Chapter Text
Katsuki came to find him about ten minutes after arriving back at the dorms. The harsh rap on his door was unmistakable and Izuku called his friend in without hesitation.
The blonde wore a ferocious scowl as he threw himself down on the rug. “I wanted to blow his fucking head off,” Katsuki said. “They didn’t let me, though, Cover File and Leopard Seal,” presumably the sidekicks who had held him back.
“Probably for the best,” Izuku replied. There was no need to explain what event they were discussing.
Kacchan growled. “I would have at least felt a little better.”
“Maybe,” Izuku hedged.
“If you got a chance to smack All For One’s skull in…?”
“Okay, you have a point,” the greenette admitted.
“I always assumed… I don’t know what I assumed,” Katsuki growled, crossing his arms. “I don’t know--I just want to blow something up.”
“I think some of the training gyms are open right now,” Izuku pointed out. “It might help.” Kacchan clearly wasn’t going to work through any of these feelings by talking. That wasn’t his thing.
“Sure, why not?” the blonde shrugged and got to his feet. “Probably can’t hurt.”
“I need to change clothes. Meet you there in ten minutes?”
“Sure.”
“You’ve gotten slipperier,” Katsuki snarled at him as the greenette twisted his wrist out of the blonde’s grasp and circled to the side.
Izuku ducked an explosion and grumbled, “what happened to not blowing my head off, Kacchan? I thought we agreed on that.”
“There was no way that was gonna’ hit,” the blonde panted. “Slippery mongoose…”
“Fossa,” the greenette corrected, tackling Katsuki’s legs and taking them both to the mat. The Explosion wielder roared and threw him aside and they sprang to their feet, panting. Fifteen minutes turned into thirty.
Predictably, the match ended with the both of them collapsed in exhausted heaps, chests heaving and hair soaked with sweat. Salty tracks traced paths down Izuku’s face as fast as he could wipe them away with his sleeve. Kacchan muttered something incomprehensible under his breath.
“Better?” Izuku asked.
“Maybe,” Katsuki replied. “I’m at least tired enough to get some sleep now and that’s half the battle I guess.”
Something had to be said here. Even if Katsuki wasn’t the type to talk about feelings, Izuku was. Sometimes anyway. “I’m sorry. About everything. It’s not fair.”
“Never is, is it?” the blonde grumbled. “He would’ve gotten away with it, too. The HPSC’s been getting away with it forever.” Yeah, for longer than he knew. “Self righteous, bastard nutcases, thinking they can pick and choose right and wrong when it suits them. Fair? Ha! Never.” Then his voice grew quiet and distant, “and you must know that better than me. I got it easy compared to you. How many friends or mentors have you lost… before ever knowing them at all?”
The greenette twitched as if Kacchan had finally landed an Explosion on him, gasping in a breath. Izuku didn’t think of it like that. He didn’t, couldn’t, let himself think of it like that for so, so many reasons…
“Sorry, nerd. Didn’t… well, misery and company and all that…”
They didn’t say anything more, eventually picking themselves up and heading back to the dorms.
Most students, including Ojiro and Shouji, arrived from internships very late the night before classes restarted. As they waited for homeroom to begin, students stared at their phones and whispered to each other nervously.
The fallout might never end. It seemed as if it had been years since War Dog (the source was anonymous but Izuku knew) published the incriminating files when it had, in fact, been only a few days.
The latest news was that Hawks was being shipped to Tartarus and drawn up on premeditated murder charges… as well as dozens of related, lesser crimes. The HPSC president had been detained, too, on a variety of corruption charges, but it wasn’t clear if she would actually go to trial. She had been called in to answer questions to investigative services, government panels, and crowds of reporters all day. A variety of other HPSC officials were facing inquiries and a dozen had been arrested. One, a woman who seemed to be nothing more than a legal assassin, had been killed in a fight with Edgeshot when he went to her apartment to bring her in; it had looked like a clear-cut case of suicide by hero.
Izuku scrolled miserably through a document and associated report which said quite blatantly that the HPSC had long considered Hakamata Tsunagu to be a problem who didn’t play by their rules. It was possible that, off the written record, Hawks had been encouraged (or even ordered) to kill the other top pro. It wouldn’t be surprising. Nothing would be surprising anymore.
Who were the good guys, then? Were there ever any good guys? Was the only way to keep the really bad guys in check to become kind of bad guys who assassinated people and eliminated “problem heroes,” to become the kind of bad guys who lied and slandered and rewrote history to keep the situation under control, keep everyone anesthetized and calm? It couldn’t be that way, could it? There had to be more to this world than wolves in sheep’s clothing fighting undisguised wolves.
Or did there? Who said the world had to be anything at all?
The final few students filtered in. Kacchan stalked to his seat and threw himself down, anger flowing from him in palpable waves. Everyone knew better than to say anything to him. Apparently the previous evening’s sparring had been a very temporary cure.
The bell rang and Aizawa joined them. “Have any of you not been keeping up with the news?” he asked. Silence. “I’d like to say that it’s business as usual in the hero industry despite the turmoil going on at the top, but it isn’t. There has been a significant increase in both villain and vigilante activity since the unveiling of the corruption at the HPSC. People are angry and frightened. Frightened and angry people make bad choices. They may turn to vigilantism or villainy. They may simply make rude comments to you in public. They might go as far as throwing things at you. That’s happened to a significant number of my colleagues recently. I’m not a philosopher. I can’t help you make sense of what’s going on with HPSC because I can’t really make sense of it myself.” That was… hard to hear. Apparently everyone was just as lost and confused as Izuku. “What I can do is teach you what to do and what not to do if an angry, frightened kid throws a rock at you while you’re on patrol because he no longer has faith in the system and assumes you’re part of the problem. Those are the kinds of situations we’re going to talk about today. Pay attention. Unfortunately, this lesson will be very important.”
He could instantly tell this wasn’t his normal kind of abnormal dream. It wasn’t a vision, or not completely a vision anyway. He glanced down at his hands just because he wanted to, his body--which really felt like his body--responding to his whims.
Curtains drawn, doors locked, lights on, Kuma sat at a rickety table and stroked a pothos plant on its tallest leaf as if it were some kind of small mammal. Izuku had seen people pet guinea pigs that way. “Ring around the roses… well, it’s not actually a rose and those aren’t actually the words,” she hummed to herself. “A pocket full of… that other plant that rhymes with roses,” as she said this Kuma placed colored glass pebbles in a spiral around the plant. “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.” She clasped her hands, gathering the plant and pebbles together, and white light shone between her fingers.
She held out the multi-colored glass orb. “See? It’s not so bad. Do you want to try it out?”
“Sure,” Izuku replied, taking a seat beside her on the whim of instinct. “How do you do it?”
“You need the center piece,” she gave him a tiny succulent, not even old enough for the tips of its leaves to turn prickly. “You need the glass.” She offered him a bowl of the pebbles and he took them. The blue ones were the prettiest. He’d use those. She placed her hands on his and guided his palms together. “Now you have to want it. It’s not… okay, it is possessiveness. You want to own it, keep it, you want it to be safe and yours so that no one can ever take it away.”
“That’s… a bit creepy,” Izuku hedged.
Kuma shrugged. “Maybe? It certainly could be… but not if you let the plant have a presence in your mind that feels the same way about you. When you own something and it owns you, too, then its love I think.”
“That doesn’t sound like love to me,” Izuku countered. Or did it? Love came in many flavors, didn’t it? Perhaps it was love for Kuma.
“Hands together,” she pushed at his fingers. “You have to really want it now. Reach out… take it!” The glass glowed between his fingers. A biting, electric warmth crackled through his veins. It was a delightful power to use, maybe even addictive. It was no wonder that twisted people like Hirano had enjoyed abusing Kuma’s quirk so much.
“There you go!” She grinned as Izuku rubbed a thumb over his cactus orb. “It’s not such a bad power, is it? Not for you.”
“Huh,” Izuku hummed to himself. “I wonder what that was about?” Some weird lucid dream that wasn’t a vision… Odd. Nothing quite like that had ever happened to him before.
It was nearly midnight and he would roll over and return to sleep except he was famished. He hadn’t been very hungry at dinner the previous evening but now the calorie deficit was catching up with him.
Izuku padded down the stairs. The light was still on in the common room. Someone else was awake at this time of night? Indeed Tokoyami perched on the couch, shoulder’s hunched, head bowed, Dark Shadow coiled about him like an angry, feathered python. “Tokoyami?” Izuku asked carefully. His classmate looked… extremely upset, feathers ruffled in all directions, eyes narrowed. “Is everything… okay?” Izuku continued carefully.
“I don’t believe it,” Tokoyami mumbled.
“What?”
“What they say about Hawks,” Dark Shadow hissed, “we don’t believe them!”
Izuku cocked his head. “I mean… it seemed pretty conclusive.”
Tokoyami’s eyes flashed. “Think about it Midoriya,” he snarled. “You’re smart and you work in the shadow, even more than me and my partner.” True. “Hawks is smart, too, do you really think--how would they have that incriminating video unless it was staged?”
“No one poses with a slasher smile like that after a murder, not unless they’re acting,” Dark Shadow put in.
“We don’t believe it,” Tokoyami repeated, arms crossed.
Personal feelings about their internship mentor interfering with logical thought processes or not, the two of them actually had a point. “And now he’s in jail but he didn’t do anything,” Dark Shadow hissed.
“What do you think happened then?” Izuku took a seat on a nearby chair.
“Hawks would never do something like this. They faked Best Jeanist’s death to help Hawks establish himself as a triple agent,” Tokoyami replied immediately, “or maybe Jeanist died of his injuries from Kamino Ward and they staged an assassination after the fact.”
Again, the feathered student wasn’t wrong. First off, Hawks had passed that secret message to Nighteye in The Book of Destro like he was being watched, like a triple agent would. Second off, The Murder Video had been immediately suspicious. Hawks didn’t seem foolish enough to document an assassination and then allow the HPSC to steal that documentation from him and catalog it. Could that have happened? Sure. Could the HPSC have authorized Hawks to murder Best Jeanist to solidify his cover as a traitor and a spy? Maybe… Receiving authorization from a government official didn’t change anything--murder was murder regardless of motive or documentation. So… was Hawks a double agent, a triple agent, or a quadruple agent? It was like trying to pick out Influx’s allegiances in the middle of the MLA War.
But shouldn’t Hawks’ status have been clear in the leaked documents? Shouldn’t it have shown up clear as day if Hawks were a triple agent…? Well, maybe not. War Dog redacted huge swathes of the pages she released. Details of Hawks’ undercover activities could have been hidden there… but if they were, why would War Dog choose to hide them? “Sorry Hawks, but we children of the trees must stick together,” seemed to have been meant honestly. War Dog actually felt sorry for Hawks, but she also seemed convinced that he really had committed a murder. The vigilante werewolf was a violent and unpredictable fighter, but there was something almost noble about her. “Snake eater” she called herself, and snakes were what she ate. If Hawks were nothing but an abused battle slave who had not committed a reprehensible crime, she wouldn’t have released any information about his undercover operations whatsoever. She outed him as a murderer because, to the best of her knowledge, it was true and he deserved to be punished. If he were a triple agent, or a triple agent turned quadruple agent, War Dog almost certainly had documentation of it and decided to keep it from the public. Why? Maybe--despite her anger--she didn’t want Hawks dead, didn’t think it would be justified to release something that would get him killed… If he were or had ever been a triple agent, outing him would almost certainly lead to his death, either in prison at the hands of another inmate or outside at the hands of the League of Villains (presuming that was who he had been working with).
“Midoriya?” Tokoyami asked him. “What’s…?”
“Oh. Sorry, I was just thinking,” the greenette replied. He had zoned out for a few minutes. What should he say to his classmate, angry and betrayed and refusing to believe his mentor could have turned on a fellow hero? Tokoyami and Dark Shadow might be right; Hawks might be on a long term deep cover assignment, or he might be a murderous traitor… or both. It could be both. “Listen--you’re right,” Izuku began. Tokoyami and Dark Shadow perked up triumphantly; clearly they hadn’t expected this response. How many people had they tried to make this argument to before Izuku? How many people had told them to stop being delusionally loyal to a disgraced monster? “That video was extremely suspicious. It’s quite possible that Hawks is a deep cover operative who didn’t do as it’s been suggested he did, but,” Izuku emphasized the word sharply, “you have no way of knowing that. That video could be exactly what it seems at first glance. If Hawks is a triple agent, it’s way, way above our pay grades. It’s not your job to sort it out; there are standard operating procedures for this situation, and you need to stay quiet about your suspicions, because if he is a triple agent and that gets spread around it could get him killed. Loose lips lose lives,” oh dear, that was something Arch used to say. “Beyond that, you have to assume that Hawks is dangerous. Whether he is a double or triple agent, he needs to act like a double agent. Do you understand?” Hopefully Tokoyami would not have the opportunity to visit Hawks in prison. That would be… bad.
“You believe us,” Dark Shadow said, sounding happier than Izuku had ever heard.
“No,” he needed to pounce on this quickly. “I agree with you that there’s some reason to suspect Hawks might be a triple agent. Belief has nothing to do with it. I know you were really close to him,” or so Izuku had surmised from this conversation, “but you can’t let that blind you. If more evidence shows up, you need to be prepared to accept it without bias. Otherwise… otherwise you and I might end up on opposite sides of a battlefield someday,” or opposite sides of a six foot slab of dirt. Tokoyami jerked in shock whereas Dark Shadow just blinked in confusion. “Don’t… don’t follow anyone down like that. Don’t choose your side because of what someone else chose.”
Tokoyami nodded stiffly, turning away. It was evident this conversation was over. Izuku sighed and returned to his quest for a midnight snack.
Maybe he shouldn’t have said anything at all.