Chapter 40
The Run

As it turned out, she'd been gone since Monday morning.

The glimpse of her voice through the office doorway – the indulgence of which Aizawa told no one about, though the thought of it burned him often – was perhaps the last anyone at the school had heard of Rin: transitory remains in the form of muttered goodbyes, frail and fleeting as the hints of her continued to disintegrate. It shouldn't have come as such a shock; on the contrary, Aizawa should have stomached it with a composed certainty and resolve. It was what he'd expected all along, after all. For her to disappear. Sand through his hands.

However, when Yamada confronted him one afternoon later in the week, looking uncharacteristically dire in his concern, the news of it crashed through Aizawa with the same shrill quality of shattering glass.

"You've been mega out of sorts, man. What's up?" Yamada had questioned with an odd note of sensitivity – unusual for him, with his bad habit of avoiding unpleasant subjects – leaning in as his voice lowered itself by a considerable number of decibels. "Something happen with Hiruma-chan?"

Doing his best to feign indifference, Aizawa had replied, "Nothing for you to be concerned about."

"Where has she disappeared to?"

By this, he had been little more than taken aback – though he didn't recall ever telling Yamada specifically that Rin had come to live with him, Aizawa half-expected the other man to be asking about the matter of their newly changed living arrangements. Word was sure to spread sooner or later (admittedly though, it did seem a little too soon for others to be finding out, given Rin's spectacular ability for keeping things to herself as well as his own silence on the matter). Aizawa, managing less to keep the discomfiture from his voice as he scrolled absent-mindedly down his computer screen, had quavered in response, "What do you mean?"

To which Yamada had pulled an incredulous face. "Well, y'know…" Suddenly seeming reluctant to pursue the conversation despite it's only having just begun. "I heard it from Kayama and figured you'd know more about it. With how quiet you've been and all – I thought you'd be missing her. Hiruma-chan, I mean."

"Heard what?"

An exaggerated shrug. Yamada had looked away, apparently no longer speaking to Aizawa specifically but instead to the unseen listeners around them. "I haven't seen her around, is all. Apparently she hasn't come back to the school since Monday."

Without further ado, Aizawa's frail attempts at avoidance were brutalized. He stumbled past Rin's office before his next class. The door was locked. No sound came from inside – and like a burly, black cloud of smoke against the sky, a hollowness descended upon the entirety of the corridor. Aizawa despaired silently within himself, wanting nothing more than to find his sleeping bag and a dark corner. For as long as the hour would allow, he paced the hallway in wait. For her. For a student who didn't know her door had closed upon them. Upon both of them. However, neither she nor an unfortunate passerby came.

And rocked as he was by such an inconvenient tragedy, sullen and brooding, Aizawa found himself able to do little more than grumble through 2A's Heroics lesson as it ticked by in unbearable slowness. Gazing hard at nothing, saying little in a state of irritability uncharacteristic even for him. Evading All Might's beady looks of care, of general understanding and unwelcome warmth. Did All Might also know she was gone? How she'd slipped from Aizawa's fingers without even the courtesy of letting him stop her?

Did Nezu know?

Of course. Of course Nezu would know.

It was with a festering resentment that Aizawa realised and stewed upon this, his antipathy simultaneously rational in its simplicity – for indeed, was it not Nezu to whom Aizawa had gone first? Was it not Nezu who'd claimed to understand, intimately, the danger of the whole thing? – while also being absurd in its zeal. In its jealousy. That the principal should be privy to the sort of things Aizawa hadn't been able to coax from Rin himself seemed… miserably unfair… and the thought of it acted with a venom both lulling and destructive. Principal Nezu would have known why Rin had left, if it was not he himself who'd made her do so. He would have known, just as he'd known all the sorts of things Aizawa hadn't when Rin had been his student.

Though the more level-headed arena of his mind realised he was likely to be embellishing – that really, Nezu was probably no more welcome in Rin's innermost workings than Aizawa himself was – he stole to the principal's office at the end of the day. Icily clear-minded; wretchedly fogged in his heart. And when he was through the door, confronted and perhaps even provoked by the bitter smell of cigarette smoke, Nezu did not seem surprised. Neither by Aizawa's presence nor by the disquietude that accompanied him.

From his place behind the imposing desk, Nezu greeted Aizawa smilingly and simply, "Ah! Good afternoon, Eraser Head!" However, beyond this, he did not bother with any sorts of formalities – instead, as if having already prepared the air for Aizawa's onslaught, he stared with flat anticipation. Unsettling, likely also a tactic for disarmament; one which may have worked, were it not for Aizawa's bubbling hostility.

He could have started with the obvious question, but by an instinctive change of direction he began by keeping his voice level and calm. "You let Paper Cut go last weekend. At the Culture Festival."

"I was wondering how long it would take before you brought it up," Nezu said with a friendly sigh.

He left the statement hanging though, as if that were an answer in itself, and Aizawa narrowed his eyes in a show of dissatisfaction. "Well?" he prompted, demanding more in response to the question before them.

"Going after Paper Cut under such circumstances would have done more harm than good," Nezu explained frankly. "It would have given Doctor Voodoo cause for concern, and if that were to happen you wouldn't be able to find him for a good number more years. You should already know that though, Eraser Head." It came as a lighthearted scold. "Disappearing is something Voodoo and his agency pride themselves on. But coaxing them out into the light isn't an impossible feat either. The trick," Nezu waved his paw in the air for effect, "is merely to boil the pot slowly. To build up the anticipation, to use just the right bait. Doctor Voodoo likes games, Eraser Head. To win, you have to play by the rules."

"Is that what you told Rin?"

A loaded, unreadable stare. "I don't understand what you mean."

Aizawa grunted sourly, closing his hands into tight fists within his pockets. "I'd like to know what you spoke about with her – Rin, Hiruma-chan – after Paper Cut left."

"Ah! That," Nezu tutted, as though Aizawa's insistence happened to be ridiculous. "Nothing of particular importance. We only spoke about chess… But come now, there's surely no need for such a grim look, Eraser Head. What has you so worried?"

"Principal Nezu," Aizawa said, raising his hand to pinch the bridge of his nose. What sort of senselessness was it that drove everyone to dance around him with riddles and half-truths? The desire to snap, to slam his hands against the rim of Nezu's desk, trembled just beneath Aizawa's flesh. However, driven by both a sense of professionalism and the need to not lose the thin grip he maintained on his remaining control, Aizawa only drew a breath of curdled air before saying with the greatest steadiness he could muster, "Please tell me where she is."

The smile across Nezu's face wavered. "Where she is?" he repeated in a bland mimic of skepticism. "But surely you already know."

"No," Aizawa just about spat, impatient and ever more confounded. "I don't."

"You mean Hiruma-chan didn't tell you?"

"She never told me a lot of things."

"But that doesn't make sense. Why wouldn't she say–"

"She left me." It came as a blow, mostly for its unexpectedness. As though having been punched through the chest, Aizawa's breath caught on the edges of his ribcage in a painful acidity. Where the words had come from – and why now, of all times – it was impossible to say, having spilled from him with the startling inadvertency of a drunken confession. It hung in the air, unsightly as soiled laundry and even more disturbing. Aizawa's face began to burn. The floor spun for a moment beneath him.

And for the first time in as long as Aizawa could remember, Nezu's face did a dramatic drop. "Oh my," the principal murmured, spinning swiftly on his chair to face away from Aizawa. "Now that isn't what I was expecting." Aizawa came closer, slightly dumbstruck before his own artlessness as well as by Nezu's subdued, pensive hum. "You're quite sure that was her intention? To leave you?"

Well.

"I don't see any other reason to believe otherwise," Aizawa said. "But what does that have to do with anything?"

Once more, Nezu twisted his chair back to its initial position. He set his gaze steadily on Aizawa, opaque and rat-like. "You have my apologies, Eraser Head." Genuine compassion in Nezu's voice was really quite alarming. Worse still, making Aizawa's organs collapse upon themselves, was the truth with which the principal subsequently said, "I'm afraid I have no idea where Hiruma-chan has gone."

Aizawa kept Rin's phone in the cupboard of his dormitory room, out of sight and for the most part out of mind. Tonight however, having skipped dinner (which wouldn't have been unusual if only he hadn't been scoffing down Rin's food for the last number of weeks like a starved beggar at a five star restaurant) and gone straight to locking himself away from the attention of his students, Aizawa ripped the device from beneath his meagre piles of clothing and clutched it between his fingers like a rare jewel. A remnant. A clue. Staring into the blackened screen as one would into the void.

He hadn't tried to guess her password. On the contrary, he'd tried his utmost not to look at the phone at all, though it vibrated with special vehemence at strange hours through the night and had become almost more of a demanding presence than even that of Class 2A on just the opposite side of the bedroom door.

With some sort of resolve which was mostly resignation, Aizawa tapped lightly at the unlock button. The screen lit up. The image of Rin's wallpaper – Blink the cat, staring with wide golden eyes into Aizawa's soul – was obstructed by a grand multitude of missed calls, the sight of which made Aizawa's innards sink and return slightly skewed to their original positions. It had been just over five days. Five days, and Rin's grandmother had called her three times. From the notification, it was possible to see the last call had been missed on Monday. Had Rin gotten hold of Granny? Told her she was safe and sound but not to be called again?

The rest of the calls, all 27 of them, were from a private number. The last of which had been two hours ago.

There were a few messages, and a few emails.

Aizawa didn't know what he was hoping to find – was about to return the phone to its hiding place once again as he heaved a morbid sigh – he was up to do so, reaching for the cupboard handle – but then, as though in resistance or enraged, the phone came to life with a violet shock in Aizawa's hand.

Private Number. Buzz. Private Number. Buzz.

It did not startle Aizawa – it would take more than that to do so. However, he did stand stunned in the center of his room's darkness for some moments. Staring with all-encompassing suspicion and indecision over the glaring title – Private Number Private Number – and the all but too-good-to-be-true timing. Deliberating, hesitating. Itching. Burning. Dying to answer. He answered. And there was an ominous silence over the line, the sort of silence that hung heavy as someone drew a breath. The sort of silence that kept Aizawa hanging onto the call, though a good number of seconds dragged by with nothing to be heard.

And when at last there came a voice, a word, a sentence, it came as a confusion of sounds layered one upon the other in a messy collage of answering-machine tones. Flat and excruciating, incensing Aizawa in their repetition of the same nonsense numbers. The same nonsense words. Once. Twice. A third time, with characters added. Four, five, in which something more coherent could be made out from the jumble. Six: an address. Tokyo. An unfamiliar ward. Seven, with the address fading back out into jumble. Eight, nine.

Aizawa spun towards his desk for pen and paper. Only too late.

Ten. The call ended on a drab recitation of mixed up letters and numbers once again, and upon the click of the line going dead Aizawa was left scraping through the muddle of digits in his memory in a feeble attempt to recall the fleeting moment of coherency. The address – Tokyo. A few numbers in no particular order.

The private number called again two hours later. This time the address was named on the fourth repeat.

And again two hours after that. The address was on the seventh repeat.

Every two hours until midnight. Then the calls stopped.

The next day, Aizawa planned to skip the staff meeting. He'd informed Principal Nezu of his expected absence, had received no objection in return, and now itched in wait for the end of the day. Curled in his sleeping bag at his desk in the teachers' office – sleep evading him with greater ease than usual, his mind piercingly awake and over-aware of everything and nothing as the hour ticked by. It was only eleven o'clock. 2A's English period. A gloomy air of thick grey outside the window, making the white light of the office seem clinical and harsh. Against it, Aizawa squinted at the crinkled note-paper in his hand, scrawled and scratched with pen.

He'd searched the address. He'd ruminated over the implications for the majority of his sleepless hours – and when he'd pulled out the newspaper article from Rin's apartment, tenderly hidden in amongst his administrative folders, it was as he'd suspected. The warehouse. The address was the warehouse, profoundly haunted by the ghost of a dead child trafficker and due any week now for demolition.

Upon the realization, Aizawa had waited for the headache to strike. He'd grown overly-aware of its approach, was an expert now at identifying the oozing sneak of its symptoms as the pain poised itself with hateful intention: the dull contraction at the back of his neck, the subtle flow of sensitivity into all his senses. He'd waited. Prepared himself for it. But it never came, and so Aizawa pushed onwards in a deliberate hunt for pictures and more information. He saved photos of the dilapidated, phantom-esque warehouse from every angle the internet would allow. He read up on the short, uninteresting history. He avoided thinking too deeply about what he himself may have known, for fear of the debilitating guardianship over his memories.

He'd split himself into two over the matter. The information which struck him with the same effect as a revelation. Mostly, he'd ached to catch a train to Tokyo in the dead hours of the night – Rin could have been there. Rin could have been there. Rin could have been there. And she could have been in danger. And Aizawa brought himself close to the knife's edge by thinking of it. But a detached logic, for once more powerful, overruled the urge: it may have been a cruel trick, the devil aiming to distract Aizawa with empty leads and ever-spiraling possibilities. It could have been a wild goose chase, a hunt for ghosts that fostered no plans to make themselves known.

And so in spite of the wild thrash of his heart, the feral toss of his pulse in his ears, Aizawa waited. He did not act rashly, thinking time and time again of Nezu's infuriating cunning – use just the right bait, he'd said. Doctor Voodoo and Paper Cut could have been doing the same thing. Aizawa checked his phone and his computer and, now poorly-concealed within his desk drawer, Rin's phone with the same restless urgency as one waiting to hear some terrible news. Everything was quiet, everything was still and unchanging. No new notifications. No new addresses.

Aizawa did not act rashly.

It was eleven thirty. Aizawa heard his name from the door, and jolted from his brooding he looked up with speed enough to make something at the back of his head twinge.

Bakugo. Bakugo stood there in the doorframe, clutching something at his side and looking irate. Mouth twisted sourly, eyes narrowed – though more in some distant thought of his own than any hostility, it seemed. He marched into the teachers' office, coming towards Aizawa with a measured determination. He rounded the desks, screwing up his face ever more as he grew closer. Aizawa noticed in Bakugo's hand an envelope, but did not make any show of paying attention to it.

"Did Present Mic finish your lesson early?" he questioned flatly.

To which Bakugo replied with a grunting spit, "I had to be excused."

"What for?"

Now before him, Bakugo thrust the envelope out for Aizawa to behold more clearly. "This was in my bag. I don't know what sort of shitty joke it is or which idiot put it there, but it's for you and not for me."

Aizawa narrowed his eyes, twisting a hand out from his sleeping bag to take the envelope, where indeed his name was written in delicate calligraphy across the front. The seal was crinkled oddly, undulating like ripples of white water as though opened and poorly reclosed. "You couldn't wait until after class to bring this to me?" Aizawa posed, and Bakugo only shoved his hands into his pockets with a huff. After a pause, growing ever more anxious, Aizawa felt his eyes begin to sting. "Did you open it?"

"I'm no sleaze-bag!" Bakugo asserted, features contorting into an incensed redness at the suggestion. "I didn't touch the fucking thing."

"It was only a question."

The boy pulled a face, embarrassed without looking it, and darted his eyes away with a loud, "Tch."

A silence, uncomfortable and unwieldy, fell between them. Its burdened quality made Aizawa reluctant to dismiss Bakugo, and seemed to make Bakugo reluctant to leave. They remained in their positions, frozen and waiting – waiting for the other to make a move, waiting for some sort of balance of power to reestablish itself. Bakugo, swallowing several times on nothing while refusing to meet Aizawa's eye, shifted his weight from foot to foot. Aizawa lowered his gaze to the envelope. Clutching it tighter. Looking back to Bakugo. Feeling his body grow heavy and unnerved within the warmth of his sleeping bag.

At last, he was about to speak. What sort of words would escape him this time, he couldn't say. But Bakugo beat him to it, propelling that intense look of attention over Aizawa as he said through close-to-gritted teeth, "She said she'd come back."

Before this – the implicit question, the restrained defenselessness which leaked through Bakugo's loaded expression – Aizawa was at a loss. He knew not what to say. So he said nothing.

And Bakugo, shifting his weight again, balling his hands so that they bulged into fists within his pockets, pursed his lips. "Will she?"

"I don't know."

Bakugo threw his gaze to the side again, saying with a farcical confidence, "She was the nicest person in this fucking school."

"I know."

Quietly, clearly unsatisfied but with nothing more to add – or perhaps no strength with which to say anything else – the boy turned and left the teachers' office in an undemonstrative meander. He muttered something to himself, the words tangling into an inaudible breeze of emotion, and Aizawa wished he could explain just how much he understood. It had been there, and however surprising it may have been under normal circumstances, Aizawa recognised without the slightest inkling of disbelief the loss in Bakugo's voice. As though he knew he didn't need to ask whether or not Rin was coming back. As though his words – She was the nicest person in this fucking school – were more eulogy than simple statement.

Tearing his eyes from Bakugo's back as the boy receded out into the corridor, Aizawa grasped the envelope harshly. The faint tremble about his fingers made the rims of the paper shake noticeably. The seal lacked any grip, and came undone with the same ease as bread breaking apart.

Inside was a photo of the warehouse's grimy exterior, taken from the empty parking lot overgrown with weeds and cracked concrete. Swirling clouds swarmed in from the distant sky. The lines and shadows blurry, as though shot in a careless rush but making the scene all the more unreal in its melancholy isolation. It was dated with the day and time in the corner, dull and red – taken yesterday evening. The address was written in stupidly extravagant calligraphy on the back, the characters' new familiarity making Aizawa's jaw clench in an instinctive defensiveness.

And behind it, another photo. Taken mere minutes after the first. Blacker, the surroundings obscure and blobby, but with light enough for the dazed, bruised, beautiful face in the center to be grotesquely clear. Aizawa's heart plunged. He twisted the photo to glimpse its back, and with a horror too immense to be suppressed by any sort of rationality, he read over the words – flouncy and thickly lined, expertly infuriating Aizawa in their nonchalant luxury – once, twice, thrice. Taking great pains to absorb their meaning through his sudden stupor.

Come get me, Aizawa-sensei - and come alone xoxo

He threw the photos into his drawer. He threw them, shut them away, and he ran.