“What do you think?”
Yep, when they would be back to Fukuoka, Toki would definitively mention that to Kameko. She would think it hilarious.
“Is there going to be combat at some point?” Keigo asked absentmindedly, looking at the various urban areas with interest. “Or is this exam focused on speed?”
“There is going to be a four-way capture-the-flag battle in the second half of the exam,” Mera assured him, “We’ll make random teams, and this time people will be judged individually. The fighters and the infiltration specialists will have a chance to shine.”
All the better for Bakugo, Toki supposed. Inwardly, she hid a wince. She had a feeling that Bakugo and Midoriya would be in separate teams and were going to go absolutely apeshit at each other. She hoped Keigo had planned for that.
“Oh, the Yūei bus must be here,” Toki suddenly realized when she glanced at the time in the corner of her HUD. “I’ll go welcome them and stuff.”
“And I’ll go find the briefing room,” Keigo grinned, patting her shoulder. “Find me after the first task!”
Toki warped outside the stadium, high in the sky, and quickly scanned the sidewalk to locate her students. Oh, there they were!
As expected, they were kind of swarmed by students of other schools. Toki recognized a few Shiketsu students, as well as some Ketsubutsu uniforms. She also recognized the dark blazers and white pants of the Isamu Academy, hovering the periphery. She caught a few people in white and determined that Seiai academy was also there. Oh, and there was even the grey blazer of the Seijin High School!
Toki warped near the entrance so she could approach the class on foot and listen to what they were saying. She arrived just as the Shiketsu student departed, followed by a few bewildered stares. A bunch of guys from Ketsubutsu were introducing themselves to Hitoshi with enthusiasm. Some girls from the Isamu Academy were chatting with Asui, Yaoyorozu, and Jirou.
Yagi was there, too, trying to make himself as discreet as possible. No one had realized he was All Might yet, apparently. His emaciated appearance hadn’t made much of an appearance on TV. As soon as he would start talking to people and leading the students, people would do a double take and then put the clues together, but for now Yagi was slouching in the shadow of the bus, clearly reluctant to make himself known.
Toki could understand.
He hadn’t really done any public appearances since Kamino. He was barely healed! And now… Everyone was going to know who he was. There was a difference between appearing as a teacher when he was just plain old Yagi, and appearing as a teacher when he was the skeletal remnant of the glorious All Might.
Maybe Aizawa could have run interference. But he was busy bickering with a green-haired woman… Wait, wasn’t she the pro-hero Mrs. Joke? She probably taught in one of those other hero high-school then… Oh, no matter. Toki was there. She could deal with that.
So Toki straightened and approached with a spring in her step, cocky Quantum just passing by, casual and cheerful like this was a completely normal occurrence, and then exclaimed loudly:
“Well, if it isn’t the odd couple!”
Mrs. Joke didn’t miss a beat, and beamed at her:
“He just accepted my proposal of marriage!”
“No I didn’t,” Aizawa growled, shoulders hunched like a grouchy tomcat.
Toki shrugged, unbothered.
“Well, sorry, Mrs. Joke. You’ll have to romance him later. Come on, Yūei, are you here to gawk on the sidewalk or actually pass the exam?”
She rounded up the kids quickly after that, and they made their way inside.
The kids were sent to a changing room, one of the numerous one there was in the building. After, they were all led in an underground tunnel, and from there they took an elevator to get into a vast square room.
Like in canon, it was actually a big square in the middle of the stadium, that would unfold when the event would start. That way, the kids would be in the middle of the stadium, with a great view over the various installations like the fake city, fake lake, and the fake factories that made up the place.
For this exam, the environment had been divided in seven arenas, delimited by high Plexiglas walls. Urban jungle, forests, mountains and cliffsides, even a river! Each arena was unique. The kids would be spoiled for choice.
Toki glanced around the room, which was already filled with competitors, but she didn’t see Bakugo’s spiky blonde hair. He must have been there, though. Keigo wouldn’t have volunteered to play the villain if Bakugo was testing elsewhere.
She hoped he wouldn’t start anything as soon as he spotted Midoriya.
Ah! Who was she kidding? If those two crossed eyes before or during that test, it would be Midoriya who would start squealing about ‘Kacchan!’ and run to his friend with a deluge of questions, apologies, and pleas for forgiveness. Toki couldn’t really claim to understand their relationship, but from what she remembered from canon… Before Yūei, it was Midoriya who chased after Bakugo, not the reverse.
Of course, when they were face to face Bakugo was the aggressive one. But Toki also remembered that Bakugo, on his own, didn’t have the same obsessive focus on Midoriya that Midoriya had on him.
Also, Toki remembered very well how Midoriya had begged All Might and his mom to not press charges against Bakugo. Midoriya had changed schools, and the kids didn’t have any contact with each other afterward, but… The news of Bakugo’s expulsion must have reached Midoriya, who then probably blamed himself.
Not that it was in any way his fault, but that’s just what happened when you had a martyr complex, a lifelong history of love-hate relationship with someone you admired, and a traumatic separation on top of that.
Oh, whatever. The kids would sort themselves out. Toki was just going to stay on the sidelines and eat popcorn.
Bakugo was Keigo’s problem now.
After settling the kids in the big briefing room, Toki warped back to the bleachers. Aizawa was sitting next to Mrs. Joke. Yagi had opted for sitting further away. Toki paused for a second, then warped next to him and plonked her butt on the nearest seat.
“So, do you know what the rules are for this first test?” she asked cheerfully.
“Some kind of rescue exercise?”
“Mostly. It’s actually a team training and a race, too…”
She quickly explained the set-up imagined by the HPSC, while Yagi nodded along approvingly. Soon enough the gigantic cube in the center of the stadium opened, freeing about a thousand teenagers. They didn’t immediately rush to the various arenas. Most stayed clustered, looking in a frenzy for compatible partners to form a team with.
They didn’t have a lot of time to form teams, though. Fifteen minutes later, a horn blared through the stadium, and the first groups started blasting their way through the arenas. Toki, who had the foresight to bring binoculars, followed their advance with interest.
One of the first teams was actually Midoriya’s. She could recognize his green glow anywhere. He had with him two boys with matching red hero costumes, as well as Asui and a girl with the head of a snake. The boys in red and Asui were apparently in charge of the rescue part, while the girl with the snake head and Midoriya faced the villain. Oh, snake-girl had a paralysis Quirk, that was neat. It also allowed Midoriya to go back to help with the rescue.
They didn’t do too badly, but they were slow, focusing on the rescue more than on the race. They also lost time trying to help fake-victims who could clearly walk. Instead of just bringing them to the main street of the arena and then moving on to the next victims, Midoriya tended to try and carry them. He wasn’t experienced with triage yet.
He also had a personal tendency to see ‘giving only the minimum help required’ as ‘not giving his all, and thus failing the task.’ Asui did the same, although not as much. The boys in red apparently corrected her once or twice, and Toki saw Asui adjust her approach to the fake victims in consequence.
This ‘all or nothing’ mentality was starting to be detrimental to the growth of the kids. That was something Toki was going to need to talk about. They should know that in a crisis, you didn’t have to carry every injured civilian on your back. Speed was of the essence, if you lost ten minutes carrying a person who could walk (no matter how covered in blood or how traumatized) to the hospital, then it was ten minutes spent not digging out a man suffocating under rubble, or stopping the bleeding of a stabbed woman, or… you know. You had to prioritize.
It sucked, and it felt horrible when you had to turn away from the other injured people who looked at you for reassurance: but you had to. You could only take care of the emotional needs when lives weren’t in danger anymore.
Anyway. Toki followed the progress of other teams with interest, too.
Yaoyorozu’s team passed at the same time, with kids from various other schools, two of them from the Seiai Academy (Toki recognized the uniform). Shouto’s team passed first too. Toki saw him in the arena facing Hawks while his teammates scrambled to drag victims out of the rubble. They were fast and they didn’t lose sight of the real test, which was a race, but Toki saw the wreckage made by the waves of ice and fire, and mentally winced.
Hawks was leading little Todoroki by the nose and evaded every large-scale attack. Shouto really needed to add some precise moves to his repertoire. But the way he used ice to shield his teammates was pretty good. He even used his flames to cut a car open and help a teammate rescue the fake civilian trapped inside.
He could be a great rescue hero. Sure, he had enormous firepower, and it would be a shame to shelve that weapon and refuse to use it in combat, so Shouto would always be capable of fulfilling the line of frontline hero if needed. But he was good in rescue, too.
The students trickled, some of them fast, some of them efficient, some of them well-coordinated, some of them making a complete disaster of things. Toki groaned when Kaminari’s team made a building collapse. It wasn’t Kaminari’s fault, though. It was a Ketsubutsu student who was half-naked and looked horrified afterward, but the harm was already done. The arena was closed to be repaired and the entire team was ushered out. For them, there would be no passing grade.
And then there was Bakugo’s team.
They faced Hawks. Toki carefully didn’t straighten or show any sign of particular interest (or even of recognition). She could feel Yagi narrow his eyes in the direction of the explosions, and mentally cursed. Shit, she had forgotten that he had met Bakugo. Was he going to connect the dots…?
Well, she couldn’t do anything about it, now. All she could do was watch Bakugo’s fight and tried to gauge his progress.
Shit, he was good.
His team was good, too. There were two girls, one boy with white hair, and a second boy who wore a Shiketsu hat… Shit, was that Inasa? Yoarashi Inasa, the guy who used wind? It looked like it, in any case! Oh, the irony. How the hell had two powerhouse like that had decided to work together?
It didn’t matter how they had decided to work together, how they had met, or what had made them decide that they could form a team. What mattered was that they obliterated the competition.
It was probably the fastest race. They took less than five minutes to cross the arena in a straight line, snatching victims right and left and pulling them on some luminous platform that one of the kids seemed to control telekinetically. They were all so fast, they all seemed to know exactly where the victims were hiding, and Bakugo kept Hawks-the-villain completely at bay, always standing between him and his team, moving with them without having to turn to look at where they were. Shit, did they have earpieces? Were they coordinating in real time?! That was fucking amazing!
They crossed the finish line. The bell rang.
There was a beat, and then an HPSC official announced in an uncertain voice that they would take a short break to send back some fake victims for the next team to rescue.
Not only Bakugo’s team had been the fastest, but they had also rescued 100% of the victims. Not even put the ambulatory ones on the road. No... they had picked up every single one of the actors hidden in their arena.
Toki had to put a hand on her mouth to hid a smile.
It was probably in part because of Bakugo’s perfectionism. But she couldn’t help but think that finding all the victims and being extra-fast was Keigo’s brand. And maybe, just maybe, he had rubbed off a little on King Explosion Murder down there.
“Well that was something,” Yagi commented.
He had a strange expression on his face, and he was looking in the direction of Bakugo’s team. Had he recognized the boy? Toki couldn’t be sure. She couldn’t even ask. She wasn’t supposed to have even met Bakugo, or know about his past, or anything.
So she just shrugged.
“Sure was. I’m kind of interested in seeing what those five will do in the second part of the test.”
“What is the second part of the test?” Yagi asked with interest.
So Toki explained to him what she knew, and they spent the next minutes wondering who would fare against the student of class 1-A and whose abilities weren’t geared toward battle. Yagi didn’t bring up the subject of Bakugo again. Toki didn’t push.
Bakugo’s fate was out of her reach now, anyway.
oOoOoOo
In canon, Toki was pretty sure that all of class 1-A had passed the first test. However, in this universe, a handful of them had picked bad teams or hadn’t been able to work with them.
It was the case for Kaminari, Tokoyami, and Aoyama. When the results were announced, they all looked crushed.
They went to sit with Toki and Yagi, miserable and dejected. Toki tried to cheer them up by saying there was a remedial session in a few months, but they were still pretty down. She couldn’t blame them. None of them had made any obvious mistakes. They had just… not been dealt a good hand. Kaminari had picked an idiot teammate, Tokoyami had had to carry almost his complete team by himself because none of them were very fast, and Aoyama had been beaten by the fake-villains, leading to the complete disarray of his own teammates. By themselves, Kaminari, Tokoyami, and Aoyama hadn’t done anything really bad… but they were graded on their teams, not on their individual competences.
Anyway.
Only a third of the candidates from the first test had passed, so that meant there were about five hundred and fifty people in the stadium for the second test. They were divided into the yellow, red, blue, and green teams. Each had about one hundred and thirty-five members, give or take one member. Each team had a ‘castle’ to defend in a corner of the arena and had three flags on poles in the center of their castle.
To win, you had to bring the flag of two other teams to your own castle and still have at least one of your own flags left.
There were a few other rules, of course. For example, they weren’t allowed to carry more than one flag at a time, so even if you managed to get to the enemy’s castle, you couldn’t take all of their flags. And people had to carry headbands showing the color of their team, and they weren’t allowed to switch teams.
The teams were selected randomly, but this time, the students from the same schools weren’t forcibly separated. Almost all of Yūei was in the green team, and almost all of Shiketsu in the blue team. As for Bakugo, Toki noticed, he was in the yellow team.
The test began.
Immediately, it was pandemonium.
From the bleachers, it was near impossible to follow the action as every team scattered in all directions. Toki mentally deducted points. Apparently nobody had thought to establish a chain of command or even a strategy. Every colored team was just an assembly of various groups who each had their own plans and were going to leave each other alone, instead of an organized army. The blue team, where Shiketsu was, was marginally better organized than the rest, but barely.
It was too chaotic. Toki managed to find Shouto Todoroki in the blue team and see that he had banded together with Inasa (really?!) to defend their ‘castle,’ which wasn’t a bad strategy, as they could fend off together the waves of assailants that came one after the other. The fire, the ice and the wind were pretty spectacular together.
Toki glimpsed a few other fights. At some point a giant wolf fought Kirishima, and later Toki saw Uraraka make rubble rain on her opponent like a Meteor Shower. Iida was being chased by two speedsters, until he turned on his heels and drop-kicked them like a pro. Toki was also pretty sure she had glimpsed Hitoshi swinging from a building to another like Spiderman, only to be tackled by Sero who had pretty much the same moves thanks to his elbow-tape.
It wasn’t long, though, before Toki could hear the explosions… And she wasn’t surprised to see Bakugo and Midoriya collide like missiles.
Bakugo wasn’t fucking around. He didn’t seem to care about collateral damage, making Toki wince a little when building after building crumbled. He was giving it his all, intent on crushing his opponents. For once Midoriya didn’t try to talk things out. He was meeting Bakugo with the same ferocity.
And even if Midoriya tried to avoid creating massive damage… their fight was completely wrecking the arena.
The both of them rampaged across the stadium without paying attention to the other participants, or even the rest of the test. They were just utterly focused on pounding the crap out of each other, while everyone else scrambled out of their way. Three people tried to interfere and stop them, and all of them were batted away like annoying flies.
“Too much collateral damage,” Toki muttered.
This was at least the second building they were demolishing, tearing at each other, and roaring like enraged beasts, blind to everything around them. Toki wondered how much of Bakugo’s fury was scripted. He knew he was supposed to fail this test to infiltrate the MLA, but Toki couldn’t help but wonder if he was only pretending to be careless, and in what measure he had honestly forgotten everything other than the urge to punch Midoriya in the face.
He was really doing a really good impression of a guy who had completely lost his shit.
“This was the boy who attacked Young Midoriya in middle school,” Yagi said lowly. His voice was cold, his eyes hard as steel. His hands had closed into fists on his thighs. “He’s the bully Young Midoriya changed schools for.”
Shit. Toki winced.
“Don’t start anything,” she warned him. “Midoriya won’t be grateful to you.”
“I’m not going to let him be attacked again!”
“He’s not losing. Look!”
They both looked.
The fight was brutal, but so far no one had seriously injured the other one. It wasn’t for lack of trying, though. Toki could see they weren’t holding back. But they were also both good enough to dodge and parry the most devastating blows. They were evenly matched.
“It will be good of him to fight back,” Toki said lowly. “Especially against someone who beat him before.”
Yagi hesitated, and then nodded grimly. Toki relaxed a little. They kept watching the fight.
Sure, the two boys were evenly matched. But… It was still incredibly violent, and Toki had trouble keeping an eye on the rest of the test, her attention always coming back to the furious battle between the two childhood friends turned enemies. She wasn’t the only one. Many of the teachers, pro-heroes or spectators in the bleachers followed the combat with worried or disapproving eyes.
Bakugo was dealing most of the damage to surrounding buildings. Midoriya didn’t seek to cause destruction like the human bomb did, but he didn’t exactly hold back either. When he punched, it was with a ferocity and a strength intending to pulverize whatever his fist impacted. They fought mostly in the air, but that didn’t quite stop the damage, either. They rampaged across the arena like a hurricane.
Another building collapsed, and Toki winced. Oh yeah, they were both going to get into serious trouble. Bakugo was instigating, for sure, but Midoriya had allowed himself to be baited. Causing so much damage to the area was really not a good look for a young heroic student, either.
It was almost a relief when the bell rang, signaling the end of the exercise.
Neither Bakugo nor Midoriya stopped immediately, and for a heart-stopping second Toki wondered if she would have to go there and stop them herself. But she didn’t have to. The bell’s ring was barely fading when a wall of red feathers erupted between the two teenagers, and suddenly Keigo was there, his insolent smile in place. Toki couldn’t hear what he was saying at this distance, but she saw him chatting cheerfully, waving his hands, so confident and unwavering that neither boy dared to question his right to interrupt their fight.
Keigo was still smiling cheerfully when he put a hand on the shoulder of each boy and corralled them toward a lateral door in the arena rather than the big hall where the other competitors were asked to go.
“Where are they going?” Yagi immediately frowned, getting up.
Toki noticed a guy in a suit walking towards them and went to meet him halfway. She wasn’t the only one to have this idea. Yagi followed her, as well as Aizawa and Mrs. Joke.
“I need a Yūei representative to fetch Midoriya-kun,” the suit informed them with a polite bow. “He’s waiting while the jury consider if this fight is ground of disqualification or for failure of the test.”
Yagi opened his mouth, probably to volunteer himself. Toki stepped on his foot, and announced loudly:
“Of course. Eraserhead will go with you.”
Aizawa looked taken aback, but he still nodded, and obediently followed the guy in a suit. Mrs. Joke waited until they were all out of earshot, then exclaimed loudly:
“You trust Eraser to bail out your student? You must have a lot of faith in him!”
Toki made a face. She just didn’t want Yagi to cause problems and didn’t want to go herself because she wanted to look for Toga’s possible presence. Eraser was the only option left.
In truth, she didn’t really care if Midoriya failed the exam and had to pass the made-up session in a few months, or if he was plainly disqualified and could only try to re-pass the exam next year.
So, whether Aizawa bailed out Midoriya or not… It wasn’t the point.
Toki didn’t really want Midoriya to do a work-study anyway. Not with the League still at large. Midoriya would still be taught inside the school. The objective in giving licenses to class 1-A was to give them a legal protection the next time they got into a fight with the League. But with Midoriya, it was a different matter. Midoriya had All Might and Nedzu and Quantum in his corner to bail him out if he ever fought without a license.
“He’ll manage. Mostly I can’t go because I’m the homeroom teacher and I have to look after the rest of the class.”
Mrs. Joke laughed. “Ahaha, you’re right! Well, I hope your student doesn’t get disqualified. He was the one in green, wasn’t he?”
They walked back to the main hall, where the students were waiting for the big screens to display whether they had passed the test or not. A few of the competitors had to swing by the infirmary first, so there was no rush.
The teachers were slowly converging in the hall too, either to speak with their students or to chat with colleagues. Toki was keeping an eye out for Shiketsu. In canon, Toga had impersonated someone for Shiketsu, right? Toki didn’t expect to recognize that person on sight, considering how terrible she was at recognizing canon-characters, but it didn’t hurt to stay attentive. Maybe the shapeshifter would betray herself somehow. Or maybe she would only have to look for someone missing…
But her search was fruitless. The only Shiketsu student not with the others was Yoarashi Inasa, who was talking with animation to Shouto. Yaoyorozu and Hitoshi were there, too, but they both looked like they were faintly bewildered by Inasa’s endless energy. Toki narrowed her eyes and went to insert herself in the conversation, half to rescue Shōouo if he was genuinely uncomfortable under the deluge of enthusiasm of an extreme extrovert, and half because she was genuinely curious.
Of course, Inasa saw her immediately and then proceeded to whip out a notebook from nowhere (a superpower that Toki thought that only Midoriya possessed) to ask for an autograph.
“… A GREAT FAN OF YOURS, QUANTUM!” Inasa was bellowing, while Toki signed his notebook. “It is an HONOR to meet you! How amazing it must be at Yūei, to be taught by All Might and Quantum! What a great school! With such an INCREDIBLE history of producing amazing alumni!”
Shouto looked at Toki, deadpan. “He’s an Endeavor fan.”
There was no way to know if he meant it as a condemnation or a commendation of Inasa’s taste. Toki let out a snort of laughter.
“Well, thanks,” she smiled at the tall Shiketsu student while giving him back his notebook. “Your school is a great one too, but I’m sure you would have made it to Yūei.”
Inasa bowed again, “It would have been my MOST ARDENT DESIRE! However, administrative restrictions precluded me from attending Yūei, which I deeply regret!”
“He was a vigilante,” Shōto added, still deadpan.
Toki’s jaw dropped.
“Indeed!” Inasa laughed, awkward but not uncomfortable. “I got overly enthusiastic when the free Quirk use law was passed, and unfortunately got too fierce while protecting the peace of my neighborhood! My abondance of enthusiasm allowed the arrest of no less than five villains, however my intervention constituted an act of vigilantism. I was, of course, MOST REMORSEFUL! But it didn’t preclude me from being sanctioned and this lapse of judgement inevitably marked in my file, precluding me from joining a school that require a perfect record!”
Holy bleeding shit, Toki thought wildly. Talk about butterfly effect.
“But that didn’t stop you from being accepted into Shiketsu?” Hitoshi asked with a hint of wariness.
“Shiketsu has a program to rehabilitate vigilante and give them licenses,” Toki told him distractedly. “It’s rarely used, though.”
“Because vigilantes don’t want licenses?” Yaoyorozu frowned.
Toki couldn’t help but laugh a little.
“No,” she shook her head, smiling. “Because the vigilantes don’t usually get caught.”
And when they were caught, half the time they were indeed teenagers that took Shiketsu’s deal… But half the time they were not. Sometimes, they were very young and could be let go with a slap on the wrist. Or sometimes, they were grown adults who definitely crossed the line from ‘helpfully tripping a villain during a chase’ to ‘assault and battery.’
“You were caught,” Shouto pointedly said to Inasa.
“I was!” The taller boy grinned, his smile blinding. “I wasn’t aware that I was doing vigilante actions, so I was very surprised when a nice hero took me to the side and explained that they needed to bring me to the police station. When it was all explained to me, I was very distressed!”
Unbelievable. It was so quintessentially Inasa that Toki had to shook her head. Oh, yeah, unbelievable, but also so funny. Oh gods, she couldn’t even tell to Keigo why it was hilarious! At least she would be sure to recount to him gleefully the story of the helpful teenager who had no idea he was doing vigilantism until he was arrested for it. That was still funny as hell.
Toki was still keeping an eye out for any stabbing, of course. But in the end, her cautiousness seemed unwarranted. No one was stabbed. After fifteen minutes, a giant screen displayed the names of those who had passed the test. Most of class 1-A had, actually. Ashido hadn’t, a fact that really seemed to disappoint her, but to be fair she had been knocked out at the beginning of the test by one of Ketsubutsu’s students, so she hadn’t been able to show what she could do. But everyone else who made it to the second part of the exam had passed.
Well, except for Midoriya.
Aizawa came back a few minutes later with the green-haired student and announced that although Midoriya had failed the test for excessive property damage, he hadn’t been disqualified… unlike his opponent, who had instigated the fight and knowingly wrecked everything.
Bakugo was thus disqualified. A fact that didn’t seem to make Midoriya very happy.
Good news though, the students who had failed the test were allowed to join remedial lessons, and to re-take the test in late October. In canon, Toki vaguely remembered that both Shouto and Bakugo had been in those remedial lessons. In this universe, though, there would be five Yūei students. Aoyama, Kaminari, Tokoyami, Ashido, and Midoriya.
Damn. She hoped that class 1-B hadn’t fared much better… or else Neito was never going to let Hitoshi hear the end of it.
Everyone climbed into the bus, chattering about the test.
“So, Midoriya-chan,” Asui croaked. “Did you know that guy you fought with? It sounded like you knew him.”
“It was super-manly!” Kirishima exclaimed.
“He was a trouble-maker damaging public property,” Iida scowled, puffing with indignation. He still had a scorch mark on his neck. Toki guessed that he must have crossed paths with Bakugo. Ahah.
“Was he an old friend?” Uraraka asked.
She was looking concerned. Midoriya turned away. He looked very sad, but his eyes were dry. There was something in the twist of his mouth that spoke of bitter determination.
Or maybe just bitterness.
“I’m his friend,” he said very quietly. “He just… isn’t mine.”
Uraraka and Asui exchanged a look. Toki saw that Hitoshi was listening in, but carefully not saying anything. Of everyone here, Hitoshi was maybe the one who knew the more about Bakugo and Midoriya’s history, but he was still keeping it quiet as if curious to hear what Midoriya was going to say.
“What does that mean?” Shouto asked, blinking.
Midoriya gave out a wet little laugh. “It means we’re not going to see each other again, I guess.”
And then he sped up to climb into the bus and sit, turning to look at the window and hide his face from view. Not fast enough, though. Toki had seen the way his eyes were briming with tears.
Toki wished she could offer him comfort. But there was nothing she could say to soften this blow. Nothing at all. So she just watched the bus’s departure with Aizawa and Yagi inside.
She suddenly felt very tired.
It was going to be worth it in the end. Bakugo’s spying would save people; Midoriya’s long-deserved awakening would toughen him up and make him realize that he deserved to be treated better than a punching bag. It was all for the best.
And yet, it always made her feel so helpless. Why did people had to be so cruel to each other?
Why couldn’t they just be kind?
oOoOoOo
The day after the provisional license exam was Hinawa’s first birthday. Which meant that both Toki and Keigo went to visit the Shinsō at their new appartement, with Hitoshi in tow. He had special permission to visit his mother for his niece’s birthday.
One year old! What a milestone!
Little Hinawa got plushies and toys, a nice walk on the beach with all of her family and took a good nap in Toki’s arms. Then, as a special treat at the end of the day, Toki even brought her to meet her godfather.
Technically, Mihoko was Hinawa’s godmother. She was in Toki’s will as Hinawa’s legal guardian if anything happened to her and Keigo. But Hinawa also had a reserve godfather, in case anything happened to Mihoko too.
That reserve godfather was a very hypothetical solution, because the chances of something offing Toki, Keigo, and Mihoko were very slim. But you know, better safe than sorry. So Toki had asked that person not long after coming back from her maternity leave. That person had said yes, and things had been settled.
And now, nearly one year later, Toki was going to introduce her daughter to Inferno.
To be honest, she hadn’t thought she would ever need to. Inferno had congratulated her upon Hinawa’s birth and had been very touched when she had asked to be a reserve godfather, but he had never asked to meet her. He was never around children, so he had been a bit awkward when it came up. He just thought that it was hilarious that Hinawa’s favorite toy was an Inferno plushy.
What? It was a silly toy that Toki had given her daughter when she was barely old enough to suck her thumb, and now Hinawa refused to go anywhere without it!
Anyway. When Toki had called today, asking about a gigantic Inferno plushy, her senpai had jokingly invited her. She had heard Salamander in the background laughing, which had been such an odd sound that now Toki had to come.
And so they did, all the little Taiyōme family in disguise. Toki, as Hoshizora, with her bangs brushed to the side, her yellow contacts, carefully applied make-up to make her face rounder, and clothes in soft shades of blue. Keigo, with a baseball cap and nerdy glasses, decked in Endeavor merch, also wearing orange-red colored contacts. And little Hinawa, whose fluffy blonde hair had been carefully darkened by a very mild dye during her nap, until she had the exact shade of brown hair as Toki.
The effect was uncanny. They didn’t look like themselves… But they still looked all related. It was very, very strange.
But very anonymous, too, which was the main goal.
Toki warped to Osaka with her daughter and husband, making a short series of teleportations high in the sky, to Hinawa’s great delight. Her baby loved high places, as well as the vertiginous sensation of warping.
They arrived on a quiet little street not far from Inferno’s agency. Inferno himself was leaning against the wall of a little house.
“Welcome, guys,” her senpai welcomed them, smiling.
He was dressed in civies, with a dark green shirt that was a little tight in the shoulders and clashed horribly with his hair. Toki vaguely wondered if he had stolen it from Salamander’s closet.
“Long time no see,” Keigo grinned. “So where are we exactly?”
Inferno pointed his thumb toward the door behind him. After a second look, it appeared to be a tiny, family-style restaurant.
“The best place in Osaka. Here is the best food you will ever eat, prepared by a loving little grandma that will take your secrets to the grave. I reserved the whole restaurant for the afternoon, so we’re not going to be barged in on… and I even asked for cake, since it’s an occasion.”
“How thoughtful,” Toki smirked. “Do you hear that, Hinawa? Cake.”
Her daughter, though, wasn’t really paying attention. She was gaping, wide eyes riveted on Inferno. Then, when Inferno’s attention turned to her, Hinawa squealed in delight, and pointed at him.
“Plushy!”
Inferno blinked. “I’m what now?”
Toki grinned, and pointed to the Inferno plushy that Hinawa was still squeezing in her hand. Her senpai looked torn between flattery and dismay, until amusement won out.
“Come on, go on in.”
The restaurant was tiny and comfortable, entirely done in a traditional style, with low tables separated by paper cloisons. Salamander was already sitting in the furthest boot, completely invisible from the entrance. He was browsing on his phone, scowling, although he put it down when their little company arrived.
Next to him was a human-sized package wrapped in brightly colored paper.
“You didn’t,” Toki said, aghast.
“What didn’t he do?” Keigo wondered. Then he saw the package, and his eyes widened. “Please don’t tell me it’s a life-sized Inferno plushy, that would be creepy.”
“It’s not creepy,” Inferno huffed. “It barely looks like me! They designed it in that manga style, where it’s kind of… simplistic and round.”
“So, this is a life-sized Chibi Inferno plushy?”
“Oh gods,” Toki whispered, vibrating. “I can be so normal about this.”
Hinawa was going to love it.
“It’s a promotional tool that outlived its usefulness,” Salamander said gruffly. His eyes softened when he saw Hinawa. “So, this is the spawn?”
“The one and only.” Was it cliché that Toki felt like preening with pride when introducing her amazing daughter to people? “Guys, this is Hinawa. Hinawa, this is Salamander, and this is Inferno.”
Hinawa nodded very seriously and, as soon as they were all seated, she clambered from Toki’s laps to Inferno to look at him with fascination, babbling in incomprehensible baby-language. Inferno looked very awkward under her scrutiny but, seeing that she didn’t yell, bite, or even try to chew his costume, he soon relaxed.
Toki tried not to coo at the sight of her baby beaming at her senpai. It was adorable, okay. Inferno clearly hadn’t been around babies much, but even then, he tried to hold Hinawa so carefully.
“So, how was the provisional license exam?” Salamander asked abruptly.
“Don’t talk work right now,” Inferno scowled him, grinning. “We’re meeting my favorite godchild!”
“She is your only godchild.”
“Yeah, weirdly enough no one in our circle of friends has thought to reproduce yet.”
“That’s because all of our friends are gay.”
Inferno blinked. “Shit, you’re right. Hawks, Quantum, you’re our token straights.”
Keigo sniggered, “It’s a shame we’re both bi, then.”
Inferno threw his hands up in mock-despair, and Toki couldn’t help but laugh at him. Even Salamander snorted in amusement.
With Hinawa being present, they didn’t dare to drink, but they still had a great time. First they unwrapped the gigantic plushy, or rather they let Hinawa wreck the wrapping paper with all the enthusiasm of a toddler enjoying her power of destruction. Then there was the gasp of delight (Hinawa), the uncontrolled laughter (Keigo), and some gleeful squealing (Toki).
It was indeed a giant Chibi Inferno plushy, with a round face, bright orange hair, and big round grey eyes. It was cute, and the real Inferno looked half-pleased half-mortified by it. Until, at some point, Keigo started wondering out loud if that kind of plushy would work with Icarus’ brand. Inferno was very pleased to inform them of the existence of an online shop that already made that kind of plushy for all of the Top Twenty. The shop was very successful.
“Don’t you dare buy one,” Toki threatened her husband.
“Aw, come on!”
“No! It’s going to be like the Endeavor dakimakura all over again!”
Inferno grinned. “Oh, I smell a story!”
Keigo didn’t have to be asked twice to recount with flourish how he had put a body-pillow of Endeavor in Toki’s seat during her maternity leave. Mostly, the story was about how the various people entering his office had reacted to it, from Hayasa-sensei desponding groan to Kameko’s hysterical laughter.
They all had plenty of new stories to tell, too. Salamander had been stabbed last week because he had interfered in a fight between two teenagers and had foolishly asked one “what are you going to do, stab me?” And then, bam, a knife. The medic hadn’t been impressed.
Then Inferno recounted how he had fought another fire-user, until Lady Siam ended the fight by kicking a fire hydrant and unleashing a super-powered jet of water on both of them. In the moment, Inferno hadn’t laughed at all, and Siam had been very apologetic. But after the fact, he couldn’t retell the story without cracking up. Toki could imagine it. It must have been looked so cartoonish!
Toki and Keigo had their own stories to tell, obviously. Keigo even reenacted a daring rescue with a bunch of feathers as puppets, making Hinawa shriek with delight while both Toki and Inferno were collapsed on the table, laughing uncontrollably, and Salamander tried to hide his own hilarity.
The food was amazing, just like Inferno had promised. It wasn’t chicken, but Keigo didn’t whine about it. It was katsudon, rich and crispy, and they all got gigantic portions. Hinawa’s meal was cut into bite-size slices and came with an adorable little apron decorated with little ducks, to avoid soiling her clothes with the sauce. Frankly, that was perfect.
As they ate, they talked about hero stuff and various missions. Inferno hadn’t seen Endeavor since the last time, so Toki vaguely mentioned seeing him after Kamino. Neither Inferno nor Salamander pressed her for questions about Meteor, for which she was secretly grateful. It was always a little complicated to untangle her feelings on the matter.
At some point Hinawa started wandering around curiously, trying to drag the giant Inferno plushy with her, so Salamander took her on his knees with the giant plushy next to him, and spent the next few minutes intently listening to her gibberish chatter, nodding seriously in answer. In the end, Hinawa yawned, sprawled all over his lap, and managed to doze off hugging Salamander’s right arm. He pretended to grumble about it but refused to let Toki relocate the sleepy toddler. Instead he just transferred his chopsticks to his left hand and continued to eat.
Aw, he was such a softie.
The conversation came back to the provisional license exam, eventually, and Toki recounted how King Nitro had lived up to his name. Or maybe his name was now Rampage? Carnage? King Carnagorus? Emperor ExplodoKill? It was hard to keep track.
“He was disqualified?” Inferno blinked. “I would have thought that he would aim to pass, at least.”
Keigo shrugged:
“Well, he wasn’t going to be given a passing grade anyway, since he’s technically assisting the HPSC with putting obstacles in the competitors’ path. He just let loose. He was fighting a powerhouse, you know.”
“Yeah,” Toki chirped in. “Besides, I think the guy he was fighting was a childhood friend. Childhood rival? Childhood Nemesis? Maybe a cousin? Those things are kind of similar.”
Salamander squinted at her. “What kind of Nemesis do you have?”
“Probably the Witch.”
“… You know, that explains a lot.”
“She’s not all bad! She’s just, you know, a self-serving, scheming, cold-hearted blood-sucking bat. But not all bad!”
“At least she’s an improvement over old Genryusai,” Salamander grumbles.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Inferno sounded almost wistful. “I mean, he was scary as hell, but he was the one who brought me into the sponsorship program, so I guess I’ll always feel a little grateful.”
Toki made a face. Yeah, Genryusai had done good things, in the aim of reaching a good goal. But he had been a very cold man. And the number of good things he had accomplished couldn’t wash away all the bad things he had done, too. People had been killed on his orders. Toki had been kidnapped and maybe others had been too. Maybe many others had been wrongly imprisoned or accused. It was so easy to abuse the system when you were at the top of it.
“The sponsorship program was a good idea,” Keigo approved. “Can’t imagine what I would have done without it.”
“Vigilantism,” Toki immediately muttered.
“Me?” Keigo grinned. “A gentle, upstanding law-abiding citizen like me? Never.”
And thus they begin bickering about what they would all be if they weren’t heroes. Toki had her answer already made, astrophysicist. Or maybe astronaut, because, you know, why not? Keigo started going over a long list of potential jobs he could do, every single one more ridiculous than the others. Cook, male model, accountant, drug dealer, telemarketer, teacher, judge, lawyer, international spy, garbage man, tattoo artist, street food vendor, fashion designer…
Inferno thought that he would have made a very hot firefighter, pun intended. As for Salamander, he grumbled a little bit before deciding that he would have probably become a firefighter too.
Aw, so cute. Always together.
Toki had never seen Inferno and Salamander kiss or hug, and they hadn’t even plainly told her they were together. But when they were relaxed and laughing, they leaned against each other with an ease borne of a deep-seated familiarity. And when Salamander grumbled that he would be a firefighter, Inferno beamed at him with the same dopey smile that Toki often wore herself when Keigo did something nice for her.
It was nice. Heroism was such a hard path to walk sometimes: it was comforting to not have to walk it alone.
Sure, you weren’t ever really alone, with the friends and sidekicks or whatnot. Life would be very different if Toki didn’t have Icarus, with Hayasa-sensei and Kameko and all the others. But it was different when you had a partner, an equal, to share the risks, the fear, and the thrill of the job.
It would be very, very different if Toki didn’t have Keigo with her.
And, well, it would probably be very different for Inferno if he didn’t have Salamander, too.
Toki didn’t know Salamander’s backstory. She knew snippets and anecdotes, but not enough to paint a clear picture. She knew he had lost both his parents at some point, before meeting Inferno; she knew he had worked at lot with Okamoto, and disliked him; she knew he was reliable, gruff and growly but kind. He took care of Inferno. Toki was pretty sure that her senpai wouldn’t have left Endeavor’s agency to start his own if he hadn’t had Salamander’s support to spread his wings.
And, well… Now she knew Salamander liked kids.
That was the cutest and most wildly unexpected thing, but hey, maybe that’s why Inferno had suddenly decided that he wanted to meet Hinawa after all this time. Salamander’s grouchy attitude melted like chocolate when you plonked a baby in his arms. His shoulders relaxed, his frown lessened, and he even managed to smile a little.
Time passed. When the moment came for Toki and Keigo to leave, Hinawa had fallen asleep for good in Salamander’s lap. It wasn’t late yet, far from it, but that gave the signal to start wrapping things up. It was time to put Hinawa to bed. Keigo was carrying her, the toddler snoring against his shoulder, one chubby hand clasping her old Inferno plushy.
They made plans to see each other again at another time, when there would be no little kid around, to get fantastically drunk and tell their crudest stories from work. That was going to be hilarious.
Maybe this time Toki could invite them into her territory. She knew Inferno didn’t want to go to Fukuoka because his father had once burned the city to the ground, but… they could go to one of the neighboring cities. After all, Icarus had a very large territory.
“It was nice to see all of you,” Inferno smiled, watching Hinawa drool peacefully on Keigo’s t-shirt. “I had no idea what I was supposed to do with that gigantic plushy.”
“You would have found something,” Toki laughed.
For a few seconds they didn’t say anything. Keigo was saying something to Salamander to make him grumble, and Keigo sniggered in answer.
“Did you ever think about having kids, senpai?” Toki said quietly.
Inferno shrugged, shoving his hands in his pockets.
“I didn’t… I mean, not really. But I know that Salamander would like to, so maybe. One day. When at least one of us is retired.”
“I mean, it’s normal if you don’t want kids,” Toki hastily said. “People shouldn’t have kids just because they want to be parents, they should have kids because they want them, they want to raise them, even if said kids ends up having a temper, or a bad Quirk, or disagree with what their parents think is best.”
The look Inferno gave her was a little too knowing for her taste.
Toki shrugged, looking away. She had never really talked about her mother. She wondered if Inferno’s mother had been like Sayuri. Having a child because being a mother was her goal, and the child that came with this status was only an unwanted package.
“I don’t not want kids,” Inferno finally grinned. “I’m thinking about it, that’s all. Maybe it’s a midlife crisis, or maybe it’s just that I’m close to retirement.”
“Not that close, though.”
He raised an eyebrow, “Hey, I’m thirty-six, and Salamander thirty-eight. We’re both past our prime. In this line of work, forty is a good age to take a step back.” He paused. “We should also probably get married. That’s something we discussed too.”
Toki grinned, and playfully punched his shoulder. “Oooh, nice.”
Inferno scoffed, punching her back.
“Don’t laugh,” he said gruffly, even if his eyes were soft. “This a serious conversation. It still feels unreal to think I may be starting a family one day.”
“Yeah, I know the feeling. You feel like you’re barely on top of things, and a kid… That’s huge. And marriage, too. But honestly, being married doesn’t really change the fact. If you’re happy together, just go for it.”
“Don’t give me advice,” Inferno whined, dismayed. “I’m your senpai. I should be the one saying wise nonsense.”
“By all means, if you have any wise nonsense about family to share, I’m all ears.”
Inferno laughed at her and ruffled her hair. It was nice.
“I think I did alright. I’ve got you, Majestic, Salamander, Burnin’, Endeavor, my sidekicks. In family matters, I’m good.”
Toki felt a warm bubble of love expand in her chest, and she knocked her shoulder against him to hide the wave of emotion. Inferno snorted and didn’t push.
For a little while they just enjoyed the moment. Keigo and Salamander bickering to the side, the warmth and the relaxation of a good meal, the feeling of being buzzed from laughter and affection rather than alcohol.
Toki tilted her head towards the windows, where the sunset was bathing the city in warm orange and red hues, and she feel herself smile.
we're shadows
and cinders
but we're also the sun;
and though we've been down
the hardest road yet travelled
at least we weren't travelling alone.
Notes:
MWAHAHAHAHA !
It had been a while since we've seen Bakugo, after all! And now here he is, in his full glory. I've written the exam from his POV, too, so i'll post that next week if you want ! =)
Inferno finally confirm that Salamander and him are together! Yay! Also they may get married! And holy crap i hadn't realized that they had gotten so old. They're in their late thirties! For me they're eternally younger. Early thirties, most likely. But that was their age when they meet Toki (who was 18) so... of course, time flies!
Next week will be a chapter of House of Wisdom about Bakugo, so stay tuned !
Chapter 68: Preparing the work-studies
Summary:
The work-studies are soon... and so is the moment to deal with the yakuza.
Notes:
Sorry i'm late posting! I feel like i don't know up from down these days!
Anyway ! A slow and easy-going chapter, preparing (like you guessed) for the incoming work-studies.
.
Some of you are interested by my ASOIAF fanfic ! So here is the sale pitch xD
It's sort-of a Self-Insert. Basically someone with modern knowledge but almost no knowledge of the actual plot is reborn in Renly Baratheon as a child. He is more scholary, a little kinder, a little more family-oriented. You still have the canon-Renly personality (easy laughter, like pretty clothes, etc.) but while canon-Renly never had the wake-up call of "shit it's the real worl i may die!!!", SI-Renly is very aware of the stakes. So he becomes much more mature much quicker, and by the time canon rolls around, a few changes have occured thanks to the domino effects.
For exemple, Renly didn't grow close to the Reach but to Dorne instead, which has interesting ramifications: the Reach tried to regain a foothold in court differently, Renly had allies with a very different skillset at their disposal, his mistrust of the Reach gave him common ground with Stannis, etc.
I think i'll feel secure enough in my plot to post the stoy when i'll reach 150k words. There are a lot of balls to juggle and i want to see where it goes, tobe able to change my first draft as often as needed. But... If the story goes to 150k... I'll post it! =)
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
PREPARING THE WORK-STUDIES
“Before today’s lesson about heroics, let’s talk about work-studies.”
Toki sat on the teacher’s desk and gestured to the class. A week had passed since the provisional license exam. The second semester had officially started… and so had the lessons.
In canon, Aizawa had pawned this lesson off to someone else, the Big Three. He had suggested to do that here, too, but Toki told him, in no uncertain terms, that it was up to the teacher to teach. Not to other students. So, she was the one giving this lesson because clearly Aizawa wasn’t up to the task. Apparently it was too soon for him to have ideas other than the classic sink or swim method.
“You all did a week of internships after the Sport Festival,” Toki continued. “There, you shadowed a hero as a simple spectator. A work-study is a little different. You don’t stop going to class, but you can have up to two days of the week dedicated to your work-study, where you’ll be excused from coming to school and will go to work instead.”
Melissa’s own work study had started today. She was at Icarus, while Toki was in Yūei. Ironic. But Toki knew her young fledging was in good hands. She had tasked Ocelot and Sunspear with showing her the ropes. They were both skilled and experimented. Besides, Melissa (or rather, Polaris) was already familiar with Icarus, the job, and their patrol route. She would be fine.
“You now have a provisional heroic license,” Toki added more seriously, looking at the students one after the other. “It means that you’ll be allowed to carry out heroic duties including rescue, surveillance, coordination, and, of course, combat.”
Several people whispered excitedly. Toki raised a finger in warning:
“However! A work-study isn’t quite like an internship. More skills mean more responsabilities. A work-study is sort of like being a sidekick. For one, you’re paid. The agency you’re working for must compensate you for your time patrolling. You can also get royalties if you do a commercial.”
Many students smiled. Hitoshi and Neito were whispering together. Toki narrowed her eyes at them, and they immediately straightened.
For this, Toki had both class 1-A and class 1-B. They were all sitting in a big auditorium for this lesson. Everyone needed to be present, even those who hadn’t managed to get their provisional license. After all, after passing the made-up test in October, maybe those students would also get a work-study.
“Secondly,” Toki continued, “You don’t require constant supervision. You can engage with villains. However, only a truly negligent hero would let a student fight alone. So be sure to use the buddy system.”
Then she grinned and added:
“And finally, it’s a work-study, meaning that your main goal is to study the mechanisms of heroic work. You’re not just there to punch criminals. You have to study why punching them is a good option or not! You’ll have to give monthly reports, and you’ll be graded on it.”
In class 1-A, five people hadn’t passed the provisional exam, and would have to take the made-up session in October. In class 1-B, though, there was only two of them. Hiryu Rin and Kosei Tsuburaba. It was surprising, as they were both very good. However, upon questioning Vlad King, Toki had learned that both of them had been on a team together for the rescue paired with a race, and they had both been eliminated with their team. Their three teammates had devolved into infighting. Rin and Tsuburaba were used to working together, so they had carried out the rescue… and let their cumbersome, childish teammates fight.
Toki was sure that it had been very satisfying in the moment, but leaving a teammate behind was an automatic failing grade. A lesson that Rin and Tsuburaba weren’t going to forget anytime soon.
“A work-study is in no way mandatory. You may decide that you would rather spend more time on your school lessons. But it’s a great way to get some practical experience. You’ll face real villains, be confronted in tense situations, and train with experienced pro-heroes and sidekicks. You’ll become stronger, and better equipped to handle high-stress conditions. Next week, I’m planning a training session with some third-years who have work-studies, you’ll see the difference in level immediately.”
Aizawa’s idea of having the Big Three kick some ass wasn’t all bad. It just couldn’t be the whole lesson.
“So!” Toki clapped her hands. “Any questions?”
A flurry of hands was raised.
They wanted to know where to get a work-study, what the hours would be, and if it would be safe. Toki answered them all, well-prepared. Nedzu had indeed taken precautions, unwilling to just throw his students into the wilderness. Internships could be offered by all agencies, but Nedzu would only allow the contracts for heroes he had personally checked, and who had the firepower necessary to defend their interns.
Toki didn’t intend to extend an offer for a work-study at Icarus to all the students, not like she had done for their internships. She intended to offer a place to Neito and another to Hitoshi, and that was it. She already had Melissa. Three interns was just the right number, in her opinion. As for the other students, she was willing to make recommendations and discuss their options with them so they could pick a good mentor, but she wouldn’t go further.
Then, once all the questions had been answered and the doubts assuaged, it was time for the actual heroic lesson. The work-studies weren’t an excuse to neglect their education.
The kids already knew so much less than what Toki had known at age twelve. The truth of the rankings, the intricacies of paperwork, the importance of proper insurance, the overlaps between heroism and police investigations, the constraints of merchandise deals, and so on. There was just so much they needed to understand if they wanted to make a living in this profession! They couldn’t just jump into some skimpy costume and punch people. The job continued long after the perp climbed into the police car. There were solid foundations to build, loose ends to tie up, and procedures to follow. You were supposed to bring order, not chaos. How were you supposed to do that if you didn’t know how things worked?
So far, Toki had wrestled control of the curriculum and set it in a better direction. The kids had been taught first aid, triage, how to help in a shelter, what paramedics did and how heroes could make their job easier, and they had all been given lessons in hand-to-hand combat. That was already a good start.
For their next practical lessons, Toki wanted to tackle gun safety. How to handle a gun, how to disarm someone with a gun, and how to unload a gun. Movies were a terrible source of knowledge on the subject. Could you believe that actors actually put their fingers on the trigger, even if they didn’t intend to shoot?! Have they never heard of gun safety??
You were supposed to keep your finger off the trigger and gun lowered until the moment you decided to shoot. Otherwise, even an involuntarily twitch or a tremble could make the gun go off. Triggers were sometimes more sensitive than a touch screen! Jesus Christ, did movie directors ever do any research?!
But that was a topic for later.
Today’s lesson was about the organization of hero agencies. Not just the collaboration-style agencies where independent heroes pooled resources, or pyramidal-style agencies where a group followed a leader, but the distinction between hero agencies, hero teams, and hero partnerships.
“Icarus is a hero agency,” Toki explained, then gestured at herself while continuing, “But Hawks and I aren’t a hero team. Who here know the difference?”
Iida’s hand shot up in the air: “It’s because you don’t pool your statistics together!”
“Correct! Hero teams, like the Wild Wild Pussycats, don’t have members that are ranked individually. Their statistics are all merged together for their ranking.”
“And hero teams have to obey stricter requirements than an agency to be dubbed as functioning, don’t they?” Yaoyorozu added hesitantly.
Toki pursed her lips, thinking.
“It’s true,” she admitted. “But most of those requirements are a question of viability in the market, rather than official requirements. Like, will the team last? Do they live in the same city? Do their interests align? This is so sponsors can put their support behind them without the fear of seeing the team splinter two years later.”
A few hands were raised. Toki randomly pointed to Asui.
“Is there a minimum number for teammates on a team, gero?”
“Not really, although teams are usually three to six people. It’s only for practical reasons. If you have more than that, then you risk getting in each other’s way, which is dangerous. But if a team is too small, when one member gets taken out, then a big part of their fighting force is eliminated.”
It was also why hero duos weren’t really encouraged. If one of them was taken out, then half their fighting force was gone. So each part of the duo had to be individually strong enough to carry the duo alone if needed, meaning they needed to be strong enough for two. It was hard.
With teams of three people or more, the risk was lessened. You didn’t have to be strong for three, because even if one teammate fell, then there were at least two other people still fighting.
“You can have teams bigger than six people!” Iida exclaimed. “Like the Idaten Team!”
Toki conceded the point. Ingenium had been a solo hero, with a few secondary heroes and some unaffiliated sidekicks, it was pyramidal-style agency after all, but almost three fourths of his sidekicks had been part of a singular team.
Basically, the Idaten Agency’s policy had been to gather the people with Quirks with a single strong point, and deploy the right people in the right places, then take on villains with perfect teamwork and coordination. For that reason, they had always banked on having a great number of specialists rather than a small number of polyvalent people. At its highest, the Idaten Agency had boasted about fifty members.
It only worked because the Agency had been well-established for generations, with a stable repute and a secure territory… and, admittedly, good leaders who knew how to inspire loyalty. It would have been unmanageable for anyone else. The logistics alone gave Toki a headache.
“There are teams of two people, though,” Midoriya said timidly.
Yeah, Toki was getting to that. She nodded:
“There are, but it’s very rare. They need to be both solo heroes and a hero team. They have to be capable while alone and also exponentially more powerful together to benefit from being a duo. It’s just easier for a solo hero to have a sidekick than for two heroes to pair up.”
Most hero duos were siblings banking on their similarities to make an impression in public, or couples who pooled together their resources… Like the Water Hose, actually.
“But in practice, teams don’t work differently from an agency?” wondered Tsuburaba. “Is the only difference in the way their statistics are calculated?”
“Yes, pretty much. But it is very important. After all, those statistics are how their salary is calculated, how their ranking is determined, and how they are known to the public. A team is also a bigger commitment than an agency. An agency is, at the end of the day, just a place of employment. With a team, though, you specifically cultivate a skillset to support your teammates, with the clear understanding that your purpose isn’t to act solo.” Toki looked over the students, and abruptly asked, “Who here has heard about Seijin High School?”
There was a beat. Then, to Toki’s surprise, both Asui and Midoriya raised their hands at the same time. She pointed to Midoriya, and he cleared his throat, blushing faintly.
“Ah, hm, Seijin a heroic school specializing in teamwork. They scout people in middle-school according to their compatibility and train them to work in hyper-specialized units with perfectly complementary skills. For example, a tracking team, or a capture team…”
“Exactly.” She paused, frowning. “You teamed up with some of Seijin’s students during the provisional license exam, didn’t?”
“Aah, yes!”
Toki had noticed that two of his teammates for the first tests had worn matching red uniforms. Good to know. She nodded, and continued:
“If you want to see what a team looks like, just check the list of Seijin’s graduates. Most of them form teams of sidekicks, but there are a few teams of heroes, too. It’s a good way to gain notoriety fast and relatively safely. After all, you’re stronger together. I’m sure a few of you already have good combo moves with some of your classmates. Don’t hesitate to bank on that.”
There were a few whispers. Awase and Tsuburaba were already bending their heads together to murmur. Ashido and Kirishima were grinning at each other. But some other students didn’t look enthused.
“What if we don’t want to stay stuck in a team we may end up outgrowing?” Hitoshi drawled.
He was sprawling in his seat like a half-liquefied cat. Toki considered reprimanding him because that position could only very loosely fit the definition of sitting. In the end, she decided to give him a free pass.
Besides, she had her butt on the teacher’s desk. Glass houses and all that.
“Most teams break-up after an average of four to five years,” she shrugged. “It’s a commitment, sure, but not a marriage.”
There were a few titters. Awase frowned, not bothering to raise his hand, “Most teams break up so soon? Even Seijin’s, who are taught during all their high-school years to work together?”
“Yes,” Toki nodded, “even them. Granted, they usually last one year or two more, but they also break up. A few of them stay longer together, but even then… it’s not a guarantee of eternal commitment.”
Awase looked half-baffled, half-outraged. Working hard for three years just to give up after four years of work must seem like a waste to him.
“Why?!”
He was missing one key-element here. Toki spread her hands, and said simply:
“Because people change. They learn different moves; they want different things. Some want to step down, others decide to get married and slow down, others wish to get higher in the rankings. People who are good teammates and good friends at one point of their lives don’t necessarily stay that way forever. They can, but it requires work. It requires them to keep similar goals and outlooks on life… but like I said, people change, and thus their goals change too.”
“… oh.”
“It’s not something tragic,” Toki added, reassuringly. “It’s can a good thing that they evolve. The Seijin graduates usually stay together and break up after four to six years, sometimes seven. They start looking for other opportunities. They keep in touch and stay friends, and the opportunities to work together don’t lack. They usually quit the team to become sidekicks in big agencies. With their training, they are amazing at fitting into bigger squads. But there is also a steep learning curve of learning how to fight without their usual teammates.” She shrugged. “You win some, you lose some.”
“Then why doesn’t Seijin change their method?”
It was a good question. If their model wasn’t working out in the long term, then it meant things could be ameliorated, right? But Toki only blinked.
“Why would they? They are famous for teaching students who are amazing at teamwork. Any new team graduating from there get a meteoric rise through the ranks because they are new, shiny, and original. If the teams don’t last a full decade, who cares? Young heroes usually leave the industry after less than a decade to look for less physically demanding jobs anyway, so Seijin isn’t breaking statistics.”
There was a pensive silence.
It was something that heroic high-schools hated to admit, because it would be tantamount to acknowledge the fact that the education they promised wasn’t a guarantee to success or even to a stable career. But it was still true that most young heroic graduates would quit within a decade.
Heroism was a very physically, mentally, and emotionally demanding profession with low rewards. The pay wasn’t really that attractive either unless you started off rich. Or if you had merchandizing contracts raining on you.
So, unless you were wealthy (like Yaoyorozu, or Todoroki), or you cheated the system (like Quantum, Hawks, and even All Might)… It was hard to make your mark. Especially when you were beginning.
Not impossible, but… hard.
The numbers were pretty damning. Two thirds of the fresh graduates would seek out an alternate employment within two years. Even those who managed to make a living would still start looking at a quitting the heroic scene when reaching their thirties… or their forties if they were very good at their job (and/or were addicted to it, like many heroes were). Very few lasted to their fifties, and almost none continued past that age.
They kept their licenses, and if there was trouble they usually kept their sense of duty and went to help... but when they were slower and more tired, then they usually spent more time pouring over paperwork than patrolling. It only made sense to leave the action to the youngsters who could bounce back much quicker.
“Anyway!” Toki continued cheerfully, “So we have agencies, where heroes pool resources and fight together while maintaining distinct identities. Teams, where heroes do that while also accepting to merge their statistics. Now, do you know what the difference between an agency, a team, and a hero partnership is?”
Several students looked at each other in askance.
“A partnership is with heroes in different specialties?” Kirishima tried.
“Close,” Toki acknowledged. “But not quite. An agency or a team is official, but a partnership isn’t. Hero partnerships can be found in the same team or the same agency, but they are often two solo heroes who work well together.”
“Like Hawks and you, sensei?” Neito cheekily asked.
Brat, Toki thought fondly. “Exactly like Hawks and me, yeah.”
“Do they usually date?” Ashido asked, trying (and failing) to look innocent.
“It’s not a requirement,” Toki said with a straight face.
Ashido squealed, but Hagakure muttered loud enough for Toki to hear ‘she evaded the question again.’ It wasn’t the first time that Ashido or another curious student (although it was often girls!) had tried to squeeze some juicy gossip out of Toki.
“Hero partnerships are usually a de facto situation,” Toki continued. “Often, it’s a limelight hero and an underground hero who work well together, and it can turn into a contract with that limelight hero agency. That’s how All Might hired his sidekick Nighteye, for example. Or how the Inferno agency hired Salamander. Or how my agency hired Mercury. In real life, you’ll often have to work with existing partnerships. Especially when several heroes team up for a big operation. Partnerships aren’t on paper, but they exist. Some heroes work better with others, even if they aren’t officially affiliated.”
She taped a nail against the desk to accent her words. Work together, she wanted to say out loud. The whole point of this lesson is that you need to work together, even if there’s no shared credit, no rule about it, no additional credit. I didn’t mention solo heroes once in this lesson. Solo heroes go nowhere. Work together, because we have an enemy to beat, and I refuse to let you get killed for something as stupid as competition.
“It’s something I want you to think about,” she finally said. “When you enter the real world, you’ll go nowhere without good support. It doesn’t matter how strong you are. If you want to make people rely on you, you need to show you’re ready to rely on them, too. The best heroes never got to the top alone.”
“Not even you?” asked someone.
Toki paused.
“Well, I’m awesome, so I could have.” It drew a few sniggers, like she hoped. “But no,” she continued, shaking her head. “Not even I can reach the top alone.”
And neither should you, she thought. Her eyes stopped on Midoriya and his pensive frown. Neither should any of you.
oOoOoOo
There was no news about the League. They were still deep underground. Nedzu was looking for their hidden headquarters. The Endeavor Agency, though, (so, probably Meteor) was of the opinion that the members had split up to cover their tracks. It wasn’t a bad idea; it was how the Crew had managed to evade capture after a few of their heists, too.
As the Endeavor Agency wasn’t officially in charge of this investigation, they could only submit the idea to Nedzu and see if he followed it. But Toki met her father for lunch, and they spent basically the whole meal going back and forth, talking about the case. With the work-studies around the corner, Toki was kind of anxious about the risks she would open her fledglings to.
It wasn’t a surprise to learn that Endeavor was thinking the same… even if Shouto apparently hadn’t told him that he had no plans to do his work-study with him.
“Maybe I should go to Yūei and give a class on what to expect from the real world,” Meteor mused while they were eating their desserts.
The prospect was so horrifying that Toki almost took psychic damage.
“No. Absolutely not.”
“It would be fun!”
“For who?”
“Well, for me, obviously.”
Toki groaned, and half-heartedly kicked her father under the table. He let her do it, like a lazy jungle cat amused by the antics of an unruly kitten, and insisted cheerfully:
“You should give me more credit. I would be the epitome of professionalism. I would keep talk of disembowelment to a minimum and only grill them about criminology theories and legislation.”
It was still one hell of a trip to remember that her father had studied law in prison.
“No way,” she retorted. “Besides, you don’t have the patience to teach.”
“Not to idiots, obviously. But I’m great with kids.”
And... he was. With baby Hinawa, with Shouto and his siblings, even with Toki herself when she had been a child. A little chagrined, Toki had to concede the point.
“You’re still not going to teach my class.”
He sighed, dramatically lounging in his chair. “Your loss. I would even make it entertaining for you.”
“I’m almost afraid to ask… But how would you do that?”
“Well… If a kid doesn’t know the answer to a question it’s fine, but I would make them pick the next person I would call on. I do that when I have a debrief with the Flaming Sidekickers. It’s a social experiment I run. I like to see if people pick their friends or their enemies. Wildly amusing.”
Toki laughed, not sure if she was appalled or if she thought it was hilarious. Somehow, that was completely in character for her father.
“Dad!”
“What? A man has to find crumbs of amusement where he can.”
Yep, she was definitely not letting Meteor teaching in Yūei, ever.
“They already have someone who can teach them about that stuff,” she groused. Then she paused and frowned. If that someone was supposed to be Aizawa she was going to have words with Nedzu. “Well, I think so.”
“You think so? Well, your unwavering confidence is certainly a comfort.”
Toki stuck her tongue at him, not dignifying that with a retort, and then dug into her dessert. She was usually partial to traditional Japanese desserts, such as mochi, wagashi, or fruit sando, but this restaurant made a parfait with tangerine and lemon that was to die for. Looking at how extravagant the colors were, you would have trouble believing it was just yoghurt, fruit, cream, nuts and sirup are layered in a tall glass.
Would it be rude to literally lick the glass clean? Probably. Toki flagged down the server to ask for a second parfait instead. Her father, who didn’t share her sweet tooth, rolled his eyes.
“What do you teach those kids anyway?” Meteor asked after a pause. “In term of practical skills, I mean. I can’t fathom learning about the realities of the streets from a sanitized classroom setting.”
Toki grimaced. “I didn’t get a sanitized classroom either. But I still learned in a relatively safe environment.”
Ironically, the most dangerous individual that had been part of her education had been Aizawa, who was now part of the ‘sanitized classroom setting’ that Meteor scoffed at. Not that Toki would ever tell him that. Actually, she was never telling anybody that. As far as she was concerned, that part of her past was better left buried. Aizawa had apologized so everyone could move on and forget.
“I sent them in small group to a shelter so they can talk to actual people who experience hardships and to get a clue about what the civilian problems are,” she said instead. “Kids who have never lived in the streets don’t think about stuff like… being wary of food given by strangers just in case someone hid razor blades in it for a laugh. Or being afraid of the police because an abusive ex reported you missing so the police can help them drag you back home.”
Meteor shook his head, looking bemused. “Kids these days are so sheltered.”
Toki wondered, in a brief flash of clarity, if Meteor had ever been homeless too. It didn’t fit with his image, the power he exuded, but… well, he hadn’t always been like that, right? Once upon a time, even her father must have been a young teenager. And his distrust of the system didn’t speak of a happy childhood.
She cleared her throat.
“Right. I’m teaching them lockpicking, gun safety, and crowd control. I’m also showing them how to break in somewhere, how to deescalate a situation, and to blend into a crowd. Also, Quirkless hand-to-hand combat— you wouldn’t believe how much some of them rely on just their Quirk to fight— climbing, jumping, and parkour, too. Dealing with the chaos of a battle, how to not panic at the sight of blood... Just… practical stuff.”
“Mmmh.” Meteor raised an eyebrow at her. “What about knife fighting? Sword fighting?”
“How to disarm people with knives would be a good idea,” Toki admitted. “But swords? Nobody uses swords.”
“Everyone I know can use a sword.”
“What kind of people do you know?!”
Meteor shrugged, unbothered.
“It’s not like there are classes for it. It’s just general knowledge. I’ve picked up a bit here and there, absorbed a degree of knowledge from the frankly alarming number of sword-wielding lunatics that I encountered on a regular basis, and now I can use pretty much any blade in a reliable manner. I suppose it’s the same for everyone.”
Toki was going to call bullshit when she remembered three separate occasions where a villain had pulled out a katana or a machete on her. And then she remembered fighting Keigo a lot during training, with swords.
Chagrined, she had to admit that maybe her father had a point. She was going to integrate some sword-fighting lessons in her curriculum. You know, just in case.
“Alright, I guess I can add that to the lesson plan. It’s practical, after all.”
“Mmmh. Speaking of practical stuff. Did you have the Talk with them yet?”
Toki snorted, trying to keep a straight face. “About using protection?”
Her father sniggered, and this time he was the one who lightly kicked her under the table. “No, Munchkins, I mean about death.”
His eyes gleamed ominously. Wow, way to darken the mood. Toki stabbed her spoon in what was left of her parfait and pushed away the glass of fruit and ice cream.
“Not yet. I’m easing them into it.”
“Easing them into it,” Meteor repeated mildly.
Toki scowled at him, “They’re fifteen! They don’t have missions yet and they’re not going to be rushed in fights where adults will be asking them to hold the line,” if Toki had anything to do or say about it, at least. “They have time. And they have all been attacked by villains already, so they’re aware that their chosen profession isn’t safe. With all the toxic bullshit about self-sacrifice that some of them are sprouting, I think my pep-talk is going to be about how they should keep themselves safe rather than how they should go Plus Ultra until they break every bone in their bodies.”
Meteor blinked at her, and Toki realized it was in surprise. It wasn’t what he had expected her to say.
“That wasn’t what I meant,” her father said, cautiously. “And I find it a little alarming that you immediately thought about telling them about their own mortality. Firstly, because they should already be aware of it, and secondly because there’s something very wrong with those children if you feel like you have to warn them away from suicidal pursuits.”
“Not all of them,” Toki muttered. “Only one nutcase. Maybe two.”
Midoriya, of course, but also maybe Tenya Iida. He hadn’t gone to chase Stain in this world, but that was only because of heavy interference from Toki. When he got an idea, Iida chased it with bullheaded stubbornness. Small details like laws, dangers, and his own mortality, all vanished from his mind.
Then Toki blinked, realizing something.
“Wait. What did you mean, then? About death?”
Meteor raised an eyebrow, and Toki understood what he meant just before he opened his mouth to answer. Of course. This was Meteor. When he talked about death… it wasn’t about his own.
“I meant about what they’ll do in a fight to the death, obviously. If they’ll roll over and die or do what they need to.”
They’re fifteen, they’re not going to be fighting to the death, Toki wanted to retort. But it wasn’t quite right. There would be fights to the death in their near future. Midoriya would have to face Shigaraki, if one day the heir of All For One found out who was the holder of One For All. And Shouto would have to face Dabi if Toki didn’t manage to solve that issue herself.
There were going to be villains that the kids wouldn’t be able to stop unless they went all out, unless they went for the kill. And that… that was a much more difficult talk to have with them.
Everybody knew that heroes sometimes died. It was tragic and sad, but it was also heroic. It was noble, to sacrifice yourself in defense of others. It was, some believed, the ultimate act of selfless love. There were problems with that mentality, of course. Problems that Toki was going to address. But, still, that logic… It was known. It was something the children understood, something that they had grown up with. Heroes lived dangerous lives, and sometimes, they died. It came with the job.
Nobody liked to talk about the fact that heroes could kill, too.
Toki pressed her lips together and tried not to think about Beros. They way her green eyes had widened, in that split-second where she had felt her death coming. Nobody talked about the fact that heroes killed, too, because…
“Heroes are not supposed to kill.”
“The ‘not supposed to’ gives some very nice wriggle room, Munchkins.”
She could hear the amusement in his voice. Toki pushed her dessert further away from her, suddenly irrationally angry.
“They still have to follow the rules.”
“They do,” Meteor agreed easily. “And sometimes they don’t. Accidentally or voluntarily, heroes kill. Violence is the path they were made to walk upon. What good would it do, to shy away from it?”
The trick to having a civil conversation with her father, she thought, was to assume he had only a passing relationship with the reality everyone else lived in. The reality Meteor lived in meant using swords was general knowledge, and people were offended if someone suggested they weren’t a natural born murderer. She knew this. She knew he was like that. It wasn’t the first time they butted heads about it.
Sometimes conversations flowed easily and seamlessly, they laughed and joked, and it was great to build a closer relationship with her dad… But sometimes they bickered, and it escalated, and they argued for real. They both were so similar, so close, it was so easy to hit a nerve and or touch a sore spot. It was so easy to irritate or even hurt each other, because they were both way inside each other’s defenses.
“Don’t sound so pleased,” she grit out.
Meteor raised his eyebrows: “Oh, I’m not. I always thought that killing someone should be personal.”
Toki abruptly looked away. She knew it was a mistake as soon as she had done it, but she hadn’t been able to keep her face still. Because she knew what he meant. She knew it, intimately, because she had killed Beros for this exact reason.
Because it had been personal.
It hadn’t been heroic, it hadn’t been noble, it hadn’t been about the greater good or anything she could rationalize. It had been a flash of white-hot rage, blindingly corrosive. It had been about her hatred, about her terror, about her. She probably wouldn’t have lost her shit if the victim had been anyone but Neito, who was one of her fledglings.
And even now, Toki didn’t feel the overwhelming guilt and shame she should feel. She had cried afterward, yes, but it had been out of shocked horror rather than grief. She felt ashamed, but ashamed of betraying her principles, not of having taken a life; and ashamed of not feeling shame, somehow. Toki felt numb, she felt angry, she felt afraid, betrayed, and lost. She wanted someone to tell her she had been right. She wanted someone to tell her she had been wrong, so she could make things right.
She didn’t know what she felt. She wanted to grieve but couldn’t, and somehow it was almost frightening. Where had her compassion gone? She had been wrong to kill Beros. Murder was wrong. Why were her feelings not in adequation with her convictions, her principes, the core of her identity? What was wrong with her?
“Munchkins,” Meteor said, very low.
Toki scowled at the tabletop. She looked up to glare at him, and then immediately regretted it. He was staring at her with that expression that made it seems as if he could see straight through her soul. Maybe it was the glowing eyes or the slit pupils, but when Meteor’s smile vanished and he stared, he had a frightening intensity about him.
“Yes?” Toki said, as neutrally as possible.
He looked at her in silence for a few seconds, and then reached out across the table to poke her chin. Startled, Toki jerked back. Meteor shook his head with fondness, but his eyes stayed dead serious.
“You tense your jaw when you’re hiding something.”
“I do not.”
She did, she knew that. Okamoto who had first told her, when he had taught her and Keigo how to lie and bluff when playing cards. So Toki had worked on that tell, and now when she smoothed her face to impassibility, she always remembered to relax her jaw.
“You do,” her father confirmed. “Just for a second, but you do.”
“Remind me to never play poker with you,” Toki muttered, a little disturbed.
Her father grinned, and then grew serious again.
“You know that you can talk to me, Toki. Especially if that’s something you can’t talk to with… your usual entourage.”
Because if Toki confessed to murder, Meteor’s first answer wouldn’t be, “oh, no, how could you?!” but rather something along the lines of, “alright, I’ll get the shovel.” In a way, it was comforting because Toki couldn’t talk about it to anyone else. Anyone else would have a moral obligation to feel guilty, too. Or to try and rationalize it. And Toki didn’t want to feel guilty or rationalize it, she wanted to know why she had done it, how to prevent it from happening again.
She sighed and scrubbed a hand against her face.
“Maybe next time, Dad.”
“Sure, Munchkins.” Her father’s eyes were glowing like embers, and undecipherable. “Next time.”
Well, that was ominous.
oOoOoOo
Shamefully, Toki had been relieved to learn that Meteor wouldn’t participate to the raid against the yakuza. The Endeavor Agency had pressured the Nighteye Agency to be part of the operation, but they had refused. Both Inferno and Toki were the main fighters. More powerhouses would have been superfluous. Endeavor had reluctantly backed off.
So Meteor would not be part of the yakuza raid. He hadn’t been happy about it either. He wanted to help because he wanted to protect Toki, but Toki didn’t need his protection. She was a hero and a damn good one at that.
In the end, Meteor had backed off, but she knew he wasn’t happy.
They loved each other, but Toki didn’t really trust him, and Meteor didn’t really respect her. Or rather, he didn’t respect her boundaries because he didn’t respect anyone’s boundaries. He played nicely because he wanted to, not out of any sense of obligation.
One day it would come, but the road to that point was long and bumpy. And they would argue often. Toki could already see it. Whatever. It was a problem for future-Toki. Present-Toki already had her hands full. The thing with Beros, the internship coming, the yakuza… Let’s tackle one problem at the time.
The yakuza were the easiest to deal with, although it was probably because it was something that Quantum could deal with, not Toki. But even then, it wouldn’t be a walk in the park. Unlike canon where the Shie Hassaikai had been taken by surprise… In this universe, they already had their hackles up.
Sir Nighteye was cracking down hard on them to try and sniff out something that would give him a warrant. Of course, there could be raids without warrants, but then the people inside were entitled to defend themselves. It would be a legal mess. No, Nighteye needed a reason to arrest the yakuza and storm their hideout. The issue was that he hadn’t found anything for nearly ten years now, and no matter the pressure that Endeavor, Icarus or the HPSC put on him, Nighteye couldn’t make something appear out of thin air.
And there was also the matter of the timing. No one besides Toki was really worried about it, but she had all the reasons in the world to be anxious about it.
Her memories of the canon-timeline weren’t the best, she could now admit it. But she knew that at some point, right before the work studies, or at their immediate beginning, two things happened. First off, the yakuza made a Quirk-suppressing drug; and secondly, the yakuza allied with the League of Villains.
Both things, of course, were pretty bad. But Toki could handle the drugs. They would only have small doses, and if they ever dared to use them or even to promote the concept, then it would leave a bright neon sign of, “WE HAD A HAND IN YOUR DEFEAT,” for All For One to rage at. Besides, maybe there wouldn’t even be drugs. Toki didn’t know for sure if the yakuza still had Eri.
No, her problem was the contact with the League of Villains.
The yakuza were a dying breed. Their hierarchical structures didn’t work well with the reality of a world where people were born with powers similar to assault weapons. But they had organization, structure, a solid foundation, and a moral code that kept them loyal. People were stronger together. That was true of heroes, but it was also true for villains, too.
Organized villains were rare. Past a certain number, usually less than a dozen, the villains couldn’t quite keep control. Small units were more tight-knit, like Meteor’s Crew, but they didn’t have the resources to root themselves deep into a territory.
The yakuza of the old had that structure, that stability. In a way, in the pre-Quirk area, it was that structure that had helped keep violence out of the streets of Japan. Their hierarchical structure required potentially out-of-control youngsters to adhere to a strict code of behavioral conduct or suffer the consequences. Consequences that the yakuza higher-ups had the means to enforce, having control over guns, drugs, or simply thugs armed with bats. As counter-intuitive as it was, the threat of yakuza had been a very effective way to insulate the Japanese civilians against random acts of violence.
But that fragile equilibrium had been broken when Quirks had appeared.
The yakuza had lost their monopoly on the threat of violence very fast, in that world where random people just got powers equivalent to assault weapons. The level of danger had thus been greatly reduced.
But they still had connections, deals, and discipline. A sense of unity, people who could cover for each other, people who didn’t snitch. It was as dangerous as a Psychokinetic Quirk. Human being had never needed superpowers to hurt each other. So the yakuza had kept afloat, as much as they could… and, as their strength declined, their sense of loyalty only grew, with an energy born of despair. This unity was the only edge they had left in this world.
The League of Villains was strong but disorganized. If they merged with an organized movement, be it the Meta Liberation Army or the yakuza… it would get messy. It would certainly be much harder to stop them.
Better to prevent it in the first place.
That was why Toki anxiously tried to remember the canon timeline. At some point Twice was supposed to facilitate a meeting between the Shie Hassaikai and the League. But so many things had changed now. The Shie Hassaikai were more pressured, the League didn’t have the same reputation… Would that meeting, and the subsequent alliance, still happen?
Fuck, Toki hoped it didn’t. Facing the yakuza was its own challenge. She really didn’t need to add a bunch of unhinged S-rank threats to that.
Anyway. Yakuza or not, Toki also had other priorities. Namely, her students.
The paperwork for the work studies went through. Icarus already had Melissa, but they would also have Hitoshi and Neito. A handful of students had sent their CV and letters to agencies approved by the principal, but so far no one had heard back from anyone.
Midoriya wouldn’t have his license before the made-up session, so not before November. This was kind of a relief for Toki because it would bench the main protagonist of the canon story until the next arc, and hopefully alleviate some pressure. Still, he was already anticipating his future work-study. He had called Gran Torino, who had told him that he couldn’t take him on again. At that point Midoriya had approached All Might to ask about Sir Nighteye, and All Might had said no with a vehemence that had apparently taken aback Midoriya.
Instead, Yagi told him to ask Toki for contacts, which Midoriya did.
Toki approved of Yagi’s decision, of course. Nighteye’s toxic brand of bullshit should stay far away from Midoriya. But she couldn’t help but wish that he gave his poor student some context. Midoriya had no idea why All Might was so dead-set against Nighteye and was probably imagining that All Might was ashamed of his choice of successor or something. Would it be so hard to say, ‘Nighteye is a dick with control issues who’s throwing a hissy fit because he wanted to pick my successor himself, and he’s petty enough that he’ll try to bully you into giving up the Quirk I entrusted to you?’
…. I mean, it did paint Nighteye like a complete jerk, of course. Maybe All Might didn’t want to completely sink Midoriya’s opinion of his former sidekick.
“Why don’t you just involve Nedzu?” Toki wondered.
Yagi gave her a wide-eyed look: “To teach Young Midoriya?”
“Sure. You trust him, don’t you?”
“… It’s more complicated than that. I do respect him and appreciate him, but his way of thinking doesn’t always align with mine. Do you trust him?”
“Oh, no. I think he’s a sociopathic badger and I’m way to close to the HPSC for him to treat me with anything but polite wariness at best, and so it goes both ways.”
Yagi sighed. “Yes. This is why I don’t involve Nedzu.”
Toki raised both eyebrows:
“Can you elaborate on that?”
“Fine. There are many reasons, not the least of which being that Nezu had a questionable understanding of morality and ethics at best. Or that ‘involving Nezu’ is a one-way trip, meaning once he is involved in something, getting him to drop it is utterly impossible. I would like Young Midoriya to become his own person, not a cackling maniac and a chess-master.”
Toki paused to consider, then nodded. That seemed like a solid argument.
“Fine. I’ll give recommendations to your student. We wouldn’t want him to become a cackling manic after all.”
And so she did.
With some difficulty, Toki put together then gave a list of recommendations to Midoriya. It included Lady Siam and Mirko, because duh, she had cited them as examples he could draw inspiration from for his shoot-style, she had to include them. However, she warned Midoriya that Mirko typically didn’t take students and Lady Siam was a very new hero, so it was doubtful that Nedzu would grant his approval for a work-study under her. Toki had recommended that Midoriya try the Endeavor Agency (what? In canon, Endeavor had been the best mentor Midoriya had had!), Basalt, or Majestic.
Toki knew that Yagi may have hoped that she would take Midoriya under her wing herself… But she couldn’t do that.
First, because if AFO thought she was the Ninth holder, then the real Ninth holder needed to be as far away from her as possible. And second… Toki herself was going to have her hands full, with her students and the oncoming Shie Hassaikai case. She couldn’t take charge of Midoriya in addition to her other students.
Anyway.
The paperwork came through, Hitoshi and Neito’s work-studies were approved… That’s how Toki ended up in her office, with all of her fledglings, very ceremoniously handling a contract to sign to each one of them. Their first contract of employment! She was almost moved.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Hitoshi grinned at Melissa.
“Why did you get to start before us?” Neito complained.
“Early bird gets the worm!” their senpai laughed.
Toki grinned. There was something deeply satisfying into seeing all three of her favorite students, here in Icarus, wearing their hero costumes and preparing to go on patrol.
Melissa had started her work-study the week before. As for Neito and Hitoshi, they were just beginning. Toki knew that a few other students in class 1-B and class 1-A had sent out their CV to various hero agencies, like Midoriya, but no one had heard back from them yet. Hitoshi and Neito were going to be the first students of their age group to have this experience.
“Settle down, settle down!” Kameko chirped cheerfully, “Quantum, do you have another hatchling to throw at us, or is that everyone?”
“Fledgling,” the three teenagers corrected automatically. Keigo masked a snigger behind a fake cough.
“That’s everyone,” Toki replied with great dignity. Then she paused. “For now.”
She hadn’t agreed to take Midoriya under her wing, but the protagonist had a tendency to sweep people into the wake of his adventures, so Toki didn’t dismiss the possibility entirely. She wouldn’t like it, but she could still mentally prepare for it.
They were all in Quantum and Hawks’ office, on the top floor. Kameko was here, to make them all sign contracts, and Hayasa-sensei too. The office was starting to be packed.
“Well,” Hayasa-sensei cleared his throat. “Let’s get to it.”
He taped on his tablet, and the holographic display of everyone’s schedules appeared above the desk. The holograms were completely overkill, but Hayasa-sensei loved them. Toki suspected that it was because it made his spreadsheets look cooler.
Everything was color-coded. It was a riot of colors, notes, and blinking text. Toki’s patrol time was in bright orange, taking most of her schedule; in yellow, she had her teaching hours. Hawks’ patrol time was in red. They both reserved a few hours for paperwork, interview, and other engagements, but most of their time was spent metaphorically pounding pavement. Patrol-time was, after all, a very broad term. It means looking out for the neighborhood, travelling all across the prefecture, but also doing missions.
Not all heroes did the same. Best Jeanist spent a lot of time doing his side-gig of fashion design, and Gang Orca did a lot of charity work. Toki was aware that the way Hawks and her ran their agency was kind of intense, and she was also aware that it meant that a lot of important stuff was delegated to Kameko and Hayasa-sensei. She was also very aware that the HPSC let it happen because Kameko and Hayasa-sensei were their agents and thus understood what was expected of them.
If Toki had named Sunspear and Ocelot at those posts instead, she was pretty sure that the HPSC would have been more difficult.
But their system worked. The HPSC directed missions and contracts towards them without needing to be asked, and the only cost was that Toki had to live with the knowledge that the two people who administrated her agency weren’t only loyal to her.
It was a small price to pay. She trusted Kameko and Hayasa. But it wasn’t the kind of logistic that other hero could imitate. Thus, it wouldn’t be the only model of organization Toki showed to her students.
“Alright!” she clapped her hands. “Let’s start with you, Polaris. You kind of know the drill already.”
Melissa grinned. “I sure do!”
Toki remembered with fondness that one occasion where Melissa had tossed her shield into the teeth of a would-be mugger during her internship. Ah, fun times.
“Polaris, we have you on Sunday and Monday,” Hayasa-sensei explained. “Cheshire and Phantom, we have you on Friday and Saturday, meaning you won’t cross paths.”
Toki raised a finger, grinning, “But nothing forbids you from swinging by on another day to do paperwork or use the gym. It will be like old times.”
Melissa, Hitoshi, and Neito all made a face, probably remembering all those fun training sessions where Toki used to run them ragged.
“Anyway,” Hayasa-sensei continued. “Polaris, first. We’ll work with a three-week system. First week you’ll shadow sidekicks. Either Ocelot, Sunspear, or Thunder Thief, depending on who’s staying in Fukuoka that day. Sunday is patrol. Monday is paperwork in the morning and patrol in the afternoon. Second week, you’ll follow Quantum.”
Toki waved and explained: “Sunday is training and patrol outside the city. Monday is undetermined. I always have patrol at some point, but I also have interviews, events, meetings, and so on. If at some point I can’t take you with me, you’ll shadow Ocelot. For the third week… I’m sharing you with Hayasa-sensei, meaning that the schedule will be flexible. We’ll try to stick to classic patrol, but you’ll also learn how our underground operations work.”
“That means investigations, recon, and stealth,” Hayasa-sensei said drily. He pointedly looked at Melissa’s bright pink costume. “I would advise to bring civilians clothes.”
Melissa nodded, looking a little dazed. Toki patted her shoulder. It was going to be intense, but in a few months, Melissa would be able to keep pace with experienced sidekicks. She would be able to ditch the training with Hayasa-sensei, at least. Then Toki will give her more patrol with Ocelot, maybe some PR-training with Kameko… and by the time Melissa would graduate, she would be up to Icarus standards to start as a sidekick.
Toki had everything planned out. Melissa would take a few of Ocelot’s duties, and work in pairs mostly with Psyren and Sunspear, who could cover her weak points without stifling her growth. By the time Melissa reached twenty, she would be as strong as a solo hero.
And then, if she wanted, she would leave Icarus and become the first Quirkless hero. Not a sidekick, sharing the fame of their boss, but her own person, maybe with her own agency.
What a way to go.
“My turn!” Keigo exclaimed.
He taped his own schedule on the hologram. There was red everywhere. Hawks spent so much time on patrol that it made their publicist weep when they had to try and find a free spot for an interview.
“I get Cheshire. Well, I got shared custody at least. You’ll be at Icarus on Friday and Saturday. Friday morning, you’re stuck here, with Kameko, learning how to con people.”
“That’s called cultivating business relationships,” Kameko corrected haughtily. Keigo ignored her.
“You’ll meet me and Quantum for lunch every day. Friday afternoon, you’re on patrol with me. Try to keep up. Then on Saturday, you have training with whoever is available. Quantum, Mercury, Psyren, me… And in the afternoon, you’ll patrol either with me or Mercury. Got it?”
Hitoshi darted a glance to Toki, then nodded. Toki felt a little sad to not be his direct referent, but she had always known it would happen like this. Hitoshi was great, his Quirk was powerful, and his agility was amazing… but in the end, he was always going to be a very different type of hero than Quantum.
Quantum, for all her charm and misdirection and chirurgical strikes, was a powerhouse. She had proven it with All For One. She was the kind of hero who stood in the light, proclaimed her abilities, and charged head-on to force the enemy to keep their eyes on her.
For Hitoshi, doing that would be death sentence.
So Hitoshi, or rather Cheshire, was going to have to learn how to work otherwise. How to talk in circles to keep your interlocutor from finding the truth without ever flat-out lying. How to notice details and later capitalize on it. How to blend in, misdirect, and to stay three steps ahead of the enemy.
(Hawks was bright, flashy, and dazzling, but deep down, his razor-sharp focus, his iron-cold ruthlessness, and his sensitive feathers all made him the perfect spy. It was a mistake to think that Mercury was the only underground hero of their agency.)
“And finally…”
“The best for last?” Neito joked.
“Smartass.” Toki elbowed him. “Phantom, you’ll be with me all Friday, every week. It’s going to be patrol nearly non-stop. If I have a mission of certain level, though, I may leave you with some sidekicks. As for Saturday, you’ll have training in the morning, and the afternoons will be more flexible. Sometimes it will be paperwork, sometimes you’ll shadow the sidekicks, and sometimes you’ll learn the ropes of underground work with Mercury or Hawks. You got all that?”
The three of them nodded.
“Great! Let’s get a move on!”
It was unfortunate that the work-studies would be occurring right as Toki was going to join the Shie Hassaikai case. It meant that her interns could be involved. She could choose to order them to stand back, of course, but it would been seen as a tacit dismissal of their abilities… and besides, Toki couldn’t afford to bench a fighter just for the sake of sentimentality.
Melissa, Hitoshi, and Neito were her friends and her students, sure: but they were also her allies and subordinates. Toki couldn’t be Toki about this. She had to be a hero, she had to be Quantum.
She had to prioritize, and she had to prepare the kids for what was to come.
Notes:
Toki is going to talk about Beros to Meteor soon... Mwahahaha. I'm impatient for that conversation.
Fic rec of the day : "a white lie" by LadyMerlin.
The Plot: Inko pays the doctor to lie and say her son has a Quirk. After all, he only needs to cultivate his skill for analysis, and he'll pass for Quirked. Right?It's not a very long fic, so it doesn't have the time to become depressing, even though the plot isn't the happiest one xD But i enjoyed Inko's reasoning, and how Izuku persuaded himself that yeah, he had a Quirk all along.
Chapter 69: Blood-stained past
Summary:
Toki talks to Meteor.
Notes:
I was planning on posting a chapter of "house of wisdom" this week but then i re-read it and.... damn, there's a few reveals i need to make in the main story before x)
So here ! Enjoy !
Also, this chapter title is metal as fuck.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
BLOOD-STAINED PAST
Toki still spent a lot of time in Yūei to teach the kids. Her fledglings were her priority, but she wanted all of her students to be well-prepared to face the future. Especially if said future involved another fight with the League. To her regret, she ended up giving a few classes to Aizawa to supervise, because she had to go back to Kyūshū patrol more. After all, she needed to put some effort into it if she wanted to be the next Number Two hero! But she did her best to only leave Aizawa the lessons that he couldn’t possibly mess up.
For example, sparring with the upper-classmen who had done work-studies, like Melissa, Hadō, or Togata. Or doing Capture-The-Flag games (like what had happened at the license exam) under the supervision of Present Mic and Ectoplasm.
All Might was an unexpected ally in this. He wasn’t an experienced teacher, but he studied ‘Teaching For Dummies’ religiously, progressed by leaps and bounds. Alright, his estimation of what actually constituted a dangerous lesson was still a little screwed, but… there was progress. It meant that Toki could let him supervise Aizawa without worrying too much.
Also, it was nice to chat with All Might from time to time, without having to worry about hiding their friendship.
Toki hadn’t ferreted out the spy yet, but with AFO defanged and the fact that AFO mistakenly believed that Toki was the ninth holder of his brother’s Quirk, there wasn’t really any point in hiding their friendship anymore.
Besides, Yagi needed the company.
Since losing the last of his power and retiring, he seemed more… lonely. He still had his hobbies, and Melissa, and Tsukauchi, of course. He hadn’t lost everything, not like in canon. But he was still downcast and melancholic. Isolated, too. Now people tended to tip-toe around him, as if afraid of hurting him by inadvertence. And not just physically, by steering him away from the training ground when students were rampaging wildly; but also emotionally, by tactfully avoiding talking about his past exploits or about the missions he couldn’t take anymore.
It was stupid. If everyone avoided talking about heroism around All Might, they wouldn’t get far. They were heroic teachers in a heroic school, what were they supposed to talk about? The weather?
So they usually took their lunch together. Sometimes they went on the roof, sometimes in various quiet spots Toki half-remembered from her teenage years here.
It spared her the ordeal of eating with her colleagues. They were nice and all, but Mic’s forced cheerfulness and Midnight’s barbs were annoying to deal with. At least with Yagi, Toki knew where she stood.
“And the foul fiend jumped at me!” Yagi was saying, waving a hand. “So, then I thought, why not just smash him into the ground? I was in Detroit at the time, so I shouted Detroit Smash—!”
“Stop it.” Toki groaned. “This is like the Missouri story, isn’t it? I don’t have time to listen to you name every state.”
“You’d be lucky to hear me name every state.” Yagi scoffed. “There’s an entire documentary series on this information and here I am, offering you quality content for free…”
“Fine, fine!”
The Detroit story was indeed just like the Missouri story. Toki wasn’t even surprised. But hey, the key-difference was that at the end of the Detroit story, the villain was liberated because of his slimy lawyer and his rich dad, thus allowing for a follow-up story in Indiana where Yagi had introduced the Indiana Smash (yes, very surprising) and punted the bad guy straight through a building.
The guy who owned the building had harassed Yagi for three months afterward, though. Yagi didn’t swear, but Toki cheerfully did it for him and said that the building owner was an ungrateful asshole. That made Yagi snigger in approval.
For a little while, they ate in companionable silence.
Toki’s mind was wandering. Her students, the work-studies, the dangers they would face. The League with Shigaraki, Toga, Spinner, and Dabi; the Todoroki drama, and the ticking time bomb they were all sitting on; Endeavor and Meteor.
Meteor, now a hero.
Meteor was a hero. It had been over a month now and yet Toki still thought it was a little mind-blowing. She knew her father. He wasn’t… He didn’t… Let’s just say that when you pictured abnegation and a noble calling towards helping others, his name wouldn’t be the first one to jump at you.
And yet, Meteor was a hero. She tried to think of him the last time she had seen him, for lunch in Shizuoka, and mentally made comparisons to her memories of him as a villain.
Oh, he was different. It was indubitable. He was less wild, less predatorial, less… unhinged. Age, or maybe Endeavor’s influence, had tempered his complete unwillingness to cater to what he deemed to be trivial social norms without any worthy cultural significance (or, in other words, other’s people boundaries). But the infinite air of superiority remained the same, as well as the toothy grins just on the edge of too threatening. He still had the same dry sense of humor, and the same inflexible ruthlessness.
Thinking of Meteor also made her think of their last conversation, and the scrutiny in her father’s eyes when he had seen her discomfort with the mention of murder. She couldn’t shake the idea that he knew, and it made her stomach drop out.
If she had to talk about Beros to someone, Meteor was the safest bet. No sense of duty compelled him to condemn her or to tell the truth to someone else, unlike… basically anyone. Even Keigo, who loved Toki and would keep her secrets to the grave, was a hero: he would judge. He would rationalize it, excuse it, but he would still judge.
Toki felt like she had to be judged. But she didn’t want to. She wanted… to be heard. She wanted to be reassured. She wanted…
She wanted to be absolved. Forgiven.
And maybe Meteor wasn’t the right person to forgive her, but he was the only one who could be told, and thus the only one who could absolve her.
Shit. She had to talk to him now, didn’t she?
“Speaking about assholes,” she suddenly said to Yagi, “Do you remember my dad?”
“Do I remember the homicidal maniac with glowing eyes, who hates my guts and is tethering on the edge of villainy every time I’m entering his field of vision?” Yagi deadpanned. “No, I’m sorry, that doesn’t ring any bell.”
“Ha-ha, very funny. No, I was thinking… When you interviewed him for the HPSC.”
“Oh, that.” Yagi winced a little. “Yes, I definitely remember.”
“After the interview, you told me it went badly, but still good enough for you to give the all clear,” Toki remembered. “But if I hadn’t asked you to give him a chance, would you have said no?”
Yagi blinked. “Why do you ask?”
Toki shrugged. She wasn’t really sure.
It wasn’t that she thought that Meteor shouldn’t be a hero. She was happy he was a hero. He was efficient, he liked it, and it was good for him. But if the man he was could be a hero, then the man he had been also could have been one. Even as cruel and unhinged as he had been, he could have still been good, done good. It just hadn’t been worth the effort. It was… a bittersweet consideration.
“I’m just curious. I mean, you don’t hate him anymore, do you?”
“Er, no. I didn’t ever really hate him. But even if I did…” Yagi shrugged. “I just don’t have the energy to do so anymore. There are— there are a lot of horrible things in the world, and Meteor isn’t really high up on the list.”
Toki imagined her father’s reaction to hearing that, and she had to bite back a smirk. She could picture the offense on his face, the drawl of his voice, the snotty retort. He would be so offended that his mortal enemy didn’t hate him.
I am high up on every list, All Might, Meteor would say haughtily, his voice dripping with sarcasm. But thanks, thank you for the ringing endorsement. I am not on the list of the most horrible things in the world. Brilliant. I’ll be having that in my eulogy.
So dramatic.
“So?” Toki insisted. “That interview, how bad it was?”
Yagi thought about it. In the end, he grimaced, and admitted: “He was hostile, barely keeping a lid on his temper. If I hadn’t been prepared, I think I would have vetoed him.”
Toki swallowed. Somehow, she had managed to avoid thinking too much about that interview, and how Meteor must have acted. She had assumed that he had put on the charm, smirked, and made clever remarks, being his annoying self without ever being outright menacing. But apparently, she had underestimated his hatred of All Might.
Damn it, Dad. It had just been an informal hearing. He just had to paste on a fake smile and pretend to play nice for half an hour, tops. Instead he had just… growled like a rabid wolf the whole time? Knowing him, it wasn’t outside of the realm of possibilities.
“… I see.”
Yagi must have read her dejection in her voice. He patted her shoulder comfortingly.
“Sure, it went poorly,” he smiled. “But I was prepared. Not just by the fact that you asked me to give him a chance, but because I knew the context.”
The context? Toki blinked, a little thrown. What context exactly? The fact that Meteor hated him? Because that didn’t sound like something that could weigh the scales in favor of the criminal radiating homicidal intent.
“It…helped?”
“Of course. I knew I had destroyed his life, and that he held me responsible for the death of his wife and unborn child, and the disappearance of his daughter. I knew how deeply he hated me. And knowing this… He could have done so much worse. If I had been interviewed by All For One, asked asinine questions while pretending he hadn’t murdered everyone I loved, knowing he held my fate in his hands… I don’t think I would have been able to handle this as well as your father did. He never once turned violent or even overtly aggressive. He even kept his mind on the interview and answered every single question correctly.”
Okay, well, when you put it like that, of course it sounded good. Still, Toki made a face, unconvinced.
“You thought he should get a passing grade because he didn’t lose his shit?”
“There was more than that,” Yagi said pensively. “At one point I asked for his personal reasons to pursue a career in heroics, and I could see him bristling. But when Endeavor told him to keep his cool… He reined himself in immediately. If he followed the lead of a hero as good as Endeavor, if he was willing to obey him unquestioningly, then maybe it didn’t matter that he had a temper. I don’t have to trust his moral compass if I can trust Endeavor’s.”
Toki stabbed her chopsticks in her bento, glowering. It was a good thing that nobody had clocked onto the romance between her father and his boss (ewww), but it was faintly mortifying to think that everyone imagined that Meteor was some dog that Endeavor could call to heel.
Although, if Meteor had been here to be asked about it, she was sure that the comparison would only make him smirk. Maybe he would even laugh and said it wasn’t completely inaccurate. He was strangely shameless about his loyalty. He brandished it like a banner, as if daring anyone to find flaw in it. He had never been any good at lying about what he loved, anyway. She remembered it well. The delight in his face and the fire in his eyes when he spoke of wild chases and violent battles, the way his grin turned carnivorous when the Crew talked about dead enemies, the shiver of Psychokinesis in the air when he prepared for carnage. Meteor had never hidden who he was, what he wanted.
He had always been so ferociously loyal.
It wasn’t blind loyalty. Meteor knew how fucked-up the people he followed could be. He knew exactly what it meant. He knew what he was doing, was she was risking. With the Crew before, with Endeavor now… He knew exactly how far it could fall and how hot it could burn.
He just didn’t care.
That wasn’t blind loyalty, or blind love. But it was love. A clear-eyed unyielding inescapable kind of love. It was destructive. It could be horribly toxic, especially considering the people involved. But Meteor just didn’t care. No matter what, once he cared about you... he never let you go. That could be comforting as much as it could be terrifying, especially when it concerned someone as inherently powerful as Meteor.
It was… a little reassuring to know that the people Meteor cared about, now, at least were on the good side of the law. They would restrain him instead of encouraging his worst instincts. The exact strength that had pushed Meteor to murder was now pushing him toward heroism.
Ironic.
He hadn’t changed that much, Toki mused. Meteor had always been like a wild animal, something predatorial and bloodthirsty, but somehow Endeavor had managed to establish himself at the head of Meteor’s pack. The wolf had become a bloodhound. Just as dangerous, but somehow domesticated.
What a strange thing to realize.
“Yeah,” Toki grumbled. “I can imagine that Endeavor’s influence must be reassuring.”
Yagi glanced at her and hesitated. “There was one last thing.” He paused. “At one point, he let slip something about how… he had nothing left of his past life, and how everything he now cared about was protected by heroes now. I don’t remember exactly how he said it. I wondered if he was talking about you.”
Toki glowered at her bento harder. No, Meteor hadn’t been talking about her. She knew who he had been talking about.
“It doesn’t matter,” she muttered. “We made peace. He’s bound to at least be civil with you, now.”
“Er, I have the impression that he’s the kind to hold a grudge.”
He forgave me, Toki thought but didn’t say. Instead, she narrowed her eyes, and punched Yagi’s shoulder playfully.
“Let me rephrase it. He’s bound to be civil with you, or else.”
Yagi threw his head back and laughed.
oOoOoOo
Toki had lunch with her father two days later.
As usual, she let him pick the place. But this time he chose a restaurant more to Toki’s usual taste. It was a nice corner-of-the-street place that did fried food to eat on the go. They didn’t even have to change out of their hero costumes. Meteor picked up their orders, still dressed as a hero, and when to join Toki on the roof of a nearby building. The way it was sloped protected them against the wind. The weather was warm today, but Toki had a feeling that it wasn’t the only reason why Meteor had picked such a good spot for their lunch.
They had a little of everything and Toki happily munched on a lot of karaage because, like Keigo, she loved fried chicken. For dessert, they had crepes filled with crazy toppings. Meteor had green matcha ice cream, like the snob he was, while Toki had chosen the most extravagant one and had a gigantic topping of strawberries, salted caramel, nuts, and whipped cream.
As they ate through the food, at first they chatted about all and nothing. Weirdly enough Meteor was bemoaning the fact that nobody wanted him to have an intern, which Toki personally thought was a very sane and logical decision. But Meteor would absolutely love to teach some gremlin how to be a force of chaos.
Somehow he had started analyzing Uraraka’s Quirk, which was both very alarming and a little endearing. Of course he would get his eyes on the one students who could make a Meteor Shower. So Toki explained to him what Uraraka’s Quirk was, and then they spent nearly fifteen minutes bickering about the mechanics of it.
Obviously Uraraka didn’t remove the gravity from people. If she actually did that, the Earth’s rotation would rip her target out into space immediately. She probably just reduced the Earth’s pull.
Personally Toki thought that Uraraka cancelled active forces and drained kinetic energy until they were zero relative to the caster (her). As a result, the target just floated around Uraraka. But when Uraraka cancelled her Quirk, the external forces came back in play… Which meant that when her Quirk was active, all of that energy was just dumped somewhere in some form. In her stomach maybe? That could explain the nausea.
Wait, what kind of black hole did Uraraka have in her stomach to consume all that energy?
Anyway. Meteor was not going to have an intern. He was disappointed. Toki was relieved. And once they had bickered enough and finished their meal… Meteor leaned against the wall, stretching his legs in front of him, and raised an eyebrow in Toki’s direction.
“So, Munchkin. There’s something you wanted to talk to me about?”
Toki scowled. She was sitting against the wall, too, but with her legs pulled close to her body to rest her arms on her knees. She scuffed the heel of her boot against the ground.
“You can’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t,” he said evenly. “Let me help.”
And, so, haltingly, Toki told him everything. The summer camp, the mountains, the fire, the panic as she searched for the students. Neito’s group and their frantic tale. Beros, appearing from nowhere; Neito appearing too just in time… And the way the arrow has pieced his chest. The way Beros had looked, just so dismissive, as if he was just a pawn taken out. All the blood…
… And then the rage.
Toki told him how she had killed Beros, simply warping her while cutting her body upon reappearance. In the space between heartbeat when she warped from one point to another, she was a god, and everything she was warping with her only existed according to her desire. It could be reshaped, displaced, cut, twisted, ground to dust. It had been so simple to cut human flesh. And then Toki had just… done it.
She told Meteor about going back to the kids, realizing Neito was alive, and then continuing with the evacuation. The fights with the League, the panic, who Beros’ death had just skipped her mind until much later. How Moonfish had conveniently eaten part of the body, making him the prime suspect for her murder; Tsukauchi hadn’t even asked questions about Toki’s fight, uncaring about the truth as long as the villain wasn’t in the picture anymore. How Toki had just gotten away with it, and how it felt… so unjust, somehow.
She was angry. She was guilty, ashamed, frustrated, lost. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She had betrayed one of her fundamental rules, and not even for the greater good: only for her selfish emotions. Her anger, her rage.
“I never wanted to be a killer,” she said miserably.
Her father stayed quiet a second, and then shook his head.
“I know. But you didn’t hunt down a civilian. You put yourself between a killer and her prey. Beros came to those mountains to kill people. Your people. She had already succeeded when you caught up to her. Of course you were allowed to retaliate with lethal force.”
“But I could have disabled her in another way, without killing her. I’m strong enough.”
Meteor looked at her disbelievingly: “Because you’re strong, you think you should constantly hold yourself back and treat your enemies with kid gloves? They won’t give you the same courtesy.”
“I know! I just… I’m supposed to be better.”
Better than the killers. Better than the brutes. Better than Meteor himself, who had so much blood on his hands. Better than the best, because if Toki wasn’t the best, if she wasn’t perfect, then all that training had been wasted. All she had worked for was worthless. She was worthless.
“You’re holding yourself to an impossible standard,” Meteor told her bluntly.
There was a short, heavy silence, where they both mutely acknowledged that this impossible standard was certainly the Crew’s fault, and Meteor’s in particular. Because Toki had seen how casually they sowed death on their path, and swore to herself to never be that dismissive of human lives. And now… and now, she had done the same.
If she did the same thing that he did, then why had she sold out her family to the heroes all those years ago? If she ended up on the same path as Meteor, seeing human lives as expandable, then why had she turned away from him? Why the pain, why the regret? Had all of that been in vain?
“Maybe,” Toki muttered. “But that was my line in the sand.”
When she thought about Beros’ death, she didn’t feel horror and guilt at taking a life. She felt angry, sad, numb, and betrayed. She felt guilty and ashamed, but it was more about her failure to do the right thing than about the life she had cut short.
Toki had lost something that night. And she didn’t know how to deal with it. She didn’t know how to deal with the fact that she had done it… and that, if she had done it once, what if she did it again?
“It was so easy,” she whispered. “It should have been harder.”
“No. It was exactly as easy as it should have been.”
Toki glared at him, but her father glared right back. The effect was way more intimidating with his glowing eyes and is slit pupils.
“You have to stop sticking your head in the sand. You keep thinking of that villain as your victim, somehow.”
“I killed her!”
“You did. And you know what? You were right to kill her. Don’t think about morals, or duty, or idealism, or even the expression on that villain’s face the moment she realized she fucked up. Think of Beros at the moment that made you decide to kill her. That moment where she was a threat, where nothing else existed but your hatred. Do you remember that moment?”
Toki swallowed. The blood seeping into her costume, the weight of Neito in her arms, the way his breath had rattled wetly in his destroyed chest… And Beros’ uncaring eyes. The lack of tension in her shoulders. The casualness in her stance, like she did it every day. And her voice, calm and almost soft. One down.
And Toki’s rage, exploding in her chest like a bomb. The wrath, immense and all-consuming, roaring like an inferno and boiling in her veins, and yet making her mind crystal clear…
Toki realized she was clenching her fists and made a conscious effort to loosen them.
“I remember,” she said quietly.
“Good.” Meteor’s voice was a low growl, almost a purr, like the rumble of a giant predator. His eyes glowed. “Then remember this: the person you killed, it’s that person. That version of Beros. It’s not the misguided girl who joined a cult, or the charming young woman who could have had friends in Otheon. It’s that person, the one who was coming at you with the intent to kill.”
“Not at me, at the kids.”
“And that make it better?!”
No, of course not, Toki thought. That make it so much worse. But that was kind of Meteor’s point, so she kept her mouth shut.
Meteor snorted, a little dismissingly.
“Your problem is that you think that because you killed her, suddenly it made her innocent. As if the wrong you did to her outweigh all the wrongs she did.”
That was… that was pretty spot-on. Once again, Toki felt strangely unbalanced, almost exposed. It was always unsettling when Meteor’s observations hit the bullseye. Especially about her darkest secrets or her most personal thoughts. Like a chilling reminder that when his entire attention was focused on you, he breezed past all your defenses like lightning, as if having defenses in the first place was laughable.
“So what?” Toki said defensively.
“So it’s irrational. She was your enemy. She was coming to destroy what was yours. She was succeeding. She was a threat, she had hurt you. There’s no objectivity to look for, no right or wrong to compare. She deserved to die: not because a jury talked at length about her sins, but because she was there, and you were there, and you saw her hurt people dear to you.”
“What about the inherent value of human life?” Toki whispered.
Meteor opened his mouth, then closed it with a rueful smile. Toki realized he had been about to say that Beros’ life had been without value the instant she had threatened Neito’s life. Not because who Beros was, but because who Neito was.
Because Neito mattered, and consequently Beros hadn’t.
“You should talk to Endeavor about it.”
“What?” Toki boggled at him. “Absolutely not. Why?!”
“I had a conversation like this with him at some point,” her father answered, his voice neutral. “Several conversations, actually. He explained it better than I could.”
“If you’re trying to tell me Endeavor has a way with words, I will have to take you to the hospital to check for brain damage.”
“Urgh. No. Well, I can paraphrase him if you want, but… Heroes kill sometimes. They are judged, they can be sanctioned, and there’s always an investigation, but most of the time they walk free and continue to life their lives, because killing their enemy was considered justified. I’ll spare you the whole thesis about what is considered excessive force and whatnot. The point is… in a world with villains capable of killing huge groups of people thanks to their powers, eliminating the threat has to be a rational response sometimes, even if you wish it weren’t.”
Toki blinked, thrown. She had forgotten that Endeavor was S-ranked. He must have… he must have killed people, at some point. Villains, yes, but… people.
It wasn’t advertised. You probably had to dig very deep in Endeavor’s cases to find those black marks on his records, and Toki had never bothered to do so. Why would she when she had all the blackmail material needed with just his private life? So she hadn’t investigated. But… If she had…
Yeah, she probably would have found some skeletons in his closet.
“Oh,” she said, stupidly.
Not all heroes were All Might, who could win the right way every time. But even All Might wasn’t like that. She knew he had a dark side too. He had tried to kill AFO, when they had first fought six years ago. To be willing to kill like that in cold blood, you had to be extremely angry and pretty comfortable with lethal force.
“This isn’t exactly my area of expertise,” Meteor said with a sharp grin. “I don’t exactly ponder the ethical ramifications of those things. Violence and non-violence aren’t ideals, they’re strategies. Sometimes violence is the right answer.”
“It shouldn’t be. I don’t want it to be,” Toki said a little savagely. “I want to believe in a better world.”
“Well, though luck. You have to live in that one.”
Toki growled. Her father’s grin slowly faded.
“Aw, Munchkin, I know you want to be kind. And you are. But sometimes…” He chose his words carefully. “You have to make a split-second judgement call. Like you did. Endeavor would tell you that public safety trumps the safety of the aggressor. But all I can tell you is that, when you’re faced with a choice were both options are terrible, you have to take the outcome you can live with.”
“And the other outcome would have been sparing Beros?”
Meteor shook his head.
“No. The other outcome would have been to not love Neito enough to feel the rage you felt in that moment. The other outcome would have been to watch him die and remove your humanity from the equation. Would you have been able to do that?”
“… No.”
“Exactly. When you come face to face with horror, sometimes embracing the monster inside is the only way to save your humanity.”
Toki took a deep breath and hugged her knees closer.
“I don’t want it to happen again,” she whispered. “I did it so easily. I don’t want to become the kind of person who can kill in cold blood without feeling anything.”
“You won’t.”
“How can you know?”
“Killing without care require indifference. Coldness. You care too much. You’ll never resort to murder as a first solution. No, the danger is that you’ll hate someone enough to not care about innocent victims caught in the blast radius, like I did. But you’re too careful about it, I think. You honed your skills for precision and swift take-downs.”
Implied was the fact that if Toki had been trained by Meteor, by the Crew, they wouldn’t have had the same care.
As a child Toki had been so afraid to be changed by the Crew. To become uncaring, like them. She couldn’t picture it, because it was such an anathema to what she was: but she knew it was a possibility. That was what had frightened her so much. The certainty and yet the unknown. But now, today, looking back… Knowing about Beros, knowing about Meteor, remembering his power, remembering her rage…
She could see exactly what she would have been. She could see what she would have become with the Crew.
She wouldn’t have been a monster, though, because none of them were. She would have just become selfish. Angry. Growling like a cornered animal, refusing to trust anyone but her family, because in their world you couldn’t trust anyone. You only had what you could hold with your own two hands, what you would fight to protect because everyone was out to get you. And if people died in the crossfire, it was their fault for getting in your way.
Yes, Toki could picture it. That rage she had felt about Beros, directed to any hero who dared to punish her family for their wrongdoing. That protectiveness crystalized in a cutting edge and weaponized with hatred.
And maybe she could have come back from that life, just like Meteor had been dragged out of it by prison and then by Endeavor. But at what cost? At what cost for everyone in the blast radius, at what cost to her own soul? When you go down that path, it’s not easy to change. You lose something forever.
Had Toki lost something forever when she had killed Beros? She didn’t know. It felt like it because it had shaken her so much. Maybe that was why she was so frightened. Not because of Beros’ loss, but because of her own. That was a pretty fucking selfish outlook on it, though.
“It was still wrong to kill Beros,” Toki sighed, putting her chin on her knees. “I should feel horrible. But… I only feel bad about not feeling horrible.”
“You shouldn’t feel horrible at all!” Meteor protested vehemently. “You didn’t kill someone important. She was an enemy.”
An enemy. It wasn’t the first time he put such an emphasis on the word, and Toki abruptly wondered if that word meant the same thing to him that it did to her. For Toki, an enemy was simply an opponent. Someone she had to defeat. But in Meteor’s mouth, it sounded much more aggressive. Toki frowned.
“She was still a person.”
“An enemy,” Meteor repeated, louder. “You can grieve her, grieve the waste that it was, grieve the stupidity of the circumstance that led to the fight. But you cannot weep for her. You chose your life above her own and that was the good choice, a choice you cannot regret.”
Oh. That was what Meteor meant when he spoke of an enemy. Someone who wanted to hurt you, to kill you, to destroy you; someone you had to destroy in kind. It wasn’t about conflicting wants, like a villain wanting to rob a store and a hero wanting to stop the theft. It was a matter of need against need, life against life, and nothing mattered more than your own because you had your back to the wall, and you couldn’t regret the actions you took to survive.
It was a simpler outlook on life, you had to admit. And… not unfitting.
But it was still hella depressing.
“Killing isn’t a form of justice, though,” she said half-heartedly.
“Sometimes,” Meteor said with surprising bite, “it is the oldest and only form of justice there is.”
Toki opened her mouth to say no, and then realized she didn’t believe it. Killing Beros had not been right; it would never been right, or fair, or good, or merciful. But in that moment, it had been just.
For a little while, Toki stayed silent. Meteor sighed and opened the last bottle of soda to give her one. Toki drank a bit, but the chemical flavor of lemon and orange tasted bland on her tongue.
She felt very tired.
“Have you talked about it with Hawks?” Meteor suddenly asked. When she shook her head, he narrowed his eyes. “Is here a risk he would turn you in?”
“No. he would just… rationalize it, and I don’t want that.”
Meteor blinked down at her. “Rationalize it?”
How to explain it? Toki chewed on her lip, uncertain. She had talked about Keigo multiple times with Meteor, but in a way she knew that Meteor didn’t quite get Keigo. He still saw him as a shiny, smiling, suave hero. Not as boy with cold predator eyes and a willingness to gut himself for the greater good, not like Toki knew him.
“Keigo is utilitarian,” she finally said. “I know he would kill if he had to. But it wouldn’t be… It wouldn’t be personal. He would never kill for selfish reasons. If he did, he wouldn’t beat himself up, and wouldn’t get hung up on it. If Keigo had to kill someone… It would always be to save someone. Or to neutralize a threat against a city, or because the HPSC gave the order for the greater good. And if I told Keigo about Beros, he would frame it as something I had to do. Something righteous and heroic because that’s how he sees things. He would make excuses. But it’s not an excuse that I need. I need to look what happened in the face and make peace with it.”
Meteor made a pensive noise.
“Endeavor has a similar outlook on murder. Greater good and all that. Never really understood the appeal, but it’s good to know your boy isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty if needed.”
Toki sighed bitterly. Yeah, she knew. She remembered canon. One of the main reasons she had become a hero was to stop it from happening. To stop Keigo from making that choice, tainting himself, sullying his reputation and his soul, killing someone he liked because he had to, and then just moving past it like it didn’t matter…
“I don’t want that for him,” she said lowly. “But I know that if needed, he could be a cold-hearted killer.”
Her father laughed: “Then he’s in good company with us.”
Toki had been expecting that and shook her head.
“We’re not cold when we kill.”
Meteor laughed again, and when he smiled at her, it was almost proud. Toki felt a lurch in her stomach when she realized she was joking about having killed someone, about being like her father: the fate she had desperately sought to avoid as a child.
It was frightening. It was horrifying. It was… It was strangely reassuring. Because it was done, it had happened, and she was still here. She was still herself. She could still do good things on a grander scale to make up for her misstep.
And yet she felt so sad.
Daughter and father, existing
as wretched mirrors of each other;
I am all you could have been,
and you are all I might become.
Toki sighed and let go of her knees to stretch her legs in front of her. She wondered if that conversation had helped her. In a way, yes, she felt soothed. It was liberating to have told someone, to not keep the secret. It was reassuring, too, to not be judged. To not just have told someone but to also have told someone who unreservedly approved.
It was good to know that she could still be loved even if she had blood on her hand. That there was at least one person who wouldn’t flinch from the monster in her, even if it was only because that person was even more monstruous.
And yet…
“I wish it hadn’t happened,” she finally said.
And that was the crux of the matter. Toki didn’t regret killing Beros, only discovering that she was capable of murder. She wished she never had done it, that she had never lived that nightmare, never had to carry those memories. She wanted to go back to who she had been before. Something had been lost to her that night.
Toki could still laugh and grow and change and love and protect people, but that something would always be gone, like a chip missing from a sculpture.
“I know,” Meteor said gently. “I wish it hadn’t happened, either. But it did, and you handled it better than most people would have. I don’t care if it was the right thing, I care that you’re okay. You did the best you could do, and even if it wasn’t perfect, it’s good enough for me. You’re still a good hero. I know I can trust you to keep people safe. Does it help?”
Toki feel her eyes burn suddenly. You are still a good hero. I know I can trust you to keep people safe. She hadn’t realized she needed to hear that: how important it was, how much of her doubts were rooted into that uncertainty. She had slipped once but that didn’t mean everything was lost. She had needed to hear it. The acknowledgement that whatever happened, she was still capable of good. She was still good. And her father’s love was still there, unchanged. He didn’t care about right and wrong, only about whether or not she was okay.
She hid her face her in hands, feeling stupidly emotional.
“Yeah,” she admitted, her voice a little muffled. “It does.”
She heard Meteor made a huff of fond amusement, and then moved. He sat down next to her and threw an arm around her shoulders. She leaned in the hug without raising her head from her hands.
They stayed like that until it was time to leave.
oOoOoOo
It would take time to come in terms with Beros’ murder. Maybe months, maybe years. Maybe Toki would feel better after admitting it to Keigo, too, even if he made excuses and argued about the greater good.
But talking to Meteor helped.
Meteor wasn’t a good listener. He rarely opened up and shared his own issues. Never, actually. Some cynical part of Toki knew that Meteor didn’t always say what he thought was right, only what he thought his interlocutor needed to hear to trust him.
But it had worked, didn’t it? He had known what Toki needed to hear. And selfishly, she didn’t care if he hadn’t entirely meant it. She didn’t care if Meteor was secretly happy she had killed Beros because it brought her closer to what Sayuri had wanted her daughter to become, or any other twisted motives. He had found her deepest insecurity and had comforted her when she had no one else to turn to, and it counted. It had helped.
She felt a little lighter, to have shared her burden.
Not everything was fixed. She still had a lot of issues to address, a lot of problems to resolve. Her daily life didn’t really allow her to catch a break. But things were better, and she would take what she could get. Moving forward, one step at the time.
________________
< Antares: thinking about fury road and how there is no mythical land where everything is okay, and how the path to redemption is returning to the place you already know and making it better as you better yourself.
< Antares: also thinking about "true journey is return" and how the revolution must be constant within us rather than a single act or movement.
< Antares: the citadel is a place of horror and despair but it doesn’t have to be.
> PinkIsPunkRock: damn, that’s deep
> NotOnFire: you’re in a philosophical mood today
>PikaPika: when isn’t antares in a philosophical mood?
> NotOnFire: point taken.
> EndeavorSucks: i loved that movie. amazing.
> EndeavorSucks: gonna watch it again just because you reminded me of how cool it was.
> NotOnFire: yeah, it’s pretty cool. great scenes, and the characters are all super-vivid even if they don’t speak a lot. compared to all those soulless big budget movies made to milk as money as possible, you can feel that the writer put the work in.
> PikaPika: the characters are weirdly relatable for people in a post-apocalyptic world whose life has nothing in common with ours.
> NotOnFire: mmmh yeah there’s that too
> NotOnFire: but maybe ‘relatable’ isn’t the right word
> NotOnFire: i feel like when we say ‘relatable’ what we really mean is ‘resonant.’ well, i do at least.
> NotOnFire: i don’t want characters who i feel are like me, i want characters who have emotions so strong I can feel them through the page (or the screen).
> NotOnFire: i think this is important because a lot of us forget the power of stories to make us feel things about characters who are not like us, who have experienced things that we never will. the purpose of listening to someone else’s story should not necessarily be identification, but understanding.
> EndeavorSucks: [slow clap]
> PikaPika: well-articulated.
> PikaPika: do you mind if I steal that for later?
> NotOnFire: not at all!
> PinkIsPunkRock: what made you re-watch fury road @Antares?
< Antares: nothing special
< Antares: I had a craving for the emotional catharsis of characters deep in shit but finding companionship and hope and acceptance through adversity
< Antares: and now my craving is satisfied
> PikaPika: any fun hero stories to share?
< Antares: mmmh not today. Got lunch with my dad, ate crepes. Pretty uneventful.
< PinkIsPunkRock: bask in that feeling, eventfulness will find you eventually.
< Antares: why does that sound like a threat?!
________________
Life went on.
Toki took her fledglings patrolling. The few times she had Hitoshi, she stuck to the high ground, kept him out of the spotlight, made him observe and only act as back-up once she had cornered the eventual threats. When Hitoshi fought, it needed to be fast and if possible without the perp seeing his face.
With Melissa it was slightly different. For fighting, Toki let her have her own frontal approach. It worked, after all. For patrolling… She had Melissa with her more often. When they were together, she had Melissa run on the rooftops parallel to her own route and had her periodically go down in the streets to settle an argument, help a cat stuck down a tree, or corral people in the event of an accident. Melissa needed the visibility, after all.
With Neito, though, Toki focused on speed and maneuverability befitting a warper.
They warped all over the city, periodically meeting the sidekicks that were supposed to accompany Quantum, but otherwise making full use of the speed of Warp-Space. High jumps, long falls, warping upside-down to cancel momentum, all the while keeping an eye on the streets for any sign of trouble… It wasn’t easy. Especially the first day. Even with all his experience with Warp-Space, Neito was lagging behind.
But with time, soon enough, Neito started keeping up with her. And once he could keep up… He could assist her for fights.
Or for general weirdness, actually, which happened way more often.
Big villain fights didn’t happen every day. Most of the trouble Quantum ran into was petty arguments threatening to escalate, a prospect that could be catastrophic when the civilians involved wielded destructive Quirks. There were some accidents, bullies posturing… And all the run-of-the-mill breadmaking of a hero... fans yelling for an autograph, cats stuck on trees, grandma needing help crossing the street, car chases, and so on.
Some of those car chases and incidents were completely nonsensical. Almost cartoonish if it wasn’t for the high risk of, you know, death or injuries it enthralled every time. Why would people escalate when heroes could step in? Why did the bystanders just let it happen? Why the hell did the perpetrators start chaos in the first place? In a world with superpowers, maybe toddlers would be high on their power-trips, but you would think that rational adults would know how to keep their cool. Right?
It was, as Toki explained to Neito, never the case. The people causing trouble were only of two sorts. Either they were planners, meaning they had calculated their odds, and they only had created the situation because they could get away with it. Or they were opportunists, meaning they had just followed their impulses, no matter how illogical. And they just followed their instincts, and somehow when people followed their instincts…
Well. It usually devolved into chaos.
So weird situations were a hero’s bread and butter. Epic fights were well and good, but they didn’t happen often. What happened was petty stuff or completely illogical things. So to be an adequate hero, you only had to adapt on the fly. Move quick and think quicker. That was the lesson Toki was imparting on Neito during that first very long patrol.
You would think weirdness was rare, in a world where strange things had turned into the norm, but it wasn’t. Some situations in life were just… Just like when a cat chased a bear up a tree.
The logic shut down, and when you looked back on that moment you only felt a great perplexity.
Logically, you knew that a bear could kill the cat with one blow with no effort at all. But a bear had no concept of how cats work. To a bear, everything that was made out of meat will fight back before becoming prey, once escaping this fate is no longer an option, but nothing that could flee would choose not to, and attack the bear first. As far as a bear was concerned, there was nothing out there that would attack a bear without an absolute confidence that it could kill a bear. If something hits you first, you fucking run.
And cats had no concept of how anything works. As far as a cat is concerned, if there was something in your face that you didn’t want in your face, you just fucking smacked it. And if something starts fleeing from you, you chased it.
Cat logic, everyone.
Sometimes in life there were situations where there only seems to be one logical outcome, the common sense one that seemed to be a foregone conclusion. But it only looked like that because you had a clear and realistic view of the big picture. Then the only logical conclusion didn’t happen because nobody actually involved in the situation has a realistic understanding of what's going on.
Like when a cat chased a bear up a tree.
Or when someone with an elephant-like mutation ran with a cash-dispenser under her arm. Or when… Well. You get the picture.
So Neito got to see what happened when someone with hook for fingers got stuck into the hair of someone with tangled vines on their head and used his other hand to try and free the first one. Or what happened when a man who could control spiders tried Trigger to see if he could control larger animals and ended up summoning a horde of spiders terrorizing his entire neighborhood.
Or what happened when someone tried to identify a large puddle by throwing a match at it and seeing if it was gasoline.
(Yes. The last one was Toki’s fault. No, Neito wasn’t allowed to tell Kameko about it.)
But good things couldn’t last. Soon enough, Toki got a message from Inferno. The Shie Hassaikai case was ready to go.
It was time to prepare to face the yakuza.
“I have to drop by Inferno’s Agency,” she said to Neito at the end of patrol, while he was getting his breath back while Toki seamlessly signed autographs and the police collected the would-be robber she just thwarted. “Can you go back directly to Icarus? I’ll join you in about ten minutes.”
“Sure. Why do you need to go?”
Toki shrugged: “We’re going to collaborate on a big case. I need to pick up a file or two. I won’t be long. Besides, it’s a chance for you to go back to the agency solo, without me as a safety net.”
Neito gave a military salute. “I can do that.”
And so they went their separate ways.
Flying through the sky in a series of quick successive teleportations, Toki arrived in Osaka in a matter of minutes. Inferno had told Toki to arrive directly in his office. He had a file on the Shie Hassaikai to give her. The raid wasn’t imminent, but it was close, and since Icarus’ participation was now official, Quantum could officially be briefed on the yakuza’s strength and who she would fight.
Still, work never stopped.
In a few days Toki would probably introduce Neito to Inferno, if she judged he had the skills necessary to participate to the raid, but she didn’t want to rush things. Better to make sure Neito was prepared, better to make sure she knew what they would face to prepare contingencies plans. It was a better option of not involving Neito (or any of her students) if this mission looked too dangerous. Especially if, in this mission, there wasn’t going to be a Midoriya with plot-armor and shōnen-protagonist energy to beat the Big Bad in hand-to-hand and save everyone’s asses.
Toki needed to be sure that she could save everyone, before bringing people in.
But when she met Inferno to collect the files, he didn’t seem very anxious about this case. Sure, he told her the yakuza were dangerous, but no more than most villains they fought those days. They were all C-ranked or B-ranked. Even the most powerful fighters of the Shie Hassaikai, Inferno assured her, were only A-ranked. It would be tough and not without risk, but it would be doable.
“It’s not going to be a walk in the park, but I don’t think we’ll have any major problems,” Inferno told her. “As long as their main fighters are neutralized first, and no one deviate from the plan.”
“That’s rich coming from you, senpai.”
Inferno put a hand on his heart as if wounded:
“What? I never deviate from the plan!”
Toki reproachfully waved a finger at him.
“Hey, I remember that time with the guys who were laundering money under that bakery. You broke into their hideout, waited for them sitting on the boss’ chair while eating the pastries on their table, and when they came back, you just waved a croissant and said that you would accept their unconditional surrender. Then they attacked you and you spent the entire fight crying about how they were going to ruin your digestion.”
Inferno blinked innocently.
“Did I? That doesn’t sound like something I would do.”
Salamander, who was perusing a file next to him, smacked Inferno on the back of the head without raising his eyes from his reading.
“Ow!” Inferno scowled at him, rubbing his head. “Fine, fine, it was me, happy?”
“Ecstatic,” Salamander grunted. “Now give her the file instead of dithering.”
“You’re no fun,” Inferno whined.
Still, he managed to extract from his pile of papers a bright orange file with several dog-eared pages and presented it to Toki. She grabbed the paper, her eyes quickly scanning the list of names and the pictures next to them.
“That’s their strongest fighters.”
“Yes. Last time, I only gave you names and numbers, but this is a little more precise. We have their Quirks, their level of threat…”
“I suppose the Boss is the main strength?” Toki hazarded.
“Oh, no. The head of the Shie Hassaikai is Shinobu Azuma, the Boss. He’s old, his Quirk is a healing one. Don’t expect him in the fighters. However, his three lieutenants are all fighters. Kai Chisaki, who sometimes goes by the villain name Overhaul; Joi Irinaka, also called Mimic; and Hari Kurono, also called Chronostasis.”
Toki’s eyebrow rose. So in this universe, Overhaul hadn’t taken over the organization after putting the Boss in a coma? Interesting. Or maybe he had, but it was too recent, and the heroes didn’t know?
In any case, that was already a minor divergence from canon. Toki mentally prepared herself to adjust her plans.
Inferno turned the page to reveal a list of names this time accompanied by photos. Toki didn’t recognize the two guys on the top of the page, but she did recognize the plague mask and the trashy fur jacket that the third guy wore. That must be Overhaul.
Uh. He looked deceptively normal like this. He was even a pretty guy, with dark hair, a fine-boned face, and golden eyes framed by long eyelashes. Toki squinted at his picture, trying to see the psychopath under the placid gaze of the portrait, but all she saw was a young man barely a few years older than herself.
Weird.
“Mimic deals with money and investments,” Inferno continued, designing one of the pictures. “Chronostatis with business relationships and commercial accords. And Overhaul, the guy in the plague mask, is apparently in charge of security. Blackmail, intimidation, protection money, maintaining their supremacy on their territory, and so on. The ones you’ll have to look out for are his underlings. Of course, all the yakuza have guns and know how to use them, but Overhaul trains his people to fight with Quirks specifically to hold their own against heroes.”
“His attack dogs,” Toki summarized.
Salamander raised his head from his own file, and corrected her:
“They’re more than that. They’re bodyguards, and some of them are very respected in the organization. But yeah, they’re fully devoted to him. He calls them the Eight Bullets. Inferno, give her the list.”
“I was getting to it!”
Inferno turned a few pages and showed her the list of those Eight Bullets. Toki’s eyes briefly ran up the page, with eight pictures, each followed by a name, and a brief description of the person’s Quirk and criminal history. Almost all of those echoed her memories from canon. Some of those people even wore plague masks! A guy who could make you tell the truth, a guy who made you feel drunk and unbalanced, another who could eat anything, someone who could suck your energy with a touch (just like Meteor had mentioned, not so long ago!)…
But then Toki’s eyes fell on the last two names, and she almost choked.
Okay, those two had not been part of the Eight Bullets in canon. And if she was reading their Quirk descriptions right… They weren’t supposed to be there right now at all. They were supposed to appear later!
What the fuck had happened?!
“What about the last two?” she said in what she hoped was an innocent tone. “They seem familiar.”
“Ah.” Inferno winced. “I’m surprised you know of them. But yeah, they both had their little scandal.”
He pointed to the first picture, a middle-aged man with white hair and distinguished garb that made him look like an English Victorian gentleman.
“This is Danjuro Tobita. The Eight Bullets’ latest recruit. Tried to be a hero, failed the exam a few times, clumsily tried to be a vigilante and caused several incidents. Became a small-time villain fancying himself a Robin Hood of sorts, stealing from luxury brands and tossing money to bystanders. That must be where you recognize him from, there were a few videos floating around. About three years ago he saved the Boss’ granddaughter from a car accident, and the yakuza gave him a place. He is a villain, obviously, but his… panache and his insistence on a chivalrous attitude… It made him well-liked in the neighborhood.”
Toki took a long breath. Oh shit, she had been right. She knew who he was.
“And this one?” she asked next, pointing to another picture.
It was a middle-aged man too, with dark skin and black hair in dreadlocks, and an annoyed frown that made him look incredibly pissed-off. Dark-skinned people were rare in Japan, so he stuck out like a sore thumb in that list of Asian men. Inferno grimaced.
“Ken Takagi. Honestly, that scandal is more than a decade old, I’m surprised you recognized him. You must have been what, eight? Nine? He tried to be a hero too, but in his last year of high-school, he got into a fight with a few thugs while going home. One of the thugs was killed. Takagi was found guilty of manslaughter and spent three years in prison. When he got out, he drifted for about a year before ending up here. Him and Overhaul became have been thick as thieves ever since.”
Toki nodded, mute, and took a long breath. Her eyes ran on their photos again, as if their faces would somehow change. But it wasn’t their appearances or even their names who had attracted her attention in the first place. It had been the names of their Quirks.
Ken Takagi, thirty-two years old. Quirk: Lock Down, the ability to lock objects into a particular point of space, turning the touched object effectively immobile.
Danjuro Tobita, thirty-two years old. Quirk: Elasticity, the ability to make anything the touched elastic and bouncy, including big disks of air that suddenly cold become shields.
Rock Lock and Gentle Criminal.
A guy who, in canon, had been a hero, more specifically a hero who had taken part into the Shie Hassaikai raid; and a guy who, in canon, had been a benign villain unwilling to hurt people.
How the fuck had they joined the yakuza?!
Notes:
Mwahaha, you didn't expect that, did you?!
Yes, the butterfly effect impacted both Gentle and Rock Lock. For Gentle, i was planning that for a while. But Rock Lock was kind of a surprise for me xD He filled a very specific role i had in mind, and i almost created an OC for it... but in the end, Rock Lock was perfect.
What did you think of this chapter? =)
Chapter 70: Familiar loose ends
Summary:
“Are you a therapist now, sensei?” Neito joked weakly.
“Do you want to see a therapist?” Toki immediately asked, not joking at all. “It’s not a magical fix-it button, but it helps to talk with someone who know how to untangle complicated feelings.”
The kids looked at each other. Yanagi blinked owlishly.
“Do you have a therapist, Quantum-sensei?”
Toki inwardly cursed. Yeah, she was giving a poor example to follow.
Notes:
I wrote this chapter at the same time i gave up on my RWBY fanfic so you can spot a little of my saltiness in Sachiko's rant x)
And NotOnFire's "origin story" comes from a tumblr post that got me on the floor laughing x) Not sure who is the author, i'll post a link if i find it again !
Also, you got a sneak-peek of Toki's nightmares, and i am a little disturbed by how visceral they are. That would teach me to research trauma to effectively write traumatized characters.
And now we learn why Rock Lock and Gentle Criminal are yakuzas now !
... and obviously Toki is going to feel responsible.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
FAMILIAR LOOSE ENDS
Toki knew this world wasn’t canon. Too much was different. Some changes could be traced back to her. Some could be traced back to the actions of other people she had met, like All Might, Keigo, even Meteor. It wasn’t all because of her, obviously. Toki wasn’t that important.
But even so…. Even so, when she encountered a big change from canon, Toki couldn’t help but wonder… what did I change? How did this happen? The opportunity that sprouted today, did it come from a seed I planted? Those people who make choices I didn’t expect, are they different from canon because at some point, their life experience was shaped by something born from my actions?
In the wreckage of that catastrophe, will I find traces of my fingerprints?
She dug a little more in the story of Gentle Criminal.
Her knowledge of his canon-character was limited. She knew Danjuro Tobita had failed to become a hero. From there, he had become a small-time villain who lived for the spotlight and committed harmless crimes while drinking tea. Oh, and he had a sidekick named La Brava who was a hacker.
That was pretty much it.
In this world… Gentle Criminal had never teamed-up with La Brava. Toki dug up all she could, but the few videos she found of his ‘Robin Hood’ period were always filmed by bystanders. Gentle never had a partner. Toki mentally made a note to look into La Brava at some point. In canon, hadn’t the girl latched on Gentle because she was depressed? Maybe she needed help.
But let’s stay on track.
Gentle never had a partner. He had never refined his brand. But… He had indeed saved the Boss’ granddaughter, Eri. There had been a car chase because of a villain attack, and it had ended with a pile-up. Gentle had been on the sidewalk. He had used his Quirk to stop a dozen cars, then he had pulled the people out of the wreckage by himself. It had been very brave of him. Not many people ran fearlessly into a pile-up of cars, in the middle of the road, to start pulling out unconscious victims.
He had saved about ten people, including Eri.
And then, the plot thickened... because Eri’s existence was known in this universe. She wasn’t an unknown prisoner in some basement. She was alive, went to school, and she lived with her grandfather!
What the fuck.
Eri was the daughter of Rio, the Boss’ only daughter. Rio and her father had been estranged. She’d lived alone with her husband, but both had died in that car accident. Gentle had pulled their bodies from the wreckage alongside the unconscious form of the little Eri, who had been three at the time.
As her only living relative, the Boss had taken custody. He had also gotten Gentle out of jail… because, after his daring rescue, poor Gentle had been tackled by a hero, who had arrested him instead of helping save the people trapped in the wrecked cars.
Said hero had mysteriously disappeared a few days later, leaving only a smear of blood and gore. It wasn’t hard to understand that the Shie Hassaikai, and more specifically Overhaul, had come for him.
Oh, whatever.
Toki couldn’t guess why Gentle hadn’t found La Brava in this world. Or maybe the canon-divergence that had changed his life had been that pile-up, and saving Eri? But even looking into it, Toki couldn’t really say what had caused that car accident in this world, and not in canon. In canon, Eri’s father at least had been alive when Eri had been four years old, because she had active her Quirk by rewinding him to nothingness.
What had changed?
It could be… anything, actually. The villain who had caused that pile-up may have been arrested in canon, and not in that universe. Or Rio and her husband may have chosen to drive by that road in this world, and not in canon, because in this world their usually itinerary was closed for roadwork? It must have been a small change… and it had led to a snowballing of consequences.
Same thing for Rock Lock, actually.
Except that, for him… Toki realized with a sinking feeling that she was, indirectly, responsible for his descent into villainy.
Ken Takagi had been a hero student, studying in a small but good hero school in Tokyo. He had a reputation for getting into fights, but it wasn’t always his fault. He lived in a rough neighborhood. One day, mere months before his graduation, he had been attacked by a few thugs on his way back home. He had fought back. Things escalated.
Against seven people, Takagi had pulled out a knife.
He only defended himself, but he had still killed someone, ran away, and been judged for it. Judged very harshly, too. Takagi wouldn’t have needed to escalate and to use lethal force to defend his life if there had been heroes patrolling the area.
But heroes hadn’t been there. And Toki knew why. She only had to look at the date. January 11th, year 2217. She knew that date. She still had nightmares about it.
Heroes hadn’t been there to protect Takagi, because nearly half the local heroes were on the other side of the city…
… where Meteor had been fighting All Might that day.
Rock Lock could never be a hero, because in this universe, his fight against thugs and his accidental stabbing hadn’t been prevented… And that was because in this universe, the heroes who were supposed to protect him had been busy being slaughtered by Meteor. Because Toki had turned her father to the police, prompting the raid and the ensuing battle.
Shit.
Toki leaned back against her seat, away from her laptop and all her research, and rubbed at her eyes with lassitude. Well, she had wanted answers. She had them.
All wasn’t bad, though. In this universe, Eri wasn’t mistreated or abused. According to the file Inferno had given her, Eri was actually taken care of by all the yakuza. Takagi drove her weekly to piano lessons and a kid-friendly dojo. Nemoto, Setsuno or Tobita had been seen a few times in supermarkets accompanied by a little silver-haired girl.
Maybe the change could be traced to the Eight Bullets. They weren’t all mindless sycophants and they held Overhaul accountable. Or maybe the Boss had kept a closer eye on Overhaul, since had gotten custody of his granddaughter sooner than in canon. Who could really say?
“Still brooding?” Keigo asked her, dropping in his seat and stretching like a cat.
“I wouldn’t say brooding. Merely contemplating. How was your photoshoot?”
Keigo did more commercials than her. Normal, with how nice he was to look at. He gave her a winning smile, and Toki couldn’t help but beam at him like a lovestruck idiot.
Wait. She was a lovestruck idiot, actually.
“Tiring, but pretty good! I saw Mirko, we had a good time. She said you should do photoshoots, too, just so she can ogle you in something that shows off your biceps and shoulders. Her words, not mine!”
Toki rolled her eyes. Sometimes Mirko’s teasing could almost look like flirting.
“My shoulders aren’t that nice,” she said out loud.
Keigo laughed at her.
“Well, we’re gonna have to agree to disagree on that one. What’s up?”
“Nothing much. Nedzu sent Icarus an email asking up to report how the fledglings have done during their first two weeks of work-studies. I started filling it out for Melissa and Neito, but I thought you should get to do Hitoshi’s, since you’ve seen him the most.”
“I’ll do it, I’ll do it. Anything else? Come on, this is a fledging-free day. Let’s bounce around the city, do a wide sweep.”
Toki paused a second. A wide sweep meant running across the whole city and its closest neighbors, tackling every villain and incident as fast as you could. It was a big work-out. It could be fun, and they usually made it fun, teasing and racing each other. But it was still intense, and no intern could follow their pace. Quantum and Hawks weren’t the fastest heroes for nothing.
But it was tiring, exhausting even, and since Toki was juggling a lot of balls right now, she was careful to pace herself… And Keigo wasn’t.
Keigo never was. His solution to stress and to a too-tightly packed schedule was always to speed up, now slow down. Keigo was always ravenous for more speed, more action, more danger, more, more, more. High and fast, reaching for the Sun with both hands, and a little part of Toki had always been faintly panicked at the fact that one day he would just go too fast for her and leave her in the dust.
“What are you thinking about?” Keigo asked.
Toki shook herself and raised an eyebrow.
“My thoughts are top-secret.”
“Now I’m assuming it was dirty,” Keigo grinned. “Is that what you want?”
“That depends,” Toki retorted, biting back a smirk. “Does the prospect of my thoughts being dirty intrigue you?”
Keigo leaned on his elbow, batting his eyelashes at her. “Intrigue me? I am mesmerized. Enthralled. Fascinated. Please tell me more.”
Toki sniggered, then realized she was leaning towards him too, and quickly straightened while clearing her throat. She had enough self-control to not jump her husband at work.
I mean, she didn’t, not really. But... the idea of Hayasa-sensei walking on them was enough to kill any fantasy before it could form.
“Sorry,” she said, and there was genuine regret in her voice. “I can’t today. I only have an hour before patrol, and I really need to dig up all I can about the Shie Hassaikai.”
Keigo blinked.
“That yakuza group that Nighteye is investigating? Why? You don’t even have a date for the raid. And for all you know they’ll ask me to come down there, not you.”
Keigo’s feathers were a better match against people who had firearms than Toki’s teleportation. She could warp out of the way, but he could actually pull multiple victims away from dangers while simultaneously neutralizing the gunman.
Still, Toki winced. The Shie Hassaikai needed to go down not because they had recovered their strength, but because they were bait for the League of Villains and any possible investigations on All For One’s missing Quirk. That meant that someone who knew why they were targeted needed to be there, to know what trail they had to pretend to follow. Also, Toki had a personal stake in this. Unlike the HPSC who thought the Quirk-erasure drug was just a project, Toki knew it was real, and she needed to get on top of that disaster as soon as possible.
“Nah, it’s going to be me. I would insist on it anyway.”
Keigo looked at her a second, golden eyes keen and assessing, before slipping on a teasing grin and sauntering to her desk.
“Alright, I’ll let you hog all the fun. Whatcha you looking at? Can I help?”
Toki smiled helplessly, and waved at her computer.
“Be my guest.”
Yakuza weren’t really seen as something cool anymore. They were a relic of a poorer, more boring time. But they still existed, often with the familial-like mafia structure than in the past. Organized crime, firmly anchored in old values and deep bonds of loyalty.
And so the yakuza still lived, although they only had a shadow of their old power. There were only a few dozen gangs left in all of Japan. Their extortion business had a hard time getting off the ground in a world of superheroes: but they still had their fingers in enough pies to stay afloat. They ran gambling rings, prostitution business, underground fighting pits… and drugs, of course.
Yakuza were dangerous, but since they also had a strict code of conduct, and harshly punished the trouble-makers that could tarnish their reputation, yakuza actually helped keep violence of the streets. Kind of like underground heroes, except that they didn’t serve the public but their own interest… and when the public beneficiated from their actions, the yakuza asked for protection money, AKA extortion.
Yakuza were also weapon-dealers. In a world of Quirks, guns were the main equalizers for weak villains who wanted to fight on equal footing with overpowered heroes. But firearms were strictly forbidden in Japan. Villains who wanted weapons needed to pay the high price, because the yakuza who smuggled them had a monopoly.
The Shie Hassaikai, specifically, ran underground fighting pits and weapon-smuggling business. They had only started dabbling in drugs very recently, in the last four years. It coincided with Kurono’s accession to the rank of lieutenant. Mostly they sold medical drugs like narcotics, and stuff like that. But they also dabbled with horrible shit, like Trigger (which very often had a psychotic effect), or GHB to get high… or as a date-rape drug.
“They’ve really expanded in the last few years,” Keigo commented, scrolling on Toki’s screen.
“I wouldn’t say really,” Toki protested, out of loyalty for Inferno. “They haven’t grown that much.”
“They started getting involved into drugs and opened a second fighting ring. There are also a lot of unsolved robberies that Nighteye suspects are linked to them.”
“More specifically, he suspects Takagi. Apparently, he’s a great cat-burglar.”
And if he wasn’t, apparently the-man-who-could-have-been-Rock-Lock was very pragmatic about theft… and he had Overhaul’s ear, and his friendship. There was no need to climb walls and do acrobatics in the ventilations shafts when you had a buddy willing to disintegrate walls and security cameras for you.
Damn it.
“Is that why the HPSC is putting so much pressure on Inferno to deliver?” Keigo deduced. “Because they expanded right under his nose?”
“Hey, they expanded under Nighteye’s nose!”
“But Inferno is the main fighter in that prefecture. It’s his territory, so it’s his nose. Come on, spill.”
Toki groaned and rubbed her forehead.
“They’re working on something to erase Quirks.”
“Something that erase Quirks,” Keigo repeated. He was frowning. “And if the League communicates with AFO in one way or another… They’ll think that’s what you used on him.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s why some HPSC official made a show to inject AFO with a placebo coming from the evidence room of Inferno’s agency,” Keigo realized. “You already knew they were working on that.”
“Yeah. They tried to kidnap Eraserhead at some point.”
“And if they really make the drug… That would be a game-changer.”
“There is that,” Toki admitted. “Hence the need to catch them before they put it on the market.”
Did that drug even exist in this world? It made Toki anxious. Maybe she was relying too much on her canon-knowledge, which was starting to be seriously outdated. In this universe, the Shie Hassaikai were different, stronger, with a different leader. Eri wasn’t experimented on. The Boss didn’t have the same goal that Overhaul, who had wanted to eradicate heroes as a whole. The fact that the Shie Hassaikai had attempted to kidnap Eraserhead was a clue pointing towards Overhaul researching a way to create Quirk-erasing bullets, but it didn’t mean the product was a reality, or even a possibility.
Toki didn’t know. She couldn’t know. The more time passed and the more this world stopped resembling the one from her canon-memories. At some point, her foreknowledge would be useless.
Maybe it already was. Maybe she only had her natural wits to rely on, now. Maybe she should stop taking clues from her memories of a story that didn’t even fit the one she was living.
She had already taken out AFO. The League was backed in a corner. The MLA was infiltrated. Toki had pretty much neutralized all the bad guys from canon, right? She had used her foreknowledge to the best of her ability, but from then on…
From then on, maybe her foreknowledge had outlived its usefulness.
“When will the raid be?” Keigo wondered.
“We don’t have an exact date,” Toki sighed. “But Nighteye only has a few weeks left to collect evidence. After that, the case will pass to Inferno’s agency, and he will go in guns blazing.”
“With appropriate back-up, which means you.”
“Yeah,” Toki said dryly. “I can’t wait.”
Ironically, that wasn’t even false. Toki had always hated that part of heroic work... the space between big missions, the build-up of anxiety, the endless waiting.
The sooner they would get this over with, the better.
oOoOoOo
> NotOnFire: okay but what about Ironwood in RWBY?
> PinkIsPunkRock: the original from 2013 or the 23rd century remake?
> NotOnFire: … there’s an original? 😮
> PinkIsPunkRock: don’t watch it it’s garbage
> PinkIsPunkRock: the animation is terrible! and after season 6 or 7 everything starts spiraling into insanity. when the scenarists realized they didn’t have a good villain for season 7, they made the hero accidentally provoke a global catastrophe by betraying Ironwood (who was the leader of the country the heroes were hiding in), and then blamed Ironwood for the destruction of his own country
> PinkIsPunkRock: it was a horrible character assassination 😡
> EndeavorSucks: … you have strong feelings for an anime from 220 years ago
> PinkIsPunkRock: I AM STILL SALTY ABOUT IT
> PinkIsPunkRock: Ironwood was my fave character in the RWBY manga, so when I learned our RWBY was a remake of some vintage anime, I had to look it up.
> PinkIsPunkRock: and I was BETRAYED!!!!
< Antares: er, hello? What’s RWBY?
> PinkIsPunkRock: hero school propaganda 😠
> NotOnFire: don’t listen to her
> NotOnFire: basically it’s a manga with monster hunters (heroes) who have powers (Quirks), and live in a post-apo world where they have to hunt creatures of darkness called Grimms. All the characters are loosely modelled after fairy tale characters. Like, the main cast are girls modelled after Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Goldilocks, and Belle. The teachers and mentor figures are all characters from the Wizard of Oz, and so on.
> NotOnFire: Ironwood is a character modelled after the Tinman. You know, the one who doesn’t have a heart, and in the end it’s revealed that it’s by having friends he learns to feel love?
> EndeavorSucks: my fave was the cowardly lion to be honest
> NotOnFire: we were talking about which villain has the best origin story!
> Moxie: I’ve always preferred villains who are unapologetically evil 😈
> Moxie: like Palpatine
< Antares: a classic
< Antares: me, I go bonkers for the misunderstood ones
< Antares: bonus points if they’re anti-heroes
> Moxie: 😂
> PikaPika: I like the ridiculous origin stories
> NotOnFire: like what
> PikaPika: … like mine
> EndeavorSucks: what?! 😂
< Antares: oooooooooooh
> Moxie: this going to be good.
> PikaPika: ahem, ahem
> PikaPika: (I’ve been waiting for ages to tell that one)
> PikaPika: once upon a time… my parents fucked
> PinkIsPunkRock: [facepalm]
> PikaPika: well, I did tell you it was my origin story =)
> PikaPika: ANYWAY
> PikaPika: they got married, yadda yadda, and they were young and poor and they somehow made things work, even though they bickered constantly and didn’t have the ray of sunshine that I am to brighten their lives
> PikaPika: so
> PikaPika: one day, they got into an argument. my very pregnant and hormonal mother stormed off…except they lived in a tiny apartment so the only place to go was to shut herself into the closet for a good long sulk.
> PikaPika: And while she was sitting in there, fuming, she looked up and saw her sewing kit on the shelf, and all my father’s uniforms hanging right there.
< Antares: oh god
< Antares: I can see where this is going
> PinkIsPunkRock: =D =D =D
> PikaPika: Yup.
> PikaPika: So my mother picked one shirt and one pair of trousers
> PikaPika: … and carefully, methodically ripped every third stitch out of every seam, and then hung them back up together so that he would be likely to pick them at the same time.
> EndeavorSucks: oh no
> PikaPika: oh yes.
> PikaPika: This took her a couple hours, so by the time she was done, the anger had worn down. She came out, she and my father had a talk that ended in apologies, after which they were tired and went to bed.
> PikaPika: my mother swears up and down that she meant to warn my father about the sabotaged clothes in the morning, but he wore a different uniform set and they were both still feeling a little raw, so she didn’t want to bring up the fight again. she decided to tell him that night instead.
> PikaPika: And then she forgot.
> EndeavorSucks: she FORGOT????!
> NotOnFire: 🤣 🤣 🤣
< Antares: omg this is going to be so good xDDDD
> PikaPika: She forgot.
> PikaPika: anyway, about four days later, my father apparently came home roughly an hour after he left for work, his clothes slowly, gently shredding off his body, the most bewildered expression on his face.
> PikaPika: “Aiko,” he said, his voice mildly shell-shocked. “Aiko, my clothes are broken.”
> PikaPika: my mother promptly burst out laughing so hard that she went into labor.
> PikaPika: and that’s the story of my birth, heralded by petty vengeance and utter confusion.
< Antares: 🤣 🤣 🤣
< Antares: that’s amazing and I’m framing that shit on my wall
________________
The work-studies only took two days of the week. The kids still had school. Toki still had school, too. Aizawa wasn’t as horrible as before, but someone still had to make sure the kids learned what they needed to.
The children had one heroic lesson supervised by Aizawa where, as Toki expected, they fought the Big Three. In this world, it wasn’t Togata, Hadō, and Amajiki; it was Melissa, Hadō, and a girl with an electric Quirk named Yuyu Haya. A top Three with only girls, it was rare. Especially since they had powerhouses among the boys in their classes. A guy who could make a magma-whip, some guy who controlled snow, a telekinesist, but also Togata, Amajiki…
But the girls had risen to the top, and Toki loved that. Three girls from class 3-A, even! Melissa and her two best friends! Toki couldn’t take all the credit, of course, but she liked to think that she was a little responsible for that.
Though, Toki had a brief moment of stomach-dropping dread when she watched the tape of the fight. Haya’s Quirk was to create long-distance electric attacks in the shape of a bow and arrow. The arrow could even change direction after being fired.
It was so reminiscing of Beros that Toki felt suddenly sick to her stomach.
And the kids in class 1-B who had fought Beras also saw the parallel, because they all froze on that footage. Tokage, Rin, Yanagi, even Neito. They got back on their feet after a few seconds, but they still froze. If Toki had been here, she knew what kind of expression she would have seen on their faces. The horror, the uncontrolled panic, like being back in the forest again, seeing Neito die all over again, the helplessness, the terror—
Shit. One thing that Toki hadn’t anticipated, again.
Toki went to see Aizawa to lecture him about triggers and PTSD, yes, even in teenagers. To his credit Aizawa was immediately serious and remorseful when he was told about Beros. He hadn’t known what her Quirk looked like. And Neito and everyone else were fine: they hadn’t been hurt in that exercise, they just had had a shock and had needed a few seconds to process it. Toki went to see them after, trying to quietly assess how they were holding up and if she needed to tear a new one at Aizawa again. Although they were touched, they also assured her they were all okay.
Tokage even said that it was a good thing to face an opponent like this in a controlled setting, because they would need to confront this traumatism to make it go away.
“That is kind of an oversimplification,” Toki winced.
“Are you a therapist now, sensei?” Neito joked weakly.
“Do you want to see a therapist?” Toki immediately asked, not joking at all. “It’s not a magical fix-it button, but it helps to talk with someone who know how to untangle complicated feelings.”
The kids looked at each other. Yanagi blinked owlishly.
“Do you have a therapist, Quantum-sensei?”
Toki inwardly cursed. Yeah, she was giving a poor example to follow.
“No,” she admitted reluctantly. “I should, but I never got the time.”
The kids looked at each other, and then finally, Rin shrugged:
“It wasn’t that bad, sensei. We can deal with it.”
And maybe they could, but what about the next time, or the time after that? Trauma wasn’t something you could cut in neat little separate piece to compartmentalize. It covered everything you were, like a layer of mud. And then something else came on top of it, and…
Toki wasn’t stupid. She knew she was traumatized. She had known ever since Meteor’s arrest. She had read books about it at Naruto Labs. She hadn’t sought out the resident psychologist, feeling like she could deal with it, and feeling ashamed of her weakness, but she had known all the same.
And she had known things would pile up.
Trauma sat in the brain like an ever-present actuality, and someone’s separate traumatic experiences all wanted to sit in the brain in the exact same way, in the exact same spot. All those nightmares? They weren’t willing to neatly separate themselves, demarcate the brain’s energies into yours and mine. Instead, they crowded each other, they rubbed against each other, they stacked up, one atop another, and compressed down into each other. Traumas get layered up on top of other traumas, the brain neurologically unequipped to differentiate between them.
Over and over and over again, until it was just one big ball of confused fear and regret and guilt. It’s my fault, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I just want it to stop— !
Toki still had nightmares about the building coming down and Meteor screaming, All Might roaring. But sometimes, in those nightmares, the building and the fight were engulfed by blue flames, and sometimes there was a frightened little voice calling “Mama?! Mama?!” while Toki frantically searched the rubble…
Sometimes Sayuri looked at her with perplexity, as if not understanding how her daughter could be worried by the way the toddler’s voice went higher and higher in panic.
Sometimes the little voice started screaming and then abruptly cut off with the same wet gasp that Neito had heaved when Beros had shot him in the chest.
Sometimes it wasn’t a building but a forest aflame, and when Toki looked back at the fight it wasn’t All Might and Meteor but Beros and Neito, or sometimes Toga and Hitoshi, or even sometimes Beros and herself… Sometimes Toki couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, could just watch. Sometimes she could fight, and she did, and she was desperately weak.
Sometimes Toki killed Beros and when she looked back at the dismembered corpse, it was Keigo, Keigo dead, dead and still and bleeding—
Gods. It was still stomach-dropping, even now. She had killed someone. Maybe it would have been easier to deal with if she had had been punished: if she could have paid for it and not think about it afterward. If the atonement could have been a finite thing, with parameters and boundaries set by other people. She could have been done with it, then. But Toki hadn’t been punished, she hadn’t even told anyone, and she had to carry it all alone. She would carry it all her life.
Wasn’t it any less than what she deserved?
And she knew it was fucked-up. She knew it was fucking her up, like so many other things. She had read about it.
Meteor’s arrest, her neglect by her parents, Aizawa’s brutal brand of training, the cardiac arrest, fighting All Might, fighting All For One, Hitoshi’s kidnapping, Neito’s near-death experience, the fear of losing Hinawa, the fear of losing Keigo… It all mixed together.
It would be easy to think that of each of those traumas were separate and distinct concerns which could, thereby, be addressed separately and distinctly. It was easy to compartmentalize them, to conceptualize them separately, to ignore the true nature of trauma.
But it wasn’t like that.
“Sometimes it can mess you up,” she said seriously. “You think you can repress it, and your brain interiorize that repression is the way to deal with traumatic event. And when there is another traumatic event, you repress it too, without realizing it. That’s not healthy.”
Neito scrunched his nose. “So what, you advise us to find a shrink to give us good coping mechanisms?”
“That would be a start.”
Early-life traumas were the most dangerous. They took up residence in your mind while the brain was still forming, while the personality was growing, while the whole of the person was still learning how to make sense of the world. Children. Teenagers. They drank every experience like a sponge. The good, and the bad.
It was possible for a person’s entire self to be shaped by an early-life trauma. It was possible for that early-life trauma to have control over every other experience, every other memory, every single thought and feeling. Future traumas were thus shaped and warped by that early-life trauma. And it became all the more problematic, when the future trauma already had a shape, a design, a structure that fit snugly into the contours of that early-life experience.
That was why Midoriya was always so desperate to prove his usefulness, willing to kill himself just to prove he wasn’t worthless. That was why Shouto Todoroki was so remote, numb to any personal attacks, as if nothing could touch him if he made himself hollow.
That was why Yagi couldn’t fathom stopping, he couldn’t shoulder the guilt of letting people die by his inaction, still carrying the guilt of his mentor’s death. That was why Aizawa couldn’t see kids in heroics with another emotion than dread and scorn, because he thought they did not understand that this life led to pain. That was why Meteor didn’t care about other people, barely saw them as human, because he had never seen any evidence of humanity around him while growing up.
That was why Hitoshi mistrusted anyone asking about his Quirk.
That was why Neito was so desperate to be needed.
That was why Keigo made himself into what people wanted from him. He’d smile and tell them what they want to hear, and he’ll never stop trying to please. That was why he gave and gave and gave, even willing to die from their sake, because deep down the child in him had been told that he was only worth anything if he served someone else’s purpose. Because his mother had made him believe that he didn’t deserve to live unless he was of use.
They had all been so young.
The world had been so cruel.
Toki knew she had been shaped by her own trauma, too. She knew that her nagging fear that love was always conditional didn’t come from nowhere. That terror that people would leave her if she asked them to change didn’t exist in a vacuum either. The desperate need to fix everything and everyone, the ever-present guilt, probably came from the same source. She didn’t know how much it had shaped her. She didn’t know what else she wasn’t seeing.
And she didn’t want to look at that thought too closely.
Trauma came in layers. It came in layers of inexpressible horror and despair, and those layers compressed into one another, so that more recent layers were made in the image of the older ones. Trauma came in layers, until you couldn’t even start chip at them: only learn how to live with that weight.
“Sensei,” Rin said, and then paused. He looked very nervous. “Did… Did you ever… I mean, when you were a student, did anything…?”
The three other kids looked at Rin with horror, as of the idea of asking Quantum-sensei how she dealt with childhood trauma was an unfathomable transgression.
Toki blinked, taken aback, and considered telling him that she was fine. Then she considered telling him it was none of his business. Then she thought about telling him the truth, in excruciating details, so that he would never ask ever again. And then finally she came to her senses, because this question wasn’t about Toki, not really: it was about Rin, about him wanting to be sure he wasn’t alone.
“When I was little, something bad happened to my family,” she said gently. “I felt powerless back then.”
“But you’re okay now,” Rin said hopefully. “Right?”
What a loaded question.
“I am,” she finally decided to say. “I think. But it took time and effort. I had to talk about it. I had to reconcile with the people who did it. It took years. I wouldn’t be who I am if I had just bottled it up.”
She could see Rin drop in discouragement, and grimaced. She had no idea how to soften that kind of truth, to be honest.
“You don’t have to see a shrink if you don’t want to,” she added cautiously. “You don’t even have to talk about it at all. Everyone has different coping mechanisms. Just don’t lock it up in a corner of your mind. Don’t let it paralyze you.”
“Fear is the mind-killer,” Yanagi murmured.
Toki laughed, taken by surprise.
“Yeah, pretty much. But fear is only as deep as the mind allows— thus, an educated and self-aware mind conquers fear.”
The four teenagers nodded, as if it was some deep wisdom. And that was it, really.
She didn’t know in what measure the kids had taken her advice. She had encouraged everyone to talk about what had happened a professional, even if it was only Hound Dog, but she also knew it could be enough to confess your fear to a friend. The soft animal in your mind only needed to be soothed, to be reassured it was over: it didn’t matter how skillfully it was done.
They’re just children, some part of Toki murmured with regret. They shouldn’t have to live with that burden.
They’re going to be heroes, another, more cynical part of herself retorted. They will face villains and danger for years. This is never going to be their worst memory. Grow up.
Toki wasn’t here to shelter the kids from the truth. She wasn’t here to discourage them from following that path, or to be their shield against the harsh reality of heroics. She was here to teach. She could help them, she could prepare them. But in the end, Toki had t make sure they were strong. They had to make sure they got up after being knocked down, that they could still move forward, that they were learning.
She was a teacher. They weren’t civilians, they were her students. Heroic students.
And so, she taught them.
Safety procedures, rescues procedures, how to establish a command chain during a crisis. How to keep calm in a crisis, too. How to meditate, how to reassess quickly, how to deescalate a crisis…
But also fun stuff, things that would hopefully take their mind off from the traumatism they had endured in the summer camp. She taught them how to talk to journalist and redirect intrusive questions. She quizzed them on silly trivia about old heroes. She enlisted Present Mic’s help and made them pass through fake interviews, some solemn and serious, and some cheerful and crazy.
She also started nitpicking at their hero costumes. Why did they choose such or such design, wouldn’t this or that be better? She mostly had a bone to pick with whoever designed Yaoyorozu’s costume.
Seriously, at some point you had to draw the line before it crossed in pure fanservice territory.
It turned out that Yaoyorozu’s first design had looked like some sportwear bikini, but the Support Department and the Business Department had changed it because it was ‘boring’. Yaoyorozu had accepted the modifications without a fight. It made Toki foam at the mouth a little.
No armor? High heels? No chest support? Books?! What the fuck. What the actual fuck. Whoever had designed this should be fired out of a canon.
“I need to have a lot of skin showing to use my Quirk freely,” Yaoyorozu defended herself.
“You can use mesh from your own hair to have your DNA,” Toki countered. “Your creations should phase right through it. And you can get injured if your boobs are flapping in the air like this! Breasts have a mass, and that mass is attached to pectoral muscles. How can you let it swing around? Muscular torsion isn’t a joke.”
“Clothes from my own hair?” Yaoyorozu murmured, her eyes gleaming. “That would work?”
“You should test it.” Toki paused. “Also, the books have to go.”
Yaoyorozu put a protective hand over the books, looking outraged. “But what if I need a reference?”
“A visor with HUD will do the job just as well.” Toki taped her own visor, where the time and her location was constantly displayed in a corner of her field of vision. “It’s what I have. A small hard drive with several encyclopedias on it, vocal reconnaissance, and you’re set.”
“Mmh. I’ll think about it, Quantum-sensei.”
With any luck, Toki would manage to convert one more person to wearing a visor. It was insane how many heroes thought they could go without eye protection.
oOoOoOo
Yaoyorozu redesigned her costume. Yanagi decided to go see a therapist. Neito didn’t but started talking more with Rin. Tokage opened up to her brother, who was a pro-hero and could understand. Life went on.
Towards the end of September, the Icarus Agency finally put down the last big gang of Fukuoka.
The Firelights were the remnants of an old yakuza group. They still defined themselves as yakuza and dealt with gambling and drugs: but they had both shrunk in numbers and dabbled in villainous activities, so they were more like a villain gang those days. Their main activity was drug-dealing, their supplies coming from China. During the last few months, Haya-sensei (or rather, Mercury) and started cutting them off from the mainland by arresting their contacts one by one. With the help of heroes specializing in maritime patrol, like Selkie, they had stopped the smuggling entirely.
To not crash, the Firelights had had to dig deeper in their other sources of income: gambling, fighting pits, robberies. They weren’t as good to those as they were with smuggling, though, so now Icarus had enough to arrest them all.
All that was left was making the arrest. In another words: a raid.
Toki and Keigo argued about it a little but in the end it was decided that the interns would be part of it. Toki wanted to wait a little more, especially for Hitoshi: but in the end she agreed that it would be a good trial-run.
The Firelights weren’t as big and as dangerous as the Shie Hassaikai. They had smaller means, less weapons, and none of them had a Quirk as dangerous as Overhaul. They were smugglers, not frontline fighters. Of course no fight was without danger, but… All three of Toki’s fledging knew how to arrest a purse-snatcher or a robber on the run, now. Hero work wasn’t just about one-on-one fights. It was also about coordinated strikes, multiples opponents, strategies of attack, collaboration with other heroes.
It was time to pass to the next level.
A big operation like this wasn’t an everyday occurrence. The atmosphere at the agency was tense, but excited. For this gig, Icarus Agency had asked a few others to team-up with them. A handful of solo heroes: Wani, Miko, Serpentine… But also some agencies in Icarus’ territory. Like Basalt, a man in his forties with an soil-manipulation Quirk, like an earthbender in Avatar; or Takeshita, who could grow and manipulate bamboo.
And, of course, the interns. Neito, Hitoshi and Melissa for Icarus… and an unknown girl with white hair, who was interning with Takeshita. He introduced her as Sensor Girl, who had a Quirk named Charter allowing her to create a holographic map locating people in her vicinity. That power could sure come in handy.
Toki was pretty sure it was the girl with white hair that had teamed-up with Bakugo for the provisional license exam. She kept that information for herself.
They stormed the place.
Flash, jump, grab, warp again, toss, hit, warp back, hit, strike, dodge, warp again: Toki appeared and disappeared in flashes, hitting and vanishing immediately, everywhere at once. From the corner of her eye she saw Wani flooding the hallway, while Ocelot climbed stairs by jumping from a floor to another like a giant tiger. Neito was darting left and right, slapping handcuffs on all the bad guys tossed his way.
A handfuls of men jumped from a window to get to the street: Toki braced herself to follow… Then there was an explosion, followed by a series of yells, and then Melissa’s voice called cheerfully and “All clear!”. Toki allowed herself a small smile, and then warped outside, warped up to see through the windows of the next floor, and warped inside.
It was faster than the stairs.
In less than an hour, the fight was over.
They secured the place. They did a headcount. No casualties, minimal collateral damage. Most of the damage was due to Wani’s flood and Polaris’ explosions. The Firelights had had guns, but the assault had been too fast for them to get the big assault weapons, and the heroes had been able to deal with the revolvers and small guns with a limited number of shots. There were some injuries (Ocelot had been grazed by a bullet), but nothing serious.
Toki called the other teams to get an update. As expected, they hadn’t completely wrapped up their own assault. But as minutes passed and everyone checked in, soon enough Toki relaxed.
Things had gone to plan. They had captured everyone.
The last gang of Fukuoka had been dismantled.
It should have felt like a triumph, but all Toki could muster was a tranquil sense of satisfaction. Like that conclusion had always been a given, like it was expected. Three years ago, she would have celebrated like crazy. But now, apparently, her appreciation for victories had scaled up.
When you fight AFO and win, it’s hard to be impressed by the take-down of a small drug cartel.
They went through the clean-up. Listing the people arrested. Securing the various locations. Then debriefing, writing reports. At this point, the interns were all exhausted. Still, Toki made them sit down at a desk and start to draft their reports, so they would know where to start tomorrow.
Then she brought them all back to Yūei. Warping was, after all, so much faster than taking the train.
If anything, this raid had reassured Toki about the abilities of her students. Neito, Hitoshi and Melissa wouldn’t take down any S-ranked villain anytime soon, of course! But they were more than able to hold their own against normal villains. Besides, they had all been particularly equipped to deal with yakuza, who used guns.
Toki loathed guns. Usually, villains used their Quirks, not firearms. But since Melissa used guns (although hers were mostly paintballs and electric pulses), it meant that both Hitoshi and Neito, who often trained against her, knew how to deal with someone using firearms. It was something that their classmates probably hadn’t. Toki made a mental note to add it to her heroic lessons.
But… Anyway.
At the end of September, something else happened.
First, she got a call from the President, which was never good. When she picked up the phone, she was in Yūei, and immediately her mind went through a list of catastrophic scenarios involving the school, the students, AFO, All Might, or even Meteor. The Witch never called with good news.
“Quantum,” Genmei-san said on the phone, voice as even and expressionless as usual. “A complication has arisen.”
“About what?”
There was a fraction of hesitation. “The Shie Hassaikai.”
Toki frowned:
“I know I’m technically on the case, but for now it’s still Nighteye who handle it. Inferno will only get it back, and organize a raid, in October. Why, what’s going on?”
“Do you remember the prison breaks after Kamino?”
The abrupt change of topic made Toki blink in surprise. She really didn’t see the correlation.
She knew there had been prison riots and a handful of escapes after Kamino. The prisoners’ morale had been boosted by the image of a depowered All Might, and it had quickly spiraled into violence. However, she knew that nobody really dangerous had escaped. And…
“Endeavor tracked down everyone, didn’t he?”
“In the Tokyo prefecture,” Genmei-san said tonelessly. “But there had been breakouts in several prefectures. It’s been nearly five weeks now, and there’s still three escapees unaccounted for. They’re from the Toyama Detention Center.”
The name was vaguely familiar, and Toki frowned. Had she arrested someone who was sent there? Why did it ring a bell? She couldn’t remember…
“They’re allies from the Shie Hassaikai,” Toki tried to guess.
“They made contact with them recently. Nighteye just submitted a demand to class his investigation as a S-ranked one, because the Shie Hassaikai has contacted multiple groups of villains, one of them being the League.”
Great. Just like in canon, Toki thought. And then: wait, no, not like in canon. Multiple groups of villains… It’s not the League seeking an alliance. It’s the Hassaikai. They are looking for something. Preparing for something? Nothing good, I bet.
“But you’re not calling about the League,” Toki countered, eyes narrowed. “Those three escaped prisoners, they had some connection to the League already?”
Genmei-san made a non-committal noise.
“Maybe. One of them, Rappa, spent most of his life in Sakai before being arrested in Shizuoka. He may have known of the Shie Hassaikai family already, and made introductions.”
Rappa, living in Sakai near the Shie Hassaikai… Toki’s eyebrow rose very high on her forehead. She could be wrong, but that sounded a lot like the guy who, in canon, had been one of Overhaul’s cronies instead of Rock Lock. A brutal pit fighter obsessed with strength, or something like this.
Who had apparently been driven away from Sakai (by what? Whom? Some canon-change? Maybe by Inferno?) and had been arrested in Shizuoka. Probably by Endeavor: the guy made the majority of villains’ arrests in that city. Hey, maybe even by Meteor.
Talk about a canon-divergence.
“And the others?”
“That’s why I’m calling about.” Genmei-san paused. “There is no easy way to tell this, but the two others were people that are in prison because of you. As they have allied against the Shie Hassaikai, you’ll undoubtedly face them. You should be warned. Heroes in your situation can be allowed to disengage if they think their rational judgement may be compromised, or that the villains’ revenge will put people in danger.”
That wasn’t reassuring at all. Toki frowned.
“Alright. I think I can handle it anyway: I’ll be dealing with the yakuza, not their allies. Who are those people? They’re from Fukuoka?”
“The first one is Yotome Hansha.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell,” Toki admitted.
“A teleporter, formerly of the neo-yakuza group called the Singapore, in the Osaka prefecture. You arrested him…”
“Two years ago,” Toki muttered. “Yeah, I remember now.”
It had been that joint operation with Nighteye’s agency where Nighteye had insulted Melissa. Toki had fought a teleporter with a gun, had nearly been shot, and had won by throwing the guy in a staircase so hard that said staircase had collapsed on him. She had read the hospital report after. The guy had needed multiples surgeries.
“Can he walk?”
“He can now. It took him ten months to relearn. He’s still limping.”
“Okay, so we can safely say he doesn’t like me.”
And he was a goddamn teleporter, too. Fuck. Oh, he was less powerful than Toki, and his Quirk depended on his vision (meaning that blinding him or putting him in a closed room would trap him), but still. What a pain.
“Who is the other?” Toki sighed. “He can’t hate me more than him.”
“Fujio Awai.”
Toki’s stomach dropped. Fujio.
She didn’t need to ask more. She didn’t even need to read his file. She knew it already. She knew what his skills were, what his Quirk was, how and when he had been arrested.
She had been the one to send that notebook to Nighteye, fifteen years ago. She had been the one to put Fujio into jail, with the rest of the Crew.
“He escaped?” she whispered, horrified. “He escaped weeks ago?”
“Yes.”
“How could you not tell me?!”
“It is not the role of the HPSC to keep an eye on the people you arrested.” Genmei-san gave the distinct impression of frowning on the other side of the phone. “If it had been your father, you would have been warned, considering all the… peculiar circumstances.”
“Like the fact you kidnapped me?” Toki muttered.
Genmei-san ignored her, “But if you need to keep an eye on some of the criminal you arrested, it’s something you should do yourself. You’re old enough to set up an alert or even mark their release dates on your calendar. I’m not going to hold your hand for this. You should have already known that Awai had escaped; your investigative skills are slipping.”
Toki clenched her jaw and looked down, chastised. Genmei-san wasn’t wrong. Toki had an alert set up to know when the people she had arrested were released, or if their prisons was subjected to a break-out. It had just… never occurred to her to set up the same thing for the people she betrayed as a child.
It was a stupid oversight. Keigo wouldn’t have made this mistake. She needed to do better.
“You’re still calling me,” Toki muttered petulantly.
“Yes,” Genmei-san said, inflexible. “Because it is now impacting a current case. A case which we have a vested interest in seeing closed soon.”
They both went silent, considering.
Toki hadn’t told Genmei-san who had AFO’s Quirk, although she had heavily implied it. Her plan had required the cooperation of the HPSC, and for that, Toki had needed the Witch to approve of her strategy. And… She knew how Genmei-san thought because she thought the same way.
Threat assessment, threat management, preparing for the next battle, keeping the peace.
The Quirk, no matter how evil, was too good of a weapon to abandon. Toki had considered making the Quirk disappear but hadn’t actually done it: and she knew that even if she had the opportunity to do so, she probably wouldn’t. Because it was too useful.
(How else could she disable villains like Shigaraki or Kurogiri? How else could she stop them without killing them, or condemning them to a life of sedation in the deepest level of Tartarus? That Quirk could do good things if it was used for good. Right?)
(Right?!)
The point was… Genmei-san hadn’t been told who had the Quirk, but she knew the situation enough to guess. What Genmei-san knew for sure was that Toki had used Neito’s Quirk to steal AFO’s, and that the whole show of injecting AFO with a drug seemingly found in Inferno’s confiscated evidence was a show supposed to make AFO suspect the yakuza of having erased his power. Which meant that Toki and Genmei-san were complicit in this.
Silencing the yakuza was now necessary for Toki and for the HPSC to cover their asses. Because if the yakuza continued to exist, if at some point AFO managed to use a contact to interrogate them… Then AFO would realize the Shie Hassaikai didn’t have the means to erase his Quirk at Kamino. He would realize he had been played.
And then, guess who he would turn his ire against?
“Wait a second,” Toki suddenly said. “You mentioned that the Shie Hassaikai contacted the League?”
“Yes. You’ll have to ask Nighteye for more details. All we can say for sure is that it’s very doubtful that the League knows about All For One’s condition. Our people in Tartarus keep All For One sedated most of the time.”
Which was probably a better idea than the straitjacket they had used in canon. Toki frowned, suddenly remembering that Genmei-san’s people in Tartarus included Okamoto. Well, at least she was sure that this dickhead wasn’t lax with security.
“And they also contacted Fujio,” Toki muttered. “I sure hope they’re not recruiting an army.”
“It is Nighteye’s case still,” Genmei-san said flatly. “You can ask to be retired from the raid at any moment. But once it becomes Inferno’s case and he assemble his team, you’ll need a reason to refuse the fight.”
Toki knew that Inferno would understand. He was one of the only people who knew her past. They hadn’t really talked about it, but… Inferno knew what it was, to come from a family of villains. And from the way he seemed to loathe his father, he could probably understand Toki’s reticence to face someone she had betrayed, too. So if Toki wanted to avoid this confrontation, it would be easy.
She didn’t want to see Fujio. She had hurt him, and she still felt guilty. Listening to his cold accusations and seeing the hatred in his eyes wouldn’t hurt as much as Toki had pictured it when she had imagined Meteor in his stead, but it would still hurt.
And… Fujio had always vaguely frightened her. He could be nice. He gave her books, sometimes, when she was a little kid running underfoot in their evil lair. But his eyes were always so cold. He came back to the hideout with blood under his nails, fresh from having murdered someone, and Toki had to see him idly wash his hand and try to not feel sick. Fujio had scared her because he had always been dangerous. He had none of the warmth of Meteor, Homura, Nono, or even Sayuri.
He was a killer. Cold-blooded and calculative. He had had fifteen years to think about how Toki had ruined his life. Of course she didn’t want to see him.
And yet…
And yet, the idea of running away made her balk.
He scared her, but it was the familiar fear that she walked with every day in heroism. A dangerous enemy, who wanted to hurt you. It wasn’t like with Meteor. She loved Meteor. He was her Dad; she had always loved him. It wasn’t the same for Fujio.
She had liked Fujio, but she hadn’t loved him, not like family. They hadn’t been close. Actually, he may have been the member of the Crew that she had been the most distant from. The otherness between them had always been too strong.
Did she want to avoid the confrontation? Yes. But could she afford to? Was her reluctance to confront Fujio, or rather the risk of confronting Fujio (maybe they wouldn’t event cross paths) enough to pull her away from the mission? The Shie Hassaikai needed to go down. The League would be there, and they also needed to be eliminated from the game. Could an old ghost frighten Toki away from her task?
No. Of course not.
“Don’t pull me from the case,” Toki finally said. “I’ll manage. I’ll just need to bring…” she made a face “… one more person on that case, as insurance.”
There was a pause.
“Are you sure about this?”
“Obviously,” Toki lied with assurance. “Trust me, I have it handled.”
Genmei-san made a doubtful noise. But she didn’t insist. If Toki wanted to walk straight into trouble, after all, it was her call. She was a grown woman, and a hero. She could make her own bad decisions all by herself.
The call ended. Toki stayed for a little while with the phone in her hands, watching the dark screen, thinking about the past. She grimaced.
The universe was apparently never going to let her catch a break.
Notes:
FUJIO IS BACK IN THE STORY! Mwahahaha!!!!
You probably had guessed it after reading the last chapter of "house of wisdom", when Rock Lock mentionned hiring a sniper. But here he is! With Rappa, who was indeed arrested by Meteor, and the teleporter that Toki nearly turned into a vegetable. Really, it's like he made his team by climbing on a table one day and asking the entire prison cafeteria "who hates Toki and Ryusei Taiyome here?" and then he picked the two persons who raised their hands. I love it xD
I'm not putting Fujio's team in Snapshots of Wisdom yet, but here is the Discord conversation that inspired the idea of Rappa joinig him...
Underneath that post, no less than 13 different people anwsered "it is!" and thus i adopted the idea xD
Momo redesigned her costume! I'll post a fanart in Snapshots of Wisdom =)
ALSO ! Did you spot all the canon-divergences? Rock Lock became a criminal after an homicide which could have been avoided if Meteor had not wrecked havoc on the city that day. Rock Lock became Chisaki's friend. Chisaki did not torture Eri. Gentle was arrested and then recruited by the yakuza BEFORE he could meet La Brava. And now we have a very different Shie Hassaikai...
Here is a reminder that this fic has a Discord server !
Next week : a chapter of "house of wisdom" about Fujio !
And the week after... A chapter of "folly of the wise", the collection of smutty one-shots ! I'm in the mood for Salamander/Inferno x) What do you think? I have some Meteor/Endeavor smutt too x) Pick your pairing !
Chapter 71: A new drug on the streets
Summary:
Shit is thickening, and the yakuza's plan is slowly taking shape.
Also, AFO learns about it, and is creepily delighted. Yay.
Notes:
Well, i'm alive and on schedule, so there's that.
Can i have five minutes to rant? Yup, i can.
So, i moved away to be closer to my family and to get a new job. Except that in this new job i clashed with my boss. To be fair, it was about a file that was shit: the secretary who had compiled the data had mispeled names, mixed places, forgotten numbers. She was fired when i got there, but her data was still there... and so everything i built from it was worthless. And i didn't correct it because i'm used to collect the data myself and so doing it RIGHT.
There was also one mistake i made, personally, because i missed one debt in the list. My bad.
But the boss also fucked up because she accused me of incompetence about a major calculation, when it turns out the calculation was completely right, she just hadn't read it to the end.Anyway, i pointed that out the next day after double-checking. We re-did the file, and now it's okay: but relationships are cold as ice.
Not a great start for a new job.
So i'm looking around. I'm not deciding to quit yet, but i'm halfway through my trial period and if at the end of it the boss say i make too many mistakes (let's be honest, it's always going to be about MY mistake, not HERS) and they don't want me, i don't want to be left hanging. I have money on the side, i'm not gonna starve, but it would blow because i had high hopes for this job.
Still, maybe it's not the right fit? I'm in a very small team and i'm litterally the only one doing Family Law, and it sucks to not be able to talk with my colleague about my files. I used to love that. Talking about what should i do about a testament with a flaw, how such succession is turning out, what are the options of the widow when the children of the first marriage want to keep the house, and so on. Family law can be funny when you talk about it with other people, but when you're alone with all the tales of family arguments, or about kids who steal from the old parents, well, it can be depressing.Anyway. Look at me, all sad because my boss was harsh once and i feel a bit lonely. Yep, my life is terrible.
ANYWAY HERE IS THE CHAPTER.
Special dedicace to Wolfgang and to Fic-a-holic Phantomchick of the Discord server ! I went to look for your rant about the term of "heroes" to fuel Toki's internal monologue about how langage has power, and even stole a few lines because, damn, the whole speech slapped.
Here it is!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
A NEW DRUG ON THE STREETS
“Fujio escaped.”
Meteor sighed. Toki’s eyes narrowed.
“You knew,” she accused. “Since when?”
She wasn’t even surprised. Of course Meteor would keep an eye on his old companions, and of course he would be better informed than her. It was expected, and yet mildly infuriating.
“Since it happened,” Meteor admitted. “I always kept an eye on the Crew. Besides, his evasion plan is the one I came up with in case we were all arrested and put in the same prison. He even copied the same team.”
“Wait, really?”
“A teleporter for interference, a heavy hitter to carve a path, and a human radar to find it,” Meteor enumerated. “They must have had a getaway driver waiting for them outside. Otherwise? He completely recreated our old plan. No need to fix what isn’t broken.”
There was a hint of affection in his voice. Toki let out a deep sigh and rubbed her nape. The certainty that Meteor still cared about his old crew wasn’t unexpected, but it was still uncomfortable. She braced herself.
“What are you going to do, then?”
Meteor raised an eyebrow. “Nothing, of course.”
She hadn’t expected that. She blinked at him owlishly. “Nothing?”
They were in a small izakaya between Shizuoka and Musutafu. Toki had no idea how her father had found this place, but the food was good, fatty, and rich. Not as fancy as in those restaurants her father usually liked, but just as tasty. The yakitori was delicious, and Toki and her father were on their second serving of yakisoba. It was a nice compromise between their respective food preferences.
“Nothing,” Meteor confirmed. “It’s not in my territory. Fujio isn’t a high-ranked villain and there’s no need for Endeavor to be involved. He probably doesn’t even know. I’m going to do exactly nothing.”
“You don’t want to help him?”
“I do. But it would compromise my place here, so I can’t. I can only wish him luck. And I don’t want to arrest him either, so I won’t help the heroes against him.”
Toki grimaced, her fingers nervously beating on the tabletop. She wasn’t going to have that luxury. She had picked her side.
She had wanted to ask Meteor for his help, but… clearly, that wasn’t happening. And even if she did ask, even if he agreed, suddenly Toki was worried about how it would go down. She wasn’t worried about Meteor turning on her, but maybe he would sabotage the case to let Fujio escape. Or maybe he wouldn’t, and having to fight his old friend would hurt him. Maybe it would feel like a betrayal.
And it would be Toki’s fault, again.
She couldn’t ask that of him. She couldn’t ask that of anyone. It was her mess. She should be the one to fix it.
“Well, I just hope I won’t face him either,” Toki grumbled half-heartedly. “Of all the teleporters he could have allied with, he picked the one I nearly crippled.”
“All the teleporters?” Meteor repeated with amusement. “Munchkin, do you know how many teleporters or warpers there is in the entire world?”
Toki shrugged, inwardly glad that her change of subject had gone smoothly. Better to not let Meteor linger on the fact that two people who hated Toki had escaped together, and that she was looking into them.
“A few?”
“Seventy-nine. In over thirteen billion of people.”
“How do you even know that? I bet you made up that number.”
“Are you doubting my wisdom?”
“You made up that number!”
“My injured feelings will never recover,” Meteor sighed dramatically. “My own daughter is mistrusting my knowledge. It’s terrible.”
(It turned out that he had, actually, made up that number. Fucking called it.)
They spent their lunch talking as usual, chatting about their respective cases and swapping stories. They bickered about everything and nothing, as usual, taking care to change the subject every time the argument started to get heated for real. When you knew how to avoid the minefields, the conversation flowed much more smoothly.
Weirdly enough, the conversation came back to Endeavor. More specifically, Shouto’s work study. Shouto hadn’t sent a request to his father’s agency, so Endeavor had wanted to send a request to Yūei. Meteor had stopped him, and then told him to wait, even if it made Endeavor seethe. Curiously, the Flame Hero had done it.
Toki couldn’t help but wonder how many times Meteor had nudged his boyfriend away from the catastrophe, lately. Endeavor wasn’t the type to listen to anyone meddling in his private business. Even banished from the Todoroki Estate, Meteor felt concerned by their disaster of a relationship.
Toki admitted that Shouto wanted to do more rescue work. But finding a rescue hero with a big flashy Quirk was rare, since they mostly went with frontline work. Toki had suggested Wani. However, Yūei now imposed restriction on the work-studies. Only heroes who already had a good track-record with interns could take a student. Wani had only ever taken two students in his life, and both had been very short internships, so Toki was pretty sure he wouldn’t qualify.
Now she wasn’t sure who to recommend to Shouto. Maybe Pixie-Bob from the Wild Wild Pussycats? On one hand, she used a powerful Quirk, Earth Flow, to shape her environment; and she did mostly rescue work. But on the other hand, the Wild Wild Pussycat had been attacked by the League, so there was no guarantee that this internship would be considered…
Anyway. Meteor managed to cajole Toki into speaking with Shouto and at least suggesting that he thought about interning at the Endeavor Agency. He could even put conditions, like how he wanted to assist in rescue operations instead of combat. Endeavor was too eager to work with his son to try to negotiate something else. The man would accept everything.
It was kind of funny to see Meteor play peacekeeper among the Todoroki, even at a distance. He knew exactly how they reasoned and what argument they would listen to. A Todoroki-whisperer, some part of Toki was sniggering.
But it was also kind of sad.
“You haven’t talked to the Todoroki kids yet?” she asked.
Meteor narrowed his eyes. “You’ve become nosy.”
“I’ve always been nosy,” Toki fired back. “I just used to be discreet.”
Meteor snorted. “Maybe.”
“What do you mean maybe?” Toki sputtered indignantly.
Her father needled her some more about how she was being as subtle as a stomping elephant, and from them they started bickering about her childhood antics, what metric of should be used to judge her level of sneakiness, and if subtlety could be considered a skill when you were a limelight hero who used bright flashes of light with every displacement.
It was only when they had finished their meal and parted ways that Toki realized that Meteor had purposefully steered the conversation in that direction, to avoid answering her question about the Todoroki children.
She rolled her eyes. He could have just said no.
But that wasn’t really how Meteor operated, was it? Toki sighed as she warped in the sky, turning toward Fukuoka and home. In a way, that purposeful silence revealed more about his investment than any misdirection.
Her dad cared about the Todoroki family. She had no doubt about it. But he cared about Endeavor more. The important thing for him was to keep Endeavor, even if that meant letting the kids push him away… even if it hurt him.
That would have been cute if the people involved had been anyone but her father and Endeavor. Ew.
I mean, yeah, they could do worse. So far they seemed to get along well. And Toki couldn’t deny they had been good for each other: Meteor had abandoned villainy and Endeavor was better with his family. Everyone was happier.
But still. Weird. Toki wasn’t used to feeling protective over Meteor.
________________
< Antares: is that weird that I’m both grossed out and weirdly invested in my father’s completely ridiculous love life?
> PikaPika: wait. Your father who was in jail?
< Antares: the very same
< Antares: we reconciled, everything is good, and he’s seeing someone
> PikaPika: congrats?
> NotOnFire: someone you like or more an evil stepmother kind of person?
< Antares: he’s seeing a guy.
> NotOnFire: oh.
> EndeavorSucks: OH.
> PikaPika: no one is straight anymore apparently 😂
< Antares: that was a surprise but turns out he’s always been mostly gay and I’m the result of a weird exception. ANYWAY. he’s seeing someone. it’s weird.
> Antares: mostly because the guy’s family doesn’t like my dad (very understandable) and I think he’s hurt by that?
> Antares: and now I’m feeling… I don’t know.
> Antares: weird.
> EndeavorSucks: it doesn’t seem weird that you would both wants to know as little as possible about your father’s intimate life AND that you’re concerned about his welfare
> PikaPika: yep, that sounds normal 🤷
> PinkIsPunkRock: wait, your father is gay? And seeing someone?!
> PinkIsPunkRock: damn, I’m sort of surprised…. But also not.
< Antares: ????!
< Antares: what is that supposed to mean???
> PinkIsPunkRock: I’ve met him, remember?
> PinkIsPunkRock: he’s way too charming to NOT flirt
< Antares: …
< Antares: are you calling my dad CHARMING?!
> PinkIsPunkRock: I’m a lesbian, not brain damaged
> PinkIsPunkRock: i should have noticed the gay vibe, though
> PinkIsPunkRock: but i was distracted by all the chaos around us at the time
> PinkIsPunkRock: anyway!
> PinkIsPunkRock: even if I don’t really care for guys, I could see he was… interesting.
< Antares: oh gods
> PinkIsPunkRock: to use our good old @EndeavorSuck’s expression: “he’s hot, in a nocturnal animal kind of way”
< Antares: [gagging noises]
> SpicyWings: told you.
< Antares: He’s WEIRD! And threatening! And ominous, and dumb, and annoying! People need to stop thirsting about my dad, seriously, what is WRONG with you people?!
> SpicyWings: excellent taste? 😁
> PikaPika: 🤣 🤣 🤣
> NotOnFire: stay cool Antares xD
< Antares: HHHHHHHHHHH I’m cool. What are you all talking about? Look how cool I am. I’m like. Pickles. That’s how cool I am.
> PinkIsPunkRock: ASDJFASDFJS
> EndeavorSucks: Pickles?
> NotOnFire: 😂
> SpicyWings: cucumber?
> PikaPika: yeah i think you meant cucumber
< Antares: FUCK ME them too whatever IM IN THE FRIDGE. I am fermenting. I am so FUCKING cool right now, I am NEARLY ice.
> PikaPika: I’m not convinced
> PinkIsPunkRock: me either.
> Megamind: wait a second your dad is seeing someone?
> Antares: yeah, and first of all: I’m telling you this in confidence so don’t go repeating it to anyone
> Antares: second of all: AAAAAARGH
> Antares: my life is so complicated
> SpicyWings: there, there
> SpicyWings: want to prank Kameko to feel better? I have catnip.
< Antares: ….
< Antares: I’ll be there in five.
________________
Kameko didn’t fall for the catnip trap, but Ocelot did. That made for a very interesting patrol.
Toki tried to look into Fujio a little more. He had indeed escaped prison with two other people. Rappa and Hansha, the ones that Genmei-san had mentioned. In jail, he had also hung out with a large group of inmates, but he had left them behind to only escape with his two accomplices. According to police reports, they had been sighted together a few times all across Japan.
What could a crew of villains want with the Shie Hassaikai, though?
The only scenario that Toki could picture would be Overhaul needing foot soldiers for his grand plan to ‘go to war against the world’ that he had had in canon. However, Toki didn’t even know if he still had that plan… or if he would want to involve people outside the Shie Hassaikai.
Fujio had his talents. He was a hitman, or rather, had been a hitman. He had operated almost completely independently of the rest of the Crew, too. He didn’t need to rely on people with more powerful Quirks to get buy. He could stalk, analyze, trap, and assassinate any target without the help of a powerhouse. He didn’t need Overhaul. He hadn’t approached Overhaul. It was the opposite: Overhaul had approached him.
Why?
What a complete mess. Toki had no idea where this was going to lead her.
One thing was certain, and that was that she would have to face the Shie Hassaikai, no matter what. She just hoped that neither the League nor Fujio would be there when she did. Seriously, she had enough issues without adding to it.
The lessons at Yūei were going pretty well, so that was that. The students who had failed the provisional license exam (Midoriya, Ashido, Aoyama, Tokoyami and Kaminari) were going to their remedial lessons and didn’t seem to be struggling with them. In class 1-B, Setsuna Tokage had managed to get an internship with Majestic.
Kirishima desperately wanted a work-study too, so Toki had pointed him toward Ryukyu, who was also mentoring Nejire Hadō from the Big Three. Uraraka was insistent on doing her own internship in a combat-focused agency. Toki gave her a bunch of contacts, but she had no great hopes.
Then there was Shouto.
Like Meteor had asked, Toki subtly brought up the topic of his work-study. He still refused to do it with Endeavor. He wasn’t pissed when he said it, but he was firm. He wanted to step out of his father’s shadow. He didn’t hate him; he just didn’t want to have to think about him when he was focused on his own growth. Besides… He was more interested in rescue work. He just didn’t know who to ask. Powerful rescue heroes were rare.
In the end, Toki had cautiously recommended him to Inferno.
Her senpai was a good mentor. He co-mentored Mirio Togata, after all! But also, Toki knew that Inferno did rescue work sometimes. She had once mentioned using fire for rescue work to Shouto because she had been thinking about Inferno. She had seen him cut open cars with super-heated hands and flames concentrated in thin scalpel-like blades. Those seemed like good skills.
Also, it wouldn’t hurt Shouto to be around someone who had a fire Quirk and yet was, personality-wise, the polar-opposite of Endeavor.
So. She helped Shouto draft an email to Inferno’s agency asking for a work-study.
Then she texted Meteor to tell him about it, and Meteor presumably told Endeavor, who threw a tantrum about it, but mercifully didn’t blow Shouto’s phone. Apparently Meteor was doing damage control. All Shouto got was a terse but polite text message from Endeavor saying that he could put a good word to Inferno’s agency if needed.
“He’s very accommodating,” Shouto commented, showing the message to Toki.
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
“I didn’t think he could be, that’s all.”
“You didn’t account for external influences,” Toki muttered.
Shouto side-eyed her. For a brief second, they were both thinking about the same thing… and they were united in their long-suffering bafflement.
“I’m not complaining,” Shouto finally said. “I’m giving him a chance. Nobody said he had to take it all alone.”
Toki almost asked him if that annoyed him: that Endeavor could act like a decent father, but only when someone else shoved reason down his throat and made him realize how selfish he had been. Like he couldn’t have figured it out himself, like he couldn’t have done the effort for Shouto alone.
But she knew the answer. She lived the same scenario, after all.
“Meteor is sad you kicked him out of your house,” she said instead.
Shouto blinked, slowly. “Did he say that?”
“Well, no,” Toki admitted. “But I guessed.”
“Did you? I don’t think he’s really the sharing type.”
“Depends. When it’s about minor annoyances he isn’t able to resist complaining about it. Usually at length. Sometimes in verse. But when it matters, he doesn’t speak about it. That’s how I know it’s bothering him.”
Shouto hummed pensively. “I understand.”
Yeah, Toki would bet. The Todoroki’s collective skill at ignoring really big issues was basically the only reason their family continued to function at all.
“I wouldn’t mind if he came back,” Shouto finally said. “It was better with him there. But Fuyumi and Natsuo aren’t ready.”
Toki patted his shoulder.
“That’s alright. Just… Send him a thank you for interfering with Endeavor, so he stops moping. Alright?”
Shouto did. The next time Toki saw Meteor, for lunch three days later, he looked in much higher spirits. She hid her smile and didn’t ask.
oOoOoOo
September ended with hot weather, clear blue sky, and three heroes killed in mysterious circumstances.
If this had been a manga, Toki would have been there and would have seen it with her own eyes. She would have even tried to stop it. However, since it was real life and she was extraordinarily unlucky right now, all she had was second-hand accounts and the testimonies accessible from the HPSC’s secured database. Neither of those murders was even technically tied to the Shie Hassaikai.
The only thing that had grabbed Toki’s attention was the fact that they had been committed by villains who had been in contact with Overhaul recently… Which was, admittedly, a very big red flag.
Such a big flag, actually, that nobody kicked a fuss when Toki asked for the police reports afterward.
In the first case had been in Kyoto. The victims had been a hero and his sidekick. They had been patrolling in a crowded area. At some point, they had both been stabbed. The crowd had moved away in a panic when they had collapsed, bleeding. A few courageous souls had tried to help, but then Tomura Shigaraki had emerged from the crowd and disintegrated the hero while the civilians were screaming. The sidekick had had his throat slit by Spinner. Then the League had left, using the panic to disappear.
The hero and the sidekick hadn’t used their Quirk to defend themselves. They had screamed, they had begged, but they hadn’t activated their Quirks. Witnesses even said that the young sidekick had been in hysteric, asking over and over again why his powers didn’t work.
Most of the police report was about what Shigaraki had said darkly after disintegrating the hero’s head. “Do you think we’re done with you, heroes?”
Very ominous.
The other murder had happened in Wakayama, the big costal city South of Osaka. It had been a solo hero, mid-forties, with a very strong Quirk. The victim had been patrolling, had seen a robbery, and had tried to intervene. There had been gunshots. The hero had been hit, but had climbed back to his feet immediately… And then one of the villains had beaten him to death with his fists. The hero had a wind manipulation Quirk, but for some reason, he hadn’t used it to defend himself. He had died under the fists of the villain.
Said villain had been identified as Rappa. He was a member of Fujio’s crew, which was unofficially called ‘The Fugitives’ on the Hero Network. They had escaped together; it would make sense that they would stick together still.
And… it meant that Fujio had probably been the one to fire those shots.
Crap.
The double-murder by Shigaraki and the shooting by Fujio both had a common denominator: the heroes had been the targets, and they hadn’t been able to defend themselves. The villains hadn’t been particularly fast, but for some reason the heroes hadn’t wanted or couldn’t use their Quirk during the assault. Of course, nobody knew why. But Toki suspected that in both cases… Quirk-erasing bullets had probably been used.
Double crap.
The forensic team was still working on the scene of the crimes. In Kyoto, there had been no bullets, but there had been an empty syringe wearing Toga’s prints. On the second scene, though, one bullet (which was actually more like a dart) had been found: but since what had been inside had been since injected into the victim, the forensic scientists were unable to know what drug exactly had been inside.
That was the Shie Hassaikai moving, Toki was sure of it. And, unlike canon, they were a few steps ahead of the heroes.
Was it why the Shie Hassaikai had contacted the League and the Fugitives? To have competent people wielding their bullets, so not even one was wasted? But then, did it meant that the Shie Hassaikai were selling their bullets to others, instead of using it themselves?!
Nothing made sense!
At least, the silver lining in that clusterfuck was that… it was now October, meaning that Inferno was now overseeing the case. He immediately sent e-mails to a bunch of heroes asking for a team-up to raid the Shie Hassaikai. Among those guests was Toki, obviously… But also a few familiar names.
Ryukyu. Fat Gum. Majestic. Kesagiri Man. Mr. Brave. Wani. Basalt.
Eraserhead.
“I like the team you’re making,” Toki told Inferno when she dropped by Osaka on the next patrol. “But I could have done without Eraserhead.”
Inferno rolled his eyes and jumped from one rooftop to the next. Toki followed him effortlessly.
“I always planned on asking him. He’s our best bet at countering Overhaul’s Quirk. Also, I just know it, but the Shie Hassaikai is connected to those two cases where the victims had their Quirk erased. Better to have an expert in erasure in our teams.”
Toki nodded. Like her, Inferno had made the connection between the Shie Hassaikai and the murders of the heroes and that sidekick, even though there was no evidence yet.
“I know. He’s a good pick,” she admitted reluctantly. “But I could have done without him. He’s gonna be weird about working with me, I’m gonna be weird about working with him, and it’s going to add tension to the team.”
Inferno raised both eyebrows.
“Tension? Wow. What, did you sleep with him?”
“WHAT?! Ewwww! What the fuck, no!!”
Inferno dodged her punch, raising both hands in surrender, and said hurriedly:
“Fine, fine! I was kidding!”
“Not everything is about sex, you weirdo!”
“Agree to disagree,” he countered with a small smirk. “You would be surprised to know how many heroes have slept together at some point. Some of them walk into a briefing room and can picture every single person in there naked— sometimes including the HPSC liaison and the police commissioner.”
“Ew! I don’t want to know! I’m married!” She saw him opening his mouth and punched him again. “And monogamous!”
“Fine, fine! Mirko is going to be very disappointed, though.”
What the hell did that have to do with anything? Toki blinked, then decided it was unimportant and shoved that information in a corner of her mind. There were priorities.
“Get your mind out of the gutter, senpai. Has anyone connected the two murders with the Shie Hassaikai yet? To their plans to erase Quirks?”
“People who know about the Shie Hassaikai aiming to erase Quirks can be counted on the fingers of one hand,” Inferno told her very seriously, “And it’s better to keep it that way. When Salamander came up with that theory, we kept it very hushed to avoid starting a panic.”
“It’s going to get out eventually, if the Shie Hassaikai are really out there giving villain groups the means to erase heroes’ Quirks!”
“Maybe,” Inferno retorted. “That’s why we have to arrest them before that.”
But Toki knew that they were too late. The cat was out of the bag. The bullets were ready, and some of them had been used. The press hadn’t talked about it, most heroes weren’t aware, and the public was of course obvious, but… more villains would learn about this. The Shie Hassaikai would spread that information as wide as they could.
Quirk-erasing bullets existed.
It was bad enough that the villains would immediately try to buy them, and that it would be one more danger on the streets. Heroes used the Quirks as their main weapon. It would be catastrophic to be suddenly vulnerable.
And then, worse than that, was the fact that soon enough that rumors would reach AFO.
He was locked up in the deepest level of Tartarus, sedated most of the time, and cut from all communication. But Toki just knew that this asshole would find a way to learn about this. And if not him, then his pet doctor who made the Nomu.
AFO, the doctor, Shigaraki, the League… The Meta Liberation Army, the Shie Hassaikai, the Quirk-erasing bullets… All those balls that Toki had to juggle. If she let one fall, it would be bad, but not irreparable. Other heroes could handle the heat. But if those balls collided, merged, combined… Then they would all be in deep shit.
No pressure.
Toki’s knowledge of canon stopped not long after Touya’s reveal, at the beginning of what looked to be a civil war arc in the manga. She had never finished the story. She didn’t know if, in canon, AFO had been able to escape prison. She suspected that he had, sure. Bastards like him were like cockroaches.
She felt jittery and nervous. Not quite anxious, because she had faith in her abilities, but… Uneasy. There were too many unknown parameters. Not only about the League and the Fugitives, but also about the Shie Hassaikai themselves. They were secretive, and Nighteye hadn’t been able to secure an informant. The yakuza were too loyal.
Toki personally thought that Nighteye’s condescension hadn’t helped him in that regard, but that was just her opinion.
Anyway. The next day, she had a lesson with class 1-B. She made separated them in two teams and made them fight, mostly to make them notice how fucking difficult it was to keep track of who did what in the chaos of a battlefield.
They had already experienced part of that lesson when they had faced the League, at the summer camp. When so many things happened all around you, and your body was high on adrenaline and your vision was focused right in front of you, you couldn’t keep track of everything. You fought, you fought, and then at one point you raised your head and realized with a nauseating lurch of dread that you had wandered away from your allies and were completely isolated… Or that two of your friends had been taken down, and you were too far to help… Or that you had no idea where your leader was… Or that you had lost the villain you were supposed to target in the first place…
A battle was messy, chaotic. Toki couldn’t teach them how to order it. All she could teach them was to cope with the chaos, not to freeze, reassess, think to regroup, stay together, and to not panic.
Class 1-A had a better instinctive grasp of it. But then, class 1-A had survived the USJ, their first real battle. It made sense that they had grasped that lesson earlier.
And once the lesson was over, Toki went to track down Eraserhead.
She didn’t find him in a vent, this time. He was on the windowsill of one of the teacher’s apartments, reading the book Toki had given him, and looking like he couldn’t decide between nodding in approval and flinging the book away from him in annoyance. Toki smirked and warped on the windowsill above him.
“Good reading?”
“Instructive,” Aizawa muttered, closing the book. He hadn’t even twitched at her appearance, completely unfazed. “Excessively coddling, but not without sense.”
“Good to know you approve,” Toki said dryly. She paused. “You saw Inferno’s email?”
“Yes.”
Toki chewed over the words for a few seconds, but there was no way to ask that politely, so she just came out and said it.
“Is working with me going to be a problem? Especially the part where I’ll give you orders.”
She would be the highest-ranked hero there. Since the city was Nighteye’s and Inferno’s territory, they would call the shots. But Quantum was not going to be walked over just because she was among the younger heroes.
“I have seniority,” Aizawa pointed out.
Toki frowned. “So? Age isn’t equal to wisdom and experience isn’t equal to intelligence. I am a better fighter than you. I need to know you’ll respect that.”
Aizawa was silent for a second, then nodded.
“I will. Contrary to popular opinion, I know how to respect the chain of command.” The corner of his lips twitched. “Besides, I would accept anything for a chance to do some real hero work again. I haven’t gone out since my stunt with the League.”
Toki blinked, taken aback. She couldn’t clearly see his face from that angle, so she slid down from her perch to sit on the same windowsill as him.
“You haven’t left the school since then?!”
“Only for patrols around the immediate neighborhood,” Aizawa corrected her. Now that Toki was paying attention, he looked… well, still scruffy, but less tired. “Nedzu wants me to stay close to the school. I even moved here.”
It was true that Yūei offered their employee a chance to live inside the school, rent-free. Toki had her own studio there (although she mostly used it as a potential safe-house). She wondered where Aizawa used to live before moving in Yūei. Wait, was he sitting just outside his apartment right now?
A brief glance to the open window behind her revealed a messy appartement with three cats napping on the couch, and a studded leather jacket that definitely didn’t belong to Aizawa thrown across the back of an armchair. Toki suddenly remembered how Present Mic had been the one to bring her the sample of Aizawa’s hair when Toki had wanted to make Neito copy his Quirk.
Uh. Maybe there was something going on there.
The silence had gone on a bit too long. Toki made a face when she realized she was pondering about Aizawa’s living arrangements. There were more fascinating topics of conversation. Like…
“How did your bout of spying go with the League, by the way? I never asked.”
“I’m alive, so it went well,” Aizawa deadpanned.
Toki snorted. He really had low standards if that was his metric for success.
“I meant… Did you manage to really sell the idea of the poor underdog sacrificed by the shiny limelight heroes to preserve their image? A hero turning villain must have looked suspicious. How did you convince them?”
For a second, Aizawa scrutinized her face, and whatever he saw there had him sigh deeply, his shoulders dropping.
“It worked, that’s all that matter,” he admitted, his voice gruff but honest. “But my cover is burned now.”
Toki hesitated, and then scowled herself for hesitating. If she wanted answers, then it was better to be blunt and direct, when dealing with Aizawa. He wouldn’t appreciate it if she tried to walk on eggshells.
“Can you tell me how it went? What you thought of them all?”
Shigaraki, Toga, Dabi, Spinner, Compress… Had he also seen Kurogiri? Hed there been a flicker or recognition? What had Aizawa thought of them all, him who was so cynical and so closed-off?
She didn’t really need to know. She just wanted to. It was useful information and could give her a tactical advantage. After all, they were all in the same boat. It was them against the League.
And… it would reassure her, in a way. Some part of her had been worried about Aizawa going straight to his death, cozying up with a lunatic man-child with murder-hands. Some part of her had also worried about him sympathizing with the League, about him feeling bad for them. Feeling guilt, feeling protectiveness. It was hard to try to get close to someone without humanizing them; it was especially hard, for a hero, to not frame them as a victim, and thus instinctively want to help.
Not that it would have stopped Eraserhead from doing his job, but… she knew how it weighed on you, to hurt people you wanted to protect.
Aizawa looked at her for a long while. She thought he wouldn’t answer. Actually, she was on the verge of laughing it off, telling him to forget about it, and treat it as a joke, when he finally opened his mouth.
“I didn’t meet the whole League,” he said slowly, looking in the distance, towards the quiet park and the trees gently swaying in the breeze. “I never had contact with any of them besides Shigaraki himself, although the warper was hovering in the shadows. They didn’t trust me.”
Toki frowned. “Shigaraki trusted you enough to tell you about the hideout.”
“Oh, no. I just met him not far from there a few times and planted a bug on him.”
“He never brought you into the Kamino hideout?” Toki blinked, thrown.
“No.” Aizawa shook his head. “I couldn’t appear eager to join him, that wasn’t the image I needed to project. I pretended I resented Yūei and that I was willing to listen to him, but that was it. Haste would have been suspicious. So I tried to buy time. I pretended to hesitate; I asked him questions. We had a big debate about what it meant to be a hero and how flawed the current system is. It intrigued him and… he kept coming back.”
For the first time, Aizawa looked almost troubled. Toki sighed, feeling sympathetic. Oh, Aizawa. You aren’t used to playing the double game, are you?
“So you tried to befriend him for months.”
Because that was what Aizawa had been doing. Not trying to convince Shigaraki, but making Shigaraki want to convince him. Making Shigaraki like him. And when you tried so hard to get someone to like you, how could you not feel at least some affinity for them? How could you not understand them, at least a little?
How could you not, when you were a hero, want to save them?
“Yes,” Aizawa said quietly. “He wanted to convince me very badly. I think he liked me. I think he felt understood.”
“Was he? Did you understand his ideals? Did you understand him?”
Aizawa stayed silent for a few seconds. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, and almost… sad.
“I think Shigaraki must have believed in the hero system at one point. He believed that he would be kept safe, and somehow, when he was a kid, he wasn’t. Something bad happened to him, something that deeply traumatized him. Something he had to survive alone. That’s because he believed in heroes so much that it felt like a personal betrayal when he wasn’t saved.”
The words stuck a chord in her. Toki looked down, troubled. She thought about a crumbling building, All Might flying, her father roaring. About a little black notebook, and all the pain and regret that had come from sending it to Sir Nighteye.
The remorse. The horror. The betrayal. Not her betrayal, but the heroes’. The heroes who were supposed to fix things.
Yeah, she understood. She had believed in heroes like the young Tenko Shimura had, too. Naively, blindly, not thinking about the how or the why, just about the fact that they were supposed to keep her safe. The reality had been a harsh shock. Heroes sometimes couldn’t save you. And when you believed in them… of course it hurt. Of course you were angry.
Toki had hated All Might for more than a solid decade, while the guy had only been doing his job.
“And now he wants all heroes to pay for that failure,” she murmured.
If Toki hadn’t been picked up by the HPSC, could she have ended up like him? She had to wonder. The betrayal, the pain and resentment had all been there. If Toki had stayed on the margins of society, it would have been easy for her to grow to hate those who made the system work, and those who benefited from it. It would have been even easier for a shady mentor to stroke the embers of her anger until it turned into a blaze.
Like how Shigaraki had been picked up by AFO, who had spent the rest of his life grooming him to hate All Might like a rabid animal.
“Yes,” Aizawa sighed. “But it’s not just revenge. Shigaraki has beliefs, ideals. Convictions. He’s… He’s attacking heroes because he felt like he was lied to about the fact that they would come to help if he was in trouble, but it’s more than that. He wants the world to see the same truth he was forced to confront. Heroes fail, heroes aren’t reliable, that heroes can’t save you. In his head, he’s fighting to reveal what he believes to be a truth about the world that the people are lied to by a corrupt institution.”
Well, fuck. That was pretty spot-on. Toki hadn’t expected Aizawa to have that much of a deep insight into Shigaraki’s mindset.
“You make it sound almost noble,” she pointed.
Aizawa grimaced, looking a little pained.
“Well, that’s how Shigaraki sees it. But his righteous anger is deeply intermingled with the fact that he’s basically throwing a tantrum and want to destroy things to feel better.”
Toki opened her mouth to say, ‘shame your cover was burned, then,’ and then realization hit her like lightning. Oh gods. Yes, Aizawa’s betrayal had been revealed. That was the problem.
“Fuck. That’s why Nedzu took you back in Yūei. You got to know Shigaraki, you spoke with him for months. He got invested… And then you snitched on him.”
If believing in heroes and being failed had felt to Shigaraki like a personal betrayal warranting the destruction of society…Then how was an actual betrayal going to feel?
“Yeah,” Aizawa said with a bitter smile. “I’m as good as dead the next time I meet him.”
Toki frowned worriedly. “In that case, should you be at Yūei? Wouldn’t it be wiser for you to disappear into the shadows?”
“If it was a normal villain, maybe,” Aizawa admitted. “But Shigaraki isn’t going to forget me to focus on his goal of attacking heroism as a whole. It’s… personal. He’s going to look for me. Hiding wouldn’t work.”
Toki swallowed. “So, ironically, Yūei is the safest place you can be.”
“Yes.” Aizawa’s grin was joyless and crooked. “Nedzu took me back to not have my death on his conscience.”
Damn. Toki hadn’t anticipated that.
oOoOoOo
The League hit again.
This time it was a little closer to Osaka. Almost on the border of the Shie Hassaikai’ territory, actually. Once again, they had killed a hero in broad daylight. A stab wound, a hero who couldn’t use his Quirk, a panicked crowd…
This time Shigaraki had even made a small speech, prowling around the downed hero who was gasping for breath, trying to stop the blood flowing from his wound. Nothing long: basically it was about heroes being liars who couldn’t protect shit, and how they just used violence to protect a corrupt system. Spinner had then jumped on a car to start ranting about the hero killer and his legacy, at which point Shigaraki must have been annoyed about having his thunder stolen because he had killed the hero… and then they had run away.
The police had been distracted by a fire started by Dabi across the city, and meanwhile Twice and Compress had been robbing a jewelry store. The League was better organized. All they had needed had been a nudge in the direction of a semblance of a plan, apparently.
It appeared that the plan was to showcase the Quirk-erasing drug. Which meant that the Shie Hassaikai were their backer.
Toki really didn’t like the idea of Overhaul (a canon psychopath) with the League of Villain as foot soldiers.
From what she remembered from the manga… and from what she had learned from Inferno’s reports… Overhaul was smart. Shigaraki wasn’t stupid per se, but he was immature, and he relied on his intuition a lot. Contrarily, Overhaul didn’t leave things to luck.
Which made him a very dangerous opponent.
But his ideology and the League opposed each other. Overhaul wanted business. The League wanted destruction.
The League wasn’t like yakuza, living off from extorsion and scams. They wanted people dead, not meekly paying protection money. Shigaraki, Dabi, Toga, Spinner… what had brought them together wasn’t the hope they could carve a place in this world, not really.
Their point was destruction. Destroying as much as they could, destroying as much as they felt like before they were killed or left with nothing but ashes. That was Shigaraki’s purpose, to destroy the world to make it pay for his misery as a child. That was Dabi’s purpose, to destroy the hero system to punish his father for daring to love his dream more than his son.
The other members of the League weren’t as crazy, probably. Twice was in there to make friends. Toga was in there to get blood and not be called a freak. Mr. Compress was there because he wanted to hurt the society who had rejected him, although he didn’t seem to have Shigaraki or Dabi’s bloodlust. And Spinner… Well, Toki wasn’t sure why Spinner was there, since the hero killer hadn’t gone mainstream in this universe. But since Spinner still cosplayed like Stain, maybe Spinner still followed the same ideal?
And of course, there was Kurogiri, who was in the League because he was brainwashed and AFO’s puppet. That was a whole other can of worms.
But, to get back to the point... the League hit again. This time they made a show of killing the powerless hero. This time, the fact that the hero couldn’t use their Quirk was noticed. Not by many, and it certainly wasn’t talked about on TV, but… It was noticed.
Soon after, the idea of Quirk-erasing bullets, or rather a Quirk-erasing injectable drug, started to appears in the underground.
That was bad.
It worried Hayasa-sensei, who kept an ear on those kinds of things. It also worried Keigo, mostly because the MLA was foaming at the mouth at the idea that something so blasphemous could be allowed to exist. It also worried Toki a lot more, because those rumor coincided with AFO having a seizure in Tartarus. Nothing serious, nothing that put his health in danger, but… well.
Yagi, who was kept informed, somberly told her that AFO talked to the guards. Or rather, he monologued at them, which was just as creepy. He was also alarmingly well-informed about what was going on in the outside world, for someone who wasn’t allowed to receive any news. He was even aware of Aizawa’s return to Yūei (he had commented on it to a guard, who was mildly freaked-out about it)! He had to have a line of communication with the outside world.
And then he had had his weird seizure.
Right before it, AFO had been in a great mood, telling the guards how nice it was to have answers, and laughing about promising young men. Then he had convulsed for about ten minutes. His brainwaves had spiked wildly. They had only calmed down when AFO had been sedated.
AFO had slipped into sleep with a smirk on his face. When he had woken up three hours later, he claimed not remembering anything.
He had been put into an artificial coma since then, as a precaution. But Toki had a grim certainty that it was too late.
“What are the odds that it’s just his health degrading?” Yagi wondered without much hope.
Toki grimaced.
“Don’t ask me that question and I’ll tell you no lie. I think it’s too suspect that it coincides with the knowledge of Quirk-erasing bullets spreading in the underground. I think he learned about it and made the link with his condition. He’s looking for a solution, like expected. He’s going to want to investigate those bullets. But he can’t do that from Tartarus, so this seizure was him… reaching out, somehow.”
Yagi groaned and rubbed his forehead. “I knew it. Do you know he’s been asking to see me?”
Toki looked at him in alarm: “You’re not seriously considering going?”
“Absolutely not. He probably just wants to gloat. Still, the idea of not interrogating him is… frustrating.”
“He can’t see you.” Toki’s voice was final. “You know the risks. Especially now.”
Yagi was silent for a few seconds. Then he sighed.
“Do you think he… reached out… to Shigaraki?”
The idea of AFO having a telepathic connection to Shigaraki was mildly sickening. But Toki had her canon-knowledge to back her up when she shook her head.
“No way. Shigaraki wouldn’t be a man-child if AFO had direct access to his brain. He would be a puppet. This… telepathic contact… if there even is one! It must be someone else.” She paused. “I don’t really imagine him consenting to connect his brain to another person, though. Maybe there’s a Nomu created to act as some sort of answering machine? Receive message, record it, play it when ordered. And if Shigaraki knows where the Nomu are stored, then he can get his sensei’s voicemail.”
Yagi looked mildly horrified. “Where do you get those ideas?”
“It’s just what I would do if I was a narcissist psychopath hellbent on world-domination!” Toki defended herself.
“This is not as reassuring as you think it is,” Yagi muttered. “And Gran Torino still hasn’t found where those Nomu were stored.”
That was what Gran Torino was doing, lately. He’d been combing Japan for AFO’s hideouts. The Nomu had to come from somewhere. Apparently Shigaraki didn’t know where (or else he would have used them already, instead of relying on the Shie Hassaikai’s drug), but he would find out at some point. It was a race between Gran Torino’s investigation and the League, to see who would rob the other of those resources.
The League was dangerous enough without it.
At least the League’s numbers had been greatly reduced. A lot of them had been captured at the summer camp. Mustard, Muscular, Moonfish, Magne… Their European ally, Sidero… And Stain, who had been caught at Korusan.
Days passed.
Toki was starting to get nervous. She had always hated the waiting part of any operation. It always gave her way too much time to think.
She thought of all that could go wrong. She thought of her students, and how she had agreed to take her fledglings with her for that mission, and what the hell had she been thinking? They were all too young to face yakuza! And then she reasoned herself, resolved to pair every kid with an experienced hero… and then she wondered what she would do if the Fugitives were with the Shie Hassaikai when the raid would take place. Or worse, the League. Shit, what if they had recruited? What if some other nutcase had pledged themselves to Stain’s cause?
Anyone who revered Stain was going to hate Toki. She had been credited for his takedown because she had been the one to visibly Warp-Blast him twice. Once in the air, and once against a wall. But she knew that the last take-down had been Meteor’s work.
And now Stain was in a coma, probably a vegetable because he had had a serious brain hemorrhage, and more or less crippled for life. So Toki expected at least Spinner, in his shitty Stain cosplay, to be out for her blood because he thought her responsible for the state of his idol.
… Actually, Toki had to expect that most of the League would be out for her blood. She had singlehandedly rescued everyone in the summer camp and captured a few of their members there… She had rescued Hitoshi right under their noses at Korusan, and (officially) crippled Stain… And she had helped finish AFO at Kamino. She hadn’t been the one to deal the final blow, but her assistance had certainly helped All Might to last long enough for Endeavor to arrive at the rescue.
Yay.
Cherry on the top, Toki had in several occasions vocally disagreed with the hero killer’s ideology. Of course, it wasn’t called “the hero killer’s ideology” online, just the “fake heroes theory” but she had opposed it all the same. One of her most watched interviews on YouTube was about how she wasn’t going to die for her job, and people should be kinder to heroes who worked hard, just like paramedics and firefighters. She completely opposed the belief that being paid made heroes “fake.”
But to be fair, Toki had always been of the opinion that Stain’s ideology was bullshit.
It was all because of a name. Heroes. If pro-heroes weren’t called heroes but something else, like Quirked Police or something that implies that they were simply a special force allowed to use quirks to subdue villains (villains who would be then called criminals, like normal people), then Stain’s ideology wouldn’t have such traction.
People associated the word “hero” with someone doing selfless, helpful actions, saving someone for no benefit of their own. It was also a picture that the media had no problem relying, with All Might being hailed at this bigger-than-life figure who existed only to make Japan safe.
But the “fake hero” theories called out the fact that pro-heroes were getting paid, had flaws, wanted recognition, got tired, and only worked eight hours a day thus making them “fake heroes” and only hypocrites and celebrities. But they were only people, at the end of the day. Which, somehow, infuriated them more. Heroes weren’t supposed to be human… and they weren’t supposed to be just people doing jobs. They were supposed to be perfect and selfless, and the crowd who wanted perfection was pissed when they didn’t get what had been advertised.
It had been stupid of the government to call professional Quirk-users Heroes, like the real world was some comic book. But it had glam. It also had been a good PR move to calm the masses. It had also allowed the government to reassure the Quirked vigilantes that they were going to be respected, that the State wasn’t going to take advantage of them. That they would be treated as heroes and not villains.
At the time, when the age of pro-heroes had begun, it had probably been empowering for the people who had been criminalized for so long for using their Quirk to save lives, to be literally and officially dubbed heroes. But in the long term— it had created toxic expectations.
Language had power.
It was funny, Toki mused, that the concept of hero had changed so much with time. For much of History, it was just someone to be admired. They were not good; they were not bad. They were just the pinnacle of what the society considered the ideal person. Like those Greek demigods, who were all called heroes as they accomplished miracles as well as slaughters. Then the definition of heroes had evolved into the concept of the perfect warrior. Medieval knight, that sort of thing. From then, sometimes the term was used to qualify a soldier who did something epic.
And then somewhere around the turn of the nineteenth century, comic books came out, and the idea of a hero turned away from a soldier to someone who stopped crime. Funnily enough, however, this coincided with the evolution of the police. Modern police had evolved in the late nineteenth century from city guards to as completely different institution, with the backing of the government.
There was something in there. Heroes, not as epic warriors, or legendary figures, but as individuals keeping order… and, in reverse, the inherent message that people who kept order were also, by nature, figures that should inspire awe.
Yeah, there was something in here. A subtle and yet unyielding thread of police-glorifying propaganda. Born in the nineteenth century, and now so deeply entrenched into societal expectations that nobody thought to look for it.
Language had power. It was so easy to forget it.
That was this advertisement, this choice of words who was the issue. If pro-heroes were just called Quirked Police, and did their job instead of being desperate to sell their image… Then they would be treated like people tasked with keeping order, not humans pretending to be gods and failing to deliver. And then, no one would have a problem with them earning their living. No one would have a problem with some heroes being brash and angry, or some other wanting to enjoy the spotlight, or… heroes being flawed in general. It was unfair to want them to be perfect.
Heroes weren’t fake for being human. But Toki could understand why it felt so comforting for angry people to cling to that indignation. Heroes weren’t supposed to be people, they were supposed to be products. They were supposed to be good and perfect, so that, in this capitalist society where everything was about identifying with what you consumed, supporting heroes automatically made you a good person.
But it wasn’t so simple.
And thus when a hero turned out to be a real, complex person, their dismayed fans perceived the sudden conflict between their moral signaling and the hero’s complex lived identity as a betrayal; and responded with reflexive horror and outrage. That’s how you got Stain, Spinner, and believers of that damned ideology. They attacked, because actually they were defending their own hurt feelings, and their own jeopardized identity as a good person who supported good people.
But again, real actual heroes were very often unpalatable when you looked past the masks. They were selfish, they whined, they had affairs, they worried about money, they were rude, they were spiteful. And that was normal, because heroes were people, and people were not meant for consumption.
Sometimes heroes weren’t pleasant, because even when they sold their public persona and cultivated their image, they weren’t products. It was a feature, not a failing.
Supporting heroes and the heroic industry got a lot less emotionally complicated when you knew, fundamentally, that you didn’t have to like those people. They weren’t symbols. They weren’t gods. They weren’t selfless paragon of virtues.
They were just people doing a job.
That was the hero killer hadn’t managed to get. His angry ranting and his killing spree were a child’s tantrum when the world refused to be as black and white as he wanted it to be, the good and the evil not broken up into straight lines. But there was no good and evil. The world was not so simple.
There were only the scared and the rash, here, only the wise and the selfish.
Heroism was a career. It was an action. It was a choice. You weren’t born made for it— pure, holy, and destined to be wholesome— you worked at it. You helped people. You chose, with all your imperfections, to make the world a little better.
And Toki was remembered, irresistibly, of a conversation long-past with Keigo.
I have the skills; I have the will. I’m good at it, and it needs doing. It’s a duty, but it’s also a choice. I’m a hero because… because I can, and so I should.
That was why Toki was a hero. That was why Endeavor, brash and brutal and who had abused his family for years, was a hero. That was why Meteor, bloodthirsty and remorseless, was a hero. Just like how Keigo was hero, and Inferno, and Aizawa, and all those people who had flaws and skeletons in their closets, who sometimes barely liked people, and still tried so hard to save the world.
None of them were perfect. Maybe they weren’t even good. But still, they tried.
“Earth to Quantum,” Inferno said, poking her shoulder. “Jeez, don’t fall asleep on me.”
“I’m not,” Toki protested. “I was just lost in thought.”
Toki had swung by Osaka to debrief about some last-minute change in the raid composition and had managed to wrangle her way into making Inferno pay for lunch.
“You, lost in thought?” Her senpai grinned. “Must have been frightening.”
“Terrifying,” Toki deadpanned. “After all, I’ve never been before.”
Inferno groaned, slouching in his chair.
“You’re no fun to tease if you get to the punchlines first.”
“Well, I can’t make everything easy for you, senpai.”
Inferno snorted, and then finished his soda, before becoming serious again. “Back to business. I’ve added more people to my strike team. There is a strong possibility that the League will be in the city when we raid the Shie Hassaikai. Or, might try to come to their aid. We don’t have anything substantial linking them, but… They have been in contact. And if they’re there… You know what it means for you?”
“Yeah,” Toki frowned. “I’m on the League’s case. They’re my priorities. If they’re here, I have to leave the yakuza to you, and focus on Kurogiri.”
“Yeah, pretty much.” Inferno paused, frowning. “I’m going to have you lead a team. If the League is there, they can clear your way.”
“Sure. Put Eraserhead in it, though.”
Inferno looked surprised, “I thought you didn’t like him?”
“I don’t, but I can be mature. And if the League is there, Shigaraki is going to go after Eraserhead in priority. He’ll be bait.”
“I’m sure he’ll be delighted.”
They prepared. They planned. They studied the layout of the building, the exits, and the possible tunnels. They analyzed their targets’ Quirk, their weapons, their skills. They tracked the most dangerous one. They assessed the risks. They mustered their forces.
The day of the raid was almost there.
Notes:
Ironically the ones that can picture everyone naked when walking into a briefing room is not Inferno. It's his ex, Majestic, and his boyfriend, Salamander. Inferno is surrounded by hoes.
Anyway! I hope you liked it ! =)
The raid takes forever to arrive, i know, but i keep being delayed by things i want to write, sooooooo you get more chapters out of it, i guess x)
Chapter 72: Planning the raid
Summary:
Toki is preparing the Shie Hassaikai's raid. She is also tripping over a landmine named Nighteye.
Notes:
I'm trying to get to the raid proper but i keep being delayed by stuff i should have written before, grrrrr.
Anyway! If you're a fan of Nighteye, well.... you're not gonna like this chapter x) He's an ass. He has excuses, and maybe even reasons: but he's still an ass.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
PLANNING THE RAID
The day before the raid wasn’t a good one.
From the moment the sun rose, Toki knew this day was going to be a clusterfuck. They were out of sugar for her tea, Keigo had forgotten to put her jacket in the dryer so she had to take one of her spare ones, and when Toki warped in Yūei she realized that she was going to have to supervise this lesson with both Yagi and Aizawa. Separately they were fine, but when they were together... it was tense.
There was a hint of coldness from Yagi and a weird self-consciousness from Aizawa that annoyed Toki. She had forgiven Eraserhead, but Yagi clearly hadn’t.
This lesson wasn’t a walk in the park either. Like she had done with class 1-B a few days ago, Toki had divided class 1-A in two groups that had to fight. The first group to secure the area won. They would fight in one of Yūei’s training grounds, with plenty of buildings, cars, even half-constructed structures and scaffolding to climb easily. Plenty of places to chase each other, jump from, and hide. The goal, obviously, was to give the kids a taste of how chaotic a battle could be.
What she hadn’t planned for was that Midoriya would burst with black tentacles of energy within fifteen minutes.
“What the fuck?” Toki jumped to her feet.
The teachers were spread out around the battlefield and had radios to communicate, so she heard Aizawa swear. “I take that wasn’t planned?”
“No!”
It was chaos. Midoriya was screaming in both pain and fright, and the long tendrils of black energy were writing like rabid snakes, lashing out in every direction. A crane, caught by a tendril, collapsed with a screech of broken metal. The other kids scattered like sparrows.
“Do we stop the fight?” Toki fretted, “He doesn’t look like he’s in control!”
“Give him a minute,” Aizawa said evenly.
“You need to intervene!” Yagi exclaimed in his radio.
“Give him a minute,” Aizawa repeated. “One minute. Let him try alone. I’ll stop it if neither him nor the other students can get things back on track.”
Toki anxiously counted the seconds. But Midoriya didn’t manage to get this thing under control.
It went on, and on, everyone hoping that Midoriya would take control… it was brutal. Everyone was too far away now. Even if Hitoshi tried to call him and tried to make him call down, it was doubtful that his voice could carry this far, especially with the tentacles crashing through buildings and tearing out rubble.
“Eraser!” Yagi yelled in her radio, just as they reached the fifty-seventh second.
“On it.”
It only took a handful of seconds for Eraser to swing high and get Midoriya in his field of vision. The black tendrils of energy suddenly disappeared. Midoriya fell to the ground, flailing.
“Looks like it was his own Quirk,” Aizawa said, sounding surprised. “What the hell was that?”
Toki groaned. She had a feeling she knew.
In canon, Midoriya had awakened the Quirk of a past-user of OFA. This one was a Quirk named Black Whip, or something like that. Seeing it in a manga or an anime didn’t really do justice to the actual visual of energy tendrils lashing out wildly, but… Toki had a feeling that it was exactly what had happened here.
She thought for sure that it had happened later, maybe in November? In any case, it was supposed to happen during the Joint Training Arc, in winter... after the Shie Hassaikai, the Billboard Announcement, and the School Festival Arc. Had Toki forgotten the chronology? … Or had this Midoriya progressed faster?
There was a second of hesitation, the other students weren’t sure whether the fight was supposed to go on or not. Then Toki warped in the middle of the arena and put two fingers to her lips to let out a shrill whistle.
Oh, yeah, a whistle. That would be a good teaching tool. Like the star stickers!
“Listen up! The fight is suspended. Is anyone injured?”
There was a chorus of negative answers. Midoriya was climbing to his feet, looking shaken. Toki put a hand on his shoulder without looking at him.
“Good. Then you have two minutes before the fight resumes, starting now. Except you, Midoriya, you’re out.”
“I can fight!” he argued. “I can handle it!”
“Can you control what just happened?”
“Er…”
“Then you’re out,” she said firmly. “To be clear, this isn’t a sanction, this is just precaution. You need a supplemental lesson in control before being allowed near a battle. Come on.”
She warped away, her hand still on Midoriya’s shoulder, and he disappeared with her.
She didn’t warp back to Yagi’s position. That would have made Aizawa a tiny bit suspicious, if she went to the depowered All Might and not to the guy who could cancel out-of-control Quirks with just a look. Instead she went back to her own position, with Midoriya in tow, and calmly informed the other teachers that she would keep an eye on him until the end of the fight. Afterward, she would debrief with him, as his homeroom teacher.
She knew Yagi would tag along for this debriefing, but Aizawa didn’t have to know that.
The fight restarted. Toki watched for a few seconds to make sure everything was fine, and then glanced back at Midoriya. He looked queasy. Everyone in both class 1-A and class 1-B had experienced Toki’s Warp-Space, but some of them were more uneasy with it than others.
“It was One For All acting up, wasn’t it?” she said lowly, taking care to mute her radio.
“Y-yeah… I had a— some sort of vision I think – when I collapsed. I think I passed out for a second…”
“Let’s go to the infirmary,” Toki decided.
“B-B-But I’m fine now!”
“You passed out after an uncontrolled Quirk outburst that made you fall ten meters,” Toki deadpanned. “At the very least, Recovery Girl can check you for a concussion.” She taped the radio at her ear. “Eraser, Yagi-san, you got that? I’m taking Midoriya to the nurse, and then we’ll debrief. I’m letting you handle this exercise by yourselves. Do you need me to send another teacher to replace me?”
“We’ll be fine,” Yagi said, voice tense. “Is Young Midoriya okay?”
“He fainted for a second when he fell down. Nothing serious. You’re welcome to our debrief when this exercise is over… If Eraser can handle bringing the whole class back to their dormitories.”
And just like that, she gave Yagi an opening, while making sure Aizawa would be busy and couldn’t join them. Yagi agreed immediately. Aizawa did, too, although a bit slower, and with some suspicion coloring his voice.
No matter. Things were already settled.
Toki brought Midoriya to Recovery Girl, who declared him perfectly fine. Then she brought him to the roof to kill time until Yagi arrived, and reassured him that really, he wasn’t in trouble.
Midoriya was less skittish than he had been at the beginning of the school year. He had gained some confidence. But Toki couldn’t help but compare him to the Midoriya of her canon-memories, who could be openly defiant towards authority figures sometimes… and she wondered if this Midoriya wasn’t a little shyer.
He didn’t stutter anymore, but he was still awkward. He had a hard time saying no. He very rarely argued with others and floundered when he had to take command of a group. He could, but when someone contested his authority, he struggled with shutting down the challenge. He didn’t like to do it. Being forceful didn’t come to him naturally.
Toki wondered if it was because, in this world, Midoriya hadn’t grown as a hero side-by-side with Bakugo.
It had been a while since she had thought of him. She wondered if everything was going well for Bakugo, too. Keigo may know something. She would ask him. Bakugo thrived in the Naruto Labs, but Toki was still persuaded that this infiltration mission was too much and too soon. Too dangerous. Bakugo was fifteen. He should be in school.
But he wasn’t. And more specifically, he wasn’t at Yūei.
Of course, it wasn’t a bad thing. Midoriya had been allowed to grow on his own, to not be afraid of speaking up in class, to forge bonds with friends, and to pass his first battle exercise without being nearly murdered via nitroglycerine-powered bomb. But… Without Bakugo here, Midoriya hadn’t been pushed to be assertive. He was assertive in time of crisis, but more like Hitoshi was, or maybe Iida. Firm, but not incandescent with conviction, not like Bakugo was.
It wasn’t good or bad. Midoriya’s passion for heroism, his determination, the brightness of his conviction— it had never depended on Katsuki Bakugo. But it was undeniable that Bakugo’s presence at his side, or at least in close proximity, would have made Midoriya strain to become… a different sort of hero. Yell louder when he was angry, take charge with more energy in his voice when he had to bark orders, stand straighter when confronted with social interaction, maybe tell people to go to hell when they pried in his business.
Midoriya wasn’t meek anymore. He hadn’t been meek in nearly a year. But he had drawn inspiration from Uraraka’s chatter, Iida rigid terseness, and Hitoshi’s snark… rather than trying to emulate Bakugo’s charisma and loud confidence.
It hadn’t changed him much. But it had impacted him. Midoriya was more settled, and yet less assertive. It didn’t make him better or worse than canon, just… different.
“So, what happened?” Yagi asked when he finally joined them.
Midoriya scratched his head, and then looked at his hand, frowning.
“It’s hard to explain. Suddenly I was overflowing with power. It was as if something I trusted until them had suddenly bared its fangs. I was… really scared… I really had no idea of what was going on. When Aizawa-sensei shut of my Quirk, it felt like being submerged in cold water. That must be when I passed out.”
“Will it happen again?” Toki asked bluntly.
“Maybe?” Midoriya hesitated. “I should be able to control it, in time, like the rest of One For All.”
“The rest of One For All?” Yagi parroted. “You mean the strength?”
“Yes, but also… Those tendrils, it’s a Quirk. It’s called Blackwhip. It was the Quirk of one of One For All’s past user. I used his Quirk! That’s what my dream must have meant!”
Toki raised a hand.
“Wait, hold on. What dream?”
Midoriya then enthusiastically explained to her that he had had a dream of a shadowy figure giving him a cryptic prediction about how it “wasn’t time yet,” before waking up with his Quirk activating on its own. Said shadowy figure was tied to One For All, Midoriya was sure, because he had seen shadows like that when his Quirk had activated on its own, one time he had been training with Hitoshi.
Midoriya thought that they were ghosts of the previous users of One For All. Like memories, or fingerprints in the core of the Quirk.
“But it’s not it,” Midoriya concluded, almost vibrating with energy. “The past users… They are living inside One For All! They’re not ghosts, they’re Vestiges!”
“Meaning they can talk to you?” Toki clarified.
Yagi looked shocked, but Toki was taking it in stride. Thanks for her canon-memories. If she was just learning that, she would probably have a big freak-out about having someone’s soul transmitted with a piece of hair. That sounded like something that could give you an existential crisis.
But then, Toki was kind of ahead of that, too. When you reincarnated in a seemingly fictional world, that raised your tolerance for what constituted a miracle.
“You saw them?” Yagi croaked.
“Well, no,” Midoriya admitted. “All those times, they were just fuzzy outlines. And when I passed out… I only saw the man who had Blackwhip. He was tall, and bald…”
He looked at Yagi hopefully. The man looked thoughtful:
“That doesn’t ring a bell. I’m going to look into the Quirk’s past users.”
“That would be for the best,” Toki drawled. “Because Midoriya awakened the Quirk of one past user, then nothing tells us he can’t awaken the others.”
“Oh, yes,” Midoriya remembered, a little sheepishly. “He said that their Quirks mixed with the core of One For All… Part of them is in the Quirk itself. Their Quirks are in the Quirk. All of them. I’m going to manifest six more Quirks.”
Yagi sat down. Poor guy looked like he needed it. Toki understood the feeling. Midoriya barreled on:
“But every Quirk also has the cultivated power of One For All, so every Quirk is much, much more stronger than what the past users had! The man I saw in my vision… He said that after going through eight people, One For All is incredibly powerful.”
Toki groaned.
“I hope it’s not going to be like that every time. What kind of Quirks are you going to have, anyway?”
Her canon-knowledge didn’t stretch that far. Maybe she vaguely remembered Midoriya having some kind of “Spider Sense” for danger during the war arc, but she wasn’t actually sure. Maybe it had just been his intuition. After that… In canon, Midoriya must have awakened his other Quirks after the war arc, and after leaving school... meaning that Toki had never read that part in the manga.
“I d-don’t know,” Midoriya hesitated, suddenly unsure. “I couldn’t ask… I can’t speak when I’m dreaming of the past users.”
Toki and him both looked at Yagi, who then raised his hands and defended himself:
“I don’t know either! I have to look into it! The only Quirk I know is… my mentor’s Quirk. It was Float. She could levitate in the air.”
He cleared his throat, sounding a little emotional. Toki abruptly remembered that the last time she had heard a mention of Yagi’s mentor, it had been in All For One’s mouth, describing with pleasure what he had done to her, and to her family.
Yikes.
“Oh, like Uraraka-san!” Midoriya perked up.
“Yes,” Yagi said softly. “A little like her.”
Toki let a few seconds pass, and then cleared her throat. She didn’t want this conversation to turn towards the dead Nana Shimura and her legacy. Especially since she was very aware that this legacy included the murder-happy Shigaraki.
“Do you think you can control Blackwhip? For the lessons in class… or the remedial training for your provisional license?”
The five students who hadn’t gotten their provisional licenses had weekly remedial lessons at the stadium. There had never been any problems, and Toki didn’t expect there would be. After all, Shigaraki’s focus wasn’t on Midoriya. It was on Toki and, at worst, on Hitoshi.
Still, if Midoriya started swinging around a second Quirk, that could attract attention.
“I won’t use it!” Midoriya swore. “I’m going to train with it to be able to use it safely, but in the meantime, I’ll keep it hidden!”
Toki couldn’t help but think again of what kind of impact Bakugo’s absence had had on Midoriya. Canon-Midoriya would have claimed that he wouldn’t mess up because he could control Blackwhip. He would have immediately pushed himself to be able to use that new Quirk. But this Midoriya was playing things safe. His plan was to learn how to use it in secret, first and foremost.
He was acting like Hitoshi would, or maybe Uraraka. Hide this new ace in his sleeve instead of yelling it from the top of his lungs. Was it good? Was it bad?
Did it even make a difference?
Toki knew that in a fight, Midoriya was probably stronger than he had been in canon. Better trained, more versatile. Just as single-minded, but with less tunnel-vision. Less brutal. If he was thrust in a war without warning, he would be more reactive, more attentive, and more observant. He would strategize better. He would lead better.
But would he have in him the violence necessary to meet on the battlefield someone who was stronger than him and wanted him dead? When there was no time to hesitate or to doubt, when it was kill or be killed?
Would he be able to strip down his reluctance, his hesitation, and fight back like a cornered animal, like nothing mattered but the blood, the pain, the victory?
That wasn’t something you could be taught. Well, maybe you could, like Aizawa had taught Toki and Keigo. But it made Toki feel faintly nauseous to think about inflicting that kind of terror on someone else. The instinct to fight… People gained it by force.
Of course it wasn’t pleasant. Growing up around Bakugo hadn’t been pleasant for Midoriya, and sharing a high school with him wouldn’t have been very pleasant either. But he would have taught him how to deal with the fear.
He would have grown stronger, not for being afraid, but for growing past it. For finding love and confidence in spite of it.
Had he lost something by not learning how to be a hero alongside Bakugo?
Would it be dangerous for him, if he was thrusted into a war? Could he be thrusted into a war, in this world? Could Toki shield him from that?
Could she afford to not prepare for a war anyway?
“Fine,” Toki said. She looked at Yagi first, then at Midoriya. “Keep it hidden. But from now on, daily training with me or Aizawa. You need to be able to handle that Quirk under pressure. Unless you have an objection, Yagi-san?”
The man sighed.
“No, no, you’re right. If the new Quirks manifest themselves violently… Young Midoriya needs to be prepared.” He paused. “I’ll supervise the training with Aizawa, though.”
Yeah, Toki could understand why. And she didn’t want to tell Yagi to not coddle him, but she also didn’t want him to think she would even slightly hope that Aizawa beat the kid bloody. He was the kind of tough teacher Midoriya needed right now. He was just tough enough to push past Midoriya’s limit since he didn’t enjoy needless violence anymore.
“Alright. I’ll be busy dealing with yakuza, anyway.”
“… Have fun?”
oOoOoOo
> Moxie: what’s up?
> PinkIsPunkRock: waiting for my knight in shining armor (ibuprofen) to rescue me from the horrors (head hurty)
> Megamind: 🤣
> NotOnFire: terrible fate
> PinkIsPunkRock: what’s up Moxie?
> Moxie: nothing much
> Moxie: bored
> Moxie: i’m making the schematics for a giant mecha-suit
> Moxie: in case i even want to fight an S-ranked villain or something
> Moxie: but I’m at school, I don’t have access the materials (not since I broke up with my girlfriend in the support department, at least)
> Moxie: so I’m bored
> Moxie: going to create a Tumblr account to be able to lose my time more efficiently
> PinkIsPunkRock: xD
> Megamind: Tumblr is perfect to lose your time
> Megamind: i think everyone here has an account
> Megamind: except Antares and Spicy because they’re old and boring
> Moxie: oh, roasted!
> NotOnFire: Speaking of tumblr!
> NotOnFire: I saw a post saying that Boromir looked too scruffy in FOTR for a captain of gondor, and I tried to move on, but I’m hyperfixating.
> EndeavorSucks: oh boy…
> NotOnFire: no, listen to me
> NotOnFire: has anyone ever solo backpacked? i have. by the end, not only did I look like shit, but by day two i was talking to myself. on another occasion i did 14 days’ backcountry in a group of twelve men with one single woman, no showers, no deodorant… and brother, by the end of that we were all EXTREMELY feral. you think we looked like heirs to the throne of anywhere? we were thirteen wolverines in ripstop.
> EndeavorSucks: 🤣
> EndeavorSucks: is that why you’re still single?
> NotOnFire: hey fuck you
> NotOnFire: are you in a relationship? no? shut up
> EndeavorSucks: i am a strong independent man and I don’t need no man
> PinkIsPunkRock: i bet you still have Grind
> EndeavorSucks: …. yeah
> EndeavorSucks: i can’t escape my fate
> EndeavorSucks: it’s haunting me
> EndeavorSucks: Google, stop showing me sex ads!
> EndeavorSucks: I know there are desperate sluts in my area, I HAVE A MIRROR!
> Megamind: 🤣🤣🤣
> NotOnFire: at least he’s self-aware xD
> PinkIsPunkRock: to know thy self is to know happiness!
> EndeavorSucks: that sound like the slogan of a sex-shop
> Megamind: pervert.
< Antares: wtf is going on here
< Antares: Megamind, aren’t you at work?
> Megamind: paperwork
> Megamind: it’s friday
< Antares: oh yeah right
< Antares: i had a crazy morning at Yūei, I forgot
> Megamind: oh?
< Antares: your classmates are wreaking havoc, the usual
< Megamind: speaking of classmates! Can I invite one here?
< Megamind: i already know that a few of them are on the general server, but I was thinking of inviting someone else in that particular chat, with the restricted access?
> PinkIsPunkRock: who?
< Antares: you have classmates in the server? This server?
> Megamind: uh, yeah. SmallMight, Uravity, Creation, OhMyCellophane, ChargeboltTheBold…
> Megamind: and I know Phantom has invited classmates too. Like Lizardy and BadOmen
< Antares: alright, and who do you want to invite into the #StarChickenConspiracy?
< Antares: (i still think it’s a stupid name)
> Megamind: Shouto
< Antares: WHAT
> NotOnFire: what’s Shouto
> PinkIsPunkRock: what, *that* Shouto?!
> Megamind: he knows who you are Antares, so… he’s qualified
< Antares: no!
> Megamind: why not?!
< Antares: 1) you can’t give Discord to Shouto, that’s a gateway to social media and he CAN’T get social media, he would become too powerful.
< Antares: 2) do NOT invite him in a server where at least 3 people are thirsting for his dad’s dick. please.
> PinkIsPunkRock: yeah that’s not a great selling point
> Megamind: …. i did not think of that
> NotOnFire: what, what dick
> EndeavorSucks: isn’t that supposed to be my line?
> NotOnFire: continue like that and im gonna be slutshaming
> EndeavorSucks: you wouldn’t dare
> PinkIsPunkRock: SLUT SHAME HIM
> Moxie: shame. shame. shame.
> NotOnFire: SHAME. SHAME. SHAME.
> Megamind: 😂
> Megamind: so that’s a no for Shouto?
< Antares: does he even use Discord? understand memes? leave the poor boy alone.
> NotOnFire: I still don’t know what dick you were talking about
< Antares: 😇
> Megamind: 😇
> PinkIsPunkRock: ANYWAY
> PinkIsPunkRock: I re-read the hunger games yesterday
> PinkIsPunkRock: you’ve got to love how the author gave Katniss and Peeta the character goals of “keep Prim safe” and “stay myself” and then just flatly denied them both
> PinkIsPunkRock: utterly ripped out my heart
< Antares: yeah
< Antares: and of course, in a way, that’s the whole point
< Antares: the fact that they can’t accomplish their goals I mean
< Antares: when you return home, at the end of it all, having survived a rebellion you started, and having lost everyone and everything you had before in the crossfire … when you have to look that person in the eyes, survivor’s guilt deep in your gut, and think “I did this for you, didn’t I? … so what do we do now?”
< Antares: the answer, the only thing you can do, stubborn wildflowers amongst the ash: grow
> PinkIsPunkRock: …
> EndeavorSucks: What the fuck, what a banger quote
> Megamind: That’s not what I expected to read on Discord
> Moxie: Why do you people feel profound thoughts have to come from high places? The gutter looks at the stars too.
> EndeavorSucks: …
< Antares: …
> NotOnFire: wait a fucking second
> NotOnFire: the dick you were talking about is ENDEAVOR’S DICK?
________________
Friday was a work-study day. So at lunch, Quantum and Phantom Thief meet with Hawks and Cheshire, like every Friday at noon. It was a chance for the kids to catch their breath, and for Toki and Keigo to eat together. And it was a real meal, not some onigiri eaten while patrolling. Meteor would be so proud. He was always disapproving of Toki missing meals or eating prepackaged onigiri.
Mother-hen.
“Look at this,” Toki said as she shoved her phone under Keigo’s nose to show him that conversation. “This is why we can’t have nice things.”
“I’m sorry alright?” Hitoshi whined. “Not my fault that everyone on the planet is obsessed with Endeavor’s junk.”
Neito chocked on his drink. “Shit, what did I miss?”
“Look at the StarChickenConspiracy chat,” Hitoshi advised him. “I tried to recruit Shouto, and Toki started freaking out.”
“Ooooh, you call him Shouto?”
“I have to! I know too many Todoroki now. I have his brother and his sister’s numbers; I can’t all call them the same thing.”
Toki blinked, taken aback. She had Fuyumi’s number, too, but not Natsuo’s. Well, she had Endeavor’s, so technically they had the same amount of Todoroki in their contacts when it came down to it, but…
“Why do you have their numbers?” she couldn’t help but wonder.
“Fuyumi wanted to keep in touch with Shouto’s friends,” Hitoshi said easily. “Natsuo plays Baldur’s Gate 9 online and wanted to join a party.”
“You play Baldur’s Gate?” Toki blinked.
“Yeah, with Kirishima and Ashido. We have a cool setup in the dorms.”
Toki would take his word for it. She had rarely played video games, even when she had been a kid at Naruto Labs. Now, she really didn’t have the time. She preferred to read, if she could. Did that make her old-fashioned?
“Inviting Shouto to the Discord server would be a bad idea anyway,” Neito added. “He doesn’t need more bad influences in his life. He’s like, two steps away from becoming a delinquent.”
Toki opened her mouth to protest, and then shut it. Neito wasn’t…. completely wrong.
“Surely you exaggerate,” Keigo laughed, giving back her phone to Toki. “He seems kind of blunt, but he was polite and respectful when I met him.”
“You meet him once!” Neito protested. “When he’s polite, it’s completely accidental.”
“Yeah, I concur.” Hitoshi nodded. “Shouto lives on his own planet. He genuinely doesn’t give a fuck about implicit rules, and he barely respect the explicit ones.”
Keigo raised both eyebrows and looked at Toki. Reluctantly, she had to agree.
“It’s true. He’s not doing it to be smart, and he doesn’t even look for loopholes, but he’s… I don’t know. Kind of dismissive towards all the hoops we want him to jump through. Even when he’s sanctioned at the end, for example with a lower grade. He doesn’t argue against the sanction, but he doesn’t regret breaking the parameters of the task to accomplish his goal.”
Like during the provisional license exam. Toki had watched the performances of her students. Shouto Todoroki had carried almost his all team on his back, privileging speed over teamwork. He had lost points for that… but since it was, for him, the most efficient way, he hadn’t really seemed to care. Even when Toki had brought it up afterward, he had only shrugged passively.
They all considered that for a few seconds. Then Hitoshi snapped his fingers.
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it! You know that saying, about how a fine isn’t a deterrent from rich people, it’s just how much it cost for doing the forbidden thing? That’s how Shouto sees rules. There is no real intrinsic sense in him that it’s wrong to go against them, just that enduring the punishment is the ‘cost’ for doing the thing.”
“Oooh, I see!” Neito exclaimed. “Yeah, exactly! He doesn’t think, ‘I want to do a Thing, the Thing is against the rules, therefore, I must not do the Thing,’ it’s just that he thinks, ‘how much am I willing to suffer in order to do the Thing?’ When the cost is too high he doesn’t bother, but when it’s just a bad grade, he goes for it.”
Toki grimaced. They were right. That was why canon-Shouto had been so pissed at the Commissioner who had wanted to sanction them for fighting Stain in canon, or why canon-Shouto had had zero problem going to Kamino with Midoriya to rescue canon-Bakugo. That was also why Shouto had also gone along with canon-Endeavor’s shitty brand of training (bringing your kid in your search for a serial killer, really?).
Basically, Shouto thought rule-breaking was okay, but you had to do the appropriate cost-benefit analysis for it. That was what you got when people were raised under strict conditions where the ‘why’ for following the rules was ‘because I said so.’
And then Toki thought about Dabi’s disdain for rules and morality and couldn’t help but contrast the two approaches. Touya had been raised in the Todoroki home, but he hadn’t had the same upbringing as Shouto. For him, punishment had never seemed like a consequence. It’d been only an unfairness.
And if punishment was arbitrary and could come at any time, and there was really no way to avoid it… well, so you might as well just do whatever the heck you wanted anyway.
“Come on, are we eating or not?” Keigo said lightly. “I’m likely to fade away where I sit if you don’t provide me with sustenance soon, Toki.”
“Fine, fine!”
They ordered. As usual, Toki and Keigo took a plate of chicken. Hitoshi took fish and Neito took beef. As usual also, they almost immediately started bickering about the merits of the different meats.
The work-studies hadn’t been going on for more than a month, and yet already both Neito and Hitoshi were more comfortable. Not just with the rhythm of patrols and the hardships of paperwork, but also with other heroes, Hawks most of all. They had known Keigo before, true but… not really as himself.
They hadn’t met often or talked much, true, but there was also the fact that the identity of Keigo was something he didn’t share easily. He joked around on the Discord server and showed up to support Toki when she wanted to introduce him to her fledging’s, but that was it.
Hawks, though… That was different.
Keigo and Hawks were two sides of the same coin, to the point where the edges blurred. Like Toki and Quantum. But Hawks was a much more important part of Keigo’s life, than Quantum was of Toki’s. And you couldn’t really know Keigo if you didn’t get to know Hawks, first.
His easy-going attitude hiding a frantic need to push himself, the workaholism hidden beneath a friendly smile and a careless air. His love of the sky, the speed, the chases. His kindness towards strangers, his winning smiles, his approachable attitude. The way he went to fast, left other in the dust, and yet always kept an eye on them. His love of competition, not to win but to see others rise to his level. The elation in his grin when people kept up with him. The conviction in his eyes. The never-ending hours of work. How he loved doing something, building something, reaching out, reaching up.
That was who Hawks was, and that was also who Keigo was.
But… There was also the youthful exuberance. The cool guy attitude, half-pretend and half not. The mirth in his eyes when they joked around, the weird trivia he knew about birds, his nerdiness about specific genre of music. The way he nitpicked at details, too.
That was Toki’s influence, that. Canon-Keigo had never loved bickering as much as the real Keigo, and he had to have learned that from someone. Toki had to accept full responsibility.
Loving to bicker was a Taiyōme trait, after all.
“Rabbit is good!” Neito was arguing hotly. “It’s a bland meat perfect to marrying savory sauces to!”
“Not it’s not!” Keigo waved his chopsticks for emphasis. “All rodents taste terrible.”
“Don’t hawks eat rodents?” Hitoshi wondered, looking morbidly fascinated.
Toki shook her head with her best poker face unquestioningly playing along with her husband’s antics.
“Absolutely not this hawk. Rodents taste like…”
She floundered; not sure what rodents were supposed to taste like. Was it really bad? She had never even eaten rabbits. Maybe she should mention it to Meteor. He would find a restaurant where they managed to make rodents taste good.
“They taste like existential despair,” Keigo said very seriously. “Rabbits know their place in the food chain and resent it.”
Toki snorted, and then nodded gravely. “Just look at Mirko. All that pent-up violence needs to come from somewhere! Now imagine a rabbit who can’t beat up villains for a living. What a terrible existence.”
Neito and Hitoshi were making that expression where they were both clearly wondering how on Earth they had managed to get into that kind of conversation.
“This is bonkers,” Hitoshi finally said. “But I’m fascinated by that take. Elaborate.”
“Of course,” Keigo said generously. “Rabbits are full of ressentiment towards the world. Mice and rats also know they’re prey animals, they just have such joy of living that it cancels out. Guinea pigs have no concept of death but understand contextless fear. Hamsters however do know the food chain, but they also know that attachment to the earth is the root of suffering, and they wisely deny the faults of the ego.”
Then Keigo ate the rest of his yakitori, and Toki slurped her noodles to hide her grin. Neito threw his hands in the air.
“I give up. You’re clearly nuts.”
Toki laughed at him. The day was warm for October, and she was surrounded by some of her favorite people, sharing good food and carefree bantering. In that moment, she didn’t care if she was nuts. She was just happy to be there.
oOoOoOo
The day of the raid came.
There had been several meetings, quiet and discreet, never with the entire taskforce at once, so as to not let the Shie Hassaikai suspect that something big was brewing. Toki had also used those occasions to not meet Nighteye. If he started talking shit about Melissa again, Toki was going to punch him. And if he started talking shit about All Might and his retirement, then Toki would punch him even harder.
Anyway. When the day came, there was one final briefing at Nighteye’s agency, in a meeting room barely big enough to hold all the heroes… just long enough to distribute the updated plans of the estate, which now included an underground facility that Nighteye had seen using his Foresight’s Quirk one of Overhaul’s underlings.
Inferno confirmed that they had gotten a warrant just this morning. The police was also moving in. They were ready.
Inferno also briefly evoked the idea of asking for additional support from neighboring agencies. Ideally he would ask a Top Hero to patrol the city to maintain order and stop runaways while the raid was happening. But Quantum would be participating in the raid, Hawks was busy (Fukuoka wasn’t going to patrol itself), and Inferno was reluctant to ask Endeavor’s help over such a trivial matter.
He mentioned asking for Endeavor to send them a few sidekicks, though. Or maybe his underground hero.
Toki very cautiously didn’t react.
She knew Inferno wasn’t asking that lightly. He didn’t like Meteor, didn’t even trust him, and he barely accepted Meteor’s change of loyalties. For Inferno to suggest bringing him in… He must be a little worried. The Shie Hassaikai were strong, and if the League or the Fugitives were also there… it could quickly become bloody and chaotic.
Of course, Meteor thrived in bloody and chaotic. But also, Meteor wouldn’t flinch if things got really, really violent. Inferno knew that. Inferno also knew that they had interns among the heroes storming the yakuza estate. Sure, those interns were hero students, competent and trained, but they lacked experience. That was why they needed good fighters with them. Someone who wouldn’t freeze.
Someone like Meteor definitely wouldn’t freeze. Someone like Meteor wouldn’t let anything happen to a hair on those kids, even if he had to kill the yakuza. Inferno knew this, too. Toki wondered if Inferno was ready to consider this possibility because his intern was Shouto, who was Endeavor’s son, and the son of the man Inferno admired so much. That must be extra-stressful.
It was only the beginning of Shouto’s work-study. He could have been benched. Inferno had offered him the option to patrol the streets with the skeleton crew left at his agency. But Shouto had said no. Hitoshi and Neito were both here, after all. Shouto wouldn’t let his friends go on without him.
So Toki didn’t say anything. She wasn’t exactly enchanted by the idea, but if Meteor had to fight… she wasn’t going to oppose it. It was Inferno’s case. He got to decide.
“Out of the question!” Sir Nighteye exclaimed.
Everyone turned to him. Toki rolled her eyes. Oh yeah, she had forgotten. It was Inferno’s case and he got to decide: but it was also Sir Nighteye’s investigation, and he was a control-freak.
“Why?” Inferno asked curiously.
Sir Nighteye pushed his glasses up his nose, face unreadable, but jaw clenched tight.
“This is unnecessary. We are at full strength. Besides, Endeavor’s underground hero is… volatile. I wouldn’t trust him without Endeavor holding his leash.”
Toki narrowed her eyes but held her tongue. She didn’t want Nighteye to notice her, to pay attention to her defense of Meteor, and make the connection. It wasn’t the right moment.
Shouto, though, didn’t have any qualms to call him out.
“He’s a licensed hero, isn’t he? He can be trusted to help.”
Sir Nighteye looked at Shouto with such condescension that Toki felt herself frown. Shouto, too, bristled with offense.
“The adults are talking, young man. You should respect your elders.”
“The kid has a point,” Inferno countered coldly. Everyone was looking at Sir Nighteye, now. Toki could see him smooth out his frown, unreadable and disdainful all at once.
“Indeed. Let’s put it this way... we are ready and orderly. Endeavor’s underground hero is a powerful fighter who will create chaos. The battle would be chaotic enough without his Quirk. He’s also excessively brutal. If we are dealing with an underground maze, he will not be suited to assist in the raid. He also doesn’t know the city, which will make him slow if he has to patrol it. And what about the delay to brief him? No, we are ready. We need to move now.”
Inferno looked at Sir Nighteye for a while, then nodded. “Fine. Let’s proceed.”
Everyone then went to climb into the police cars that would drive them to the Shie Hassaikai’s estate. Toki, though, warped close to Inferno. He was still at the head of the briefing table, talking to Sir Nighteye in hushed whispers.
When they both saw her, they fell silent. Inferno even looked slightly ill-at-ease. Sir Nighteye, though, brimmed with righteous annoyance. His eyes were gleaming coldly behind his glasses.
“Are you sure we don’t need additional support?” she asked Inferno pointedly, ignoring Sir Nighteye.
As she had guessed, Sir Nighteye scoffed:
“If we do, not from him.”
Fucking called it. He knew who Meteor was, that was a given; and he hated him. Toki could understand why— Meteor had been a villain and Nighteye had taken the disaster of his arrest very personally— but it still made her purse her lips unhappily.
“Meteor is a hero now,” Inferno said lowly. “I understand your disdain for his past, Sir Nighteye. Believe me, I share it. But I will not turn away an ally over mere dislike. I agreed to let it go because your arguments are logical, but if there’s a personal motivation behind this…”
“This is nothing personal,” Sir Nighteye scoffed. There was venom in his voice, betraying the lie. It sounded a lot personal. “He’s not trustworthy. Endeavor is to be commended for leashing that mad dog, but eventually Meteor will reveal his true colors. I would rather that it didn’t happen in our city.”
That mad dog was said with such condescension, such scorn, and hatred. Toki clenched her fists, fighting a wave of furious indignation. Don’t talk about my dad that way, she wanted to growl at him.
But she couldn’t do that. Sir Nighteye didn’t know Meteor. He didn’t know who he was, he just knew that Meteor had killed several dozens of people under his eyes during his arrest. That kind of person deserved to be loathed.
“He was a villain before,” Toki said calmy, keeping her voice smooth and even. “He’s changed. Acknowledging his progress doesn’t mean forgiving his past, but…”
Sir Nighteye cut her off, incredulous: “Forgiveness? Quantum, you cannot be serious. I know that you’re young and naïve, but you should know better than to think that kind of scum can change their nature.”
Toki clenched her jaw until it ached.
“Don’t call him scum,” she said very lowly.
Inferno gave her a wild-eyed look. Sir Nigheteye didn’t notice. He was glaring at her, going from scornfully incredulous to straight-up venomously vindictive.
“Do you know who he is, Quantum? This man killed over a hundred men and women. He should have been executed. This whole…” Sir Nighteye gestured vaguely, sneering at nothing. “This whole pantomime of redemption is an outrage. The idea that an individual like him should step foot outside of Tartarus is sickening. He should never have been freed. And giving him a heroic license, a permit to use his power freely? It’s revolting. I petitioned the HPSC when I heard about it, but by that time, it was too late, and the deed was done. Our only hope is that someone does the world a favor and kills him before he sullies the image of heroism any further.”
Toki’s blood was pounding in her ears. She felt angry, insulted, but most of all, almost shocked. Taken aback by such virulence. Chilled by the utter conviction in Sir Nighteye’s voice.
She knew her father had his sins. She had cried over them for years. She had even betrayed him over them. She knew he deserved the hatred of the people he had hurt, no matter how much he had changed, he hadn’t fixed the pain he had caused. Meteor was gentler now, but he was still ruthless, remorseless asshole. The fact that he saved people now didn’t change the fact that he had killed so many before.
And yet Toki hadn’t expected the degree of Sir Nighteye’s hatred. It wasn’t the hot, burning, searing anger of someone who had lost a loved one to disaster. It was cold. It was the dispassionate disdain of someone looking at another human being and not seeing them at all. Instead he saw dirt, trash, or something to step on and crush.
It unsettled Toki. She had never had that kind of hatred directed towards her or people she loved before. It made her flounder in shock.
“He didn’t do anything to sully heroism so far,” she managed to say, trying to get her bearings, to get some control on the situation, “In fact, Endeavor’s statistics are on the rise. He made his prefecture one of the safest because Meteor was—”
“Does that erase what he is?” Sir Nighteye cut her off again. He sneered. Toki was suddenly hit by the thought that if Sir Nighteye had been a smidge less polite, he would have spat on the ground. “Some people can’t be redeemed. They just need to be removed from society, whether by throwing them in a hole for life or executing them, depending on your legal options. They just deserve to die and be forgotten. That man is a waste of space that should have been taken out back and shot.”
Toki’s jaw slackened, opening in pure shock. She tried to say something and couldn’t find the words. Her chest felt very hollow, suddenly. She knew how to snap back at assholes. They meet you halfway, in some ways it was a battle of wits between equals. But the way Sir Nighteye talked…
How do you argue with someone who doesn’t think that the person you want to defend was even a person?
She felt cold. All her naïve idealism and her grand ideas of altruism suddenly seemed very small. She remembered arguing with Meteor about giving people a chance, about believing in humanity. It had been easy to argue with him because they both ran hot. They growled, they raised their voices, they got invested, they got angry. But… even when they disagreed on a fundamental principle, they listened to each other.
Sir Nighteye didn’t want to listen. He didn’t want a debate. A debate would mean acknowledging that the other person deserved a platform to be listened to; that there was something to debate.
Toki swallowed, once. The unease was still there, but she could feel anger mounting, too. The indignation. The pure, outraged rage that someone would dare talk about someone she loved like this. That someone would talk about any other person like that... like they weren’t human beings, like they were rabid animals, like they didn’t deserve rights, like they were just meat to be disposed of—
That was another fucking problem of hero society, too. Of society in general. This predated the dawn of Quirks by centuries. This— inflexibility, this punitive mindset. The idea that broken things needed to be thrown out.
The idea that people who broke the rules should be punished, and only punished. The idea that giving them support or help to change, the idea that they could be allowed to change and escape punishment, would be an injustice in itself. The idea that good people stayed at their place and that bad people, people who didn’t fit, should be beaten until they cowered back into the rank: or, if you didn’t find them broken enough to fit in, should be disposed of.
That was the revolting thing. That was the fucking disgusting thing. That toxic mindset.
Because that? That didn’t solve anything. It didn’t help. Purging those who didn’t fit didn’t make society safer or better or kinder. That was just how you hurt people.
Once you had taken the punitive mindset, and you believe that violence was justice, it didn’t matter how good you promised your justice system to be. You would torture people who genuinely hurt others, and you would torture people who got fucked over because society wanted to see them suffer. No system was so holy and perfect that it couldn’t be used by a mean, bigoted person to hurt others. And the cycle of violence continued, over and over. You hurt people. Sometimes they deserved to be hurt, they deserved to learn the consequences of their actions, but what about those who didn’t deserve it?
And what about those who did deserve it, for a while. Should they be eternally punished? Were you going to continue hurting them, over and over, until you were happy? Just because you could?
How awful. How cruel. Just because they had done something wrong, did that mean they could never change? Did that mean that they were born wrong, born evil, should have been smothered at birth? Weren’t they people?
What did that make those advocating for their torture and death, and to feel nothing? Who were you to judge?
What kind of monster could make that judgement?
“How can you be a hero?” Toki said, voice low, almost trembling. “Do you hear yourself? You speak of him like he’s not even human.”
Sir Nighteye rolled his eyes at her. “Don’t be so sensitive, Quantum.”
Toki had to fist her hands to stop them from trembling. She didn’t know whether she felt shock, despair, sadness, or rage, but she felt almost sick.
“Once you dehumanize any person or any group of persons, you have lost. Even those who are cartoonishly evil. They are people. No human being deserves to lose their human rights, just like no human being deserve to be denied the opportunity to change and grow.”
Sir Nighteye shook his head.
“Some of them can’t grow. The idea of letting people like that back into the world after catching them… it’s insane. They should stay in prison for life if you find killing inhumane monsters to be objectionable. As long as they are held away from the society.”
“Sir Nighteye,” Inferno said. His voice was very cold. “That’s enough.”
“Of course, of course.”
“You should go,” Inferno added, narrowing his eyes.
But Sir Nighteye didn’t go. He pushed his glasses up his nose again and looked at Toki. His face wasn’t twisted in hatred anymore. In a way, it was worse. He was so calm and dispassionate about it.
“I would advise you to not trouble yourself with those questions,” he said to Toki, and she still had the capacity to be confounded, because why the fuck was he being condescending to her?! “It’s not a question of human rights. Some people cannot be redeemed simply because they are insane. They cannot function in a society because something inside their brain didn’t form correctly, and they decided that killing people was an acceptable course of action. Those people can’t change because they don’t have the correct brain functions to enact or even want that change. They may pretend to change, but they don’t. They’re… born wrong. They shouldn’t be allowed to mingle with normal people. They’re the worst of humanity.”
Toki took a breath. Her heart was pounding. She tasted blood on her tongue. The rage and the hurt were almost making her shake. It wasn’t the wave of homicidal rage she had felt with Endeavor or Beros. It wasn’t burning and overwhelming. It was cold and suffocating. It hurt differently.
How could he say that? How could he say that about anyone? How could he say that about her dad?
Meteor was a cruel, dangerous man, but he still did good things. He tried. He changed. He was intelligent, observant, rational, adaptable. He cared. He loved people, he loved so hard. He was so devoted.
He was her father. How could Nighteye dare to say those things about him?!
“You think he’s the worst of humanity?” she asked. It felt like her voice was coming from very far away.
Sir Nighteye paused, something dark and stormy passing in his gaze.
“I once saw him murder seventy people. When they managed to shut him in the police truck, he was still trying to kill people. Don’t you think that’s monstruous?”
Seventy people. That was the arrest. Toki looked at him, incredulous, outraged, and fucking furious. Was he seriously…?! The fucking arrest, the one that had gone wrong because they hadn’t followed her notebook’s plan, the plan she had sent to him?!
She was clenching her jaw so hard her teeth hurt. It took effort to relax her muscles. She was taut like a bowstring poised to snap, almost trembling with tension, the urge to hit him until he shut up, until he couldn’t say those horrible things anymore. She felt sick.
She hated him. She wished he would still die on this mission.
“Take a good look in the mirror,” she finally bit out. “I have a monster devoid empathy right in front of me. I gave you the means of taking him down without a single casualty with my notebook. Without hurting him or anyone else. The people who died in that arrest are on your head as much as his, you fucking hypocrite.”
Nighteye went deathly pale.
Toki glared at him for a second, and then turned on her heels and walked out.
She was almost shaking with rage. Her eyes were blurry with tears. She had to warp on the roof and take thirty seconds to breathe just so she could compose herself. Everyone else was climbing into the police cars and driving away, but Toki stayed on the roof, gripping the railing until her palms hurt, until she could ground herself with the pain. She wanted to fucking scream.
Piece of shit. How could he say that? How could he say that and call himself a hero? How could he say that and not think that it was monstruous, that it was a horrible thing to think about other people?
How could he say that to her, about her father?!
Toki took a long breath. Held it. Released it.
Repeated the exercise, repeatedly, until she had stopped vibrating with pent-up fury.
She had a mission. She needed to focus. She couldn’t just… lose her shit on another hero right before storming the Shie Hassaikai compound. Come on, Toki. Be calm. Be rational. She could do this.
She hadn’t planned on revealing her identity to Sir Nighteye. Chagrined, she realized that it was something she couldn’t take back. The cat was out of the bag now. I mean, she would have had to tell him at some point, probably… but damn it, she shouldn’t have blurted it out right before a high-stakes mission. That wasn’t professional of her.
But then, Sir Nighteye hadn’t been very professional either.
Toki scowled and closed her eyes. She took another long breath. Calm. Focus.
The mission first. Then she would deal with Sir Nighteye. She would… I don’t know, maybe punch him in the face. Maybe put the HPSC on his case. His hate speech was no grounds for an investigation, but Toki could also just ask Kameko to make Nighteye’s life difficult, and she would find a way.
Also, what was that petition Nighteye had mentioned?! Toki hadn’t heard about it. She would ask Mera-san. And maybe Endeavor. He could be relied on if it was to protect Meteor, at least.
Another long breath. Then another. It had been nearly five minutes. Everyone must have nearly arrived around the compound, ready to storm it. Toki didn’t have much time left to dither. Being a warper meant she could twiddle her thumbs while the other heroes lost time in commuting, but it also meant that they all expected her to be the first to arrive, focused and ready.
One last deep breath. Toki exhaled, and slowly slipped into the confident mindset of Quantum.
She could do this.
She warped in the sky, going to the rendezvous point just near the yakuza estate, where she would wait for her team. It was a building two streets away. From the rooftop, Toki had a good view of the place. She took care to activate the GPS in her HUD, and to be sure to turn on her comms. She sent the signal for ready to Inferno. There was a slight hesitation, and he send her the code asking for status update. She knew he wasn’t inquiring about her physical health.
She sent back ready again, and nothing else.
She waited. She could see the police cars getting into positions, the various heroes starting to arrive.
Inferno was leading the main strike force. He was bringing with him almost all his sidekicks… As well as his intern, Shouto. He would be the one to lead the charge.
Then there was Ryukyu with her interns Kirishima and Hadō, supported by Basalt, Kesagiri Man, and a handful of underground pro-heroes. They would act as support, able to detach themselves from the main group if needed.
Sir Nighteye was leading a smaller team, designed to be fast and look for hidden passages. His team included Mr. Brave, Melissa, Salamander, Mirio Togata… And Hitoshi. Toki almost considered asking Inferno to change this group, and to refuse to let both of her fledglings in the same group as Nighteye: but in the end, she didn’t call her senpai with that selfish request. She shouldn’t let her personal dislike in the way of her professional assessment. Nighteye wasn’t an enemy (yet): he would protect them. And Salamander would be there, too, as well as a handful of other heroes.
Another team was led by Lady Siam. This team included Bubble Girl and Centipede, but also Fat Gum, who had with him his two interns Yaoyorozu and Amajiki. There were also three other heroes that Toki didn’t know, and who were all combat-oriented. They would storm the estate by the back door, to meet the main strike team right in the middle.
Toki was leading a smaller group, including Eraserhead, Neito (or rather, Phantom Thief), and two of her own sidekicks, Psyren and Ocelot. They were a support team, supposed to bounce between the different groups to support them as needed, but also able to detach themselves quietly if they found the League there.
They weren’t in position yet, though, when the first explosion boomed through the Shie Hassaikai estate.
“What’s happening?” Toki asked tensely.
“No idea,” Inferno retorted in the comms, raising his voice. “Fuck waiting, let’s move now! All the heroes in position, go!”
There was a second explosion. This time it wasn’t in the estate but further away, Toki turned, looking for it frantically… There! A section of the street collapsed with a great rumble, exposing a whole section of underground tunnels. People were fighting in there! And in the Shie Hassaikai’s estate, you could hear scream and roars of rage, as the fighters were converging on… whatever was happening inside the tunnels to create this kind of chaos.
“It’s the League!” someone yelled in the comms.
“What?” Toki barked, warping toward the collapsed street. “They’re attacking us?”
“No!” This time, Toki recognized the voice, it was Fat Gum. He sounded a little shell-shocked. “The League is attacking the Shie Hassaikai!”
Notes:
I love my cliffhangers, i admit it x)
So ! About Nighteye!
Sir Nighteye is much more self-righteous and agressive than in canon as a result of a whole butterfly effect coming from Toki's first intervention against the "canon-timeline", AKA when she sent the notebook that allowed the Crew's arrest.
It was very funny to me to imagine that domino cascade. The attack with all those deaths happened when Nighteye was litterally just begining his career, and probably keenly feeling the good old Imposter Syndrome. Obviously there was a massive trauma resulting from the Meteor Incident, with Nighteye fumbling to justify the death toll to himself, then having to face his first critical failure (saving Toki) immediatly after. Thus we get consequences: becoming more rigid and paranoid, seeking self-justification almost to an unhealthy degree. Give it a few years and it starts to snowball into taking even the tiniest clues and RUNNING WITH THEM, creating a whole narrative in his head where he's the oNLY ONE WHO SEE THE TRUTH... Like, for exemple, how he persuaded himself that All Might was going to pick a female successor x)
Nighteye is still an amazing investigator and a competent hero. Endeavor is living proof that you cna have great statistics while also having the personality of a trash can. But Nighteye is not pleasant to work with.
Anyway! Nighteye's rant was partially inspired by a comment i got on this fic about how Meteor should have been shot like an animal because he's sub-human, which... wasn't a great thing to read. I kind of feel bad for that reader, who realized only at chapter 50 that this was a redemption story. It also made me kinda squint because i was trying to write Nighteye around that time, and the sheer vitriol of that reader seemed very personnal. Anyway, garbage was recycled in this chapter =)
Also Toki revealing who she is to Nighteye, is kind of the psychological equivalent to warping away his lungs, so it was very satisfying xD
We'll go back to Nighteye and WHY he has it out for Meteor in a few chapters, don't worry!
Here is a reminder that this fic has a Discord server !
Also, i updated Snapshots of Wisdom ! Take a look at the new fanarts =)
Hope you liked it !
Chapter 73: Fated enemies
Summary:
Toki felt like she was using the destructive abilities of her Quirk more often this past year than she had her whole life. It was still hard to get used to it. She could never hold back an instinctive wince at the sheer shock of power as it explodes out into the universe around her. The expanse of the damage she left in her wake, a mark of her strength ingrained into the world. She knew it was the only way to keep up with the powerhouses she was against, but this wasn’t a comfort.
(Toki fights the League again.)
Notes:
Sorry i'm posting late ! I was sick as hell. No idea if it was my pariod or my period *and* a bad dinner, but i spent nearly a whole day with horrible cramps and unable to keep anything down. Today i'm better, so i considered going to vote... and didn't. Yep, no, i am dragging myself downstair to post and that's it.
Trigger warning: Gore and graphic descriptions of injuries. Also, character death. Not Major Character Death, but still.
And let's goooooooooooooooo!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
FATED ENEMIES
It was chaos.
The attack had started when only half the heroes had arrived. The police forces weren’t all here, either. Nighteye’s team was the only one to be complete, because they had all climbed in the same car. Everyone else had to scramble, reassess, and join forces with the closest heroes.
Most people charged the estate, bursting through the doors and commencing the raid. Several others, Toki included, went straight to the collapsed street which revealed the hidden tunnels and the fight that was happening there.
She was a top hero, one of the strongest in the whole country. She could afford to jump into a fight without backup.
About half a dozen of Spinner clones were spreading though the tunnels, hacking and slashing at everyone in sight. The yakuza had pulled out guns, but in the confusion they couldn’t without taking the risk to hit each other. It was a mess.
The first person who rushed towards Toki wasn’t a Spinner, though. It was a burly guy with glowing fists. Light? Fire? Both? Either way, better not touch them. Toki warped away when he punched, reappearing just behind the man and snapping a handcuff around one of his wrists.
The issue being, of course, that now she was holding a piece of metal attached to the guy, which mean that he could use it as leverage to move her.
He dragged her in range of his fists, using the handcuff she held onto. Toki warped them both high in the sky, however, and the villain lost his focus when they started freefalling five kilometers high above the city. Toki took a breath, focused… And when she warped back in the street, she took care to warp the guy with both wrists handcuffed.
She didn’t even have to wrestle with him for that part. When she warped with something, she had total control on a molecular level with everything she was warping. That was why she could cut objects with Scalpel, expulse compressed air with Warp-Blasts, and disappear upright and repeat sitting down.
The villain, handcuffed, landed flat on his belly. The only reason he didn’t crack his chin on the pavement was that Toki had grabbed his hair. He paused a second in shock, like most people who ended up on the receiving end of a grappling fight with her, and then started growling and struggling in his handcuffs.
“This is cheating!” the villain sputtered.
Toki opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again.
“I’m allowed?” she hazarded. “I have a license and everything?”
The villain sagged in discouragement. Whether it was at his predicament or at Toki’s lame answer was anyone’s guess. Toki shrugged, made sure the cops were here to bag this suspect, and then warped back inside.
It was still complete chaos. Unsurprising.
She darted into the nearest corridor, grabbing a guy, slamming him in a wall to knock him out, and then warping him next to the first one. Then another, and another. Rinse, repeat. She took them out one by one as she stumbled upon them in the chaos, but sometimes she had the chance to expel a Warp-Blast and took out a whole group at once.
Jump, punch, dodge, grab and slam, warp away, hit, dodge, hit again. There were so many people, at first. It was like a never-ending wave. Toki completely lost sight of the other heroes. She couldn’t afford to look for them, either, since she was bulldozing through the ranks of the yakuza. A single distraction could mean getting a knife to the ribs. That wasn’t an experience she was keen to repeat.
Fuck, there are so many of them!
And when the ranks cleared a little, it became worse because they took that as a sign that they should start using guns. Toki fucking hated guns. In addition to the very lethal threat that they posed, the gunshots were so loud, banging on the concrete walls and reverberating over and over, that it almost made Toki’s ears ring.
Hit, dodge, fuck a gun— change the angle— warp away, reappear, grab, punch, disarm—
By the time Toki could stand still for more than ten consecutive seconds, catching her breath in a deserted hallway with three defeated and unconscious thugs at her feet, she realized she was… kind of lost. The underground tunnels were far vaster, and much larger, than expected. Every hallway was wide and tall enough to drive a car through, so people could easily fight and move without the tunnels getting crowded, but it was a veritable maze. It sprawled under the yakuza compound but also likely the whole neighborhood.
Also, it was underground, which made Toki’s visor blink sadly ‘NO SIGNAL’ where her GPS map should be. Damnit.
No matter. She could deal with that.
She switched her coms to short-ranged radio, because it was everyone’s best bet to actually get some reception in those underground tunnels, then she marched on. She ran into three deserted hallways… and then nearly collided with Spinner when she turned into the fourth one. Reflexively, she used Warp-blast on him, and the lizard-man dissolved into black goo.
Dammit. It had been another clone from Twice. The real one must be somewhere around here, then.
Shit, she hoped that her fledglings were okay. She had already agonized for a while about bringing them on that mission, and the only reason she had actually gone through was because the students would be constantly accompanied by experienced pros. But if they had been separated in the chaos…
She wavered and almost tried to reach them. Then she scowled herself. They weren’t kids. They were heroes in training. They knew how to fight. She trained them. They could handle themselves without Toki mothering them. Hitoshi and Neito were going to stick together if nothing else. As for Melissa…
Well. Ironically, Toki was less worried for Melissa.
Maybe it was her Quirklessness, but Melissa was more adaptable than any other hero. She had a hundred gadgets, but even if she didn’t have those, she always fell back on her feet. Heroes got paralyzed when they lost their favorite weapons or couldn’t use their Quirk. They were too specialized, too used to always running at a problem the same way. Toki herself was guilty of this. She may be inventive with Warp-Space, but in the end, she always thought of a fight in terms of how to best use her Quirk.
Melissa didn’t have that. She fought with her bare hands like some feral kangaroo, but she was also quick to resort to improvised weaponry. And Toki wasn’t just talking about the times where Melissa brandished an aerosol can and a stove lighter with utter fearlessness. Melissa had no qualms about directing her opponents into a wall, a random piece of furniture, or into a miffed bystander.
Give her a straight fight, and Melissa was ten pounds of crazy in a five-pound bag with rabies.
Toki bit back a smile at that thought, and threw open another door, ready to fight. The Spinner-clone had come from there, so maybe there were others…
There were no others— plural.
There was, however, a guy bleeding out against a wall.
Toki swore under her breath and hurried to his side. It was a guy with hair slicked back and glasses on his nose, wearing a suit like a businessman; probably one of the yakuza. He was weakly pressing his hands against a stab wound at his flank, and when he raised his head to lock eyes with Toki, she had a second shock.
She had seen his picture in Inferno’s files. This was Nemoto, one of Overhaul’s Eight Bullets. Confession, or something like that.
Toki kneeled next to him and got her first-aid kit from her belt. The yakuza had a broken nose (and probably a concussion after being slapped against a wall, if Toki matched the blood on his skull with the indent on the concrete wall), but he also had very deep gash along his ribs and it was bleeding a lot. A strike of Spinner’s katana, probably. It seemed to have ripped on the bones instead of perforating anything vital, but the cut was deep and very large, pissing enough blood to turn the guy’s shirt entirely red.
Toki tied a tourniquet in quiet, efficient movements, keeping an eye on Nemoto hands. You never knew if the criminal you were trying to help wasn’t going to knife you while your guard was down. But Nemoto didn’t try to attack, he just groaned in pain when she tightened the tourniquet, and waited until she was done to grasp her wrist with a bloodstained hand.
“Wait… It’s the League. They’re after the Boss’s family.”
Toki paused. For a second, she weighted the pros and cons of trusting the man, but then she decided that she could trust his desire to save his yakuza kin, at least.
“I can help. Tell me where they are. I’m going after the League in priority anyway.”
Nemoto clenched his jaw. Toki knew how he saw her, a hero who had invaded his home. Someone who had the upper hand over him and didn’t even have the grace to be humble about it. A woman, most of all; someone who didn’t belong in the yakuza’s famously sexist view of the natural order.
He didn’t like that. He didn’t like her, at all: but he was also desperate.
“The Boss is in his appartements. Second floor, main house. I think… Eri-chan was with him. His granddaughter. Shigaraki wants— He’ll go after her.”
To hurt the Boss? Or because he knew Eri was the source of the Quirk-erasing bullets? Both were bad options, in any case.
“Shigaraki is targeting Chisaki in priority,” Nemoto added, grimacing in pain. “Chisaki will stop him, but…”
He cut himself off, apparently unwilling to say that Chisaki was going to kill the League, or to admit that the League had to a good chance to kill Chisaki instead. Both options were not things he would admit to a hero. Incriminating testimonies and all that.
“Where are they?” Toki asked without pushing.
“… West of here. In the lab. There is a hidden door— in the next hallway.”
So Toki got directions. She also got to warp back outside, carrying the injured Nemoto, to deposit him in the nearest ambulance. She had stopped the bleeding but there was no way she was letting him lie there, wounded, and unable to move. These tunnels were crawling with fights, and Toki was pretty sure that it was only a matter of time before someone with a destructive Quirk provoked a collapse somewhere.
She went back to the tunnels immediately, and it didn’t take long for her to find the hidden door, then follow the corridors until the labs. A feeling of wrongness made the hairs on her nape rise, and her jaw clenched. Kurogiri must be nearby. Maybe even inside the lab itself.
Part of Toki had been bracing herself for a torture chamber of some sorts, the kind of place where Chisaki and his goons would cut open little Eri and make bullets out of her blood... But, when she burst through the doors of the labs, it was anything but.
She took the scene in one sweeping glance. A big, spacious laboratory, with a big ventilation shaft near the ceiling (they must be near street level, to have good ventilation). Clean worktable. One dentist chair in the corner, with the tools for a transfusion near-by, but no restraints or chains anywhere. Big glass selves with tools and labelled vials. Some equipment Toki recognized were a centrifuge, a synthesizer, and a microscope. There was a stack of brightly-colored children’s books neatly arranged on a stool.
In the center of the labs, though, the tables and chairs and glass shelves had been smashed to pieces. A man, wearing a lab coat, was lying unconscious in a pool of blood that didn’t bode well for his survival. Four more people were standing poised to strike but had frozen upon Toki’s entrance.
Shigaraki had a hand curled around the neck of a dark-skinned man wearing a suit. Kurogiri was standing menacingly behind him, dark mist rippling around them. One of his spectral hands held a gun. A bald man in a suit was panting, bleeding from a dozen stab wounds, standing in a puddle of black goo vaguely shaped like a man. On one knee on the floor, Kai Chisaki was snarling, a hand pressed against a bleeding wound on his shoulder.
On a second glance, Toki recognized the man in the suit. The one Shigaraki was holding hostage was Ken Takagi, aka Rock Lock, the guy who should have been a hero, if not for the butterfly effect. The guy bleeding, who had apparently smashed to paste what appeared to be either a clone of Toga or a clone of Spinner, was another one of Chisaki’s men: the guy with the crystal Quirk, Yu Hojo. One of the unconscious men on the ground, the one in a pool of blood, had pale hair and a plague mask, it had to be Chronostasis.
They had all fallen defending their leader.
Toki’s glance flickered between Shigaraki’s fingers wrapped around Rock Lock throat, and the gun that Kurogiri held loosely in his hand. She wasn’t sure which was the deadliest right now.
For a second, there was silence, and then Shigaraki hissed: a sound so full of loathing that Toki almost looked behind her, wondering who the hell could make Shigaraki mad like that.
“You.”
Oh yeah. He probably hated her guts. She had ripped out AFO’s legs, hadn’t she? And also wrecked his kidnapping plan... and arrested a lot of his pawns. No wonder he seemed so furious.
She smiled as threateningly as she could.
“Me,” Toki said agreeably. “What a surprise, Tomura Shigaraki.”
“Kurogiri, shoot her!” Shigaraki ordered. But Kurogiri didn’t even aim the gun towards her.
“I am sorry. That was the last bullet.”
Chisaki let out a low, joyless laugh, cut short by a hiss of pain. Ah, that’s where the last bullet had gone. Kurogiri had shot him, to prevent him from using his Quirk. Toki would bet that he regretted that choice now.
Or not. After all, Toki would only arrest them. Chisaki would have killed them.
“Don’t fucking move,” Shigaraki growled. His fingers tightened, his raised pinky twitching toward his hostage’s throat. “Or I’m reducing this one to dust.”
He would do it. Toki held back the urge to tense up. She couldn’t let him see her unease. Instead, she just considered him, narrowing her eyes. She should have activated A.D.A. before entering the tunnel. She could have cut off Shigaraki’s hand, then.
“Do it and you’ll lose your only leverage,” she said flatly. “After that, I’ll cut off your hands.”
Shigaraki’s eyes shone with fury. “You reveal your true colors pretty fast, hero.”
“My true colors?” Toki barked a laugh. “You’re threatening a man’s life in front of me. Are you shocked to learn I would draw blood to stop you?”
Shigaraki scoffed.
“You’re just looking for an excuse. That’s all your kind is good for. Lying through their teeth and attacking those who don’t lick their boots.”
The bald man had quietly taken a step back, then another, drawing closer to Chisaki. Chisaki, for his part, had slowly started to climb to his feet. Shigaraki saw it, and turned back to him, growling like a rabid animal.
“DON’T YOU FUCKING MOVE. I’m not done with you!”
His hostage Rock Lock wasn’t moving, rigid like a marble statue. But for a second, he and Chisaki locked eyes, and Toki knew they were both ready to pounce at the slightest opportunity.
Clearly Chisaki wasn’t the same as he was in canon. He must have cared at least a little about Rock Lock, because when he looked at Shigaraki… If looks could kill, the heat of his glare would have incinerated Shigaraki on the spot.
“Well I’m done with your demented ramblings. I didn’t do a fucking thing to your boss, you lunatic.”
“You LIAR, you must have!”
Chisaki barred his teeth, a flash of fury in his eyes. If he had had his Quirk, Toki knew that he would have killed Shigaraki right there. She could see the hatred in his expression, the violent desire to hurt and to make the other bleed, to make them suffer, because you needed to see the terror in their eyes to sate your anger…
Chisaki took a long breath and smoothed his face back into glacial impassibility. It was almost disturbing. When he spoke, his voice was calm and even, almost courteous.
“Quantum, as a hero, you will be focusing on the main treat, won’t you?”
Toki hesitated, and then decided where her priorities lied. Chisaki could wait. The League could not.
“Yeah. But just a tip, you’re surrounded and under arrest.”
Chisaki gave the tiniest nod and took a step forward to touch Chronostasis’ neck. Looking for a pulse, she realized. But she had seen the pool of blood, how large it was, how it wasn’t growing larger. She knew the man was dead even before she saw the way Chisaki’s lips thinned, and how he got back up without a word.
She saw the hatred in his eyes, too. If Chisaki got his Quirk back before the end of the fight, then Shigaraki was dead.
“Well.” Toki looked back at Shigaraki. “Are you going to come quietly?”
Shigaraki glared at her. He was so tense that the slightest twitch would mean the death of his hostage. Toki had to disable him quickly. And then…
And then Kurogiri drew herself to his full height, a swirling portal of darkness opening behind him and Shigaraki, and he said tonelessly:
“This is not the time or place. More heroes draw near, Tomura Shigaraki. Retreat.”
“You think I’ll let you go?” Toki scoffed.
“You will let him go,” Kurogiri corrected. His voice was calm and even. “You’ll be too busy fighting me.”
Shigaraki hissed in shock. “Kurogiri, what the fuck?!”
Toki herself was kind of taken aback, although she didn’t let it show. She was poised to pounce if either member of the League lowered their guard. Shigaraki still held Nemoto by the throat. Chisaki and Hojo had backed off but hadn’t left yet. This whole situation could explode like a powder keg at any moment.
“That’s a bold statement,” Toki said. “Maybe I want to take on your boss.”
Damn, she shouldn't have called Shigaraki his boss. That was giving him too much respect. She should have called him brat or puppy, or insinuated that Kurogiri was babysitting a toddler, not being the right-hand man of a dangerous villain. Shigaraki was easily angered: if she could get him to throw a tantrum, he would get sloppy, and then…
“You will not,” Kurogiri answered, unflappable. “You know that as long as I am free, I will rescue Tomura Shigaraki. As a hero aiming to stop him, it is your duty to neutralize me.”
Well, he wasn’t wrong.
There was also the fact that even standing near Kurogiri made Toki’s skin crawl, a visceral revulsion that even All For One hadn’t elicited. Like nails on chalkboard, making her hairs stand up. He felt wrong. Some animal part of her wanted to flinch back, screaming that there was something unnatural about him. But fifteen years of training had curbed the instinctive urge to flee into the reflex to attack instead, and Toki’s hand hitched to strike, to make the wrongness stop.
Kurogiri was a thinking Nomu, she remembered that from canon. He had been designed, made for a purpose. Was it why he felt so wrong? Was it why she felt the urge to hiss at him like a frightened cat? Had he been created to be, in a way, her natural enemy?
“Kurogiri,” Shigaraki spat. There was an anxious undertone in his scratchy voice. “What do you think you're doing? Let me deal with her.”
“She is too strong for you,” Kurogiri answered evenly, not looking away from Toki. “I am your protector, Tomura Shigaraki. I will do my duty.”
“You’re not a fighter!” Shigaraki hissed. “You can’t fight Quantum!”
Toki looked at him for a second. A S-ranked villain whose hands caused death. He was an enemy, a threat. Something cruel and evil who wanted to hurt everyone around him, who didn’t care about the collateral damage and innocent bystanders, who wanted to make good people suffer just because he enjoyed the way they bleed.
And yet, in that moment, she only saw the anguished rage in those eyes. She heard the helpless fury in his voice. There was so much loathing in the way he spat her name, and yet she saw, in that moment, the flash of fear in his expression. He was afraid of her. He had seen her fight; he knew what she could do. He knew how strong she was.
It should have made her happy. Instead, Toki experienced an unexpected and unwelcome stab of pity.
What did it look like, from Tomura Shigaraki’s point of view? What did Quantum look like? A young upstart hero, whose brand was all about being untouchable. Someone who laughed a lot on TV and didn’t seem to take things seriously. Someone he had only seen in person twice; once snatching Hitoshi from his hideout, seconds before the heroes completely overpowered his gang… and the second time, when she had chased him off the Kamino battlefield, before cutting off All For One’s legs.
What did it look like for Tomura Shigaraki, to see someone adored by the masses that he hated, someone he couldn’t hurt but who could and would hurt him? How did it feel to see that smiling mask from TV fall and reveal someone with glowing eyes and a murderous expression? Who did he see? What did he think of her, someone who, every time they crossed paths, hurt the people he cared for? Someone who sided with his enemies and brought them victories, paying it with the blood of Shigaraki’s friends?
No wonder he hated her.
That did not change what he had done. That didn’t change the fact they were enemies. And yet, Toki allowed herself to feel a little bad. She knew how it felt, to be scared of a hero because of the harm that had done to your loved ones, even if it was in the name of justice. Especially of it was in the name of justice.
“Don’t take his choices away from him, Shigaraki,” Toki said politely, keeping her eyes on Kurogiri. “Let the hostage go and we’ll talk.”
Shigaraki growled like a feral animal. There was something almost crazed in his expression.
“I hate you. You hurt Sensei, I hate you!”
Toki didn’t feel guilty. She remembered AFO too well to ever felt guilt about what she had done to him. But, in that moment, looking at Shigaraki, she felt something like pity. Pity, dismay, and outrage.
“How can you defend him?” Toki blurted out. “He’s probably the one who gave you your Quirk. He orchestrated your family’s murder just because you share blood with All Might’s former mentor. He wants to wear your braindead body like a suit. He’s been stripping you of your identity ever since you were a child! You should want him dead. You should be sick to even think about him.”
Shigaraki’s eyes widened infinitesimally. For a second, the craziness was gone, replaced by shock and incomprehension. And then, suspicion.
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
Suspicion, not dismissal. He didn’t know what she was talking about, but he was listening. He must suspect… He must know there was something wrong, and if Toki could make him listen…
For half a second, she wondered wildly if she should push her advantage. Tell him about her suspicions but also about what she knew for sure. about Nana Shimura, about his Quirk, the weird timing, how well-planned the whole thing had been. AFO had probably been the one making sure no hero or cops crossed the path of pitiful, blood-soaked Tenko Shimura when the child had stumbled away from the ruins of his house. AFO had been the one to isolate him, groom him, manipulate him. Turning him into a tool, keeping him both sheltered and hurting, so he would never learn to cope with his pain. Keeping him vulnerable.
If Toki could say it… If she could make him understand, or at least question why his dear Sensei had done all that… then maybe—
And then Kurogiri was suddenly there.
“Tomura Shigaraki, you need to go!”
The swirling portal of darkness widened. Shigaraki glanced at it, then swore, then looked at Chisaki and snarled in fury. Toki realized with a sinking feeling what he was going to do a second before it happened.
She lunged forward at the same time as Chisaki, both of them reaching out, but Shigaraki had already put his last finger on Rock Lock’s throat.
It disintegrated.
“NO!” Chisaki and Toki both roared.
Rock Lock collapsed, clutching at the mess of blood and gore that now his throat; Shigaraki stepped back into the portal and disappeared while laughing. Chisaki let out an animal scream of fury, grabbing at Rock Lock’s shoulders—
It wouldn’t do any good. There was nearly half his neck missing: Toki could see his fucking spine. Takagi may not have been dead when he had collapsed, but Toki knew it would only take a seconds, and that no medic would be able to save him. He was dead. He was dead, and Toki had just watched Shigaraki murder him, and she hadn’t been fast enough…!
Toki snarled in rage. She didn’t let time to Kurogiri to try and open a second portal for himself. In a second, she was on him. She hadn’t been fast enough to stop Shigaraki, or fast enough to save Takagi… But this time, at least, she could take the warper down. And she would. That fight was long overdue, and this time, he wouldn’t escape!
The purpling shadows of Warp-Gate clashed with the blinding light of Warp-Space in a thunderous explosion.
oOoOoOo
The underground lab collapsed on them.
So did a few tunnels, when Toki and Kurogiri started chasing each other, flinging big maws of darkness and flashing explosions of light. When their respective warping collided, it sounded like a scream, like nails on a blackboard. Their powers rejected each other like magnets, if magnetic force was also matter. The first explosion nearly killed everyone in the lab, which neither of them had expected. It was pure luck that Yu Hojo managed to shield his boss and himself with crystals.
Toki didn’t have time to check on them. Panic and rage was making her heart pound: she had no time for anything at all except to catch Kurogiri.
So she ran and punched and warped blasts of compressed air. Kurogiri launched tendrils of mist like giant whips, and the resulting clashes exploded again. In the dust and smoke, a furious chase started, although it was hard to say who chased who. It was clear that Kurogiri wanted her taken down as much as she wanted him taken down.
She had just watched Shigaraki murder someone. Like that, right in front of her. She wanted to scream and hit something. Gods, there had been so much blood. In canon, Takagi had been a hero, he had survived. But now, he was dead. Dead because Toki hadn’t been fast enough, dead because the League fucking destroyed everything they touched, and Toki was done with it. She was going to fucking stop them, because beating them would be the only way to fix this.
Jump, flash, hit, warp, dodge fucking dodge— Fuck, Toki’s ears were ringing. With the explosions, she was completely deafened. She couldn’t even hear her own heartbeat pounding. If people were yelling at her in the hallways, or if someone tried to reach her radio, she wouldn’t be able to hear anything. Her skull felt like a giant cymbal. Too much of that and she would throw up. Wrongness crawled over her skin every time Kurogiri activated his Quirk, like some sixth sense. Toki’s own Quirk and senses were revolting against this violation of the space-time continuum, and it frankly didn’t help.
Gods, fighting Kurogiri felt both right and horribly wrong. Right, because he was a threat and Toki had been conditioned to face those heads-on, to put herself in control by attacking instead of fleeing; and wrong, because even his presence made her feel like ants were crawling all over her skin. It was a pressure in the air, kind of like the drop in pressure before a storm: but also nothing like that.
It was alien and dark and— and sticky, like cobwebs or mucus or something.
It was hard to describe... It felt kind of like plunging your hand in a bowl of viscera and shuddering from head to toes with a spasm of revulsion so brutal that it was almost making you heave. Every time Kurogiri opened a portal, Toki felt it. It was as if someone had shoved a handful of insects down the back of her shirt.
The instinctive urge to wriggle away from the unpleasant feeling was superposing with the rapid-fire action-reactions of the fight, and Toki’s brain felt like it was saturated with physical stimuli, barely keeping pace with everything that was happening. She didn’t just see and hear Kurogiri’s attacks; she could feel them. It both helped and threw her off, like sensory overload. She was less precise, and she compensated by being more brutal. Every Warp-Blast was twice as large as it would have needed to be, and every impact felt like a bomb.
Toki couldn’t hear a fucking thing with the ringing in her ears. Dust flew everywhere with the explosions, impeding her vision. At this point the fight had lost all strategy or elegance. They were just blindly flinging their Quirks at each other, wrecking more tunnels as they did so.
Toki was faster. She had always been faster. She was also the better fighter. It was obvious in the way Kurogiri moved and stood that he wouldn’t know the first thing about grabbing, twisting, and dodging. But this fight was unlike any other Toki had experienced. Her own warping turned to concussive blasts, and in the smoke and chaos both her and her enemy were fumbling to even aim properly at the other.
It seemed that in no time at all, with the tunnels collapsing around them, they both erupted at the surface…
… And then, under the open sky, suddenly there was no holding back.
Kurogiri’s Warp-Gate was slow to form, but it could stretch, like a whip of some sort. The black mist of his Quirk only looked like fog. When Kurogiri compressed it, it moved more like water. A water whip. Kurogiri’s physical body didn’t move much, but his portals swirled into existence; they snapped and bent like— like tentacles, maybe?!
Some kind of eldritch horror, actually, made of water and darkness. Like a storm without wind, just obscurity and rain and oppressive power.
Toki couldn’t stretch her power like that, not without A.D.A. or a lot of concentration. Ironically, she had a lot less finesse. She used Warp-Blasts, launching compressed air towards Kurogiri’s body; and she used Warp-Force, warping with a bubble of energy around her and crashing like a sledgehammer on her opponent.
When her warping made contact with his, the long tendril of darkness and the flashes of light obliterated themselves with a gigantic detonation. Like a black hole, the universe dividing itself by zero and then wiped out its mistake. Figments of quantum equation and physics knowledge zapped through Toki’s mind, and she hysterically hoped that those explosions didn’t emit radiation. A true black hole was, in a way, very akin to a nuclear bomb. It was mass compressed to without changing its gravitational pull, until basically a small amount of matter was converted into pure energy, and then boom.
Toki realized they were both in the sky, high, very high up. They had both moved up to have some visibility and not risk being crushed by rubble, but— it made a retrospective shiver of dread run down her spine, to think of what would happen if they fought like this at street level.
A glimpse down to the ground was enough to make her wince. The yakuza compound looked eviscerated, like something monstruous had exploded from its entrails. Several buildings were being evacuated, people running out like water pouring out from every exit, fights momentarily paused, as everyone scrambled to get to safety.
Toki felt like she was using the destructive abilities of her Quirk more often this past year than she had her whole life. It was still hard to get used to it. She could never hold back an instinctive wince at the sheer shock of power as it explodes out into the universe around her. The expanse of the damage she left in her wake, a mark of her strength ingrained into the world. She knew it was the only way to keep up with the powerhouses she was against, but this wasn’t a comfort.
Hit, dodge, blast, reappear, dodge again, blast him— They collided again, the resulting deflagration enough to knock them back several meters, both freefalling for a second before using their respective warping to propel themselves higher in the sky and strike again. Dodge, dodge, punch…!
Shit, he wasn’t fast, but he was fucking slippery, with all that mist blurring the outline of his body. It was infuriating. Toki missed again, cursed, and warped away just as Kurogiri was trying to catch her with one of those black tendrils of void. Toki didn’t want to think of what would happen if he managed it. Every tendril was a miniature portal. Would she be sucked in and then reappear somewhere else?
Or worse, would she only be partially sucked in, and then cut in half like… like Beros?
It could happen. Warping could do that so easily. Kurogiri could do that so easily too. He may be slower than her, but Toki wasn’t going to make the mistake to think she could underestimate him.
He wouldn’t even have to think very hard about the logistics to kill her.
Kurogiri didn’t fight like a killer. It was obvious he wasn’t even a fighter. He was too static, too stiff. But there was glacial efficiency in his movements, something mechanical, not quite ruthlessness but more like a smooth, professional kind of resolve. Even in his violence, Kurogiri felt cold.
No, Kurogiri didn’t fight like a killer, but he would kill her if he could, and probably not feel a thing. It was his mission. It was his purpose. Protect Shigaraki… and thus, eliminate the threats.
Still, right now Kurogiri wasn’t as cool and collected as he had been in the labs. The brutality of the fight was exhausting. His glowing eyes were narrowed with deadly intent, but Toki could see the way his chest rose as he panted, the way he was tense, the way his eyes darted around, the way wave after wave of darkness smashed against Toki’s explosions of light.
Maybe he could feel the way Toki’s warping rejected his own, too, like she did. Maybe it made his skin crawl, maybe it unsettled him just as much as it unsettled her. At any rate, they weren’t fighting smoothly like acrobats sharing a deadly dance; they were just blasting everything around them like sledgehammers, compensating for their lack of control with a show of unrestrained force.
This kind of fight couldn’t go on forever. And… There was a sense of urgency in Toki, too, that didn’t have anything to do with the shivers of revulsions coursing through her spine.
Toki couldn’t allow him to flee. Not only Kurogiri was the most dangerous pawns of the League, but he was also the only League member she could catch right now. She had already lost Shigaraki, already let Rock Lock get killed…! If she let Kurogiri escape, it would have been for nothing. She couldn’t allow it; she wouldn’t allow it.
“SO WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO NOW?!” she taunted him after another explosion.
She could barely hear her own voice. They were both in the sky, falling when they weren’t bouncing between deflagration, so part of it was probably the wind. But part of it was also the fact that those deafening explosions had had left her ears ringing so shrilly she could feel the vibrations still lingering in her skull, drowning everything else.
“Do you think you have already won?” Kurogiri droned; eyes narrowed.
She could barely hear him with the wind and the ringing in her ears. And yet, she couldn’t pass the chance to needle him. She grinned at him, all teeth, her heart pounding with the terror and elation and fury of a fight.
“My Quirk is better than yours!”
Not one of her best come-back, but hey, she was a little busy too. Still in freefall, she sent a warp-blast whose explosion sent them both careering in the air, and narrowly avoided Kurogiri’s whip of darkness in answer.
“What are you, by the way?” she yelled at him. “I figure you’re a Nomu, but are you actually a thinking one or are you remotely controlled by All For One?”
Kurogiri froze half a second, almost like a computer glitching, and then retorted flatly:
“I am Tomura Shigaraki’s protector.”
“That doesn’t answer my question! Do you even know how many people’s DNA have been stitched together to create your abomination of a power?”
Kurogiri didn’t freeze this time, but there was a deliberate half-second where Toki felt the wrongness intensify, as if somehow Kurogiri’s focus had shifted. She suddenly wondered if he remembered who had had been, before.
She didn’t give him time to answer and blasted him to make her point. He parried the hit with his own shield of shadows, but it was enough to make Kurogiri lose whatever balance he had found, once again thrown into the air. Toki went hot in pursuit, pressing her advantage.
Kurogiri had never fought. He was a novice, powerful but not battle-tested. Nervous. Frightened. That was why he had escalated too quickly, forcing Toki to respond in kind. He had no real strategy. He was in over his head, and now they were both unleashing attacks that were almost ridiculously excessive for a duel.
And Kurogiri knew it. That was why he was hitting faster, and harder, because he couldn’t back down. Because he was acting on instinct. Reacting, not acting.
She could use that.
Toki expanded the invisible membrane of Warp-Space like a bubble around her, stretching it for a dozen meters. Englobing all the space around her, all the energy around her, including Kurogiri and his own Warp-Gate—
She didn’t need A.D.A for this. She didn’t need math and calculation: she only needed her own visualization. It only took her the time of one heartbeat.
And then she warped with it.
They reappeared about twenty kilometers higher in a massive deflagration.
The air here was thinner. With the wind of her freefall, Toki felt lightheaded, unable to take in enough oxygen. Her vision was swimming. And yet she had been prepared, she had been breathing quickly for the last minutes to saturate her bloodstream with oxygen. Kurogiri was woefully unprepared. The explosion of their warping sent him careening wildly through the air like a ragdoll, losing all sense of what was up and down, the thinning air making him gasp and instinctively flail in panic, all coordination lost….
Toki warped a bubble of air around her fist, twice the size of what she would usually use (she had to account for the thinner atmosphere after all) and aimed a Warp-Blast at him.
The first two shots sailed harmlessly through mist, but still helped her triangulate the position of his real body. Kurogiri understood what she was trying to do and struggled to regain his bearings, maybe to counterattack. In vain. He was determined, Toki would give him that. But no amount of determination could suppress the instinctive response of losing all sense of balance of up and down while choking on no air. Only years of rigorous training could do that.
Toki’s third shot hit Kurogiri square in the back of the head, and he went completely limp.
For a fraction of second Toki was seized by terror. Had she hit too hard? Was he dead? Dead like Beros?! But she could still feel that tingle of wrongness on her skin when she warped next to him, even more so when she grabbed him. He was alive... just unconscious.
It was only a matter of moments to warp back down, negating her momentum as to not crash on the sidewalk at terminal velocity, and shoved the unconscious Kurogiri into an empty police van. There were three ambulances around the Shie Hassaikai compound. Toki’s stomach lurched. People had been hurt. That was inevitable in a raid, but she hoped none of the victims were her little fledglings.
“Quantum!”
Oh, her hearing was coming back. Great. Being deaf would have sucked.
Someone helped her sit down. Police officers were strapping the unconscious Kurogiri in straitjacket. He wasn’t dead… not even completely unconscious, either. Toki saw him moving weakly. He was probably going to need a hospital. Gods knew Toki would need one. Then a paramedic injected Kurogiri with a sedative, and the warper went limp.
That was a problem neatly solved.
She briefly closed her eyes, groaning. Her head was still spinning a little, and her ears were ringing. Her face was so cold it was almost numb, and yet her eyes and nose stung pretty badly. She patted at her face and realized her nose was bleeding. That was what skydiving at dangerous altitudes without proper equipment did to you.
“Is the fight still ongoing?” she asked the nearest police officer.
Her voice was wobbly and thick, as if she had a hangover. The very nice police officer kindly didn’t remark upon it.
“It’s almost over,” he told her. “It seems that the League escaped. Most of the yakuza have already been captured. This is just clean-up.”
“Maybe I should help,” Toki sighed. She tried to stand up and the Earth started spinning very fast. She sat back down, then amended: “You know, I think they have things well in hand.”
The very nice police officer didn’t call her out on that either. Instead he politely nodded, and let Toki gather back her sense of balance, oxygens in her lungs, and some measure of auditive capacity. Toki closed her eyes, letting the darkness soothe the headache she could feel beginning to pound in her skull, and let out a long deep breath.
Yup, everyone else had things well in hand. She could probably take a break until she could take two steps without feeling like throwing up, then.
oOoOoOo
By the time Toki was more or less in condition to fight again, the raid was over and there was a dozen more ambulances around the scene.
Toki and Kurogiri’s fight hadn’t killed anyone, thank all the gods, but they had wrecked the place and many people had been caught in that. Yakuza, mostly, but also people who had been close to the compound. A few residential houses were damaged, a car had been upturned, and so on. Toki joined the team of paramedics who was making sure no one was trapped in the rubble, and used her radio to get updates on the other heroes.
Inferno was fine. He had briefly fought Dabi before the villain escaped through a portal. Of all the heroes to face Dabi, Inferno may have been the best pick. His perfect heat-resistance gave him immunity against Dabi’s blue fire. Shouto, who had been with Inferno, had been strictly instructed to run the hell away from the fight, and so he hadn’t seen even a flicker of a flame. Toki approved. Instead Shouto had teamed-up with Hitoshi and they had captured half a dozen yakuza all by themselves. Nice going.
Not everyone had been so lucky. There had been a copy of Shigaraki in the main building which had injured several people by disintegrating the top floor, but no casualties. The copy had been destroyed by Lady Siam. The real Shigaraki, of course, had escaped.
The real Twice had been fought by Salamander and Mirio, and they had won pretty easily. Unfortunately, Toga had dropped from the ceiling and provided cover for Twice to escape just as Salamander was handcuffing the guy. Spinner had been there, injured but mobile enough to help them. In the end, the whole League had escaped.
Toga had been coming from another fight, one where she had apparently gravely injured Sir Nighteye. There was another hero stabbed (Mr. Brave). Melissa had been with them, but she was uninjured. That was a hell of a relief.
As for the yakuza… Most of them, if not all of them, had been caught.
Neito had his share of glory. He had fought no less than three of the Eight Bullets of Overhaul and had defeated them all. He didn’t have a scratch on him, either. He had danced literal circles around them, using both Warp-Space and his own Quirk to constantly be three steps ahead of his opponents, taunting them the whole time. Toki was really a bad influence on him.
Not everything was perfect, of course. The yakuza’s boss had been killed, as were most of the higher-ups. The League had carved through them like a knife through butter. The only known survivor was the little girl, Eri… And she was missing. So was Danjuro Tobita, who had been with her at the time of the attack. The Gentle Criminal had apparently grabbed the girl and ran, thus saving her life. No one had been able to follow him.
And Overhaul had managed to run away, too. Which was… bad.
With the labs destroyed and Chronostasis dead, Toki knew it would be hard for any would-be villains to replicate the formula of the Quirk-erasing bullets. Especially if nobody knew that Eri was their source. But still… Overhaul managed to get his hands back on Eri… Or worse, if AFO’s pet doctor got his hands on Eri, then it could be very bad.
And AFO was paying attention to the yakuza, now, because Toki had had the good idea to paint a target on their backs…!
Shit, she should have just killed him when she had the chance. She should have killed him at Kamino, fuck the laws and the witnesses. Even without his Quirk, AFO was still a terrible opponent. And now…
The whole point of this operation was to destroy any trace of the Quirk-erasing drug, and that included putting Eri somewhere safe. Failing to secure Eri was a major fuck-up. No one but Toki knew it yet, because no one knew Eri was the key to the drug, but… One of the yakuza would talk at some point. Some of them must know, and so they would talk. They would talk about the girl.
And the girl was somewhere in the wild, not hidden and protected by heroes!
“Well, you don’t look as bad as I thought!”
Toki squinted up at Inferno as the older hero sat next to her. He had dust and sooth all over his suit but seemed otherwise unharmed. The fledglings looked fine, too. Toki had seen them from afar. Actually, Toki was the most battered of them all. It was so unfair.
She hadn’t been stabbed or shot (this time) but she felt like she had been run over by a bus. Her ears were still ringing, and considering how painful her whole body felt, she was pretty sure she was bruised to hell and back. That’s what concussive blasts did to you.
“I’m still hearing things like I’m underwater,” she said anyway.
“You’re fine. Considering how spectacular the fight looked from the ground, I’m almost surprised you’re still in one piece.”
“Really?”
“I’m sure someone filmed it. You can probably find it online already. You didn’t hold back at all, up there! Light against dark, with explosions concussive enough to deafen three city blocks? It was epic, believe me.”
Tok smiled weakly. “I’ll take you word for it. And you, you fought Dabi?”
Inferno grunted an agreement.
“Yeah. Not long. He ran when he realized who I was. He must know I’m heat-resistant. He’s a one-trick pony, clearly. Kind of puny, too. If you ever go toe to toe with the League, ring me up. I could march through his flames and crack his spine in half over my knee. Problem solved.”
Toki laughed, and the grimaced because her ribs hurt terribly. Yeah, she would definitively see Recovery Girl as soon as she could. Ouch.
“So, when is the debrief?”
“Not anytime soon,” Inferno told her apologetically. “We have a lot of injured people to send to the hospital. You caught a warper, so now we have to send him to a facility that can hold him. That’s not a walk in the park. Usually I would have said Tartarus was the only place they could send him, but…”
“Not with All For One there,” Toki completed. “Or any member of the League, actually. Isn’t Stain there too?”
Inferno briefly looked around them, and then lowered his voice:
“Stain is dead. Died from his injuries within hours of being locked up in Tartarus. He never woke up from the battle. I think he was already braindead at that point, to be honest. Paperwork just say he died in prison because it’s less incriminating for heroes than to have a villain die in battle.”
Toki hissed between her teeth. “Shit. How do you know that?”
“Salamander. Well, more exactly, Okamoto speaking with Salamander. Don’t spread it around, alright? They’re keeping it under wraps.”
Of course they were. Stain had never been famous like in canon, but he had still been a member of the League. It gave him some notoriety. His death would raise questions. It would also provoke the League. They would try and seek revenge on…
Wait. Meteor had killed Stain. Toki had played a part, but it was Meteor who had dealt the final blow.
… Was it bad that Toki didn’t feel even the slightest revulsion at the thought? Death used to make her balk. Specifically, her father killing people made her balk. But when the victim was Stain, Toki’s old horror was nowhere to be found. Mostly she felt wary of the consequences. For Meteor, of course, but also for heroes as a whole, when the League would learn it and become even more unhinged as a result.
Damn it. She didn’t have the energy to deal with that today.
“Can this mission be over yet?” she whined.
“Yeah, yeah. I need you in the escort for Kurogiri. Get a move on.”
She gave him a military salute and went.
She checked on her fledglings first, of course. Everyone was fine and dandy. Shouto was a little annoyed to have been sent away as soon as Dabi had appeared, but at the same time he appeared to be a little relieved that he wouldn’t have to face the villain. Hitoshi was tired but satisfied. Neito was, of course, proud as a peacock of his success. Melissa was more pensive. During her fight, she had managed to deescalate the situation to make everyone leave. A necessity, considering that the two heroes she had been with had been stabbed and needed urgent care. But it had also allowed Toga and Spinner to run away.
Toki assured Melissa that she had done an admirable job, but Melissa still seemed pensive. This fight had apparently rattled her. It was the first time she fought with the League. Maybe that was why she was so contemplative? But the important thing was that they were alright. Toki could confidently leave them with Inferno and do her own job.
Her job was currently to escort a prisoner, so that was what she was going to do. Kurogiri was strapped to a stretcher. The vehicle carrying him was a heavy van, half-ambulance, and half police truck. They didn’t depart immediately, though. There was a bit of uncertainty about where, exactly, they would bring him. Tartarus was out of the question, of course.
In the end, the question climbed the hierarchical ladder until someone in the HPSC managed to point them towards a secure prison where Kurogiri would be kept sedated until they could move him to a more secret location.
Toki was pretty sure that, in canon, Kurogiri had been kept in a coma in a hospital after his capture. Maybe the same thing would happen there? After all, Kurogiri’s presence was essential to a few plot-points. Wasn’t it by interrogating him that Aizawa discovered where the Nomus were made, and where AFO’s pet doctor was hiding?
Toki didn’t remember the name of the city. Her memories of canon were getting fuzzier with time. Her foreknowledge was useless here.
It didn’t matter at the moment. Toki climbed into the car, Kurogiri’s stretcher was loaded, and they went.
They would have to leave Osaka. The prison was a two-hour ride of the city. Toki planned to use that time to start typing her report on her phone, and maybe have a medic look at her head. She had been pretty banged up.
There was two cops and a paramedic in the back of the van with Kurogiri. Toki was in the cabin with the driver, ready to warp out and start hitting people if the League showed up. She seriously hoped she wouldn’t have to. Everything hurt.
“What a day, uh?” the driver said lightly.
He was an older cop, with gray hair and a small beard. He was mostly focused on the road, but he still glanced at Toki when she groaned in answer.
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” she muttered. “This day can’t end soon enough.”
“Two hours more, miss,” he said in a conciliatory tone. “I have to respect the speed limit, after all.”
He drove carefully, but pretty fast. Maybe they would make good time. Toki didn’t want to be distracted as long as they were in the city, where an ambush could be coming, but once they would be out maybe she could put on some music…
One street, another, a turn, another. The destroyed Shie Hassaikai compound had now vanished from the review mirror. Toki breathed a little easier. She still kept an eye on the road, though. In canon, the League had attacked a convoy very similar to this one to get revenge on canon-Chisaki: maybe they would use the same strategy to try and rescue Kurogiri. Although apparently Spinner was wounded after the battle, so maybe they wouldn’t attempt a rescue right there…
“Shit, what’s this guy doing?!”
Toki’s attention snapped back on the road. One man was standing in the middle of it, looking at them, directly in their path. With a cold shock, Toki recognized him.
Chisaki.
“Change paths!” she yelled.
Too late. Chisaki had slammed both hands on the concrete, and the road rose like an animal suddenly awoken, spikes piercing the surface everywhere. Their vehicle hit one head-on and was thrown to the side at the same time.
Toki grabbed the dashboard and warped with the entire car.
They reappeared on the road behind Chisaki, where the concrete was still smooth and untouched. Toki hadn’t affected their momentum, only their direction so they wouldn’t be shoved to the side, and the car hit the ground at all speed. To his credit, the driver didn’t lose control. With a curse, he righted the car and hit the gas, making the car jump forward with a roar. For a second Toki believed they were safe…
… And then she saw the metal of the car’s door twist and bloat like plastic melting under a flame, and then she realized with horror that somehow, they must have warped close enough for Chisaki to touch the car. How was it possible?! He must have been five meters away at least, how had he moved that fast, had Toki miscalculated somehow…?!
Fuck, it was too late to think of the logistics…!
The vehicle imploded just as Toki grabbed the driver and warped.
She reappeared in the sky, like she always did. Under her, she could still hear the lingering echo of metal screaming. Toki gasped, took a breath, shifted her weight, and warped again with the driver. This time she shifted their momentum to negate it, and they landed weightlessly on the ground, unhurt.
Well, Toki was unhurt. The driver collapsed immediately. There was a piece of crystal the size of a dinner plate stabbed in the meat of his tight and it was pissing blood. Toki swore. Yu Hojo must be with Chisaki, then. Had he used the crystals to grab the car from under, allowing Chisaki to cross the distance between them and then grab it…?
A consideration for later. The driver collapsed. When he fell, the shock dislodged the crystal and the blood literally sprayed. Fuck. The artery was touched.
Frantically, Toki grabbed one of the garrots in her leather pouch and tied it around the driver’s thigh. He gasped in pain and immediately passed out. Toki cursed. Yeah, the artery was definitely hit. Thankfully the tourniquet was doing its job and maybe the guy would survive but…
Shit. The car. The cops, the paramedics. Kurogiri.
Toki took a breath, ignoring the ringing in her ears and the way her head was spinning. The surge of adrenaline had been enough to make her briefly forget all her various pains and aches, but now, with the cold shock of dread, it was back. Gods, everything hurt. She steeled herself and raised her eyes to the roads, not even five meters away.
The car had been utterly blown up.
And in the middle of the crater, with metal part curving inward like the ribs of a robotic carcass, Kurogiri’s stretcher was untouched.
The cops and the paramedic were dead. Toki could see their bodies, crumbled piles of clothes lying in pools of blood. They had been crushed or stabbed debris, impossible to know what exactly. The acrid smell of gas and motor oil were seeping through the air, mingling with the smell of blood. Toki had a hysterical thought for the canon-story, where the League had attacked the convoy to get revenge on Chisaki. How the tables had turned. Now it was Chisaki using the exact same plan to get revenge on the League.
The car looked like it had been turned inside out, shredding everything inside… Except for Kurogiri. The black mist was rippling gently, not quite awake. Two luminous yellow eyes were struggling to open.
Chisaki started walking toward the stretcher. As if he had waited for Kurogiri to wake, too. To let him see death coming.
Toki realized she was too far away. If she took off her hands from the bleeding driver, he would probably bleed to death. She wasn’t going to be able to attack. Maybe she could use a Warp-Blast, but she wasn’t sure she could shoot fast enough. Her skull was still ringing. Every limb was as heavy as lead. Kurogiri had exhausted her; another fight, especially against someone as strong as Overhaul, would be exhausting and possibly lethal.
What could she do? What was she supposed to do?!
“Chisaki!”
He looked up. Glacial fury emanated from him like something physical. Something bigger than rage, deeper than bloodlust. The cold unwavering resolve of someone who had discarded all restrain. Chisaki had the eyes of a killer. There was nothing in them. Just intent, devoid of all passion or even warmth, like a black void consuming everything.
Toki’s voice stayed stuck in her throat.
Slowly, Chisaki’s eyes lowered to Kurogiri’s body, still tightly bound in a straitjacket, lying in a stretcher, and drugged almost to unconsciousness. Vulnerable. Chisaki’s expression didn’t change. When he spoke, his voice was low and deadly.
“Shigaraki cares about him, doesn’t he?”
Toki sucked in a sharp breath. Kurogiri’s eyes were barely open, unfocused: he wasn’t fully conscious. Even still, there was a ripple in the mist, as if the warper could feel the threat.
“Don’t,” Toki said softly.
She was frantically trying to search for a plan, an idea, anything. But her mind felt sluggish and exhausted, running in circles like a hamster in its wheel. She couldn’t find a solution. She couldn’t do anything at all.
Chisaki raised a hand. Toki’s grip tightened on the unconscious driver’s thigh. The blood had soaked through the fabric, hot against her bare fingers. She couldn’t let go. He would die. If she had thought of warping him immediately to a hospital and then coming back, maybe she would have been free to fight, but she didn’t think of that, and now she was the only thing keeping this guy alive. If she let him die, could she save Kurogiri?
Did she want to make that choice?
“Don’t,” she repeated, barely more than a whisper.
If Chisaki heard her, he gave no sign of it.
He put his hand on Kurogiri’s chest and overhauled him.
The black mist that made Kurogiri’s body shattered like glass, blood and gore splattering everywhere. Kurogiri’s Warp-Gate was made of several Quirks tightly woven together and constantly activated, and his body was a delicately crafted puppet of organic matter, but it didn’t matter in the face of Overhaul’s power. Flesh and mist and everything that had made Kurogiri, so vast and powerful that taking him down had needed every scrap of Toki’s strength, was suddenly reduced to a bloody pulp. Blood splattered everywhere, as if someone had crushed a can of tomato soup. Toki instinctively flinched away from the spray, squeezing her eyes shut.
Something changed in the air, like a subsonic buzz suddenly silenced.
Toki blinked her eyes open. It took her a second to realize what it was. The feeling of wrongness following Kurogiri, the instinctive shudder of revulsion caused by his mere presence—
It was gone.
Chisaki was still standing there. He was looking at the mess of gore that had been Kurogiri. Gods, it didn’t even look like a person, or even a body. Toki almost heaved. Chisaki was splattered with blood now. His hands hung limply at his sides. His skin was red, covered in hives, but he made no gesture to wipe his hands or even his face.
Slowly, Overhaul raised his eyes, and looked at her.
“Well, hero.” His voice was soft. But his eyes were cold as death, burning with unsatisfied bloodlust. “What now?”
Notes:
Oh, look at that! Another cliffhanger!
I'm sorry for fridging Rock Lock. He had such an amazing potential. But i stayed stuck on this chapter for nearly two months and i only managed to unlock it when i made Shigaraki kill Rock Lock, thus unleashing Chisaki's fury. So.... Sorry, Rock Lock.
Anyway !
Did you like this chapter? Did you squint when you saw the title? I bet you did x) And... The funny question in that chapter is: who are the fated enemies? And the whole chapter, you're wondering:Is it Toki and Shigaraki? The descendant of heroes raised by villains; and the child of villains raised by heroes, both of them guilty of destroying their home and running away from their identity?
Or is it Toki and Kurogiri? Both warpers, one bright and luminous, the other dark and twisted? Were they made to fight to each other? Is that why Toki felt wrongness around Kurogiri? Is that why her victory over him felt so unsatisfaying?
Is it Toki and Chisaki?
Or is it Toki and someone else entirely ?
Chapter 74: What was done, what is left to do
Summary:
“’I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. And then Gandalf said, ‘So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’”
“… I can’t believe you’re quoting Tolkien at me. Who are you?!”
“Someone who spend a lot of time on your Discord server, reading books recommended by your crazy friends. Now let’s get back to the topic at hand. I very much doubt throwing the whole of Japan into Mordor will solve our problems.”
Notes:
Well well well, time to go back to the plot !
Remember where we left of? That cliffhanger with Toki and Chisaki staring each other down? Well... Here is what happened. But we start the chapter after a time-skp, because otherwise it's not funny xD
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
WHAT WAS DONE, WHAT IS LEFT TO DO
“Alright.” Toki clicked her pen and looked around the table. “Keep the verbal report concise, please. It’s a summary of what you’ll put in your written report. We’ll tackle that after, anyway. Phantom Thief, you start.”
“Er, where should I start?”
“Traditionally, at the start of the mission, or at the moment you were separated from the person asking your report.”
“Oh. Right. So, we arrived at the compound, and the League was attacking the yakuza. I realized it meant that you were going after the League, and we… meaning, the students… were supposed to keep away from the League. But since nobody called off the mission, I went ahead. I ended up with Lady Siam and Bubble Girl, at first.”
“At first?”
They were in Icarus’ headquarters, in the conference room. It was part of Toki’s duty to teach the fledglings how to write a report, after all. They were all tired and dirty from the fight, but it was better to at least have an outline while the memory was fresh. Thus Melissa, Hitoshi, Neito and Shouto were all there, each with a laptop to take notes or start typing. A recorder was set in the middle of the table to record this briefing.
Usually, the immediate post-mission briefing would happen in the headquarters of the head hero for that case. But Nighteye was in surgery, and Inferno was putting out a lot of fires in his city, so he wasn’t available. It was why he had entrusted his intern Shouto to Toki’s care. After all, while this operation had ended with the destruction of the Shie Hassaikai… there was a lot more death than planned.
And that was without taking in account what had happened with Chisaki afterward.
“Yeah, at first,” Neito confirmed. “We started fighting though the ranks of the yakuza, until someone said that the boss yakuza and his lieutenants were attacked by the League, on the upper floors. Lady Siam went there with other heroes, including Eraserhead… But she told Bubble Girl and me to stay at this level, with Ryukyu, to secure the building.”
Good decision. Taking Eraserhead to deal with Shigaraki, while making sure that the interns were under the protection of a powerhouse and also away from the main danger.
Also, it had probably spared Neito quite the traumatism because Lady Siam and Eraserhead had only found corpses where the yakuza’s commands had been fighting. Oh, the yakuza had fought, but against five copies of Shigaraki and seven of Spinner... it hadn’t been much of a fight. The building had been partially destroyed, and the boss as well as his eight closest advisors had been stabbed or reduced to dust.
The whole organization of the Shie Hassaikai had been decapitated… and the hero had no arrests to show for it. Only body bags.
Toki kept those depressing thoughts for herself. She nodded, and gesture at him to continue.
“Well, that’s what we did,” Neito continued awkwardly. “Ryukyu ended up stuck in a fight with a villain who could suck energy, so Bubble Girl and me just jumped around knocking out anyone who got close. I used Warp-Space mostly, to cuff people and then evacuate them to the police vans. At one point one of the yakuza pulled a gun, but I used Hitoshi’s Quirk to make him empty the mag on the ground and give the gun to Bubble Girl. I fought one yakuza with a bird mask, Setsuno I think: the one with the Larceny Quirk? He gave me some trouble because I couldn’t handcuff him, but in the end I used Warp-Space to slam him into walls and wrap him up in a curtain. It worked great!”
“Good. And after?”
“We… kept fighting in that area until it was over, and then Eraserhead told me to stay with Hito— with Cheshire and Shouto. And then you came to bring us back here.”
Toki nodded and gave him some pointers to start writing his reports. Mostly how to detail where exactly he had been fighting, and descriptions of any notable villains he had cuffed. Then she turned to Shouto.
“Your turn.”
“I was with Inferno,” he started flatly. “We went into the main building. We immediately fought copies of Spinner and some yakuza. One wall went into flame, and Inferno ordered me to go back and join the team behind us. I did. As I was leaving I heard something crumble and then Dabi’s voice.”
He paused. Toki narrowed her eyes:
“You didn’t turn back, did you?”
“No. I almost did, but then Inferno started laughing and mocking Dabi, so I… I trusted him. I didn’t turn back, and I went where he told me to.”
“Good.” Toki smiled at him. “Part of being a hero is trusting the people around you. Inferno doesn’t have an ice Quirk, but he’s heat-resistant. Dabi ended up running away from him. If you had stayed there, he would have gone after you.”
Shouto nodded begrudgingly. He didn’t look very happy about it. Toki motioned for him to continue, hoping to leave that topic behind them. He obeyed:
“I retraced my steps and found a group of heroes and policemen in the main hallway. Cheshire was among them. We teamed-up for the rest of the mission. Among the yakuza we fought was Mimic, who fused with part of the building and was making the tunnels collapse on us. Cheshire was the one to take him down.”
“Only because you iced the walls and made him reveal his position,” Hitoshi protested.
Toki raised an eyebrow and turned to him:
“Alright. Your turn, now.”
Hitoshi took a breath and began:
“I was with the smallest group. Salamander and Centipede, and I think about twenty police officers? We were supposed to only catch runaways, not get into the thick of the fight. But… Plans and first contact with the enemy, you know the saying. It was chaos, so Salamander pushed us inside to bottleneck the entrance and stop the fighting from spreading to the streets. We followed the fighting and ended up in the hall, where Shouto found us. He froze a lot of yakuza, so it cleared up that area pretty quickly. At that point, the tunnels’ entrance was open, and we heard screaming, so… we went there.”
Hitoshi paused a second, gathering his thoughts. His voice was a little rough. He must have spoken (or yelled) a lot during that attack.
“We started chasing a man because he was carrying a little girl on his back. What we hadn’t expected was that a dozen of yakuza would fall on us when we did that.”
Toki straightened. Oh, damn, that must have been Danjuro Tobita running away with Eri! She hadn’t known that Hitoshi had caught a glimpse of them.
“One of the tunnels had a car in it, with people loading suitcases in the truck,” Hitoshi continued, frowning. “I didn’t see much, because when the man turned into that hallway, everyone there suddenly attacked us. The man used the car to run away with the little girl. We don’t know where that particular tunnel led, because at some point Mimic joined the fight, injected himself with something, and fused with the walls to make the hallway collapse.”
“I kept the ceiling from crushing us with ice,” Shouto interjected flatly. “Then I froze the walls and everything, until Mimic started yelling at us.”
“And then I insulted his mother until he answered to me, and I made him fall asleep,” Hitoshi continued smugly.
Typical. Toki held back a snigger; it wouldn’t have been very professional. Hitoshi and grinned, before continuing:
“We were kind of trapped between the ice and rubble after that, so we spent a lot of time clearing the way, and then cuffing and bringing to the police all the yakuza knocked out. When we got back out, the battle was mostly over. Salamander told us to wait near the police cars and describe the man who ran away with the car to one of the officers. Neito joined us not long after. And that’s it.”
Toki gave both Shouto and Hitoshi some more recommendations on how to write their reports, mostly about describing who they had fought with. They had already given Tobita’s description to the cops, so there was that.
Toki was mostly worried about what was in the car that Danjuro had used to run. The yakuza had been loading the truck in the middle of an attack: it must have been a precious cargo. Gods, she hoped it was drugs, not Quirk-erasing bullets!
Oh, who was she kidding? It was absolutely Quirk-erasing bullets. Now the main problem would be to find out who had them. Tobita was probably selling them to buy himself the means to get revenge for the boss, and protection for Eri.
“Alright,” Toki finally said. “Your turn, now, Polaris.”
Melissa took a deep breath and began.
“I was with Sir Nighteye and Mr. Brave. We went to the tunnels almost immediately. Sir Nighteye said they had a lab where they were making drugs somewhere, so we needed to secure the evidence while Lady Siam captured their main fighters.”
Wow, that was so typical of Sir Nighteye. Efficient, but in a way that pushed his favorite to hog all the spotlight. Toki would bet that Nighteye was pissed, now, that Lady Siam hadn’t fought the real Shigaraki, Kurogiri, or even Chisaki.
“Instead we stumbled upon the League,” Melissa said. “Spinner and Toga. A copy each, but also… the originals. Toga stabbed Nighteye, Spinner got Mr. Brave, but I broke Spinner’s leg. There was a standoff. Toga knew that if she kept on fighting, Spinner would get caught; the police wasn’t too far behind us. And I knew that Mr. Brave and Sir Nighteye needed a hospital. So I stalled. I talked to Toga, convinced her that we could all go our separate ways.”
“And it worked?” Neito blurted out.
Melissa stayed silent a second, looking troubled.
“Yeah,” she finally said, softly. “I convinced her. I told her that— We would both be happier if we didn’t hurt each other, and she listened. She let Mr. Brave and Sir Nighteye evacuate, I let Spinner leave… Then we went our separate ways. I didn’t try to stop her.”
Shouto frowned a little, but Toki nodded.
“You did well. You are still a student, and it is not your job to stop the League. Fight back, yes, but not attack when you have a chance to avoid combat.”
Melissa smiled weakly:
“Still. I didn’t do much, in the grand scheme of things. One fight, and then I was just keeping two guys from bleeding out in a basement. Hardly the stuff of legends.”
“Sir Nighteye is probably very grateful you chose that option.”
And if he wasn’t, Toki was going to slam his head against a brick wall. Dickhead. She sighed, and made a movement toward the recorder to switch it off…
But then Hitoshi asked:
“What about you? What happened on your end?”
Toki paused. She looked at the recorder, then at the four students around the table. And then she breathed deeply. Why not, after all? She needed to make her report, like everyone else.
“I was one of the first people inside the compound…”
Slowly, she summarized her mad rush though the corridors and hallways, then through the tunnels, emptying them of fighters as she caught them and brought them to the police cars one by one. Then encountering a wounded yakuza, who told her about the location of the labs. And in the labs, stumbling upon the aftermath of the fight between the League and Kai Chisaki.
Silently, Toki wondered what would have happened if she hadn’t come.
Shigaraki would have killed Rock Lock anyway. There was a universe where Rock Lock was a hero who survived this raid, but that wasn’t her universe. The dice had been cast long ago. And in that basement… Shigaraki had been furious. He had wanted to make someone hurt, and Rock Lock had been within his grasp. It was that simple. Nothing Toki could have done would have saved him. Maybe if she had had a Quirk-erasing bullet and a gun… But it was too late to think about that.
If Toki hadn’t arrived when she had, then Shigaraki would have killed Rock Lock anyway. And then killed Chisaki. And then killed Yu Hojo, the last of the Eight Bullets. And then, he wouldn’t have found the answers he wanted, and continued to kill.
Because that was why the League had attacked the Shie Hassaikai. For answers. Shigaraki’s incoherent yelling and Chisaki’s sneering answers had at least told Toki this. All For One had found a way to send a message out, and now the League knew he didn’t have his Quirk. Or at least, they had been told that the yakuza had something to do with All For One’s predicament… and since they knew about the Quirk-erasing drugs, they must have thought that Chisaki had double-crossed them.
It wasn’t surprising. That was Toki’s plan, after all. Redirecting the League’s fury onto the yakuza rather than allow it fall on Neito, Yagi, and herself. Anything to keep her people safe.
But… even if it was her plan… she had hoped to remove the yakuza from the equation before the League realized the trap. She had hoped no one would get hurt.
She hadn’t been fast enough, once again.
At least the League hadn’t caught Eri. Or the Quirk-erasing bullets. Or Chisaki, or Chronostasis, or the secret to the fabrication of the Quirk-erasing drug. The League hadn’t even gotten their answers about how AFO’s Quirk had vanished. All they had accomplished was making Shigaraki throw a homicidal tantrum, kill a lot of people— and losing Kurogiri. The yakuza were the great losers of this plot-twist, but the League hadn’t won anything either.
The heroes were the great victors, in a way. Shame that this victory tasted so bitter.
“Shigaraki escaped by Kurogiri’s portal,” she said abruptly. “I tackled Kurogiri, and we fought.”
“Oh yeah, I saw part of that,” Hitoshi grinned. “Big flashes of light and whips on darkness the size of a city block, floating in the sky? With big crashes and roars like a plane was flying overhead? That rings a bell.”
“Yeah, that,” Toki huffed. “We fought. I won. He was put into a van for transport, and I went with to escort him.”
She paused, suddenly grave. She hadn’t expected Chisaki. She hadn’t expected the attack, the car exploding, all of it. If she had… She would have done things differently.
Maybe she should have given the task to escort Kurogiri to someone who wasn’t battered and bruised to hell. Toki had seen a paramedic before bringing back all her fledglings to Icarus, and her entire body was one giant bruise. She didn’t have any broken bones, but there were contusions on every inch on her thorax and back and arms and legs, like she had been tossed like a ragdoll by deflagrations… Which wasn’t far from the truth.
She could already feel it. She was stiff and in pain like an old grandma. Even her abs were hurting, as if she had trained too long. Her back, especially, throbbed with a dull pain every time she moved, as if she had a bad fall. Just… ow. Oh, it would be fine with some rest, frequent visit to an osteopath, and daily stretches to pop everything back into place. But still. Toki didn’t get tossed in all directions like that every day.
“The escort was attacked by Chisaki,” Toki continued, voice even. “He was seeking revenge for the yakuza members that Shigaraki killed. He managed to touch the car and made it explode. I barely had time to warp out with the driver.”
The driver would live. It had been a close call, but he would be fine. Toki had saved his life with her quick thinking and the tourniquet in her supplies. That was a comfort at least.
“Chisaki killed Kurogiri.”
What a nice and clinical way to describe the way Chisaki had obliterated the warper gate user, leaving only a smear of gore behind. Toki wondered if the autopsy, of what passed for it when what was left behind could barely qualify as a body, would be able to find out that Kurogiri had been created from the body of Oboro Shirakumo. And if the legist found out, would he even tell Aizawa and Yamada? And now that Kurogiri was dead, who would be able to tell the hero where the League was hiding, and where the Nomu were produced?
“And I captured Chisaki.”
The fledglings looked suitably impressed. Toki kept on smiling, not letting the truth appear on her face.
“And now the battle is over. You all did well. Congrats on your first big mission. It wasn’t a success; I’m not going to lie. People died. People that we were too late to save. But… At least none of you, and none of ours, died. And no innocent bystanders.”
There was silence. When she switched off the recorder, this time, no one interrupted. It was only after several seconds that Hitoshi said weakly:
“Not a great pep-talk, you know.”
“Yeah. Sorry, not at my best today. I prefer missions where nobody dies.”
Even thinking that it was the bad guys killing each other didn’t bring any comfort. About twenty-five yakuza had died in that assault. All killed by League members, or their copies. Sure, when you took in account the fact that there were more than two hundred members of the Shie Hassaikai, it didn’t seem like a lot, but it was still twenty-five people too much.
And five cops, two of them killed in the car Chisaki had blown up. And one paramedic, also in that car.
And Kurogiri, of course. A villain, a Nomu, but also a prisoner in their care.
Toki used to be so uncompromising about death. She used to think and act like any death was wrong. Like all death was a personal failure. When a civilian died or she failed a rescue, it broke her heart. She had almost never let villains kill each other under her watch, she had always been fast enough to stop everyone.
But now… It felt like she wasn’t fast enough, lately. Like things were happening too fast, like she wasn’t in control.
People died. It would be far too narcissistic to say that people died because she got them killed, but still, people died, and if she had been faster or more powerful, maybe they would still be alive. It wasn’t always her fault, but it didn’t make it any less her responsibility. The League wouldn’t have attacked the Shie Hassaikai and killed those people, if not for Toki’s misdirection. But if they hadn’t attacked the Shie Hassaikai, then surely the League would have come for her; for her family, for Meteor, Hinawa, Keigo, her students.
Toki couldn’t convince herself she had done the wrong thing. But it was hard to think it was the right one, either.
“At least you captured the Shie Hassaikai leader,” Shouto said. “It’s very impressive.”
Toki laughed uneasily.
“Yup, that’s me. Impressive.”
oOoOoOo
Two hours earlier.
Toki and Chisaki looked at each other from either side of the blood and gore that had once been Kurogiri. The road was deserted, for now, but Toki knew that in a few minutes cops and heroes would rush there.
There would be a fight. There would be more people dead.
“Well, hero.” Chisaki’s voice was soft, but the cold thirst for blood hadn’t left his eyes. “What now?”
Toki exhaled deeply. She didn’t think about the driver’s warm blood under her hand, she didn’t think about her entire body stiff with pain, she didn’t think about Kurogiri’s death and what it could mean for the canon-story.
She thought, what would Keigo do?
And she realized what he would do.
It was insane, it was crazy, absolutely no one could pull that off. No one but Keigo… Because it was absolutely what Keigo would do. Keigo, the brilliant spy, the thinker, the planner, the charmer, the man who could hear any lie and slit any throat for the greater good, the man who knew what buttons to pushes to make people like him.
I can’t do that, a small part of Toki said in dismay.
Hold my beer, the other part said.
“I could arrest you,” Toki said slowly. She held his gaze, projecting calm and power as much as she could while kneeling with her hands on a guy who was hemorrhaging on the pavement. “Neither of us would enjoy the experience, I think.”
“Or I could kill you.”
“Yes. Or I could kill you.”
Chisaki’s lip twitched. Like a smile but without any joy, barely a spark of cold amusement.
“You, a hero, kill me?”
Toki narrowed her eyes.
“Don’t confuse my dislike of violence for an inability to exercise it.”
Chisaki looked at her for a second, and then cocked his head to the side. Like a bird, almost: the gesture reminded Toki of Keigo, and the echo made her feel a strange dissonance. The movement, but also the look in his eyes. Not quite calculating, but cold, watchful, like a bird of prey seizing up an opponent.
Toki wondered what he saw. She was tired, she was hurting, she was keeping an unconscious man alive and couldn’t fight. She couldn’t summon that burning rage she had felt in the past, that fury that made murder so easy and violence so cathartic. But she had reached a point of exhaustion where fear and restrain were distant concepts.
And when she looked at Chisaki, she was capable of thinking, clinically, about cutting him into pieces. She didn’t want to, but she would.
Chisaki looked at her, his eyes still dark and empty of any warmth, and then took a deep breath. He didn’t exactly step back, but his back straightened, his face smoothed out, as if becoming a little more cognizant of his surroundings, instead of walking in a homicidal daze. As if he was paying more attention.
“Seems we are at an impasse, then,” Chisaki said lightly.
Toki breathed. “What do you suggest, then?”
He looked faintly amused.
“Well, we go our separate ways, of course. I let you live. I let that man live.” He glanced at the driver on the ground. “And you don’t get in my way.”
Toki raised an eyebrow: “And then? What do you intend to do?”
Chisaki’s faint look of amusement vanished replaced by a dark glare.
“It’s none of your business, hero.”
He was angry. An anger born of grief, loss, fear, despair, but anger. A rage like that needed a target. Toki could use it. She pushed her luck.
“Everyone in the Shie Hassaikai was killed by the League or arrested by heroes. There’s nothing left for you there. Well, nothing except revenge. You strike me as a sore loser. Do you intend to track down Shigaraki and take from him the same thing he took from you? His allies, his family, his little kingdom?”
Chisaki clenched his jaw, his fingers twitched, as if itching to disintegrate something. But he didn’t leave. He didn’t attack. He was watching her, listening to her. Toki didn’t smile, but she felt her heart racing, adrenaline ramping up. She was very much aware of the stakes here.
Gods, was it how it felt to Keigo when he was playing the MLA? That was both a thrill and so anxiety-inducing that Toki wanted to throw up a little.
“I wouldn’t be opposed on the principle,” she said, her tone intentionally light. “The League are unhinged maniacs. But they’re also very difficult to track. Even without Kurogiri… They’re slippery. They used a second warper back when I fought them in Korusan. You’re going to have a hard time pinning them down.”
Chisaki narrowed his eyes at her:
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that it’s difficult to hunt a gang of villains through the entire country. The best way to catch them is to anticipate their movements. To wait for them where they are obligated to go, or to determine what they want so you can take it from them.”
Chisaki tilted his head to the side. The look in his eyes was assertive, now.
“And what do they want?”
Toki grinned. A grin full of teeth.
“Well, hypothetically, if the time Shigaraki spent ranting about it is any indication… What he wants the most is to get his sensei back alive, and healthy.”
Chisaki didn’t move. But his eyes narrowed infinitesimally, cold as ice.
He remembered Shigaraki’s rant, too. He knew Toki was right. Shigaraki cared about Kurogiri, but he loved his sensei. Was obsessed with him, actually. More than love, it was adoration. Taking his sensei from him was the cruelest thing possible… which was why Shigaraki hated Toki and All Might.
Toki could see Chisaki’s priorities realign, dismissing the rest of the League as unimportant pawns and focusing on the main prize. All For One. She would almost feel bad for AFO. And then she remembered the glee in his voice when AFO had recounted what he had done to the Shimura family, the clear warning in his voice when he had believed Toki to be the ninth, the danger he represented for the people she loved…
And she spitefully thought: serves you right, fucker.
“And where is that sensei?” Chisaki asked smoothly.
Toki’s grin widened. Her heart was thundering in her chest so hard she could hear the pounding of her pulse in her ears. Now was the time to place her bet.
Holy shit, she was really hoping it wasn’t going to blow in her face.
“In Tartarus.”
Chisaki blinked, the first sign of surprise she managed to pull from him. Then his lips twitched, more in amusement at his own surprise than out of real delight.
“You have some nerve, hero.”
He sounded half-disbelieving, half-impressed. Yeah, it was ballsy. And crazy. And it probably wouldn’t work. But Toki knew the edge of mania in Chisaki’s look. She had seen people done crazier things.
So Toki shrugged, appearing unbothered:
“Well, it’s worth a shot. It would be a different story if All For One was still the boogeyman, kept under constant watch in solitary confinement. But he has no arms, no legs, and no Quirk. He’s kept under watch, but he has never been so vulnerable.”
Chisaki stared at her, almost morbidly fascinated.
“You are dreaming if you think I’ll walk in that kind of trap.”
You’re not gone, though, Toki thought almost giddily.
Chisaki hadn’t left. Part of it must simply be that he didn’t have anywhere to go. Canon-Chisaki had been found by the yakuza boss when he had nothing and no one. The yakuza had been his entire life. Now it was razed to the ground, and the people he loved the most had been savagely murdered. There was no moving on, no plan, no long-term projects anymore. Toki knew how it felt to lose your home. She knew how to felt to have that gaping hole where your life used to be and staring at it in horror because the enormity of the tragedy crushed you too much to even think about something else.
Chisaki had nowhere to go. He was desperate, and manic, and furious, and adrift. The only reason why he wouldn’t let Toki arrest him, if she attacked right now, was the need to lash out. But if she gave him a target…
His entire family was dead. More than his family... his business, his empire, the place he had hoped to have in the world. Of course fury was the only thing holding him together, because without the rage there was nothing left to live for. Oh, it would pass. One day, it would pass. But not now, not a few handfuls of hours after the catastrophe, not when Toki had seen the glacial determination in Chisaki’s eyes when he had killed Kurogiri.
Chisaki wanted blood. And he would be ready to do some pretty crazy things to get it. Including walking into a deadly fight with Shigaraki. So how walking in a prison was any different?
It was so crazy that nobody would expect it. Nobody. Especially not All For One. And Chisaki knew it.
“I wouldn’t call it a trap,” Toki protested. “I want you arrested. I’m honest about that. I’m just saying there would be benefits to it for you too.”
“I like my freedom, thank you,” Chisaki drawled.
“Suit yourself. Choosing escape over revenge is a perfectly valid choice.”
Chisaki clenched his jaw. And still, he didn’t leave. Reinforcements would be there any minutes now, and he didn’t leave.
Escape was not what Chisaki wanted. He wanted destruction. He wanted revenge, even if he had to die for it. There was no heat and fury in his eyes: but this cold murderous resolve on his face was all familiar all the same. Only death could pay for what he had lost.
And maybe Chisaki was just enough mad to consider a crazy idea a viable plan, after all.
“What is between you and Shigaraki, hero?” Chisaki finally asked.
Toki hadn’t expected that. She should have, though. After all, her plan reeked of personal beef between her and the League. She blinked, and answered honestly:
“Nothing. I simply mutilated his dear old sensei, and he hates my guts.”
“Then what is between you and that sensei that you want dead?”
Toki tightened her grip on the driver’s injury. She thought of AFO’s taunt and the sheer hatred in his voice after she cut his legs. The danger. The oppressive menace that would weight on Toki as long as she lived: on her, on Hinawa, Keigo, Meteor, Hitoshi, Melissa, Neito, everyone—
She didn’t have to feign the way her voice went flat and hard like steel.
“He threatened someone very dear to me. At some point, he will do it again. I would rather he didn’t.”
Chisaki looked her over, eyes cold and dark. As if methodically categorizing the costs and benefits of simply killing her here and now or going along with her crazy idea. For a second Toki braced herself to escape with the unconscious driver…
… and then Chisaki grinned, a smile without joy that didn’t reach his eyes, and said lightly:
“You must be truly desperate, then. Alright, I accept. Do your job, hero. I expect preferential treatment for not resisting arrest.”
oOoOoOo
Now.
The police hadn’t found little Eri and her bodyguard Tobita Danjuro. The car had been found several kilometers outside the city, but it was empty. Danjuro must have called someone to buy the anti-Quirk bullets. Or to serve as a taxi. Great.
But everyone who knew about the secret of those bullet’s fabrication was dead or arrested. Mostly dead, though. Everyone in the upper echelons of the yakuza had been massacred by the League. The highest-ranking yakuza arrested had been Chisaki, and considering his destructive abilities, it wasn’t very hard to push for incarceration in Tartarus. Toki was still a little stunned that her crazy bluff had worked.
Stunned, and a little disquieted.
She had pretty much sent an assassin after a blind and crippled inmate. It was one thing to kill in the heat of battle. It was still bad, but it was… more natural. You reacted. You weren’t thinking. But it was quite different to coldly plan for the death of a man. Toki hadn’t realized it was something she was capable of doing.
Then Toki hardened herself and scowled. Yeah, it was shitty. You know what was shittier? To know that AFO would murder her entire family and wear Hinawa as a skin-suit, like he had planned to do to Tomura Shigaraki, just because he had a pissing contest going on against Yagi.
But you’re planning someone’s murder, whispered her subconscious in a reproachful voice. Her subconscious sounded like Mihoko-san, which was a little perturbing.
When is it ever justifiable to take another person’s life? Toki wanted to counter. It never is, but we can’t stand aside as the lives of hundreds are ruined by one person.
Beros’ face floated in her mind. For a second Toki felt like a giant hypocrite. It hadn’t been justifiable to kill Beros either, but Beros hadn’t been ruining hundreds of lives. Beros could have been subdued non-lethally, and it would have been so much easier to deal with her than trying to deal with AFO.
But Beros hadn’t been an innocent bystander either. Beros had nearly killed Neito. And yeah, answering with lethal force hadn’t been morally good. It had been impulsive and emotional, an inexcusable failure of the perfect control that Quantum was supposed to have all the time. But… Beros had used lethal force too. Beros had been a threat. A deadly threat.
And killing her had been just. Wrong, but just.
Was it a good thing that Toki was coming to accept it? She liked to think it was. Making peace with her actions was necessary and would save her a lot of self-flagellation in the future. But she wondered if she was supposed to make her peace with it so fast. had been less than two months. A good person who had sworn to never take a life wasn’t supposed to shrug and say “whoops, couldn’t be helped” and then move on when they actively murdered someone. Right?
Anyway.
In Osaka, everything seemed to be fine. Almost all the yakuza had been bagged. Considering they had been attacked by the League, they were all out for blood and eager to make life more difficult for the League. It meant they were more open to cooperating with heroes than they would have been in other circumstances.
Their entire organization had collapsed. They didn’t have much to hang onto except revenge. Just like Chisaki. And, like Toki had done…. The other heroes were using it.
Although they used it for information, not to hire an unhinged psychopath as an assassin in the more secure prison of Japan.
Toki still didn’t quite believe she had done that, and that it had worked. It felt like it should have involved a lot more planning and subtle manipulation. Instead she had just… employed the complex geometry of just friggin’ winging it. And it had worked.
What even was her life.
Anyway. Back to the point.
Inferno was fine. And, as he assured Toki, so were all the other heroes. Sir Nighteye was the most grievously injured hero. Apparently, he had been stabbed in the back and was looking at a spinal injury at least. Inferno said he wasn’t in critical condition, but he wasn’t released from the hospital either.
No doubt someone would write a poignant article about Nighteye’s bravery, and the injuries suffered in the line of duty. Urgh. The PR agents of various heroes were already glued to their phones, trying to spin the story in a way that cast an advantageous light on the heroes. There were too many casualties to call the operation a success, after all. But the heroes were going to spin it like “we came to rescue the yakuza from the League,” and not, “the League murdered half our targets before we even got there.”
So Toki went back to her fledglings. She brought them back to Icarus. Reports were given. Toki took the time to check that all the fledglings were alright and were dealing well with their first big battle. They were all okay. Not even shaken. Melissa was a little pensive, but it was mostly because she had talked at length with Toga and was disquieted by what the girl had revealed to her.
Toki decided to bring the kids to Yūei and maybe hang there a little before coming back to Fukuoka. She knew that as soon as she clocked out, Hayasa-sensei would drag her to a hospital to check her bruises… and he would also probably lecture her for two hours straight about taking better care of herself.
In all fairness, Toki should take better care of herself. She knew it, Hayasa-sensei knew it, everyone knew it. The only reason why Keigo wasn’t the one giving her those long sermons when she came back bruised to hell and back, was because he was just as bad as her.
Anyway. Back to the point, again.
Toki brought the kids back to Yūei. She made sure Hitoshi and Neito were alright. She said hello to Yagi, asked a few questions about Midoriya’s progress. And then, she took the time to take Melissa take a breath of fresh air on the roof… and maybe gently ask her what was on her mind.
Melissa didn’t disappoint.
“Toga’s file said she’s Quirkless,” Melissa said quietly. “The Quirk registry was never updated since she was a child. But… She craves blood, like, really violently. Like it hurts her to not drink it. And what she implied about her parents… I think they made her repress her Quirk.”
Toki sighed. “Yeah, that’s what I gathered too. You haven’t seen her general file, but it’s the theory the police and the heroes are basing everything on. Toga has a blood-based Quirk, her parents made her repress it, then one day Toga snapped and ran away.”
Melissa looked outraged: “Was something done about her parents? Quirk-repression is a crime! Like…. Like conversion therapy!”
Conversion therapy wasn’t a bad comparison. Electroshocks, punishment, mind-break based around guilt and social ostracization. Yeah, that was kind of similar. There was a reason why conversation therapy was banned in almost every country in the world.
“There is no proof,” Toki was forced to say. “Toga never reported them.”
“Of course she wouldn’t, if she believed society would support them!”
“I know. But she became a criminal instead. She’s beyond your help.”
“That’s not true!” Melissa replied hotly. “We can still help.”
“By reforming her?”
The question was honest. Toki didn’t really see how someone like Toga would go about reformation. For Meteor, it had been a question of channeling his thirst for violence into heroism rather than villainy, and the catalyst for it had simply been to care about people who were heroes, and not villains. Toga, though? She didn’t thirst for violence, just for… blood. To the point of murder.
Melissa weighted the question a few second, looking suddenly pensive. Maybe she was thinking the same thing.
“No,” Melissa said quietly. “It would be cruel. Society has to change for her, not change her. Society needs to become a place where… when you are weird and different and could be dangerous… you’re still valued and respected, instead of being preventively shunned, or broken to fit the mold.”
Toki’s eyebrows rose. “Is this about Toga, or just in general?”
“It is about Toga,” Melissa nodded, frowning. “She’s the one I talked with. But what she said… It made me think, that’s all.”
Toki blinked. Well, it wasn’t surprising. Melissa was an idealist. Of course at one point she was going to look at the League and wonder if they could be helped. What was surprising was that it was Toga who had prompted this reflection.
“Think about what exactly?” Toki encouraged her.
Melissa gave herself a few seconds to think, and then grimaced.
“You know, Toga doesn’t believe that the world can change for the better and that the society would try to work with her instead of completely suppressing her. She doesn’t believe that she would have a future if she would allow herself to be captured by heroes. And I think that this entire thought process is coming from the core ideology of the League of Villains. Not believing that the world can change and help them, so the only thing left is to either destroy it or die; that’s their ideology, isn’t it? Shigaraki’s ideology.”
Toki hesitated. That was… yeah, that was pretty spot-on. Shigaraki’s canon-character had started his arc by questioning heroic society, but by the time the MLA had rolled around, canon-Shigaraki had been hellbent on destroying everything. That was his version of liberation. Destruction was the main point. Destroying as much as they can before they were killed or before they were left with nothing but ashes.
That was Dabi’s purpose, too. That was what the whole Dabi reveal had been about, in canon, with Dabi dancing, laughing, and claiming he would drag everyone in hell with him.
It wasn’t about changing society, but about dying and taking everyone with him. Dying while having a fucking blast, dying while doing whatever he wanted and laughing at the world. Accepting the fact that he would die, but at least he would cause as much harm and pain to the world as possible before that.
“Yes,” Toki finally said. “That’s the League’s ideology.”
Melissa gave her a piercing glance: “And you think they’re right? That they have no other options?”
Oh, what a fucking landmine of a question.
“I think society as it is, it’s flawed,” Toki replied carefully. “There has been progress. Things are better. But there’s still a long way to go. As things are… Someone like Toga who craves blood would have a hard time, still. She could live without being suppressed, yeah, but she would still have to adapt… There would be a lot of push-back.”
Melissa bit her lip.
“If it’s her Quirk that makes her crave blood… It’s not her fault. People shouldn’t punish her for being born like that.”
“Well, yeah,” Toki admitted. “But there’s a step between craving blood and stabbing random people in the street.”
Melissa scowled and didn’t say anything. Toki briefly wondered if Melissa was going to launch an investigation into the Toga family to take down those abusive parents, and then decided that it wasn’t her business. She would only step in if Melissa needed help. Or she tried to do something really crazy.
And the threshold for really crazy was pretty high in Toki’s entourage.
But… Melissa wasn’t wrong. Himiko Toga had been mistreated, abused, and hurt. Once upon a time, she had been a victim. The fact that she was now a villain didn’t erase her past suffering. Those two things were deeply connected.
You couldn’t solve the issue of her villainy if you did not address what had caused it in the first place.
From her canon-knowledge as well as the police files, Toki was already aware that Toga’s home life had been a study in repression and self-hatred. Suppressing your Quirk was a pretty terrible thing because it denied a part of you. But suppressing a Quirk that gave you physical craving? That verged on torture. Like starvation, in a way.
The best realistic solution for Toga would have been to wait a few years and, once an adult, find a community willing to give her blood. With all the weird Quirks around, those things existed. But then, Toki realized it was easier said than done. It would have required Toga to wait for years in an abusive home… and to also believe a better future awaited her if she survived.
And believing that was… sometimes very difficult.
If you don’t see a future where you are allowed the possibility of happiness, can you imagine one? If you are beaten and dismissed and hurt every day in your parents’ house, can you believe things would get better when you’ll be an adult and will move out? Can you actually imagine it, if you don’t even know how the absence of misery looks like? Can you swallow the despair and wait it out? Trust that things would get better? Many people could not.
Waiting for an uncertain happiness that you couldn’t even really picture felt like bleeding out from an invisible wound. You had the pain of the disappointed hope, without any of its joy. There was only bitterness and uncertainty.
Better to self-destruct. At least, that way, you felt like you were in control of the outcome.
That was the path Toga had chosen. There had been other options, but she couldn’t see them. Not with how she had grown up.
“There has to be a better way,” Melissa whispered, unknowingly echoing Toki’s thoughts.
And then she looked up at Toki, and Toki recognized her hopeful expression for having directed it at her so often during a catastrophe. Can you fix it? Can you help?
Ah, damn it.
“You are aware that she stabbed me in the guts, right?”
Melissa sniffed: “Come on, don’t be petty.”
“Oh, the irony,” Toki muttered.
Then she closed her eyes and started thinking, blocking out the sounds and drawing in her mind’s eyes a giant blackboard of facts, ideas, concepts, intel, and deductions. She thought. She put down the numbers. She took a step back and laid down the facts.
Melissa wasn’t wrong. Society as it existed today was not a welcoming place for Himiko Toga. Society needed to be kinder. To be… more accepting. Not so obsessed with Quirks and appearances. Baby steps had been taken with All Might’s retirement, but deep down, things were still the same.
Because… people looked up to heroes. And heroism was still the same.
Heroism by itself wasn’t the problem. It was a good thing that people fought villains, rescued cats from trees and protected civilians when there was a fight. But heroes had become so much more than “people who helped others.” They were an amalgam of ideals, a few of them toxic, and it warped the whole system. It warped the values of society. What was a hero, if not someone good? What was goodness, if not what heroes did?
And what did the heroes do, if not keeping up the status quo?
People absorbed that mindset. Goodness wasn’t something you did, it was something you were born into: and thus, bullying people who were wrong, broken, and different, was a marker of goodness. Because you were strong. You were heroic. Goodness was strength. Goodness was power, plain, and simple.
It’s the price of being powerful, Toki remembered reading in Destro’s book. Sometimes you step on ants.
It was Katsuki Bakugo’s view of heroism in a nutshell. Well, canon-Bakugo, at least. Toki didn’t quite know what the boy thought of it, now that he had been knocked down a few pegs.
But Bakugo’s view of heroism was society’s view of heroism. It was Iida’s view of the entrance exam in canon, personal success above all else. It was Endeavor’s result-oriented mentality and his obsession with the rankings. It was Dabi’s powerless rage and fury at the unfairness of fate. It was even Aizawa’s discriminatory test from the first day of school, threatening to expel the worst ranked student.
Shit, even when Toki had confronted Aizawa about his stupid test, she had never questioned the logic of it. The inherent, perverted logic of you have no place here if your Quirk isn’t good enough.
No place here in school, but more importantly: no place here in society.
Because the lesson was that your Quirk determined your life.
If you had a good Quirk, you were easily forgiven when you messed up. You were praised. You were given second or even third chances. Like Bakugo. Like Meteor. But if you had a bad Quirk? Something creepy, something ugly, something unlovable? Like Toga, Shigaraki, Spinner, or Hitoshi? Then you had to work twice as hard for half the reward.
If you were not destined to have a happy life from the start, you were screwed. And no one did anything about it because it seemed like the natural order of things.
Your Quirk determined your life. For heroes it could make sense, but it was true for everyone. Most people worked in office jobs where natural talents didn’t come into things at all, but inherent qualities like beauty or being a cute cuddly mutant instead of a ‘gross’ or ‘freaky’ one, or having a Quirk that makes you crave blood… All those things still mattered. All of it mattered so much that it defined your existence, because this society glorified heroics not as a career of abnegation but as showmanship, appearance, propaganda, popularity.
Nothing was more desirable than being a hero with a good Quirk. That was what screamed all the glitter and the pomp, the advertisements, the commercials, the songs, the movies, the news, the politics, the education system. Nothing was more envied. Nothing was more worthy of love, adoration, respect. And the further you were from this ideal, the less human you were. The less worthy of love, respect, kindness.
But... Toki already knew that.
Toki already knew she needed to fix that.
What Melissa was asking was very different. Much simpler, and at the same time so much more complicated. Because yeah, society was obsessed with Quirks. Just like society had once been obsessed with religion, or skin color, or nationality. Small differences that people obsessed over, until it exploded into hatred, violence, and war.
And the question was, how do we step back from this? How do we leave the cycle of hatred before it becomes too late? How do we reach out towards each other before the chasm between us becomes too wide to be closed?
“You don’t ask simple questions, do you,” Toki muttered.
“I had a good teacher,” Melissa answered smugly.
Toki snorted in amusement. Alright, point to Melissa for that one.
“Flattery will get you everywhere. Well, what do you think?”
“You know what I think.” Melissa squared her shoulders, blue eyes flashing. “I want to know what you think should be done about it.”
“Making society kinder as a whole is a big task,” Toki warned her. “Making people angry and afraid is easy. Making them care is hard. Even the Symbol of Peace couldn’t manage.”
“Maybe because he didn’t choose quite the right moniker.”
Good point.
“Yeah,” Toki admitted. “Symbol of Triumph would have worked better. Or Symbol of Hope, maybe. Peace… War… It’s not a situation that we can handle and expect to stay fixed.”
“Peace is not the absence of conflict. It’s an active process,” Melissa agreed. “We’ll have to keep working at it.”
Toki sighed, shoulders slumping a little. “Forever. It’s a burden that can never be set down.”
“It’s worth it!”
“Of course it is. I never said it wasn’t. But sometimes…”
Toki’s voice trailed off. She thought of Meteor and the building coming down, the screams and the terror, the gawking guilt. She thought of her mother’s funeral, of how she still flinched away from the memory. She thought of arduous training, frustration, loneliness, the heart-wrenching pain of separation. She thought of constantly juggling a hundred tasks and a thousand dangers, relationship seeped in lies, truths hidden, blood on her hands, not being able to raise her own daughter, sending the love of her life in a pit of vipers.
She thought of all the things she could lose, all the danger she was in, all the sorrow she carried and all the misery she would have to carry. Of what she had lost, what she would lose in the future.
“Sometimes,” she whispered, “I wish I wasn’t the one who had to do it.”
Melissa stayed silent for a bit, and then quoted:
“’I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo. And then Gandalf said, ‘So do I, and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’”
“… I can’t believe you’re quoting Tolkien at me. Who are you?!”
“Someone who spend a lot of time on your Discord server, reading books recommended by your crazy friends. Now let’s get back to the topic at hand. I very much doubt throwing the whole of Japan into Mordor will solve our problems.”
Toki snorted, and then grew serious again. Yeah, since throwing society into an active volcano wasn’t on the table, she had to look for other options. But this was huge. So huge that it seemed impossible to find a place to start. All big journey started with a first step, sure, but what to do when you couldn’t even see a viable path? Toki wasn’t sure there was anything she could do to make society less Quirk-obsessed, in this world where Quirks were everywhere, and people held more tightly than ever on their coping mechanisms because they had just lost the Symbol of Peace. It had already been a big blow to them when he had stepped down as Number One…
Wait. Actually, that was a thought.
“The hero rankings,” Toki said.
Melissa blinked, and then understood. Her eyes widened:
“Get rid of them?”
“Yeah. Or at least completely separate them from popularity. So the top heroes will be the guys who helped the most people, the kindest, the most professional, the smartest. Not the ones with the coolest Quirks. And then… In a few years… Just get rid of the ranking altogether.”
Melissa whistled. “I love that, I do, but this idea will majorly piss off so many people.”
“You think I don’t know that?” Toki scoffed. “The HPSC will scream. The heroes will scream. The support industry will throw a fit. A lot of fans will be outraged. But… heroism should have never been tied to popularity in the first place. I know why it ended up that way, and yes, it was a good way to build public trust in the institution. But now it’s just pageantry and propaganda. It doesn’t help anyone anymore.”
“It’s even actively hurting people,” Melissa pointed out.
“Yeah. All the more reason to get rid of it.”
Especially since now Toki was actively at risk of becoming Number One. Ewwww. Seriously, it creeped her out. Yes, the glory and the praise must feel nice, but all Toki saw when she thought about that golden throne was the fact that a spotlight would be constantly aimed at her… and it only made her feel dread.
Toki liked her privacy. She liked being a spotlight hero because she liked to connect with the public, but… because she wanted to talk to them, to be their friends. Not to have them clap blindly and approve of all her actions, like they had done to All Might. As if the Number One hero wasn’t a person anymore, but an object of adoration. Someone you couldn’t judge, couldn’t debate with, someone who couldn’t change. It was so… utterly dehumanizing.
Yeah, Toki thought, her resolve hardening. The hero rankings were a good place to start cleaning up.
But it was easier said than done.
“And how are you going to do that?”
The question was sincere. Melissa looked half-excited, half-wary. To be fair, Toki mostly felt wariness. She had never made a secret of her indifference (bordering on dislike) for the rankings, but to actively talk about getting rid of them… it was different.
Oh boy. Kameko was going to blow a gasket.
Notes:
Surprise !
Yeah, Toki wants to get rid of the rankings. No surprise. Melissa wanting to save Toga is unexpected, though. It jumped on me when i was writing, and... yeah. I wrote a one-shot about Toga afterward x) I'll post it in Hous eof Wisdom soon !
As for Chisaki.... Ha ha. It's funny x) Curiously nobody had guessed that Toki was going to negociate with Chisaki, not fight him! His character has a lot of potential. This isn't the last we'll see of him!
Nobody had guessed that Toki was going to use him to try and kill AFO in Tartarus, either, but it was a serious plot-twist xDDDD
Also ! Fic rec of the day: "Lights. Camera. Action." by AWeeBitRustyEh.
The Plot: After the death of his close friend Oboro, Hizashi is approached by the HPSC with an offer he can't refuse. The Hero Commission need somebody on the inside, a hero who can maintain their deep cover and take down criminals from the inside. They need a villain. And Hizashi becomes very, very good at it.Present Mic isn't one of my favorite character but he's very well-written in this. The backstory was just perfect. And how Eraserhead constantly SUSPECTS but can't prove anything, mmmmmh YES, that's good shit. Anyway, it has two alternative ending, an open one and a happy one, so you can pick your poison!
Chapter 75: A very civil conversation
Summary:
“Do you have any further plans to torment me?” he said, his tone acidic.
Toki pretended to think, and then shrugged: “No.”
Not plans, per se. She was operating on an as-needed basis.
Notes:
There are actually several perfectly civil conversations in this chapter xD
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
A VERY CIVIL CONVERSATION
The day after the fall of the Shie Hassaikai, Toki went to pay a quick visit to an old friend. No, friend wasn’t the right word… old acquaintance? Old enemy? Old… ghost from her past?
Okamoto hadn’t changed a bit. He was still a round, purple-skinned man with a receding hairline. With his job at Tartarus and the lack of sunlight, he had become paler. That wasn’t an improvement, though.
Toki plastered on her face her most insolent smile and plonked herself in the free chair at his table. Okamoto tensed at her appearance, then tensed even more when he recognized her. His eyebrow twitched.
Toki beamed at him.
“Well, long time no see!”
Okamoto got off Tartarus for the weekend once every month. When he did, he took his morning coffee here, in this little shop away from prying eyes. There was no doubt that he went back to working right after, doing paperwork even on his day-off. That was the kind of ethic expected from a workaholic like him.
Was this coffee break his only moment of peace in a very busy day? Probably. Did Toki feel guilty about ruining it?
Not at all.
“Quantum,” Okamoto bit out.
“Ah-ah-ah,” Toki waved a finger reproachfully, “Do you see a hero costume anywhere? Where is your professionalism? Call me Taiyōme-san.”
Ooh, she could almost hear him grind his teeth. She grinned, enjoying his annoyance. Pettiness could taste so sweet.
“How is life?” she asked lightly. “Does your job suck?”
It did. She knew it did because she was the one responsible for his current job. Okamoto looked like he had bitten in a lemon.
“Does your presence here have a point?”
“I was in the neighborhood! How could I resist catching up with an old acquaintance?”
Okamoto’s face said it all. Toki sniggered, and then sprawled in her chair, manspreading as much as she could while still making it look natural. She knew it always drove Okamoto crazy. He had always been barking about posture and presentation.
“Are you mad at me?” she grinned.
Okamoto glared at her. So that was a yes. “I know you were the one behind my transfer to Tartarus.”
Toki gasped dramatically, putting a hand to her chest, “Wow, you really think I’m a mastermind like that? You think I fabricated all that evidence of you abusing your power? Committing fraud? Blackmailing people? I’m hurt! But also, realistically, I would never have had the time.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Okamoto sneered at her. “I know you didn’t fabricate evidence. You simply stuck your nose in something that wasn’t your business.”
“Hey, hey, hey, how was it not my business? I was sent to Yūei to find a spy. It was very suspicious to see that your henchman had turned into a hero! If he had a dark secret, why not two? It was literally my job to do some digging.”
Okamoto glared some more, but he knew she was right. If Okamoto had come clean to the President at any time prior to Toki’s mission, then he wouldn’t have been caught. Things would have already been smoothed over. Hey, maybe Toki wouldn’t even have been sent to Yūei, because Okamoto would have been asked to use Aizawa instead!
But, you know. Roads not taken and all that.
“I suppose you’re not here to reminisce about the past,” he said coldly. “Don’t you have anything more productive to do?”
“More productive than seeing your face? Always.”
“Then go away.”
“But it’s so nice to annoy you!” She laughed, high and cheerful and intentionally grating. Okamoto looked like he was contemplating stabbing her with his coffee spoon. Toki grinned at him. “More seriously, I just wanted a quick chat. I sent quite a few people to Tartarus. How are they… settling in?”
Okamoto narrowed his eyes. You had to give it to him, even extremely annoyed, in his off-time, and taken by surprise, he had no issues switching gears to talk shop and look for hidden messages.
“Depends who.”
Toki shrugged, projecting indifference. Keigo did it better, but maybe that was the wings. He always made a shrug look so much more impressive, practically dripping with nonchalance.
“Oh, there’s a lot! Moonfish, Sidero, Muscular, Magne, and of course I can’t forget dear old All For One. Then there’s the yakuza, Kai Chisaki! Did he make it to Tartarus already?”
Okamoto blinked slowly like a serpent, trying to figure out her angle.
“He wasn’t transferred yet.”
“Too bad, too bad!” Toki kept her tone light. “Anyway, I looked into Tartarus a little. You know, for security reasons. You’re not very careful with the security, huh? That’s what, nine inmates who were killed since you took your post?”
Okamoto’s eyes narrowed. She kept her smile. He didn’t deflect and talk about unruly prisoners, though. But since he couldn’t help but be unpleasant, he simply bit out:
“You did your homework, for once.”
Toki had never tried to look into Tartarus when Meteor had been there. She wanted to pretend that, by plugging her ears and closing her eyes, it made the problem go away. But now Meteor was free, and AFO was in Tartarus.
So, Toki had looked into it.
It was one big block of dehumanization. Like a white lab, everything sterile and sanitized, with prisoners kept in solitary cells almost constantly. Socialization was restricted to a few hours a day. The inmates were given books and access to university courses if they wanted to distract themselves. Nothing more. No news from the outside, no contact with family, just… locked up like rats in a lab. Constantly watched. Muzzled and collared like animals. Herded in sterile rooms with batons and threats, like cattle.
Reading the reports, Toki had felt a little sick.
It was all so cold and unforgiving. It made her think of Sir Nighteye and the disdain in his voice when he had talked about the worst of humanity, unworthy of redemption or even of basic decency. And people lived there. People were imprisoned there. Bad people, yes, like Muscular, All For One, and plenty of monsters. But Meteor had been there too. Treated just like them, all because Toki had sent him there.
She wasn’t going to be able to look Meteor in the eyes for a while.
… But this wasn’t why she had sought out Okamoto on his off-day.
The inmates in Tartarus could mingle together in small groups, a few hours a day, usually to do chores. At those times, sometimes a fight would break out. Sometimes the fight happened to be so violent that an inmate died. It had happened six times in the seven years before Okamoto took his post. But, big surprise… Three months after Okamoto’s arrival in Tartarus, the nine biggest and baddest of Tartarus had inexplicably gotten into a brawl and killed each other. Since then, the prison was apparently much more peaceful.
Those nine people had all, without exception, been villains who had escaped a death sentence and were clearly insane. For example… One of them was Moonfish. But another was Kuma, a little old lady who had sequestered thousands of people like trophies in little glass balls. Not someone who would start a fight. And yet, she had been killed in a brawl, in Tartarus.
Odd. Very odd.
But the oddest thing was… It wasn’t just the prisoners. Immediately after that big fight, there had been an important turnover with the guards. Quite a few had been transferred elsewhere. In the weeks following their transfer, they had often been fired for misconduct; or, in two cases, arrested. One for assault, the other for attempted rape.
And once again… After their departure, the prison was much more peaceful.
For anyone who knew Okamoto, the conclusion was obvious. He was cleaning house. There was no proof, though. It was just guesswork. Toki knew it would never hold in court of law. But absence of proof was not proof of absence, and she knew what Okamoto was doing. It was what he always did. It was how he had taught Toki and Keigo to think.
Okamoto had always liked to run a tight ship. He was ruthless and unfeeling, and it was chilling when he used his clinical mindset in a civilian setting. But in Tartarus, a place that was by nature and design horrible? Well… In a way, it was almost an amelioration. Because Okamoto was result-oriented, not sadistic. Instead of focusing on breaking the prisoners indiscriminately, he was getting rid of the inconveniences, including corrupt guards.
Except, of course, that this was still Okamoto, and this was still the HPSC at work. The clean-up targeted guards and prisoners equally, but… The guards walked out with their lives. The inmates, not so much.
Okamoto didn’t even have to kill them himself. He had just stuck several people who hated each other in the same space and let their repressed rage do the rest. That wasn’t murder. That was just unhinged inmates. That was criminals reaping what they sowed. That was just bad luck, aggressivity, inconveniences. Okamoto was careful. He would only be guilty of negligence if someone looked closely. And in the meantime? Nine dangerous villains were dead, all in one swoop. Because, like Nighteye, Okamoto had no patience for keeping the worst of humanity alive.
Toki was relieved that Meteor was out of that place. So fucking relieved.
(Because even if he hadn’t been a troublemaker, Meteor had been an inconvenience for the HPSC. They would have preferred him to be dead. And now someone with no qualms to make it happen was at the helm.)
“Yeah,” she drawled. “I did my homework. Aren’t you proud? Or maybe you’re not. Nine people… It seems your security is a little lax. Anything can happen. I mean, look at All For One. I hope you don’t feel too dumb knowing he’s still in communication with the outside and managed to send a message to the League so they would attack the yakuza.”
Okamoto clenched his jaw.
“There is no proof of that.”
“Well, not with all that red tape. But I was there to hear Shigaraki ramble about confidential intel that he could only have gotten from All For One after the Kamino battle, so believe me, I know. And I’m sure you do too! You must feel so dumb. Did you find out how he did it? Maybe he has a Quirk to hijack electronic communications. Doesn’t he give off that creepy vibe of always knowing what’s going on?”
Okamoto glared at her. It was hard to guess what was annoying him more, her good cheer or her insinuations.
“Things would have been easier if you had killed him at Kamiko,” Okamoto said coldly.
Wow, what an ass. I mean, it was true, but it was really cold to say it point-blank to her face. Especially for someone who knew that, as a hero, Toki wasn’t supposed to kill.
Would Okamoto have approved of what Toki had done to Beros? She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Part of her still felt guilty and sick, but she mostly felt guilty about betraying her own sense of honor, her own sense of self. She felt regret and culpability about killing someone, but only in an abstract sense. When she thought about Beros, about the way she had died… Toki mostly felt numb.
There was no sense of crushing horror, no hysterical self-disgust. Toki had just… killed her and moved on. Toki really didn’t want to know if Okamoto would approve. Whatever his opinion would be, it wouldn’t comfort her, anyway.
“Yep, everyone would be happier if All For One was dead!” Toki chirped. “I know All Might was disappointed I took his legs and not his head. I was, too! But more importantly, that bastard is still pulling the League’s strings from behind the scene. Isn’t it your job to do something about it?”
“He’s in a medical coma for now,” Okamoto answered through his teeth.
“Yeah, yeah, you are so powerless to restrain him that your only option was to put him under, and you have zero long-terms solutions. Even blind and amputated, he’s making you run in circles. Hey, by the way. Do you know how to call a guy without arms or legs, lying on your front porch? … Matt! Get it?”
She could see the twitch in his eyelid now. How fascinating!
“I will be sure to share this entertaining joke with him,” Okamoto bit out.
“Well, feel free… if you want to die. He doesn’t seem to have a lot of humor. I don’t get why the League is so attached to him. In a way, Overhaul did you a big favor by offing Kurogiri, because I bet the warper’s next stop was Tartarus to steal his ugly boss from under your nose.”
Alright, maybe now she had planted enough clues about how AFO was the worse, would escape, was probably spying on everyone, was a very big threat even now… Oh, and also the fact that nobody would miss him if he died.
Time to switch gears and introduce the second part of Toki’s brilliant and utterly insane plan.
“Well, I hope the next villain I’m sending you doesn’t make you pass for an idiot!” she grinned. “Chisaki is much more polite and open to cooperating with heroes… as long as it furthers his own goals of course.”
Okamoto’s eyebrow rose a fraction, even if his voice was still tight with annoyance.
“Is that so?”
“Yeah. He absolutely hates the League, and anything related to it!”
Okamoto blinked slowly, and his chin dipped a fraction. Not quite a nod, but an acknowledgement. Message received.
“He doesn’t like other villains very much,” Toki added cheerfully. “There might be a few more accidents if you let him mingle to do chores. Besides, I heard he hates germs. Gets hives all over. Better to let him help in the infirmary or whatever you guys have in place. It would be a nice reward for his peaceful surrender, don’t you think?”
The infirmary where, coincidently, the mutilated and heavily sedated All For One was taking a big nap. Quirkless and defenseless.
Toki could hardly make her plan clearer.
“Maybe,” Okamoto said neutrally.
“Think about it!”
“I will. Now do you have any further plans to torment me?” he said, his tone acidic.
Toki pretended to think, and then shrugged:
“No.”
Not plans, per se. She was operating on an as-needed basis. Toki stretched like a cat, grinning, just to see Okamoto’s eyelid twitch as he doubtlessly guessed that she wasn’t done bothering him. She even briefly considered putting her feet on the table just to see if Okamoto would explode. In the end, she decided against it. Not out of respect for Okamoto (fuck that guy) but for the café owner who didn’t deserve to have to clean his table again.
“Oh, also, one more thing. What is the dental care like in Tartarus?”
Okamoto looked to the heavens as if pleading for the gods to descends and grant him patience.
“It exists. Why.”
Wow, if the best thing you could say about something was that it existed, the bar must be really low. Like a restaurant advertising the food is edible or a movie boasting that the actors are clearly visible. No wonder that Meteor had said that dental care in prison was appalling.
“It would be great if you could get your hands on a tooth of Kai Chisaki,” she finally said.
“A tooth.”
“Yeah. Or a piece of bone, I’m not picky.”
“Yes, of course,” Okamoto deadpanned. “Because collecting organic trophies is such a normal thing to do.”
“Urgh.” Toki made a face. “Do you have to be gross? No, it’s not for me. I just happen to have a student who can copy Quirks from organic matter. Skin and hair degrade too fast, but bones and teeth last longer.”
Okamoto raised his eyebrow, looking genuinely surprised for the first time. And…. Almost pleased?
“Reasonable,” he agreed. “Tartarus often collect tissues and DNA for experimental purposes. A tooth can be extracted and sent to a lab discreetly. The Kyoto Private Labs usually does our analysis. It will be there within a week. It will be up to you to find a good pretext to collect it, though.”
Toki decided to not think about the fact that Tartarus actually treated its inmates like labs rats, because if she did, she was going to actually start screaming. Tartarus often collect tissues and DNA for experimental purposes?! Hello, what the actual fuck?!
The prison was fucked up. Any carceral system in a world a of super-powers had to be fucked up, because security took precedence over human rights, and it was so easy to dehumanize the captured villains… But yeah. What the actual hell.
In that kind of moment, Toki completely understood Shigaraki’s urge to rase the entire society to the ground.
She swallowed back her fury, plastering on her face her trademark insolent smile. Yeah, she had heard enough. The message had been given. Time to leave. Toki jumped to her feet and gave Okamoto a cheerful little wave.
“Well, nice talk. Enjoy your crappy coffee. Have a good day!”
She warped away, whistling like she didn’t have a single care in the world. She didn’t know if Okamoto would heed her warning, if Chisaki would be up for the task, if AFO would be unable to fight back, or even if Toki herself would forever carry the sins for planning someone’s murder. But at least she had done her part. Now she just had to sit back and see if the pebble she had kicked snowballed in an assassination inside the most secure prison of Japan.
No pressure.
oOoOoOo
It must be strange for the kids. For those who had been part of the Shie Hassaikai mission, especially. Now they were back in school, and… learning algebra. It must seem so trivial, when you had fought against villains for the first time. Not as a victim fighting back, like what had happened in the mountains during summer camp, but as a hero, proactive and measured, attacking a villain hideout as part of a coordinated operation.
For Toki, that was just life as usual. Go out, wreck shit, file paperwork, rinse and repeat. It was a change of pace from rapid-fire patrols with cats in trees and trash cans to empty, but it was still routine, in a way.
Part of Toki’s job (as one of the strongest heroes who had assisted with the takedown of the Shie Hassaikai) was to be available to help with patrols in the area. Arresting the yakuza had created a power vacuum. Soon enough the heroes would reorganize themselves and fill that vacuum to discourage other criminals to try and step in the yakuza’s shoes.
For Toki, it meant that she had to take over the patrols of the heroes who had been injured during the raid and couldn’t resume their duties immediately… Like Sir Nighteye.
Nighteye was still in the hospital and expected to stay there for a while. The attack had only happened two days ago, so Toki didn’t know everything, but… She knew he had been stabbed in the back, and his spine was injured. Several surgeries were planned. Nobody had been able to tell Toki if Nighteye would be able to walk again.
Did it make her a bad person, that she didn’t feel bad for him?
She knew Nighteye had been a good friend to Yagi in the past. He was a good mentor for Lady Siam. He was a good colleague for Inferno and Salamander. It was just that, on a personal level, she couldn’t stand him. She did feel a little sorry that someone had been injured by Toga; but she didn’t feel sorry that it was him.
Anyway. Toki personally thought that the guy was a dickhead and could go choke, but that wasn’t a reason to leave his territory bereft of protection. So, there she was. Patrolling Sakai, keeping an eye out for trouble or for the imminent arrival of Lady Siam, and grumbling under her breath.
Toki spent the whole day patrolling Osaka and Sakai, breaking up fights, and posturing in the bad neighborhoods to make sure no one got ideas about filling the power vacuum left by the yakuza. She signed a few autographs. She called Kameko to argue about her idea of getting rid of the rankings, once again.
Only if you become Number One, Kameko finally said, a smug grin in his voice. So, basically, Toki still had a lot of arguing to do. Great.
The issue was that the ranking not only mattered for how heroes had their salary calculated, but also for how much their advertisements and merch were worth. The higher you were ranked, the more valuable your time and your image was. And for limelight heroes… It was incredibly important.
Because that meant money.
Limelight heroes made their money predominantly via advertisements and endorsements. Oh, sure, they had a salary, they had government subsidies and tax rebates adjusted for criminal bookings, giving them a very comfortable wage. They could live off with just that. Most underground heroes did, after all.
But limelight heroes usually aimed higher. Limelight heroism was expensive. Support items, rent in a fancy skyscraper, qualified staff to deal with all the boring aspects of the job, long vacations, big villas, extravagant shows of power… They needed a bigger take-home pay. And so, they did most of their money thanks to their image. They were paid not to take out villains and rescue civilians, but to be seen doing it, or even to be seen, plain and simple.
This monetization strategy, while allowing spotlight heroes to make money equivalent to that of celebrities and CEOs, inevitably encouraged a certain set of values. Consumerism. Greed. Lack of accountability because appearances had to be preserved. Discrimination towards Quirks and people who didn’t fit in what society wanted. Glorification of strength and violence at the detriment of the weak.
All of that brought to light a whole host of explanations for the current issues persisting in the hero industry.
Financially speaking, a limelight heroes’ best interest was to continue being in the spotlight. That wasn’t necessarily in the best interest of society, however. Every now and then free market capitalism and social good aligned and created a well-oiled machine of law and order; on other occasions, it caused friction instead. Friction, tensions, violence.
Wherever social interests collided, the danger of violence was always a given. After all… violence in its essence was a tool of power: and whoever had the power was king. But deep down, when you peeled back all the appearances and the layers of pretense: was there a difference between power and violence? Could you even be forced to differentiate, to pick apart what was so tightly intertwined? Yet, power was always an essential part of societal constructs and of society itself— and violence necessarily wasn’t.
Power meant order, violence meant chaos. Power was the mark of heroes, violence the mark of villains. And yet… power and violence, two sides of the same coin. They always went hand in hand. Having one necessarily meant leaning towards the other. Violence was accessible to anyone, could be wielded by anyone. Did it mean that anyone could rule, could have power?
What did it mean to have power?
And did it also meant that violence was always physical? Could the exercise of power also be violence? Could order bring pain and suffering: could chaos protect people?
There was a status quo in heroic society that was supposed to keep people safe and unhurt. But if people sill turned to violence in despair, then it meant the status quo didn’t work as it should.
Toki was working on that. All Might had been working on that, too, by urging people to be kinder, more altruistic. But at some point, you had to tackle the root of the problem, and it was deeply built into the whole foundations of the system. Urgh. Life was so complicated. She wished this world was a goddamn shōnen manga, just so the protagonist could fix it with some Talk No Jutsu!
Whatever.
She would worry about when the Shie Hassaikai thing was finished. Right now, with Nighteye hospitalized and Inferno running after the missing yakuza (Danjuro Tobita and Yu Hojo), the heroes of Osaka needed a hand, and it was taking a lot of her time.
Toki was pretty sure nothing was going to happen during those patrols. Her presence was a big deterrent, but mostly she would bet that the remaining yakuza had already left town. Danjuro Tobita and Yu Hojo, the only two members of the Shie Hassaikai who hadn’t been arrested, were still missing. So was a Eri, and a massive shipment of… whatever Tobita had stolen as he ran, which was probably a lot of Quirk-erasing bullets. If they were smart, Tobita and Hojo were already halfway through the country, putting as much distance as possible between them and the heroes in charge of the Shie Hassaikai’s destruction.
That would be the logical approach.
Unfortunately, as Toki had once explained to her little fledglings, sometimes things didn’t make sense. No one has the complete picture and thus crazy shit happened, like a cat chasing a bear up a tree… or a yakuza ambushing her in an empty parking lot. In retrospective, Toki really should have expected it. It was her own fault for thinking that the yakuza would act rationally.
What happened was Toki heard a sad meowing coming from a side alley just as she was crossing the rooftops. She warped there. It didn’t take her long to see that there was a cat carrier between two dumpsters, with a cat inside, and no one around. She cooed at the poor kitty, knelt to look at it and see if she had to take it to a shelter…
… and then there was a muffled gunshot, and a flare of pain in her neck.
She jumped with a swear, immediately slapping a hand on her neck, eyes darting around frantically for the threat. She pulled on the invisible muscle in her heart that controlled her Quirk, aiming to warp back on the rooftops, get the high ground—
Nothing happened.
Warp-space didn’t work. Her Quirk was inert, vanished.
Toki felt her pulse jump with reflexive panic: she forced herself to stay still. Fuck. The hand she had slapped on her neck tensed, and she felt something under her palm. Something tiny and metal? She grabbed it, hissed when it pinched her skin, and brough it to her face to look. A tiny cylinder with a needle to inject something, like those tranq darts that were used to sedate wild animals.
Except it didn’t quite look like a dart, and more like a bullet.
Shit.
Toki’s mind immediately whirred with possibilities, even as she flexed and contracted her Quirk without any result. Exit points, hiding spots, weapons, closest hero to call for help— There was a sharp anxiety in her gut, but not the panic that she would have expected. She was back to being Quirkless, like she had been as a teenager. It was disconcerting, but not terrifying. She still had her knives, her radio, her training, her wits.
She raised a hand towards the communicator in her collar…
“Don’t call for help,” said a deep voice from the shadows, making her freeze. “There is no need to make this difficult.”
Danjuro Tobita, AKA Gentle Criminal, emerged from the shadows.
He had his hands open, showing he was unharmed, but Toki didn’t lower her guards. The absence of a gun only meant that Danjuro Tobita was not the one who had shot her. There was an accomplice, hiding somewhere. Probably Yu Hojo, the other Shie Hassaikai member on the run.
Shit.
“Did you steal a cat to draw me here?” she said lightly, keeping her hands where they were.
The poor cat had been startled enough by the gunshot that it had scuttered to the back of its carrier, hissing, ears flat on its head. Tobita paused, and there was a hint of sheepishness in his expression.
“It’s called borrowing if you return it before they realize it’s gone.”
“Oh my gods, you did steal a cat,” Toki repeated, half-incredulous and half-horrified.
“It will be returned to its owner!”
“That does make it better, but no less crazy!”
Tobita opened his mouth, then closed it: “… In my defense, it wasn’t my idea.”
“It’s still insane!”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
It had. Clearly, she was a sucker and could be outsmarted by any villain using a cute kitty as bait. Toki pouted, unwilling to admit this. Both she and her opponent were aware that she had lost that argument.
“I have some questions for you, Quantum.” Danjuro Tobita was grave, eyes dark and cold. “You were the one who arrested Chisaki-san, aren’t you?”
Toki’s eyes narrowed. Well, that wasn’t good.
“I was,” she said carefully. “Are you here for revenge?”
“Maybe.” Tobita’s tone was flat and unreadable. “What I desire to know is how you subdued him.”
Toki hesitated briefly. But she didn’t have the advantage, here. Provocations and taunts wouldn’t be any help. On the contrary, she needed to placate her enemy, if she didn’t want to be shot.
“I didn’t. He surrendered.”
Tobita blinked. “Didn’t your fight destroy a police truck?”
“No. He attacked the truck and killed the League member prisoner in it. Then I convinced him to surrender.”
“You convinced him,” Tobita repeated, looking a little incredulous. “How?!”
Toki shifted her weight, uncomfortable. She couldn’t actually say that she had dangled in front of him the possibility of killing someone in Tartarus, could she?
“That’s between him and me, I’m afraid.”
“I urge you to reconsider.”
Was that a hint of threat? Tobita’s voice was polite, and he looked like a very proper gentleman, with a grandfatherly smile. But, there was a cold calculation in his gaze. This man wasn’t to be pushed around. Being a yakuza didn’t allow for weakness.
Toki was tense but didn’t let herself be cowed.
“I don’t think so. Besides, I have a question for you, too. What happened to Eri-chan?”
Tobita’s eyes narrowed.
“She’s safe.”
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“And yet that’s all you will be told.”
“Please.” Toki took a deep breath. “She’s just a kid. She doesn’t belong on the run.”
Tobita’s expression softened a little, but he still shook his head.
“I’ve been raising her since she was a toddler. I can take care of her. She’s safe with me.”
“That isn’t a life for a kid. What about school? Friends? What about when she finds out what you do for a living and starts raising objections?”
Tobita frowned, a little defensive: “What would you know about that?”
“More than I would like to know,” Toki said sadly.
There was no way this kind of story ended well. A child had no place among criminals. It was a cruel life, made for cruel men. An innocent kid could suffer so much just from coexisting with that kind of coldness.
Maybe it didn’t seem so bad when that was the only life you had known. Baby-Toki hadn’t been miserable with the Crew. She had loved them. But still, she had been hurt. She had been afraid, she had been— damaged. The trust issues, the pathological need to be self-reliant, the wariness of unconditional love… They were things that Toki hadn’t been born with. She had been taught.
Her parents hadn’t wanted to teach her that. But they were villains living dangerous lives, and those things came with the territory. Part of their lives had bled through: and little Toki, like a child, had soaked it up like a sponge. Once, long ago, she had told Mihoko-san that she wished that she could have been her mother instead of Sayuri. What she had meant was that she would have happily traded her childhood for Hitoshi’s. She would have been so much happier. She would have grown up without so many emotional and mental scars.
Oh, Toki didn’t want to erase the past. Her childhood had been a formative experience. It was part of who she was. Toki wouldn’t be Quantum, Hoshizora, or even Taiyōme without it. It was hers, and she had grown attached to it, just like she had grown fond of her scars. They weren’t pretty but they were part of her identity. But still. Toki hadn’t had a choice in getting those scars or not. It wasn’t something she had wanted. It was only something done to her. She had just been a little kid, scared and powerless.
Like Eri was, right now.
“She’s safe with me,” Tobita stubbornly repeated.
“She’s not with you right now. Did you leave her alone?”
“Of course not! She’s with Hojo. We would never leave her to her own devices.”
Toki darted a quick look upwards, as if trying guess where the other yakuza was hiding. If he was the one who had shot her, then he had to be close by…
As if guessing her thoughts, Tobita smirked.
“He’s not my sniper. I have other allies.”
… That sounded pretty bad. Toki’s eyes narrowed. Could he mean that he was allied with the Fugitives? Fuck, if Fujio was the one with a gun aimed at her, her odds of survival were plummeting very fast.
“You’re aware that you’re not going to be able to run from the city, not with a small child to care for?” she probed.
The yakuza’s smirk widened.
“I know what I’m doing.”
Should she be reassured or freaked out by that?
“Things would be easier if you just surrendered,” Toki tried. “Eri would be raised in a nice family, protected from the ugliness of this world. You would have a fair trial. You have a good Quirk, and a sense of honor. You could try to be rehabilitated as a vigilante.”
Tobita scoffed.
“No thanks. I will devote myself to Eri’s family as I always did since they took me in. I have my own plans. Prison doesn’t feature in any of them.”
“Not even to find your boss Chisaki?” Toki tried.
Tobita opened his mouth, and then closed it, eyes narrowed in thought.
“So that’s how you convinced him,” he said lowly. “There is something he wants, and that he can only get in prison…”
Toki bit her lip to held back a swear. Okay, she had kind of walked into that one, but in her defense, she hadn’t expected Tobita to be so observant.
“That’s between him and I,” she repeated.
“Interesting.” Tobita tilted his head to the side. “That’s an unexpected alliance.”
“Oh, wow, I wouldn’t say an alliance. We just had a very civil conversation.”
Tobita was still watching her with frightening intensity, as if he could peel back the layers of dissimulation and reveal the truth underneath just by the strength of his gaze.
“But you must have something to gain from it,” he muttered. “And he had something to gain from it too, or else he would never have agreed. You are using each other to get closer to your goals. And if I can figure out where you interests align, I can figure out what Chisaki-san is aiming for… and how to help him.”
Okay, that was way too insightful for her comfort. Toki shifted, nervous. Nobody knew about her history with All For One, fortunately, or about the fact that he was going to target her. But even so, it wasn’t impossible to guess that Quantum and Overhaul had a common enemy locked up in Tartarus.
Toki reevaluated Tobita’s instincts and his intelligence. She had believed him to be simply an obedient dog of Overhaul, maybe with a flair for dramatics, but clearly he had a brain and knew how to use it.
There was a tense stand-off. They just watched each other, waiting to see who would make the first move. Toki knew she was disadvantaged, but unlike most heroes she knew how to fight Quirkless. Tobita’s Quirk wasn’t long-ranged. He couldn’t do long-distance attack. If she managed to get the drop on him, maybe… If she was fast enough for the invisible sniper to hesitate…
If the sniper wasn’t Fujio, and if he didn’t recognize her and decide to shoot her anyway, of course.
Toki was tensing her muscles, preparing to move… When suddenly Tobita looked up, frowned, and then bent down to pick up the cat carrier. The cat inside meowled sadly, a little paw sneaking between the bars of the door to bat at the air.
“Well, this was an enlightening conversation, but I have to go!”
He bounced back in the shadows. Toki saw someone materialize behind him: blonde hair, a glare full of loathing in her direction… and then that faceless shadow grabbed Tobita and his cat carrier, and they both vanished.
A second later, Lady Siam landed next to Toki with a loud cry:
“MY RIVAL! I hurried to you LIKE THE WIND!”
“Wh—”
There was a gunshot: a bullet made sparks fly right next to Toki’s feet. She jumped back with a curse, but already Lady Siam had grabbed her in bridal carry and bounced straight to the rooftops with an overpowered jump. Toki shrieked in surprise and, by reflex, grabbed Siam. It was only afterward that she realized that it wasn’t really the most dignified reaction.
“I am never letting you live that down!” Lady Siam informed her cheerfully.
“Put me down!”
“Absolutely not!”
Lady Siam jumped on another rooftop; Toki tried to twist her neck to look back, searching for Tobita’s stature, or the glint of a gun… But there was nothing.
She had a feeling that the yakuza and their sniper had already vanished like smoke.
oOoOoOo
________________
> NotOnFire: the fact that “the vibes here are rancid” is a power that the jedi actually have is insane to me
> NotOnFire: can you imagine
> NotOnFire: being a normal dude, and you’re getting help from this jedi,
> NotOnFire: and this jedi’s like “head’s up, the next five minutes have the worst vibes imaginable”
> NotOnFire: and you’re like “why?!”
> NotOnFire: and the jedi dude’s like “inscrutable cosmic power told me so, doesn’t get more specific than that”
< Antares: xDDDDD
< Antares: what is going ON in your brain?!
> PinkIsPunkRock: no, let him speak
> NotOnFire: thank you.
> NotOnFire: like all these weird little men in weird little robes with glowy swords do is meditate because they have sorcerer-induced anxiety.
> NotOnFire: yoda’s always fucking meditating on his little pillow because he has to figure out if he’s nauseous because the arcane will of all life itself is speaking through his midichlorians to warn him or if he just ate a bad burrito for lunch.
> PinkIsPunkRock: omg I love it
> PinkIsPunkRock: the force is constantly dunking on these weird little men and telling them “something bad’s going to happen” and never explaining what’s going to happen.
> NotOnFire: exactly!
> NotOnFire: do you sense bad vibes because your washing machine is about to break and flood your apartment, or because the government you serve is about to turn into a dictatorship and mow your ass like grass? that’s for you to figure out
> PinkIsPunkRock: mace windu has Double Anxiety because every now and then he gets a pop-up that tells him when he is making a Significant Visual Novel Protag Choice
> NotOnFire: YES!
> NotOnFire: anyway, I’m going to write fanfiction about it
> NotOnFire: and my OC will sleep with Obi-Wan, probably
> PinkIsPunkRock: … fair
< Antares: the more you’re on that discord server and the less straight you are
> NotOnFire: hey, technically Obi-Wan is an alien, so fucking him wouldn’t be gay
< Antares: …
< Antares: that doesn’t sound right, but I don’t know enough about fucking aliens to argue against it
> PinkIsPunkRock: yeah, we need to ask an expert in fucking
> PinkIsPunkRock: next time EndeavorSucks is online, I’ll ask
< Antares: I was gonna say that xD
> NotOnFire: wait, aren’t you on patrol Antares?
> NotOnFire: you know, for your JOB?! That I pay for with my TAXES?!
< Antares: I’m in the hospital (again)
> PinkIsPunkRock: AGAIN?!
> PinkIsPunkRock: are you alright?
< Antares: meh
< Antares: I’ve been better, I’ve been worse.
< Antares: no one stabbed me, so I’ve definitely been worse.
> NotOnFire: what happened?
< Antares: nothing interesting, really. The most bothersome thing is that I’m having to sit on my hands and wait for an hour.
< Antares: oh, wait, the doctor is coming back. See you later!
________________
The Quirk-erasing drug wore off in a little over an hour, to everyone’s relief. Toki would have been in deep shit without Warp-Space. She had to go through a battery of tests but was cleared to get back to work as soon as her Quirk came back. With how disorganized Osaka was after the take-down of the Shie Hassaikai, they needed every hero out there on the streets. At least now they knew for sure that the mysterious cargo Tobita had vanished with had been Quirk-erasing bullets.
Inferno wasn’t pleased.
The yakuza had had their fingers in a lot of pies. Several people had suddenly left town. When you shook up their business, their revealed holes and corruption like upturned rocks hiding crawling maggots. While the heroes patrolled the streets to make sure no villains would step into that power vacuum, the HPSC was hiring lawyers and accountants left and right to straighten out the mess. Several buildings and business were going to be confiscated and sold when this would all be over.
Toki didn’t remember Icarus’ own cleaning of Fukuoka to be this tedious.
But then, they mostly had dangerous villains and violence in the streets. Osaka dealt with quieter dealings like corruption, racket, stuff like that. There were still violent crimes, but the clean-up involved more talking than fighting. Toki patrolled the rest of the day, like every other hero, on the hunt for Tobita and his accomplice. But of course, they didn’t find anything.
Lady Siam was taking it a little personally, bowing and apologizing for letting the villains slip between her fingers. But hey, she had been busy rescuing Toki’s ass at the time, so she could hardly be blamed. Toki could have done without the whole bridal carry, but to be honest, she was pretty happy that she had showed up and broke the stand-off with Danjuro Tobita. Still, though. Tobita, his sniper, and his other accomplice had vanished. It was like they had all disappeared into thin air.
Which they could have, actually.
Toki couldn’t help but think of the person who had emerged from the shadows to bring Tobita with them when Lady Siam had appeared. It was a man with shoulder-length blond hair. He looked familiar, and when Toki consulted her file, she could see why. She had arrested him a few years ago. Yotome Hansha, the teleporter. Also, one of the fugitives who had escaped prison with Fujio, and who was certainly a member of his new crew.
“Well, this is one big mess,” Inferno scowled.
Toki shrugged. She was sitting on the railing of the rooftop, at the top of his agency. The sun was setting on the city, and it was beautiful, even if it was cold as hell. Inferno radiated heat, which helped a little.
“No one died, that’s a success.”
“But they still have the little girl. And those bullets!”
Toki sighed and swung her legs idly.
“Yeah, I know. I’m less worried about Eri-chan, though.”
Inferno scowled at her: “That’s not funny.”
“I know it’s not. She’s not going to be happy. It’s sad to be raised by people who live for violence and money. It’s cold. Even if Tobita takes care of her, even if he loves her, the world he can share with her will always be a cold and cruel one. And it’s a terrible thing to understand, for a child her age. But… She can survive it. I did, after all. And… Tobita seems to really care about her. He will keep her safe, or at least he will try. Things could be worse.”
Inferno’s expression softened a little, and he sighed.
“Tobita has allies now. The sniper there…”
“It was probably Fujio. One of the Fugitives. And an old friend of my dad, who knew me when I was little. Yeah.”
Her senpai grimaced. “Fujio Awai was a friend of your father? Jeez, this case is just a gift that keeps on giving.”
“Oh, you don’t know the half of it. The other two members of the fugitives are Kendo Rappa, a guy which I am fairly certain that Meteor helped arrest…”
“Oh my gods.”
“… And Yotome Hansha, a teleporter that I arrested and nearly turned into a vegetable with blunt force trauma. I’m going to take a wild guess, and say they both may be a smidge resentful.”
Inferno closed his eyes and groaned loudly.
“I don’t know what you did in your past life, Quantum, but your karma is shitty as hell.”
“Not true!”
“Quantum,” he said, deadpan. “Us heroes are used to deal with ridiculous and over-the-top stories, but I think your is the weirdest that I have encountered. You are the child of an S-ranked villain with a nationwide underground reputation, and you became one of the strongest heroes in the world: how were you ever going to fly under the radar?”
Toki almost told him that in term of drama, she had nothing on the Todoroki or All Might, and then she reconsidered. I mean, she had gotten tangled with All Might’s backstory and now had the attention of his Nemesis, so… there was that. As for the Todoroki, okay their lives sucked, but Toki’s family drama was at least equal to them.
Oh shit. He was right. Her karma was shitty as hell. It couldn’t quite be called bad luck, because she had gotten out of everything mostly unscathed, but… If there was a god looking over this universe, he sure liked to make her the butt of his jokes.
When she had been a teenager, she had been worried about being swept away by the narrative of the Main Character like a pebble dragged by a tsunami. Now that she was older and tangled in her own problems, she almost wanted to laugh about her past naivety.
They were all the protagonists of their own lives.
Some people were happy to stay in the background, to not invite trouble, to watch the spectacle unfold and ride the waves. But Toki had been proactive since she was a kid. She dived straight for trouble, every single time. And she was a warper, one of the rarest Quirks in the world. A Quirk that she had cheated, modified, and also made incredibly powerful. Was it really a surprise that she was a trouble magnet?
Of course diving headfirst into the world of heroes was dangerous. But everything important was dangerous, everything meaningful was dangerous. What was Toki supposed to do, lead an unimportant life? There was no such thing.
Especially when your name was Toki Taiyōme.
Toki had willingly taken the path of exceptionalism, but she had been born onto it, too. She was a warper, the daughter of villains. Instead of burying her past, she had forcibly exhumed it, and added its ghosts to the ones she had made for herself. More ties to the past meant more traps to trip her up when she last expected it. Meteor’s shadow, especially, had planned over her existence for as long as she could remember. It was no wonder that things had ended up like this.
“Oh, shut up,” she muttered.
Inferno sniggered. He leaned against the railing, raising his temperature just enough to make the air toasty warm, and sighed:
“Well, at least it’s pretty sure they all skipped town now. Most of the danger is gone.”
“Yeah. I was planning on taking one of my fledglings with me for my last patrol there. Not sure I would have done that with Fujio sulking around.”
It was one thing to face villains in the open, but a sniper didn’t let you see them coming. They were ambush predators with a skillset revolving around instant killing. You were walking and then, bam, you were dead.
That wasn’t the kind of thing Toki was going to expose her students to.
“Well, not all is lost!” Toki added, trying to be cheerful. “Now we know for sure that Tobita is allied with the Fugitives. It makes sense. He needs a teleporter, and they need those bullets. Now that the underground know that Quirk-erasing bullets are a thing, and they’re a finite resource because their producers were arrested, the price is going to go up. Imagine if not only you could order a bullet, but also order a hit using those bullets? Fujio is going to be rich. He was always a good hitman.”
“A hitman who can erase Quirks,” Inferno groaned. “My lifespan is shrinking just by listening to you. You realize how bad it is?”
Toki sighed, her levity vanishing.
“Yeah. I know.” She remembered trying to warp and not being able to; the tightening in her chest, the jump in her pulse, the surge of fear. She shivered. “I know I could have been killed without a chance of defending myself, or even running. I guess it’s lucky Fujio didn’t recognize me.”
Inferno paused, and suddenly looked at that with incredulity:
“Uh, what makes you say that?”
Toki blinked, surprised by his own surprise. She would have thought it was pretty obvious. After all…
“If Fujio knew who I was,” she explained, “he would have taken that shot and I would be dead. He didn’t.”
Inferno shook his head, frowning.
“You got it wrong. I would argue that the reason you’re alive is because Fujio knows exactly who you are.”
“What?”
She hadn’t expected that. It didn’t make any sense! If Fujio knew that Quantum was the snitch who had sent him in jail, then Toki was pretty sure that she would be worm food.
But her senpai nodded, and insisted:
“Think about it. You captured Chisaki. Tobita must want revenge for that. Add to that the fact that Hansha, their teleporter, probably hold a grudge against you. That makes two people who had you cornered in that alley with good reasons to want you dead. And yet you’re alive? Fujio, who had a sniper rifle pointed at you, only shot at your feet? He doesn’t want you dead. In fact, he probably took great pains to order Tobita and Hansha to not harm you, and that is because he knows you’re Toki Taiyōme.”
Toki stared at him incredulously.
“I doubt he has any lingering fondness for me.”
Fujio hadn’t hated little Toki, but he hadn’t loved her either. He found her snark amusing and let her share his space easily enough, but he was the member of the Crew who had socialized the least with her, keeping her at arm’s length. He was always focused on other things. His side-jobs. His weapons. His plans. His own life, which only intersected with Meteor’s, and where Toki was only an interloper.
Inferno shrugged.
“Maybe. I can’t judge. But I wasn’t referring to that.”
“Then to what were you referring to?”
“To the fact that Fujio knows your father.”
Toki almost said that she doubted Fujio has spared her out of lingering fondness for Meteor, either; but then, suddenly, she realized what Inferno meant. Inferno didn’t see Meteor through the lens of filial affection like Toki did. When Inferno thought of Meteor, he didn’t think first Dad, and all that went with it: protection, affection, annoyance, anguish, guilt, love, familiarity, caution. He didn’t have all that baggage… and in a way, that made him more clear-eyed and aware.
So when Inferno thought of Meteor, his first thought was threat.
“Oh,” Toki said faintly.
She understood now. Fujio didn’t want to kill her, because if he did, Meteor would fall upon him like a rabid animal and rip out his liver to suffocate him with it. Because it was Meteor, and no matter how tame he could be, there was always this ticking bomb of bloodthirsty violence just begging to be unleashed. A beast, hungry for blood. Meteor had always craved the thrill of a fight, the terror and the violence of a killing blow. Even now, even walking side by side with a hero, Toki was sure that it itched at him.
Meteor could, and would, kill again.
He only needed a reason, and it didn’t even need to be a good one. Toki remembered her own dip into homicidal rage when she thought Neito had been killed, and she swallowed. Yeah, Meteor only needed a reason, and his daughter’s death would be a very good reason.
“Oh,” she repeated, a little weaker. “Yeah, I guess that’s a deterrent.”
Inferno snorted.
“A pretty good one, I would say. If Fujio Awai knows that not only Meteor is a maniac, but also that he’s out there… Then of course, his only condition to any alliance with yakuza that you publicly took down, would be that they all get away from you without harming a hair on your head.”
“He knows Meteor is out of jail because of Rappa,” Toki remembered, eyes wide. “He must have known for the beginning.”
“And that’s why the Fugitives went to the ground after the raid,” Inferno added. “He knows you’re here, so he’s steering clear. He was probably only waiting for Tobita to ask his questions before hightailing out of the prefecture, putting as much distance as possible between you.”
Toki munched over that for a little while.
She didn’t know if she was relieved about it, or if she was annoyed. Probably a mix of both. On one hand, it was good to know that she was virtually untouchable. On the other… Toki had worked hard to be respected in her own right. To be discarded as a person entirely, to be just a pawn, a go-mad button for Meteor (who didn’t need much to go crazy, anyway) …It was a little offensive.
She sighed, her shoulders dropping. Inferno patted her on the head, comfortingly.
“Go home, Quantum. You had a hard day.”
“Not really,” Toki said truthfully. “I didn’t even fight.”
“Yeah, and it’s a good thing. Besides… With Tobita and the Fugitives gone, at least now, we know the rests of the patrols are going to be nice and uneventful.”
“Don’t say that. You’re going to jinx it.”
“My good luck will compensate for your shitty karma,” her senpai grinned at her.
Toki rolled her eyes. She hoped he was right.
Notes:
Fic rec of the day: "we are here (to help those that won't help themselves)" by JoWithTheFlow.
The Plot: Izuku jumped from the roof, survived, was crippled, and is now a quiet student in the Support Course. Bakugou is eaten alive by guilt and fury and regret and annoyance. Shoto is just fascinated.So. Basically, a story of how Shoto always gravitates towards Izuku. No wordbuilding here, only reflexion, soft feels, angst, and a healthy dose of fluff and humor to keep things light. The story is from Shoto's POV, and yet Izuku and Bakugou both resolves as much of their issues as he does!
So. On a more serious note, this story is soon going to go on hiatus. In two chapters, i think.
It's not abandonned. I still have ideas and plans and stuff to write. But it's been months since i wrote about this fandom. Right now i'm focussing on my ASOIAF fanfic, which i will maybe post a some point. I hate posting unfinished works so i'll at least finish the first volume, i think.
But i'm also mostly focussing on myself. Writing is hard. After putting what's in my mind to paper for two solid years without breaks, i feel like i'm running low on fuel. I want to read, to watch shows, to saturate my brain with news things: to give the fertile soil of my imagination some time to recuperate, instead of draining it dry. So... yeah, i'm not writing much these days.
Anyway, knowledge comes but wisdom lingers is stuck. I decided that i'll post the next two chapters, so i won't leave you on a cliffhanger: and then i'll pick up the story.... when i can, i guess. I hope not too many of you will be tired of it at that point.
So.... there is that.
Chapter 76: Blood and violence
Summary:
Toki lost a precious second gaping in horror. This was her strongest attack; she could feel the burn in her chest, her state-of-the-art heart pushed to its limit and throbbing with pain. This was on par with a punch from All Might. This was stronger than she had unleashed on AFO. And her opponent had just… shrugged it off like it was nothing.
Toki suddenly realized that what she felt was just humiliating, inescapable, simple fear. It was a complete understanding of her own helpless inadequacy.
Notes:
Hello !
I forgot to post last week, and tomorrow i probably won't post because i'll be busy, so... here, have a chapter =) I only have this one and the next one written, after that the story will go on hiatus, so enjoy it as much as you can !
And don't throw stones at me when you'll reach the end of that chapter xD
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
BLOOD AND VIOLENCE
The mission wasn’t completely over once the captured villains were shoved in the back of a police truck. There was clean-up, verifications, regular patrols in the area to see what kind of vultures circled the place and check how to power vacuum was getting filled.
The patrols were all very uneventful. After that brush with Tobita, nothing happened all week. Toki barely broke up a few fights. Mostly, she jumped around the city, looked impressive, and tried to pet every stray cat she could find.
Yeah, the hostage situation with Tobita clearly had taught her nothing. She still cooed at every kitty crossing her path.
Anyway. The most exciting thing that happened during the week was that she had to call Yagi, to pass the time…. Well, officially, she was calling him to talk about Yūei. With those additional patrols, Toki had had to excuse herself from a heroic lesson, and Yagi had taken over. He had followed her lesson plan, so everything was fine, but Toki liked to have a debrief afterward.
Yagi liked it, too. He had a hard time chatting with other people. There was always a distance between him and the other teachers, or even the other heroes. Toki and Nedzu were pretty much the only person to treat Yagi like a normal person.
But instead of talking about class, they had ended up talking about Nighteye.
“He’s an asshole,” Toki muttered. “Why does he hate my dad so much? Apart from his entire personality, of course.”
And even taking in account Meteor’s personal brand of bloodthirsty insanity, it wasn’t a reason to call him scum and said out loud how sorry you were that he wasn’t dead. Especially not to Toki’s face.
Yagi sighed in the phone.
“I’m sorry about him. The Meteor case was very hard on him, but we both felt responsible.”
The Meteor case. It was strange to hear it like that, to realize there had been a case. Toki warped to a nearby rooftop to better survey the streets, and asked distractedly:
“How so?”
“The death toll,” Yagi said somberly. Just like that, Toki’s attention came right back to him. “Seventy people died in that assault.”
“Yeah, I know.” Toki snarled a little. “My notes were supposed to avoid that.”
“I know. And he knows it too. You have to understand my mindset at the time. Sir Nighteye had started to work me with just a year before, and his help was a miracle. Putting him in charge of strategy freed a lot of my time, and with his Quirk, Foresight, I never had to advance in the unknown. Until that day, every single attack he coordinated had ended with zero casualties. But this…! The entire operation was faulty from the start, but the tipping point was when we decided to do a full-scale assault instead of a sneak attack.”
“Yeah, what was that about?” Toki was still salty about it. If there had been some sleeping gas, a quiet strike team… the whole disaster would have been avoided.
“It was Sir Nighteye’s idea— No, I shouldn’t put this on him. It was me. It was how I operated. I always attacked upfront. I had to lead the fight. So Mirai planned for a front assault, because his entire strategy was hinging on me being an unsurmountable force that would take care of the problem.”
Toki paused and scowled furiously at the street under her. What a fucking pile of bullshit.
Yes, Yagi (or rather, All Might) had fucked up with the whole Symbol of Peace thing. The glorification of righteous violence, the hyper-consumerism of heroism, the spectacle of it. The deification of the Number One spot, making people blind to the flaws of the system or even to the fact that one person couldn’t carry their entire country forever. Yagi had pulled Japan out of a dark age, under the thumb of villains: but like so many warriors, he hadn’t known how to build things anchored in peace.
And he hadn’t known how to ask anyone to help him with that, either.
Toki huffed a breath. Yeah, whatever. Now this was all in the past. The Symbol of Peace was retired, AFO was gone or as well as gone, and a new age was coming. She had already started talking with Kameko about her idea of suppressing the ranking. Kameko was very unhappy about it, true. But she had always loved challenges. Toki would wear her out, she was sure of it.
“So Mirai planned a frontal assault,” Yagi finally said, sounding weary. “It was supposed to be easy, a show of force from myself more than a real attack. A lot of heroes showed up to assist with crowd-control and bask in my success. I… loved inspired young heroes, so they were all welcomed, even though most of them were young and inexperienced. And then…”
“And then Meteor turned out to be much stronger than you believed.”
“Yes. Mirai looked into my future that morning, and he was… terrified. Horrified. Until that morning, he hadn’t even known there would be casualties. And now that he had confirmed the future with his Quirk, there was no way to avoid it. So he… He gave the signal for the attack.”
“Even knowing about the death toll?” Toki was horrified.
“It wasn’t his fault,” Yagi defended him. “He had foreseen it, so he couldn’t avoid it. All he could do was make sure the day ended with the villain behind bar.”
“That’s bullshit and you know it. He didn’t check a few days ahead?! Didn’t order the young hotshot heroes to evacuate the neighborhood as the attack started? He could have done a hundred different things!”
“I know,” Yagi said grimly. “This is why this operation shattered part of our trust.”
Toki paused. She hadn’t expected that.
“You told him off?”
“Afterward, yes. I was… very angry. In my heart, I trusted him. I thought his Quirk gave him a greater insight and a more human wisdom. But all those deaths— It shattered that belief. I had to recognize that Mirai was just a man, a very young man just starting in heroism, and that even himself could miss vital intel. I had to recognize that even when he boasted an absolute confidence in his Quirk and himself, sometimes he was wrong. He simply… couldn’t admit it, to himself or to me.”
Oh.
Suddenly All Might’s reluctance to share his burden as the Symbol of Peace made so much sense. All Might had shared his burden, once. He had found someone perfect for it. He had found a hero who couldn’t be taken by surprise, someone who wouldn’t try to walk in danger with him, someone who could stand at his back and give him directives for everything to be okay, to eliminate the crushing terror of not knowing…
And then, that perfect sidekick had failed him.
That perfect sidekick who knew it all had missed a key-element which had led to several dozens of victims. That perfect sidekick had known it would happen, and pushed for it to happen anyway, because…
“He couldn’t back out,” Toki understood. “Nighteye… He’s a prick. He’s proud. Confident. But most of all, a control-freak. When something unexpected happen, he doesn’t change his mind. He doubles down.”
“Right.” Yagi cleared his throat, sounding a little embarrassed. “Admitting a mistake is unthinkable because it would mean having to reevaluate everything he had ever known. The only time I managed to make him apologize for messing up something was when he was sedated for surgery after being shot twice; and even when he regained consciousness, he pretended not to remember. Mirai isn’t a bad person, he’s just… He can’t admit he’s wrong. He can’t admit he’s at fault for anything; or else it would mean, to him, admitting he’s at fault for everything he ever predicted.”
Toki blinked. “That’s messed up.”
“Yes. It is. But it was… You have to understand it goes deeper than that. After Meteor’s arrest and all those deaths, people wanted someone to blame. Meteor was publicly charged with that disaster, but anyone who looked closer at that operation knew that the heroes had messed up. The police and several hero agencies urged me to fire Mirai and throw him to the wolves. I didn’t! But Mirai knew that it had been asked of me. It made him afraid, paranoid. That’s what made him become harsher later in life.”
And Nighteye had needed, desperately, to believe he had been right to order the assault. Because if he had been wrong… then all those deaths were on him, and All Might should get rid of him. It was probably terrifying, for a young man confronted with his first failure. Someone as rigid as Nighteye didn’t bend. They held on, or they broke.
And so Nighteye had held on because he couldn’t break.
Every tiny event had ripple. Every decision had consequences, which shaped people, and people later hardened with those new edges. Canon-Nighteye probably hadn’t been as cold and brutal as real-Nighteye, but that was because canon-Nighteye had never dealt with the shitshow of Meteor’s arrest. Never had to confront his own failures, never had to see the betrayed horror in Yagi’s eyes, never had to be so brutally faced with his own inadequacies.
Never had to double down and dig his heels in, plugging his ears and closing his eyes against any questions, because questioning his self-righteousness was too frightening. Experiences shaped us. And sometimes those experiences were traumatic. Toki still had nightmares of the building coming down. Maybe Nighteye had those nightmares too.
But, where Toki always woke up desperately wondering if she could have done otherwise, Nighteye woke up furiously telling himself that he had nothing to be ashamed of. That it had to go that way, that it was written.
Dickhead.
“Maybe you should have fired him anyway,” she muttered. “He had fucked up.”
“Yes.” Yagi sighed deeply, sounding very tired. “Maybe I should have. But he was my only friend, my only support. He could do so much good if he was given a second chance. So I said no. I kept him with me, even if I didn’t rely on him blindly anymore. I don’t know if it made things better or worse. In any case, that wound never healed.”
Toki ruminated about that for a few seconds, warping in the sky, then into a small park. There was a trash can starting to overflow with garbage, so she picked up the bag to empty it.
“And that’s why he thinks Meteor should have been shot?” she asked, distractedly.
Yagi let out a low groan, and there was a sound like his forehead hitting the top of a desk in mortification.
“He said that?! I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize for him. I was pretty shocked, but… I’m over it.”
And even if the cold dehumanization of her father had shocked her more than she could admit, Toki had also been aware that Meteor was not the kind of individual that invited compassion. Meteor was a killer, plain and simple. Just because he had chosen to fight on the good side didn’t change his nature.
“He blames Meteor,” Toki continued, emptying the garbage bag in a big public trash can, and then warping bag to put a new bag in the park’s trash can. “He needs to blame Meteor because if everything is Meteor’s fault, then it can’t be his. Or yours.” She paused, and added, more quietly, “Or mine.”
“… Yes. Mirai has become someone very callous with time, but his disdain of Meteor has turned to hatred because he needs to blame someone. For those deaths, but also for making him doubt his righteousness.”
Toki left the park and continued to jump from rooftop to rooftop, pondering that. Yeah, it did make a lot of sense, seen through the lens of Nighteye’s frantic attempts to justify himself. Meteor wasn’t just a Very Bad Person who had killed innocents, he was also the catalysis and the personification of Nighteye’s first big failure.
So Nighteye’s hatred was very personal. It wasn’t just about Meteor being a dangerous villain, it was about Meteor being a threat to Nighteye’s self-image.
“Is that why he’s such a control-freak?” she asked suddenly. “Nighteye, I mean. In general. Because it makes him feel safe?”
“… You lost me.”
“Well, you see how some people feel happy when they’re always going fast? Like me, like you, like Hawks. We want sensation to distract us from our sorrows. But Nighteye doesn’t want excitement. He wants safety and certainty that everything is well, that the person in charge can do no wrong, and that he’s protected by the strongest power there is. He wants safety in the form of control.”
Yagi paused, and then hesitantly said. “Maybe.”
“Mmmh. I’m no shrink, so this is just a random thought, but it makes sense. He lost control once, and it had never happened to him before, and it had disastrous consequences. Even if he was an adult, it would be traumatizing. So now he wants to make sure it never happens again, by controlling everything.”
There was a moment of silence as they both digested that, and then Yagi groaned.
“Oh, that explain why he was so adamant about finding a successor myself, then. The idea of not having some measure of control on OFA, which is an incredible power and defined not only a big part of his life, but also the fate of the world… It must have frightened him. Angered him, too.”
“That’s no excuse for being a dick!”
“Oh, I agree. I’m just saying it makes sense. It’s comforting, in a way, that he has a reason to be angry, instead of just being furious at me for not dying soon enough to leave him free to model my legacy as he sees fit.”
“Jeez,” Toki muttered, a little shocked. “That’s cold.”
“He’s a cold man.” There was melancholy in Yagi’s voice. “He didn’t use to be. He could have been so different, if we hadn’t argued after that catastrophe, or if he had been allowed to make his first mistake in an easier situation. It… It hurt him, what happened. He hated it, hated that weakness, but it still hurt him, and he didn’t know how to deal with it. I didn’t know, either. We stayed friends and coworkers, but there was always the shadow of this failure between us. I trusted him, of course I did, but I never walked blindly into his plans anymore. He took it as an insult. It grew worse and worse, until we parted ways.”
“After your fight with AFO,” Toki guessed.
“Yes. He said that if I continued to be the Symbol of Peace, a villain would kill me in a few years.” Yagi snorted, weirdly enough. “I think he was picturing All For One, but when Meteor was released, Mirai probably thought that he would be the one to end me. That would be a nightmare scenario for him.”
Toki sniggered, imagining it. Somehow, it was easy to imagine Meteor haunting someone’s nightmares. Her father had always been a little terrifying when he wanted to be.
“Are you going to visit him?” she hazarded. “He’s probably going to retire, you know.”
Nighteye was still hospitalized. There was no news. With a spinal injury, it wasn’t a good sign. Toki wondered if Nighteye was looking forward to a life in a wheelchair. For someone as obsessive about control and his image as him, that would be shattering.
“I don’t know,” Yagi finally sighed. “I’m worried that it wouldn’t help.”
Yeah. Someone in a position of weakness and angry at the world had a tendency to lash out. Even a well-intended visit would probably devolve in a screaming match. Accusations, despair, bitterness. Not a good mix. Toki hummed.
“Suit yourself. I, for one, am going to keep my distances.”
“I understand. Although… it would mean a lot to him, to know that the child he failed to save still became a hero.”
Toki made a face. Yeah, right. She didn’t feel in the mood to make Nighteye happy. Especially in regard to the disastrous arrest of Meteor’s Crew.
Besides… Now that she knew that his hatred of Meteor was personal, she thought it would be more careful to keep her distance. Hero or not, she was still Meteor’s daughter. With his smirk, his eyes, his strength. When your feelings aren’t rational, it’s easy to let them spill over to the nearest person.
“No thanks. He won’t be in a good place, mentally, and I don’t want him to project on me all his unresolved feelings about Meteor’s arrest.”
“You exaggerate,” Yagi protested. “Mirai felt terrible about failing to rescue you. He blamed himself for years.”
“He also blamed my father for his own mistakes… and yours. When in reality, the fault was mostly his and mine.”
“It wasn’t your fault. You were eight! How could it be your fault?!”
Toki laughed self-depreciatingly.
“Well, I’m the one who kickstarted the whole thing, didn’t I? I could have done it differently.”
Starting a correspondence with the police to establish her reliability as an inside source, maybe. Or sent her notebook to a hero more strategic-minded, like Endeavor. Or spy some more on the Crew and give the location of their individual apartments to the heroes, instead of giving them the hideout.
“You did the right thing,” Yagi said firmly.
Toki swallowed. She wished the conversation hadn’t gone in that direction. It always made her feel a little raw, a little unsteady. Her father had forgiven her, but what about everyone else? Her mother, Fujio, Homura, Nono? And all of the people killed under the rubble? What about Toki herself?
She had never been good at forgiving herself.
“But I did it wrong,” she whispered. “So what the fuck difference does it make?”
“All the difference in the world.” Yagi’s voice was strong and certain. “They were doing the wrong thing right. What do you think would have happened to countless civilians if someone hadn’t stepped in? What do you think would have happened to your family if no one had ever told them ‘no’ in a way that they couldn’t ignore?”
“Yeah, but look at what happened anyway, what I did!”
“You weren’t the one who gave the order for the attack.” It was All Might’s voice, booming and deep and unshakable. “You weren’t the one to collapse that building, or the one to push your parents to villainy. Don’t borrow sorrow, Quantum, or guilt. Your parents and the heroes who fought them, including me, made their own decisions. What they did isn’t your fault.”
“People still died because of a decision I made.”
“We live in a dangerous world. People die because of decisions made by others every day. You are not to blame for what your parents did, nor for what the heroes arresting them did. You never were. It’s not your fault the adults around you failed you.”
Toki found a pretext to end the phone call, feeling a little raw and vulnerable. Then she took a breath, held it a second, and then let it go.
Maybe Yagi wasn’t the right person to talk about this. Oh, he was her friend. And he had a unique insight about Meteor’s arrest, as someone who had been there, who had made it happen as much as she had. But… He was also All Might.
He wasn’t just Yagi, her friend. He was All Might, the Symbol of Peace. The man who had done so much, who was so much, who held so much power. Toki wasn’t important next to him. Hearing him try to be reassuring made her feel a little distant. Removed from the equation. Like some part of her couldn’t hear what he was saying or didn’t believe he was addressing her.
Part of Toki would always be the little girl on the roof, watching the building go down under All Might’s fists. Part of her would always be the child of villains, left behind, the dregs of society, unwanted and unloved under his light. All Might represented the hero society that she had wanted to believe in, and who had betrayed her so terribly.
And maybe that was why it was so hard to hear reassurances from him.
She knew, rationally, that Yagi wasn’t wrong. And yet… It was so hard to believe it.
It’s not your fault that the adults around you failed you, Yagi had said. And now that Toki was the adult in charge of not failing the children around her, could she live up to those expectations? It seemed that her failures were always outweighing her successes, in her memories.
She had been forgiven by Meteor for her part in the arrest. She had forgiven herself for what she had done to her family, or at least to her father. And yet it still weighted on her, like a burden she could never quite set down. All those people had died because of her notes. Okay, maybe they had died for multiples reasons: the Crew being villains, All Might being a brute, Nighteye being an arrogant self-centered asshole who hadn’t been able to owe up to his mistake. But Toki’s actions had played a part. Toki’s actions had been the catalyst.
Toki’s actions were always the catalyst.
oOoOoOo
It was her last day of patrol in Osaka today. Still no sign of the yakuza, or the Fugitives. The city was mostly calmed down, and the heroes had started to reorganize. Toki was soon going to be able to go back to her usual routine.
“It will be nice to have you back,” Keigo offered her in the morning, yawning as he drank his coffee. “You spend most of your patrol outside our kingdom. I miss you.”
Toki made a little awww sound and burrowed her face against his neck for a second, enlacing him from behind.
“Come on, it’s just been a week. Tomorrow I’ll be done, and I can resume my usual patrols with you.”
“How romantic,” Keigo purred.
Toki laughed and kissed the side of his neck, making him twitch with ticklishness. When she moved back, the edge of his wing came to tickle her side in retribution. The only reason why it didn’t devolve into a tickle fight (and probably making out against a wall) was because Keigo had a burning cup of coffee in his hands.
Shame.
“Be careful!” Keigo teased her as she left, as usual.
“I always am!”
Besides, her injuries from the yakuza raid were almost completely healed. The chiropractor (and a quick swing by Recovery Girl’s office) had done wonders. Toki’s back was still a little stiff, and her shoulder and thigh ached after a long day of running around, but otherwise, she was back at peak efficiency.
Not that she really needed it: those patrols in Osaka had all been very peaceful so far.
For today’s patrol, Toki was taking Melissa with her, and they were going to circle the old yakuza territory, especially the docks and warehouses. Because there had been such a strong yakuza presence there, there had been very little (if none at all) violence in the streets. Thus, those areas had very little heroic presence. The local heroes were reorganizing to spread out more evenly, but in the meantime, having a top hero there to check things out helped maintain order… and dissuade other villains to try and fill the power vacuum.
Toki and Melissa thus started walking around, or rather jumping from rooftop to rooftop in the industrial area. Most of the time Toki stuck close to her student, half to keep an eye for her (although Melissa didn’t really need it) and half to talk.
Small talk was, after all, an essential part of patrol.
So they talked about the hero society and heroic ideals, the socio-economic impact of popularity as a deciding factor in hero rankings, about how Melissa was coping with the mission, and what she had thought about Toga.
In retrospective, Toki was a little freaked out that one of her fledglings had had a run-in with the League. Especially Melissa, who was… not weaker! But who couldn’t go toe to toe with a powerhouse, not like Hitoshi who could neutralize a threat instantly or Neito who could teleport away.
But Melissa had handled her own admirably. Not just by fighting, but by deescalating. Heroes rarely bothered to do so. Their priority was to capture and bolster their statistics. Melissa, though, had kept in mind the fact that her teammates were injured, and the priorities was to rescue them, get them out of the fight.
And in doing so, Melissa had even managed to create a dialogue with a villain. Sure, she hadn’t gotten any new intel, but… It was promising. Even if it was Toga, the manic with a knife and a freaking addiction to sucking on people’s arteries!
“I can’t believe you held an entire conversation with her.”
“So what?” Melissa defended herself. “She’d been nothing but polite.”
“You do know she killed people, right? She’s dangerous.”
“So are we,” Melissa shrugged. “She’s dangerous, I’m dangerous, you’re dangerous too. And we all know it so there’s no problem. We have to meet on equal footing somewhere to start communicating and knowing what the other wants.”
Toki hummed pensively. The thing was… she agreed. She just hadn’t thought of Melissa being the one to step up to face a villain, hands open in a placating gesture, offering to listen. And she hadn’t imagined Toga to be the one answering that call. Not at all.
“I thought that if one League member would be open to dialogue, it would be either Shigaraki or Dabi,” Toki abruptly confessed.
Melissa stared at her, nearly missing a step and falling from the roof.
“What?! They’re the most demented ones!”
She had a point. Toki grimaced.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s just because I know their origin story, the names they wore before becoming villains, and what they are looking for. Both want closure, a closure that I can more or less identify. I can’t really identify Toga’s motives, so I didn’t imagine her reaching out.”
Melissa frowned. “Toga’s motives are simpler than you think. She wants to be loved. She wants to be accepted, not beaten down to fit the mold. Her parents couldn’t give her that, and it made her an outcast. Now she found other outcasts who accept her, and she follows them because she wants to belong. It’s normal. Everyone wants to belong somewhere.”
Toki thought of Shigaraki and Dabi, or rather Tenko Shimura and Tōya Todoroki. They had wanted to belong somewhere too. But… Unlike Toga, who still craved this love and acceptance, Dabi and Shigaraki had given it up. Now they wanted to punish the world for not loving them.
Maybe there was something to consider here.
Maybe because Toga was younger. Maybe because she was a teenage girl. Maybe because she hadn’t centered her life around heroes and thus had been disappointed by them. But the result was the same; Toga hadn’t given up. She was dangerous and unstable, but she hadn’t given up on the world, or on herself. She still wanted to live. She still wanted to belong. She was in the League to belong, not to burn down the world.
But was it enough to save her?
Toki didn’t know that yet. She had to trust Melissa’s instincts. And she did, she wanted to! But Melissa was eighteen. Toki couldn’t rely on a teenager’s guts feeling for something so serious. She was going to listen to Melissa, and she was going to try to save Toga. But… she didn’t have Melissa’s faith in that endeavor. If it failed, Toki would be disappointed, but not surprised.
That was a conversation for later, though.
Toki warped high to take a good look at the surrounding area, as they reached a long mostly-deserted street between two old industrial buildings. Then she warped back to Melissa and they both wordlessly climbed down from the roof to walk at street level. A few civilians waved; a few others ignored them. Routine.
“To go back to the hero ranking,” Melissa said after a few steps. “You’ll probably Number Two this year, so maybe you could make a speech, and say…”
Toki never heard what she said next.
One minute the Melissa was speaking; the next Toki was lying flat on her back almost ten meters from where she had been standing, something like a subsonic boom still resonating in her bones, the inside of her head ringing. Her visor was cracked, A.D.A. blinking up a warning at her. Toki she blinked up at the grayish sky above her. She was certain the sky had been blue not two minutes ago.
It took her a moment to recognize the smoke rising up against the clouds.
Wh— What?
Toki stumbled to her feet, catching herself on a nearby car as she almost fell back over, and stared.
About five hundred meters from what she was standing, down the street, where a big warehouse had been standing, was now a fucking crater. It was as if a massive bomb had been there, or an entire gas canalization had ignited. The building had been obliterated. The whole street was devastated. Debris had been blown everywhere; rubble, rocks, broken steek pipes, crushed metal containers, carbonized rubble. People were laying on the ground, some of them standing sluggishly, in shock; some other unmoving.
There was blood where the debris had hit people at bullet-speed; but even the bright splatters of red seemed muted. Fog…? No. Ashes, and white cement dust, absolutely everywhere. Toki’s ears were ringing.
Fuck.
Her brain, rattled as it was, shifted from shock to crisis mode. Toki looked around wildly, and a sudden burst of panic suddenly eased from her chest when she saw Melissa standing up a few meters behind her, looking shaken but unhurt. She was covered in white dust and grey ashes, and her eyes were very wide behind her pink visor.
“What…?”
“I don’t know,” Toki swallowed. She took a breath, straightened her posture. “Maybe a gas explosion. We need to start an evacuation right now. You remember how to do that?” Melissa nods. “Good.”
Then Toki turned towards the closest victim, a man who was starting to kneel, looking blank and in shock. But she had barely moved two steps that a raspy, familiar voice froze her in her tracks.
“Well, you were closer than I thought.”
Toki stopped. Toki turned.
There, less than a stone’s throw away from her, Shigaraki was standing.
The gates of the industrial building, closed and painted blue when Toki had glanced at them five minutes ago, weren’t there anymore. Decayed, probably. Shigaraki had been in the building. Toki had walked past that door not even five minutes ago, and he had been in that building. He had been waiting for her.
Shit.
“I knew you were going to be in the area to patrol,” Shigaraki continued, his red eyes narrowed behind the creepy hand affixed to his face. “I thought the bomb would draw you out, but I was prepared to wait a few minutes. This is even better.”
Toki carefully didn’t look at Melissa. There was a direct line of sight between her and Shigaraki; hopefully, he wouldn’t pay attention to the hero student a few meters away.
“What do you want?” she asked, loudly.
Shigaraki tilted his head.
“When I last saw you, you told me some things about sensei. I was planning to ask you about it, the next time we saw each other.”
“Then…”
“But,” Shigaraki cut her off, his voice dropping to a growl, “that was before you killed Kurogiri.”
Oh shit. Toki’s stomach dropped out. Kurogiri’s death had been kept more or less under wraps, but it hadn’t been classified. Shigaraki had learned it. And now… Her mind flashed to Aizawa, to the face he had made talking about how Shigaraki took things personally, how an encounter between them would be a death sentence now that Shigaraki had beef with him.
And now Toki had harmed the two people who mattered the most to Shigaraki: All For One, and Kurogiri. Now Shigaraki had beef with her. Now it was personal.
Fuck.
“I didn’t kill him,” Toki said, slowly, her mind whirling for a way out. How fast could she evacuate the civilians? How fast could Shigaraki lunge at her? Could she grab him, take him high in the sky? “The yakuza killed him.”
“I DON’T CARE!” Shigaraki suddenly screeched, and Toki jumped. “I DON’T CARE, you were the one fighting him and now HE’S DEAD! You captured him, you beat him and locked him up and Overhaul KILLED HIM, but it’s YOUR FAULT! Your fault, to both of you!! And I’ll kill the both of you!!!”
Oh, that was bad.
“Shigaraki, I—”
“SHUT UP! Shut up, I hate you!”
He paused, chest heaving, eyes crazed and furious. Toki stood there; hands half-raised, ready to pounce while also appearing as non-threatening as possible. She barely dared to breathe. Behind her, people were starting to rise, to cry, to scream in horror. To run away, too, after seeing the standoff between hero and villain. In the distance, sirens were wailing.
“Nomu,” Shigaraki hissed.
A massive black silhouette lumbered from the shadows inside the building and went to stand next to him.
“Strong,” it warbled, voice rough like gravel. “Where… strong.”
Toki’s breath caught.
The Nomu was gigantic. Bigger than Shigaraki, bigger than Toki, bigger than All Might in his prime. Massive and muscular, humanoid but twisted, somehow, with hind legs reminiscing of those of a hound or wolf. It was black, skin pulled taut over budging muscles. It had a long neck, and a hood of shadow that hid his head and his possibly-exposed brain. It made his huge unblinking eyes glow a sick yellow in the darkness.
“I know you are dangerous, Quantum,” Shigaraki breathed. There was a deranged gleam in his eyes. “You’re too strong for me, right now. But it doesn’t matter. I’m not your opponent today.”
Toki looked at the Nomu. His long neck, his stature, his big glowing yellow eyes under a hood of darkness. There was a sinking feeling in her stomach. Toki wasn’t good at recognizing canon-characters, but… This creature, the eyes, the timing…
The fact that it could speak…
It was Hood, the High End Nomu that, in canon, Endeavor and Hawks had fought after the Billboard Charts. The Nomu who could regenerate, the one who could go toe to toe with Endeavor at full strength and nearly win. The Nomu who could only be defeated by a fire Quirk powerful enough to burn him faster than it could regenerate, and a heavy hitter with a strong enough constitution to withstand brutal hits.
Toki didn’t have that. She just had cleverness and warping. Scalpel and Warp-Force were her strongest attacks, and none of it would work against that beast.
Toki’s hands twitched at her sides. She felt her breathing speed up, her heart thundering in her chest.
For a second, there was the possibility of running. Making Shigaraki’s chosen battlefield an impossibility. Making him go home in frustration with his beast. But Toki couldn’t do that because Melissa was right there. If Toki tried to take away Shigaraki’s chance at vengeance, he would take his rage out on Melissa. Or on any of the civilians behind them.
Toki didn’t run.
There was a terrifying kind of cold reaching every cell of her body and keeping her in place as her brain was saturated with dread. Because that was the kind of cold born from undiluted horror, the kind where you knew that what was going to happen was inevitable.
There was no running from this.
“Nomu,” Shigaraki rasped. “Kill her.”
oOoOoOo
The High End Nomu was freakishly fast.
The only small mercy in this disaster scenario was that Shigaraki hadn’t stayed to wreak havoc on the street or ordered the Nomu to just kill everyone. Shigaraki had vanished, laughing, puking black teleportation-goo, and the Nomu had gone straight for Toki, ignoring everyone else. That was the good news.
The bad news was… everything else.
Toki warped and jumped, drawing the beast in the air, away from civilians, but it was so fast and so powerful. The instant it lost interest in her, it would descend back on the streets and kill everyone there. Toki was bait; she was bait, and she could just annoy him further and further, none of her attack did anything.
She rained down Warp-blasts and knives on it, but it was like the beast didn’t even feel it. Toki was good; she was excellent even, but it just didn’t matter. Knives or not, he was stronger, faster. He nearly took her head off twice in less than ten seconds. Its flesh rippled and twisted, big whip-like claws bursting from his torso to try and spear her if she got too close. Toki only evaded them by inches.
There was a long scream of terror and horror and powerless rage trapped in her throat. What was she going to do?! What could she do?!
The Nomu could fly, she couldn’t even toss him in the sky and hope for the impact to stun him. When she tried to rip the protrusions he used as wing, they regenerated instantly. She tried to use Scalpel to cut off his head and couldn’t, because if she teleported close enough to touch it, she risked being gutted by his claws—
Warp-Force managed to punch him back a few meters, but he didn’t stay down, didn’t even go down. It bounced back, roaring in either joy or fury, a screech that had nothing human, before jumping back to attack. No sign of fatigue, of calculation, of caution. Just… Power, wild and unstoppable.
Toki was panting as she frantically warped, blasted compressed air, basted the gravity around her, jumped high and higher to force the beast to chase her away from the street. Blood was pounding in her ears, her throat was dry, she felt frantic.
Fuck. Fuck. Toki couldn’t check on what was going on at street level. She was warping, punching, and running. The beast was focalized on her, big and strong and hungry like a wolf after a rabbit. A single missed punch had broken the roof of a building like cardboard. She couldn’t let him even graze her. It was fucking terrifying, it was…
It was like fighting All Might in Jehda, all over again. The speed, the terror, the dread, the horrified understanding that she was facing an opponent league ahead of her. It was like facing All Might, if All Might had been turned into a mindless ravenous beast trying to rip her from limp to limb with animalistic fury, and Toki was very much aware that this fight would be to the death.
Maybe her death.
It hit her like a block of ice after warping fifty meters high to escape another blow. Maybe it would be her death. Maybe that would be it. This Nomu was engineered to be the perfect counter to her Quirk. It regenerated. There was no possible swift take-down.
Maybe Toki was going to die there. Maybe she would die there, in the sky, all alone.
Curiously, after that second of contemplation in the street, it didn’t cross her mind to run. She could have, though. Her range stretched to nearly eighty kilometers if she strained her heart. She could warp far, so far the monster would lose track of her, and hide. But it didn’t cross her mind. Maybe it was a hero’s instinct. Maybe it was the adrenaline. Maybe it was because ethe urge to flee had been beaten out of her by the time she was eleven. But Toki didn’t think to run, not once.
“Evacuation ongoing,” her communicator sizzled in her ear. It was Salamander’s voice, although it took her a second to recognize his terse tone. She could barely hear it with the wind. “Status report.”
“My student?” she gasped between two jumps.
“Fine. Need reinforcement?”
“That thing can regenerate!” Jump, warp, avoid the fucking punch, warp again…! “I need a fucking bomb!”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Salamander said dryly. “Sending you the location of a suitable battleground.”
Her GPS blinked. Osaka’s ghost neighborhood. She should have thought of that. Toki send a powerful Warp-Blast to the Nomu, sending it soaring a few meters back, and then warped in several jumps in the indicated directed, making sure to pelter the Nomu with Warp-Blast so it would follow her.
It wanted her. It was chasing after her, not quite mindlessly but close, frantic like a rabid dog. Its attacks were wild, brutal, swinging wide, using force rather than precision, like a pit fighter with no formal training, but he was so fucking fast, faster than All Might had been, so fast Toki could barely stay ahead between one heartbeat and the other—
“I can send you Inferno,” Salamander said in her radio, voice tense.
Toki wondered if he was hearing how hard she was panting. If he was wondering if sending Inferno was sending him to his death. She was wondering that, too. After all, there was a gulf between Toki’s level and her senpai. She was faster, stronger, she could dish out more damage, even use ranged attacks.
But Inferno had a fire Quirk.
Toki took a big breath, launching another Warp-Blast at the Nomu. It screeched, revealing a mouth with big broken teeth. The wind made his hood fly back a second, revealing the exposed brain and the way the beast’s pupils were rolling in its yellow eyes. It looked insane. It looked hungry. Toki felt her anxiety rise a notch higher.
In canon, it had taken the combined strength of both Hawks and Endeavor to bring down the Nomu. Raw firepower and stamina, allied with speed and maneuverability. But the level they had to reach… It wasn’t just about allying a fire Quirk with a flying Quirk. It wasn’t math. It was power. It was about the Number One and the Number Two hero facing the monster, and barely making it. In canon, defeating the Nomu had taken everything Endeavor and Hawks could give, and then some.
Were Quantum and Inferno as strong as Hawks and Endeavor?
Probably not. But Hawks wasn’t there, Endeavor wasn’t there. There was just Toki. There was just Quantum and Inferno, and they would have to make do.
“How long until he gets there?” she panted.
“Fifteen minutes. He’s in a fight on the other side of the city.”
Could she last fifteen minutes? Could she hold the line fifteen minutes, and then fight again? Toki didn’t know. She was terrified that the answer would be no.
But she didn’t have a choice.
The right thing to do was to stand between the danger and those who couldn’t defend themselves. The right thing to do was to fight for those who couldn’t. Toki was a hero. It was her job.
But to do what was right, was only to do what is right. It did not guarantee success, or even survival.
You had to do it anyway.
“Send him.”
She cut her radio just as she warped above the ghost neighborhood. Tall buildings and large streets, all deserted. Her heart was pounding, she was shaking with adrenaline. When the Nomu crashed in the next building over, raising a massive cloud of dust, Toki felt a strange feeling of déjà-vu. The same nauseating fear, the same visceral urge to fight.
Yes, it was exactly like fighting All Might in Jehda. Different opponents, different stakes. But… There was the same absolute difference in power levels, the same terror, the same anger.
How dare you? How dare you trap me there; how dare you want to kill me. This is my life. This my fucking life, you can’t take it from me!
Toki roared, eyes blazing when the Nomu charged her, she expanded the invisible field of Warp-Space to its maximum… and warped all the gravity in it straight into the Nomu’s chest.
It hit.
She saw his chest cave in and burst like a ripple fruit smashed with a hammer, dark blood and crimson gore flying everywhere. The spine was shattered, the body basically ground to a pulp, limbs ripped apart—
But the head had kept its shape.
It rolled towards the edge of the roof like a monstrous football. Even as it rolled and bounced, Toki could see the skin twist and grow, the mass inflating like a balloon being blown in the shape of muscles, a thorax, an arm. By the time the decapitated head fell from the edge of the roof, it had two arms and torso again, and it was roaring.
A heartbeat later and it was climbing the roof again, whole, and unharmed.
“STRONG!” it warbled, words barely intelligible, face split by a carnivorous grin. “YOU STRONG!”
Toki lost a precious second gaping in horror. This was her strongest attack; she could feel the burn in her chest, her state-of-the-art heart pushed to its limit and throbbing with pain. This was on par with a punch from All Might. This was stronger than she had unleashed on AFO. And the Nomu had just… shrugged it off like it was nothing.
Toki suddenly realized that what she felt was just humiliating, inescapable, simple fear. It was a complete understanding of her own helpless inadequacy.
“Well,” she gasped. Her voice tremored pathetically. “The shit is thickening.”
Maybe if she did that again, but aimed for the head specifically…? Fuck, she didn’t know if she could do that. Her heart hurt, like a weight pressing on her ribcage, making every heartbeat pulse painfully in her entire chest. She could unleash that kind of force once more, maybe twice at best. Then she knew her enhanced heart would snap just like her old one. She was pushing its limit. She didn’t even know if she could hit the Nomu’s head, physically. It was one thing to target that huge torso, but the head… It was smaller, more mobile, and the Nomu was protecting it.
Did she have a choice, though?
No. No, she didn’t. Toki clenched her jaw and pounced again. The beast did too, grinning its demented grin, glowing yellow eyes mad with delight.
They chased each other through the ghost neighborhood, Toki trying to pin down the monster to give a fatal blow, and the monster doing the same. He crashed through walls, he punched buildings… he laid the empty city to waste like a freaking hurricane. He was fast, too; oh, so fucking fast!
But Toki was faster. It was her saving grace. If the Nomu managed to grab her, he would crush her like an empty soda-can. If he managed to get close enough in the space between one heartbeat and the next, between one teleportation and the next, his extendable spear-like limbs would burst from its body and impale her. It was a killing machine, plain and simple, and Toki was fighting that.
There was no finesse or strategy. Blood was roaring in her ears and occluding all sounds; she was bleeding, not thinking about anything besides this second then the next, the fight, the fucking fight, the urgency, the action, the reaction, everything happening almost too fast, her body acting and her brain following. Warp, punch, warp, jump, dodge, hit, claw, snarl and run, jump, and hit again…!
They were like wild animals trying to rip each other in pieces. Toki unleashed a constant deluge of Warp-Blast on the Nomu, launching compressed air and debris to him to try to nail him somewhere and be able to fucking aim a good shot at its head; and at the same time she was running, running, running.
If he caught up to her, she was dead. If he caught up to her, they wouldn’t be able to identify her body with how it was going to rip her into pieces.
I can’t die here, Toki was frantically repeating to herself. She tried to morph her fear in rage, like it had happened during the fight with All Might, but all she could find in her chest was the gritty animalistic resolve of a cornered animal. I can’t die here; I refuse to die here.
Toki was staying ahead: just barely, but she was. She was disheveled, covered in cement dust and dirt, with road burns on her hands and back after a few rough landings, but she was alive, and still running. As long as she could move, she would live.
She couldn’t die here. She refused to fucking die here. She was Toki Taiyōme, and would not die easily.
How long had they been fighting? It seemed like it was hours: it also seemed to be barely a few minutes. Time had no meaning. Toki was starting to warp further and further away each time, making him chase her just so she could stop and breathe for a few seconds. She felt like her lungs were on fire, like her heart was going to explode. She was shaking.
“FIGHT ME!” the Nomu screeched. “WANT… FIGHT… STRONG!”
“Will you shut up the hell up?!” Toki shrieked at him.
The Nomu let out a scream again, “DIE!”
“I WON’T FUCKING DIE HERE!” Toki yelled back, sounding half-crazed and not giving a flying fuck about it. “I won’t die here because I’m going to KILL YOU!”
The Nomu let out a screech that sounded like elation, and crashed into her, or tried to. She warped away just in time. The Nomu went through the roof the building like a wrecking ball, ripping walls like cardboard. He burst out of a wall at mid-level of the building in a shower of dust and rubble, still screaming. It was laughing, Toki realized with a shock of sick horror.
The building listed to the side with a groan. Another hit and it would collapse. How many buildings had been demolished in their fight? That strategy wasn’t working. The Nomu wasn’t even slowing down.
Toki realized she needed to get closer to him.
It was a terrifying prospect, but no other strategy had worked. She hadn’t been able to nail him to a wall by launching debris and steel bar at him, she wasn’t able to take a shot at his head if she couldn’t see it, A.D.A could help her but it wasn’t a targeting system… She needed to get closer.
Fuck, her heart was beating too fast, she wasn’t going to have the luxury to expand Warp-Space, aim, and then warp in front of the beast to release the gathered energy. Her heart was beating too fast, badum-badum-badum-badum, and gather-release-gather-release-gather-release without a pause, and— She was going to have to warp in front of the Nomu for one heartbeat, one full heartbeat, shit, the Nomu was so fucking fast it could take her heart off twice in that lapse of time…!
She squeezed her eyes shut for a second. She was tired, she was shaking, she was afraid, she was angry and running on fumes. She didn’t know what else to do. She wanted it to stop, she wanted it to end, please, stop, she couldn’t take it anymore. She was trembling like a leaf. It hurt to breathe, she was so tired: this was supposed to be a routine patrol, she hadn’t even been back at peak form, her whole body hurt like hell. How long had she been fighting? Tears of frustration burned her eyes.
Gods, she wanted this fight to finally end. Please, let it end.
And the only way to do that was to get close. To get close, to aim at the beast at point-black, because otherwise Toki didn’t have the required accuracy. Oh gods. She was so stupid. She should have trained more, she should have…
In a flash, Toki remembered warm afternoons spent in Mustafu’s ghost neighborhood as a teenager, trying to master Warp-Blasts and aiming blast of compressed air to empty cans on a rooftop while Mihoko-san was painting a fresco in the background. Even then, Toki had struggled with small targets. She had reached a level she had deemed acceptable and been relieved to be done.
She should have trained until she became a fucking sniper.
But it was too late to revisit the past. Toki steeled herself. She took a big gulp of air, focalized her attention, and warped right in front of the beast. Just out of arm’s reach, hopefully…
The beast lunged.
Everything happened really fast.
Toki’s heart started a beat. It pumped blood in the ventricles. The field of Warp-Space, that tiny invisible membrane that only existed in Toki’s mind and yet could tear down the fabric of space, expanded as far as it could go: thousands of meters of volume, like a gigantic bubble whose center was Toki.
And at the exact same time, the Nomu’s fist closed Toki’s left arm, that she had extended to mentally help her aim. Its grip wasn’t quite right, not closing around her arm but tearing into it instead. Maybe it had been aiming for her chest, and her arm was only there because it was in the way?
It didn’t matter. Pure strength and razor-sharp-claws bit in her flesh like butter, found resistance, and grasped it with destructive savagery.
Toki’s scream split the air, vision going white with agony as bone shattered and crunched under the monster’s grip.
Toki’s heart achieved its beat. The ventricles pumped the blood out. Pain exploded in her chest like a starburst of white-hot agony. She would not be able to push her heart any further. But it didn’t matter: her Quirk had done its job. The field of Warp-Space, huge and filled with power, snapped like an elastic pulled taut: going from static to where Toki’s will and Quirk directed it.
Thousands of tons of force slammed into the Nomu’s face, crushing his head (and his body, and the building behind it, and the several meters of street behind that) into paste.
The sound of the deflagration roared like thunder; dust flew everywhere. The brief disappearance of gravity in the area surrounding Toki made buildings shake, like a deflagration going up instead of away from the epicenter of an explosion.
Toki was still screaming.
Her left arm was in ruin. Bone and blood, stopping halfway between elbow and wrist. The rest had been ripped off. Toki grabbed the stub, gasping for breath, and fell to her knees. Pain was throbbing in her chest with every heartbeat, subliming the agony of her arm until it was overwhelming.
The scream turned into gasping, chocking sobs.
She was on the ground, curled around her arm, cradling her wound. Toki didn’t remember falling. Blood filling her mouth from a bitten tongue. She was clutching at her arm, head spinning so badly she could barely tell up from down. Shock.
The rest of her arm, mangled beyond recognition, with her perfectly intact hand at the end, had fallen on the ground next to her. It was so close she could touch it if she reached out. A piece of her, ripped away. At her stump, blood poured through her fingers, painting the ground. It was a carnage.
Her arm, oh gods, her arm—
Gasping for breath, Toki fumbled with the pouch at her belt. She had a tourniquet there. It tightened automatically around the stump of her arm. She didn’t know if it hurt more, or if her nerves were so raw that any additional pain just didn’t compute. Her entire world was drowned in red, pulsing with her heartbeat. She was going to throw up. She couldn’t breathe.
Was it pain, was it terror, was it horror? She couldn’t think. Toki was panting, gasping, feeling like she was drowning on dry land. She could barely gasp little gulps of air; panic, terror, and shock were rising and ebbing like the tide. She was hyperventilating. She couldn’t stop gasping, feeling like she was suffocating. Toki clawed at the ground with her hand— her only hand, her only hand because the other was—
Gods, she couldn’t… She was going to die if she didn’t breathe.
She gasped a good lungful and held it, fighting against the animal panic, the primitive part of her brain persuaded that she was drowning. She breathed out slowly, tried to take another deep breath after. Tried to focus on breathing. Her brain didn’t shut off though, feeding her flashes of memories from the path, of panic and terror.
But this blind panic wasn’t from any memory. Toki had never been so afraid before. It was paralyzing. It felt like dying.
She breathed, choked, sobbed, breathed again, gasped. Control was slipping through her fingers. How was she even conscious? She couldn’t hear anything with the ringing in her head. Her head pounded. Where was she? Was she dying?
“QUANTUM!”
Red filled her vision. More blood? No, she blinked and it was only Inferno’s hero costume. He had fallen to his knees in front of her: his face was livid. His vivid orange hair made his bloodless face look almost gray, frozen in horror.
“A tourniquet,” he said, and Toki stared at him, gasping, his words not really computing. “Good thinking, you’re not in shock, your… You’re having a panic attack. Take a deep breath.”
She couldn’t. Inferno manhandled her face to him and put a hand on her chest, pressing in time with his breathing to help her. Toki was shaking. She stammered, words jumbling in her mouth. Her eyes were burning, her vision blurred, her face wet and tacky. The world was spinning, she felt like she was going to pass out.
“That’s it,” Inferno said slowly, encouragingly. “You’re okay. You’re safe.”
She coughed, swallowed, tasted bile. She didn’t remember throwing up. She felt nauseous, terrified. The demolished buildings on either side of her looked like they were leaning in, closing her off. Time slipped between her fingers in fits and bursts.
It went on, and on, and slowly, the ringing in her ears abated a little. At least enough for her to hear her wheezing, gasping breaths, hitching like sobs. Slowly, awareness of the rest of the world returned. The demolished buildings. The pain. The terror.
“Good,” Inferno said, soothing. “You’re doing good. Breathe with me. Breathing in… and out…”
Toki nodded jerkily, breathed, breathed again. Her thoughts were all jumbled together. Her tongue felt too thick, her chest hurt, there was blood in her mouth, her throat was dry, words were slipping her grasp.
My arm, no, no, my arm, I can’t— Hurt, hurt too much—
Her mind lurched back on track, a lifetime of discipline wrestling with her animal instinct to take control of her train of thought. The Nomu, the threat.
“Fire,” she gasped.
Where was the Nomu? She didn’t see it, and the panic rocket up a notch. Fire, she needed fire. Now. But Inferno didn’t know that, trying to grasp her mutilated arm, talking in a soothing tone:
“Yes, yes, I’m going to cauterize…”
“NO!” Toki gasped, grasping the front of his costume with her hand, eyes wild. “The Nomu… It regenerates. From his head. Burn it!”
Inferno’s eyes widened. “What? No, you killed it, the body is right there.”
They both tuned toward the Nomu’s body. It was paste. Gore and blood strewn over a dozen meters. Nothing was moving. The brain had been obliterated, pink and fleshy matter scattered on the road. With its prefrontal cortex disintegrated, the Nomu couldn’t regenerate anymore.
It was dead.
Holy shit, Toki had killed it.
That does make sense, a small delirious part of her brain thought. After all, kinetic energy turns into heat upon impact. I did calculate how to cook a chicken with the heat of a slap at some point in high-school when I was bored. Sure, said slap would have to be strong enough to disintegrate the chicken, but that’s kind of what I did with Warp-Force here. Ka-Boom.
She had killed it. With one punch. Did that mean that punch was as powerful as the Jetburn attack from Endeavor? Was Toki a powerhouse now?
“Come on Quantum. Don’t space out now. Bite this,” Inferno ordered, shoving something (a glove?) between her teeth. “I’m cauterizing your arm. You’re bleeding way too much.”
Toki gasped, tried to say something, maybe no or wait or please, she didn’t know. But then Inferno’s hands on her wound lit up, and her whole world became agony once more.
Maybe she screamed, maybe she didn’t. But the black at the edges of her vision swallowed her whole, the rushing in her ears got louder, and then all at once everything was quiet.
Notes:
Holy shit this chapter took a lot out of me. Just... I'm gonna lay down on the ground now.
So ? What did you think ? =)
One more chapter and then the story will go on hiatus!
Chapter 77: Standing on your own two feet
Notes:
Well, this is it. The last chapter before the hiatus.
Hope you enjoy!
Fic-a-holic Phantomchick you will reconize the part dedicated to you x)
I was listening to this youtube playlist when i wrote, and damn it seriously helped me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgigSpt70WY
So i keep an eye on the fictional calendar to always know what month it is in the chronology, and by my calculations, when this chapter ends, it's late October, but not the end of the month. Which means that Toki isn't yet 22 years old. Seriously, for being near thirty myself, i'm shook. She's a baby!
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
STANDING ON YOUR OWN TWO FEET
Her arm was lost.
The surgeons couldn’t reattach it: it was mangled beyond recognition. Add to it the field cauterization which had probably saved her life, and yeah, her stump was a broken mess. In the end the surgeons had to amputate her arm a few inches above the initial injury, scraping carbonized flesh and crushed bones until they got a clean stub at elbow level.
Toki felt numb.
Maybe it was shock. Ever since waking up in the hospital, it seemed like a dream. She had awakened once before surgery, in pain but coherent enough to consent to the operation. But then they had given her the good drugs and now she was in a haze. It was hard to think that the fight had only been a few hours ago. She had seen a few doctors. Inferno, too. A very nervous HSC agent who had been on the phone with Kameko.
Toki felt like everything was distant and muffled and yet strangely clear, like an out-of-body experience. She looked at her injured arm and it seemed so surreal to see it end at the elbow. Her thoughts spiraled into an endless vortex. She felt untethered, unmoored, and unaccountably empty.
It had been a part of her, and it was… gone, just like that. She felt small. She felt diminished, or maybe fragile. Raw, aching, tired. So tired.
She took a long breath, and closed her eyes. Come on, Toki. Get a grip.
It wasn’t the end of the world. She would get a prosthetic. Maybe a cybernetic arm: I-Island had started to produce them, and Icarus Agency was one of the few heroes to have a contract with them. But still… She had lost her arm.
She had never been injured like that. She had never been pushed like that, never had to fight alone someone so obviously out of her league. If destroying the Nomu’s brain hadn’t worked— If the Nomu had had Shock-Absorption or something like that— Toki would have died.
She had nearly died.
All Might, All For One… They had been titans, monsters in their own right. But All Might hadn’t wanted to kill her, and she had had help against AFO. This Nomu… It had been an abomination. Fast enough to keep up with her, resistant to her attacks, rabid in its homicidal hunger. And it had been after her.
Toki had never been the prey before. Not like this. She thought of herself above the hunt, but if she had to pick a place in it, she would have thought herself a predator. It was fucking terrifying to realize that she could be crushed like an ant by an enemy that would swallow her whole, barely chewing on the way down.
Oh, she had won that fight. But it had been close. Too close. She shivered just thinking about it.
It had been way too fucking close.
The door to her hospital room opened, and Toki turned her head. She felt slow and sluggish, distant, not quite there. She had been awake for hours now, but she still felt pretty out of it. Apparently, with her heart issues and the risk of hypertension and the surgery and whatnot, she was on pretty good drugs. Personally Toki would rate the experience a solid six out of ten. No pain, floaty feeling, but wasn’t she supposed to be giddy and dumb under anesthetic? Now, she just felt… blank. Numb.
“Hey,” Keigo said.
He tried to smile, but it fell halfway through. His wings slumped a little. He had a backpack in his hands, and his hair was in complete disarray. Toki blinked slowly.
“Did you fly here?”
“It’s not that far of Fukuoka,” he said dismissively, approaching her bed cautiously. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I’m underwater and also like I’ve been run over by a bus.”
He laughed weakly, and then raised the backpack a little.
“Brought you some stuff, since you’re staying there a few days. Clothes, toothbrush, that kind of thing. Your laptop, if you want to write another thesis or just watch Netflix. A few of your notebooks, too.”
He put the bag on a chair next to her bed. Toki reached towards it with a good arm. Keigo looked at the other arm, the one swaddled in bandage that ended at her elbow, and he took a stuttering breath. His entire body was too tense, his feathers ramrod straight, his hands balled into fists.
His eyes crossed Toki’s, and she smiled a little sadly, raising her stump.
“Sorry. I promised you to be careful, and yet…”
Keigo swallowed. His usual smile was gone, his nonchalant façade shattered. A storm of emotion was raging in his eyes, shock and dismay and despair and sorrow and grief, all at once.
“I know.” His voice broke. He took a step closer; his hands grasped the bed’s railing in a white-knuckled grip. “I know you were careful. And still…”
“I’m alive,” Toki said gently.
“You’re hurt.” His voice was low and raw. “Toki, you almost died, and this… It’s a career-ending injury.”
She blinked. She hadn’t thought of it. She should have. Most crippled heroes stopped fighting. Not her, though: it hadn’t even crossed her mind to stop. Maybe she could have been angry at the insinuation, but anger seemed very distant.
“I’m not retiring.”
Keigo shook his head, and took a long trembling breath.
“I know. I guessed. But you know… if you did— If you wanted— You could. Maybe you should. You’re strong, I know you’re strong, but… You’re hurt. This isn’t like your heart, this is… This is a big injury. It’s not going away. You’ll always be hurt.”
He looked at her, almost pleading. Toki knew he didn’t want to ask her to retire. He didn’t want to ask her to stay. What Keigo needed from her was— to be strong. To be whole. To be safe, to not be hurt. To be like the Toki of their childhood: carefree, powerful, untouchable.
But Toki hadn’t been this person in a while now. Just like Keigo hadn’t been that same kid in a while, either. Their innocence had been lost, piece by piece. What Toki had lost today was just a bigger chunk than usual. Or maybe the last chunk, actually, revealing what had always been under the gleaming armor. The tiredness, the injuries, the fragility.
“Does it matter?” Toki asked softly.
You’ll always be hurt, Keigo had said with agony in his voice. But they were both destined to so much more pain than this. They were heroes. Top heroes, bound for greatness, blood and violence. There was a war in their future, and even after that, there would always be the next fight. There was always going to be hurt in their lives. Maybe today was only the first day where they faced the consequences of it, without masks and illusions. Maybe that was why it was so frightening.
But Toki wasn’t going to give up. It had never been an option. And deep down, when she asked if it mattered, it wasn’t about the hurt. It was only about Keigo: about him standing with her when she confronted the hurt.
Do you love enough
that i may be weak with you?
Everyone loves strength,
but do you love me for my weakness?
Do you love me
stripped of everything that might be lost
for only the things i will have forever?
Keigo sniffled a little, and then took her hand with a wobbly smile. There were tears in his eyes, although they didn’t spill. Keigo never cried, after all.
“It doesn’t matter,” he told her, his voice a little rough. “I’m with you anyway. I just wish I could shield you a little more.”
Toki thought of how herself had been so desperate, as a child, to protect Keigo from his canon-fate, and she let out a little drunken laugh. Gods, what a pair they made.
“This isn’t funny,” Keigo said, maybe a little sharply. “Do you know how it feel, to always be on the sideline when you get hurt?”
“… I don’t do it on purpose.”
“I know!”
He paused and took a deep breath. Toki patted his hand a little clumsily, at loss for words. She didn’t know how to reassure him. There was no possible reassurance to give. She couldn’t even say that this wouldn’t happen again, because odds were that it would. There was still a war looming on the horizon.
“Sorry,” she said lamely.
Keigo sighed, wings dropping a little in discouragement.
“Sometimes I wish you weren’t a powerhouse. Don’t get me wrong, I like that you’re strong and can handle what life throw at you. But it’s infuriating to have to step back and watch you handle fights of Endeavor’s level while I rescue cats from trees. I feel so useless.”
There were so many things wrong with that statement that Toki barely knew where to begin.
“You’re not useless! And you could handle an Endeavor-level fight. It just hasn’t happened yet. And what’s that about me being a powerhouse? I mean I have a few tricks up my sleeves, but my thing is still swift take-down, not massive destruction.”
“It is a little massive destruction, though.”
“I’m not a heavy hitter,” she protested.
Keigo stared at her.
“Well, maybe not naturally. But Toki, my love, my humble warp goddess, you can throw buildings at people and that’s a heavy fucking hit.”
Okay, he kind of had a point.
“The fight was caught on video, by the way,” Keigo informed her with forced cheer. “Ghost neighborhood means security cameras, you know, to stop squatters and illegal fights? It was retransmitted live in half the country, before your blast took out all the cameras. I got a call from your father. He was… a little stressed.”
Oh. That wasn’t good. Toki groaned.
“I should call him.”
“Already did. Also, Kameko and Hayasa-sensei are in charge of the PR stuff, to reassure the public. Officially, you’re fine and recovering. No one is entitled to more details, especially not about your arm. The HPSC might send a bunch of flowers, though. That thing you did, that big punch with Warp-Space… that was very impressive.”
Toki winced, her right hand coming up to automatically rub at her chest. It didn’t hurt anymore, but she still felt a tingle of discomfort. Like when you pulled a muscle, and it was stiff for a while afterward. In a few days, maybe a few weeks, it would be back to normal… But now Toki knew exactly where her limit was.
“I can’t pull it more than twice during a fight. The first time felt like a kick. The second was like being stabbed. The third would probably made my heart implode or something.”
“Did the doctors had a look at it?” Keigo asked worriedly.
“I don’t think so. There’s no rush, I feel fine! But I’ll ask Hajime-san to look at it. He’s the expert, after all.”
Keigo nodded, and then hosted himself up to sit on the edge of her bed. Like this, his wings trailed over Toki’s legs. He was just at the right distance to take her free hand in his.
For a moment, they were both quiet.
“I’m glad you’re not retiring,” he finally said, barely more than a whisper. “But you still can’t go on like this. You’re not… you’re not going to make it to retirement if you carry on like this.”
Toki swallowed, and let her eyes drop to her knees, avoiding the stump of her left arm.
She knew. Of course she knew. She wasn’t even twenty-two and she had more scars than most heroes: it was ironic, for a warper supposed to be untouchable. But she had scrapes and road-burns from Aizawa’s training. The big scar on her chest from her heart surgery. The thin scar slicing her eyebrow, where AFO had nearly gouged her eye out. The short, still fresh scar of Toga’s knife in her belly. And now her arm.
She knew she couldn’t go on like this. Toki was going against stronger and stronger opponents: opponent of All Might’s class, of Endeavor’s class. Powerhouses. And she wasn’t running circles around them like Keigo would: she was facing them, meeting them head-on. Using her Quirk not to evade and deal a thousand little cut, but to hit back, hard and brutal.
Toki wasn’t packed with muscles. She didn’t have a huge stamina. She couldn’t take big hits. So she was forced to be more and more reckless to keep up with that new class of enemies, and it showed. There was a price. If she kept going on like this, one day she wouldn’t be able to afford that price.
“What are my other options?” she sighed, her shoulders slumping. “Someone has to hold the line.”
“It shouldn’t be you,” Keigo said, low and yet cutting, almost savage. “It shouldn’t be you. Not like this, not against the League.”
Of course it shouldn’t be Toki; just like it shouldn’t have been All Might, and it shouldn’t be Endeavor either. No one should hold the line. That was too heavy of a burden. But when the flood was right there on your doorstep, it wasn’t the right time to complain about the burden of maintaining the dam.
“Shigaraki is still out there, though. He kind of hold a grudge against me.”
Keigo frowned, eyes dark. Then he sighed, his wings dropping.
“I want to make a world where the heroes can take it easy. Where you can take it easy. Is too much to ask?”
“Of course not. But that world…” She shrugged. “We have to make it happen.”
Keigo looked at her stump.
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “We have to.”
oOoOoOo
Being hospitalized was fairly boring. Toki felt too tired and woozy to read anything intelligent. Even reading a good old fantasy book was hard: her attention wandered, she missed half the plot, she nodded off. All she did was sleep, and watch the walls without really seeing them, and sometimes listen to music. She wrote in her notebook, a little, but when she got back to it she mostly squinted with perplexity at what she had written. Her ideas were disjointed and mismatched. Even doing a basic Quirk analysis felt like walking in a block of fog.
Most of Toki’s entertainment was in her visitors.
They dropped by randomly, and although they weren’t allowed to stay long, it still brightened her day to talk to living people instead of staying stuck in her own head. Inferno, of course, came to see her almost every day, since she was in his city. Salamander, too. Her fledglings came by once, fluttering worriedly around her, and telling her news about school. Melissa, especially, who burst into tears almost immediately, blaming herself for not stopping Shigaraki, and promising Toki that she would build her an amazing prosthetic.
Toki was mildly worried about said prosthetic being a railgun.
A few other heroes sent cards. Mihoko-san didn’t come by because she was watching Hinawa, but she called. So did Sachiko. All Might swung by, very briefly. So did Mirko, who was in the neighborhood, and Lady Siam who brought with her a flower bouquet as big as Toki’s bedside table.
Meteor came to visit, of course: but he broke in through her window, instead of using the door like a normal person.
“Hospitals creep me out,” he sniffed haughtily as a justification.
It was possibly true. Even dizzy and tired, Toki could feel the tension radiating from her father, like a bowstring pulled taut. He was worried, he was tense, he was angry. Not homicidal, but… unhappy. Frustrated.
Probably because he didn’t have anyone to eviscerate.
If it was Hinawa who was lying in a hospital bed with an arm cut off, Toki would have wished to have someone to eviscerate. She could understand Meteor’s anger. In other circumstances, maybe she would have felt a bit put out by his rage on her behalf, as if she was some child and not an extremely competent hero, but… well.
In those specific circumstances, maybe a bit of fury was warranted.
Well, at least Meteor didn’t kill anyone. Nobody killed anyone, actually: nobody died at all, because the Nomu hadn’t killed anyone. Kameko sent a few exuberant emails to Toki saying that her popularity was through the roof and that she was going to bully the HPSC to give her the coolest prosthetic ever. Then the emails stopped, probably because Haysa-sensei had given Kameko a scathing dressing-down about how inappropriate it was to rejoice about popularity and cool prosthetics in a moment like this.
Anyway.
A few days later, Toki meet a very nice, grey-bearded doctor who explained her what was going to happen. If she wanted to have a prosthetic, if she wanted her prosthetic fitted for a civilian or a heroic lifestyle, if she wanted her prosthetic arm to be an actual arm or a big canon with retractable blade attached… That kind of thing. An artificial limb grown in a labs, like her heart had been, were possible: but an arm was much bigger and complex than a muscle or an organ. Every joint, every never, every vein had to be perfect. It would take at least five years and a massive chunk of money, and it was recommended that she give up hero work. Out of the question.
So, it would have to be a prosthetic.
Toki didn’t want anything extraordinary. She wanted an arm. She would have wanted her arm, to never have lost it in the first place, to still be whole, to not have been hurt, to not have been so afraid, so terribly afraid—
But what was done, was done.
So Toki asked for an arm. Nothing crazy. She wanted to do hero work. That arm needed to be able to grasp and grip and grapple. The doctor asked a lot of question about daily movements of her hands, forcing Toki to take a step back and pay attention to things she usually did without thinking. Did she climb a lot? Did she favor punches during a fight? Did she block strikes with her forearm? Did she do a lot of handstands and acrobatics requiring her elbow to support her weight? Did she write a lot?
Toki didn’t defuse bombs on the daily, but she still used a lot of fine motor control. Grasping people in a fight required precision, but also a certain strength in your grip. Not too much strength, either, to not break bones. Fiddling with handcuffs couldn’t be done if you were clumsy, and Toki fiddled a lot with handcuffs to restrain the people she grabbed and warped in the cuffs. Then there were all the small things that she didn’t do usually, but that she still couldn’t lose as a hero: being able to type fast on a phone, being able to lockpick a door, tying her hair, handling bandages and tourniquet, manipulating guns…
“Don’t worry too much if the precision is slow to come back,” the doctor assured her. “That’s what physical therapy is for. Your prosthetic will also grow with you.”
Toki blinked.
“Like… It will become more finely attuned to me?”
“In a fashion. For the first month or so, you’ll be given what is called the standard model. It’s good for physical reeducation, but it’s not adapted to your Quirk. So, once we have enough data, we will start creating a prosthetic perfectly adapted to you. It will be built while you regain all your motor functions.”
Then he showed her a tablet on which he could display several models of prosthetic arms. Some were bulky, almost like armor, evoking the automails of the old manga Fullmetal Alchemist. Others were sleek and elegant, very futuristic-looking. A few others were work of art, displaying their inner workings, or seemingly made of ivory or glass. Some were reminiscing of Star Wars, and other were covered in some sort of synthetic skin-like layer, giving the whole arm the appearance of a human limb simply covered with a thin black glove.
“The main issue with prosthetic todays is that you can’t have a basic, one-size-fit-all model,” the doctor explained. “Everyone has a unique Quirk, and everyone has a body impacted by their Quirk. Thus, every prosthetic must be specially conceived to work around someone’s Quirk.”
He showed her prosthetic arms made for people with mutations, for example. An old woman with an alligator-like mutation had needed an arm that was shorter than usual. A man who could create water needed a very peculiar prosthetic to accommodate the wetness clinging to his skin. A girl with elastic limbs required a completely different limb than a boy who could turn his skin to rubber.
“That’s pretty cool!” Toki was very impressed, shuffling through the various example with raised eyebrows. “I had no idea that you guys had so much diversity.”
“The hero industry helped us. In the last generation or so, the money has started to dry out, but… In the four first generation of Quirks, there were a lot of accidents. So the HPSC funneled funding into support items to accommodate people’s Quirks. Now there are less accidents, so less funding: but it still gave our field of study a great technological advance.”
“You don’t have that funding anymore?” Toki frowned.
“We have less.” The doctor chuckled, looking a little uncomfortable at the realization that he was complaining about the HPSC to a very high-ranked hero. “It’s just that, now, it’s support items for heroes who are popular. Not… support items for civilians.”
“It’s not support item if it’s a prosthetic!”
“Well, prosthetics are a special case. Arms and legs… They are mobility devices, so improving them can be of interest to support items companies. Every prosthetic made by a support company for a civilian is entirely tax-deductible, see? So they can use the prosthetics to test concepts that they can later re-use to make… well. Actual support items.”
That was actually a very good system. Toki was grudgingly impressed. Of course, it could be improved (everything could!), but giving the support items companies a financial incentive to toss as many technological prowess they could towards hospitals… Yeah, that wasn’t a bad plan.
“So, what will my arm look like?” she wanted to know. “The base model, I mean.”
The doctor scrolled some more, and then showed her a relatively simple prosthetic. The outside was gleaming steel and there was some exposed wiring. It didn’t quite look like a Star Wars prosthetic, but it was closer to that than from a Fullmetal Alchemist automail.
“Here is the base model. It’s mostly mechanical, but there’s also a degree of technology involved.”
Toki started nodding, and the paused, alarmed.
“Could someone hack my arm?”
“No, the technology is completely internal,” the doctor reassured her with a short laugh. “No Wi-Fi there! It’s simply that if you get caught in EMP, you’ll certainly lose most if not all function in that arm. Your complete prosthetic will be much the same, so… Don’t get caught in an EMP. You can probably handle big electric shocks, but I wouldn’t play with those, either.”
Toki nodded, and the doctor shifted the arm displayed on his tablet to show another angle.
“The actual arm is made from a titanium composite. Your complete prosthetic will be mostly titanium, but there will probably be plastic and maybe some nanotech. You have a contract from I-Island, don’t you? Then probably nanotech. You may want to look into bringing a bionic engineer into your agency, in your support staff: prosthetics made for hero work can’t be handled by your usual technical support.”
Toki mouthed to herself the words bionic engineer. Well, that wasn’t something you heard every day. But then Toki mentally slapped herself, because a lot of people had Quirk fusing technologies with their bodies, so there must be a lot of specialists for that. Hell, wasn’t Tenya Iida running around with engines in his legs?
“But first thing first!” the doctor finally exclaimed. “The first step was to deal with your wound and to get a good baseline of your constitution. You have a very strong heart, and you’re already at risk of hypertension, so we accounted for that. Now, the next step is to prepare your arm for the prosthetic.”
Toki looked with some trepidation to the tablet. All the prosthetic arms ended with a futuristic-looking port, like you could slot it on a robot.
“That port is to connect the nerves, right?”
“Yes. You’ll need a surgery to connect your nervous system to the… port, I suppose, although the correctly medical term is the connective implant. Your implant will also double as the elbow articulation, so it will cover most of your stump. We can do the surgery tomorrow. It’s without danger, but it’s pretty long, since it’s a delicate work.”
Toki imagined in vivid detail someone peeling open her arms and tying little knots with her nerves and electrical wires, plucking them with tweezers from her flayed muscles. The image made her blanch a little.
“Yeah, I can imagine,” she said faintly. “What about, er, rejection therapy?”
“The implant is treated by a woman with a Quirk that deal with it,” the doctor assured her. “She can make a small amount of metal completely fused to the body with no rejection. It doesn’t suppress completely the need for medication, but it’ll greatly lessen it. You’ll also bounce back much quicker than with a usual surgery.”
“Okay, okay. Good to know.”
“That implant will take a few days to heal,” the doctor continued. “You can be discharged during that time. Then, once it’s healed, you will be given an initial prosthetic. It’ll be simple, unlikely to manage more delicate motions, but it’s necessary to acclimate your nerves to functioning with the implant. Over the next weeks we’ll continue to replace and upgrade the prosthetic, until in the end you have a full function prosthetic. This should take between two and five months. But once you regained all motor functions, you will abandon the initial prosthetic and get the finale version: the one that will enable you to continue your hero work.”
Toki flexed the fingers in her right hand. Her only hand, now. Her left arm didn’t hurt, but it still felt… empty, to have nothing where an arm and a hand used to be. Like when you fall asleep on a limb and couldn’t feel it when you wake up, except that now Toki had the visual to know that there wasn’t anything to feel.
She tried to not think about it. It was easier to focus on what she could still do, what she could still fix, what she could prepare for.
And she didn’t want to think about it, because sometimes, when she was tired and the drugs made her feel a little raw and alone, she felt an odd sense of loss swelling in her chest, bringing tears to her eyes. Like sadness, or exhaustion, or sorrow. It was stupid, it was just flesh and bones! But… But it had been a part of her.
It had been a part of her, and it was gone, and Toki was grieving.
“I won’t get my sense of touch back, right?” she asked softly, looking at her right hand. “I know you have some amazing sensors and stuff, but…”
The doctor shook his head. Toki thought of the very specific sensation of sliding both hands in Keigo’s feathers, or the feeling of holding Hinawa’s beaming face between her palms to squish her little cheeks, and even of holding her notebook open with her left hand while she wrote with her right. A painful tingle tugged at her heartstrings.
It was not a big loss in the grand scheme of things. But those were things she would never get back.
“Your sense of touch won’t be the same, no,” the doctor confirmed. “You’ll feel pressure, but not texture or temperature. However, in time, your prosthetic will be capable of just about anything your flesh arm could manage.”
Toki tried to smile, but it came out a little crooked.
“And could I add a railgun to it, hypothetically?”
The doctor snorted, looking like he had expected the question.
“Lot of heroes like to add all sort of things to their prosthetics. The truth is that it depends on how much of your arm is still intact. You don’t want to put too much weight on your remaining joints. I will advise taking it under consideration when your engineer start babbling about integrating a tank to your costume.”
The doctor looked deadly serious, tired even: and Toki had the amusing realization that he must have had that exact conversation with several other heroes. Or probably, with their support engineer. Toki knew that this was exactly the sort of warning that would have become necessary with, say, Mei Hatsume.
… Or Melissa Shield, actually.
“One thing at the time,” Toki laughed. It was a little forced, but mostly sincere. “Let’s start with the implant, then the basic prosthetic, then the physical reeducation. And then I will worry about the possible railgun.”
The doctor left, possibly reassured. Toki took out her phone and tried to busy herself talking about prosthetic with Melissa. Apparently her protégé had gone on a crazy blender of research about prosthetic, nanotech and everything deadly you could put in a bionic arm. The absence of a railgun was not going to slow her down. She had ideas for hidden knives, smoke bombs, even a plasma gun.
Toki tried to laugh about it, but in the end she pretexted she was sleepy, and left the conversation.
It was one thing to talk about it with the doctor, when her brain couldn’t wander. But now, reading Melissa’s messages about it… Toki couldn’t help but think about the absence of her flesh arm, rather than what was going to replace it.
It was dumb. It was dumb, wasn’t it? She hadn’t lost her mobility: not if a shiny prosthetic was going to replace her arm in a matter of days. She hadn’t lost strength, or a crucial sense like sight of earing. She hadn’t lost her memory, her logic, her sense of self. She hadn’t lost a person.
She had simply lost an arm. It was like, one tenth of her total mass? So little, when you thought about it.
But it had been hers. It had been a part of her. It was that arm that had enlaced Sayuri for the very last time when she had been seven, or had hugged her father when she had gotten him back. It was that arm that had carried her through all those training sessions with Hayasa-sensei or with Keigo, and it was that arm she had used to lean back and watch the stars so many times. It had been a part of herself, and it was lost, destroyed forever.
You’ll always be hurt, had said Keigo: and maybe one day she wouldn’t feel hurt, maybe one day the loss would have scabbed over and she wouldn’t give it even a passing thought. But right now she felt it keenly, that hurt. That loss.
A wave of discouragement came over her, tears burning at her eyes. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fucking fair and she was so tired. Her throat felt tight, and she rubbed at her eyes aggressively to wipe out the tears before they could fall. For a second she could feel the temptation to just give up like a huge shadow falling over her. She was so tired of being hurt, of fighting, of being afraid. She was so tired.
But Toki couldn’t stop. She didn’t know how to stop: for her, it was akin to laying down to die. She needed to be there, to be part of the fight, to help where she could. Even if killed herself doing it.
Keigo wasn’t the only one who went too fast.
Toki huffed an amused breath. She took her poetry notebook from under her laptop, and opened it to a new page. Keigo had even brought pens. She took a red one this time: red like blood, like sunset, like resolve.
This I choose to do
If there is a price, this I choose to pay.
If it is my death, then I choose to die.
Where this takes me, there I choose to go.
I choose.
This I choose to do.
She reread the text before shutting the book closed. It sounded almost like a promise. Good. Toki wanted to remember that vow.
oOoOoOo
Toki’s elbow healed. The next day, she had her surgery for the implant. It was long and of course, it was under general anesthesia. Toki was drugged to the gills. This time it was the good drugs, the one that made her floaty and giggly. And, well, mostly sleepy.
Inferno put a guard on her room after the operation. It was sweet of him, but Toki’s karma wasn’t that bad. No one tried to break in her hospital room to murder her.
Thank the gods for that. Toki had reached her quota of bullshit for the entire year.
Anyway. She healed. The days passed, waiting for her arm to be ready for her prosthetic. Toki made some phone calls. Meteor visited again. So did Keigo. Mihoko-san managed to visit briefly. Mostly, Toki received visits from Inferno, and they talked about the yakuza and the Fugitives.
Toki couldn’t really help, about the Fugitives. She didn’t really know Fujio’s motivation. It had most likely to do with murder, mayhem and money, AKA the holy trinity of any good villain.
The good news was that if it was Fujio who had the bullets, then it wasn’t the League and their crazy doctor. If they already had the crazy doctor with them, that’s it. Toki didn’t even have confirmation about it. She knew it because of her canon-knowledge, but the official investigation hadn’t yet found the labs where the Nomus were created.
But if Fujio had those bullets, could he ally with the League, and make common cause? For revenge against Toki, maybe?
Toki didn’t know. Fujio didn’t want to kill Toki in a way that could be traced to him because he was afraid of Meteor, but maybe he still held a grudge. She couldn’t shrug him off, or believe that he wouldn’t dare to harm her. The protection of Meteor’s shadow had its limits.
An alliance between the Fugitives and the League seemed unlikely, thought. Shigaraki was grating and Fujio had always chaffed under orders. He hated incompetence, and Shigaraki was… powerful, but not organized at all.
Shigaraki’s leadership, but most of all Shigaraki’s personality, would piss of Fujio. It was that simple. He had accepted Meteor’s but that was because he had respected him, had been his right-hand man, had been valued. Toki couldn’t imagine Shigaraki offering the same deal. Besides, Hansha the teleporter was a grating asshole and Rappa the pit-fighter was a maniac: they wouldn’t be able to cooperate with the League without a homicide within the week. So no, Fujio wouldn’t join the League.
But make an alliance, maybe? That… that could be possible, wasn’t it?
More complications. More interrogations. More uncertainties. Great. Exactly what she needed.
At least it gave her something to ponder while her implant healed. She went through the Fugitives’ files, the yakuza files, the report from Gran Torino’s search of the Nomu’s hideout. She didn’t find anything new, but at least she was all caught up.
And she got her new arm.
Now, it was time to leave… and start the long healing process before she could resume her role as an active hero. Four months, the doctor had said. Toki knew she could do it in tow, but had settled for doing it in three. November, December, January… and she would be back hitting the streets in February. No problem.
Toki sighed. She gingerly placed her feet on the floor, and then briefly closed her eyes. Fuck the drugs. If the Earth could stop spinning so fast, that would be great.
“Should you be up yet?” Hayasa-sensei asked from the doorway.
“I’m fine!”
“Oh yeah?” He raised an eyebrow, and sat down in a visitor’s chair before waving vaguely in her direction. “Go on. Fall over. It will be entertaining.”
Toki scowled at him.
“I don’t want to use the wheelchair,” she muttered, mulish. “I’m not a cripple.”
“You’re an amputee,” Hayasa-sensei retorted. “You are also heavily medicated. Take the damn chair. It’s just until I load you in the car anyway.”
“I could bypass the car and warp in the sky like usual,” she whined.
“Not when you’re so drugged you can’t even stand up. Take the chair, Quantum.”
Toki huffed, tried to get up, and had to sit back down because her legs were like jelly. She pouted a few seconds. And then she took the wheelchair. That was just to make Hayasa-sensei happy, not because she actually needed it, of course.
“How’s the arm?” Hayasa-sensei asked gently.
Toki raised her prosthetic arm, and slowly curled her fingers.
This was the basic model. Bulky, functional. An arm, a hand, nothing crazy, all in chromed steel and exposed components. Toki couldn’t form a fist yet, and her wrist didn’t quite rotate all the way, but…. It was an arm. When she waved at Hayasa-sensei, the motion was jerky, but still recognizable.
That was her arm, now. She was going to relearn how to use it, slowly, and… and then life would go on. She was alive. She could get up and keep moving. She was starting to make peace with it. Not today, not tomorrow, but… one day, it would be fine, and she wouldn’t feel the loss anymore.
“The arm is good,” she smiled. “In no time at all I’ll be back to somersaulting on rooftops and punching people, blooming like a flower in spring.”
“Does your bloom have to involve violence?”
“Meh. It’s a metaphor.”
“Metaphors are imprecise,” Hayasa-sensei pointed out as he started pushing her wheelchair out of her room.
“Oh, I agree. It rather is their point.” She loved metaphors. They were the vessels of misdirection, verbal sleights of hand, the magician’s first recourse. “A metaphor is a lie that is generally accepted to be a lie by both the speaker and the listener, absolving the liar of his deception. Is it not wonderful?”
“I am more partial to direct statements,” her teacher said dryly.
“Nobody is perfect.”
Hayasa-sensei snorted and started wheeling her towards the exit. Toki was as disguised as she could be in a hero hospital where people knew she was Quantum, meaning that she wore her hair down. It was crazy how the absence of her signature hairstyle could throw people off. When she wore her twin buns, people looked; now, they eyes passed straight over her.
Unless it was the wheelchair making people uncomfortable. That was also a possibility.
At least there weren’t a lot of people. They walked by three, maybe four people. The hallways were spacious and brightly lit, with large windows, and a hushed silence reigned on the place. It was a luxurious hospital. Only the best for injured heroes, after all.
They were almost at the elevator when a nurse caught up to them.
“Er, Quantum-san?”
Toki and Hayasa-sensei both turned to the nurse, who was a little out of breath after having run after them the whole length of the hallway. The nurse gave them an uneasy smile, and then gave Toki a little carboard box. Said box was white and non-descript as possible, but the nurse was side-eying it as if it held live spiders.
“Here are your bones, as requested.”
Hayasa-sensei looked at Toki. He didn’t say anything, he just had that look.
“Oh don’t give me that face,” Toki groused, flushing in embarrassment. “Neito can use the bones for his Quirk, so a few weeks ago, I promised him he could have them.”
“Right.” Hayasa-sensei deadpanned. “Because it’s such a normal thing to do.”
“In my defense, I had no idea that this joke would turn into foreshadowing.”
She took the box. The nurse bowed and then left as quickly as politeness allowed it, still giving the box a wide-eyed look. Alright, Toki had to admit that her request may have been a little weird.
In Japan, there was a weird taboo about dead bodies. That was why organ transplant was avoided, and why organ cloning thrived instead. It wasn’t really religious, it was more… cultural. Dead bodies weren’t meant to be touched, weren’t meant to be used. There was a respect given the dead that was almost spiritual.
But people confronted with death (and blood, viscera, and all the ugly parts leading to death) on a daily basis, like heroes… they tended to be a little desensitized to that. It hadn’t shocked Toki to request that her amputated arm and hand were cleaned, and as much of the bones as possible was salvaged to she could take it home. It probably hadn’t shocked the surgeon.
But it had certainly freaked out the nurse. Ah.
“Whatever,” she huffed. “We can go.”
“Quantum, wait!”
Hayasa-sensei let out a deep sigh.
“What is it, now?”
It was Sir Nighteye.
Just for that, Toki almost pretended she hadn’t heard him. But too late: Hayasa-sensei had stopped, and Nighteye had caught up to them in his own wheelchair. Lady Siam was standing next to him, hovering awkwardly as if she wanted to help him, but knew that she would be rebuffed if she reached out.
Nighteye looked like shit. He was in a wheelchair too, but his was sleeker, designed for long-term use, not just to wheel out of the hospital. Sir Nighteye wore hospital clothes, unlike Toki, and he also wore a weird medical corset holding his entire torso immobile. He had massive eyebags, his expression tight, as if his state of exhaustion was a personal insult to his mental discipline.
“You,” Toki said coldly. “What do you want?”
Nighteye’s jaw clenched. Behind the rigid stoicalness and his usual glare, he looked a little haggard, a little desperate.
“I wanted to apologize for my rudeness.”
“I don’t care.”
It slipped out. Maybe it was the drugs. Maybe it was just general tiredness. Maybe Toki just didn’t give a fuck. Nighteye looked taken aback.
“Quantum, I assure you…”
“I don’t care,” Toki repeated. “You’re sorry for being rude, you’re not sorry for saying those things, thinking those things. Take a good look at yourself, and then apologize when you’ll mean it. I won’t accept it either, but you’ll be a better person for it.”
Lady Siam took a step forward, frowning:
“Quantum, don’t be so harsh! Whatever happened…”
“This is between him and me, Siam,” Toki cut her off.
The cat-lady hesitated, glanced down at Nighteye, and then stepped back. Meanwhile Sir Nigheteye’s jaw worked for a second, his eyes a little wild, as if frantically searching the right words.
Toki didn’t know why he bothered. As far as she was concerned, everyone would be happier if they parted ways like this and never crossed paths again. Time had proven that they had nothing constructive to say to one another.
“I saw the images of your fight against that Nomu,” Nighteye said, hesitantly. His eyes darted to her stump. “It was very impressive. A strength worthy of All Might.”
“Yeah. So?”
“I worked with him for years. I can help you.”
Toki squinted at him with incomprehension for a handful of seconds, wondering what the hell those two statements had to do with each other, and why Nighteye would get the silly idea that she needed his help for anything.
And then it hit her.
He thought she was the Ninth holder of One For All.
Ah! He had fell for the trick of Warp-Force, just like AFO. The super-strength, the enormity of her power— It didn’t fit with what a warper should be able to do. It didn’t fit with the image he had of her in his worldview centered around All Might, and thus Quantum being the Ninth holder was the only thing that made sense in his narrative. Just like for All For One. It was so ironical that Toki would have laughed… if, immediately on the heels of the wave of amusement provoked by her realization, hadn’t come a burst of outrage.
How dare he think he could help her?!
How dare he offer to mentor her or some bullshit like that, as if his advice was more valuable that the opinion of All Might himself? Because if Toki had been the Ninth, then she would already have All Might helping her and teaching her, and she would have had no use for Nighteye! Especially since Nighteye was still at odds with All Might, and picking him as a mentor would absolutely cause problems with All Might down the line!
How could Nighteye even think he was worthier than the original holder of One For All, that his opinion should count more?!
And how could he try to pull that shit on Toki, especially?!
Every time they talked, they ended up arguing, sneering and snarling at each other. Nighteye insulted the people she cared about and felt no remorse about it. Toki had made no secret of the fact that she disliked him. He had told her he wished her father dead, to her face, less than ten days ago. Had he forgotten that?!
Toki clenched her jaw, glaring daggers at him, and growled between her teeth:
“Siam, sensei, can you give us a second?”
Hayasa-sensei and Lady Siam glanced at each other, and then at their respective heroes. Hayasa-sensei was the first to move back, patting Toki’s shoulder once and then ostensibly going to look by the windows a little further away. Siam moved too, slower, but a bit further down the hallway.
“Mirai Sasaki,” she said lowly, and Nighteye’s widened. “Listen to me, because that’s the last time I’ll speak to your stupid face. You’re wrong. You’re wrong about my father, you were wrong about All Might’s fate, and you’re wrong about me. You’re wrong, and deep down you know it: you’re just too scared to admit it, and you make everything worse. Everyone is going to abandon you because you treat them with callousness as soon as they stop being docile tools for your plans. Wake the fuck up.”
She turned her wheelchair around to leave, paused, and then turned back to the frozen hero with a snarl:
“And another thing. Lady Siam is an amazing hero who deserve respect in her own right. Using her as a vessel for your ambitions is revolting. Does she even know you don’t value her or her Quirk? She deserves better. Do better, or she’ll leave just like Yagi did.”
This time, she turned her wheelchair around for good, without waiting for an answer. If Nighteye even had one, she wasn’t interested in listening to it anyway.
She was fucking tired of being the bigger person. He could solve his issues on his own.
oOoOoOo
Toki was on leave for three months at best. The doctor would rather give her six months, but to be honest Toki was going to be climbing the walls within six weeks, so they had to be reasonable. In two months, she would be mission-ready and would probably resume lessons à Yūei. In three months, she would have recovered all her skills and would probably have some additional firepower in her arsenal thanks to some hidden weapons in her prosthetic. She wasn’t worried.
She was just… a little numb. Some part of it didn’t quite feel real. Benched for months? Losing an arm? The magnitude of that change would take a while to sink in.
Maybe she could try to look for a job as Hoshizora. She had quit her last job because she wanted to focus on hero work (and also because her supervisor had been extremely rude when she had asked for leave to take custody of Neito), but maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea to reconnect with her work in astrophysics.
Or maybe spend more time with her fledglings? She had nothing but time, now. Three whole months banned from heroic work, it was enormous.
Toki didn’t even know what were her plans. She could stay in Fukuoka, but to do what? She could go hunker down at Mihoko-san’s house, like she had done the last time she had been grievously injured and banned from hero work, but… well. Hitoshi wasn’t there anymore. And the guest room had been turned in a nursery. Toki would always be welcome, but she couldn’t impose.
She could visit friends, probably. Inferno, Salamander. The Todoroki (yes, they counted as friends). Sachiko. Yagi. Maybe it would be a chance to reconnect with Sawayomi. Toki hadn’t looked her up in years now.
She sighed, and rubbed her forehead, before glancing down at her prosthetic. Moving the arm was more or less fine, and the articulation of the wrist bent and twisted adequately when she focused on it. But fingers were another question. Toki tried to squeeze her hand into a fist, and the fingers laboriously half-curled, like the legs of a dying spider.
Not great.
“It will come back,” Hayasa-sensei said.
Toki glanced up. They were in a massive car, practically a limousine, because her sensei had required only the best for the trip back to Fukuoka. Also, because Toki was apparently rich. She tended to forget it, because she rarely used a lot of money, but… she was as rich as a celebrity of CEO. She could have fifteen houses and twelve yachts if she wanted.
So she was in a limousine with Hayasa-sensei, who was on baby-sitting duty. Toki still felt a little drowsy from the hospital, but she couldn’t fall asleep. She had never been comfortable enough in cars to sleep in them.
She flexed her mechanical hand again.
“I know. I’m just… getting used to it.”
“Mmmh.”
“You didn’t have to come to pick me up, you know,” Toki felt obligated to say. “I know you’re busy at Icarus. I could have waited a day to not faceplant upon landing, and then make my way back by myself. Worse come to worse, I’m sure Inferno-senpai would have offered me hospitality.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You deserved to have someone bring you back. Besides, I left instructions for everyone while I’m gone.
He showed her his emails on his phone. Toki scrolled through the list, and sniggered:
“Your email to Thunder Thief just say ‘NO’.”
“Yes. I want him to apply that to every possible situation.”
Toki laughed and gave him back his phone. “Well, I see you have everything under control. I shouldn’t have doubted you, sensei.”
Hayasa-sensei shook his head with fondness.
“I won’t be gone that long. And… I’m not as busy as you think.”
Toki grinned faintly: “Is that an admission of slacking off? For shame, sensei, for shame!”
Hayasa-sensei snorted dismissingly:
“Hardly. I’m simply not as fast as I used to be. This year I spent more time doing paperwork and investigations than on the streets.” He paused. “I wanted to talk about it with Hawks and you, by the way.”
“You’re not going to retire, are you?” Toki asked, faintly horrified at the prospect.
“Not completely. But I’m nearly forty-five. I would rather switch to a non-combatant role, and only do recon, investigation, and administrative work. I already have a list of underground heroes who could potentially be hired to replace me.”
So many changes. Toki’s heart squeezed a little. She was on leave, Hayasa-sensei was going to hang the mantle of Mercury… They were going to need to hire a new underground hero. And a bionic engineer. Oh, Icarus as a whole would have no trouble to adapt, and with how freaking rich they were it would be no trouble financially either. But still. It was going to be different.
“Is Sherazade on the list?”
Hayasa-sensei shook his head, briefly amused:
“No, she has no plans to move so far south. But I have Serpentine. She’s a little young, it’s true. But she already worked with us and showed real talent. Besides, it will allow me to keep an eye on her. The young prodigies spit out by the Naruto Labs have a tendency to burn out rather quickly.”
“I didn’t.”
“Because I kept an eye on you.”
It wasn’t entirely false. Toki stuck her tongue at him, very maturely.
“Alright then. I’ll look over their profiles, but I’ll keep Serpentine in mind. What else? Did you find a bionic engineer?”
They went back and forth about the agency for almost an hour. What would change, what would stay the same. If the work-studies were going to be impacted. Melissa was practically a graduate now, so she didn’t require as much supervision, and Hayasa-sensei could then dedicate himself to train his successor. For Hitoshi and Neito, though, there may be some issues. No Toki, no Hayasa… They couldn’t rely on Keigo for everything.
He wasn’t really a good teacher, anyway. He went too fast.
They considered several angles, including reaching out to neighboring agencies to ask for their heroes to allow the interns to follow them once or twice. Toki thought that Hitoshi would benefit greatly from Wani’s expertise. For a limelight hero, Wani was much more focused on precision strikes, and loathed the press. As for Neito, maybe it would be fun to ask Mirko to take him on for one patrol or two. She was not a team-player, at all: but she loved a challenge and would probably agree to have a student tail her, if only to see if he could keep up.
Toki also had plans to be productive during her leave. She couldn’t sit still for three months, she would go crazy. She could dive back into astrophysics, study criminology and economy to dig deeper into societal issues, harass Kameko and the HPSC to push for change into the structural issues of heroism. Maybe try to locate the League. Maybe draw a trap for Dabi. Maybe charge Toga’s parents with child abuse.
Maybe push for more attention paid to child abuse. Protest against Quirk discrimination. Propose reforms of the heroic industry, with less commercialization and more compassion. Compassion towards victims who were also ugly, aggressive, or lashing out.
Like the League.
Toki would not be able to save Shigaraki. This ship had sailed. Maybe he would have listened to her before, but not now. Not after Kurogiri’s death. Maybe someone else could reach him, though: and Toki had a duty to give that person the tools needed. The structure needed.
The heroes… No, society as a whole… They only cared about saving the kind of completely innocent victim who cowered in the face of danger and waited to be saved. The NPC. If they strayed from their role of passivity and become their own persons, then they weren’t good victims. Worse, if they were fighting back against their circumstances, or lashing out in pain, then the heroes gave up on trying to save them. That’s how you got villains. That’s how you got Tomura Shigaraki or Dabi or Toga, screaming at the world how unfair it was, while society just wanted to shut out the bothersome noise.
But they should have been saved, too.
“You’re supposed to be recuperating,” Hayasa-sensei scolded her. “If you appear one day in Kameko’s office with a whole plan of reforms instead of resting like you’re supposed to, I’ll ask Hawks to sit on you.”
“Aw, come on. You love my ideas. When have I ever done something rash or irresponsible?”
“I keep a list,” he deadpanned. “It’s alphabetized.”
Toki laughed out loud, and then shook her head:
“But seriously, you know I need something to do, or I’ll start chewing the furniture like some feral racoon.”
Hayasa-sensei didn’t seem mollified.
“Why the interest with reforms, all of sudden?”
Toki shrugged.
“Why not? I have time on my hands. And it’s no secret that I think the rankings and the uber-commercialization of heroism distasteful.”
“And you think it needs to be… fixed?”
“Yeah. It could be something good. Even if it’s not headed in the right direction yet, that could change. Could be changed. The structure’s not bad, and if you repurposed the institutional support but eliminated some of the stupid requirements that put people at each other’s throats…” She smiled a little wryly. “Don’t have to burn it to the ground just because it’s not perfect yet.”
Hayasa-sensei sighed. His voice softened.
“Talking to those villains in the last months was though for you too, wasn’t it? Seeing evidence of how the system failed them.”
Toki had nothing to say to that. It was true.
Ever since realizing she had been reborn, Toki had felt some sort of responsibility towards the characters, no, the people that the story had screwed other. Maybe it was her martyr complex, maybe it was simple empathy, but… She wanted to reach out. She wanted to help.
It had heightened all of her experience as a person, and as a hero. Her job was to help people. And it was what she did, every day, all day long, going as fast and as far as she could because who else could do it? She was a warper. She was a second life. With great power came great responsibility, and when you factored in the fact that HPSC had nurtured that feeling in her, well… It was no wonder that Toki had become who she was.
She was a real hero. She was incredibly successful, incredibly powerful. She was in the top ten strongest pro-heroes of the country, no doubt about it. Toki was smart and clever and talented and rich and…
And sometimes, she still failed.
She never took times to consider her defeats. Well, not much. It was grating and a little frightening to ponder her failings. She never really had time. It was always more urgent to bounce back, do better, dive head-first into more work.
Toki had never been good at slowing down.
But sometimes she had to. Like when she had taken some time off to take care of Neito, and had been forced to contemplate what she had done at the summer camp. Beros’ death, her failure to save Hitoshi, her cowardice in covering up her crime. It was useless to bemoan your failure indefinitely, of course, but… At some point you had to look them in the face eventually. Find out what went wrong. Or accept that you did everything right, and yet things didn’t work out anyway. Accept it, and move on.
And now Toki had a lot of time to do just that.
Fuck, she had wished to save Shigaraki. Not because she was personally sad for him, although of course she found his story sad: but because he was so dangerous. Like a bomb that needed to be defused. Of course, you could detonate him and shield the civilians, but… Toki would rather that no detonation was necessary.
Besides, as a character, Shigaraki had always symbolized the voice of villains. A victim of abuse who had grown disillusioned with the system and wanted to topple what he considered a corrupt organization. Like Aizawa had said: Shigaraki had been betrayed by heroes, and fought to made that truth known. He was unhinged and violent but his criticisms were legitimate. Heroes were hailed as infallible, as the reason why the system didn’t need to change because it was perfect… But heroes failed. Heroes turned a blind eye to dirty children in the streets, because they were too busy running after cameras. Problems were only solved when it turned to fighting. The system needed to change.
In that, Toki agreed with Shigaraki. Things could be better. People could be kinder. And she had thought that if they found common ground with that truth… If Shigaraki could be reasoned with— If he could be heard, listened to, soothed in some way—
Well. It was a moot point anyway. Maybe he would have listened to Quantum even if she had wounded AFO. But he wouldn’t listen to her after what had happened to Kurogiri.
What a waste.
“I always knew the system wasn’t perfect,” Toki said, looking out of the window. “Do you know how I ended up in the HPSC’ care, sensei?”
Haysa-sensei looked taken aback, and then strangely wary.
“I know your father was a villain. I didn’t pry. He’s a hero, now.”
“He wasn’t always. My father led a villain gang in Tokyo. I tipped off the heroes when I was eight. Everyone was arrested. Seventy people died in the arrest. My mother and little brother died in the hospital soon after. My father was locked up for a decade. I lived on the streets for over a month in the middle of winter, because I knew foster care and the system in general wouldn’t be able to protect me.” She took a long breath, her chest suddenly tight. “It was shit,” she said frankly. “I knew it was shit, and that’s part of why I became a hero. So I could snatch people out of the way of danger, so that they wouldn’t have to try to save themselves like I did, and suffer like I did for it.”
Hayasa-sensei hesitated, then clumsily reached out to touch her knee.
“I’m sorry it happened to you.”
Toki smiled weakly.
“Thanks. But my point isn’t that I have a sob story. My point is that change should happen on an institutional level. It’s good that heroes are here to save those who can’t save themselves, but there’s too many of them slipping through the cracks. What we need is… a safety net, somehow.”
“Changing society isn’t an easy task,” Hayasa-sensei cautioned her. “I know you have the vision, but you also need the means, the connections, all of it.”
“Well. There’s the HPSC on my side, more or less. There’s All Might. There’s Endeavor, for what it’s worth. I can probably get Nedzu on board at some point. And there’s Hawks and me, who aren’t so powerless. That’s a lot of people with very loud voices.”
She wasn’t going to advocate for the redistribution of health, although good old-fashioned communism was very attractive when you looked a little closer at the disparity of wealth between Japanese citizens. But she could push for accountability. For less monetarization of the hero’s image. For less obsession with popularity. For less use of violence as a first recourse. They would always need fighters, but this wasn’t what a hero would need to be first and foremost.
“I believe you,” Hayasa-sensei smiled, a little wryly. “Just… take it easy.”
Toki had never taken anything easy in her life, but she still nodded obediently. She looked back to the window.
She could not save Shigaraki. She had tried, and she couldn’t. It would be up to someone else, now. Maybe Midoriya. Maybe someone else entirely: after all, why should that enormous responsibility falls on the shoulders of a teenager? It didn’t matter that Midoriya was the Chosen One. He was still a kid.
Toki couldn’t save Shigaraki, and she couldn’t save Dabi either. She couldn’t reach either of them. She may be a hero, but— she wasn’t the person they needed to hear. She wasn’t the one they would consider listening to.
There were people in this world Toki couldn’t save. Like Shigaraki, and Dabi. And Fujio, Chisaki, all those villains who would rather spat at her feet than change their ways. Toki couldn’t save everyone.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t at least try.
I will soothe you and heal you,
I will bring you roses.
I too have been covered with thorns.
It would be long and probably hard. Nothing worth having was ever easy to get. But Toki owed it to herself to try. To look at the future and search for solution. And if she didn’t find them, made them herself.
Some people saw a problem and shut their eyes, plugged their ears, trudged along, hypnotized by the idea that change was only possible if it’s for the worse. But Tok couldn’t. Not after all that had been lost. Not when the luxury of burying her head in the sand wasn’t possible anymore. When there was a problem, you fix it. If you couldn’t, you got someone who could. And you repeated that process until the problem was gone, or you were.
To just accept how the world was, without trying to chance it, was unforgivably defeatist. Of course sometimes the problems seemed to pill up, like a wall of darkness trying to swallow you up. Darkness, like the black nothingness of space. It was endless and nihilistic and all enveloping. A lit candle has no hope against it. Toki was just one person.
But a lit candle could light others.
And if enough small candles and little matches gave themselves the word, then they could walk through this wide, uncaring universe, and they could light up that sky.
“What are you going to do, for starter?” Hayasa-sensei.
Toki flexed the fingers of her mechanic hand, not quite able to make a fist yet, and shrugged. The answer was obvious.
“Heal,” she said simply.
Notes:
And this is it. What a ride, uh?
I made sure to end in a quit and hopeful note, because from now on, the fic is on hiatus. I need to recharge my batteries.
Honestly, i really want to finish this fic but if i don't have the motivation/inspiration to write, forcing myself to do so will only end up with garbage chapter and digust with the whole story. So i'm staking a step back.Right now i'm writing a fic on the A Song Of Ice And Fire fandom. I haven't posted it yet. It's Renly Baratheon centric, not quite a Self-Insert but with parts of that, and... i'm not even sure how it's gonna end up. Basically i made the Baratheon my main characters, like the Stark are in canon. I'm waiting to see what the characters do, so it'll be fun x)
If you know any good Barathon-centric fic, i'm all ears !
Anyway. This is where i leave you. Hopefully it's only temporary, and i'm really sorry to have to take a break. But even if the inspiration never come back... I will still be happy about having written this story, created those characters, cried and laughed as i wrote. I will still be happy about having shared it with you.
And i hope it made you happy too. =)
Pages Navigation
Rosenetic on Chapter 1 Sat 27 Mar 2021 11:08PM UTC
Comment Actions
Aemon_Targaryen13 on Chapter 1 Sat 27 Mar 2021 11:55PM UTC
Comment Actions
Rosenetic on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Mar 2021 05:15PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ywena on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Mar 2021 05:57PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ywena on Chapter 1 Sun 28 Mar 2021 05:59PM UTC
Comment Actions
BiaYe_Spring on Chapter 1 Mon 24 Oct 2022 08:46PM UTC
Comment Actions
vanetta on Chapter 1 Sun 23 May 2021 02:23PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ywena on Chapter 1 Sun 23 May 2021 04:27PM UTC
Comment Actions
Astrx7 on Chapter 1 Tue 13 Jul 2021 05:05AM UTC
Comment Actions
blueCuzILikeIt on Chapter 1 Sun 26 Sep 2021 09:57PM UTC
Comment Actions
Asriel_Dreemurr_God_of_Hyperdeath on Chapter 1 Mon 29 Nov 2021 07:18PM UTC
Comment Actions
raginblastocyst on Chapter 1 Fri 07 Jan 2022 10:52PM UTC
Comment Actions
Bowburn (Guest) on Chapter 1 Wed 30 Mar 2022 09:52AM UTC
Comment Actions
Zarakaiy (Guest) on Chapter 1 Fri 08 Apr 2022 12:18PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ywena on Chapter 1 Fri 08 Apr 2022 12:51PM UTC
Comment Actions
The_Maned_Wolf on Chapter 1 Mon 25 Apr 2022 11:31PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ywena on Chapter 1 Tue 26 Apr 2022 10:28AM UTC
Comment Actions
TheMadcapWriter on Chapter 1 Fri 05 Aug 2022 08:17AM UTC
Comment Actions
Ywena on Chapter 1 Fri 05 Aug 2022 05:06PM UTC
Comment Actions
Isy (Guest) on Chapter 1 Sat 03 Dec 2022 08:03PM UTC
Comment Actions
enburn on Chapter 1 Sun 11 Dec 2022 05:39AM UTC
Comment Actions
Ywena on Chapter 1 Sun 11 Dec 2022 12:57PM UTC
Comment Actions
SkyWorthy on Chapter 1 Mon 12 Dec 2022 08:23AM UTC
Last Edited Mon 12 Dec 2022 08:25AM UTC
Comment Actions
Ywena on Chapter 1 Mon 12 Dec 2022 10:22AM UTC
Comment Actions
CorruptedFlame on Chapter 1 Mon 19 Dec 2022 07:51AM UTC
Comment Actions
SkyBlueCoffee on Chapter 1 Sun 05 Feb 2023 11:24AM UTC
Comment Actions
Ywena on Chapter 1 Sun 05 Feb 2023 07:42PM UTC
Comment Actions
Sting03 on Chapter 1 Wed 08 Feb 2023 05:59PM UTC
Comment Actions
readerwriting on Chapter 1 Wed 22 Mar 2023 06:51PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ywena on Chapter 1 Wed 22 Mar 2023 08:31PM UTC
Comment Actions
CinnamonBunProtectionAgency on Chapter 1 Sat 01 Apr 2023 07:16AM UTC
Comment Actions
Ywena on Chapter 1 Sat 01 Apr 2023 11:04AM UTC
Comment Actions
Ransworn (Guest) on Chapter 1 Mon 10 Apr 2023 06:56PM UTC
Comment Actions
Ywena on Chapter 1 Wed 12 Apr 2023 10:00AM UTC
Comment Actions
Spade_Z on Chapter 1 Sun 18 Jun 2023 09:21AM UTC
Comment Actions
Pages Navigation