--
Midoriya Izuku had been cleaning Takoba Municipal Beach Park every morning at 5 AM for the past two months and he still couldn't lift a refrigerator without his arms shaking.
All Might said this was progress.
All Might also said a lot of things while being seven feet tall and glowing, so the bar for what counted as encouragement was different for him than it was for normal people.
The point was that Midoriya was tired, exhausted, dead tired. The kind of tired where you sit at your desk in class and your eyelids feel like they are dragging down your face. So tired that the teacher's voice fades into white noise, and the only thing keeping you upright is the fear that if you fall asleep, Kacchan will wake you up with an explosion to the back of your head.
Except Kacchan hadn't done that in a while.
That was another thing.
Kacchan was still Kacchan, loud, aggressive, and driven by ego in everything he did. But the edge had come off him, like someone had taken a knife sharp enough to cut through steel and dulled it by half a millimetre. He could still cut, just not as often.
Midoriya knew exactly why, and some of the others in the class could guess, but no one talked about it. But he knew, the makeshift courtroom, the thing Asano Ren had done to Kacchan's quirk, and the three hours where Bakugo Katsuki had been quirkless, just like me.
Midoriya thought about that sometimes. What it must have felt like. To be Kacchan, who had never been without his quirk for a single second since it manifested, and to suddenly have nothing.
He thought about it because he'd lived it.
He understood that silence in a way Kacchan never could.
But that wasn't what bothered him right now.
What bothered him was Tuesday afternoon in Tanaka-sensei's class.
Review session. Hero legislation. AC losing its war against July. Half the class was melting. Tanaka-sensei asked about the Unforeseen Circumstances clause and a girl in the front gave the textbook answer and Tanaka-sensei nodded and said "anyone else?"
Asano answered. He hadn't raised his hand. He just talked.
Midoriya didn't remember the exact words. Something about hero agencies and insurance liability and the clause protecting the industry instead of civilians. He remembered the words were correct because Midoriya had read about this stuff himself, late at night, between beach sessions, in the notebooks that nobody knew about except All Might.
What he remembered, the thing that stuck, was the voice.
It sounded like someone had taken all the parts of a voice that made it belong to a person and set them aside. What was left was accurate and clear and completely empty. Like a textbook reading itself.
And the eyes.
Midoriya was three rows ahead. He'd turned around like everyone else. And when his eyes met Ren's there was a half-second where Midoriya's stomach dropped, not because Ren was looking at him with hostility or anger or anything threatening. Because Ren was looking at him the way you look at a chair. Acknowledging that it exists. Noting its position and moving on.
Midoriya had been looked through before. Being quirkless in a world of quirks meant you got looked through a lot. You got used to it. It stopped hurting after a while.
This was different.
It felt different, completely foreign like he was staring at the starless sky. It almost felt like he was a husk of a human?
Being looked through by people who didn't care was one thing. Being looked through by someone who was clearly present, clearly aware, clearly seeing everything in the room and choosing to find none of it significant, that was something else.
It felt heavy.
The air around Asano felt like it had weight around it.
Midoriya had mentioned this to All Might during their beach session the next morning, because he mentioned everything to All Might because he couldn't help himself, the muttering was a problem.
"There's a student at my school and something is different about him. He's always been quiet but it's a different kind of quiet now. Like he's not... all there. But also too there? Like there's too much of him in the room. Does that make sense?"
All Might, in his deflated form, had looked at him for a moment and said, "Some people carry more weight than their body was meant for, young Midoriya. It's not always a quirk. Sometimes it's just what happens to a person."
That hadn't answered anything but it was All Might so Midoriya treasured it anyway.
He was walking home from school on Wednesday when he passed Ren in the hallway near the shoe lockers. They didn't speak, they never really speak to each other. The shoe locker conversation months ago had been the longest interaction they'd ever had and it had lasted maybe thirty seconds.
But as Ren walked past, Midoriya felt it again. That heaviness. Like standing next to a building instead of a person. His skin prickled. His body wanted to step back.
He didn't step back. He kept walking. Changed his shoes and went home.
On the train he stood holding the overhead strap and thought about the rooftop. About what Ren had done for him. About the courtroom he didn't understand and the floating thing with sewn eyes he understood even less. About Ren telling him "you should stand up for yourself more" with a small smile that had small amounts of warmth in it.
That smile was gone now.
Midoriya didn't know what was wrong with Asano Ren. He didn't have the framework for it. He couldn't analyze it the way he analyzed pro heroes because pro heroes made sense, they had quirks with mechanics you could study and fighting styles you could break down and motivations you could understand.
This didn't make sense. A classmate who'd been a background character for two years was suddenly the most noticeable person in every room he walked into, not because he was doing anything but because the room itself seemed to respond to him being in it.
Midoriya couldn't help him. He knew that. He was quirkless and couldn't even move a fridge without shaking.
But the thing about Midoriya Izuku, the thing that All Might had seen in him when nobody else had bothered to look, was that knowing he couldn't help had never once stopped him from wanting to.
---
Bakugo Katsuki was doing pushups at 11 PM on a Wednesday.
One-armed. Right side. Fifty reps. Then switch. His shoulder burned. Good. Burning meant working. He popped a small explosion from his free hand between reps because he could, because his quirk was his and it worked and it was right there, right where it should be, hot and loud and alive.
He did not think about Asano Ren.
He thought about training. Those were separate things.
Fifty-one. Fifty-two.
He was not thinking about a courtroom. Not thinking about a podium he couldn't leave. Not thinking about his palms going cold and quiet, three hours of nothing where the most important thing about him should have been.
Didn't think about the devastating words that Ren spoke out loud to him."Your ego convicted you, not me."
Fifty-three. Fifty-four.
That one sentence had been stuck in his skull for four months now, not because it was cruel or mean, he could handle that easily. It stayed with him because it was true, and he couldn't blow it away. You couldn't destroy something that was true. You could only bench more weight, do more push-ups, time your detonations faster, and tell yourself it didn't matter, while training like a lunatic, like it was the only thing that did.
His quirk came back the same day, three hours later, all of it.
But every morning when he woke up and flexed his hands, there was a gap. Half a second between reaching for the spark and feeling it. The shortest half-second in the world and the longest one in his life.
He switched arms.
The thing about Bakugo was that he didn't process events the way normal people did. Normal people had something bad happen to them and they thought about it and maybe talked to someone about it and slowly dealt with it over time.
Bakugo had something bad happen to him and he trained until the feeling went away.
The feeling wasn't going away.
So he trained more.
He'd started watching combat footage of pros he used to think were beneath his attention. He timed his detonations now. Measured the interval between thought and ignition. Tried to shave milliseconds. He was doing structured workouts instead of just blowing things up in his backyard until his mom yelled at him to stop.
If you squinted, it almost looked like discipline.
But it wasn't. It was obsession.
The obsession of trying to prove himself better than the person who had swatted him aside like a fly.
He didn't look at Asano in the hallways. He didn't track him. He didn't map his schedule or adjust his routes.
He just happened to take the west corridor when Asano was in the east one. Coincidence. The school had two hallways. Sometimes you went left instead of right. Nothing to read into.
Sixty. His arm gave. He hit the floor, rolled onto his back, lay there with his chest heaving and his palms crackling at the ceiling.
*I'll beat him. Whatever that was. I don't care what it was. I'll surpass him. I'll surpass everyone.*
He got up and started his third set.
---
Isaac Lindqvist had a spreadsheet tracking Ren's lifts and last week the trendline had gone vertical and Excel had flagged it as a data entry error.
It was not a data entry error.
"727.5," Isaac said, standing next to the bench press at Iron House with his clipboard. "That's what you just benched."
"Yeah."
"I did math during your warm-up. That's more than three adult male gorillas."
"Why do you know how much a gorilla weighs?"
"Because I Googled it three weeks ago when you hit 600 and I needed context. I've been converting your lifts into animal equivalents to cope about it. Last week's deadlift was ninety-six golden retrievers."
Ren sat up. Chalk on his hands. Sweat on his shirt. His face had the same expression it always had now, which was less an expression and more the place where an expression used to be.
Isaac had been coaching Ren for almost six months. He'd watched this kid go from strong-for-a-teenager to strong-for-a-human to whatever the hell this was. He'd tracked every session, every set, every rest period, every rep. He had data going back to January. The early numbers made sense. Linear progression, consistent with a trainee who had an accelerated recovery quirk. The recent numbers did not make sense. The recent numbers looked like someone had fed his spreadsheet steroids.
"Isaac."
"Yeah."
"You're staring at your clipboard with the face you make when someone's squat form is wrong."
"Your squat form is perfect. That's part of the problem. Everything about you is perfect right now and that's not how humans work. Humans have weak points. Humans have lagging muscle groups. You don't have either anymore and I've been pretending that's normal for three weeks and I can't do it anymore."
Ren put the chalk down.
"You told me you'd explain when you had the words," Isaac said. "You said that five weeks ago."
"I know."
"Do you have them yet?"
"Some of them."
"Give me what you have."
They were between sets. The gym was mostly empty because it was 7 PM on a Wednesday and nobody came to Iron House at 7 PM on a Wednesday except Isaac, Ren, and the old guy who used the cable machine in the corner while listening to podcasts about fishing.
"I have abilities beyond my quirk," Ren said. "I can reinforce my body with an energy I can't fully explain. It's why the numbers don't track. It's been growing since March."
Isaac put his clipboard down. This was how you knew it was serious. Isaac would sooner put down a child than his clipboard.
"Since March. So the entire time we've been training together."
"Yeah."
"And you didn't tell me."
"I told you I can't lie anymore. I haven't lied. I just hadn't told you yet."
"There's a word for that, Ren. It's called lying by omission."
"No it isn't. Omission is choosing not to share information. Lying is actively misrepresenting it. I said 'good programming' when you asked about my gains. Your programming IS good. I just left out the part where I'm also reinforcing my muscles with an energy source you can't see."
"That's the most technically honest bullshit I've ever heard."
"Probably."
Isaac sat down on the bench next to him. Not across from him, not standing over him. Next to him. Because Isaac was the kind of person who understood that some conversations happened better side by side than face to face.
"Are you safe?"
"Yes."
"Are you hurting yourself?"
"No."
"Then why do you look like someone turned your lights off?"
Ren didn't answer immediately. Isaac watched him from the side. The jaw was tight. Not angry-tight. Something else. Something that looked like it cost him to hold.
"I made a permanent decision a few weeks ago. I can't lie anymore. About anything. To anyone. Including myself. It removed some things I didn't account for."
"Like what?"
"The ability to say 'I'm fine' when I'm not. Small talk. Deflecting. The stuff that makes normal conversations feel normal. I can choose not to speak. I can't choose to speak and make it untrue."
Isaac was quiet. Isaac being quiet was like the sun being cold. It happened, but it meant something was wrong with the universe.
"Ren."
"Yeah."
"You're my friend. Not my client. You know that."
"I know."
"So hear me when I say this." Isaac turned to look at him properly. "You're getting stronger every week and emptier every week. I don't like where those two things meet."
Something moved behind Ren's face. Not much. A shift, there and gone, like a light flickering in an empty room. The kind of thing you'd miss if you blinked. Isaac didn't blink.
"I hear you," Ren said.
"Do you?"
"Yeah. I don't have a good answer yet. But I hear you."
Isaac looked at him for another few seconds. Then he picked his clipboard up and stood.
"Your left lat is firing late. Single-arm rows, three times this week."
"Sure."
"And stretch tonight."
"Okay."
"Promise me."
"I can't promise things I might not follow through on. That would be lying."
Isaac stared at him.
Then he laughed. Not the usual big one that made the whole gym look over. A smaller one. Tired.
"You're such a freak, Ren."
"Yeah."
---
Mrs. Takahashi from next door had replanted her entire rose garden and she would go to her grave insisting it had nothing to do with what the Asano boy said.
It had everything to do with what the Asano boy said.
She was watering the new beds on a Thursday when he came out the front door. Gym bag, black shirt, shorts. He was bigger again. She didn't know how a person kept getting bigger but he was doing it, weekly, like someone was adding a little more of him every time she wasn't looking.
"Good evening, Takahashi-san. The roses look better. The gradient works."
Then he walked away.
She went inside and locked the door. Told her husband at dinner that there was something off about the Asano boy. He said she was imagining things. She agreed.
She moved her watering schedule to after he left for school.
---
Asano Yui was making tonkatsu.
She made tonkatsu when she was scared. She knew this about herself the way she knew her blood type and her shoe size, basic personal information that she'd never bothered to examine because examining it would mean admitting what it pointed to.
It was Friday evening. Ren was still at the gym. Kenji was still at work. The kitchen was hers and she was using it to bread chicken cutlets and cry.
The kind where tears just showed up on your face while your hands kept working because stopping would mean feeling it fully and she was not ready to feel it fully. She might never be ready.
Oil at 170 degrees. Her hands had touched the pan. The one thing her quirk was good for. The one thing she could do perfectly every single time without fail in a world where her son was failing, no, not failing, succeeding, succeeding at something she couldn't see in a direction she couldn't follow, and the success was eating him alive.
Last week. Right here. This kitchen. This counter.
He'd been cutting vegetables. The knife slipped. Cut his finger. She'd gasped, started toward him, and then watched the cut close. In front of her. The skin pulling together like a zipper, the blood stopping, the wound gone in eight seconds.
She knew about his quirk. She'd known since he was four. Broken bones in three hours. Cuts in minutes.
Not eight seconds. Not visibly, in real time, while he stood there looking at his own finger with nothing on his face.
Nothing.
Like watching your own skin seal itself shut was about as interesting as a weather report.
"It's been accelerating," he'd said. "A few months."
"A few MONTHS?"
"You didn't ask."
She wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist. Turned the cutlets. Wiped her eyes again.
You didn't ask.
She hadn't. Fourteen years of looking at her son every morning and running the same checklist. Eyes? Upright? Alive? Check, check, check. She'd never updated the checklist. She'd never thought she'd need to. He was her son. She knew him the way she knew her own hands.
Except her hands didn't hum.
She'd felt it last week. Reaching to fix his collar, the thing she'd been doing since he was small, the automatic mother-gesture that her body did without her brain's permission. Her fingers brushed his neck and there was something under his skin that hadn't been there six months ago. Not a sound. A vibration. Low and constant, like touching the wall of a building with heavy machinery running somewhere deep inside.
She'd pulled her hand back.
He hadn't noticed. Or he had and hadn't reacted. She didn't know which was worse.
Front door. Shoes on the genkan. Bag on the hook. Footsteps.
"Mom."
"Kitchen."
He filled the doorway. Gym clothes, flushed, still breathing slightly heavy from the walk. He looked at the stove. Looked at her. Whatever calculation happened behind his eyes took about a quarter of a second.
"You've been crying."
"The onions."
"There aren't any onions out."
She laughed. It came out wet and cracked and she hated the sound of it. "Sit down."
He sat. She put the plate in front of him. Tonkatsu, extra cabbage, the homemade sauce she only made when it mattered, rice in a perfect dome. She sat across from him at the table with the wobbly leg.
He ate. She watched. The same thing they'd done a thousand times in this kitchen. A thousand dinners at this table. The wood under her palms was scratched from years of plates and elbows and homework and her husband's paperwork. One leg was shorter than the others. She'd been meaning to fix it for four years.
"Mom."
"Hm?"
He put his chopsticks down.
"I love you. And I love that you cook for me. Every single meal you've ever made me has been perfect. You touch every plate before it leaves the stove. That's the most consistent act of love I've ever experienced from anyone. I should have told you that a long time ago and I'm sorry I didn't."
She couldn't breathe.
"But I think about you and Dad being vulnerable. All the time. Your quirk adjusts temperature. Dad's quirk tells him where furniture is. Neither of those protects you. If a villain broke into this house tomorrow, there is nothing either of you could do. I think about that every single day. It scares me. And I'm training so that one day the gap between what I can do and what I need to do to keep you safe doesn't exist anymore."
The tears were back. Properly now. Not the quiet kitchen kind. The kind that came from somewhere underneath her ribs, from the place where she'd kept fourteen years of love for a boy who used to fit in her arms and now couldn't fit in his own shirts.
"That is not your job," she said. Her voice cracked on the word job.
"It will be."
"You are fourteen years old."
"I know."
"You are my baby."
"I know, Mom."
"I don't care how tall you get. I don't care how strong you get. I don't care about your quirk or your training or whatever is happening to you. You do not get to take my job by worrying about me first. That's what I do. That's mine. You don't get to have it."
She was crying openly. She didn't care. She'd given up on dignity somewhere around the second sentence.
He got up. Walked around the table. And put his arms around her.
He was so big. When had he gotten so big. When had the boy who fit against her chest turned into a person whose chest she fit against. His arms wrapped all the way around her and she pressed her face into his shirt and she could feel it, the hum, the vibration, the thing underneath his skin that was him but also not him, the thing she couldn't name and couldn't reach and couldn't stop.
She grabbed his shirt with both fists and held on.
"I'm still me," he said. Into her hair. Quiet.
"Are you?"
He didn't answer fast enough.
"The parts that matter are."
She didn't let go. She didn't know if that was true. She didn't know if his definition of "the parts that matter" and hers were the same. She just held on because that was the one thing she could still do. The only act of love that didn't require understanding what was happening. You held on and you hoped it was enough and you made tonkatsu on Fridays and you pressed warmth into kitchen tables and you checked on him at night even though checking meant standing in a doorway feeling something in the air that your body understood and your brain refused to understand.
He went upstairs. She washed the dishes. Dried them. Put them away. Wiped the counter twice.
She pressed both hands flat on the kitchen table. The wood warmed under her palms.
She left the warmth there because she didn't know what else to leave.
---
Asano Kenji got home at 8:47 PM.
Tie loosened. Briefcase in one hand. His quirk told him the coat hook was 14.3 centimetres to the left and 162 centimetres off the floor. His hand adjusted without him thinking about it.
He stood in the hallway and read the house.
The kitchen was empty table surface 2.1 degrees warmer than ambient in a palm-shaped pattern. She'd been pressing warmth into the table again.
Living room empty also.
Upstairs. Bedroom two. Ren at his desk.
The distortion was there. Faint. Measurable. The air around his son, denser than it should be. Kenji had been tracking it for six weeks. It was getting stronger.
Far stronger then it should be.
He went to the kitchen first. Yui was at the table with a cup of tea that had gone cold. She looked up when he came in. Her eyes were red but dry. She'd finished before he got home.
"Long day?" he asked.
"I made tonkatsu."
That told him everything he needed to know.
He touched her shoulder on the way past. She reached up and covered his hand with hers for a second. Neither of them said anything. They'd been married for sixteen years. Some conversations happened in the space between gestures.
He went upstairs.
Ren's door was open. Laptop, notebook, desk. The same configuration every evening for months.
"Ren."
"Dad."
Kenji walked into the room. Past the threshold. Past the desk. He sat on the edge of the bed. This was unusual. Kenji was a doorway person. He delivered observations from the frame and retreated. Coming inside was a different protocol.
But the doorway protocol hadn't been working for a while.
"Your mother made tonkatsu tonight."
"Yeah."
"My quirk has been reading you for six weeks."
Ren turned from the desk.
"The spatial profile around your body is off. You're denser than your frame accounts for. There's a distortion in the air immediately around you that doesn't match anything in my reference set."
"I know. I can feel it."
"Is it dangerous to you?"
"No."
"To other people?"
"Not if I'm in control."
"Are you in control right now?"
"Yes."
"Is 'right now' the same as 'always'?"
Ren looked at him. "No."
Kenji sat with that for a moment. His quirk fed him data. Distance between them: 1.7 metres. Desk angle: 4 degrees off perpendicular. Ren's shoulder width: 54.2 centimetres. All useless. All precise. None of it the measurement he actually wanted.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out a business card. Held it out.
"Colleague. Quirk-related insurance claims. High-clearance work. He's discreet."
Ren took it.
"If it goes past what you can manage," Kenji said. "You call that number. Not because I think you need it now. Because I need to know you have it."
He stood up. Walked to the door.
"Try not to scare her."
He went downstairs. Yui was still at the table. The tea was still cold. She looked up at him with a question she didn't put into words.
He sat down. Took her hand.
The table wobbled between them.
He didn't say it would be okay. He didn't say their son was fine. He didn't say he was scared because saying it would require dismantling something he'd spent forty-six years building and the glue wouldn't hold if he took it apart now.
He held her hand.
She held his.
---
Past midnight.
Yui got out of bed.
Kenji was asleep beside her. The man could sleep through a villain attack. He approached unconsciousness the same way he approached everything else, with total commitment and zero visible emotion.
She walked down the hall. Bare feet on cold floorboards.
She opened Ren's door. Just a crack. The way she used to when he was small. When checking on him meant blankets and nightlights.
He was asleep. On his back. One arm hanging off the bed. Mouth open.
For a second he looked exactly like her son.
Then she felt it. The heaviness in the air. The hum. Even asleep. Even with his face slack and his breathing even and his body still. Whatever was inside him didn't stop.
She closed the door.
Went back to bed.
Pulled the blanket up and pressed her face into the pillow.
She thought about the day he was born. How small he was. Six pounds two ounces. How his hand wrapped around her finger and held on like she was the only solid thing in the world.
She cried.
Quiet. Into the pillow. So Kenji wouldn't hear.
Not because of what her son might do. Not because she was afraid of him.
Because every morning she reached for him and every morning she reached a little less far.
And he wasn't reaching back.
---
How was Chapter 6?
Leave a comment if you enjoyed it. I read every single one.