The stack on his desk was eleven cards thick, which was three more than he'd expected and eight more than he'd wanted.
Aizawa had distributed them first period — the nomination cards, one set per student, the tangible output of every agency that had watched the Sports Festival and decided that this particular student was worth two weeks of their time. Most of the class had gotten between two and five. Bakugo had gotten — Yami didn't count them from across the room, but the expression on Bakugo's face when he looked at his stack was the expression of a person who had received a number consistent with their existing assessment of their own worth.
Eleven.
He went through them in order. The first four were exactly what he'd predicted after the name leak: medical research agencies and hero support organizations who wanted access to a student with a documented regenerative quirk for obvious reasons that had nothing to do with hero training and everything to do with what his biology might tell them about wound response, cellular reconstruction, and whatever else lived in the category of practical applications. He set those to the left.
The next five were legitimate hero agencies — mid-tier offices with functional rosters and straightforward training programs, the kind of placement that produced competent heroes and would have been the correct choice for a student without specific developmental objectives. He set those in the middle.
The tenth card.
The Endeavor Hero Agency logo had a flame motif that was not subtle about its reference point. The card stock was the kind of weight that communicated the agency could afford better materials than this and was choosing not to waste them on students. The note inside: Seeking internship candidate demonstrating resilience and tactical awareness. Four words that had Endeavor's fingerprints on them and were doing significant work for their word count.
He set it to the right.
The eleventh card was plain. White. The kind of stock that came in bulk from an office supply store. The handwriting was real handwriting — not printed, not stamped — in an old person's hand that was still precise, the specific quality of someone whose coordination hadn't gone even if the joints had opinions about it.
Gran Torino. Retired. — Address enclosed.
He read it once. He looked up at All Might — Yagi-san, present in his diminished form for the nomination session because Aizawa had requested all homeroom teachers — and All Might was looking at something in the middle distance that was not the classroom and not the window.
Yami held the card up. All Might's eyes moved to it. Something shifted in his expression — not surprise, something older than surprise, the particular quality of a person encountering the name of someone they hadn't thought about in a specific context and thinking about it now.
He wrote the recommendation quietly, with the pen Yami had already placed on his desk, and didn't make a comment.
The hero name session ran after lunch. Midnight handled it with the theatrical investment she brought to every category of task that intersected with presentation and aesthetic — she had a reaction prepared for each name, ranging from warm approval to scandalized delight depending on the name's specific qualities.
Most of the class went through the session in a pattern he'd watched play out in the original timeline with minor variations. Bakugo's Lord Explosion Murder was rejected and its replacement (Kacchan — he'd never live it down) was not Bakugo's preferred outcome. Kirishima's Red Riot received genuine approval. Todoroki's Shoto — just his given name — made Midnight briefly speechless, which was its own achievement.
Yami had chosen Revenant approximately forty minutes after the Sports Festival bronze medal ceremony, while sitting in Recovery Girl's tent with two cracked ribs and a notification count that hadn't stopped climbing. The word had the advantage of being accurate — someone returned from death — and the specific advantage of being a thing the media had already started calling him in the articles he'd been reading in stairwells for a week.
Control the narrative. Name yourself before they name you.
Midnight's theatrical gasp was not entirely performed. "The aesthetic," she said. "It's very dark. Very committed." She looked at him with the expression of a woman assessing whether the darkness was costume or content. "It works."
[Hero Name Registered: REVENANT]
He filed this in the category of things that were now official.
Todoroki noticed the declined card in the right-hand stack during the transition between the nomination review and the hero name session — not because he was looking at Yami's desk but because their desks were adjacent and Todoroki's peripheral attention was the quality it was. The Endeavor logo was facing up.
He looked at it. Then at Yami.
"You declined."
"Yes."
"Why." Not an accusation — the factual question of someone who had expected a different answer.
"I don't trust his reasons for asking." He kept his voice at the volume of two people having a conversation rather than a classroom disclosure. "Whatever he wanted from that internship, it wasn't training."
Todoroki was quiet for a moment with the expression that filed things. "He wanted to observe what you did to me at the semifinals."
"That's what I think."
Another moment of quiet. Then: "I accepted his offer."
"I know." He did know, and the knowledge was the specific kind that had an ethical weight attached to it — he knew what the Todoroki internship with Endeavor was going to produce, had watched it produce it, and was choosing not to say I know how that goes because the version he knew was the original version, and the original version had not included the fire already being out. Whatever Todoroki was walking into at Endeavor's agency was a version that started from a different place than canon. "I think that's probably the right call for you."
Todoroki looked at him with the expression that had been appearing more often since the semifinals — the one that was still the assessment expression underneath but had something else in the layer above it, something that hadn't been there before the fire came out.
"You're strange," Todoroki said, which was Todoroki's version of a longer sentence.
"I've heard that."
The train platform at three-forty PM had the specific quality of a late-afternoon departure point in early June — the light at the angle that made everything look more significant than it was, the particular population of people who took the mid-afternoon trains because they had either very flexible schedules or very rigid ones and happened to align with this time.
Gran Torino's town was two hours southeast.
He found his seat, put his bag in the overhead rack, and sat with his knees at the angle that accommodated the seat's legroom, which was not quite enough. The train moved. He watched the city transition through the stages it transitioned through — urban density, then the mixed zone, then the specific visual grammar of a smaller town not yet finished arguing with the urban sprawl — and thought about what the next two weeks were going to contain.
In his jacket pocket, in the position it had occupied since January, was a sticker note with All Might's handwriting on it that said It's All Right. I'm here. He'd never moved it. It was the specific kind of object that accumulated meaning by staying where it was.
Three cars back, the same platform, Iida Tenya had boarded a train to Hosu.
Yami was the only person in either train car who knew what that meant.
He looked out the window. The legroom was not getting better. He pulled out Gran Torino's card and looked at the address one more time.
Another strange one, the old man would probably say.
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