Well with all my motivation to write so much this week... it didn't really work out - you might have realized there was no extra update this week. Also... I draw threateningly close to the end of my already written chapters. Normally when I post I already have the next three or so chapters (almost) ready to go. Now, I'm running out of chapters, as I somewhat hide from the obligation of writing this next conflict. It's a lot more difficult than I had expected.


A Nightly Incident

It was early in the morning on Sunday when he suddenly woke up. It was still dark outside, still too early to go to work. It was Sunday, but to him Sundays were as much work as any other day of the week. There had been a time when he had tried to take two Sunday's a month off, to spend time with his family. Those times were long past. Touya had only been four then, or maybe five… Shoto hadn't even been born yet, and Natsuo…

He didn't remember. Maybe he had already been born. But he would have been very small. He wouldn't remember anyway. He wondered if even Fuyumi and Touya would remember those times.

It had ultimately not been positive for his hero rankings, so he had stopped taking time off, unless it was truly necessary.

For the Hero Rankings, only three factors were really important. Number of cases solved, public approval ratings, and attribution to society. His popularity had always been abysmal compared to other high-ranking heroes, so he couldn't bank on public approval ratings. As he avoided talk shows and public outings like the Pest, and since he also wasn't the most inspiring hero, his score for attribution to society was always just mediocre. So, he had to try his hardest to dominate the last category. And that he did. For years, he was dominating the ranking for heroes with most solved cases. Five years ago, he had officially become the single one hero with the most cases solved in the history of japan. Every day he didn't work, he would lose a little of his lead.

Of course, hero rankings weren't everything. Becoming Number One on the billboard charts had never been his primary goal. He had wanted to be the strongest, stronger than All Might, and strength was the one factor that didn't really work into the hero rankings. If he were honest, if he had tried, if he had gone to talk shows or other PR-events, maybe he would have even been able to beat All Might in these rankings. He already had more solved cases… Put a bit of effort into his reputation, throw a few million yen at charities and he might have made it. Not likely, but possible. But he had wanted to win this number one position by merit, by power, and sweat and hard work. Sneaking the number one position away by kissing up to the public or the jury who would decide the rankings had never been his goal. He wanted to be the strongest hero. The one and only.

So, official hero rankings weren't the most important thing, but they were the best measuring stick he had. And among the three categories acknowledged via the billboard charts, the number of cases solved was the only thing he himself put any value on.

Ultimately, he had decided that his work and ambition were more important than his family. In the end, with him, it always came down to this. Work was the most important.

Still, he normally tried to get at least a bit of much needed sleep done on Sundays, sleeping a little longer than normally.

And he hadn't even slept last night. He had expected to be dead to the world for at least ten hours straight, if not half the day. Yet, as he looked out the window, it was dark outside. The moon shone silver lines on his tatami floor boards.

There were lights outside. Cars passing-by or parked at the street outside his property, but the sky was still pitch black.

Why was he awake?

Then he heard it. There was a small noise, like a scraping on wood.

He sat upright in his bed, listening. There it was again. Like a tap-tap on the ground. Was somebody sneaking outside his window?

He moved his blanket away and stood up as silently as he could walking up to his window. As he glanced outside, he couldn't see anything but the lights at first. It was unusually bright, like a car was parked just outside shining straight onto his property. He blinked against the bright light, trying to see anything else, but failing. There were shadows moving, but that could just be from the wind moving the branches of the big peach tree in front of the house.

Still, he was sure somebody was here to make the noise. But if so, why hadn't the alarm system triggered? For a second of sudden fright, he wondered if he hadn't switched it on that night, but of course it worked with a timer. It should have warned him if somebody had entered his property during the night unauthorized.

It should have… but either it had failed, or he was imagining things, because now that he managed to shake off the heavy drowsiness, he could hear it clearly.

Barefoot, he sneaked up to his door, sliding it open and entering the corridor. He was quite sure he could hear people, two or three of them, whispering. They didn't seem to be in the house, but just outside. He walked down to the side exit which led to the patio with the small pond.

As he opened the door and stepped outside, he could hear feet shuffle hastily on wooden ground, but as he looked around, he still couldn't see anything. The bright headlights were at the front of the house. They hardly reached here, but with the moon and stars and the lights coming from a close by apartment complex, it was enough that he could make out exactly what was in front of him.

If he turned left now, he would find his way to the dojo. Instead, he went right to walk around the house to the other side.

As he turned around the corner he was immediately blinded by the lights. They must have put them on full beam. It hurt his eyes to the point that he raised his hand protectively in front of his face, and blinked rapidly to get used to the dazzling brightness.

"Faster," he heard a woman. He could hear somebody move hurriedly across the yard. Then he could finally make out two silhouettes, dark against the light.

He activated his fire immediately. He didn't know who these guys were, but they were on his property, and they must have disabled his security system and now they were obviously running without him ever having seen their faces.

He was only in a pair of boxer shorts and a tank top that immediately sizzled and burned in the fire, leaving him bare chested. But he still wasn't fast enough. As his fire shot towards them, he could hear car doors slamming and the motor roaring to life. One of them seemed to hesitate at the car and look back at him. Now that the trespassers were behind the headlights Enji could only barely make out their shapes. But he was sure one of them stood for a moment.

He put more force into his fire, but it collided with something… Water! He realized it only as the cloud of hot steam surrounded. He ran out of the boiling hot air, skin red from the heat, towards the main street.

But the car was already racing away. He looked around angrily. Then there was a sudden flash.

He turned towards the news crew in sudden realization that he wasn't alone. Since when were they back? He raised his arms to shield himself from the camera light. It was only when he raised his arms to his face that he realized he stood there only in boxers, his chest and back exposed to the public. All his scars open to be seen and judged by everyone.

Not just the cut over his face, but all of them. The deep scar tissue in his side where the Noumu had ripped his guts open. His left arm still mangled where the Noumu had flayed skin and flesh from his bone when Endeavor had relentlessly burned it from the inside out, while its mouth and teeth kept regenerating endlessly, digging into his forearm. His right arm still marred with the burn mark Dabi had left there during his encounter. Shigaraki Tomura's distorted handprint on his chest. The bullet marks where his own son had tried to kill him. Even the fading bruises on his chest from the Friday patrol were still visible.

A thousand other scars that marked his body from thirty years of fighting villains.

Endeavor didn't dislike his scars. Most he had well-earned in tough battles. Some remind him of failures, some of his victories. Some of long forgotten shock and past anxiety, and some of very current trauma and real nightmares. Some, like the little bullet wounds his son had left on his skin, he could still hardly look at; and some he wore with pride.

Still, no hero wanted their scars and injuries to be in the public eye. No hero wanted the world to know how vulnerable they were. He couldn't do anything to hide his facial scar, but for the others… There was a reason he mostly wore long sleeved clothes that closed to his neck.

He immediately withdrew to his yard. Whoever that was on his property was long gone anyway, and because of the bright lights from the headlights, he hadn't been able to get a clear view of the car, never mind the license plate. They were gone.

What had they…?

As he turned back to his front doors. There in broad letters of dark red paint words were smeared over his door and walls.

"Death to Villains! Death to Abusers! Death to the False Heroes!"

He stood deathly still for a moment. Those words… He remembered them well enough. "The Hero License is no license to abuse! Death to Villains! Death to Abusers!" Weren't those the words that had been left by the people who had rescued the Raining Man before he reached Tartarus?

And somebody had just used water to block his attack resulting in a big cloud of steam that had dissolved into the air as soon as they had made their successful getaway.

He tried to remember everything Inari had told him about the group that had freed the Raining Man. There had been three people, plus the Raining Man. And one of them had a quirk that could jam communications. At least that had been the police's assumption at the time.

He ground his teeth in anger as he entered the house again and threw the disgustingly dirtied door shut behind himself. Turning to the alarm system next to the door, he could see that it was switched off but looked undamaged. He tapped against it with impatient fingers, but it didn't go back online. Instead, the screen remained black and dead. He pressed 'Standby' several times, but nothing happened. Had they used an electricity quirk to short-circuit it? That was surely possible, even if they hadn't entered the house. Somebody with a good and precise electricity quirk could do this. He took the system off the wall.

Enji was a bit rough as he wrenched the plastic case open to see if there was any visible damage, but he couldn't see anything. He wasn't an electrician, but the wiring seemed fine to his untrained eye. His eyes found the batteries. Maybe the problem was them…

He put the system on the shoe cabinet in the hall. He would just take it with him to work and let the Support Team look over it. They were more knowledgeable than him in this field. Surely, they would find out what was wrong with the system.

And until then… He went to his home office, and onto the computer to activate his old back-up security system. It wasn't quite up to par, but it would hold for a few days, he hoped. In any case, if he had enemies who could so easily sidestep the best home security system on the market… It would just be a waste of money to buy a new system immediately without knowing how they had managed to circumvent it. They would just destroy the new one just like this one.

A glance at the clock revealed that it was 6 AM. He had slept for eight solid hours. Better than nothing. No point going back to sleep. With his luck, he would just get a nightmare. When he wasn't quite so tired anymore, those were more and more common.

He drank a coffee in the kitchen, put the empty cup in the dishwasher and contemplated whether to put it on or not. Since he spent most of his days at work, ate lunch and dinner either in the Endeavor Hero Agency cafeteria or out on patrol, he hardly even ate anything here anymore. At most, he enjoyed his breakfast at home and even then, he ate at the agency more often.

It was one of those changes that he hadn't quite considered now that he lived alone. Hardly any dirty dishes. Overall with him hardly at home, nothing happened in the house. There was a stack of dirty clothes in the washing room, because he never quite found the time to take care of those, a growing stack of paperwork on the desk in the office, the disheveled bedding on his bed where he slept, and some untidiness in his main bathroom and the dojo. That aside, most places in the house were just collecting dust.

Back when he had first come back home to the empty house after Natsuo's pretend kidnapping, he had stayed here for many days without ever stepping outside. He had used all the rooms then, even the ones he hadn't entered for years before, like the guest rooms, or the children's playroom, or the workroom next to the garage, or Rei's small library. He had been everywhere just to get a change of scenery without actually leaving the house, and the house had quite a few rooms to offer.

Ha had left all the rooms in a mess not bothering with cleanup. Fuyumi had always taken care of that before. He had never even bothered to find out if she had done it herself or arranged a house-cleaning service. It was only when one Monday morning, a woman had appeared on his doorstep demanding to be let in to clean, that he had realized it must have been the latter: Fuyumi had paid somebody to do it. Irina, or Irina-Obasan as she demanded to be called, was a Russian migrant in her fifties.

It was quite convenient for him, he just let her keep working and made the contract in his name and not Fuyumi's. Now, however, he started wondering if he still needed her at all. Nothing was dirty anymore, nothing was even used anymore. And although he didn't quite know when he would find time for it, he thought he should find an hour to clean the bathroom and do his dirty laundry once a week at least.

Everything else was of course collecting dust, but he didn't need her to come by once a week to stay for half-a-day just to dust down the shelves and cushions that nobody used anymore anyway.

The house was too big for him…

He should ask Irina to come by this Sunday if possible. Maybe she could get rid of the smearing on the front door and walls. Or at least she could hire somebody to do it if the color was too hard to wash off by regular means.

He really wanted those words gone from his house. He didn't want to see them again at all.

He should probably also report this incident to the police.


So this is... well, Endeavor is still not well-liked. I feel with all the stuff happening around his Agency now, I needed a reminder before I go back to dealing with his work-related drama.

I hope you liked it