The rhythmic, mechanical clatter of the train tracks was a steady heartbeat that didn't belong to him.
Yoshi Abara sat in the corner of the semi-empty car, his hood pulled low over Izuku Midoriya's face. To any passing commuter, he was just another tired student, perhaps a victim of the stress currently paralyzing the nation. But beneath the fabric of the stolen sweatshirt, space was weeping.
The train was heading to Yokohama. For the last hour. As the landscape blurred into a smear of grey concrete and dying greenery, the dam in his mind finally gave way. The "static" that had plagued his thoughts since he had latched onto the Golden Child's soul began to clear, revealing a high-definition nightmare.
He remembered her. He remembered the silk.
Her name was Hana. She was five years older, a girl with eyes like purple lilies and a laugh that could make the cold Yokohama winters feel like spring. She was his entire world. Their parents were long gone, leaving Hana to weave a life out of nothing to keep Yoshi fed. He never asked where the money came from, or why she often came home at odd times after her part time job. He just knew she loved him.
Yoshi hadn't been quirkless. He remembered the day his power manifested, a subtle "shimmer" in the air, a way to reach for a toy and have the distance simply… disappear. But in a world of explosive heroes and flashy giants, a boy who could manipulate the "gaps" was seen as a minor curiosity. He didn't want to be a hero. He just wanted to stay in the quiet box of their life with Hana.
Then came the day the box broke.
Yoshi had been turning thirteen. He had decided to take the long way home from school, a detour through the outskirts of the residential district. He saw her, Hana, walking with a man in a dark hoodie. The man walked with his hands in his pockets, his posture stiff, his head darting left and right.
Curiosity, that jagged little needle, had pricked Yoshi's heart. He followed them.
He followed them deep into a secluded, forested area on the edge of Yokohama. The trees were dense, their leaves heavy with the coming storm. In a clearing stood a house, too large for a single family, looking like a forgotten monument to a better time. And further back, nestled in the shadows of the looming oaks, was the Shed.
Yoshi crouched in the tall grass, the first drops of a violent summer storm beginning to pelt his neck. He watched them. The hooded man was shouting now, his hands shaking wildly as he gestured angrily towards her. Hana stood her ground, her book bag clutched to her chest, her face a mask of quiet, desperate betrayal.
The wind picked up, a howling gale that seemed to push against Yoshi's very soul. He tried to climb down a small embankment for a better view, but the mud gave way. As he slid, his side hitting the damp earth, the world ended.
Bang.
The sound was a thunderclap that had nothing to do with the storm.
Yoshi scrambled up, his heart hammering against his ribs. He ran toward the clearing, the rain blinding him. He saw the man's face then, illuminated by a flash of lightning.
Kenji Hoshino. The Pro Hero: Stinger.
The man was manic, his eyes wide and glazed with a terrifying psychosis. He was weeping, the tears carving tracks through the grime on his face. At his feet lay Hana. There was a hole in her chest, a red thread beginning to unspool across the silk of her blouse.
"Dirty," Hoshino was muttering, his voice a broken, high-pitched warble. "You're all so dirty. I had to… I had to... You spoiled yourself, Hana. You and your dirty soul."
Yoshi had screamed, but the storm swallowed the sound.
The memories on the train became jagged here, skipping like a damaged record. He remembered being grabbed, not by Hoshino, but by a someone with the face of a crow. Stinger's sidekick. A mutant with cold, black eyes that seemed to eat the light.
"Look at me, Yoshi," the crow-man had whispered. "Forget the gun. Forget the hero. She was sick. She fell. You're confused."
Every time Yoshi looked into those eyes, the memory of Hana's smile turned sour, rotting into a lie. They put him in a psych ward, a sterile white room where they tried to lobotomize his grief with chemical "treatments" and psychological gaslighting. For months, Yoshi was told he was a "disturbed child" with "delusions of hero-murder."
But he couldn't forget.
Yoshi had broken out. He remembered the night he found Stinger again. He had confronted him in a quiet narrow street, his voice trembling as he asked the only question that mattered: "Why did you kill her?"
Hoshino hadn't looked like a hero then. His face was a fractured mess of ego and fear. But when Yoshi spoke the truth, the mask returned. The man's eyes went cold, a face that spoke no truth. He looked at Yoshi not with guilt, but with a searing, narcissistic rage.
"You're just like her," Stinger had hissed. "A blemish on the record."
Then came the piercing feeling.
The hero's "Stinger" a retractable, high-density spike, had punched through Yoshi's throat. It didn't kill him instantly. It was a precise, agonizing wound designed to paralyze his voice.
Yoshi remembered being dragged. He remembered the smell of the forest again, the smell of wet earth and rot. He was thrown into the Shed.
Hoshino had been crying again, a pathetic, snivelling sound as he tied Yoshi's hands and feet with heavy industrial wire.
"She did this to me," Hoshino had whispered, his voice cracking. "She made me break the rules. Now I have to leave you here. You can be together. Two ugly stains in a dark room."
The man left. The door slammed shut, and the padlock clicked home.
Yoshi had turned his head, his throat a fountain of cooling blood. Beside him, in the corner of the shed, was Hana. Or what was left of her. She had been there for months now. She was missing an arm, her clothing torn away by the Man of Iron in some final, desecrating fit of madness.
Yoshi couldn't scream. He couldn't even pray. He just lay there in the dark, wiggling his feet against the wire, watching the spiders crawl over his sister's hollowed-out eyes.
He lasted nine days.
Nine days of watching the light filter through the cracks in the wood. Nine days of the thirst turning his tongue into a piece of dry leather. Nine days of the hunger gnawing at his stomach until it felt like he was swallowing glass. On the tenth day, he felt his quirk flicker in a dry stasis and his world turned black.
The train hissed to a stop. Yokohama Station.
Yoshi stepped off the train, his movements robotic. He walked through the crowded terminal, a ghost among the living. He felt no warmth from the sun outside. He felt nothing but the heavy, rhythmic pull of the "White Stones."
He walked for hours, his feet leading him instinctively toward that secluded forest. As he entered the treeline, the air grew cooler, the sunlight filtered through the canopy in jagged, pale needles.
He reached the Shed.
It was overgrown now, covered in thick, choking ivy. The padlock was a lump of orange rust. Yoshi didn't use a key. He reached out and touched the wood, and the distance between the door and the frame simply… vanished.
The door fell inward.
The smell hit him first, not the smell of fresh death, but the ancient, dusty scent of a tomb. Yoshi stepped inside.
He saw it.
In the corner, two heaps lay in the shadows. His sister's remains were little more than bones and tattered silk now, a heap of white stones scattered by the passage of time and the small creatures that had found their way inside. Beside her was his own body.
He doesn't know what he may have triggered in his final moments, but his corpse hadn't rotted normally. It was mummified, the skin stretched tight over the bone like brown parchment, his face frozen in a permanent, silent scream of agony.
Yoshi felt a hot, searing trail of moisture on Izuku's cheeks. He was crying. Not the frantic, loud sobs of the Golden Child, but a deep, silent weeping that felt like his soul was being wrung out.
"I'm back, Hana," he whispered, his voice cracking. "Your brother is home."
He looked at his sister's remains. He felt a profound, crushing sadness. She had died in the dirt, discarded like a broken toy by a man the world called a hero.
Yoshi knelt. He reached over and grabbed a dirty blanket nearby. With hands that trembled, he gathered her bones, the ribs that had held her breath, the skull that had held her dreams. He wrapped them in the blanket, cradling the bundle against Izuku's chest.
He didn't stay in the shed. He used the Ripple Effect, shrinking the distance between the forest and a location he remembered from a different life.
He reappeared in the Sankeien Garden.
It was a place of symbolic beauty, a sprawling flower garden in the heart of Yokohama. Hana had loved it here. She used to save every spare yen they had to bring him here on the weekends. She would point at the lilies and the lotus flowers, telling him that no matter how dark things got for them, there was always something blooming somewhere else.
The garden was closed for the evening, the paths empty under the rising moon. Yoshi walked to a secluded flowerbed near the weeping willows, a place where the scent of lilies was thickest.
He knelt in the dirt, Izuku's designer shorts staining with the earth. He didn't use a shovel. He used his hands, digging into the soil until the hole was deep enough. He placed the bundle of Hana's remains inside.
"Rest now, Silk Sister," Yoshi whispered, his forehead touching the cool earth. "The box is open. The Man of Iron is going to pay. Your brother is awake."
He stayed on his knees for a long time, a boy in black praying for a girl made of silk in a world that had forgotten them both.
Finally, he stood up. His eyes were no longer wet. They were cold, black pits of resolve.
He teleported back to the Shed. He looked at his mummified body, his "White Stones." He reached out and touched the dry, parchment-like skin. With a flicker of space, he sent the body elsewhere and planned on taking it back when the time was right.
"I'll need you later," he murmured to his own corpse.
He stood in the center of the dark shed, the poem Izuku had found echoing in his mind.
"The Shadow must find the Red Thread. Blood is the river that carries the soul. To return to the world of the living, the Shadow must steal a drop of blood from the one who broke him. He must tie this red thread to the White Stones, binding the past to the present."
"The Hone-Kara is begun," Yoshi said, his voice a chilling, hollow promise. "Now, I just need the thread."
He stepped out of the shed and into the moonlight, the Shadow finally knowing exactly what it needed to do to become Man again.