Chapter 45
Fate

Like sunlight through a pond, pools of dull colour swirled in the blackness behind Aizawa's lids. He rasped. A shudder travelled through him, down every inch of flesh and muscle he could still feel. Limbs disconnected, strange figments lolling about his insides.

He was floating somewhere, up into bright light with swaddling clouds of cottony white falling about him. He wasn't in pain but he dared not move, rested as there was a weighty numbness about his forehead and temples, between which a quiet throb – throb – throb swam back and forth. Floating into cold sunlight. His eyes cracked open, a slither of slicing intensity across his pupils, and he became aware for the first time of a lackluster beeping. A mechanical whirring. The sting of vile stiffness down his arms and back.

Every inch of him felt sensitive and full, swelling at the seams. Aizawa imagined inky purple darkness up and out along his skin, as though he'd been thrown piece by piece down a cliff face, collecting bruising jewels on his way down. Down, down, down.

Thirst drowned him, his throat somehow sticky and charred.

His eyes opened more fully against the light. There was around him a clinical walling of pastels and plainness, his own body before him covered in a thin sheet of white. Was this the morgue? Was he dead, his ghost now looking upon himself?

A needle was in the back of his hand.

The beeping continued.

"Ah, Eraser Head – awake at last," a voice said, and feebly, appalled by his own slowness, Aizawa screwed his head to the side. A pillow beneath him. A table of blurry objects upon which he couldn't quite focus. And there, on a high stool next to him, Nezu smiled thinly.

"Awake?" Aizawa repeated, though the word came out scratchy and distorted.

"How are you feeling?"

"Thirsty."

"Here." Taking from the side table a full glass, Nezu handed it to Aizawa.

His arm lifted with painful effort, fingers seemingly hesitating to wrap around the glass, and when at last he managed to drink it was silk down his throat. Pouring through his chest and lungs in stale, perfect coolness. He gasped and gently thrust the glass back towards Nezu, a quiet plead for more. A plead to which the principal obliged meekly, refilling the glass from a dispenser on the other end of the room and returning to his seat. Staring down as Aizawa drank, saying nothing and smiling that same, loaded smile.

With a labored sigh, Aizawa dropped his hand and the glass to his side. Head back on the pillow, closing his eyes as though to sleep – yes, sleep seemed a marvelous idea – he hummed in response to Nezu's slow, careful questions.

"Are you in any pain, Eraser Head?" Mmm. "Shall I call a nurse?" Mmm-mmm. "Do you remember everything?"

"M–" What was everything? What more was there to remember? The soundless images of crinkling bodies and Yukio's mouth split wide in dogged cries; blood and bones that cracked without cracking. And Doctor Voodoo, face a fleeting horror in the dark recesses, his eyes staring down Aizawa's throat into his beating heart – how had no one ever noticed? The greens. The greens of his eyes, glowing and lecherous and mythical in their depth. "Of course I fucking remember," Aizawa spat, rather too quietly for his taste. "Where is he?"

Placing his paws together in his lap, nodding unaffectedly in the face of Aizawa's rising ire, Nezu said, "In Tartarus." A thoughtful, though unwelcoming pause. "Since the arrest, overwhelming evidence has begun to flood–"

"I meant Yukio," Aizawa demanded. At that moment, the thought of Doctor Voodoo was rather too much for him. "Where is Yukio?"

And with a sudden, shocking wave of sympathy – making his mousey features drop into a soft, sad mask – Nezu sighed. Aizawa's heart plunged. "He passed away two nights ago."

It shot through him worse than any bullet. He didn't know why, but a carnal pain reared itself in his chest, his gut.

"Hiruma-chan was able to prevent the majority of the damage from his wound. Blood loss and the like," Nezu said, muted. "But I don't think that poor child had any will left to live. His heart simply stopped beating. Though if I might say, it's better this way. For him as well as for our investigation, callous though it may seem – it appears the effects of his quirk were cancelled out. Many witnesses have been coming forward with new–"

Aizawa's heart seemed to cave in on itself. Yukio was dead, and without explanation a hole seemed to open itself up. Glaring and Yukio-shaped. He hadn't even felt much more than disdain for Yukio, and whether by guilt or by being desperately overcome with unwieldy emotion, Aizawa was struck hard by the urge to cry. "Was Rin with him?" he questioned in something of a gasp. Breathless. Reeling. "With Yukio, when he died?"

Nezu nodded again. "Until the very last moment."

"Rin–"

"She was discharged yesterday."

Discharged. The word was hung with weighty implication, like rotting grapes upon a vine as they dropped blackened and sweet. Aizawa blinked once, twice again, waiting for more though sensing a dire finality in the words. She was gone – she hadn't come to see him – she'd been discharged from the hospital, the prison, the morgue in which Aizawa now lay and he wanted to see her but she wouldn't come. Perhaps Nezu saw it, the pale melancholy as it crossed Aizawa's face in miniscule twitches and drops, for he smiled and sighed once again.

Black eyes shining, full of higher knowing, his paws remained clasped in his lap as he leaned forward upon the chair. In a calm, tiresome voice – ever pacifying and now more than ever making Aizawa's teeth grate – he spoke affectionately, "There's something I'd like you to know, Eraser Head, now that all of this over." Something inside of Aizawa unfurled itself under the weight of Nezu's gaze: a sleeping knowledge suddenly waking, a premonition previously ignored now announcing itself loud and unbearable. Since forever, he'd known what was coming, yet to hear it was ripping. "I was the one who told Hiruma-chan to have your memories taken away."

Aizawa understood but could say nothing. Rin had left him for this. After they'd kissed that first night in his apartment, after everything, she'd fled from his mind and heart still without an explanation in her own words. And now here was Nezu, soft-spoken as though this were not a knifing betrayal.

Heedless of the way Aizawa glared, the principal continued, "Do you remember I told you Voodoo and I played chess back in the days?"

Aizawa said nothing.

"Well, since Hiruma-chan started at UA, we've been playing an even bigger game. And she was my most powerful piece," Nezu said, and there was a wavering irony. "You see Eraser Head, I've always had my suspicions about Voodoo, but have never been able to make any conclusive moves against him. Because of his connections. Because of how easily he slips from sight. But when I discovered his interest in Hiruma-chan – quite momentous, really, since he has never paid much attention to the students at our school – I seized the opportunity."

Were it not for the numbing weakness down his spine, Aizawa's hands would have been around the rodent's neck, silencing him. How dare he speak like this? Of Rin as a piece. An opportunity.

Was he himself simply that to Nezu? A piece?

"I trained her for this very specific purpose, knowing that only she would be able to slip into Voodoo's trust. Psychology, manipulation, the works," Nezu said simply. "I never told her my intentions until she came to me one night saying she didn't want to be a hero anymore. That there was something she wanted much more…"

Had it been for that that she'd come? That night in his apartment, her lips against his and her eyes all dewy with a confused cocktail of emotion. For this? For him, from the very start?

Nezu's smile widened. "You loved her. I only realised it then – indeed, you did a fine job of hiding it, Eraser Head. But you loved her and it would have jeopardized everything. So I gave her the choice." He held out a paw as though to balance the immensity of the revelation in his palm. "I did give her a choice," he repeated. "Either she could help me uncover Doctor Voodoo's secrets – because only she was in a position to do so – and potentially bring an end to a large ring of criminal activity. But she would be alone. And before now, only her and I and the Chief of Police have known about this mission. To have involved anyone else would have been… too much of a risk." He paused, letting it all sink in.

"Or," Nezu held out his other paw, "she could love you in return. Love you freely, though knowing Doctor Voodoo is not a man to simply let things go. He'd put too much work into her to allow her to simply slip away." Dropping his paws, shaking his head in an attempt to look regretful, Nezu said, "She chose the first. And she realised the need to let you go."

"You used her," Aizawa hissed, all the venom rising out from the depths of his soul. "You used her and now you've used me."

Nezu nodded. "I did use her. But I didn't count on you coming back into her life so soon."

"People fucking died."

Ears pricking upwards, Nezu smiled. "Yes. People did die, but no one was killed."

Aizawa stared at him, confused and angry. More riddles.

"Paper Cut was taken into custody and questioned, and after many stolen memories of his own were returned, he confessed to many things. The three from the agency Hiruma-chan involved in the investigation, for example, were Doctor Voodoo's suicide bombers, intended to make her think she was responsible for unnecessary deaths." Cocking his head, looking smug. "It seems Voodoo found out about our operation some months ago and has been making preparations. Not to escape. He knew he'd been caught. But instead to make Hiruma-chan suffer. The way he has gone after you. Yukio's death. It has had nothing to do with anyone but Hiruma-chan."

"So all this time–"

"It's been a game. And Doctor Voodoo is rather an unwilling loser, though he knows when he's been beat."

Unsteadily, Aizawa pushed himself up to sit, to come eye-to-eye with Nezu. To stare daggers into him on a more equal footing.

"The only reason it's gone on so long," Nezu said, "was because we were working our hardest to get Voodoo out in the open. Not Yukio. Not Paper Cut. Him. And I needed the right bait for that. I needed you."

"So Rin lured me to the warehouse."

"I told her to. That day at the Culture Festival. I explained my strategy but she refused." His ears pricked happily once again. "I suppose that's why she left you then."

To remember it, how his heart had splintered into shards about his ribcage, brought a sour burn to Aizawa's gut. "But – she left her phone. I got phone calls–"

Nezu made a tutting sound. "Believe it or not, Eraser Head, that was probably an accident. Intelligent as she is, Hiruma-chan is butter-fingered and careless. Many times I've had to clean up certain trails she's left behind… Really, it's a miracle she wasn't found out sooner."

Looking down to his hands, one of them bandaged up from a wound he didn't remember receiving, Aizawa spoke more now to himself than to any other listener, "And the letter."

"Bakugo opened it and brought it to me first."

"That fucking–" Aizawa's head shot upwards, sending a plastering pain down his spine though through his disgust he was able to ignore it. "You brought my student to the warehouse! He could have been killed… Do you understand what sort of trouble that would cause for the school? After everything!"

"I'm afraid there was no talking the boy out of it. He's very attached to Hiruma-chan and was very insistent on joining myself and the other teachers in the raid. We got hold of the police immediately. It all happened much faster than you might believe."

Indeed, it all crashed down in violent blurs. Words. Explanations. Sounds that meant everything but which Aizawa simply couldn't string together in his mind. He felt his neck go limp beneath the weight of his skull, and he sagged forwards upon the bed in a dejected, overwhelmed slouch. Exhaustion came like a smoke. It hit him with the force of tumbling waves. More questions seemed superfluous, knowing as Aizawa did that no more answers would reach him in any comprehensible form. He thought again of Doctor Voodoo, the eyes he should have recognised. He thought again of Yukio, and of Paper Cut. And of Rin. All of this – could all of this really have been because of her?

"But…" Aizawa breathed, something of a stammer resounding in his pulse. "Why?" Why, what? What logic, what clues was he looking for? There'd be no making sense of it. Maybe in some days, maybe after weeks or years. But now nothing could reach him. Still, he repeated it, and elicited a surprised shuffle from Nezu, "But why would he do all of this to his daughter?"

Silent for a moment, Nezu pulled something from the side table. Through a daze, Aizawa noticed the papery curve, the heft of documents. Gently, two folders were placed in his lap, and with a faraway, underwater quality he heard Nezu say, "There is no reason other than that he can."

Two names. Two photos, each one stamped with the miserably familiar symbol of Child Welfare. The first, Mujitsu Yukio. The second, Hikisaku Kizashi, a little face too familiar for Aizawa to look at it in all its childish, long-gone misery. Swollen eyes. Split lip. Like a disease, Aizawa pushed both the folders away. He didn't need to read to know what Nezu was trying to say. Rin wasn't the only one. She wasn't the only one caught up in this.

"Where–"

"Back at her apartment," Nezu declared, jumping from his stool and making to leave.

After four glasses of wine, her head was spinning, and it was as though the floor fell out beneath her feet when she rose from the couch. Rin was only vaguely aware of the knocking at the door, caught up as she was in the stifled sound of sobs as she swallowed them down with the acidic fruitiness of her merlot's aftertaste. With the sleeve of her jersey, she scrubbed at the wetness across her cheeks. Wishing away whoever was outside and half-damning them because for fuck's sake, she wanted to die. She wanted to lie down on her couch's faded material, and curl up into a ball as pathetic as she felt, and disappear entirely.

The knocking grew more insistent, a violent throb like wood being chopped. Muffled by the dizzy pressure between the walls of her skull. She had her hand upon the doorknob before she realised she'd moved her arm, but instead of opening she simply stood there, her forehead against the wood and her eyes falling heavily towards the floor. Go away. She was too drunk. She was too tired. Her face burned and her hair was oily around her scalp, like a gross slick of neglect.

It was over, but god did she feel so much worse than ever before. Everything pulling down on her, clutching at her innards and soul the way Yukio had clutched her hand.

He had looked at her so softly. No matter how many times she'd told him she was sorry, he had smiled up at her with that skew, sharp-toothed smile – It's fine now, Rin-chan. I'm going to go now – and then he'd slipped out from her grasp like night faded into sunrise. Quietly, sighing. Features pastel with relief. And Rin wished she could do everything differently. She wished someone better could have protected him – because she had tried and failed, had tried ever since she was a little girl to keep him safe just as she'd been kept safe by love and heroes. But no. She didn't know what it was to be safe, not really, and Yukio should have been allowed to die a lot sooner and in much gentler arms than he had.

She heard her name. Her heart skidded up into her throat and she was sure she'd be sick. Harsh reverberations of his fist against the door. "Rin, please let me in."

Outside, it was frozen and dark, stars hanging glittery and still in the blackness. And Shouta was there. And he was swaying before Rin's vision, though perhaps that was her own fault, the fault of the wine's. Eyes encircled by tired shadows. The cuts across his cheeks had scabbed and bruised. He looked down at her, hard and ruffled and everything she'd ever wanted, and Rin – looking up at him and refusing to look away because every night she'd dreamed of him and it had torn her heart to shreds to find it hadn't been real – found her lungs floundering for air.

"You were discharged," Shouta said, the sound of it dry and painful.

The sensation in Rin's own throat was sharp. "So were you."

"No. Not really. The nurse's don't know I'm gone."

"What?"

"I'm coming in."

He pressed past, only the slightest graze of his arm against hers, and Rin shuddered. For what seemed an age, she stared at the place he'd stood while listening to his boots drop behind her, to his socked feet tapping through her apartment in heavy, uncertain steps. Could he have been here, truly? Or was this some sort of wine-drunk dream into which she'd stumbled? Wonderful and awful, with all the vivid lucidity of reality to make it all the worse.

She turned, heart trembling with the threat of escape from her ribcage, and watched Shouta lift the bottle of merlot from the dining table to throw down what remained inside of it. He pulled a face, crinkles in his brow and nose, and pressed his fingers to his eyes. "That's disgusting," he muttered. "Do you have more?"

With a sudden, shocking clarity of mind, Rin did her best to walk straight. Into the kitchen, feeling Shouta's eyes in the back of her neck – she was too cowardly to return his gaze, but too weak to resist several desperate glances in his direction as she poured more wine. Two glasses: one fresh from the cupboard, the other stained from several days of over exertion. Leaving the hospital, she'd bought four bottles of red and some packets of rice cakes. This would be the last wine. She had perhaps three rice cakes left, but no appetite for anything more.

They drank in the kitchen, under dull light and silence. Shouta swallowed gulps at a time, saying nothing but watching Rin over the rim of his glass; she sipped more hesitantly, willing herself to sober up but at the same time begging to be more drunk. It would be easier to take whatever Shouta had to say if she was in a daze; she'd be able to accept his hatred if she had the numb slackness of liquid courage.

At last, wiping the final traces of alcohol from his lips with the back of his hand, Shouta set the wine glass aside and met Rin's eye without barriers. "Why didn't you come?" he questioned blandly, though Rin knew the question was anything but bland. "In the hospital. You never came to see me."

Tears pricked at the corners of her eyes. "I thought you probably wouldn't want me to." More quietly, she added, "Ever."

"Nezu told me everything."

She wanted to tell him she was sorry – but the syllables now seemed tasteless and wasted upon her tongue, after all the times they'd already been spilled. She wanted to tell him how much she wished she'd been the one to say everything that until now had gone unsaid – but she'd had plenty of opportunity and it had been her choice to shut up.

"Is it true?"

He already knew the answer. But still, with uncomfortable quickness, Rin replied, "Yes."

Things fell into a hush once again, poignant and pregnant. Rin twisted herself against the kitchen counter, and breathed in a considerable flow of her wine. It lingered in her throat. She wondered how possible it would be for her to drown herself on alcohol.

Shouta said her name, followed by incoherent syllables, but through a sudden surge of some wicked hopelessness, Rin cut in sharply, "You don't have to say anything."

Then that look crossed his eyes, and it jolted Rin as though she'd seen her reflection move of its own volition. He looked at her like he was looking at stars die, or like he was listening to a beautiful, sad song. "I want to say something," he said, resolute and quiet. "And I want you to say things in return. Real things, because now this is over and it will all be very different from now on."

It didn't make much sense, dipped in the nonsensical filter of shallow intoxication. Still, sensing she was obligated to be obliging while also realising her heart's own weakness – indeed, it had things to say, and after all this time, it seemed there was no harm in loosening the restraints (or rather, there was no point in staying quiet any longer) – Rin nodded, clasping her wine glass like a lifeline between her hands and waiting, waiting for Shouta to speak.

He sighed. "I'm sorry about Yukio. But you don't have to say anything to that. What I want to know is if Nezu told you to keep my memories a secret even after we… were together. Again."

"No," Rin said, trembling, clawing through the fugue over her own thoughts to remember things clearly. "He didn't really tell me to do anything. I – I just – there were so many reasons I didn't want you to remember even though if you had it would all have been… I don't know… a lot simpler I guess. But I was–"

"Scared?"

Rin nodded feebly.

"Because you thought I'd see you differently?"

Looking down at her glass, swirling the sliver of wine remaining, Rin felt a whimper begin to sew itself in her throat. Yes. She'd been scared he'd see her differently – because she had bad blood inside her veins, the blood of a monster. And she'd tried to bleed it out. She'd only guessed at it years after the fact. She'd only seen her face in his eyes and had been overwhelmed by the sneaking foreboding. It was true now, written out in DNA tests and a doctor's signature of confirmation, but even if it had only been a guess back then Rin had wanted to hide herself and Shouta from such an unfair, terrible truth.

Shouta pushed his glass along the counter behind him. "Did it also have anything to do with what happened between us that night you came to my apartment? After your graduation, I mean, when we–"

"Yes," Rin murmured. "It also had to do with that."

It struck her heart to see such a pained expression cross his features usually so composed and cool. "Why?"

"Shouta," his name flowed like honey from her lips, and it drained her greatly not to throw her head into his chest. "Every single day since then, I've regretted not choosing you." Rin's chest cracked. The hills and crevices of her heart began to squeeze themselves out. "But whatever happened between us back then was… it wasn't healthy. Every single thing I did revolved around you. I didn't care about becoming a hero. Ever since I was little I just wanted to be with you in some form or another because I couldn't imagine ever being whole without you. And I think you felt the it's not up to us to make each other whole."

He said nothing, but paid her all the world's attention.

Rin felt her finger press into her lip, and she bit down. She didn't quite get the thrill of the pain, not consciously at least, but the pressure of what it should have been was disarming. She dropped her finger with agonizing slowness, her teeth having left fine indentations in its tip, and allowed her mouth to curl unhappily. "I wanted to start again," she said. "Things were different, or are different, and I thought we had a chance to be something. But I wanted to do it right. Without such a mess of feelings."

"And Paper Cut?"

"What about him?"

"Did you love him?"

The seventeen year old somewhere within Rin's greatest depths squirmed. And cried. And cried and cried. "I think I thought I did." One last sip from her glass, to make it bearable, though like a ghost from her teenage mistakes, the sour burn seemed more of smoke than of grapes quashed into wine. She imagined goosebumps over all the places Kizashi's hands had stroked and smacked and scratched. She recalled the sear of his cigarettes into her side, and of how he'd whispered her name with all the apple-sweet temptation of serpents. "We were both fucked up inside. And I think we'd convinced ourselves that we needed each other. I made him feel better, and he–"

Shouta's eyes were narrowed. "But you didn't love him."

"No."

"Do you love me?"

The question wasn't fair. Not nearly so simple. But Rin had thought about it many times. Many times since she was a little girl. She set aside her own wine glass, suddenly defenseless without anything for her hands to hold. "Yes," she said, as honest as she could ever be. "I do."

Beneath the ragged sag of his clothing, Shouta's body almost deflated, as though Rin's answer were a puncturing needle into the stiff tension through his limbs. He gazed at her, sizing up every small twitch of her features, and she let him though the alcohol burned in her cheeks and salt seared her eyes. Beneath her, her legs were quivering, and like sand she was about to crumble. Shouta was saying nothing, and perhaps that was the end. Maybe now he would leave satisfied into the night, and she'd be left quite deservingly alone.

But no! What was this?

Before Rin could realise, his arms were around her. Her face in his shoulder – and oh, that warm, musky smell – and his hands against her gently – and the scratch of his stubble, coarse and wonderful, against her cheek. She could feel his heartbeat, and in the touch of his lips to her ear, innocent and quiet, the world and Heaven and Hell collided in shattering, gorgeous brightness. "Tell me again," he said. "Tell me you love me." And suddenly, as implosions of feeling melted out like gold, there seemed nothing in the world left to say.