A Foundation of Scars

The last evac shuttle lifted off at dawn, rotors kicking dust through the skeletal ribs of the collapsed station. Izuku stood at the edge of the cordon tape with a clipboard he didn’t need and a camera ten meters from his face. The producer’s voice crackled, someone counting down to live as if grief needed a schedule.

“Pro Hero Deku, can we get a statement? How many were saved? How many—”

He nodded, swallowing the dryness in his mouth. His costume was scraped, knees dirty, gloves torn at the knuckles where rebar had bitten through. They’d set up lights that made the site look like a stage instead of a ruin—the burned concrete almost golden under the glow. He wanted to look back at the wreckage and listen for any voice he’d missed. Instead he faced the microphone with a careful smile that felt stitched on.

“We did everything we could,” he said, and tried to make the we sound big enough to hold everyone. Fire crews, local heroes, volunteers with raw hands and sunburned faces. “Our priority was getting people out safely. The structure was compromised. We—” His mind flashed to the woman with ash in her hair who had gripped his wrist and whispered thank you into his skin like a prayer. “We succeeded in stabilizing the perimeter. Rescue teams will remain on-site as the investigation continues.”

The reporter leaned in, scent of hairspray sharp on the wind. “There’s speculation this level of coordination is part of your plan as the next Symbol of Peace. Some are saying your leadership—”

“I’m a hero,” Izuku cut in, soft but firm. “A lot of us led. I just followed where I had to.”

A lens zoomed. Flashbulbs popped despite the rising light. He could feel the weight of the city funneled into that gaze, the questions behind it—Are you him yet? Will you be?—and he nodded once, the way All Might used to, even though it felt heavy on his neck.

He gave names to all the things that had worked because gratitude was easier than talking about expectations. He thanked the volunteers twice. He didn’t mention the tremor in his hands when the fourth floor finally groaned and gave way, the way he had leapt without checking the load-bearing lines on instinct. He didn’t mention the way the crowd had surged at the barriers, shouting his name like a command.

When it was over, he ducked under a strip of fallen tape and found a patch of battered shade behind a half-collapsed wall. He let his knees hit the dirt and braced his forearms on them, breathing through the ache in his shoulders. A paramedic passed him a bottled water without looking, like they’d known each other a decade. He cracked the seal and drank greedily, water cold enough to make his teeth ache.

His phone buzzed once in his pocket: HPSC press follow-up at 0900. He closed his eyes. Birds had started up in the few trees not blackened by smoke. The sun was here, real and warm, and somewhere, a child was crying, but the sound was thin now, not panicked.

He should check on the structural engineers again. He should go back to the tents and make sure the displaced had blankets, and then he should go home because everyone kept telling him to take a break as if breaks didn’t unravel him. His head tilted back against cracked wall tile, and a face surfaced without permission, sharp angles and a mouth that never quite hid what it thought.

Dynamight would have snapped at the reporters. Or not. He’d gotten better at choosing what to show, better at precision in more than just his quirk. Izuku pictured him in a different light, all sharp edges honed to control in a fight that would make the feed loop for hours. The crowd would press closer then too. The questions would be different but the same.

How do you do it? Izuku wondered, and he meant the fights and also the noise. He meant the way Bakugou’s presence filled a space until it was all you could think about. Did it ever swallow him whole afterward? Did his apartment go silent in a way that made his skin flare? Under the glare of this morning, the thought felt like a thread he had pulled too much, exposing something private and tender.

He scrubbed a hand over his mouth and forced himself to stand. Faces blurred in front of him as he moved back through the organized chaos. He stopped when needed, signed a cast, nodded at an old man who gripped his elbow in thanks so intense it felt like confession.

By the time he made it to the portable HPSC booth, the press officer was waiting with a tablet and a tight smile. “Quick recap on message. Emphasize team effort. You’re trending at number one. Keep it steady, Deku.”

He listened, he agreed, he repeated. He let them fix the torn strap on his gauntlet with a safety pin and thought about a different set of hands that would have ripped the strap off entirely and told him to get better gear.

A little after eight, his part here was done. He signed off with the incident commander, checked that the rescue dogs were being rotated, and walked the long path to the car with the spare clothes and the scarred thermos and the quiet. He didn’t get into the driver’s seat. He leaned his forehead against the warm metal and held his breath for a count of ten, then twelve, chasing a calm that kept slipping out of reach.

He wondered if Dynamight had already gone home after his latest takedown or if he was somewhere like this—near a broken edge, alone, turning the day over and over in his mind the way he had since they were twelve. He imagined Bakugou’s scowl at the idea of being measured against a symbol and felt his mouth curve, unguarded, just once. It was over too quickly, replaced by the familiar pressure at the base of his skull.

Izuku straightened and got in the car. When the GPS lit up, his reflection hovered in the screen over his own route home. The camera would find him again soon enough. The questions would, too. He turned the key and pulled out, hands steady on the wheel, the image of a sharp grin and bright, explosive eyes lingering in his thoughts longer than he let himself admit.

The call came in before noon: armored convoy hijack on the expressway, unknown tech, heavy resistance. Katsuki was already in the air.

The wind cut clean along his jaw as he rocketed above traffic, smoke streaking after him in a controlled ribbon that didn’t spill into the lanes below. The map in his earpiece pinged a moving red dot; he adjusted his trajectory by a hair, palms sparking. He’d learned the weight of restraint the hard way—how much to give, where to hold back. Now it lived in his bones. He could feel the current of his quirk like muscle memory, the balance between burn and control.

The convoy was a black caterpillar chewing through the shoulder at thirty over the limit, two lead bikes cutting interference, a rear van armed with a mounted energy rifle that hummed a warning pitch across the asphalt. Civilians were already filming. He hated that knowledge lived right beside the tactical in his mind, but it did. It always did.

He dropped fast, heat blooming and then snapping smaller as he skimmed the lead bike. The rider flinched and overcorrected. Katsuki grabbed the back of his jacket, yanked him clear of the skid, and slammed him into the median hard enough to rattle bone but not break it. The second bike swung wide to flank him—he let the rider think he’d found an opening, then pivoted midair and popped a micro-blast at the rear tire. Rubber burst. The bike fishtailed; Katsuki snapped his hand out, catching the handlebars and guiding the machine into a controlled slide that spared the nearest sedan. He heard someone gasp behind a windshield. He didn’t look.

“Dynamight, the payload van is reinforced,” dispatch crackled. “Unknown tech on the roof.”

“Yeah, I see it,” he said, and it was easy, his voice a low, even line. The rifle tracked him. He didn’t give it a clean shot. He was already moving, already measuring angles. Heat gathered in his palms as he slipped along the passenger side of the center truck, then blasted upward, a short, contained burst that flipped him onto the roof. He planted his boots and grabbed for the rifle’s support. Whoever engineered it had thought about bracing against recoil. They hadn’t thought about someone who could generate his own counter-force. He twisted, let a focused detonation kiss the joint. The mount gave with a sharp, ugly sound.

The gunner swore. Katsuki didn’t waste time with a quip. He shoved the rifle sideways, kept it pointed skyward as it fired one last hot bolt that fizzled out harmlessly. He pivoted, elbow to temple, and the gunner slumped. The threat shifted behind him—the driver of the rear van jerking, trying to ram the car on his left, probably hoping to take a hostage situation out of a clean takedown. Katsuki leapt the length between vehicles, arced low, and slid against the side panel, sparks throwing a brief glow across the expressway’s signage as he melted through the lock with a tight, precise heat.

He kicked the door open. Two inside. The driver glanced back; Katsuki was already on his shoulder, hand clamped, a flare of controlled pain that loosened fingers from the wheel. He didn’t need to blow the van; he needed it to stop. His other hand set a charge on the dash—a soft pop, a fizz—knocking out the illegally installed override while leaving the standard systems. He tugged the wheel just enough to bring the van onto the shoulder, and the brakes bit. He was back out before the passenger could decide if he was brave or stupid.

Sirens were close now. He timed his next jump between the center truck’s stuttering swerve and a family SUV merging two lanes over. He saw a toddler’s face pressed to the glass with wide eyes. The pulse in his throat kicked, and he reined in his speed to a clean burst that wouldn’t rattle the chassis. He landed on the final truck, dropped a knee, and peeled back the roof plate like a can’s tab with calibrated blasts along the seams. Inside: two thieves and a crate that hummed in a way that made his gums ache—same frequency as the rifle, but stronger.

“Hands where I can see them,” he said. Sweat slid down his back under his gear. They moved too slow. He shut that down fast, zip ties quick and efficient, knuckles finding nerves without bruising the way he used to. The hum from the crate vibrated in his molars. His jaw tightened. Quirk-disrupting tech? He’d heard the chatter. He didn’t like the way his palms prickled.

Support arrived in a rush of uniforms and flashing lights. Katsuki stepped back, gave the quick, clipped breakdown they needed to secure the scene and disconnect the crate without triggering whatever fail-safe was singing through its casing. His chest lifted, fell. The heat under his skin eased. He was already composing the after-action report in his head when the first microphone shoved into his space.

“Dynamight, do you think this is connected to the recent string of—”

He stared past the camera to the crate being carefully maneuvered onto a reinforced gurney. “Work with HPSC. Don’t be idiots with it,” he said, and the press corps bristled, pleased. “Move, you’re in the way.”

“Your control looked sharper today,” another voice said with a bright edge. “A new technique? Public wants to know.”

He barked a laugh with no humor in it. “Public can watch the feed like you did.”

“Any comment on Deku’s overnight rescue? He’s trending number one—”

That landed like a grain of grit under a contact lens—small, immediate, impossible to ignore once you felt it. He didn’t let it touch his mouth. “Good for him,” he said, flat. He turned away toward the closest patrol officer. “Perimeter’s a mess, get a unit on the exit ramp. Don’t let the rubbernecks start a pileup.”

But the question lingered, catching on the edges of his thoughts as the scene shifted from crisis to cleanup. He signed off on transfer of custody for the suspects, logged the evidence note about the crate’s frequency, and only then let his gaze slide to the portable screen one of the camera crews had propped on a tripod.

Deku’s face filled it, eyes ringed in fatigue, careful smile in place. Katsuki recognized the set of his shoulders, the press-trained cadence that smoothed out every spike. The lower-third chyron read Pro Hero Deku: The Next Symbol? and it made Katsuki’s molars grit. Not at him. Never at him. At the machine that wanted to make him into something he’d bleed to maintain. At the part of himself that reacted anyway, like a far-off muscle twitch.

He blew out a breath and scrubbed a hand over the back of his neck. His gloves smelled faintly like burnt sugar from the nitro mix. It always used to be a harsh, bitter scent. Now it was cleaner. He’d made it cleaner. He’d worked for that.

“Dynamight—just one more—”

“No.” He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. “That’s it.”

He pushed through the circle of cameras, feeling lenses track the line of his back like hands. The sky was a clear, indifferent blue. He hated that part of him ticked off the ways Deku was going to answer, how he’d deflect, how he’d lift everyone else up even though he was the one with a thousand eyes on him. He hated the way it hooked into the old itch in his chest, that familiar, irritating spark that had lit everything between them since they were kids. The same one that had made him chase, and race, and sharpen himself against the idea of being second to no one—least of all to the person who had once looked at him like he hung the damn moon.

He got to the edge of the shoulder. Traffic flowed again. The city didn’t care that his pulse still had a high note in it. He checked his gauntlet readouts out of habit, checked the battery balance, the microfracture in the left brace he’d patch tonight. His reflection in the metal was a quick, fragmented smear.

Dispatch buzzed his ear. “Dynamight, press wants—”

“They got enough,” he said. He popped the comm from his ear and shoved it into a pocket. The crate’s hum had faded with distance, but the memory of it stuck in his teeth. Quirk-disruption. Deku’s face on a screen. The public’s hunger chewing at both. He rolled his shoulders once, and the pinched spot between them loosened by a degree.

“Good work,” a sergeant said, jogging up. “Would’ve been ugly without your precision.”

“Do your job,” Katsuki said, but it didn’t land sharp. He flicked his gaze to the screen one last time. The station had cut to aerial footage of the rescue site, lights, dust, Deku a bright point in the center of the chaos. A prickle went down his spine, like a pre-storm charge.

He launched upward with a contained blast that didn’t ripple the police tape as he passed over it. The city opened under him, a grid he knew in his bones. He climbed until the noise dropped to a low murmur. The wind hit his face. The sting under his skin ebbed, replaced by the steady thrum of motion. He didn’t think about the headline. He didn’t think about the way that careful smile had looked like a shield. He kept moving, chasing the next call, the next necessary thing, and told himself that was all it was.

The apartment door clicked shut behind him, muffling the distant city noise into a low hum. Izuku toed off his boots and lined them along the entryway mat, straightening them without thinking. The air inside was cool, disinfected by the purifier’s soft whir. The living room was exactly as he’d left it—couch squared with the coffee table, blankets folded crisp, shelves that marched along the wall crowded with All Might’s smile in a dozen eras. Posters he’d collected when he was small. A bronze-toned figure frozen mid-pose. A limited print signed in a shaky hand that still made his throat tighten when he remembered the day he’d earned it.

He shrugged out of his jacket, hanging it on the same hook as always, and stretched his neck until a vertebra clicked. The rescue had blurred into itself—the names, the faces, the way people grabbed his forearm and said thank you like it was a prayer. He’d smiled. He was good at smiling now. He was getting better at making sure the smile didn’t look like a wound.

The kitchen was immaculate. He filled a glass, drank half, and stood there a moment staring at the reflection of his face in the window over the sink, the city lights layered over his tired features. He knew the press conference was still bouncing across networks; his phone wouldn’t stop blinking in the corner of his vision. He didn’t touch it. He took the glass with him to the couch, set it on a coaster, and reached for the remote.

The TV lit the room with a sterile blue. He skipped the channels showing his own voice and pulled up a feed aggregator. The top tile was already clipped and labeled: Dynamight—Expressway Interdiction—Live Chopper Cam. He hovered over it for a breath too long, then pressed play.

Katsuki dropped into frame from above, a controlled fall that turned into a clean landing on the roof of a truck. Izuku’s shoulders loosened despite themselves. He recognized the angle of his legs, the set of his hands before each burst. The camera struggled to keep up with the speed, but the precision came through anyway—the way he contained the blast to the joint on the mount, the way he shifted balance when the vehicle swerved to avoid collateral. Izuku rewound and watched the moment with the rear tire again, the micro-blast catching rubber at the perfect point to destabilize without flipping. It wasn’t brute force. It was math, instinct and learned adjustment folded together so tightly you could miss it if you didn’t know where to look.

“Your timing’s tighter,” Izuku murmured to no one. He reached for a notebook without thinking, found it already open on the table, and jotted a shorthand line: left-hand recoil compensation—0.3 sec delay cut—quicker re-center. He underlined it, then stared at the ink until it dried glossy. He’d seen Katsuki fight a hundred times, a thousand, some in person with sweat stinging his eyes, some through pixelated screens in the dead of night. He could chart the evolution in his head—less noise, less waste, more purpose.

The feed cut to a close-up where the press had boxed him in. Katsuki didn’t bristle the way he used to. He carried the same charge, but he kept it caged, let it become weight instead of heat. His mouth moved. Izuku could read the clipped words even if the audio were off. Good for him. Move, you’re in the way. Izuku’s throat worked around a tight feeling he didn’t have the energy to name. He scrubbed a hand over his face and then dropped it, watching Katsuki’s gaze flick, just once, toward a screen showing—Izuku glanced at the corner—the rescue. He paused the frame there. Katsuki’s eyes were hard to read unless you’d learned the language years ago.

It startled him sometimes, how easy it was to forget the world was seeing the same person he knew, just from a different angle. To them, he was Dynamight, all edges and control. To Izuku, even now, there were slices of the boy who’d grabbed his wrist too tight, then later, somewhere along the line, learned how to hold back without breaking. He exhaled slowly and hit play.

The crate on the gurney. The hum you couldn’t hear through the speakers, but Izuku swore he felt it in his teeth anyway, as if the memory of the frequency could transmit by suggestion. He wrote: tech matches chatter—anti-quirk?—HPSC involvement likely. He added a question mark by likely and circled it. The back of his neck prickled. The media would feed on the “what if” until it grew teeth. They would try to make it clean. He thought of the little boy in the SUV pressing his face to the glass. He thought of Katsuki slowing down a fraction so the chassis wouldn’t rattle.

His gaze drifted. The All Might figure on the nearest shelf caught the TV’s cold light, throwing back a thin gleam. The smile that had once powered him felt like a picture in a museum now, a piece of history pinned and labeled. He was grateful for it. He was. But the shape of what he chased every day was different now—heavier, messier, cut to fit a world that didn’t accept simple narratives. His shoulders sank into the couch cushion. He pinched the bridge of his nose until color sparked behind his eyes.

The crowd on-screen swelled, microphones pushing forward like spears. Katsuki turned away, not flinching. Izuku pressed pause again and the room stilled. He listened to the purifier’s steady cycle, to his own breath. The loneliness landed as a soft, familiar ache. It wasn’t bone-deep and dramatic. It was small and constant, the absence of a voice that would cut through the static and say what he couldn’t. He had friends. He had colleagues who’d drop everything if he called. He had a mentor who always seemed to know when to show up. He had a city that needed him so loudly he could barely hear himself think. And still, late at night, he watched Katsuki through a screen and wanted—in a way he didn’t examine—to ask him how he made it look like anger saved him instead of swallowing him whole.

He let the video run to the end. Katsuki lifted off, a contained arc that cleared the tape without a ripple. Izuku tracked the line he drew into the sky until the feed lost him. He set the remote down carefully, like it could shatter. The glass of water had sweated a ring onto the coaster; he dabbed it dry with the edge of his sleeve, because it was something to fix.

He stood and crossed to the shelves. He touched the corner of the signed print and straightened it by a millimeter. “We’re doing our best,” he said softly, to the smiling figure, to the empty room, to himself. His reflection in the frame looked older than he felt. He turned back to the table, to the notebook with half-finished thoughts and arrows that led nowhere yet, and sat. He flipped to a fresh page and wrote a new line, crisper than the rest: Silas—patterns, partner possibilities. He stared at the word partner until it blurred, then forced his mind back to work, underlining patterns twice, circling it until the pen nearly tore the paper. Outside, the city kept on breathing. Inside, he worked in the quiet, the video paused on a man leaving a swarm behind.

The door snicked shut behind him and cut the city to a thin, distant hiss. Katsuki didn’t turn on a light. The apartment didn’t need one to show its edges: smooth steel counter, black sofa without pillows, a single photograph face-down in a drawer he never opened. He kicked off his boots, lined them up by habit, and went straight to the mat he’d rolled out beside the window. The glass reflected his outline and the faint red blink of a tower on the next block over. He dropped, palms to the floor, and started to move.

Push-ups first, quick and clean, chest grazing the mat on every descent. He counted in his head until numbers blurred and muscles took over. The quiet made his thoughts louder at first, the leftover buzz of adrenaline with nowhere to burn. He let it sharpen into focus and then tried to sand it down. The day slid through him in frames—the tilt of a truck, the snap of a tether, the way a camera had tried to crowd too close to a crying woman. The way a certain name had crawled under his skin like grit.

He flipped, abs tightening, legs rising and lowering in steady lifts. Sweat tracked along his temples. He breathed through his nose, a controlled flow he’d trained into his body years ago. The mat smelled faintly of rubber and the citrus cleaner he used every other day. His mind, traitor that it was, dragged backward, past the news chyrons and the sterile interviews, to a muddy creek and a boy with scraped knees keeping pace on a path too steep for him.

“Leave me alone,” he’d said then, sharp, too big for his mouth. The memory played like a clip he couldn’t archive. Izuku’s face had been open in a way that had made something in Katsuki’s chest feel exposed. It had been easier to push than to let the feeling stay. He clenched his abs harder, welcomed the ache.

He rolled to his feet in a single motion and grabbed the pull-up bar wedged in the doorway. He hauled himself up until his chin cleared metal. The first ten were strict, arms and back firing in sequence. The next ten blurred into each other. On the twelfth, his grip slipped a fraction, damp with sweat, and he tightened his fingers until they protested. The skin along his palms was already toughened with old work. He bared his teeth and kept going.

The creek was gone; the schoolyard replaced it. The jeers bent around him, and he had worn the noise like armor. Izuku’s notebooks had glinted with pencil smears, pages full of other people’s quirks and a mind that never shut up. He had told himself that made it weaker, not stronger. He had told himself a lot of things. The bar creaked. He dropped, landed with bent knees, and shook out his arms.

He didn’t let the picture of the rooftop play, the one with a hand under another’s shoulder years later and apologies that didn’t exist yet. He shut it down and reached for the weighted bag hanging by the window. He set his stance, fists up, and drove the first punch into the leather. The impact traveled through his wrist into his forearm. He exhaled. A second punch, tighter, inside the arc. A third, then a combination he’d drilled until it lived in his bones. The bag swung and he caught it with a palm, redirected it, hit it again.

On the fourth set, his quirk sparked in a controlled stutter across his skin. Sweat beaded along his collarbone. He let a small explosion pop against the leather, enough to feel the heat without scarring the bag. The scent of singed air cut through the citrus. He could still, if he let himself, feel the small bones of a wrist in his hand from a lifetime ago. He could feel how he’d loosened his hold too late.

He punched harder. The rhythm became a metronome, keeping time with the flicker of the tower outside. He pictured data instead of faces—trajectories, yields, force vectors he’d learned to bend away from the fragile parts of the world. He had ripped out the parts of him that were sloppy and built something else in their place. It had worked. It kept working. The bag groaned on its hook.

A drop of sweat ran into his eye. He blinked it away and circled the bag, footwork sharp. He threw a knee that sent it back with a satisfying thud and followed with an elbow. His breath fogged the window. He didn’t think about how Izuku watched him even now with a gaze that cataloged every adjustment, how that attention felt like a bar laid across his spine keeping him straight. He didn’t think about the way that stupid smile had looked on TV, a little too careful.

He didn’t think about the nights after fights when silence ate at him and his thumb hovered over a name he refused to call.

He hammered the bag until his forearms hummed and his shoulders burned. He stripped his shirt off one-handed, tossed it in a corner, and went to the floor again. Plank. He held it until his elbows trembled. The city outside kept breathing. The apartment absorbed the sound of his breath and said nothing back. The old guilt was there, quiet and well-behaved under most days, mean on others. Tonight it pressed against his ribs without asking. He ignored it. He counted backward from one hundred.

At sixty-two, a laugh he hadn’t heard in years echoed in the wrong part of his head—small, breathless, delighted at something he’d done. He gritted his teeth and kept his back flat. He let a small charge crackle along his spine, just enough to reset the tremor into something he could command. Fifty. Forty-eight. He swallowed, mouth dry.

He dropped, flipped to his back, and braced his feet under the edge of the sofa. Sit-ups, fast, cleaner than his thoughts. He would sleep when his body had nothing left to say. He would not chase a ghost through his phone screen or let the phantom weight of a hand he had shielded with his body once—only once—crawl up his arm.

He finished the set and let himself lie flat for a breath. The ceiling stared back, blank. He got up before the ache could turn into something like tenderness. He ran the routine again, lighter, a cool-down that steadied him. When he finally turned toward the sink, his reflection in the dark glass looked more like the version the city expected. Jaw set. Eyes clear. Hands steady.

He poured a glass of water and drank it in long swallows. The cold ran down his chest and did nothing to quiet the heat in his muscles. He stood there, glass in hand, and reached for the comm device on the counter out of habit. He clicked it on, scanned alerts, saw nothing that needed him right now. His fingers hovered for half a second over a contact he had never removed. He put the device down like it weighed too much.

He set the glass in the rack with care that bordered on absurd. He turned away from the window. The mat waited, rolled tight like a promise. He would get up tomorrow and do this again, with or without the noise. He wiped his face with a towel and tossed it toward the laundry basket. The towel landed soft. The apartment hummed. He stood in the hush and pretended he didn’t feel the echo of a name in it.

The television lit the room a soft blue when Izuku finally let himself stop writing. He hadn’t meant to turn it on. The remote had been under his palm and his thumb had moved before he could think better of it. He told himself background noise might help. He told himself the city updates were useful. He didn’t tell himself why he wanted to hear another voice.

“…authorities are calling it coordinated, surgical, and strange,” the anchor was saying. The banner read: Silas: Who Are They? Izuku sank back into the couch with the water glass between his palms. The condensation made a cold ring around his fingers. He pressed them together and faced the screen.

Security footage rolled. Grainy, color-shifted, but clear enough to see silhouettes in sleek, nondescript gear move through a private R&D lab. No quirks. No tells. Their bodies were efficient lines. They bypassed a biometric lock with a handheld device that flashed once and turned green. The lock disengaged without a spark. The camera flickered at that exact second; Izuku’s breath caught at the precise timing. He leaned forward.

“The group calling itself Silas has pulled off five major thefts over the last two months,” the anchor continued. “Each incident involved quirk-dampening environments. Victims report feeling their powers misfire, sputter, or shut down completely. There is no evidence of quirk use from Silas operatives. Experts are baffled.”

A clip cut to a pro hero in a suit on the steps of an office tower, giving a measured statement. “We are investigating. We ask the public to remain calm.” Izuku recognized the man, a mid-tier hero known for his sonic waves, a blankness in his posture when he said calm that told Izuku he wasn’t.

Charts replaced the interview. Dates lined up with dotted maps. West ward. South docks. Midtown. Two research labs; one high-end medical tech facility; a warehouse that, on paper, stored agricultural equipment but in reality housed prototypes for quirk-adjacent gear. Nothing flashy. All foundational. He uncapped his pen without looking and wrote down the locations in a column, circled the warehouse twice.

“While precise, their strategy is hard to predict,” a voiceover added. The screen split with a new clip: grainy footage of a bank vault that opened like a flower, petals of metal gliding inward. An employee stumbled back, hand to his mouth. No alarms blared until two seconds after the vault had already given up its heart. Izuku felt the prick of a pattern in the smoothness. It felt like fingers already knowing where to press.

His mind traced quirks he knew that could do something similar. None. This wasn’t bending metal or hacking a lock with a quirk-based burst. This was designed tech that understood quirks like a set of rules to exploit. He thought of All Might battling brute strength with brute strength. He thought of the way he’d had to learn to read fights like equations, solve them in motion. This was a problem that didn’t want force. It wanted attention.

The footage switched to victims interviewed on hospital gurneys or office chairs. A woman in a lab coat described her telekinesis stalling when she tried to throw a chair at an intruder. “It just fell,” she said softly, eyes unfocused like she was replaying it. “It just…fell.”

Izuku rubbed his thumb over the rim of the glass and set it down. His notebook was already open. He wrote in block letters: Not quirk null—disruption. More targeted? Frequency? Field? Directional? He tapped twice beside the last word, then drew an arrow to a margin where he listed possibilities for power sources small enough to carry and strong enough to blanket a room. He wrote: shielding? The footage had shown a flicker at the edge of the camera—maybe an interference bubble, maybe a phase.

“In each case, Silas left no trace,” the voiceover said. “No fingerprints, no DNA, no disruptive blasts or signatures. They move like a private force with corporate precision.”

A panel box appeared with a retired detective and a tech journalist. The detective talked about discipline and rehearsal. The journalist talked about black-market quirk research folded into consumer tech. Izuku listened and filed away the details that weren’t speculation, crossing out phrases that overreached. He underlined the one that mattered: coordinated.

His chest tightened like a hand had set there. He knew coordination. He’d learned it at fourteen chasing a boy who refused to look him in the eye and at twenty fighting across a city with him anyway. He exhaled and let his shoulders drop.

“Silas has not yet made a public demand,” the anchor said when they returned to her. “Their thefts have halted two major startups and compromised one government-funded research lab. There are whispers of a larger plan, but nothing has been confirmed.”

The screen shifted to a press room where the HPSC President stood at a podium, measured and composed. “We are taking the threat seriously,” she said. “We are assembling a task force with top-tier heroes and analysts. We will address this swiftly.”

Izuku noted the angle she held her head, the slight emphasis on analysts. She was telling someone who to come forward. She was telling someone else what to expect. His pen hovered. He drew a small, blank box beside the name Silas and didn’t fill it.

“And now,” the anchor said, her smile crisp and thin, “we turn to speculation: which heroes will be tapped to lead the response?”

The screen cut to a montage. Footage of him—Deku—helping civilians out of a collapsed stairwell, then shaking hands with a child whose face was streaked with dust. His face looked wiped out at the edges, but he was smiling. He remembered the weight of the child’s fingers. The montage shifted to Dynamight cutting through a wall of twisted steel, the blast tight, the edges clean enough to leave the sign above intact. His expression when he turned away from the camera was closed, jaw set. The overlay read: Top candidates: Deku, Dynamight, Shoto, Edgeshot.

His pulse thudded once, hard. Of course it would be like this, he thought. Of course they would ask the two of them to stand in the same room and solve a puzzle that wanted all of their attention. He felt a thread of something warm and dreadfully aware tug at his center. He had told himself all night he wasn’t thinking about Katsuki. He wasn’t thinking about Dynamight. He was thinking about patterns.

He let himself think of him now.

Somewhere across the city, a different television threw the same light against different walls. Katsuki had dried his hair with a towel and left it hanging over the back of a chair he didn’t sit in. He stood, arms folded, as the anchor recounted the failures of the current investigation. He watched as a replay of his own clean breach filled the screen, a proof that he could bend chaos around a single, neat intent.

“Speculation is mounting that a combined effort would be the Commission’s best move,” the anchor said. “Deku’s data-driven approach and Dynamight’s tactical precision have proven, in different contexts, to outmaneuver even the most unpredictable threats. Together, could they anticipate Silas’s next move?”

Katsuki snorted, a small, sharp exhale that barely reached the empty air. The breath fogged against a ghost of a laugh he didn’t let out. He tilted his head as the footage rolled of Deku’s face on a close-up, eyes green and bright, mouth pulling into a soft smile like he didn’t know the camera was there. He looked too tired for a smile and too stubborn not to wear one. Katsuki’s fingers flexed, an old habit when he wanted to reach for something and didn’t.

He knocked his knuckles against the counter instead, once. He didn’t need a panel to tell him what the Commission was thinking. He could already hear the call, feel the way his stomach would pull low and tight when they said the name and the plan in the same breath. He clicked his tongue, annoyed at the way his own heartbeat picked up like it had been waiting.

On Izuku’s screen, the segment ended with their photographs side by side. Two faces the city had learned to recognize and to measure against each other whether they wanted it or not. Izuku stared at the space between them that the graphics had filled with a neutral gray. He picked up his pen and drew a line between the two boxes on his page, a simple, straight stroke. It felt like stepping into a cold pool and finding the temperature right.

“We’ll have continuing coverage as the story develops,” the anchor finished. “For now, the city watches. For now, we wait.”

The volume dropped to a hush when Izuku hit the button. The apartment breathed again. The quiet was heavier now, but it didn’t make his hands shake. He turned the page and wrote a checklist for what he needed to pull—old research on quirk interaction with electromagnetic fields, case studies on tech-assisted crimes, a list of contacts in R&D who would take his call at midnight. At the top of the page, he wrote in smaller letters than the rest: Talk to— He paused. He didn’t write the name. He didn’t need to.

Across town, Katsuki reached for his comm again and let his thumb rest where it always did. He didn’t press. The blue light from the screen fell across his scars and the smooth metal of his kitchen fixtures alike, carving out edges, turning everything honest. On the television, the anchor’s voice had moved on to the weather, to tomorrow’s morning commute, to a rooftop feature. Katsuki’s jaw unclenched. He rolled his shoulders back and stood up straighter, as if bracing without meaning to.

The city exhaled around them. The night was not quiet so much as held. Somewhere in between two apartments, a line had already been drawn, thin and invisible, pulled taut. The news had given it a name. They would follow it. They always did.