Irusu (A BNHA x IT AU)

by Seroyonin

It started in the winter of 2004, after the death of Midoriya Izuku's little sister Eri, and it would end almost 16 years later, after Kaminari Denki made his six phone calls. After all, they had all promised that they'd come back. (An "IT" AU with *that* part removed) (Cross posted from Ao3) (Every trigger warning imaginable applies- seriously, proceed with caution)

25. The Apocalyptic Rockfight

—1—

MAY 30TH, 2020 / IRUSU, JAPAN

Deku and Kaminari made it there first. Kaminari's workshop wasn't to far off from his home on Omagari Drive- still very much on the outskirts of town. In fact, other than a couple of houses and barns, they hadn't passed much on the way there.

The shop was a three-garage grey-paneled structure with an office attached to the side. The door leading into the office was white, and had a diamond-shaped window cut into it. A large sign read CHARGEBOLT: AUTO BODY & REPAIR in black and yellow lettering near the top of the building. Dirt paths lead into each of the garages, (each painted the same shade of white as the office door, with large diamond-shaped windows going across the top of each) with a fourth path leading behind the building, where Kaminari and Deku pulled into. Back there, old, rusting cars, tractors, and other farm equipment Kaminari was salvaging parts from lay ripped apart and abandoned, their parts strewn across the dying grass field hauntingly. In the back of his mind, Deku was reminded vaguely of the ruins of the Kanazaki Ironworks, and shivered.

Deku helped Kaminari pull the love seat from his house they'd hauled there on a trailer into one of the empty sections of his expansive working garage- as well as a beat up couch from Kaminari's office. They arrange the furniture pieces into a sort of semi-circle around two poker tables they'd pushed together, and Kaminari nodded proudly.

"I think this is enough seating for all six of us."

Deku nodded, smiling teasingly. "Should be. You're small enough to squeeze onto that couch with three others."

"Haha." Kaminari's tone was sarcastic, but his smile was genuine.

Deku collapsed onto the light-blue couch and surveyed the room. It was just as messy as Kaminari's at-home garage: tools all over the place, drawers and cabinets left open, an old Nissan was still being lifted up in the air by a carjack, a Duralast mechanic's creeper had been rolled halfway across the room, next to it was a large, open, bottle of antifreeze. Gigantic speakers hung from the ceiling, and Deku assumed they got quite a bit of use, considering their Bluetooth remote laying on the poker table in front of him had almost all the buttons labels worn off. Crushed cans of RedBull were strewn across every surface, some with rusty horseshoes thrown around them- most likely something Kaminari had done on particularly slow days. Three packs of movie-theater sized Mike & Ike's sat, each opened and half eaten, on top of a car battery.

'Never change, Denki' Deku thought, smiling softly to himself. 'Never change.'

The door to Kaminari's office was still open, and Deku's eyes fell to a shelf, and found with some surprise, limited-edition box sets of each of his manga series. Next to them were even the anime/movie counterparts of each work (that had one, at least). His mouth quirked up into an almost sad grimace when he noticed the jacket hanging off the back of his faux-leather desk chair had a 'Todoroki Design Co.' label stitched into the collar, and he averted his eyes away.

'Never change.'

Kaminari, who had gone over to the Nissan and lowered it so its newly rotated tires were touching the ground once more, began to walk back that way. "Sorry about the noise from that thing... I just- don't wanna risk 5000 pounds of metal spontaneously crashing to the ground... haha." His eyes darted quickly to his open office door, his cheeks flushed a bit, and he shut it a little to quickly. "...with how everything's been going today and all..."

"I understand."

There was an uncomfortable silence, and Deku was reminded, ever so briefly, of a very similar situation happening back in 2005... but it was gone before it could be fully realized. He sighed.

After a few moments, Kaminari came and sat next to him on the couch, causing the paper bag in Deku's lap to crinkle and echo through the large shop. There was a pint of bourbon inside and he reckoned he had never wanted a drink so badly in his life as he did right now. Kaminari would be able to supply water, possibly RedBull by the looks of things- But Deku figured that wouldn't be nearly enough.

He thought of Silver, leaning against the wall of Kaminari's garage on Omagari Drive. And from that his thoughts progressed naturally to the day they had met in the Barrens- all except Kaminari -and each had told his tale again: lepers under porches; severed heads who rolled on ice; blood from drains and dead boys in the Standpipe and pictures that moved and werewolves that chased small boys down deserted streets.

They had gone deeper into the Barrens early that July, he remembered now. It had been hot in town but cool in the tangled shade on the eastern bank of the Shibui. He remembered one of those concrete cylinders not far away, humming to itself the way the Carjack had while lowering the SUV just now. Deku remembered that, and how, when all the stories were done, the others had looked at him.

They had wanted him to tell them what they should do next, how they should proceed, and he simply didn't know. The not knowing had filled him with a kind of desperation.

Looking at Kaminari now, sitting hunched over one of the tables, fidgeting with an old car battery- causing sparks to fly up into the air every once in a while- a sudden sureness came to him; he hadn't known then because they hadn't been complete when they met that July 3rd afternoon. The completion had come later, at the abandoned gravel-pit beyond the dump, where you could climb out of the Barrens on either side- Right around, in fact, where the Interstate overpass was now. The gravel-pit had no name; it was old, its crumbly sides crabby with weeds and bushes. There had still been plenty of ammunition there- more than enough for an apocalyptic rockfight.

...But before that, on the bank of the Shibui, he hadn't been sure what to say- what did they want him to say? What did he want to say? He remembered looking from one face to the next- Sero's; Todoroki's; Kirishima's; Iida's; Bakugo's. And he remembered music. Supercar. Music. Low. And darts of light in his eyes. He remembered the darts of light because...

—2—

JULY 3RD, 2005 / IRUSU, JAPAN

... Bakugo had stuck his fancy 5th generation IPod in the lowermost branch of the tree he was leaning against. Although they were in the shade, the sun bounced off the surface of the Shibui, onto the Ipod's small screen and from there into Deku's eyes.

"T-Take that th-hing d-d-d-own, Kah-Kacchan," Deku said. "It's gonna buh-blind m-m-me."

"Okay," Bakugo said at once, with no smartmouth at all, and removed the device from the branch. He also turned it off, and Deku wished he hadn't done that; it made the silence, broken only by the rippling water and the vague hum of the sewage-pumping machinery, seem very loud. Their eyes watched him and he wanted to tell them to look somewhere else, what did they think he was, a freak?

...But of course he couldn't do that, because all they were doing was waiting for him to tell them what to do now. They had come by dreadful knowledge, and they needed him to tell them what to do with it. 'Why me!?' he wanted to shout at them, but of course he knew that, too. It was because, like it or not, he had been tapped for the position. Because he was the idea-man, because he had lost a sister to whatever it was, but most of all because he had become, in some obscure way he would never completely understand, Deku.

He glanced at Todoroki and looked away quickly from the calm trust in his heterochrome eyes. Looking at Todoroki made him feel funny in the pit of his stomach. Fluttery.

"We cuh- can't go to the p-p-police," he said at last. His voice sounded harsh to his own ears, too loud. "We c-ca-han't g-go to our puh-huh-harents, either. Unless... " He looked hopefully at Bakugo. "What a-a-about your m-mom and d-dad, Kacchan? They suh-heem p-pretty reh-reh-regular."

Bakugo snorted: "Yeah, compared to the rest of you guys- except maybe four-eyes, but his parents are always gone- they're definitely the most normal."

"So?..." Kirishima asked from his spot by Sero. He was sitting by Sero for the simple reason that Sero's height kept the suns rays from blinding him. His dark hair was plastered to his forehead, and he had his shirt off, trying his best to ignore his mind-mother's screaming at him about sunburns and skin-cancer. His aspirator was in his right hand.

"They'd think I was ready for Juniper Hill," Bakugo shrugged, though he never looked at Kirishima directly. He had a nasty scab on his chin. The day before Twice had come up behind Bakugo as he left the Ice Cream Bar with a pistachio cone. "Tag, you're it!" Twice, who outweighed Bakugo by fifty pounds or so, screamed, and slammed Bakugo hard in the back with both hands laced together. Bakugo had flown forward into the curb, losing his ice cream cone, busting his chin and skinning his elbows and knees. He had, however, gotten a good punch in, and Twice had puked up his lunch all over the side-walk as Bakugo made a run for it.

Of course, because things never seemed to go in Bakugo's favor, the call his mother had gotten from Mrs. Mayeda (who owned and operated Meyeda's lunch, the restaurant right next to the Ice Cream Bar), had insinuated that it had been Bakugo who had started the fight- not Twice- meaning that not only did Bakugo have a horrid headache and stinging injuries, but he was also treated to a forty-five minute lecture from his mother.

"-But Mom, this kid pushed me, he came up behind me, this- this giant piece of shit kid, and pushed me-" Bakugo, who, due to the mind-breaking horrors he'd been subjected to this past June was near his wits end, and near tears. This failure to make his mother understand hurt much worse than being slammed into the gutter by Twice.

"I don't want to hear any more about it," Bakugo Mitsuki said almost robotically, turning back around to finish preparing dinner. Bakugo noticed her eyes looked a little distant- a little distracted... he frowned. "Just- your father will have to deal with you when he gets home- because I just- I can't right now."

"But Mom-"

"-I said drop it." Her voice was curt and final- worse, it was near tears. She was pale as she left the room, letting the rice cook, dabbing at the sweat on her brow, and soon the TV was going much too loud. Bakugo had been left alone sitting miserably at the kitchen table.

It was this memory that caused Bakugo to shake his head again. "My parents are normal, but they'd never believe this. Not in a million years."

"W-What a-a-about other kih-kids?"

And they looked around, Deku would remember years later, as if for someone who wasn't there.

"Who?" Iida asked doubtfully. "I can't think of anyone else I trust."

"...well," Sero began, and though Deku couldn't have known this, Kirishima, Todoroki, and Iida had recognized the look on his face... it had been the very same one he had had in the washateria, when he told the three of them that Deku would write Manga's about this whole thing one day.

"Wuh-wuh-well?" Deku pressed.

He hesitated, that strange look disappearing in an instant. "...never mind."

—3—

If asked, Sero Hanta would have told you that Shigaraki Tomura hated him more than any of the others in the Losers Club, because of what had happened that day when he and Shigaraki had shot the chutes down into the Barrens from the bridge on Kanazaki Drive, because of what had happened the day he and Bakugo and Todoroki escaped from the Aladdin, but most of all because, by not allowing Shigaraki to copy during exams, he had caused Shigaraki to be sent to summerschool and incur the wrath of his father, the reputedly insane Mr. Shigaraki (no one knew his real first name, he had always been Mr. Shigaraki or Shigaraki Senior.)

If asked, Bakugo Katsuki would have told you Shigaraki hated him more than any of the others, because of the day he had fooled Shigaraki and his dumbfuck gang in Aizawa's drug store.

Iida Tenya would have told you that Shigaraki hated him most of all because he was smart. (when Iida had been in the third grade and Shigaraki the fifth, Shigaraki had washed Iida's face with snow until it bled and he was screaming hysterically with pain and fear, all because he had made a perfect score at the end of the year exams and Shigaraki had failed)

Deku believed that Shigaraki hated him the most because their father's didn't get along very well, he stuttered, and because he liked to dress well ('L-L-Look at the f-f-f-fucking puh-puh-PANSY!" Shigaraki had cried when the Irusu School had had Careers Day in April and Deku had come wearing a tie; before the day was over, the tie had been ripped off and flung into a tree halfway down Taiko Street).

He did hate all four of them, but the person in Irusu who was number one on Shigaraki's personal Hate Parade was not in the Losers Club at all on that July 3rd; he was a short, blonde boy, named Kaminari Denki, who lived a quarter of a mile down the road from the Shigaraki's home, and shared a fence with their fields.

Tomura's father, who was every bit as crazy as he was reputed to be, was not his real dad. Tomura had no idea who his real parents were, nor how he ended up in Mr. Shigaraki's custody- just that they weren't related by blood what-so-ever. He'd been told that by some kid in grade one, and when he questioned his father about it, he had simply said: "Of course. Didn't realize you were that thick, Tomura."

Mr. Shigaraki associated his financial, physical, and mental decline with the Kaminari family in general and with Kaminari's mother in particular. Kaminari Kaori, he was fond of telling his few friends and his son, had had him thrown in the county jail when all of her chickens died. "So she could get the insurance money, don't you know," Mr. Shigaraki would say, calm, but eying his audience with all the baleful interrupt-if-you-dare pugnacity of a war chief. "She got some of her friends to lie, and that's why I had to sell my car."

"Who lied for her, daddy?" Tomura had asked when he was eight, burning at the injustice that had been done to his father. He thought to himself that when he was a grownup he would find liars and coat them with honey and stake them out over anthills, like in some of those Western movies they showed at the Theater on Saturday afternoons.

...And because his adopted son was a tireless listener (although, if asked, Mr. Shigaraki would have maintained that was only as it should be), Shigaraki Senior filled his son's ears with a litany of hate and hard luck. He explained to his son that while all hussy's were stupid, some were cunning as well- and down deep they all hated men and wanted to exterminate them. "Maybe it wasn't just the insurance money after all," Shigaraki Senior said; "...maybe Kaminari had decided to lay the blame for the dead chickens at my door because I have the next produce stand down the road... She'd done it, anyway, that was for sure. She'd gone and gotten a bunch of pussy-whipped bleeding hearts from town to lie for her and threaten me with prison if I didn't pay her trollop-ass off..."

"And why not?" Shigaraki Senior would ask after taking a large gulp of his drink, and turn toward his round-eyed dirty-necked silent son. "Why not? I was just a man who fought a word war for this country- but forget that, right? That all goes down the drain when a decent looking, big-titted, blonde asks for a favor... one can harbor a guess on how she repaid those pigs..."

The chicken business had been followed by one unlucky incident after another- his tractor had blown a rod; his good harrow got busted in the north field; cataracts had begun to set in on first his left eye and then his right, the harpy started using her foully gotten money to undercut Shigaraki Farm's prices so they lost customer's.

In Tomura's ears, it was a constant litany: the hussy, the slut, the bitch. Everything was that blonde cow's fault. The wretched wench had a nice white house with an upstairs and an oil furnace while Shigaraki senior and his son lived in what was not much better than a tarpaper shack. When Mr. Shigaraki couldn't make enough money farming and had to go to work in the woods for awhile, it was the whore's fault. When their well went dry in 2004, it was the hussy's fault.

Later that same year Tomura, who was then twelve years old, started to feed Denki's dog, Mr. Chips, old stewbones and bags of potato-chips. It got so Mr. Chips would wag his tail and come running when Tomura called. When the dog was well used to Tomura and Tomura's treats, Tomura one day fed him a pound of hamburger laced with insect poison. The bug-killer he found in the back shed; he had saved three weeks to buy the meat at Eagle's.

Mr. Chips ate half the poisoned meat and then stopped. "Go on, finish your treat, faggotdog," Tomura had said. Mr. Chips wagged his tail. Since Tomura had called him this from the beginning, he believed it was his other name. When the pains started, Tomura produced a piece of clothesline and tied Mr. Chips to a birch so he couldn't get away and run home. He then sat on a flat sun-warmed rock, put his chin in his palms, and watched the dog die. It took a good long time, but Tomura considered it time well spent. At the end Mr. Chips began to convulse and a thin green foam ran from between his jaws.

"How do you like that, faggotdog?" Tomura asked it, and it rolled its dying eyes up at the sound of Tomura's voice and tried to wag its tail. "did you like your lunch, you shitty mutt?"

When the dog was dead, Tomura removed the clothesline, went home, and told his father what he had done. Mr. Shigaraki was extremely crazy by that time: and a year later he'd be arrested and held over night at the Irusu Police Department after getting into a horrid confrontation with Toshinori Yagi. Tomura was likewise frightened of his father and felt a terrible hate for him sometimes, but he also loved him. And that afternoon, after he had told, he felt he had finally found the key to his father's affections, because his father had clapped him on the back (so hard that Tomura almost fell over), taken him in the living room, and given him a beer. It was the first beer Tomura had ever had, and for all the rest of his years he would associate that taste with positive emotions: victory and love.

"Here's to a good job well done," Tomura's crazy father had said. They clicked their brown bottles together and drank them down. So far as Tomura knew, the hussy and the faggot had never found out who killed their dog, but he supposed they had their suspicions. He hoped they did.

The others in the Losers Club knew Kaminari Denki by sight- Sero simply because they had been best friends since they were toddlers, and the other's because in a town where he was the only 'out' member of the LGBTQ+ community, it would have been strange if they had not.

Although he tried to show it as little as possible by hiding behind jokes and other manners of deflection, Kaminari Denki lived in constant terror of Shigaraki Tomura. In 2005 Kaminari Denki was slim and well built, and, of course, only 4'4. But he was fast and agile, and that had saved him from several beatings at Shigaraki's hands. And, of course, he was homeschooled. Because of that and the age difference, their paths rarely coincided that year. Kaminari did everything he could to keep things that way. So the irony was this: although Shigaraki hated Kaminari Denki more than any other kid in Irusu, Kaminari had been the least hurt of any of them.

Oh, he had taken his lumps. Two weeks after Kaminari's encounter with the bird, Shigaraki sprang out of the bushes while Kaminari was walking toward town to see if Sero wanted to hang out. It was warm enough for bike-riding, but in those days Jo Road turned to dirt just beyond the Shigaraki's place, which meant that it was a quagmire of mud- no good for bikes.

"Hello, faggot," Shigaraki had said, emerging from the bushes, grinning.

Kaminari backed off, golden eyes flicking warily right and left, watching for a chance to get away. He knew that if he could hook around Shigaraki, he could outdistance him. Shigaraki was big and Shigaraki was strong, but he was also slow.

"Come here," Shigaraki said, advancing on the much smaller boy. "Your outsides need to be just as dirty as your insides, cocksucker."

Kaminari cut his eyes to the left and twitched his body in that direction. Shigaraki took the bait and broke that way- too fast and too far to pull himself back. Reversing with a sweet and natural speed, Kaminari took off to the right (in high school, when several other people had come out and he was no longer the soul target of homophobic harassment, he'd return to public school and replace Todoroki Natsuo as Irusu High school's best pitcher his second year). He would have made it easily past Shigaraki if not for the mud. It was greasy, and Kaminari slipped to his knees. Before he could get up, Shigaraki was upon him.

"FaggotFaggotFaggot!" Shigaraki cried in a kind of religious ecstasy as he rolled Kaminari over. Mud went up the back of Kaminari's shirt and down the back of his pants. He could feel it squeezing into his shoes. But he did not begin to cry until Shigaraki slathered mud across his face, plugging up both of his nostrils.

"Now you look as dirty as you truly are, you fucking fairy!" Shigaraki had screamed gleefully, rubbing mud in Kaminari's blonde hair. "You fruity little fag!" He ripped up Kaminari's jacket and the tee-shirt beneath and slammed a poultice of mud down over the boy's bellybutton. Shigaraki screamed laughter triumphantly, and slammed mudplugs into both of Kaminari's ears. Then he stood back, muddy hands hooked into his belt, and yelled: "I killed your dog, retard!" But Kaminari did not hear this because of the mud in his ears and his own terrified sobs.

Shigaraki kicked a final sticky clot of mud onto Kaminari and then turned and walked home, not looking back. A few moments later, Kaminari got up and did the same, still weeping.

His mother was of course furious; she wanted to call Chief Okumura and have him out to the Shigaraki's house before the sun went down. "He's been after you before," She had said, pacing furiously back and forth, crushing a bottle of water in her hands. Kaminari had been sitting on the couch, finally coming clean after three shower's, watching her- very intimidated. "I will have the law on that boy, I swear it! Both the dog and the pup!"

However, it had not taken long for her to come face to face with the reality of life once again. As, when she finally calmed down enough to call Chief Okumura, he had simply told her there was nothing he could do.

"Ha!... nothing... nothing you can do!?" She had suddenly yelled into the phone, causing Kaminari to jump. "WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO!? WHAT SHIGARAKI TOMURA DID TO MY SON WAS ASSAULT!"

"...there's nothing we can do, Kaori, I'm sorry."

"Of course there isn't!" She cried, half laughing in exasperation. "Of course! You can't do anything for Hanta even though anyone with eyes can see his mother isn't fit to raise him because you just don't want to deal with it, you can't do anything for Denki because- what? He's bi? And the town wouldn't like it if you punished Tomura because they probably all agree with what he did? Is that it? No wonder kids are getting murdered left and right- BECAUSE YOU ONLY EVER GET OFF YOUR ASS LONG ENOUGH TO HOLD A TEN MINUTE PRESS CONFERENCE AND REPEAT THE SAME GODDAMN SHIT EVERY DAY!"

She hung up soon after, and slammed her head against the wall, letting the landline drop and swing back and forth, back and forth. Chief Okumura was not Chief Goro. If chief Okumura had been chief during the chicken incident, she would have never gotten her money. She pushed back the tears in her eyes, and turned to her wide-eyed son: "...What's Hanta doing?"

Kaminari shrugged. "I think he's just at home."

"What do you think about picking him up and getting something to go, hm? Order a nice big meal?"

Kaminari nodded slowly, still looking quite shell-shocked. She give him a weak smile, and after a moment, he returned it.

"Let's go, then."

On the way to pick up Sero, Kaori sighed, and turned off the radio. Kaminari noticed that she looked tired, strung-out, and it made him frown.

"You'll want to stay away from Tomura," she said finally, "I'm sure you know that, but... I'm your mom so I have to tell you anyway."

Kaminari nodded.

"His father is crazy."

Kaminari nodded.

"I mean really crazy." She cracked her neck a little as they waited at a stop sign. "He came back from the war that way I think... crazy old bastard..."

"I think Tomura's crazy too," Kaminari said. His voice was low but firm, and that strengthened Kaori's heart... although she was, as a momma-bear to her core, unable to believe a child could be crazy.

"Well, he's listened to his father too much, but that is only natural," Kaori said. Yet on this her son was closer to the truth. Shigaraki Tomura, either because of his constant association with his father or because of something else- some interior thing- was indeed slowly but surely going crazy.

"I don't want you to make a career out of running away," his mother said, "...but because, due to no fault of your own, you're bisexual... you're more likely to be targeted than most... Do you know what I mean?"

"Yes, mom," Kaminari said, thinking of some boy he couldn't quite remember at school, who had tried to explain to Kaminari that faggot could not be a bad word, because his father and older brother used it all the time. Kaminari remembered that, looking at that boy's earnest pinched face, surrounded by the mangy fur of his hand-me-down snowsuit-hood, he had felt not anger but a terrible sadness that made him feel like crying. He had seen honesty and good intent in the kid's face, but what he had felt was loneliness, distance, a great whistling emptiness between himself and the other boy.

"I see that you do know what I mean," Kaori said, and ruffled her son's hair. "And what it all comes down to is that you have to be careful where you take your stand. You have to ask yourself if Shigaraki Tomura is worth the trouble. Is he?"

"No," Kaminari said. "No, I don't think so." It would be quite awhile before he changed his mind; July 3rd, 2005, in fact.

—4—

While Shigaraki Tomura, Kurogiri, Twice, and Toga Himiko were chasing a winded Kaminari Denki through the trainyard and toward the Barrens about half a mile away, Deku and the rest of the Losers Club were still sitting on the bank of the Shibui, pondering their nightmare problem.

"I nun-know w-where ih-ih-it is, I think," Deku said, finally breaking the silence.

"The sewers," Iida said, and they all jumped at a sudden, harsh rattling noise. Kirishima smiled guiltily as he lowered his aspirator back into his lap.

Deku nodded. "I wuh-wuh-was a-asking Yuh-Yuh-Yagi about the suh-sewers a f-few nuh-hi-hights a-a-ago."

"All of this area was originally marsh," Yagi told his step-son, "and the town founders managed to put what's downtown these days in the very worst part of it. The section of the Canal that runs under Main and comes out in Ukiyo Park is really nothing but a drain that happens to hold the Shibui. Most of the year those drains are almost empty, but they're important when the spring runoff comes or when there are floods..." He paused here, perhaps thinking that it had been during the flood of the previous autumn that he had lost his daughter. "...because of the pumps," he finished.

"Puh-puh-pumps?" Deku asked, turning his head a little without even thinking about it. When he stuttered over the plosive sounds, spittle flew from his lips.

"The drainage pumps," his father said. "They're in the Barrens. Concrete sleeves that stick about three feet out of the ground-"

"-Seh-Seh-Sero H-H-H-Hanta calls them Muh-Morlock h-holes," Deku said, grinning.

Toshinori Yagi grinned back... but it was still weaker than his old grin had been back before Eri had died. They were in Toshinori's workshop, where he was turning chair-dowels without much interest. "sump-pumps is all they really are, kiddo," he said. "They sit in cylinders about ten feet deep, and they pump the sewage and the runoff along when the slope of the land levels out or angles up a little. It's old machinery, and the city should have some new pumps, but the Council always pleads poverty when the item comes up on the agenda at budget meetings. If I had a quarter for every time I've been down there, up to my knees in crap, rewiring one of those motors... but you don't want to hear all this, Izuku. Why don't you go watch TV?"

"I d-d-do wuh-want to h-hear it," Deku said, and not only because he had come to the conclusion that there was something terrible under Irusu someplace.

"Why do you want to hear about a bunch of sewer-pumps?" Toshinori asked, ruffling Deku's hair.

"Skuh-skuh-hool ruh-report," Deku said wildly.

"School's Out."

"N-N-Next year."

"Well, it's a pretty dull subject," Toshinori said, still smiling softly. "Teacher'll probably give you an F for putting him to sleep. Look, here's the Shibui-" he drew a straight line in the light fall of sawdust on the table in which his handsaw was embedded- "and here's the Barrens. Now, because downtown's lower than the residential areas- Taiko Street, say, or West Broadway- most of the downtown waste has to be pumped into the river. The waste from the houses flows down to the Barrens pretty much on its own. You see?"

"Y-Y-Yes," Deku said, drawing a little closer to his father to look at the lines, close enough so that his shoulder was against his father's arm.

"Someday they'll put a stop to pumping raw sewage into the river- we've already reworked quite a few, actually... but anyways- For now we've got those pumps in the... what did your buddy call em?"

"Morlock holes," Deku said, without a trace of a stutter; neither he nor Toshinori noticed.

"Yeah. That's what the pumps in the Morlock holes are for, anyway, and they work pretty well except when there's too much rain and the streams overflow. Because, although the gravity drains and the sewers with the pumps were meant to be separate systems, they actually crisscross all over the place. See?" He drew a series of "X's radiating out from the line which represented the Shibui, and Deku nodded. "Well, the only thing you need to know about water draining is that it will go wherever it can. When it gets high, it starts to fill up the drains as well as the sewers. When the water in the drains gets high enough to reach those pumps, it shorts them out. Makes trouble for me, because I have to fix them."

"Dad, h-how big are the suh-sewers and drains?"

"You mean, what's the bore on them?"

Deku nodded.

"Hm... well, the main sewers are maybe six feet in diameter. The secondaries, from the residential areas, are three or four, I guess. Some of them might be a little bigger. And believe me when I tell you this, Izuku, and you can tell your friends: you never want to go into one of those pipes, not in a game, not on a dare, not for any reason."

"Why?"

"A dozen different town governments have built on them since 1885 or so. During the Depression the WPA put in a whole secondary drain system and a tertiary sewer system; there was lots of money for public works back then. But the fellow who bossed those projects got killed in World War II, and about five years later the Water Department found out that the system blueprints were mostly gone. That's about nine pounds of blues that just disappeared sometime between 1937 and 1950. My point is that nobody knows where all the damned sewers and drains go, or why."

"When they work, nobody cares. When they don't, there's three or four sad sacks from Irusu Water who have to try and find out which pump went flooey or where the plug-up is. And when they go down there, they damn well pack a lunch. It's dark and it's smelly and there are rats. Those are all good reasons to stay out, but the best reason is that you could get lost. It's happened before."

Lost under Irusu. Lost in the sewers. Lost in the dark. There was something so dismal and chilling about the idea that Deku was momentarily silenced. Then he said, "But haven't they ever suh-suh-hent people down to map-"

"-I ought to finish the dowels." Toshinori suddenly interrupted- and his tone was suddenly so robotic and cold it gave Deku whiplash.

"B-B-But Dah-Dah-Dad-"

"Go on, Izuku," Toshinori said, and Deku noticed how funny his eyes looked then- how dull and vacant they seemed. Toshinori's color was off too- strangely pale- and sweat was starting to bead at his brow.

(He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.)

...That stupid phrase. It had taken on a talismanic cast in his mind: the day he could walk up to his mother and simply speak that phrase without tripping or stuttering, looking her right in the eye as he spoke it, the robotic coldness would break apart; her eyes would light up and she would hug him and say, "Wonderful, Izuku! What a good boy! What a good boy!"

He had, of course, told this to no one. Wild horses would not have dragged it from him; neither the rack nor the boot would have induced him to give up this secret fantasy, which lay at the very center of his heart.

(He thrusts his fists against the posts and still insists he sees the ghosts.)

Nor did he tell it to his friends on that July 3rd- but he told them what his step-father had told him about the Irusu sewer and drain systems.

"What makes you so sure the fucker's in the sewers?" Bakugo asked, looking from Deku to Iida Tenya and then back to Deku again.

"E-E-Everything g-goes back t-to th-th-that," Deku said. "The v-voices Sh-Sh-Shouto heard c-came from the d-d-drain. And the bluh-blood. When the c-c-clown ch-chased us, those o-orange buh-buh-buttons were by a suh-sewer. And Eh-Eh-Eri-"

"It wasn't a clown, dumbass," Bakugo said. "I told you that. I know it's crazy, but it was a werewolf." He looked at the others defensively. "I saw it."

Deku said: "It was a werewolf for y-y-you."

"Huh?"

Deku said, "D-Don't you s-s-see? It was a wuh-wuh-were wolf for y-you because y-you saw that duh-humb movie at the A-A-A-Aladdin."

"I don't get it."

"I think I do," Sero said quietly.

"I went to the l-l-library and l-looked it uh-uh-up," Deku said. "I think It's a gluh-gluh"- he paused, throat straining, and spat it out- "a glamour."

"...A ...Glammer?" Kirishima asked doubtfully.

"G-G-Glamour," Deku nodded, and spelled it. He told them about an encyclopedia entry on the subject and, a chapter he had read in a book called 'Night's Truth.' Glamour, he said, was the Gaelic name for the creature which was haunting Irusu; other races, cultures, and countries at other times had different words for it, but they all meant the same thing. The Plains Indians in North America called it a manitou, which sometimes took the shape of a mountain-lion or an elk or an eagle. These same Indians believed that the spirit of a manitou could sometimes enter them, and at these times it was possible for them to shape the clouds themselves into representations of those animals for which their houses had been named. The Himalayans called it a tallus or taelus, which meant an evil magic being that could read your mind and then assume the shape of the thing you were most afraid of. In Central Europe it had been called eylak, brother of the vurderlak, or vampire. In France it was le loup-garou, or skin-changer, a concept that had been crudely translated as the werewolf, but, Deku told them, le loup-garou (which he pronounced "le loop-garoo') could be anything, anything at all: a wolf, a hawk, a sheep, even a bug.

"Did any of those articles tell you how to beat a glamour?" Todoroki asked quietly.

Deku nodded, but his freckled face didn't look hopeful. "The H-H-Himalayans had a rih-hi-hitual to g-get rih-rid of i-i-it, but ih-it's pretty gruh-gruh-grue-some."

They looked at him, not wanting to hear but needing to.

"I-I-It was cuh-called the R-R-Ritual of Chüh-Chüd," Deku said, and went on to explain what that was. If you were a Himalayan holy-man, you tracked the taelus. The taelus stuck its tongue out. You stuck yours out. You and it overlapped tongues and then you both bit in all the way so you were sort of stapled together, eye to eye.

"Gross" Todoroki said, wrinkling his nose just a bit. Sero offered him a condolence cigarette, which Todoroki gladly accepted.

"What then?" Kirishima asked.

"W-W-Well," Deku said, "this sounds cuh-cuh-crazy, b-but the book s-said that th-then y-you started telling juh- jokes and rih-riddles."

"...What?" Iida blinked.

Deku nodded, his face that of a correspondent who wants you to know- without coming right out and saying it- that he doesn't make the news but only reports it. "R-Right. F-First the t-taelus monster would tell o-o-one, then y-y-you got to t-t-tell o-one, and y-you w-w-went o-on like thuh-that, t-tay-takin t-turns-"

Todoroki pulled his knees against his chest, hands linked around his shins. "I don't see how people could talk with their tongues, you know, nailed together."

"M-Maybe it was suh-suh-suhpposed to be tuh-telepathy," Deku said thoughtfully. "A-Anyway, i-if the h-h-human laughed f-f-first in spi-hite of the p-p-p-p-"

"Pain?" Iida asked.

Deku nodded.'-then the taelus g-got to k-k-kill h-him and e-e-e-eat him. His soul, I think. B-But i-if the muh-man c-c-ould make the t-taelus l-laugh f-f-first, it had to go away for a huh-huh-hundred y-years.

"Did the book say where a thing like that would come from?" Sero asked.

Deku shook his head.

"Do you believe any of it?" Iida asked, sounding almost as if he wanted to scoff but could not quite find the moral or mental force to do so.

Deku shrugged and said, "I a-a-almost d-do." He seemed about to say more, then shook his head and remained silent.

"It explains a lot," Kirishima said slowly. "...The clown, the leper, the werewolf..." He looked over at Iida. "The dead kids, too, I guess."

"So what do we do about it?" Iida asked, and once again Deku could only shake his head... and feel he almost knew. Iida stood up. "Let's go somewhere else," he said. "My legs are starting to fall asleep."

"I like it here," Todoroki said. "It's shady and nice." He glanced at Iida. "I suppose you want to do something stupid like go down to the dump and break bottles with rocks."

"No, actually-" Iida began, but was cut off by Kirishima before he could continue.

"-I like breaking bottles with rocks," Kirishima said, now standing beside Iida. "It's-"

"-It's shit," Todoroki deadpanned, and sighed.

"...I've got some firecrackers," Bakugo said, and they forgot all about glamours and manitous as Bakugo produced a package of Black Cats from his hip pocket. Even Iida was somewhat impressed.

"Juh-Juh-Geeze, Kah-Kacchan, w-where did you g-g-get thuh-hose?"

"Found them."

Deku doubted that it was as simple as that, but let it slide.

"Let's shoot 'em off!" Kirishima cried, nearly apoplectic in his joy. "Let's go shoot em off, Katsuki! Come on!"

To Deku's utmost surprise, Iida Tenya was watching this happen without a single ounce of protest- sure- he looked a little nervous- but, usually by now he would of gone full mother hen. Instead, he just stood watching as Kirishima and Bakugo (and eventually Sero) buzzed excitedly at the thought of exploding pyrotechnics, hands stuffed in his pockets, and a small smile on his face.

'He's letting this happen because it's something normal.' Deku thought, 'something that doesn't unwrap the fabric of the universe as we know it... something silly... something stupid... something kid-like.'

Todoroki looked at Deku and Iida, and shrugged, before getting up to join the other three. "Sounds interesting. Less shit than breaking bottles, anyway."

Deku laughed at that, and gestured Iida over as he became apart of the group as well. After a few moments, Iida's smile widened just a bit more, and he moved to join them, laughing quietly and shaking his head like an exasperated parent.

"Yay, Tenya!" Kirishima laughed, wheezing just a little, as he clapped the tall boy on the back. "One of us! One of us!" He chanted, and pretty soon the five of them were chanting as they began to walk- Iida blushing a little and laughing as they did. The sound of it drifted across the broad shallow expanse of the Shibui on that day before July 4th, a summer-sound, as bright as the sunrays darting off the water, and none of them saw the orange eyes staring at them from a tangle of brambles and sterile blackberry bushes to their left. This brambly patch scrubbed the entire bank for thirty feet, and in the center of it was one of Sero's Morlock holes. It was from this raised concrete pipe that the eyes, each more than two feet across, stared.

—6—

The reason Kaminari ran across Shigaraki Tomura and his not-so-merry band on that same day was because the next day was the Mayor's birth day. The city council held a parade every year in honor of the mayor's day of birth, and the Kaminari's rented out their horses to pull the carriage with mayor Chiharu herself inside. This was an occasion that Kaminari had been looking forward to for over a month. He was going to help his mother lead the horses down main street for the first time ever.

The rehearsal was not scheduled until two-thirty, but he and his mom left at one because the dirt section of Jo was muddy once-more, which meant their beat-up truck and horse trailer were going to have a hell of a time getting through it to the paved area.

In spite of the road conditions, the thought of Shigaraki Tomura was the furthest thing from his mind. A glance behind as they approached Neibolt Street and the Church school would have changed his mind in a hurry, though, because Shigaraki, Kurogiri, Twice, and Toga were spread across the road behind him. If they had left the Shigaraki's house five minutes later, the Kaminari's would have been out of sight over the crest of the next hill; the apocalyptic rockfight and everything that followed it might have happened differently, or not at all.

...But it was Kaminari himself, years later, who advanced the idea that perhaps none of them were entirely their own masters in the events of that summer; that if luck and free will had played parts, then their roles had been narrow ones. He would point out a number of these suspicious coincidences to the others at their reunion lunch, but there was at least one of which he was not aware of. The meeting in the Barrens that day broke up when Bakugo Katsuki produced the Black Cats and the Losers Club headed toward the dump to shoot them off. And Kurogiri and the others had come out to the Shigaraki's farm because Shigaraki had firecrackers, cherry-bombs, and M-80s (the possession of these last would in a few years become a felony), and just like Bakugo Katsuki, Shigaraki had 'only happened' to come across them that morning.

None of them, not even Kurogiri, went out to the Shigaraki's farm under ordinary circumstances-primarily because of Shigaraki Tomura's crazy father but also because they always ended up helping Shigaraki do his chores: the weeding, the endless rock-picking, the lugging of wood, the toting of water, the pitching of hay, the picking of whatever happened to be ripe at the time of the season- sugar beats, onions, corn, potatoes. These kids were not exactly allergic to work, but they had plenty to do at their own places without sweating for Shigaraki's kooky father, who didn't much care who he hit (he had once taken a length of stovewood to Twice when the boy dropped a basket of onions he was lugging out to the roadside stand). Getting whopped with a chunk of birch was bad enough; what made it worse was that Shigaraki Senior had chanted (although, it had been quite a calm chant) "I'm gonna kill all of you. Every last one." when he did it.

Twice had expressed it best: "I don't fuck with crazy people," he told Kurogiri one fall day two years before. Kurogiri had chuckled dryly and agreed.

But the siren-song of all those firecrackers had been too great to be withstood.

"...Tell you what, Tomura," Kurogiri said when Shigaraki called him up that morning at nine and invited him out. "I'll meet you at the coalpit around one o'clock, what do you say?"

"You show up at the coalpit around one and I'm not gonna be there," Shigaraki replied. "I got too many chores. If you show up at the coalpit around three, I will be there. And the first M-80 is gonna be stuffed down your windpipe, Giri."

Kurogiri hesitated, then agreed to come over and help with the chores.

The others came as well, and with the four of them, three big boy's and one particularly strong girl, working like fiends around the Shigaraki's place, they got all the chores finished by early afternoon. When Shigaraki asked his father if he could go, Senior simply waved a languid hand at his son. Old man Shigaraki was settled in for the afternoon on the back porch, a quart milk-bottle filled with exquisitely hard cider by his rocker, his portable radio on the porch rail. An American M1 Garand lay across Mr. Shigaraki's lap, a war souvenir which, Mr. Shigaraki said, he had taken off the body of a dying "red-blooded American" (he said 'red-blooded American' with a tone of mirth so great, it made the children shiver) during World War II (he had actually traded six bottles of beer and three joysticks for the gun in Kyoto). Lately Shigaraki Senior almost always got out his gun when he drank. And since all of the kids, including Shigaraki Tomura himself, were secretly convinced that sooner or later he would use it on someone, it was best to be far away when it made its appearance on the white-haired elder's lap.

The boys had no more than stepped out into the road when Shigaraki spied the Kaminari's Horse trailer up ahead. "It's the faggot and his hussy mother!" he said, his eyes lighting up like the eyes of a small child contemplating Santa Claus's imminent arrival on Christmas Eve.

"The faggot and the hussy?" Twice looked puzzled-he had seen the Kaminari's only rarely- and then his dim eyes lit up. "Oh yeah! Them! Let's get the fairy, Tomura!"

They stalked the truck all the way to Main Street, and once Kaori had disappeared with Bakugo Mitsuki and Toshinori Inko into the Shajima (there was a luncheon going on inside for everyone participating in the parades preparation), Twice broke into a thunderous trot. The others were following suit when Shigaraki grabbed Twice and hauled him back. Shigaraki had more experience than the others chasing Kaminari Denki, and he knew that catching him was easier said than done. That invert could move.

"He doesn't see us, yet. To busy brushing the horses... Let's just walk fast till he does. Cut the distance."

They did so. An observer might have been amused: the four of them looked as if they were trying out for that peculiar Olympic walking competition. Toga Himiko's knee-length skirt fused to the front of her legs due to the wind. Sweat rolled down Twice's face, which soon grew red. But the distance between them and Kaminari closed-two hundred yards, a hundred and fifty yards, a hundred- and so far the blonde midget hadn't looked back.

"What are you going to do to him, Tomura?" Kurogiri asked in a low voice. He sounded merely interested, but in truth he was worried. Just lately Shigaraki had begun to worry him more and more. He wouldn't care if Shigaraki wanted them to beat the Kaminari kid up, maybe even rip his shirt off or break his nose, but he was not sure that was all Shigaraki had in mind. This year there had been several unpleasant encounters with the children from Irusu Elementary Shigaraki referred to as "the little shits." Shigaraki was used to dominating and terrorizing the little shits, but since March he had been balked by them time and time again. Shigaraki and his friends had chased one of them, the Trashmouth Bakugo kid, into Aizawa's drug store, and had lost him somehow just when it seemed his ass was surely theirs. Then, on the last day of school, that anorexic kid-

-But Kurogiri didn't like to think of that.

What worried him, simply, was this: Shigaraki might go too far. Just what too far might be was something Kurogiri didn't like to think of... but his uneasy heart had prompted the question just the same.

"We're gonna catch him and take him down to that coalpit," Shigaraki said. "I thought we'd put a couple of firecrackers in his shoes and see if he dances."

"But not the M-80s, Tomura, right?"

If Shigaraki intended something like that Kurogiri was going to have to take a rain check. An M-80 in each shoe would blow that fairies feet off, and that was much TOO FAR.

"I've got only four of those," Shigaraki said, not taking his eyes off Kaminari Denki's back. They had closed the distance to seventy-five yards now and he also spoke in a low voice. "You think I'd waste two of em on a fucking invert?"

"No, Tomura. Of course not."

"We'll just put a couple of Black Cats in his keds," Shigaraki said, "then throw his jacket and shirt into the barrens, maybe he'll catch poison Ivy going after them."

"We gotta roll im in the coal, too," Twice said, his formerly dim eyes now glowing brightly. "Okay, Tomura? Is that cool?"

"Mhm," Shigaraki acknowledged in a casual way Kurogiri didn't quite like. "We'll roll him in the coal, just like I rolled im in the mud that other time. And... " Shigaraki grinned, causing Kurogiri to wince as he watched his skin split. "...And Ive got something to tell him. I don't think he heard when I told him before."

"What's that, Tomura?" Toga asked. Toga Himiko was grinning wildly, and merely asking out of excitement rather than hidden worry. She came from one of Irusu's 'good families'; she lived on West Broadway, and if things hadn't gone the way they had that summer, in a few years she would have been sent to a prep school in Kyoto.

"You'll find out," Shigaraki said. "Now shut up. We're gettin close."

They were twenty-five yards behind Kaminari and Shigaraki was just opening his mouth to give the order to charge when Twice's long and gangly legs tangled with one another and he went crashing to the ground with a loud 'Thud!'

Kaminari turned around. Shigaraki saw his eyes widen to the size of dinner plates- his golden irises sparkled in the sun, the arm holding the horse brush fell limply to his side.

"Get him!" Shigaraki howled.

Kaminari froze for a moment; then he did something pretty stupid- he dove underneath his horse's menacingly huge body- the equine beauty neighing and kicking in terror at the sudden loudness of Shigaraki's shout, and shot off down the road.

—7—

The Losers wound their way through the bamboo in the Barrens in this order: Deku; Bakugo; Todoroki behind Bakugo, walking slim and pretty in bluejeans, a white T-shirt, and Natsuo's jacket tied around his waist, then Sero, trying to keep himself upright (he hadn't eaten properly in several days, and that combined with the heat was really taking a toll on him); Iida; Kirishima bringing up the rear, the snout of his aspirator poking out of his right front pants pocket. Deku had fallen into a "jungle-safari" fantasy, as he often did when walking through this part of the Barrens. The bamboo was high and white, limiting visibility to the path they had made through here. The earth was black and squelchy, with sodden patches that had to be avoided or jumped over if you didn't want to get mud in your shoes. The puddles of standing water had oddly flat rainbow colors. The air had a reeky smell that was half the dump and half rotting vegetation.

Deku halted one turn away from the Shibui and turned back to Bakugo. T-T-Tiger up ahead, Kah-Kacchan."

Bakugo rolled his eyes in annoyance- he was, of course, above baby games like this- but nodded and turned back to Todoroki anyway. "Tiger,"

"Tiger," Todoroki deadpanned to Sero, his expression bored but his eyes playful.

"Man-eater?" Sero asked, blinking an array of colors out of his vision.

"There's blood all over him," Todoroki said monotone-like.

"Man-eating tiger," Sero muttered to Iida, and he passed the news back to Kirishima, whose face was hectic with excitement.

They faded into the bamboo, leaving the path of black earth that looped through it magically bare. The tiger passed in front of them and all of them nearly saw it: heavy, perhaps four hundred pounds, its muscles moving with grace and power beneath the silk of its striped pelt. They nearly saw its green eyes, and the flecks of blood around its snout from the last batch of samurai warriors it had eaten alive.

The bamboo rattled faintly, a noise both musical and eerie, and then was still again. It might have been a breath of summer breeze... or it might have been the passage of an African tiger on its way toward the train yard side of the Barrens.

"Gone," Deku said. He let out a pent-up breath and stepped out onto the path again. The others followed suit.

Bakugo was the only one who had come armed: he produced a cap-pistol with a friction-taped handgrip. "I could have had a clear shot at him if you'd moved, idiot," he said grimly, finally giving in completely to the game of pretend.

"There's in-in-innoc-ents a-around here," Deku said. "C-C-Can't rih-risk a shot. Y-You w-want t-to start a w-war?"

"That's a shitty development," Bakugo said, but he lowered the play-gun anyway.

Deku made a come-on gesture with his arm and they were back on the path again, which narrowed into a neck at the end of the bamboo patch. They stepped out onto the bank of the Shibui, where a series of stepping-stones led across the river. Iida had shown them how to place them. You got a big rock and plopped it in the water, then you got a second and plopped it in the water while you were stepping on the first, then you got a third and plopped it in the water while you were stepping on the second, and so on until you were all the way across the river (which here, and at this time of year, was less than a foot deep and shaled with tawny sandbars) with your feet still dry. The trick was so simple it was damn near babyish, but none of them had seen it until Iida pointed it out. He was good at stuff like that, but when he showed you he never made you feel like a dummy.

They went down the bank in single file and started across the dry backs of the rocks they had planted.

"Deku-" Todoroki called urgently.

He froze at once, not looking back, arms held out. The water chuckled and rilled around him. "What?"

Todoroki's face flushed a little, and he turned away, pushing his index fingers together nervously. "There's..." he paused, and sounding more like a question than anything else, said: "...piranha fish?... I... um... I saw them eat a whole... a... a whole cow... t-two days ago?... A minute after it fell in, there was nothing but bones... so... don't fall off... or... something?... I'm sorry, I'm not... I'm not good at this..."

"Right," Deku said, nodding at Todoroki encouragingly. "Be careful, guys."

They teetered their way across the rocks. A freight-train charged by on the railway embankment as Kirishima neared the halfway point, and the sudden blast of its airhorn caused him to jiggle on the edge of balance. He looked into the bright water and for one moment, between the sun dashes that darted arrows of light into his eyes, he actually saw the cruising piranhas. They were not part of the make-believe that went with Deku's jungle safari fantasy; he was quite sure of that. The fish he saw looked like oversized goldfish with the great ugly jaws of catfish or groupers. Sawteeth protruded between their thick lips and, like goldfish, they were orange. As orange as the fluffy pompoms you sometimes saw on the suits the clowns wore at the circus.

They circled in the shallow water, gnashing.

Kirishima pin wheeled his arms. 'I'm going in!' he thought. 'I'm going in and they'll eat me alive!-'

-Then Iida gripped his wrist firmly and brought him back to dead center.

"Close call," Iida said. "If you fell in, your mother would have had a fit."

Thoughts of his mother were, for once, the furthest things from Kirishima's mind. The others had made it to the far bank now and were counting cars on the freight. Kirishima stared wildly into Iida's kind eyes, then looked into the water again. He saw a potato-chip bag go dancing by, but that was all. He looked up at Iida again.

"Tenya, I saw-"

"-What?" Iida looked and sounded worried, that almost father-like warmth flowing off him in waves.

Kirishima shook his head. "Nothing, I guess," he said. "I'm just a little-"

('but they were there yes they were and they would have eaten me alive')

"-jumpy. The tiger, I guess. Keep going."

This western bank of the Shibui- the train yard bank- was a quagmire of mud during rainy weather and the spring runoff, but there had been no heavy rain in Irusu for two weeks or more and the bank had dried to an alien crack-glaze from which several of those cement cylinders poked, casting grim little shadows. About twenty yards farther down, a cement pipe jutted out over the Shibui and spilled a steady thin stream of foul-looking brown water into the river.

Sero said quietly, "It's creepy here," and the others nodded.

Deku led them up the dry bank and back into the heavy shrubbery, where misquotes whirred and berry bugs rattled. Every now and then there would be a heavy ruffle of wings as a bird took off. Once a squirrel ran across their path, and about five minutes later, as they approached the low wrinkle of ridge that guarded the town dump's blind side, a large rat with a bit of cellophane caught in its whiskers trundled in front of Deku, passing along its own secret run through its own microcosmic wilderness.

The smell of the dump was now clear and pungent; a black column of smoke rose in the sky. The ground, while still heavily overgrown except for their own narrow path, began to be strewn with litter. Deku had dubbed this "dump-dandruff," and Kirishima had been delighted; he had laughed almost until he cried. "You've got to write that down, man," he said. "That's really good."

Papers caught on branches wavered and flapped like cut-rate pennants; here was a silver gleam of summer sun reflected from a clutch of tin cans lying at the bottom of a green and tangled hollow; there the hotter reflection of sunrays bouncing off a broken beer bottle. Todoroki spied a babydoll, its plastic skin so brightly pink it looked almost boiled. He picked it up, then dropped it with a little gasp as he saw the whitish-gray beetles squirming from beneath its moldy skirt and down its rotting legs. He rubbed his fingers on his jeans.

They climbed to the top of the ridge and looked down into the dump.

"Woah," Deku said, and jammed his hands into his pockets as the others gathered around him.

They were burning the northern end today, but here, at their end, the dumpkeeper was tinkering on the World War II D-9 'dozer he used to push the crap into piles for burning. His shirt was off, and the big portable radio sitting under the canvas parasol on the 'dozer's seat was putting out the Nippon-Ham Fighter's game.

"Can't go down there," Deku agreed. The dumpkeeper, Oye Kazuo, was not a bad guy, but when he saw kids in the dump he ran them off at once- because of the rats, because of the poison he regularly sowed to keep the rat population down, because of the potential for cuts, falls, and burns... but mostly because he believed a dump was no place for children to be. "Hello there!" he would yell at the kids he spied who had been drawn to the dump with their BB's to plink away at bottles (or rats, or sparrowheads) or by the exotic fascination of 'dump-picking'- "Aren't you kids nice?" Oye would bellow (he bellowed not because he was angry but because he was deaf and wore no hearing-aid). "Didn't your folks teach you to be nice? Nice boys and girls don't play in the dump! Go to the park! Go to the library! Go down to Community House and play box-hockey! Be nice!"

"Nope," Bakugo said, and kicked an empty can in annoyance. It made several 'clank' sounds as it bounced into the lower levels of the smoldering trash heap "Guess the dump's out."

They all sat down for a few moments to watch Oye work on his bulldozer, hoping he would give up and go away but not really believing he would: the presence of the radio suggested Oye intended to stay all afternoon. There was really no better place to go with firecrackers other than the dump. You could put them under tin cans and then watch the cans fly into the air when the firecrackers went off, or you could light the fuses and drop them into bottles and then run like hell. The bottles didn't always break, but usually they did.

"Wish we had some M-80s," Sero sighed, unaware of how soon one would be chucked at his head.

"My mother says people ought to be happy with what they have," Kirishima said so solemnly that they all laughed. (well, Todoroki smiled, but that was about as close as they ever got to getting him to emote)

When the laughter died away, they all looked toward Deku again.

Deku thought about it and then said, "I nuh-know a p-place. There's an old gruh-gruh-gravel-pit at the end of the Bun-Barrens c-closer t-to the t-t-trainyards-"

"Yeah..." Iida said, sounding a little anxious, but getting to his feet all the same. "...I know that place... it would definitely work."

"They'll really echo there," Todoroki agreed.

"Well, let's go," Bakugo said.

The six of them, one shy of the magic number, walked along the brow of the hill which circled the dump. Oye glanced up once and saw them silhouetted against the blue sky. He thought about hollering at them- the Barrens was no place for kids- and then he turned back to his work instead. At least they weren't in his dump.

—8—

Kaminari Denki ran past the Church School without pausing and pelted straight up Neibolt Street toward the Irusu trainyards. There was a janitor at the school, but he was older and deafer than even Mr. Oye. Also, he liked to spend most of his summer days asleep in the basement by the summer-silent boiler, stretched out in a battered old reclining chair with the Irusu Weekly News in his lap. Kaminari would still be pounding on the door and shouting for the old man to let him in when Shigaraki Tomura came up behind him and tore his freaking head off.

So Kaminari just ran.

But not blindly; he was trying to pace himself, trying to control his breathing, not yet going all out. Shigaraki and Twice lagged yards behind, wheezing, muscles aching. Kurogiri and Toga Himiko, however, were much faster. As Kaminari passed the house where Deku and Bakugo had seen the clown- or the werewolf- he snapped a glance back and was alarmed to see that Toga Himiko had almost closed the distance. Toga was grinning cheerfully- a steeplechase grin, a full-out polo grin, a pip-pip-jolly-good-show grin, and Kaminari thought: 'I wonder if she'd grin that way if she knew what's going to happen if they catch me... Does she think they're just going to say "Tag, you're it," and run away?'

As the trainyard gate with its sign- PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED- loomed up, Kaminari was forced to push himself to the limit. There was no pain- his breathing was rapid yet still controlled- but he knew everything was going to start hurting if he had to keep this pace up for long. The gate was standing halfway open. He snapped a second look back and saw that he'd pulled away from Toga again. Kurogiri was perhaps ten paces behind Toga, the others now forty or fifty yards back. Even in that quick glance Kaminari could see the black anger on Shigaraki's face.

He skittered through the opening, whirled, and slammed the gate closed. He heard the click as it latched. A moment later Toga Himiko slammed into the chainlink, and a moment after that, Kurogiri ran up beside her. Toga's smile was gone; a sulky, balked look had replaced it. She grabbed for the latch, but of course there was none: the latch was on the inside.

Incredibly, she said: "Come on, kid, open the gate. That's not fair."

"What's your idea of fair?" Kaminari asked, panting. "Four against one?"

"Fair-up," Toga repeated, as if she had not heard Kaminari at all.

Kaminari looked at Kurogiri, saw the troubled look in his purple eyes. Kurogiri started to speak, but that was when the others pulled up to the gate.

"Open up, faggot!" Shigaraki bawled. He began to shake the chainlink with such ferocity that Toga looked at him, startled. "Open up! Open up right now!"

"I won't," Kaminari said quietly.

"Open up!" Twice shouted. "Open up, ya fuckin' fruity retard!"

Kaminari backed away from the gate, his heart beating heavily in his chest. He couldn't remember ever being quite this scared, quite this upset. They lined their side of the gate, shouting at him, calling him names for 'gay' ('I'm not even gay,' he wanted to yell, but he knew deep down that it made no difference to them.) he had never dreamed existed- invert, limp-wrist, flamer, sodomite, others. He was barely aware that Shigaraki was taking something from his pocket, that he had popped a wooden match alight with his thumbnail- and then a round red something came over the fence and he flinched instinctively away as the cherry-bomb exploded to his left, kicking up dust.

The bang silenced them all for a moment- Kaminari stared unbelievingly at them through the fence, and they stared back. Kurogiri looked utterly shocked, and even Twice looked stunned.

'They're scared of him now,' Kaminari thought suddenly, and a new voice spoke inside of him, perhaps for the first time, a voice that was disturbingly adult- a voice that was not his own. 'They're scared, but that won't stop them. You've got to get away, Denki, or something's going to happen. Not all of them will want it to happen, maybe- not Kurogiri and maybe not Twice-but it will happen anyway because Tomura will make it happen. So get away. Get away fast.'

He backed up another two or three steps and then Shigaraki said: "I was the one who killed your dog, Fruit."

Kaminari froze, feeling as if he had been hit in the stomach with a bowling ball. He stared into Shigaraki Tomura's eyes and understood that Shigaraki was telling the simple truth: he had killed Mr Chips.

That moment of understanding seemed nearly eternal to Kaminari Denki- looking into Shigaraki's crazed, sweat-ringed, eyes and his dry, rage-filled, face- it seemed to him that he understood a great many things for the first time, and the fact that Shigaraki was far crazier than Kaminari had ever dreamed was only the least of them. He realized above all that the world was not kind, and it was more this than the news itself that forced the cry from him: "You fucking chickenshit bastard!"

Shigaraki uttered a shriek of rage and attacked the fence, monkeying his way toward the top with a brute strength that was terrifying. Kaminari paused a moment longer, wanting to see if that adult voice that had spoken inside had been a true voice, and yes, it had been true: after the slightest hesitation, the others spread out and also began to climb.

Kaminari turned and ran again, sprinting across the trainyards, his shadow trailing squat at his feet. The freight which the Losers had seen crossing the Barrens was long gone now, and there was no sound but Kaminari's own breathing in his ears and the musical jingle of chainlink as Shigaraki and the others climbed the fence.

Kaminari ran across one triple set of tracks, his sneakers kicking back cinders as he ran across the space between. He stumbled crossing the second set of tracks, and felt pain flare briefly in his ankle. He got up and ran on again. He heard a thud as Shigaraki jumped down from the top of the fence behind him. "Here I come for you, you stupid-ass Sod!" Shigaraki bawled.

Kaminari, for a reason he would not know for another fifteen years, had decided that the Barrens were his only chance now. If he could get down there he could hide in the tangles of underbrush, in the bamboo... or, if things became really desperate, he could climb into one of the drainpipes and wait it out.

...He could do those things, maybe... but there was a hot spark of fury in his chest that was usually very hard to draw out of someone as fun-loving as himself. He could understand Shigaraki chasing after him when he got the chance, but Mr Chips?... killing Mr Chips? 'My DOG wasn't a faggot, you cheapshit bastard,' Kaminari thought as he ran, and the bewildered anger grew.

Now he heard another voice, this one his mother's:

"I don't want you to make a career out of running away... and what it all comes down to is that you have to be careful where you take your stand. You have to ask yourself if Shigaraki Tomura is worth the trouble..."

Kaminari had been running a straight line across the trainyards toward the storage quonsets. Beyond them another chainlink fence divided the trainyards from the Barrens. He had been planning to scale that fence and jump over to the other side. Instead he veered hard right, toward the gravel-pit.

This gravel-pit had been used as a coalpit until 1935 or so- it had been a stoking-point for the trains which ran through the Irusu yards. Then the diesels came, and the electrics. For a number of years after the coal was gone (much of the remainder stolen by people with coal-fired furnaces) a local contractor had dug gravel there, but he went bust in 1955 and since then the pit had been deserted. A spur railroad line still ran in a loop up to the pit and then back toward the switching-yards, but the tracks were dull with rust, and ragweed grew up between the rotting ties. These same weeds grew in the pit itself, vying for space with goldenrod and nodding sunflowers. Amid the vegetation there was still plenty of slag coal- the stuff people had once called "clinkers."

As Kaminari ran toward this place, he took his jacket off. He reached the run of the pit and looked back. Shigaraki was coming across the tracks, his buddies spread out around him. That was okay, maybe.

Moving as quickly as he could, using his light-jacket for a bindle, Kaminari picked up half a dozen handfuls of hard clinkers. Then he ran back toward the fence, Instead of climbing the fence when he reached it, he turned so his back was against it.

Now, Kaminari Denki was not book-smart- that much was true... but he had always had a knack for split-second decisions like this one...

Shigaraki didn't notice the jacket; he only saw that he had the stupid faggot trapped against the fence. He sprinted toward him, yelling.

"This is for my dog, you bastard!" Kaminari cried, unaware that he had begun to cry. He swung the jacket full of coal at Shigaraki and struck him against the chest with a large 'bonk!'- Shigaraki stumbled to his knees. His hands went to his chest. Blood seeped through his fingers at once, like a magician's surprise, all the breath had been knocked out of him.

The others skidded to a stop, their faces stamped with identical expressions of disbelief. Shigaraki uttered a high, windless, cry of pain and stumbled shakily to his feet again, still holding his chest. Kaminari swung. Shigaraki ducked. He began to walk toward Kaminari, and when Kaminari swung a third time, Shigaraki removed one hand from his gashed chest and batted the make-shift weapon almost casually aside. He was grinning.

"Oh, you're gonna get such a surprise," he said. "such a-OH MY GAWD!" Shigaraki tried to say more, but only inarticulate gargling noises emerged from his mouth.

Kaminari had not swung this time, instead, with the arm of a future-star pitcher, he had pegged a single chunk of coal and this one had struck Shigaraki square in the throat. Shigaraki buckled to his knees again. Toga Himiko gaped. Twice's brow was furrowed, as if he were trying to figure out a difficult math problem.

"What are you guys waiting for?" Shigaraki managed. Blood seeped between his fingers. His voice sounded rusty and foreign. "Get him! Get the little cocksucker!"

Kaminari didn't wait to see if they would obey or not. He dropped his jacket and leaped at the fence. He began to pull himself up toward the top and then he felt rough hands grab his foot. He looked down and saw Shigaraki Tomura's contorted face, smeared by blood and coal. Kaminari yanked his foot up. His sneaker came off in Shigaraki's hand. He pistoned his socked foot down into Shigaraki's face and heard something crunch. The older boy screamed again and staggered backward, now holding his spouting nose.

Another hand- Twice's- snagged briefly in the cuff of Kaminari's jeans, but he was able to pull free. He threw one leg over the top of the fence, and then something struck him with blinding force on the side of his face. Warmth trickled down his cheek. Something else struck his hip, his forearm, his upper thigh. They were throwing his own ammunition at him.

He hung briefly by his hands and then dropped, rolling over two times. The scrubby ground sloped downward here, and perhaps that saved Kaminari Denki's eyesight or even his life; Shigaraki had approached the fence again and now lopped one of his four M-80s over the top of the fence. It went off with a terrific CRRRACK! that echoed and blew a wide bare patch in the grass.

Kaminari, his ears ringing, went head-over-heels and staggered to his feet. He was now in high grass, on the edge of the Barrens. He wiped a hand down his right cheek and it came away bloody. The blood did not particularly worry him; he had not expected to come out of this unscathed- though, in hindsight, the fact that everything was seemingly in black and white was probably not a good thing.

Shigaraki tossed a cherry-bomb, but Kaminari saw this one coming and moved away easily.

"Let's get him!" Shigaraki roared, and began to climb the fence.

"Jeez, Tomura, I don't know-" This had gone too far for Kurogiri, who had never encountered a situation that had turned so suddenly savage. Things were not supposed to get bloody- at least not for your team- when the odds were comfortably slugged in your favor.

"You better know," Shigaraki said, looking back at Kurogiri from halfway up the fence. He hung there like a bloated poisonous spider in human shape. His baleful eyes stared at Kurogiri; blood rimmed them on either side. Kaminari's downward kick had broken his nose, although Shigaraki would not be aware of the fact for some time. "You better know, or I'll come after you, you fucking jerk."

The others began to climb the fence, Kurogiri and Twice with some reluctance, Toga with just as much excitement as before.

Kaminari waited to see no more. He turned and ran into the scrub. Shigaraki bellowed after him: "I'll find you, invert! I'll find you!"

—9—

The Losers had reached the far side of the gravel-pit, which was little more than a huge weedy pockmark in the earth now, many decades after the last load of gravel had been taken out of it. They were all gathered around Bakugo, looking appreciatively at his package of Black Cats, when the first explosion came. Kirishima jumped- he was still a bit messed up over the piranha fish he thought he had seen (he wasn't sure what real piranha fish looked like, but he was pretty sure they didn't look like oversized goldfish with teeth).

"Calm down, shitty hair," Bakugo said, pushing him a little. "It's just other kids shooting off firecrackers, don't be such a baby."

"Y-you're s-so rude s-sometimes, Kah-Kah-Kacchan." Deku smiled, shaking his head, though his greens eyes shined with anxiety as he glanced in the direction the noise had come from. "d-didn't you wuh-wuh-once tell m-me K-Kiri was your b-bestest fruh-friend?"

Bakugo's cheeks colored, and he gave Deku a hard punch in the chest. "Shut the fuck up, I didn't do that-"

"-I-I s-seem to ruh-ruh-remember it dif-differently." Deku teased, giving Bakugo two quick shots in the arm.

"Shut the fuck up-"

"-OKAY!" Kirishima laughed weakly, his face also flushing a brilliant red as he weaseled his way in between the two of them. "I get it, I get it- Katsuki's rude, we're best friends-"

"-We are not!-"

"-and I have stupid hair-"

"-Can we just shoot off the fireworks already?" Sero butted in, a freshly lit cigarette hanging lazily from his mouth. "At this rate, it'll be curfew before we even get the chance."

"You and Shouto are going to get so sick one day..." Iida sighed, "you both seem to go through a pack of those a day."

"I resent that," Sero smiled, blowing smoke from his mouth, "it's a pack and a half."

Iida looked worried for a moment, before catching on that the skinnier boy was joking. He smiled, and rolled his eyes. "Haha..."

"Open the pack up, Trashmouth," Todoroki said, stamping out his own cigarette. "I've got a lighter."

They gathered around again as Bakugo carefully opened the package of firecrackers. There were Chinese letters on the black label and a sober caution in Japanese that made Bakugo snort. "do not hold in hand after fuse is lit," this warning read.

"I'd pay to see what that dumbass who made this warning necessary looks like." Bakugo said. "Some people really shouldn't be allowed to breed."

"-wait." Iida interrupted, making them all jump- it had gone eerily silent as Bakugo moved to open up the package.

Bakugo looked extremely annoyed, but did what Iida asked. "What is it, four-eyes?"

"...let me do it." Iida said, and his cheeks turned a dark shade of red when he was met with five identical disbelieving looks. "NOT BECAUSE I WANT TO-" he held both hands out in front of him and shook his head back and forth violently. "-but because- if we're going to do this- we might as well do it as safely as possible- and- no offense to you Katsuki, but I don't really trust you around explosives-"

"-What the hell is that supposed to mean, four-eyes?" Bakugo challenged threateningly, taking a step forward, hands (and the packaged of fireworks) on his hips.

"Well-" Iida began, before being interrupted.

"I-I a-agree with T-Tenya." Deku shrugged, shooting Bakugo an apologetic glance.

"WHAT!?" Bakugo exclaimed, rounding on Deku, "Why-"

"-Y-You're suh-sort of a wuh-wild c-c-card, Kah-Kacchan."

"Yeah," Sero nodded, leaning against a tree. "They're right... best to let Tenya do it so you don't blow us all to hell."

"WHAT THE FUCK!?" Bakugo threw his hands up in exasperation, looking around wildly.

Kirishima and Todoroki also ended up agreeing, much to Bakugo Katsuki's chagrin, and he angrily chucked the package at Iida, who caught it one-handedly with ease.

Working slowly, almost reverently, while Bakugo continued to rant in the background, Iida removed the red cellophane and laid the block of cardboard tubes, blue and red and green, on the palm of his hand. Their fuses had been braided together in a Chinese pigtail.

"I'll unwind the-" Iida began, and then there was a much louder explosion. The echo rolled slowly across the Barrens. A cloud of sparrowheads rose from the eastern side of the dump, squalling and crying. They all jumped this time- even Todoroki. Bakugo's angry rant ceased in an instant. Iida dropped the firecrackers and had to pick them up.

"...Was that dynamite?" Sero asked nervously. His cigarette had fallen out of his mouth when he jumped, and he stamping it into the earth as fast as he could, worried the dry grass he was standing in might catch on fire.

"That was an M-80, I think," Todoroki said quietly. He was looking at Deku, whose head was up, his eyes wide. Todoroki thought he had never looked so handsome- but there was something too alert, too strung-up, in the attitude of his head. He was like a deer scenting fire in the air. "...My brother Touya... he's a pyrotechnician... Natsuo and Fuyumi take me to his shows sometimes, and the M-80's always bang like that."

Iida nodded, pushing his glasses up his nose. "I saw some teenagers set one off in the park once... they put it in a trash can and it made a noise just like that."

"Did it blow a hole in the can, four-eyes?" Bakugo asked, voice full of curiosity, all signs of previous anger gone.

"No, but it bulged out the sides. They ran away."

"The big one was closer," Kirishima said. He also glanced at Deku.

"P-P-Put our f-fuh-fireworks a-a-away."

They all looked at Deku questioningly, a little scared- it was his abrupt tone more than what he had said.

"P-P-Puh-hut them a-a-a-away," Deku repeated, his face contorting with the effort he was making to get the words out. Spit flew from his lips. "s-S-Suh-homething's g-g-gonna h-h-happen."

Kirishima licked his lips, Iida twisted his hands together. Todoroki moved a little closer to Deku without even thinking about it. Sero stood up straighter.

Bakugo opened his mouth to say something and then there was another, smaller explosion- another cherry-bomb.

"Ruh-Rocks," Deku said.

"What?" Bakugo asked, sounding and looking exasperatedly at his neighbor.

"Ruh-Ruh-Rocks. A-A-Ammo." Deku began to pick up stones, stuffing them into his pockets until they bulged. The others stared at him as though he had gone crazy... and then Kirishima felt sweat break on his forehead. All of a sudden he knew what a malaria attack felt like. He had sensed something like this on the day he and Deku had met Sero Hanta, the day Shigaraki Tomura had casually bloodied his nose- he felt the way he had when Bakugo and Sero and Deku had introduced him and Iida to Todoroki Shouto a few weeks earlier- (except Kirishima, like the others, was already coming to think of Sero and Todoroki as part of them- as if they had always been members of their group) but this felt worse. This felt like maybe it was going to be Hiroshima time in the Barrens- this felt- this felt as if-

(As if the circle was closing)

-as if, just like Deku had said, something was about to happen.

Sero started to get rocks, then Bakugo, moving quickly, not talking now. Iida's glasses slipped all the way off and clicked to the gravelly surface of the ground. He moved to clean them and slide them back onto his face, before deciding differently, and tucking them into his shirt pocket.

"Why did you do that, Tenya?" Todoroki asked. His voice sounded thin, too taut.

"Don't know," Iida said, and went on picking up rocks. "It just... something told me too, is all."

"Sh-Shouto, muh-maybe you b-better g-g-go buh-back t-t-toward th-the duh-dump for a-a-awhile," Deku said. His hands were full of rocks, and he wasn't entirely sure why he didn't want Todoroki to come with them- wherever it was they were going.

He gave Deku a fierce look and said: "Shit all over that, Midoriya Izuku." He bent and began to gather rocks himself.

Sero looked between the two of them thoughtfully, and frowned. 'Poor Denki,' he thought having no idea how much trouble his best friend was truly in right now, 'he doesn't have a chance.'

Kirishima felt the familiar tightening sensation as his throat began to close up to a pinhole.

'Not this time, dammit,' he thought suddenly. 'Not if my friends need me. Like Sho said, shit all over that.'

He also began to gather rocks.

—10—

Shigaraki Tomura had gotten too big too fast to be either quick or agile under ordinary circumstances, but these circumstances were not ordinary. He was in a frenzy of pain and rage, and these lent him an ephemeral unthinking physical genius. Conscious thought was gone; his mind felt the way a late-summer grassfire looks as dusk comes on, all rose-red and smoke-gray. He took after Kaminari Denki like a bull after a red flag. Kaminari was following a rudimentary path along the side of the big pit, a path which would eventually lead to the dump, but Shigaraki was too far gone to bother with such niceties as paths; he slammed through the bushes and the brambles on a straight line, feeling neither the tiny cuts inflicted by the thorns nor the slaps of limber bushes striking his face, neck, and arms. The only thing that mattered was the faggot's medium-length blond-hair, drawing closer. Shigaraki had one of the M-80s in his right hand and a wooden match in his left. When he caught the fruit he was going to strike the match, light the fuse, and stuff that M-80 right down the front of his pants.

Kaminari knew that Shigaraki was gaining and the others were close on his heels. He tried to push himself faster. He was badly scared now, keeping panic at bay only by a grim effort of will. He had turned his ankle more seriously crossing the tracks than he had thought at first, and now he was limp-skipping along. The crackle and crash of Shigaraki's go-for-broke progress behind him called up unpleasant images of being chased by a killer dog or a rogue bear.

The path opened out just ahead, and Kaminari more fell than ran into the gravel-pit. He rolled to the bottom, got to his feet, and had taken no more than two-strides around a corner before running smack-dab into something- sending him and it crashing to the ground.

Kaminari blinked, looking down into wide, grey, confused eyes. "...Hanta?..."

Sero Hanta, who had been the 'object' Kaminari Denki had run into, was laying underneath him- looking dazed. He blinked a few times, shook his head, before finally saying: "...Denki?... what the hell?..."

Kamianri merely shrugged, blood from his cheek gash dripped onto Sero's neck, beading and leaving a thin trail behind it as it raced towards the gravel-covered earth. "Fancy running into you here... literally...haha...ha... heh..."

Sero rolled his eyes, opened his mouth to respond, but was cut off before he got the chance:

"Are you alright, Denki?"

Kaminari, still on top of Sero, turned to his left and felt his entire face flush despite the insane situation he was in- because Todoroki Shouto was squatting next to him, his eyes shining with concern, his left hand outstretched, as if reaching to help him up. The bright sun shined behind him, giving off the illusion of a halo. He wasn't smiling- in fact, he looked almost bored, but he still seemed like an angel to Kaminari all the same.

The memory of the soft kiss on the cheek Todoroki had given him the pervious December briefly flashed through his mind as he scrambled, trying to form words "I-I... um..."

"-Will you get off of me?" Sero mumbled, and shoved the blonde off gently. It was only then, picking himself up out of the dirt, that Kaminari noticed the four other kids standing there. They stood in a line, looking at him- and when Sero and Todoroki joined that line, Kaminari noticed the funny look on all six of their faces... It wasn't until later, when he'd had a chance to sort out his thoughts, that he realized what was so odd about that look: it was as if they had been expecting him.

Kaminari heard the sound of twigs and leaves getting crushed from somewhere behind him.

"-Help," the short blonde managed, sounding both dumb and pathetic in his own ears, the reality of what was going on suddenly slamming into him at full force. He spoke instinctively to the vaguely familiar boy with the freckles instead of Sero- which, despite being so, didn't feel odd. "Kids... big kids-"

-That was when Shigaraki burst into the gravel-pit. He saw the six of them and came to a skidding halt. For a moment his face was marked with uncertainty and he looked back over his shoulder. He saw his troops, and when Shigaraki looked back at the Losers (Kaminari was now standing in between and slightly behind Deku and Sero, panting rapidly), he was grinning.

"I know you, kid," he said, speaking to Deku. He glanced at Bakugo. "I know you, too, Trashmouth." And before Bakugo could reply, Shigaraki saw Sero, Iida, and Todoroki "Well, son of a bitch! Four-eyes and Ana are here too! Fuck! Even Scarface! It's Christmas in July!"

Sero jumped a little, as if startled.

Just then Toga Himiko pulled up beside Shigaraki. Kurogiri showed soon after and stood on Shigaraki's other side; Twice arrived last. He stood beside Kurogiri, and now the two opposing groups stood facing each other in neat, almost formal lines.

Panting heavily as he spoke and still sounding more than a little like a human bull, Shigaraki said, "I got bones to pick with a lot of you, but I can let that go for today. I want that faggot. So you little shits buzz off."

"Right!" Twice added smartly.

"He killed Mr. Chips, Hanta!" Kaminari cried out, his voice shrill and breaking. Sero's eyes widened a bit in understanding. "He said so!"

"You come on over here right now," Shigaraki growled, "...and maybe I won't kill you."

Kaminari trembled but did not move.

Speaking softly and clearly, Deku said: "The B-Barrens are ours. G-get out."

Shigaraki's eyes widened. It was as if he'd been slapped unexpectedly.

"Who's gonna make me?" he asked. "You, mush mouth?"

"Uh-Uh-Us," Deku said. "We're through t-t-taking your crap, Tuh-Tuh-Tomura. Get ow-ow-out."

"You stuttering freak," Shigaraki growled. He lowered his head and charged.

Deku had a handful of rocks; all of them had a handful except for Kaminari. Deku began to throw at Shigaraki, not hurrying his throws, but chucking hard and with fair accuracy. The first rock missed; the second struck Shigaraki on the shoulder. If the third had missed, Shigaraki might have closed with Deku and wrestled him to the ground, but it didn't miss; it struck Shigaraki's lowered head.

Shigaraki cried out in surprised pain, looked up... and was hit four more times: a harsh strike from Bakugo Katsuki on the chest, one from Kirishima that ricocheted off his shoulder-blade, one from Iida Tenya that struck his shin, and another from Todoroki Shouto, which hit him, with a startling sense of accuracy, in the stomach.

He looked at them unbelievingly, and suddenly the air was full of whizzing missiles. Shigaraki fell back, that same bewildered, pained expression on his face. "Come on, you guys!" he shouted. "Help me!"

"Ch-ch-charge them," Deku said in a low voice, and not waiting to see if they would or not, he ran forward.

They came with him, firing rocks not only at Shigaraki now but at all the others. Shigaraki's gang was grubbing on the ground for ammunition of their own, but before they could gather much, they had been peppered. Toga Himiko half-screamed half-laughed as a rock thrown by Bakugo Katsuki glanced off her cheekbone and drew blood. Kurogiri backed up a few steps, paused, threw a hesitant rock or two back... and then fell back.

Shigaraki grabbed up a handful of rocks in a savage sweeping gesture. Most of them, fortunately for the Losers, were pebbles. He threw one of the larger ones at Todoroki and it cut his arm. He hissed in pain.

To everyone's surprise, Kaminari managed to weave his way through all of them, and chuck a large stone Iida Tenya had dropped. It struck Shigaraki hard in the mouth. Shigaraki stumbled backwards, yelling, cupping his mouth, and a few moments later he spit a rotted, bloody, tooth out into his hands, looking utterly bewildered.

Sero, seeing his opportunity, closed the distance between the groups and dove for Shigaraki's legs- reopening the wound given to him earlier that summer from Shigaraki's knife.

Shigaraki was off-balance; Sero Hanta didn't weigh much, but the blow to his legs had been just enough. Shigaraki landed on his back and skidded. Sero held onto his right leg, keeping him there, only vaguely aware of a warm, blooming pain in his ear as Twice nailed him with a rock roughly the size of a golf ball.

Shigaraki was able to get groggily to his knees, and elbow Sero hard enough in the forehead to split skin and have the skinny boy seeing stars. Sero let go for only a moment, and Shigaraki was just regaining his footing when Sero, for the second time that summer, shot out a leg and kicked him hard, his sneakered foot connecting solidly with Shigaraki's left hip. Shigaraki crumpled heavily onto his back. His eyes blazed up at Sero as the younger boy grabbed onto his leg once more.

"This is what you get for messing with my best friend, you fucker!" Sero shouted. He could not remember ever in his life feeling so outraged. "And for what happened on the last day of school! I barely passed that damn exam myself, you know!"

Then he saw a flame in Shigaraki's hand as Shigaraki popped the wooden match alight. He touched it to the thick fuse of the M-80, which he then threw at Sero's face. Acting with no thought at all, Sero struck the ashcan with the palm of his hand, swinging at it as one would swing a racket at a tennis ball. The M-80 went back down. Shigaraki saw it coming. His eyes widened and then he rolled away, screaming. The ashcan exploded a split-second later, blackening the back of Shigaraki's shirt and tearing some of it away- both boys ears rung and light exploded behind their eyelids, dazing them.

A moment later Sero was hit by something on the top of the head so hard, that for only a moment, the blood flowing steadily into his left eye from his split forehead spurted out instead. His teeth clicked together over his tongue so harshly they nearly severed off the tip. He blinked around, dazed, only dimly aware that the world had temporarily lost all color. Toga Himiko was standing over him, a bloodied rock the size of a baseball in her hand, she raised it above her head to strike him again- a crazed glint in her eye proving she had every intention to beat him to death with it- but before she could, Deku came up behind her and began pelting her with rocks. Toga wheeled around, bellowing.

"You hit me from behind, yellowbelly! That's a dirty move!"

She gathered herself to charge, but Bakugo joined Deku and also began to fire rocks at Toga. Bakugo, pissed with Toga's rhetoric on the subject of what might or might not constitute yellowbelly behavior, pegged a rock at her knee, causing that leg to collapse underneath her weight. He had seen the four of them chasing one scared kid, and he didn't think that exactly put them up there with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Another one of Bakugo's missiles split the skin above Toga's left eyebrow. She cried out in pain.

Kirishima and Iida moved up to join Deku and Bakugo. Todoroki moved in with them, his arm bleeding, his expression blank, but his eyes wildly alight. Rocks flew. Twice screamed as one of Todoroki's clipped his crazy bone. He began to dance lumbersomely, rubbing his elbow. Shigaraki got to his feet, the back of his shirt hanging in rags, the skin beneath almost miraculously unmarked. Before he could turn around, Sero Hanta, still laying on his stomach with spinning, black and white, vision, bounced a rock off the back of his head and drove him to his knees again.

Despite his earlier reservations, it was Kurogiri who did the most damage to the Losers that day, partly because he was a pretty fair fastball pitcher, but mostly-paradoxically- because he was the least emotionally involved. More and more he didn't want to be here. People could get seriously hurt in rockfights; a kid could get his skull split, a mouthful of broken teeth, could even lose an eye. But since he was in it, he was in it. He intended to dish out some trouble.

That coolness had allowed him to take an extra thirty seconds and pick up a handful of good-sized rocks. He threw one at Kirishima as the Losers re-formed their rough skirmish line, and it struck the asthma-riddled boy on the chin. He fell down, eyes watering, the blood already starting to flow. Bakugo turned toward him but Kirishima was already getting up again, the blood gruesomely bright against his skin, his eyes slitted.

Kurogiri threw while Bakugo was distracted and the rock thudded off Bakugo's collarbone, causing him to stumble a few steps backwards and blood to flow. Kirishima's pupils dilated with fury, and with a strength he didn't know he possessed, he managed to strike Kurogiri right between the eyes- causing the older male to cry out, and relent his assault for just a moment.

Bakugo shot Kirishima a 'I could have taken care of that myself, you know.' glare, but anyone with eyes could see the blush creeping down his neck.

To prove that he could take care of himself, Bakugo threw back at a recovered Kurogiri, slightly off balance due to the searing pain in his chest. Kurogiri ducked it easily and threw one sidearm at Deku. Deku snapped his head back, but not quite quickly enough; the rock cut his cheek wide open.

Deku turned toward Kurogiri. Their eyes locked, and Kurogiri saw something in the stuttering kid's gaze that scared the hell out of him. Absurdly, the words 'I take it back!' trembled behind his lips... except that was nothing you said to a little kid. Not if you didn't want your buddies to start ranking you to the dogs and back.

Deku started to walk toward Kurogiri now, and Kurogiri began to walk toward Deku. At the same moment, as if by some telepathic signal, they began to throw rocks at each other, still closing the distance. The fighting flagged around them as the others turned to watch; even Shigaraki turned his head.

Kurogiri ducked and bobbed, but Deku made no such effort. Kurogiri's rocks slammed him in the chest, the shoulder, the stomach. One clipped by his ear. Apparently unshaken by any of this, Deku threw one rock after another, pegging them with murderous force. The third one struck Kurogiri's knee with a brittle chipping sound and Kurogiri uttered a stifled groan. He was out of ammunition. Deku had one rock left. It was smooth and white, shot with quartz, roughly the size and shape of a duck's egg. To Kurogiri it looked very hard. Deku was less than five feet away from him.

"Y-Y-You g-get ow-out of h-h-here now," he said, "or I'm g-going to spuh-puh-lit your h-head o-o-open. I m-mean ih-ih-it."

Looking into his eyes, Kurogiri saw that he really did. Without another word, he turned and headed back the way they had come.

Twice and Toga were looking around uncertainly. Blood trickled from the corner of the Toga's mouth, and blood from a scalp-wound was sheeting down the side of Twice's face.

Shigaraki's mouth worked but no sound came out. Deku turned toward Shigaraki, his face cool, composed, but his eyes burned with anger. "G-G-Get out," he said.

"What if I won't?" Shigaraki was trying to sound tough, but Deku could now see a different thing in Shigaraki's eyes. He was scared, and he would go. It should have made Deku feel good- triumphant, even- but he only felt tired.

"I-If you w-won't," Deku said softly, "w-w-we're g-going to muh-move i-in on y-you. I think the s-s-six of u-us can p-put you in the huh-huh-hospital."

"Seven," Kaminari said, and joined them. He had a softball-sized rock in each hand. "Just try me, Tomura. I'd love to."

"You fucking FAGGOT!" Shigaraki's voice broke and wavered on the edge of tears. That voice took the last of the fight out of Twice and Toga; they backed away, their remaining rocks dropping from relaxing hands. Twice looked around as if wondering exactly where he might be.

"Get out of our place," Todoroki said simply, casually throwing and catching a fist-sized rock like a baseball, a simple twitch of his wrist all that was needed to cause devastating injury. "Now."

"Shut up, you scarfaced freak," Shigaraki spat. "You-" Six rocks flew at once, hitting Shigaraki in six different places- his face, chest, stomach, thigh, left arm, neck, and pelvis. He screamed and scrambled backward over the weed-raddled ground, the tatters of his shirt flapping around him. He looked from the grim, old-young faces of the little kids to the frantic ones of Twice and Toga. There was no help there; no help at all. Toga turned away, almost embarrassed.

Shigaraki got to his feet, snuffling through his broken nose. "I'll kill you all," he said, and suddenly ran for the path. A moment later he was gone.

"G-G-Go on," Deku said, speaking to Twice. "Get ow-out. And d-don't c-c-come down h-here anymore. The B-B-Barrens are ow-ow-ours.

"You're gonna wish you didn't cross Tomura, kid," Twice said. "Come on, Himiko."

They started away, heads down, not looking back. Toga limped.

The seven of them stood in a loose semicircle, all of them bleeding somewhere. The apocalyptic rockfight had lasted less than four minutes, but Deku felt as if he had fought his way through all of World War II, both theaters, without so much as a single time-out.

The silence was broken by Kirishima Ejirou's whooping, whining struggle for air. Sero stumbled forward and leaned heavily against a tree, his dizziness from earlier way to much to handle, his right eye burning with the blood still flowing into it.

It was Bakugo and Todoroki who went to Kirishima. Todoroki put an arm around the thin boy's waist while Bakugo dug his aspirator out of his pocket. "Bite on this, shitty hair," he said, and Kirishima took a hitching, gasping breath as Bakugo pulled the trigger.

"Thanks," Kirishima managed at last, cheeks coloring the lightest shade of pink.

Kaminari, who was rubbing Sero's back, looked around at the other's sheepishly. His eyes locked with Todoroki's for a moment, and before he could dart them away, Todoroki walked over to him, and squatted next to him once more, hands between his thighs.

"Thanks for sticking up for me," he said. "It was sweet... I didn't know it was possible for you to look so angry."

Kaminari nodded, looking at his dirty sneakers, and put up a joking front: "Ah... well... ya know... turns out I was the real hair-trigger blonde all along..."

Todoroki furrowed his eyebrows, looking confused. "...no?... from what I've seen, you're very kind."

"No- that-" Kaminari's face was ridiculously red. "It was a joke-"

"...Aren't jokes supposed to be funny?" Todoroki had asked the question innocently, his head cocked to the left, but Kaminari was humiliated all the same.

Sero, despite himself, began to laugh until there were tears in his eyes, and one by one the other's turned to look at the trio- more specifically at Kaminari. They looked at him carefully, cautiously, thoughtfully. Kaminari had felt such curiosity a lot since his unfortunate outting- and he averted his gaze, knowing what was coming.

Deku looked from Kaminari to Bakugo. Bakugo met his eyes and Deku seemed almost to hear the click- some final part fitting neatly into a machine of unknown intent. He felt ice-chips scatter up his back. 'We're all together now,' he thought, and the idea was so strong, so right, that for a moment he thought he might have spoken it aloud. But of course there was no need to speak it aloud; he could see it in Bakugo's eyes, in Sero's, in Kirishima's, in Todoroki's, in Iida's.

'We're all together now,' he thought again. 'Oh no. Oh no. Somebody please help us. June was child's play compared to what's coming. Now it really starts. Now-'

"-You're Kaminari Denki, right?" Iida asked.

"Yep." Kaminari nodded, cheeks still a little pink. "Irusu's resident punching bag, heh."

"I'm Tenya."

"Hi Tenya." Kaminari waved, and Sero rolled his eyes. Iida looked confused- unsure whether or not Kaminari was making fun of him or not.

"You want to shoot off some firecrackers?" Kirishima asked, and Kaminari's sudden, confused but sunny, grin was answer enough.

—

A/N:

WHOO that was a long one haha... but it's one of my favorites.

I wonder how the BNHA cast would react to this AU lol... like, as a past life sort of thing, not a "look at this fanfic" kind of thing... they'd probably be horrified haha... especially with poor Eri still not having a happy life... also, their reaction to the TodoKami and TodoDeku love triangle would be great...

See you all tomorrow!

XoXo