The dust from the warehouse collapse hadn't even settled before the air began to scream again.
Izuku was a phantom of tactical necessity. He used a jagged piece of rebar to vault over a sweeping arc of Dabi's blue fire, the heat singeing the edges of his tattered clothes. Toga was a blur of steel behind him, her laughter muffled by the settling debris, while Twice's clones began to crawl out of the rubble like a tide of mud.
It was a nightmare of area denial. Every time Izuku found a footing, Magne's magnetic pull threatened to rip the metal plates from his costume, or Spinner's massive blade carved a path through the air where his head had been a second before.
Crack.
The sound was sharper than the falling masonry. Izuku tilted his head by a fraction of an inch, the high-velocity round from Emerald Eye's rifle grazing the fabric of his hood. The mercenary was somewhere in the darkness of the surrounding cranes, a silent predator waiting for the "Champion" to slip.
Izuku.
The voice was a warm, shimmering thread of gold in the freezing dark of his mind. He nearly shouted her name, his heart leaping into his throat.
"Nana?" he whispered internally, his body twisting in mid-air to avoid a lash of Dabi's flame.
I'm here, Nana Shimura's voice was soft, carrying a heavy weight of regret. I'm sorry I've been silent, Izuku. Yoshi Abara's... departure... it left the Vestige realm in a state of shock. He was a jagged stone in a glass house. But he's gone now. One For All is yours again. You can feel it, can't you? The flow?
"It's different," Izuku thought, his mind racing as he ducked beneath a flurry of Toga's knives. "It's heavier. But I'm struggling, Nana. There are too many of them."
You can use more of us now, she encouraged, her voice a steadying hand on his soul. You've moved past the threshold. Don't fight the power, let it breathe through the cracks he left behind.
Izuku landed in a low crouch, his Blackwhip snapping out like whips to slap away a dozen Twice clones. He looked past the villains, his emerald eyes scanning the industrial skeleton of Kamino. There, in a sub-level entrance fifty yards away, he saw it, the bruised purple flicker of a warp gate.
Kurogiri, he realized. That's where he is. That's where they're keeping the prize.
He needed to clear the board. He needed the wolves off his back. With a burst of newfound confidence, Izuku lunged into the wreckage. He didn't attack the villains, he attacked the environment. He used Blackwhip to pull down a hanging steel girder, creating a wall of twisted metal between him and Toga. He kicked a pile of loose brick into a cloud of dust, obstructing Dabi's line of sight.
He was a shadow, a blur of green sparks and black ink. He thought he had broken their line. He thought he was free.
Then, the world turned into solid iron.
A massive hand gripped Izuku's throat, slamming him backward into a rusted storage tank with a force that made the metal groan and buckle. The air left his lungs in a wheeze.
Meteor stood over him, his gaunt face illuminated by the distant blue glow of Dabi's fires. The man of gravity didn't look like a killer, he looked like a judge.
"Show me," Meteor rasped, his eyes burning with a cold, gravitational malice. "Show me the power you used to break your teacher. Show me the grit of the boy who fought All Might."
Izuku gripped the man's wrist, his fingers sparking with green lightning. "I can't," he choked out. "I... I've seen the reports, Hoshikawa. You're a criminal. You're a monster who dropped the sky on his own life. You accidentally killed your wife because you were too arrogant to surrender. Just... give up. Let the authorities end this."
Meteor's expression didn't change, but the gravity in the room seemed to double. Izuku's bones began to creak.
"Surrender?" Meteor asked, his voice a terrifying, quiet drone. "You think you know what happened that day? You think the little news clips told you the truth of my arrest?"
Izuku nodded, his vision blurring. "You dropped the debris. You hit the train station. All Might stopped the worst of it, but he couldn't save her. Your wife died in the hospital because of your choice."
Meteor leaned in closer, his damp eyes reflecting the ruined world around them. "The debris didn't hit the station, Midoriya. All Might didn't just 'stop the worst of it.' He breached the ceiling of my home like a god descending from heaven. He didn't look for the small things. He didn't see the cradle."
Meteor's voice broke, a jagged sound of pure, unadulterated grief. "The falling masonry, the debris that he caused when he broke in to capture me, crushed my newborn child. My daughter died before she even had a name. I guess whoever was giving the news outlets their source were happy to hide that from the morning edition. A 'collateral tragedy' doesn't sell the Golden Era."
Izuku's eyes widened. The green sparks of his quirk flickered.
"They wouldn't even let me go to the funeral," Meteor whispered, a tear tracing a path through the dust on his cheek. "He stood there with that smile, that hollow, golden mask, while they put me in chains. He didn't want to face it. He's a coward, Midoriya. He's a man who hid the blood of a baby behind a billion-watt grin."
The silence that followed was a physical weight. The other villains were still floundering in the dust Izuku had created, but here, in the shadow of the metal tank, the world had stopped.
Izuku looked at the man, the father who had spent fifteen years in a cell fuelled by the taste of ash. He thought of Yoshi and Stinger. He thought of the "Champion" he was supposed to be.
"I can't give you your daughter back, Hoshikawa," Izuku said, his voice regaining its low, gravelly crawl. He didn't pull away from the grip; he looked Meteor in the eye. "And I won't tell you that your grief is a lie. What happened to you... it's a stain on every statue they ever built for All Might. It's a rot in the foundation of the world I wanted to protect."
Izuku reached up, his hand glowing with a soft, steady green light, and placed his palm over Meteor's heart.
"But look at where you're standing," Izuku said, his voice echoing with a tragic, piercing clarity. "You're standing in the ruins of a city, working for a man who wants to turn other children into statistics. You're fighting with that. You think you're honouring your daughter by burning the world, but all you're doing is becoming the very monster All Might claimed you were. You're letting them win, sir. You're letting a 'lie' become the truth."
Izuku's eyes flared with a sudden intensity.
"You call him a coward for hiding a truth you're not even sure he knew about. But what do you call a man who uses his daughter's spirit to justify a massacre? You aren't fighting for her. You're just too afraid to be the only one who remembers her as something other than a casualty."
Meteor froze. The gravity in the room wavered, the pressure on Izuku's throat slackening just enough for the boy to breathe. The speech had landed like a blade in the dark, and for the first time in fifteen years, the man of stars looked like he didn't know which way the sky was.
The gravity around Izuku snapped.
Meteor didn't fall so much as he drifted, his knees hitting the scorched concrete with a hollow, dead sound. The man of stars didn't look at the boy anymore, he looked at his own open palms, as if trying to find the ghost of the child the world had asked him to forget.
Izuku didn't linger. He felt a sharp, stabbing pang of sadness, a weight in his chest for a man whose grief he couldn't possibly fathom. He had never lost a child, he had only ever been one. But as he turned and sprinted toward the dark maw of the sub-level entrance, he felt the heavy irony of it all. The Hero Society had built its towers on the silence of men like Hoshikawa, and now those towers were finally falling.
Go, Izuku, Nana's voice urged, vibrating with a frantic heat. The air is changing. Something massive has just touched down.
As Izuku dove into the industrial attic, a cold, lightless labyrinth of concrete and rusted pipes, a violent, structural rumble shook the earth. It wasn't the erratic explosion of a villain, it was a heavy, coordinated landing. A kinetic strike of absolute authority. Izuku stumbled, his hand hitting a damp wall, but he didn't stop.
I have to be on time, he thought, his pulse a frantic drum in his ears. I have to be the one who gets there. The hero who gets there.
He sprinted past empty, derelict rooms that smelled of stale chemicals and old blood. He kicked down doors, his green sparks illuminating the dust-choked darkness for a fleeting second before he moved on. Each empty room was a fresh wound, a terrifying reminder of the League's efficiency.
He reached the end of the final corridor. A heavy, metal slab was slowly, mechanically sliding shut.
Izuku didn't think. He threw his entire weight into a kick, the green lightning of One For All screaming as it met the reinforced steel. The slab groaned, the hydraulics hissing and snapping as the door was forced back into its housing.
Izuku stepped into the room, his breath hitching, his hands glowing with a dying light.
He faltered.
The room was bare, a cold, windowless concrete box. In the center, slumped against a rusted pipe, was a figure that barely looked human.
Katsuki Bakugo was unrecognizable. He was emaciated, his once-broad shoulders were sharper now, with more definition and less muscle. His skin was a tapestry of cruelty, deep, purple welts, chemical burns, and jagged, vertical slices across his chest and back that looked like they had been carved with surgical glee. His head was bowed, his ash-blonde hair matted with dried blood and filth. He wasn't moving. He didn't even seem to be breathing.
The "Bomb" Izuku had fought at the exams, the "Monster" he had spent his life trying to outrun, the "Hero" he had once worshipped in a shared childhood... he was gone. In his place was... this.
Izuku's knees felt weak. The tactical clarity of the last hour dissolved, leaving him small and frightened. The emerald lightning faded, leaving him in the dim, grey light of the cell.
"Kacchan?"
The name left his lips before he could stop it, a regressive, childish whisper that belonged to a four-year-old boy in a playground, not a vigilante in a war zone.
He's alive, Izuku, Nana whispered, her voice thick with a profound, shimmering pity. Faint, but he's there. He's still fighting.
Izuku took a step forward, his hand reaching out, then stopping. He looked at the marks on Bakugo's body. He looked at the way his "childhood hero" was broken, slumped like a discarded doll in the dark. This was the boy who had told him to jump. This was the boy who had made his life a waking nightmare. And yet, seeing him like this... it felt like the world had been inverted.
"Why did you hate me?" Izuku whispered to the silent room. "What was it... that made you want to break everything?"
The question hung in the cold air, unanswered and ancient.
"TARGET ACQUIRED."
The voice was loud, clinical, and amplified by a tactical helmet.
Before Izuku could react, the room was flooded with the sharp, blinding glare of tactical flashlights. Red laser sights danced across Izuku's chest and head. From the shadows of the corridor and the ceiling vents, a SWAT team materialized, men in matte-black, lead-lined armour, their weapons raised with a synchronized, military precision.
"MIDORIYA IZUKU," the lead officer commanded, his voice a distorted, mechanical rasp. "CEASE ALL ACTIVITY IMMEDIATELY. YOU ARE BEING RECOVERED UNDER THE AEGIS EMERGENCY CHARTER. DO NOT RESIST, AND YOU WILL BE TRANSFERRED BACK TO U.A. HIGH FOR PROCESSING."
Another team moved past him, their boots clicking on the concrete as they surrounded the unconscious Bakugo, their movements devoid of the emotion Izuku felt. To them, it wasn't a rescue, it was the recovery of a stolen asset.
Izuku stood in the center of the lights, his hands slowly, absentmindedly rising into the air. He looked at the lasers on his chest, then at the broken boy on the floor being hoisted onto a specialized stretcher.
___
The office was a cathedral of cold, white marble and sharp, minimalist glass. Outside, the Musutafu rain streaked the windows like liquid lead, blurring the city into a gray, unrecognizable smudge. Mitsuki Bakugo sat behind her desk, a slab of black that felt as heavy as the silence in the room.
She had been off work for three days. To the industry, she was "recovering from a familial crisis." To herself, she was simply waiting for the punchline of a very long, very cruel joke.
When the news of the kidnapping had first broken, she hadn't cried. She hadn't even stood up. She had stared at the screen, her first thought being that it was a lie, a joke. And then when UA brought up the missing student story she thought it was still just a desperate, clumsy PR stunt by UA to distract from the fact that her son was a legally designated villain.
She had raised him to be a wall, a force of nature, a masterpiece of her own design. There was no way a group of street-trash like the League could simply take him.
But as the days turned into a stagnant, humid week, the "worry" had begun to seep in like a slow-moving poison. It was a concern. She had been harsh, yes. She had been a little cruel in her criticisms. But she had done it because she saw the potential for rot within him, the explosive, unrefined jaggedness that needed to be hammered into something elegant.
Why couldn't you just be quiet? she thought, her fingers tracing the edge of an expensive fountain pen. Why couldn't you take in the good parts of Inko's boy? The stillness. The humility.
Her mind drifted, sliding backwards through the years until it snagged on a memory she had spent a decade trying to polish into a different shape.
It was Katsuki's seventh birthday.
She had hosted an event that evening, a gala for the elite of the fashion world, a collection of men and women who viewed children as either accessories or successors. She had promised Katsuki that the party was for him, but in reality, he was her prop. He was the "Heir," dressed in a suit that cost more than a mid-range sedan, his ash-blonde hair styled until it looked like a crown of gold.
But Katsuki wouldn't play the part. He was obnoxious, his voice a grating, high-pitched roar that cut through the civilized hum of the violinists. He clung to her silk dress, leaving sticky handprints on fabric that was worth a year of tuition. He was rude to the peers who tried to pinch his cheeks, his eyes already burning with that terrifying, predatory light.
"Go away," he had snarled at a Baroness. "You smell like dead flowers."
Mitsuki had felt the hot flush of embarrassment, the "Bakugo" brand fracturing in real-time under the weight of her son's lack of refinement. She had hissed at him to go to his room, to be a "good boy" until the guests left.
He had disappeared for ten minutes.
Mitsuki was mid-conversation with a lead editor when the sound hit. A sharp, crystalline detonation that silenced the entire ballroom.
She had found him standing in the foyer, surrounded by the shards of a Ming-era vase, a family heirloom that was the center-piece of the room's symmetry. It was pulverized.
"It was an accident!" Katsuki had whined, his small hands shaking, his voice a frantic, desperate squeal. "I didn't mean to!"
Mitsuki had stood there, the eyes of some of the most influential people in Japan boring into her back. She looked at the shattered porcelain, then at the child who looked more like a monster than a birthday boy. To this day, she didn't know if it had been an accident or a deliberate act of sabotage, a cry for attention or a simple lack of control.
Most children would have confessed by now. Most children would have grown out of the whining. But Katsuki had remained that same, jagged creature, always claiming his destruction was "accidental" while his eyes said something else entirely.
She remembered the look on his face when she told the guests the party was over. She remembered the way the servants cleared the table before the cake could even be brought out.
Mitsuki sat in the dark of her office, the memory clicking into place like a final, missing puzzle piece. She realized then, with a cold, visceral clarity that made her chest ache, that she hadn't celebrated his birthday that year. Or the year after. She had spent the last decade punishing him for the vase.
She had spent ten years treating her son like a broken heirloom, and now... a realization settled over her like a shroud. She hadn't just lost a son to the League. She had lost him years ago, in the middle of a gala, when she chose the porcelain over the child.
Her phone buzzed. She looked at the number and it belonged to the school.
Took them long enough.
She picked up the phone and clicked on the little green answering button.
"Yes..."
.
.
.
He was alive. The task force assembled to find her son had found him. Katsuki was safely back at UA and was in the hospital for treatment.
"Hmm."