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)

28. Kirishima's Big Break

—1—

MAY 30TH, 2020 / IRUSU, JAPAN

By the time Bakugo finished, they were all nodding. Kirishima, a little pink in the face from remembering his boyhood romance (well, 'romance' was really stretching it... it was more or less just saying that they were dating and giving one another quick, rough, shy pecks without really knowing what they were doing or the full concept of what dating actually was) nodded along with them, remembered along with them, when pain suddenly raced up his left arm. Raced up? No. Ripped through: it felt as if someone was trying to sharpen a rusty saw on the bone in there. He grimaced and reached into the pocket of his sweatpants, sorted through a number of bottles by feel, and took out the Excedrin. He swallowed two with a hearty gulp of Yorsh. The arm had been paining him off and on all day. At first he dismissed it as the twinges of bursitis he sometimes got when the weather was damp. But halfway through Bakugo's story, a new memory clicked into place for him and he understood the pain. 'This isn't Memory Lane we're wandering down anymore,' he thinks; 'it's getting more and more like Shibuya Crossing.'

Five years ago, during a routine check-up (Kirishima had a routine check-up every six weeks), the doctor said matter-of-factly: "There's an old break here, Mr. Kirishima, Did you fall out of a tree when you were a kid?"

"Something like that," Kirishima agreed, not bothering to tell Dr. Akiharu that his mother undoubtedly would have of collapsed dead of a brain hemorrhage if she had seen or heard of her delicate baby boy climbing trees. The truth was, he hadn't been able to remember exactly how he broke the arm. It didn't seem important ('although,' Kirishima thought now, 'that lack of interest was in itself very odd-' he was, after all, a man who attached importance to a sneeze). But it was an old break, a minor irritation, something that had happened a long time ago in a boyhood he barely remembered and didn't care to recall. It pained him a little when he had to drive long hours on rainy days. A couple of aspirin took care of it nicely. No big deal.

...But now it was not just a minor irritation; it was some madman sharpening that rusty saw, playing bone-tunes, and he remembered that that was how it felt in the hospital, especially late at night, in the first three or four days after it happened. Lying there in bed, sweating in the summer heat, waiting for the nurse to bring him a pill, tears running silently down his cheeks into the bowls of his ears, thinking It was like some kook sharpening a saw in there.

'If this is Memory Lane,' Kirishima thought, wincing, 'I'd trade it for one great big brain enema.'

Unaware he is going to speak, he said: "It was Shigaraki Tomura who broke my arm. Do you remember that?"

Kaminari nodded. "That was just before Toga Himiko disappeared. I don't remember the date."

"I do," Kirishima said flatly. "It was the 20th of July. Toga was reported missing on... what?... the 23rd?"

"Twenty-second," Todoroki Shouto said, although he didn't tell them why he was so sure of the date: it was because he saw It take Toga. Nor did he tell them that he believed then and believed now that Toga Himiko was crazy, perhaps even crazier than Shigaraki Tomura. He would tell them, but this was Kirishima's turn. He would speak next, and then he assumed that Sero would narrate the climax of that July's events... the silver bullet they had never quite dared to make. 'A nightmare agenda if ever there was one,' he thought- but that crazy exhilaration persisted. When had he last felt this young? He could hardly sit still.

"The 20th of July," Kirishima mused, rolling his aspirator along the table from one hand to the other. "Three or four days after the smoke-hole thing. I spent the rest of the summer in a cast, remember?"

Bakugo slapped his forehead in a gesture they all remembered from the old days and Deku thought, with a mixture of amusement and unease, that for a moment there Bakugo looked exactly like his mother. "Shit, of course! You were in a cast when we went to the house on Neibolt Street, weren't you? And later... in the dark... " But now Bakugo shook his head a little, puzzled.

"What, Kah-Kacchan?" Deku asked.

"Can't remember that part yet," Bakugo admitted with a shrug. "Can you, freckles?" Deku shook his head slowly.

"Himiko was with them that day," Kirishima said. "It was the last time I ever saw her alive... and the first time I'd seen her since the rock fight at the beginning of July..."

"They all died, didn't they?" Todoroki asked quietly. "After Izumi Kota, the only ones who died were Shigaraki Tomura's friends... or his ex-friends."

"All but Tomura," Kaminari agreed, glancing toward the balloons tethered to the table leg. "And he's in Juniper Hill. A private insane asylum in Shinri."

"...My dad used to work there?..." Todoroki said quietly, though questionably- as if he wasn't quite sure. He looked at Kaminari, who nodded solemnly.

"Yes. Your mother was there too, when it was still owned by the government."

Todoroki nodded stiffly, and looked down at his drink, tracing the rim with his finger delicately "yes... that's right..."

Deku said, "W-W-What about when they broke your arm, Kuh-Kiri?"

"Your stutter's getting worse, Deku," Kirishima said solemnly, and finished his drink in one gulp. "It's almost as bad as it was that summer."

"Never mind that," Deku said, leaning forward. "T-Tell us."

"Tell us," Bakugo repeated, shifting, brushing against his arm. The pain flared there again.

"Alright," Kirishima said. He poured himself a fresh drink, studied it, and said, "It was a couple of days after I came home from the hospital that you guys came over to the house and showed me those silver ball-bearings. You remember, Deku?"

Deku nodded.

Kirishima looked at Todoroki. "Deku asked you if you'd shoot them, if it came to that... because you had always been that best of the best when it came to stuff like that... I think you said you wouldn't... that you'd mess it up... And you told us something else, but I just can't remember what it was. It's like-" Kirishima stuck his tongue out and scrunched up his face, trying to remember the details. Kaminari and Sero both smiled, the expression familiar. "Was it something about Himiko?"

"Yes," Todoroki nodded. "I'll tell you all when you're done, Ejirou. Go ahead."

"It was after that, after all you guys left, that my mom came in and we had a big fight. She didn't want me to hang around with any of you guys again. And she might have gotten me to agree- she had a way- a way of making you feel like the worst person in the world for going against her, you know..."

Deku and Bakugo both nodded. The two of them remembered Kirishima Akemi the best out of all of them, a small, frail, woman, with thick rimmed round glasses, and a strange schizophrenic face, a face capable of looking stony and furious and miserable and frightened all at the same time.

"Yeah, she might have guilted me into agreeing," Kirishima said. "But something else happened the same day Tomura broke my arm. Something that really messed me up."

He uttered a little laugh, thinking: 'It messed me up, alright... Is that all you can say? What good's talking when you can never tell people how you really feel? In a book or a movie what I found out that day before Tomura broke my arm would have changed my life forever and nothing would have happened the way it did... in a book or a movie it would have set me free. In a book or a movie I wouldn't have a whole suitcase full of pills back in my room at the house, I wouldn't be married to Echii (It'd have been Katsuki dressed in white that day) I wouldn't have this stupid fucking aspirator here right now. In a book or a movie. Because-'

Suddenly, as they all watched, Kirishima's aspirator rolled across the table by itself. As it rolled it made a dry rattling sound, a little like maracas, a little like bones... a little like laughter. As it reached the far side, near Todoroki and Deku, it flipped itself up into the air and onto the floor. Todoroki made a startled half-grab and Deku cried sharply, "don't t-t-touch it!"

"The balloons!" Sero gasped, and they all turned.

Both colors of balloons tethered to the microfilm recorder now read ASTHMA MEDICINE GIVES YOU CANCER! Below the slogan were grinning skulls.

They all exploded at once with a single loud bang.

Kirishima looked at this, mouth dry, the familiar sensation of suffocation starting to tighten down in his chest like locking bolts.

Deku looked back at him. "Who t-told you and w-w-what did they tell you?"

Kirishima licked his lips, wanting to go after his inhaler, not quite daring to. Who knew what might be in it now?

He thought about that day, the 20th, about how it was hot, about how his mother gave him a check, all filled out except for the amount, and around 300¥ for himself- his allowance.

"Aizawa," he said, and his voice sounded distant to his own ears, without power. "It was Aizawa Shouta."

"He always struck me as odd... almost... almost like he sort of knew that the seven of us had something important to do... even before we ourselves did..." Kaminari said, but Kirishima, lost in his own thoughts, barely heard him.

Yes, it was hot that day but cool inside the Center Street Drug, the wooden fans turning leisurely below the pressed-tin ceiling, and there was that comforting smell of mixed powders and nostrums. This was the place where they sold health- that was his mother's unstated but clearly communicated conviction, and since he was only eleven, Kirishima had no suspicion that his mother might be wrong about that, or anything else.

'Well, Aizawa sure put an end to that,' he thought now with a kind of sweet anger.

He remembered standing at the magazine rack for awhile, spinning it idly to see if there were anything new. He had given his mothers list (she sent him to the drugstore as other boys mothers might send them to the grocery store) and his mothers check to Aizawa; he would fill the order and then write in the amount on the check, giving Kirishima the receipt so his mom could deduct the amount from her checking balance. This was all normal for Kirishima. Three different kinds of prescription for his mother, plus a bottle of Estrovén- because, she told him mysteriously, "It's full of iron, Ejirou, and women need more iron than men." Also, there would be his vitamins, a bottle of Dr. Ayame's Elixir for Children... and, of course, his asthma medicine.

It was always the same. Later he would stop in the At the Ori Road Trade with his 300¥ and get two caramel Chiroru squares and a melon soda. He would eat the candy, drink the soda, and jingle his pocket-change all the way home. But this day was different; it would end with him in the hospital and that was certainly different, but it started being different when Mr. Aizawa called him. Because instead of handing him the big white bag full of cures and the receipt, reminding him to put the receipt in his pocket so he wouldn't lose it, Aizawa looked at him thoughtfully and said "Come-

—2—

JULY 20TH, 2005 / IRUSU, JAPAN

-back into the office for a minute, Ejirou. I want to talk to you."

Kirishima only looked at him for a moment, nervous, a little scared. The idea that maybe Aizawa thought he had been shoplifting flashed briefly through his mind. There was that sign by the door that he always read when he came into the Drug Store. It was written in accusing black letters so large that he bet even Iida Tenya could read it without his glasses:

SHOPLIFTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. NO, I DON'T CARE WHO YOUR PARENTS ARE.

Kirishima had never shoplifted anything in his life, but that sign always made him feel guilty- made him feel as if Aizawa Shouta knew something about him that he didn't know about himself.

Then Aizawa confused him even further by saying, in a surprisingly gentle voice (albeit, still laced with exhaustion): "How about an ice-cream soda?"

"Well-"

"-It's on the house. I always have one in the office around this time of day. Good energy, unless you need to watch your weight, and I'd say neither of us do... Ya know, you should invite your friend Hanta here sometime as well... I'd let him drink from the nozzle if it meant that kid would gain a few pounds... but anyway, what flavor, Ejirou?"

"Well, my mother said to get home as soon as I-"

"-You look like a chocolate man to me. Chocolate okay for you?" Aizawa's tired eyes seemed to twinkle a bit, but it was a dry twinkle, like the sun shining on mica in the desert. Or so Kirishima, a fan of quite a few old westerns, thought. (Cowboys were both manly and hot... so it was a win win)

"...Sure," Kirishima gave in. Something about the way Aizawa rolled up the sleeves of his long white coat made him edgy. Something about the way Aizawa seemed both nervous and secretly pleased. He didn't want to go into the office with Aizawa. This wasn't about a soda. Nope. And whatever it was about, Kirishima had an idea it wasn't such great news.

'Maybe he's going to tell me I got cancer or something,' Kirishima thought wildly. 'That kid-cancer. Leukemia. Oh no!'

'Oh, stop acting like such a baby,' he answered himself back, trying to sound, in his own mind, like a hodge podge of both Bakugo Katsuki and Deku. Deku had replaced quite a few manga and anime protagonists as the great hero in Kirishima's life. In spite of the fact that he couldn't talk right, Deku always seemed to be on top of things. Bakugo Katsuki, former best friend and current boyfriend, had a rash and outspoken personality that Kirishima Ejirou could only dream of... it was certainly one of the quality's Kirishima was most attracted to, anyway. 'This guy's a pharmacist, not a doctor, for fuck's sake.' But Kirishima was still nervous.

Aizawa had raised the counter-gate and was beckoning to Kirishima with one hand. Kirishima went, but reluctantly.

Kayama Nemuri, the head librarian at Irusu Public Library, was sitting by the cash register and reading an issue of Friday, her hair in a messy bun on top of her head. "Would you make two ice-cream sodas, Nemuri?" Aizawa called to her. "One chocolate, one coffee?"

"Sure," Kayama said, marking her place in the magazine with a tinfoil gum wrapper and getting up. "Though, you know I don't work here, right?... just because we're friends doesn't mean you'll get free labor out of me forever, Shouta."

Aizawa looked at her unamused: "Bring them into the office."

"Sure." She winked. "Whatever you say."

"...okay... Come on, Ejirou. I'm not going to bite you." Aizawa said, deadpanning almost as good as Todoroki.

He had never been behind the back of the counter before, and he gazed at all the bottles and pills and jars with interest. He would have lingered if he had been on his own, examining Aizawa's bottles of Vyvanse and shelf full of insulin pens, his scales and weights, the fishbowls full of capsules. But Aizawa propelled him forward into the office and closed the door firmly behind him. When it clicked shut Kirishima felt a warning tightness in his chest and fought it. There would be a fresh aspirator in with his mother's things, and he could have a long satisfying honk on it as soon as he was out of here.

A ceramic bowl of pineapple hard candy stood on the corner of Aizawa's desk. He offered it to Kirishima.

"No thank you," Kirishima said politely.

Aizawa sat down in the swivel chair behind his desk and took one, opening it slowly and thoughtfully. Then he opened his drawer and took something out. He put it down next to the tall bottle of pineapple flavored candies and Kirishima felt real alarm course through him. It was an asthma inhaler. Aizawa tilted back in his swivel chair until his head was almost touching the calendar on the wall behind him. The picture on the calendar showed more pills. And-

- and for one nightmare moment, when Aizawa opened his mouth to speak, Kirishima remembered something that had happened in the shoe store when he was just a little kid, when his mother had screamed at him for putting his foot in the X-ray machine. For that one nightmare moment Kirishima thought Aizawa would say: "Ejirou, nine out of ten doctors agree that asthma medicine gives you cancer, just like the X-ray machines they used to have in the shoe stores. You've probably got it already. Just thought you ought to know."

But what Aizawa did say was so peculiar that Kirishima could think of no response at all; he could only sit in the straight wooden chair on the other side of Aizawa's desk like a brain dead husk.

"This has gone on long enough."

Kirishima opened his mouth and then closed it again.

"How old are you, Ejirou? Eleven, isn't it?"

"Yes, sir," Kirishima said faintly. His breathing was indeed shallowing up. He wasn't yet whistling like a tea-kettle (A loud sound that would always make Todoroki flinch and cover his ears) but that might happen at any time. He looked longingly at the inhaler on Aizawa's desk, and because something else seemed required, he said: "I'll be twelve in October."

Aizawa nodded, then leaned forward like a TV pharmacist in a commercial and clasped his hands together. His brown eyes gleamed in the strong light thrown by the overhead fluorescent bars. "do you know what a placebo is, Ejirou?"

Nervously, taking his best guess, Kirishima said: "Those are the things on cows that the milk comes out of, aren't they?"

Aizawa sighed, smiled a little, and rocked back in his chair. "No," he said, and Kirishima blushed to the roots of his shaggy chin-length hair. Now he could hear the whistle creeping into his breathing. "A placebo-"

He was interrupted by a brisk double tap at the door. Without waiting for a come-in call, Kayama Nemuri entered with an oldfashioned ice-cream-soda glass in each hand. "Yours must be the chocolate," she said to Kirishima, and gave him a warm grin. He returned it as best he could, but his interest in ice-cream sodas was at its lowest point in his entire personal history. He felt scared in a way that was both vague and specific; it was the way he felt scared when he was sitting on Dr. Sunada's examination table in his underpants, waiting for the doctor to come in and knowing his mother was out in the waiting room, laying down and taking up most of one sofa, a book (most likely Dr. Yamaguchi Jun's The Power of Positive Thinking or Dr. Nishimara Ayame's Folk Medicine Recipes) held firmly up to her eyes like a hymnal. Stripped of his clothes and defenseless, he felt caught between the two of them.

He sipped some of his soda as Kayama went out, hardly tasting it.

Aizawa waited until the door was shut and then smiled his dry sun-on-mica smile again. "Loosen up, Kid. I'm not going to bite you, or hurt you."

Kirishima nodded, because Aizawa was a grownup and you were supposed to agree with grownups at all costs (his mother had taught him that), but inside he was thinking: 'Oh, I've heard that bullshit before. It was exactly what the doctor said when he opened his sterilizer and the sharp frightening smell of alcohol drifted out, stinging my nostrils. That was the smell of shots and this was the smell of bullshit and both came down to the same thing: when they said it was just going to be a little prick, something you hardly felt at all, that meant it was going to hurt plenty.'

He tried another half-hearted suck on his soda straw, but it was no good; he needed all the space in his narrowing throat just to suck in air. He looked at the inhaler sitting in the middle of Aizawa's light wood desk, wanted to ask for it, didn't quite dare. A weird thought occurred to him: maybe Aizawa knew he wanted it but didn't dare ask for it, that maybe Aizawa was-

(torturing)

-teasing him. Except that was a really stupid idea, wasn't it? A grownup- particularly a health-dispensing grownup- wouldn't tease a little kid that way, would he? Surely not. It wasn't even to be considered, because consideration of such an idea might necessitate a terrifying reappraisal of the world as Kirishima understood it.

...But there it was, there it was, so near and yet so far, like water just beyond the reach of a man who was dying of thirst in the desert. There it was, standing on the desk below Aizawa's smiling mica eyes.

Kirishima wished, more than anything else, that he was down in the Barrens with his friends around him. The thought of a monster, some great monster, lurking under the city where he had been born and where he had grown up, using the sewers and drains to creep from place to place- that was a frightening thought, and the thought of actually fighting that creature, of taking it on, was even more frightening... but somehow this was worse. How could you fight a grownup who said it wasn't going to hurt when you knew it was? How could you fight a grownup who asked you funny questions and said obscurely ominous things like "This has gone on long enough?" And almost idly, in a kind of side-thought, Kirishima discovered one of his childhood's great truths. 'Grownups are the real monsters,' he thought. It was no big deal, not a thought that came in a revelatory flash or announced itself with trumpets and bells. It just came and was gone, almost buried under the stronger, overriding thought: 'I want my medicine and I want to be out of here.'

"Loosen up," Aizawa said again. "Most of your trouble, Ejirou, comes from being so tight and stiff all the time. Take your asthma, for instance. Look here."

Aizawa opened his desk drawer, fumbled around inside, and then brought out a balloon. Expanding his narrow chest as much as possible, he huffed into it and blew it up. CENTER STREET DRUG, the balloon said. PRESCRIPTIONS, SNACKS, TOYS, AND ICE CREAM SODA. Aizawa pinched the balloon's rubber neck and held the balloon out in front of him. "Now pretend for just a moment that this is a lung," he said. "Your lung. I should really blow up two, of course, but since I only had one left from the sale we had just after Christmas-"

"-Mr. Aizawa, could I have my aspirator now?" Kirishima's head was starting to pound. He could feel his windpipe sealing itself up. His heartrate was up, and sweat stood out on his forehead. His chocolate ice-cream soda stood on the corner of Aizawa's desk, the cherry on top sinking slowly into a goo of whipped cream.

"-In a minute," Aizawa said. "Pay attention, Ejirou. I want to help you... It's time somebody did. If Sunada isn't man enough to do it- and honestly, I shouldn't even be surprised, considering he's to much of a coward to claim a kid that looks just like him-" he coughed, looked somewhat guilty, and then continued: "...never mind... shouldn't have said that- forget it... but, anyway, I'll just have to be the one to tell you the truth I guess... as I said, this has gone on long enough."

"...Your lung is like this balloon, Ejirou, except it's surrounded by a blanket of muscle; these muscles are like the arms of a man operating a machine, you understand? In a healthy person, those muscles help the lungs to expand and contract easily. But if the owner of those healthy lungs is always getting stiff and tight, the muscles begin to work against the lungs rather than with them. Look-"

Aizawa wrapped a hand around the balloon and squeezed. The balloon bulged over and under his fist and Kirishima winced, trying to get ready for the pop. Simultaneously he felt his breathing stop altogether. He leaned over the desk and grabbed for the inhaler on it. His shoulder struck the heavy ice-cream-soda glass. It toppled off the desk and shattered on the floor like a bomb.

Kirishima heard that only dimly. He was clawing the top off the aspirator, slamming the nozzle into his mouth, triggering it off. He took a tearing heaving breath, his thoughts a ratrun of panic as they always were at moments like this: 'Please Mom I'm suffocating I can't BREATHE oh shit oh no oh no I can't BREATHE please I don't want to die don't want to die oh please-'

Then the fog from the aspirator condensed on the swollen walls of his throat and he could breathe again.

"I'm sorry," he said, nearly crying. "I'm sorry about the glass... I'll clean it up and pay for it... just please don't tell my mom, okay? I'm sorry, Mr. Aizawa, but I couldn't breathe-"

There was that double tap at the door again and Kayama poked her head in. "Is everything-"

"-Everything's fine," Aizawa said sharply. "Leave us."

"Well- I'm sorry..." Kayama said. She rolled her eyes and closed the door.

Kirishima's breath was starting to whistle in his throat again. He took another pull at the aspirator and then began his fumbling apology once more. He ceased only when he saw that Aizawa was smiling at him- that peculiar dry smile. The balloon lay on his desk. A thought came to Kirishima; he tried to hold it back and couldn't. Aizawa looked as if Kirishima's asthma attack had tasted better to him than his half-finished coffee soda.

"Don't be concerned," he said. "I'll clean up the mess later, and if you want to know the truth, I'm rather glad you broke the glass. Because I promise not to tell your mother that you broke it if you promise not to tell her we had this little talk."

"Oh, I promise that," Kirishima said eagerly.

"Good," Aizawa said. "We have an understanding. And you feel much better now, don't you?"

Kirishima nodded.

"Why?"

"Why? Well... because I had my medicine." He looked at Aizawa the way he looked at a teacher in school when he had given an answer he wasn't quite sure of. (which happened far more than he cared to admit)

"But you didn't have any medicine," Aizawa said. "You had a placebo. A placebo, Ejirou, is something that looks like medicine and tastes like medicine but isn't medicine. A placebo isn't medicine because it has no active ingredients. Or, if it is medicine, it's medicine of a very special sort... er... 'mind easy-ing' medicine." He said simply, calmly, clearly. "do you understand that, Ejirou 'mind-easy-ing' medicine?"

Kirishima understood, all right; Aizawa was telling him he was crazy, psycho, belonged in Juniper hill. But through numb lips he said, "No, I don't get you."

"Let me tell you a little story," Aizawa said. "In 2001, a series of medical tests on ulcer patients was run at DePaul University- that's a university in America, if you didn't know- One hundred ulcer patients were given pills. They were all told the pills would help their ulcers, but fifty of the patients really got placebos... They were, in fact, just M&M's given a uniform pink coating." Aizawa said, yawning a bit, as if describing what he had had for breakfast that morning instead of some sort of experiment "Of those one hundred patients, ninety-three said they felt a definite improvement, and eighty-one showed an improvement. So what do you think? What conclusion do you draw from such an experiment, Ejirou?"

"I don't know," Kirishima said faintly, his palms clammy, his vision swimming. He found himself trying to escape mentally, trying to force himself to think of how cute Bakugo had looked only a couple of days before- blushing after having given Kirishima a very quick, somehow almost violent, kiss on the cheek as they left the barrens. Until now, that memory had never failed to make him grin to himself and blush, but now, it just slipped away as if it meant absolutely nothing to him.

Aizawa tapped his head solemnly. "Most sickness starts in here, that's what I think. I've been in this business a long, long time, and I knew about placebos a mighty stretch of years before those doctors at DePaul University did their study. Usually it's old folks who end up getting the placebos. The old fellow or the old girl will go to the doctor, convinced that they've got heart disease or cancer or diabetes or some damn thing. But in a good many cases it's nothing like that at all. They don't feel good because they're old, that's all. But what's a doctor to do? Tell them they're like watches with wornout mainsprings?... Not likely. Doctors like their fees too much." And now Aizawa's face wore an expression somewhere between a smile and a sneer.

Kirishima just sat there waiting for it to be over, to be over, to be over. 'You didn't have any medicine:' those words clanged in his mind.

"The doctors don't tell them that, and I don't tell them that, either. Why bother? Sometimes an old party will come in with a prescription blank that will say it right out: Placebo, or 25 Blue Skies, which is how Sunada-" (Dr's Sunada's name came out sounding chock full of pure and utter loathing) "-writes them."

Aizawa rubbed his eyes briefly, sighing. Then sucked on his coffee soda.

"Well, what's wrong with it?" he asked Kirishima, and when Kirishima only sat there, Aizawa answered his own question. "Why, nothing. Nothing at all... At least... usually... Placebos are a blessing for old people. And then there are other cases-folks with cancer, folks with degenerative heart disease, folks with terrible things that we don't understand yet, some of them children just like you, Ejirou. In cases like that, if a placebo makes the patient feel better, where is the harm? Do you see the harm, Kid?"

"No sir," Kirishima said, and looked down at the splatter of chocolate ice cream, soda-water, whipped cream, and broken glass on the floor. In the middle of all this was a cherry, a cherry that could have quite possibly come from Kaminari Farms, as accusing as a blood-clot at a crime scene. Looking at this mess made his chest feel tight again.

"Yes... yes... I tend to agree... usually... now, five years ago, when an old friend of mine had cancer of the esophagus- a painful, painful sort of cancer- and the doctors had run out of anything effective they could give him for his pain, I came by his hospital room with a bottle of sugar-pills. He was a good friend, you see. And I said, "These are special experimental pain-pills. The doctor doesn't know I'm giving them to you, so please be careful and don't tattle on me. They might not work, but I think they will. Take no more than one a day, and only if the pain is especially bad." He thanked me with tears in his eyes. Tears, Ejirou- And they worked for him. Yes. They were only sugar-pills, but they killed most of his pain... because pain is here."

Solemnly, Aizawa tapped his head again.

Kirishima said: "My medicine does so work."

"I know it does," Aizawa replied, and smiled a maddening complacent grownup's smile. "It works on your chest because it works on your head. HydrOx, Ejirou, is water with a dash of camphor thrown in to give it a medicine taste."

"No," Kirishima said. His breath had begun to whistle again.

Aizawa drank some of his soda, spooned some of the melting ice cream, and fastidiously wiped his chin with his a napkin while Kirishima used his inhaler again.

"I want to go now," Kirishima said.

"Let me finish, please."

"No! I want to go, you've got your money and I want to go!"

"Let me finish," Aizawa said, so forbiddingly that Kirishima sat back in his chair. Grownups could be so hateful in their power sometimes. So hateful.

"Part of the problem here is that your doctor, Sunada Kaito, is weak. The other part of the problem is that your mother is determined you are ill. You, Ejirou, have been caught in the middle."

"I'm not crazy," Kirishima whispered, the words coming out in a bare husk.

Aizawa's chair creaked like a monstrous cricket. "What?"

"I said I'm not crazy!" Kirishima shouted. Then, immediately, a miserable blush rose into his face.

Aizawa sighed. 'Think what you like,' that sigh said. 'Think what you like, and I'll think what I like.'

"I don't think you're crazy. All I'm telling you, Ejirou, is that you're not physically ill. Your lungs don't have asthma; your mind does."

"You mean I'm crazy."

Aizawa leaned forward, looking at him intently over his folded hands.

"No." He said, "I don't. I think your mother filled your head with idea's and convinced you that you were ill when you were not. I think it's a holdover from when you were diagnosed with Kawasaki disease... it scared her quite badly, and now she's punishing you, unconsciously maybe, for scaring her so badly."

"It's all a lie!" Kirishima cried, surprised the words came out so strongly from his tight chest. He was thinking of Bakugo, how Bakugo would react to such amazing charges. Bakugo would know what to say. Bakugo would know how to be brave. "All a great big lie! I do have asthma, I do!"

"Yes," Aizawa said, and now the dry smile had become a weird skeletal grin. "But who gave it to you, Ejirou?"

Kirishima's brain thudded and whirled. Oh, he felt sick, he felt very sick.

"Four years ago, in 2001- the same year as that placebo test was going on, oddly enough- Dr. Sunada began prescribing this HydrOx for you. That stands for hydrogen and oxygen, the two components of water. I have condoned this deception since then, but I will not condone it anymore. Your asthma medicine works on your mind rather than your body. Your asthma is the result of a nervous tightening of the diaphragm that is ordered by your mind... or your mother, maybe. You are not sick."

A terrible silence descended.

Kirishima sat in his chair, his mind whirling. For a moment he considered the possibility that Aizawa might be telling the truth, but there were ramifications in such an idea that he could not face. Yet why would Aizawa lie, especially about something so serious?! Aizawa sat and smiled his heartless desert smile.

'I do have asthma, I do. The day that Shigaraki Tomura punched me in the nose, the day Deku and I were trying to make a dam in the Barrens, I almost died. Am I supposed to think that my mind was just... just making all of that up?'

'...But why would he lie? (It was only years later, in the Irusu Public Library, that Kirishima asked himself the more terrible question: 'Why would he tell me the truth?')

Dimly he heard Aizawa saying: "I've kept my eye on you, Ejirou... well- really, I've kept my eye on that group of friends of yours as a whole... but... I told you all this because you're old enough to understand, but also because I've noticed you've all finally come together... They're good friends, aren't they?"

"Yes," Kirishima said.

Aizawa tilted his chair back (it made that cricketlike noise again), and closed one eye in what might or might not have been a wink. "And I'll bet your mother doesn't like them much, does she?"

"She likes them just fine," Kirishima said, thinking of the cutting things his mother had said about Bakugo Katsuki, "He has a foul mouth... and... they way he looks at you sometimes Ejirou, why... I think there's something... wrong... with him." her sniffing remark about Iida Tenya's family ("They have way to much money to be living in a place like Irusu... it must be dirty.") her outright dislike of Midoriya Izuku, and the horrid comments she constantly made about Sero Hanta: "That Sero kid is on a dangerous path... He's already smoking, I promise you he's gonna end up just like his mother- hell, probably worst, considering he's a bastard child."

He repeated to Aizawa: "She likes them a lot."

"Does she?" Aizawa said, still smiling. "Well, maybe she's right and maybe she's wrong, but at least you have friends. Maybe you ought to talk to them about this problem of yours. This... situation you're in... See what they have to say."

Kirishima didn't reply. He was through talking to Aizawa; that seemed safer. And he was afraid that if he didn't get out of here soon, he really would cry.

"Well..." Aizawa said, standing up. "I think that just about finishes us up, Ejirou. If I've upset you, I'm sorry. I promise you I didn't tell you this to hurt or make fun of you. I was only doing my duty as I saw it. I-"

-But before he could say any more, Kirishima had snatched up his inhaler and the white bag of pills and nostrums and had fled. One of his feet skidded in the ice-creamy mess on the floor and he almost fell. Then he was running, bolting from the Center Street Drug Store in spite of his whistling breath. Kayama pressed herself against the door, out of his way, watching him in astonishment.

Behind him he seemed to sense Aizawa standing in the doorway of his office and watching his graceless retreat over the prescription counter, gaunt and neat and thoughtful and smiling. Smiling that dry desert smile.

He paused right outside on the three-way corner of West Broadway, Main, and Center. He took another deep pull from his aspirator while sitting on the low stone wall by the bus-stop- his throat was now positively slimy with that medicinal taste-

("nothing but water with some camphor thrown in.")

-and he thought that if he had to use the aspirator again today he would probably puke his guts.

He slipped it into his pocket and watched the traffic pass back and forth, headed up Main Street towards Ori Road. He tried not to think. The sun beat down on his head, blaringly hot. Each passing car threw bright darts of reflection into his eyes, and a headache was starting in his temples. He couldn't find a way to stay angry at Aizawa, but he had no trouble at all feeling bad for Kirishima Ejirou. He felt real bad for Kirishima Ejirou. He supposed that Deku and Bakugo never wasted time feeling sorry for themselves, but Kirishima just couldn't seem to help it.

More than anything else he wanted to do exactly what Aizawa had suggested: go down to the Barrens and tell his friends everything, see what they would say, find out what answers they had. But he couldn't do that now. His mother would expect him home with her medicines soon-

("your mind... or your mother")

-and if he wasn't there-

("your mother is determined you are ill")

-trouble would follow. She would assume he had been with Deku or Bakugo or Iida or "the bastard," as she called Sero Hanta (insisting that she meant no harm by calling him that, but was simply "slapping down the cards' -her phrase for truth-telling in difficult situations), And standing here on this corner, trying hopelessly to sort out his flying thoughts, Kirishima knew exactly what she would say if she knew he was friends with Kaminari Denki and Todoroki Shouto.

He started slowly toward Ori Road, dreading the stiff climb up up-mile hill in this heat. It felt almost hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. For the first time he found himself wishing for school to be in again, for a new grade and a new teacher's peculiarities to contend with. For this dreadful summer to be over.

He stopped halfway up the hill, not far from where Deku would rediscover his bike Silver fifteen years later, and pulled his aspirator from his pocket.

HYDROX MIST: ADMINISTER AS NEEDED

Something else clicked home.

"Administer as needed." He was only a kid, still wet behind the ears (as his mother sometimes told him when she was "slapping down the cards'), but even a kid of eleven knew that you didn't give someone real medicine and then write on the label "Administer as needed." If it was real medicine, it would be too easy to kill yourself as you went happy-assholing around and administering as needed. He supposed you could kill yourself with plain old aspirin doing that.

He looked fixedly at the aspirator, unaware of the old lady who glanced curiously at him as she passed on down the hill toward Main Street with her shopping basket over her arm. He felt betrayed. And for one moment he almost cast the plastic casing into the gutter- 'better yet,' he thought, 'throw it down that sewer-grating. Sure! Why not? Let It have it down there in Its tunnels and dripping sewer-pipes. Have a pla-cee-bo, you hundred-faced creep!' He uttered a wild laugh and came within an ace of doing it- ...But in the end, habit was simply too strong. He replaced the aspirator in his right front pants pocket and walked on, hardly hearing the occasional blare of a horn or the diesel drone of the town bus as it passed him. He was likewise unaware of how close he was to discovering what being hurt- really hurt- was all about.

—3—

When he came out of the Ori Road Trade twenty-five minutes later with a melon soda in one hand and two Meiji chocolate bars in the other (they'd been out of his caramel squares), Kirishima was unpleasantly surprised to see Shigaraki Tomura, Kurogiri, Twice, and Toga Himiko kneeling on the crushed gravel to the left of the little store. For a moment Kirishima thought they were shooting caps; then he saw they were pooling their money on Twice's baseball shirt. Their summer-school text-books lay off to one side in an untidy heap.

On an ordinary day Kirishima might have simply faded quietly back into the store and asked Mr. Inaba if he could leave through the back door but this had been no ordinary day. Kirishima froze right where he was instead, one hand still holding the screen door with its cigarette sign (A very pretty woman in a sailors suit holding up all four fruity flavors of Paradise cigarettes like a person playing poker), the other clutching the brown grocery bag and the white drugstore bag.

Kurogiri's violet irises met his own sparkling rubies and, before Kirishima could think to react, the thirteen year old was elbowing Shigaraki Tomura. Shigaraki looked up; so did Toga. Twice, who had went on counting yen coins for five seconds or so before the sudden silence sank into him, also looked up.

Shigaraki stood, brushing loose pieces of gravel from the knees of the jeans he was wearing. There were splints on the sides of his bandaged nose, and his voice had a nasal foghorning quality. "Well lookie here," he said, scratching absently at his neck. "One of the rock-throwers. Where's your friends, asshole? They inside?"

Kirishima was already shaking his head numbly when he realized this was another mistake.

Shigaraki's smile broadened. "Well, that's okay," he said. "I don't mind taking you one by one. Come on down here, wheezy."

Kurogiri, sporting a nasty gash on the forehead from when Kirishima had bonked him good between the eyes, stood beside Shigaraki; Toga Himiko, a large band-aid on her knee, trailed behind them, smiling in a strangely vacant way Kirishima was familiar with from school. Twice, also covered in gashes and bandages, was still getting up.

"Come on, kid," Shigaraki said, the scratching getting worst. "Let's talk about throwing rocks. Let's talk about that, you wanna?"

Now that it was too late Kirishima decided it would be wise to go back into the store. Back in the store where there was a grownup. But as he retreated Shigaraki darted forward and grabbed him. He pulled Kirishima's arm, pulled hard, his smile turning into a snarl. Kirishima's hand was ripped free of the doors handle, taking a hangnail with it. He cried out in a mixture of pain and fear as he was pulled off the steps and would have crashed headlong into the gravel if Kurogiri hadn't caught him roughly under the arms. Kurogiri threw him. Kirishima managed to keep on his feet, but only by whirling around twice. The four of them faced him now over a distance of about ten feet, Shigaraki slightly ahead of the others, smiling. His light blue hair, matted and dirty, hung in his eyes. All four loser-tormentors spun in Kirishima's dizzy vision, making him feel somewhat sick.

Behind Shigaraki and on his left was Toga Himiko, a genuinely spooky girl- not like, "chases you on the playground trying to kiss you" spooky- but really spooky, scary, even. Kirishima hadn't even been able to register exactly who she was during the rock fight. She was small, had a round face, and platinum blond hair pulled into messy space buns, and a crazed grin on her face.

Toga liked to kill flies with her purple plastic SkoolTime ruler and put them in her pencil-box. Sometimes she would show her fly collection to some new kid in the playyard at recess, her lips smiling, her cheeks flushed, her yellow eyes wild but thoughtful. She never spoke when she exhibited her dead flies, no matter what the new kid might say to her. That expression was on her face now.

"How ya doin, Rock Man?" Shigaraki asked, advancing across the distance between them, scratching so furiously at his neck that Kirishima was beginning to see red lines forming along his neck. "Got any rocks on you?"

"Leave me alone," Kirishima said in a trembling voice, trying his best to keep it steady.

"'Leave me alone,'" Shigaraki mimicked, not unlike how he had mimicked Sero Hanta on the last day of school, waving his hands in mock terror. Kurogiri chuckled. "What are you going to do if I don't, Rock Man? Huh?" His hand flashed out, incredibly fast, and exploded against Kirishima's cheek with a gunshot sound. Kirishima's head rocked back. Tears began to pour from his left eye.

"My friends are inside," Kirishima tried weakly, rubbing his stinging cheek.

"My friends are inside," Toga Himiko squealed. "Ooooh! Ooooh! Ooooh!" She began to circle on Kirishima's right like how a great white circles the stranded protagonist in an ocean-based film.

Kirishima started to turn in that direction, deducing that he would be able to overpower Toga pretty easily- but Shigaraki's hand flashed out again, and this time his other cheek flamed.

'Don't cry,' he thought, 'that's what they want, but don't you do it Ejirou, Katsuki would think you were acting like a baby- Deku wouldn't cry, and don't you cry, eith-'

-Kurogiri stepped forward and gave Kirishima a hard open-handed push in the middle of his chest. Kirishima stumbled half a step backward and then fell sprawling over Toga, who had crouched directly behind his feet. He thudded to the gravel, scraping his arms. There was a whoof! as the wind rushed out of him.

A moment later Shigaraki was on top of him, his knees pinning Kirishima's arms, straddling Kirishima's stomach.

"Got any rocks, Rock Man?" Shigaraki raved down at him, and Kirishima was more frightened by the mad light in Shigaraki's eyes than he was by the pain in his arms or by his inability to get his breath back. Shigaraki Tomura was nuts.

Somewhere close by, Toga giggled and handed something over to Shigaraki. "You wanna throw rocks? Huh? I'll give you rocks! Here! Here's some rocks!"

It turned out to be a fist full of gravel, which Shigaraki slammed down into Kirishima's face. He rubbed the gravel into Kirishima's skin, cutting his cheeks, his eyelids, his lips. Kirishima opened his mouth and screamed.

"Want rocks? I'll give you rocks! Here's some rocks, Rock Man! You want rocks? Okay! Okay! Okay!"

Gravel slammed into his open mouth, lacerating his gums, grinding against his teeth. He felt sparks fly against the fillings in his molars. He screamed again and spat gravel out, trying his hardest to shove the older boy off of him.

"Want some more rocks? Okay? How about a few more? How about-"

"-Stop that! Stop that! You, Tomura! Quit it! Right now! You hear me? Quit it!"

Through half-lidded, tear-blurred eyes, Kirishima saw a big hand come down and grab Shigaraki by the collar of his shirt. The hand gave a yank and Shigaraki was pulled off. He landed in the gravel and got up. Kirishima rose more slowly. He was trying to scramble to his feet, but his scrambler seemed temporarily broken. He gasped and spat chunks of bloody gravel out of his mouth. His mouth and face stung horrifically, and he could already feel the bruises forming on his arms in the shape of Shigaraki Tomura's kneecaps. At that moment, he wanted nothing more than to be with his friends.

His savior was none other than Mr. Inaba and he looked furious. There was no fear in his face, although Shigaraki stood about three inches taller and probably outweighed him by fifty pounds. There was no fear in his face because he was the grownup and Shigaraki was the kid. 'Except this time,' Kirishima thought miserably, 'that might not mean anything. Mr. Inaba doesn't get it. He doesn't understand that Tomura is nuts.'

"You get out of here," Mr. Inaba said, advancing on Shigaraki until he stood toe to toe with the sullen-faced boy. "You get out and you don't want to come back, either. I don't allow bullying. And I sure don't allow it with four against one. What would your mothers think?"

He swept the others with his hot, angry eyes. Twice and Kurogiri dropped their gazes and examined their sneakers. Toga only stared at and through Mr. Inaba with that vacant yellow look. Mr. Inaba looked back at Shigaraki and got just as far as "Now, get on your bikes and-" when Shigaraki gave him a good hard push.

An expression of surprise that would have been comical in other circumstances spread across Mr. Inaba's face as he flew backward, loose gravel spurting out from under his heels. He struck the steps leading up to The Trades entrance and sat down hard, breathing heavily.

"How dare-" he began.

Shigaraki's shadow fell on him. "-Get insides." he said.

"You-" Mr. Inaba said, and this time he stopped on his own. Mr. Inaba had finally seen it, Kirishima realized- the light in Shigaraki's eyes. He got up quickly, suddenly untucked shirttail flapping. He leapt up the stairs as fast as he could, stumbling on the second one from the top and going briefly to one knee. He was up again at once, but that stumble, as brief as it had been, seemed to rob him of the rest of his grownup authority.

He spun around at the top and yelled: "I'm calling the cops!"

Shigaraki made as if to lunge for him, and Mr. Inaba flinched back. That was the end, Kirishima realized. As incredible, as unthinkable as it seemed, there was no protection for him here. It was time to go.

While Shigaraki was standing at the bottom of the steps and glaring up at Mr. Inaba and while the others were staring, transfixed (and, except for Toga Himiko, looking fairly horrified) by this sudden successful defiance of adult authority, Kirishima saw his chance. He whirled, took to his heels, and ran.

He was halfway up the block before Shigaraki turned, his eyes blazing. "Get him!" he bellowed.

Asthma or no asthma, Kirishima ran them a good race that day. There were spaces, some of them as long as fifty feet, when he couldn't remember if the soles of his red Vans had touched the sidewalk or not. For a few moments he even entertained the giddy notion that he might be able to outrun them.

Then, just before he reached Taiko Street and what might have been safety, a girl on a lime-green racing bike suddenly pedaled out of a driveway and right into Kirishima's path. Kirishima tried to swerve, but running full-out as he had been, it might have been better to jump over the girl (the girls name, in fact, was, Shiozaki Ibara, and she would grow up, get married, get divorced two years later, and three months after it was finalized and the cheating son of a bitch had his stuff out of her house, birth a son named Shiozaki Norio, who would be drowned in a toilet and then be partially eaten by a cackling clown that rose up from the toilet two weeks before a twenty-seven year old Kaminari Denki made his six phone calls), or at least to try.

One of Kirishima's feet caught on the bike's back wheel, where an adventurous little shit might stand to ride double. Shiozaki Ibara, who would be residing in a mental health facility fifteen years from now after walking in on her child's massacred remains, barely rocked on her bike. Kirishima, however, went flying. He struck the sidewalk on his shoulder, rebounded, came down again, and skidded ten feet, erasing the skin from his elbows and knees. He was trying to get up when Shigaraki Tomura hit him like a shell from a bazooka and knocked him flat. Kirishima's nose connected briskly with the concrete. Blood flew.

Shigaraki did a quick side-roll like a paratrooper and was up again. He grabbed Kirishima by the nape of the neck and by his right wrist. His breath, snorting through his swelled and splinted nose, was warm and moist.

"Want rocks, Rock Man? Sure! Shit!" He jerked Kirishima's wrist halfway up his back. Kirishima yelled. "Rocks for the Rock Man, right, Rock Man?" He jerked Kirishima's wrist up even higher. Kirishima screamed. Behind him, dimly, he could hear the others approaching. The girl on the bike cried out, begging them to stop- only to be cut off by the harsh sound of skin connecting with skin and Toga's laughter. A moment later there was a yelp and the sound of a bike clattering against the sidewalk, and feet scrambling to keep the body they were attached to upright.

'Join the club, friend.' Kirishima thought bitterly, and in spite of the pain, in spite of the tears and the fear, he let out a large belt of laughter.

"You think this is funny?" Shigaraki asked, sounding suddenly astounded rather than furious. "You think this is funny?" ...And did Shigaraki also sound scared?... Years later Kirishima would think 'Yes, scared, he sounded scared.'

Kirishima twisted his wrist in Shigaraki's grip. He was slick with sweat and he almost got away. Perhaps that was why Shigaraki shoved Kirishima's wrist up harder this time than before. Kirishima heard a crack in his arm like the sound of winterwood giving under an accumulated plate of ice. The pain that rolled out of his fractured arm was gray and huge. He shrieked, but the sound seemed distant. The color was washing out of the world, and when Shigaraki let go of him and pushed, he seemed to float toward the sidewalk. It took a long time to get down to that old sidewalk. He had a good look at every single crack in it as he glided down. He had a chance to admire the way the July sun glinted off the flecks of mica in that old sidewalk. He had a chance to note the remains of a very old hopscotch grid that had been done in pink chalk on that old sidewalk. Then, for just a moment, it swam and looked like something else. It looked like a turtle some sort of animal.

His consciousness had nearly faded when his newly broken arm was sandwiched between his thin body and the sidewalk below. The pain that resulted was fresh sharp, bright, hot, and terrible. He felt the splintered ends of the fracture grind together. He bit his tongue with his sharp (shark) teeth, bringing fresh blood. He rolled over on his back and saw Shigaraki, Kurogiri, Twice, and Toga standing over him. They looked impossibly tall, impossibly high up, like they were peering into an open casket.

"You like that, Rock Man?" Shigaraki asked, his voice drifting down over a distance, floating through clouds of pain. "Huh? You like that action, Rock Man? Do you?"

Toga Himiko giggled.

"Your father's crazy," Kirishima heard himself say, feeling disconnected from the words "and so are you."

Shigaraki's grin faded so fast it was like someone had popped him in the mouth. He drew his foot back to kick... and then a siren rose in the still hot afternoon. Shigaraki paused. Kurogiri and Twice looked around uneasily.

"Tomura, I think we better get out of here," Twice said, surely thinking about the two stents of juvie-time that had earned him his nickname.

"I know damn well I'm getting out of here," Kurogiri drawled, already moving out of Kirishima's eye line. How far away their voices seemed. Like the clowns (the dancing clown) balloons, they seemed to float. Kurogiri took off toward the school, hands stuffed deep into his pockets, a (barely concealed) nervous look on his face.

Shigaraki hesitated a moment longer, perhaps hoping the cop-car was on some other business and he could continue with his own. But the siren rose again, closer. "You got lucky, wheezy," he said. He and Twice took off after Kurogiri.

Toga Himiko waited for a moment.

"Here's a little something extra for you," she whispered in a low voice. She inhaled and spat into Kirishima's upturned, sweating, bloody face. Splat. It dripped into his thick hair. "don't eat it all at once if you don't want," Toga said, smiling her lavish, unsettling, smile. "save some for later, if you want."

Then she turned slowly and was also gone.

Kirishima tried to wipe the spit off with his good arm, but even that little movement made the pain flare again.

'When you started off towards the drugstore, you never thought you'd end up on the sidewalk with a busted arm and Toga Himiko's spit running down your face, did you? You never even got to drink your Melon Soda. Life's just full of surprises, isn't it?' He turned his head towards his gushing soda and ruined chocolate, already sizzling in the summer heat. The fizzy drink ran into a storm drain, and Kirishima briefly wondered if It had a taste for melon.

Incredibly, he found himself laughing again. It was a weak sound, and it hurt his broken arm to laugh, but it felt good. And there was something else: no asthma. His breathing was okay, at least for now. A good thing, too. He never would have been able to get to his aspirator. Never in a thousand years.

HYDROX: ADMINISTER AS NEEDED

He sighed.

The siren was very close now, whooping and whooping. Kirishima closed his eyes and saw red under his eyelids. Then the red turned black as a shadow fell over him. It was the girl with the bike.

"You okay?" the girl asked.

"Do I look okay?" Kirishima asked weakly, cracking open one eye. He didn't mean for it to come out as rude as it probably did... it was a genuine question.

"No, you look terrible," the girl said, brushing her long, thick, green hair from her face. (Green. Like Deku's hair.) The right side of her face was bright red, and her eye was starting to puff a little. "I'm sorry for tripping you. I didn't see you coming... honest."

Kirishima began to giggle. Here was the cop-car; he could hear the squeal of its brakes. He found himself hoping vaguely that Mr. Torino would be in it, even though he knew Mr. Torino was a foot patrolman.

"Why are you giggling?" the girl asked.

He didn't know, any more than he knew why he should feel, in spite of the pain, such intense relief. Was it maybe just because he was still alive, that the worst he had suffered was a broken arm, and there were still some pieces to pick up? He settled for that, but years later, sitting in Kaminari's garage with a glass of Yorsh in front of him and his aspirator across the table after being tossed there by some unknown entity, he told the others he thought it was something more than that; he had been old enough to feel that something more, but not to understand or define it.

"I think it was the first real pain I ever felt in my life," he would tell the others. "It wasn't what I thought it would be at all. It didn't put an end to me as a person. I think... it gave me a basis for comparison, finding out you could still exist inside the pain, in spite of the pain."

Kirishima turned his head weakly to the right and saw large black rubber tires, blinding chrome hubcaps, and pulsing blue lights. He heard Mr. Torino's voice then, and his giggling got even worst.

"Oh Ejirou... what's happened to you, kid?..."

At this point Kirishima floated away.

—4—

And, with one exception, stayed away for quite awhile.

There was a small, brief, period of consciousness in the ambulance. He saw Mr. Torino sitting across from him, tipping a drink from a water bottle and reading a paperback. He could see blinking lights and cords criss crossing every which way, feel the shaking of the ambulance as it drove, feel the straps across his chest and legs keeping him in the gurney. His eyes shifted lazily past Mr. Torino to the driver up front. The driver peered around at Kirishima with a big leering grin, his skin livid with greasepaint and talcum powder, his eyes shiny as new quarters. It was Pennywise the dancing clown.

"Mr... Tor...no..." Kirishima husked weakly, his heart beginning to race so rapidly he was worried he was going to have a heart attack.

(At least I'm already in an ambulance)

Mr. Torino looked up and smiled. "How are you feeling?"

"... driver... the driver..."

"Yes, we'll be there soon," Mr. Torino said, and handed him the water bottle. "Drink some of this. It'll make you feel better."

Kirishima drank the water, which did nothing but irritate his ruined mouth. He coughed, hurting his arm. He looked toward the front and saw the driver again. Just some guy with a crewcut. No clown.

He drifted off again.

Much later there was the Emergency Room and a nurse wiping blood and dirt and spit and gravel off his face with a cold cloth. It stung, but it felt wonderful at the same time. He heard his mother bugling and clarioning outside, and he tried to tell the nurse not to let her in, but no words would come out, no matter how hard he tried.

"... if he's dying, I want to know!" his mother was bellowing. "You hear me? It's my right to know, and it's my right to see him! I can sue you, you know! I know lawyers, plenty of lawyers! Some of my best friends are lawyers!"

As far as Kirishima was aware, his mother knew no lawyers.

The nurse cleaning up his face was young and a man, and he could feel the nurse's chest pressing against his good arm. For a moment he had this crazy idea that the nurse, with his bright red hair, sparkling blue eyes, and concentrated expression, was Todoroki Shouto... and then he drifted away again.

When he came back his mother was in the room, talking to Dr. Sunada at a mile-a-minute clip. Kirishima Akemi was a frail woman with glasses that took up the majority of her gaunt face. Her legs, encased in dark panty-hose, were bird-like and knobby. Her face was pale now except for hectic flaring blots of blush she dabbed on every morning before work to take attention away from her hollow cheeks.

"Mo...m..." Kirishima managed,"... alright... I'm alright..."

"You're not, you're not," Akemi moaned. She wrung her bony hands, and her thin, black, hair looked as if it were moments from falling out from stress. Kirishima heard her knuckles crack and grind. He began to feel his breath shorten up as he looked at her, seeing what a state she was in, how this latest escapade of his had hurt her. He wanted to tell her to take it easy or she'd have a heart attack, but he couldn't. His throat was too dry. "You're not alright, you've had a serious accident, a very serious accident, but you will be alright, I promise you that, Ejirou, you will be alright, even if we need to bring in every specialist in the book, oh Ejirou... Ejirou... your poor arm..."

She burst into wracking sobs. Kirishima saw that the male nurse who had washed his face was looking at her without much sympathy.

All through this hysteria, Dr. Sunada had been stuttering, "Akemi... please, Akemi... Akemi...?" He was a lanky, semi-toned, man with a wide mouth, grey almond-shaped eyes, and inky black hair. He looked nervous. Kirishima remembered what Aizawa had told him that morning and frowned doctor.

At last, gathering himself, Sunada Kaito managed to say: "If you can't control yourself, you'll have to leave, Akemi."

She whirled on him and he drew back. "I will do no such thing! Don't you even suggest it, Kaito! This is my son lying here in agony! My son lying here on his bed of pain! If you had a son you'd understand!"

Dr. Sunada's eyes filled with fear for a split second, and he pulled nervously at his collar, sweat dotting above his brow. "Of course... of course... if I had... a... yes..." he coughed anxiously.

Kirishima astounded them all by finding his voice. "I want you to leave, Mom. If they're going to do something that'll make me yell, and I think they are, you'll feel better if you... if you just go."

She turned to him, astonished... and hurt. At the sight of the hurt on her face, he felt his chest begin to tighten down inexorably, guilt beginning to tighten around his chest. "I certainly will not!" she cried. "What an awful thing to say, Ejirou! You're delirious! You don't understand what you're saying, that's the only explanation!"

"I don't know what the explanation is, and I don't care," the nurse said flatly, the parallels between him and Todoroki Shouto almost criminal now. "All I know is that we're standing here doing nothing while we should be setting your sons arm."

His mothers cries grew louder. rising toward the high, bugling note it took on when she was most upset. He had the urge to cover his ears.

"Please, Akemi," Dr. Sunada said, sounding beyond exhausted. "Let's... let's not have an argument here... Let's help Ejirou."

Akemi stood back, but her glowering eyes- the eyes of a mother bear whose cub has been threatened- promised the nurse that there would be trouble later. Possibly even a suit. Then her eyes misted, extinguishing the glower- or at least hiding it. She took Kirishima's good hand and squeezed it so painfully that he winced.

"It's bad, but you'll be well again soon," she said. "Well again soon, I promise you that."

"Sure, Mom," Kirishima wheezed, trying to regain blood flow in his good arm. "Could I have my inhaler?"

"Of course," she said. Kirishima Akemi looked at the nurse triumphantly, as if vindicated of some ridiculous criminal charge. "My son has asthma," she said. "It's quite serious, but he copes with it beautifully."

"Good," the nurse said flatly.

His mom held the aspirator for him so he could inhale. A moment later Dr. Sunada was feeling Kirishima's broken arm. He was as gentle as possible but the pain was still enormous. Kirishima felt like screaming and gritted his teeth against it. He was afraid if he screamed his mother would scream, too. Sweat stood out on his forehead in large clear drops.

"You're hurting him," Akemi said. "I know you are! There's no need of that! Stop it! There's no need for you to hurt him! He's very delicate, he can't stand that sort of pain!"

Kirishima saw the nurse lock his furious blue eyes with Dr. Sunada's tired, worried, grey ones. He saw the wordless conversation that passed between them: 'Send that woman out of here, doctor.' And in the drop of his eyes: 'I can't. I don't dare.'

There was great clarity inside the pain (although, in truth, this was not a clarity that Kirishima would want to experience often: the price was too high), and in that unspoken conversation, Kirishima accepted everything Aizawa Shouta had told him. His HydrOx aspirator was filled with nothing more than flavored water. The asthma wasn't in his throat or his chest or his lungs but in his head. Somehow or other he was going to have to deal with that truth: that truth that he was messed up in the head.

He looked at his mother, seeing her clear in his pain: each flower on her department store dress, the sweat-stains under her arms where the pads she wore had soaked through, the scuff-marks on her black flats. He saw how small her brown eyes were in their hallow sockets behind her thick black glasses, and now a terrible thought came to him: those eyes were almost predatory, like the eyes of the leper that had crawled out of the basement at 29 Neibolt Street. "Here I come, that's right... it won't do you any good to run, Ejirou.."

Dr. Sunada put his hands gently around Kirishima's broken arm and squeezed. The pain exploded.

Kirishima drifted away.

—5—

They gave him some liquid to drink and Dr. Sunada set the fracture. He heard Dr. Sunada telling his mom that it was a greenstick fracture, no more serious than any childhood break: "It's the sort of break kids get falling out of trees," he said, and Kirishima heard his mom respond furiously: "Ejirou doesn't climb trees! He wouldn't dare do that to his mother! Now I want the truth! How bad is he?!"

Then the nurse was giving him a pill. He felt his chest against his shoulder again and was grateful for the comforting pressure. Even through the haze he could see that the nurse was angry and he thought he said, "Mom's not the leper... please... please... don't think that... she's only... she's only... eating me because she... she loves me..." but perhaps nothing came out because the nurses angry face didn't change...

...He had a faint recollection of being pushed up a corridor in a wheelchair and his mothers voice somewhere behind, fading: "What do you mean, visiting hours!? Don't talk to me about visiting hours, that's my son!"

Fading. He was gladhe was fading, glad she was fading. The pain was gone and the clarity was gone with it. He didn't want to think. He wanted to drift. He was aware that his right arm felt very heavy. He wondered if they had put it in a cast yet. He couldn't seem to see if they had or not. He was vaguely aware of radios and TV's playing from rooms of patients who looked like ghosts in their hospital gowns walking up and down the wide halls, and that it was hot... so very hot. When he was wheeled into his room, he could see the sun going down in an angry orange boil of blood and thought incoherently: 'Like a great big clown-button.'

"Come on, Ejirou, you can walk," a voice was saying, and he found that he could. He was slid between crisp cool sheets. The voice told him that he would have some pain in the night, but not to ring for a pain-killer unless it got very bad. Kirishima asked if he could have a drink of water. The water came with a straw that had an accordion middle so you could bend it. It was cool and good. He drank it all.

There was pain in the night, a good deal of it. He lay awake in bed, holding the call-button in his left hand but not pressing it. A thunderstorm was going on outside, and when the lightning flashed blue-white, he turned his head away from the windows, afraid he might see a monstrous, grinning face etched across the sky in that electric fire.

At last he slept again, and in his sleep he had a dream. In it he saw Deku, Sero, Bakugo, Iida, Kaminari, and Todoroki- his friends- arriving at the hospital on their bikes (Deku was riding Bakugo double on Silver). He was surprised to see that Todoroki was wearing shorts- they were ashy grey, and cuffed at his mid thigh. His brothers black and white varsity jacket hung down farther than those shorts did. Kirishima thought they looked nice on him. He couldn't remember if he had ever seen Todoroki in shorts before; all he remembered were jeans, uniform khaki's, and on rare occasions, sweat pants.

In the dream he saw them coming in for the 2:00 P.M. visiting hours and his mother, who had been waiting patiently since eleven, turning and shouting so loudly at them that everyone turned to look at her.

"If you all think you're going to go in there, you've got another thing coming!" Kirishima's mother shouted, and now the clown, who had been sitting here in the waiting room all along (but way back in one corner, with a copy of The Tokyo Journal held up in front of his face until just now), jumped up and mimed applause, patting his white-gloved hands together rapidly. He capered and danced, now turning a cartwheel, now executing a neat back-over flip, as Akemi ranted at Kirishima's fellow Losers and as they shrank, one by one, behind Deku, who only stood there, pale but outwardly calm, his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his jeans (maybe so no one, including Deku himself, would be able to see if they were shaking or not). No one saw the clown except Kirishima... although a baby who had been sleeping peacefully in his mother's arms awoke and began to cry quite loudly.

"You've done enough damage!" Kirishima's mom shouted. "I know who those kids were! They've been in trouble at school, they've even been in trouble with the police! And just because those boys have something against you is no reason for them to have something against him. I told him so, and he agrees with me. He wants me to tell you to go away, he's done with you, he never wants to see any of you again. He doesn't want your so-called friendship anymore! Any of you! I knew it would lead to trouble, and look at this! My Ejirou in the hospital! A boy as delicate as he is..."

The clown capered and jumped and did splits and stood on one hand. Its smile was real enough now, and in his dream Kirishima realized that this was of course what the clown wanted, a nice big wedge to drive among them, splitting them apart and destroying any chance of organized action. In a kind of filthy ecstasy, the clown did a double barrel-roll and burlesqued kissing his mothers cheek.

"Th-Th-Those kih-hids who dih-did it-" Deku began.

"Don't you speak back to me!" Akemi shrieked, pointing an accusing finger in the small boys direction, singling him out. "Don't you dare speak back to me! He's done with you, I say! Done!"

Then an intern came running into the waiting room and told Kirishima's mom she would have to be quiet or leave the hospital. The clown started to fade, started to wash out, and as it did it began to change. Kirishima saw the leper, the face shield, the bird; he saw the werewolf, and a vampire whose teeth were Gillette Blue-Blades set at crazy angles like mirrors in a carnival mirror-maze; he saw Frankenstein, the creature, and something fleshy and shell-like that opened and closed like a mouth; he saw a dozen other terrible things, a hundred. But just before the clown washed out completely, he saw the most terrible thing of all: his mothers face.

"No!" he tried to scream. "No! No! Not her! Not my mom!"

But no one looked around; no one heard. And in the dream's fading moments, he realized with a cold and wormy horror that they couldn't hear him. He was dead. It had killed him and he was dead. He was a ghost.

—6—

Kirishima Akemi's sour-sweet triumph at sending Ejirou's so-called friends away evaporated almost as soon as she stepped into her son's private room the next afternoon, on the 21st of July. She could not tell exactly why the feeling of triumph should fade like that, or why it should be displaced by an unfocused fear; it was something in her sons pale face, which was not blurred with pain or anxiety but instead bore an expression she could not remember ever having seen there before. It was sharp, somehow. Sharp and alert and set.

The confrontation between Ejirou's friends and Ejirou's mom had not occurred in the waiting room, as in Ejirou's dream; she had known they would be coming- Ejirou's "friends" who were probably teaching him to smoke cigarettes in spite of his asthma, his "friends" who had such an... unhealthy... hold over him that they were all he talked about when he came home for the night, his "friends" who got his arm broken. She had told all of this to Mrs. Furutani next door. "The time has come," Mrs. Kirishima had said grimly, "to slap a few cards down on the table." Mrs. Furutani, who had horrible anxiety issues due to her abusive husband and who could almost always be counted upon to agree eagerly, almost pathetically, with everything Kirishima Akemi said, in this case had the audacity to disagree.

"I... aren't you.. happy... Ejirou's made some friends?.." Mrs. Furutani asked as they hung out their washes in the early-morning cool before work- this had been during the first week of July. "...he's certainly safer if he's with other children, Akemi, don't you think so? With all that's going on in this town, and all the poor children that've been murdered?..."

Mrs. Kirishima's only reply had been an angry sniff (in fact, she couldn't just then think of an adequate verbal response, although she thought of dozens- some of them extremely cutting- later on), and when Mrs. Furutani called her that evening, sounding rather anxious, to ask if Mrs. Kirishima would be going to the bingo game held at the Irusu Community Center with her like usual, Mrs. Kirishima had replied coldly that she believed she would just stay home that evening and put her feet up instead.

Well, she hoped Mrs. Furutani was satisfied now. She hoped Mrs. Furutani saw now that the only danger abroad in Irusu this summer wasn't the... the sex-maniac killing children and babies. Here was her son, lying on his bed of pain in Irusu Home Hospital, he might never be able to use his good right arm again, she had heard of such things, or, gosh, loose splinters from the break might work through his bloodstream to his heart and puncture it and kill him- oh of course she would never allow that to happen, but she had heard of it happening, so that meant it could happen. In certain cases.

So she lingered on the Home Hospital's long and shady front porch, knowing they would show up, coldly determined to put an end to this so-called "friendship"- this camaraderie that ended in... in broken arms and beds of pain, once and for all.

Eventually they came, as she had known they would, and to her horror she saw that one of them was the queer. Not that she had anything against queers, mind you; she thought they had every right to do what they want, marry who they want, etcetera etcetera, as long as they didn't bother straight-

(Normal)

-people, but she also believed firmly in what she called the Bird Theory: woodpeckers flew with other woodpeckers, not with the tundra swan. Sparrowheads roosted with Sparrowheads; they did not mix in with the Red-crowned crane or the white-tailed eagle. To each his own was her motto, and seeing Kaminari Denki pedal up with the others just as if he belonged there caused her resolution, like her anger and her dismay, to grow exponentially in size. She thought reproachfully, as if Kirishima were here and could listen to her: 'You never told me that one of your "friends" was the queer.'

'Well,' she thought, twenty minutes later, stepping into the hospital room where her son lay with his arm in a huge cast that was strapped to his chest (it hurt her heart just to look at it), she had sent them packing in no time... None of them except for Inko and Yagi's boy, the one who had such a horrible stutter, had had the nerve to so much as speak back to her. The scar-faced boy, whoever he was, had flashed a pair of decidedly (and, though she had never used this word to describe a young man before, she felt it was the only one that fit just right) whore-ish mismatched eyes at Akemi- 'from Lower Main Street or someplace even worse,' had been Kirishima Akemi's opinion- but she had wisely kept her mouth shut. If the peculiar looking boy had dared so much as to let out a peep, Mrs. Kirishima would have given him a piece of her mind; would have told him what sort of people had those eyes. There were names for girls (and now, she guessed, boys as well) like that, and she would not have her son associated, now or ever, with the ones who bore them.

Bakugo Katsuki had leered at her hatefully, but said nothing, just as he always had (Bakugo Katsuki had a quick temper, but he wasn't stupid. If he had said any of the things he'd thought of saying to Kirishima Akemi, he'd of never seen his boyfriend again- in fact, the word "boyfriend" was number one on that particular list) The others had done no more than look down at their shuffling feet. That was about what she had expected. When she was done saying what she had to say, they had gotten on their bikes and ridden away. The Midoriya boy had the foul-mouthed demon that had spawned from Akemi's (former) trashy, lowlife, underclassmen, Mistuki, (who she was definitely not jealous of) riding double behind him on a huge, unsafe-looking bike. Mitsuki's spawn had a dum-dum pop hanging loosely out of his mouth and a pissy expression on his face. With an interior shudder Mrs. Kirishima wondered how many times her Ejirou had ridden on that dangerous bike, risking his arms and his legs and his neck and his life.

'I did this for you, Ejirou,' she thought as she walked into the hospital with her head firmly up. 'I know you may feel a bit... disappointed... at first; that's natural enough. But parents know better than their children; the reason children have parents in the first place is to guide, instruct... and protect.' After his initial disappointment, he would understand. And if she felt a certain relief now, it was of course on Ejirou's behalf and not on her own. Relief was only to be expected when you had saved your son from bad companions.

...Except that her sense of relief was marred by fresh unease now, looking into Ejirou's face. He was not asleep, as she had thought he would be. Instead of a drugged doze from which he would wake disoriented, dimwitted, and psychologically vulnerable, there was this sharp, watchful look, so different from Ejirou's usual soft tentative glance. Like Sero Hanta (although Mrs. Kirishima did not know this), Ejirou was the sort of boy who would look quickly into a face, as if to test the emotional weather brewing there, and glance just as quickly away. But he was looking at her steadily now ('perhaps it's the medication,' she thought, 'of course that's it; I'll have to consult with Dr. Sunada about his medication'), and she was the one who felt a need to glance aside. 'He looks like he's been waiting for me,' she thought, and it was a thought that should have made her happy- a boy waiting for his mother must surely be one of the most favored-

"You sent my friends away." The words came out flatly, with no doubt or question in them, and decidedly un-Ejirou like.

She flinched almost guiltily, and certainly the first thought to flash through her mind was a guilty one- 'How does he know that? He can't know that!-' and she was immediately furious with herself (and him) for feeling that way. So she smiled at him.

"How are you feeling, Ejirou? Does your arm feel any better? Should I ask for a larger dose of painkillers?"

That was the right response. Someone- some foolish intern, or perhaps even that incompetent and antagonistic nurse from the day before- had been flapping their gums. Someone.

"Ejirou? How are you feeling?" she asked again when he didn't respond. She thought he hadn't heard her. She'd never read in any of her medical literature of a broken bone affecting the sense of hearing, but she supposed it was possible... anything was possible.

Ejirou still didn't respond.

She came farther into the room, hating the tentative, almost timid feeling inside her, distrusting it because she had never felt tentative or timid around Ejirou before. She felt anger as well, although that was still under control, simply brewing under the surface. What right did he have to make her feel that way, after all she had done for him, after all she had sacrificed for him?

"I've talked to Dr. Sunada, and he assures me that you're going to be perfectly fine," Mrs. Kirishima said briskly, sitting down in the straight-backed wooden chair by the bed, patting down the skirt of her frilly dress. "Of course if there's the slightest problem, we'll go to see a specialist in Ashikawa. In Sapporo- hell, Tokyo, if that's what it takes." She smiled, as if conferring a great favor. Kirishima did not smile back. And still he did not reply.

"Ejirou, sweetie, are you hearing me-?"

"-You sent my friends away," he repeated, staring right at her.

"Yes," she said, dropping the pretense, and said no more. Two could play at that game. She simply crossed one leg over the other and looked back at him.

..But a strange thing happened; a terrible thing, really. Ejirou's eyes seemed to... to grow, somehow. The flecks of burning orange embers in the sea of deep red seemed to actually be moving, like licking flames. She became aware suddenly that he was not "in a mood," or "having a bad day," or any of those things... He- he was furious with her... and Kirishima Akemi was suddenly scared, because something more than her son seemed to be in this room. She dropped her eyes and fumbled her purse open. She began searching for a Kleenex.

"Yes, I sent them away," she said, and found that her voice was strong enough and steady enough... as long as she wasn't looking at him. "You've been seriously injured, Ejirou. You don't need any visitors right now except for your own mom, and you don't need visitors like that, ever. If it hadn't been for them, you'd be home watching TV right now, or building your racer in the garage."

It was Ejirou's dream to build a soapbox racer and take it to Sapporo. If he won there, he would be awarded an all-expenses- paid trip to Tokyo for the National Soapbox Derby. Kirishima Akemi was perfectly willing to allow him this dream as long as it seemed to her that completion of the racer, which was made out of orange crates and the wheels from a Choo-Choo Flyer wagon, was just that- a dream. She certainly had no intention of letting Ejirou risk his life in such a dangerous contraption, not in Irusu, not in Sapporo, and certainly not in Tokyo, which (Ejirou had informed her) would mean riding in an airplane as well as making a suicidal run down a steep hill in a wheeled orange crate with no brakes. But, as her own mother had often said, "what a person didn't know couldn't hurt him" (her mother had also been fond of saying "Tell the truth and shame the devil," but when it came to the recollection of aphorisms Mrs. Kirishima, like most people, could be remarkably selective).

"My friends didn't break my arm," Kirishima said in that same, horrid, flat voice. "I told Dr. Sunada last night and I told Mr. Torino when he came in this morning. Shigaraki Tomura broke my arm. Shigaraki Tomura, mother, not my friends. Some other kids were with him, but Tomura did it. If I'd been with my friends, it never would have happened. It happened because I was alone."

This made Kirishima Akemi think of Mrs. Furutani's comment about how it was safer to have friends, and that brought the rage back like a tiger. She snapped her head up, her thin hair bouncing messily around her face as she did. "That doesn't matter and you know it! What do you think, Ejirou? That your mom fell off the back of a haytruck yesterday? Is that what you think? I know well enough why the Shigaraki boy broke your arm. That cop was at our house, too. That big boy broke your arm because you and your "friends" crossed him somehow. Now do you think that would have happened if you'd listened to me and stayed away from them in the first place?!"

"No. I think that something even worse might have happened," Ejirou said.

"Ejirou, you don't mean that-"

"-I do mean it," he interrupted her, and she felt that- that power coming off him, coming out of him, in waves. "Deku, Katsuki, and the rest of my friends will be back, Mom. That's something I know. And when they come, you're not going to stop them. You're not going to say a word to them. They're my friends, and you're not going to steal my friends just because you're scared of being alone."

She stared at him, astonished and terrified. Tears filled her brown eyes and spilled down her cheeks, wetting the powdered foundation there, forming ugly stripes. "This is how you talk to your mother now, I guess," she said through her sobs. "Maybe... maybe this is the way your "friends" talk to their parents- especially Mitsuki's boy... I've heard his mouth... heard hers too- trashy, the whole family- I guess you learned it from them."

She felt safer in her tears. Usually when she cried Ejirou cried, too. A low weapon, some might say, but were there really any low weapons when it came to protecting her son? She thought not.

She looked up, the tears streaming from her eyes, feeling both unutterably sad, bereft, betrayed... and sure. Sure that Ejirou would not be able to stand against such a flood of tears and sorrow. Sure that that cold, sharp, look would leave his face. Sure that the blazing anger in his eyes would go out... Perhaps he would even begin to gasp and wheeze a little bit, and that would be a sign, as it was always a sign, that the fight was over and that she had won another victory... for Ejirou, of course. Always for Ejirou.

She was so shocked to see that same expression on his face- it had, if anything, deepened- that her voice caught in mid-sob. There was sorrow under his expression, but even that was frightening: it struck her in some way as an adult sorrow, and thinking of Ejirou as an adult in any way always caused a panicky little bird to flutter inside her mind. This was how she felt on the infrequent occasions when she wondered what would happen to her if Ejirou didn't want to go to an online college, or Hokkaido University, or Sapporogakuin University so he could come home every day after his classes were done, what would happen if he met a girl, fell in love, wanted to get married. 'Where's the place for me in any of that?' the panicky bird-voice would cry when these strange, almost nightmarish, thoughts came. 'Where would my place be in a life like that? I love you, Ejirou! I love you! I take care of you and I love you! You don't know how to cook, or change your sheets, or wash your clothes! Why should you? I know those things for you! I know because I love you!'

"Katsuki and his family aren't trashy." He said, and his voice was shaking- but not in that anxious way she had been hoping for, no, her sons voice was shaking with unfiltered rage. "They're all awesome. His parents are very nice to all of us and cook us dinner-"

'He's been in their house!?' Mrs. Kirishima fretted in her own personal horror on the verge of utter collapse 'He's eaten dinner in that house!?'

-and Katsuki... Katsuki's amazing! He actually knows how to stand up for himself! And he stands up for me, too."

But his mother was no longer listening, instead, she was spiraling. Her son had been in that house- and, oh no, had he been in Bakugo Katsuki's bedroom?- She felt her head begin to spin as she thought back to that day the year before, when she had caught the loud-mouthed blonde staring so... intently... at her precious baby boy... she had known that look- anyone with eyes would have known that damned look- but... she had told herself that, surely not, surely Ejirou knew about the Bird Theory-

Kaminari Denki rolling up with his group of heathens flashed through her mind, her eyes widened, and all at once she found herself begging that the theory wasn't true, because... if that were to be the case, how many "different birds" were there?... and... was her son?-

"-You are never seeing those boys again-"

"-mom-"

"-No, Ejirou." She hissed through her teeth, thinking about how she had only been able to accurately describe Todoroki Shouto's eyes as "Whore-ish", and nearly passing out as she sweat through the back of her dress. "You-"

"-Be quiet."

She paused mid fan, her sweaty palms soaking through the first page of the 'Adults with ADHD' pamphlet she'd grabbed off the table. "Ejirou-"

"Just- be quiet." Kirishima sighed, astonishing her even further. "Just... I love you, Mom... But I love my friends, too... all of them... and I think... I think you're making yourself cry."

"-Ejirou, you hurt me so much," she whispered, and fresh tears doubled his pale face, trebled it. If her tears a few moments ago had been calculated, these were not. In her own peculiar way she was tough- she had seen her husband into his grave without cracking up, she had gotten a job in a depressed job-market where it wasn't easy to get a job, she had raised her son, and when it had been necessary, she had fought for him. These were the first totally unaffected and uncalculated tears she had wept in years, perhaps since Ejirou had gotten Kawasaki disease when he was two and she had been so sure he would die as he lay there in his bed of pain, covered in splotchy rashes, peeling skin, dangerously high fever, the white's of his eyes bright pink. She wept now because of that terribly adult, somehow alien expression on his face. She was afraid for him, but she was also, in some way, afraid of him, afraid of that aura that seemed to surround him... which seemed to demand something of her.

"Don't make me have to choose between you and my friends, Mom." Kirishima said. His voice was uneven, strained, but still under control. "Because that's not fair, and because you and I both know who I'll pick."

"They're bad friends, Ejirou!" she cried in a near-frenzy. "I know that, I feel that with all my heart, they'll bring you nothing but pain and grief!" And the most horrible thing of all was that she did sense that; some part of her had intuited it in the eyes of the Midoriya boy, who had stood before her with his hands in his pockets, frowning at her disapprovingly- as if he were the adult and she was the child. His eyes had been so grave, so strange and distant... like Ejirou's eyes now.

'And hadn't that same aura been around him as it was around Ejirou now? The same, but even stronger?' She thought so, yes. No- she knew so.

"Mom-"

She stood up so suddenly she almost knocked the straight-backed chair over. "I'll come back this evening," she said. "It's the shock, the accident, the pain, those things, that make you talk this way. I know it. You... you... " She groped, and found her original text in the flying confusion of her mind. "You've had a bad accident, but you're going to be just fine. And you'll see I'm right, Ejirou. They're bad friends. Not our sort. Not for you. You think it over and ask yourself if your mom ever told you wrong before. You think about it and... and..."

'I'm running!' she thought with a sick and hurtful dismay. 'I'm running away from my own son! Oh, please don't let this be!'

"Mom."

For a moment she almost fled anyway, scared of him now, oh yes, he was more than just Ejirou; she sensed the others in him, his "friends" and something else, something that was beyond even them, and she was afraid it might flash out at her. It was as if he were in the grip of something, some dreadful fever, as he had been in the grip of the Kawasaki that time when he was two, when he had almost died.

She paused, her hand on the doorknob, not wanting to hear what he might say... and when he said it, it was so unexpected that for a moment she didn't really understand it. When comprehension crashed down, it came like a loose load of cement, and for a moment she thought she would faint.

Ejirou said: "Aizawa said my asthma medicine is just water."

"What?... What?..." She turned fearful eyes on him.

"Just water. With some stuff added to make it taste like medicine. He said it was a placebo." He said simply, playing with the line dripping the morphine into his system lazily, his eyes calculating and cruel.

"That's a lie! That is nothing but a solid lie! Why would Aizawa Shouta want to tell you a lie like that? Well, there are other drug-stores in Irusu, I guess. I guess-"

"-I've had time to think about it," Kirishima said, softly and implacably, his eyes never leaving hers, "and I think he's telling the truth."

"Ejirou, I swear to you he's not!" The panic was back, fluttering.

"What I think," Ejirou said, "is that it must be the truth or there would be some kind of warning on the bottle, like if you take too much it will kill you or at least make you sick. Even-"

"-Ejirou, I don't want to hear this!" she cried, and clapped her hands to her ears like a child seeing fireworks for the first time. "You're... you're... you're just not yourself and that's all that it is!-"

"-Even if it's something you can just go in and buy without a prescription, they put special instructions on it," he went on, not raising his voice. His red eyes lay on her light brown ones, and she couldn't seem to drop her gaze, or even move it. "Even if it's just Vicks cough syrup... or your iron medicine."

He paused for a moment. Her hands dropped from her ears; it seemed too much work to hold them up. They seemed very heavy.

"And it's like... you must have known that, too, Mom..."

"Ejirou!-" She nearly wailed it.

"-Because," he went on, as if she had not spoken at all- he was frowning now, concentrating on the problem, "because your mom is supposed to know about medicines. I mean, I use that aspirator five, sometimes six times a day. And you wouldn't let me do that if you thought it could, like, hurt me. Because it's your job to protect me. I know it is, because that's what you always say. So... did you know, Mom? Did you know it was just water?"

She said nothing. Her lips were trembling. It felt as if her whole face was trembling. She was no longer crying. She felt too scared to cry.

"Because if you did," Kirishima said, still frowning, "if you did know, I'd want to know why. I can figure some things out, but not why my mom would want me to think water was medicine... or that I had asthma here-" he pointed to his chest "-when Aizawa says I only have it up here-" and he pointed to his head.

She thought she would explain everything then. She would explain it quietly and logically. How she had thought he was going to die when he was two, and how that would have driven her crazy after losing Habiki only eight months before. How she came to understand that you could only protect your child through watchfulness and love, that you must tend a child as you tended a garden, fertilizing, weeding, and yes, occasionally pruning and thinning, as much as that hurt. She would tell him that sometimes it was better for a child- particularly a delicate child like Ejirou- to think he was sick than to really get sick. And she would finish by talking to him about the deadly foolishness of doctors and the wonderful power of love; she would tell him that she knew he had asthma, and it didn't matter what the doctors thought or what they gave him for it. She would tell him you could make medicine with more than a malicious meddling druggist's machinery and degrees. "Ejirou," she would say, "it's medicine because your mother's love makes it medicine, and in just that way, for as long as you want me and let me, I can do that. This is a power that is only given to loving caring mothers. Please, Ejirou, please, my heart's own love, you must believe me."

...But in the end she said nothing. Her fright was too great.

"But maybe we don't even have to talk about it," Ejirou went on. "Aizawa might have been joking with me. Sometimes grownups... you know, they like to play jokes on kids. Because kids believe almost anything. It's mean to do that to kids, but sometimes grownups do it."

"Yes," Kirishima Akemi said eagerly. "They like to joke and sometimes they're stupid... mean... and... and..."

"-So I'll kind of keep an eye out for Deku, Katsuki, and the rest of my friends," Kirishima said, "and keep right on using my asthma medicine. That's probably best, don't you think? Hm? Mom?"

She realized only now, when it was too late, how neatly- how cruelly- she had been trapped. What he was doing was almost blackmail, but what choice did she have? She wanted to ask him how he could be so calculating, so manipulative. She opened her mouth to ask... and then closed it again. It was too likely that, in his present mood, he might answer.

But she knew one thing. Yes. One thing for sure: she would never never never set foot into Aizawa Shouta's drugstore again in her life. (Unbeknownst to her, Aizawa didn't much care- he had already sold his Irusu located business, and would move to Osaka in only a few months time. His talk with Ejirou had just been one thing on a long list of things he wanted to take care of before his big move.)

His voice, oddly shy now, interrupted her thoughts. "Mom?"

She looked up and saw it was Ejirou again, just Ejirou, and she went to him gladly.

"Can I have a hug, Mom?"

She hugged him, but carefully, so as not to hurt his broken arm (or dislodge any loose bone-fragments so they could run an evil race around his bloodstream and then lodge in his heart- what mother would kill her son with love?), and Ejirou hugged her back.

—7—

As far as Kirishima was concerned, his mom left just in time. During the horrible confrontation with her he had felt his breath piling up and up and up in his lungs and throat, still and tideless, stale and brackish, threatening to poison him.

He held on until the door had snicked shut behind her and then he began to gasp and wheeze. The sour air working in his tight throat jabbed up and down like a warm poker. He grabbed for his aspirator, hurting his arm but not caring. He triggered a long blast down his throat. He breathed deep of the camphor taste, thinking: 'It doesn't matter if it's a placebo, words don't matter if a thing works.'

He lay back against his pillows, eyes closed, breathing freely for the first time since she had come in. He was scared, plenty scared. The things he had said to her, the way he had acted- it had been him and yet it hadn't been him at all. There had been something working in him, working through him, some force... and his mother had felt it, too. He had seen it in her eyes and in her trembling lips. He had no sense that this power was an evil one, but its enormous strength was frightening. It was like getting on an amusement-park ride that was really dangerous and realizing you couldn't get off until it was over, no matter what.

'No turning around,' Kirishima thought, feeling the hot, itchy weight of the cast that encased his broken arm. 'No one goes home until we get to the end. But, Geez, I'm so scared...' And he knew that the truest reason for demanding she not cut him off from his friends was something he could never have told her: 'I can't face this alone.'

He cried a little then, and then drifted off into a restless sleep. He dreamed of a darkness in which machinery- pumping machinery- ran on and on.

—8—

It was threatening showers again that evening when Deku and the rest of the Losers returned to the hospital. Kirishima was not surprised to see them come filing in. He had known they would be back.

It had been hot all day- it was generally agreed later that that third week of July was the hottest of an exceptionally hot summer- and the thunderheads began to build up around four in the afternoon, purple-black and colossal, pregnant with rain, loaded with lightnings. People went about their errands quickly and a little uneasily, with one eye always cocked at the sky. Most agreed it would rain good and hard by dinnertime, washing some of the thick humidity out of the area. Irusu's parks and playgrounds, underpopulated all summer, were totally deserted that evening by six. The rain had still not fallen, and the swings hung moveless and shadeless in a light that was a queer flat yellow. Thunder rumbled thickly, a barking dog, and the low mutter of traffic on Outer Main Street were the only sounds that drifted in through Ejirou's window until the Losers came.

Deku was first, followed by Bakugo. Todoroki and Iida followed them, then Kaminari, and Sero came last. Sero looked excruciatingly uncomfortable in a large turtleneck sweater, who's sleeves went way passed the tips of his thin fingers.

They came to his bed, solemn. Not even Kaminari Denki was smiling.

'Their faces,' Kirishima thought, fascinated. 'Holy crap, their faces!'

He was seeing in them what his mother had seen in him that afternoon: that odd combination of power and helplessness. The yellow stormlight lay on their skins, making their faces seem ghost-like, distant, shadowy.

'We're passing over,' Kirishima thought. 'Passing over into something new- we're on the border. But what's on the other side? Where are we going? Where?'

"Your mom's a grade A bitch." Bakugo said suddenly, breaking the silence. Kirishima was expecting Deku to punch his arm or kick his shin like he usually did when Bakugo was unnecessarily rude. He did not.

"H-h-Hello, Eh-Eh-Ejirou," Deku said instead, sounding tired. "How're you d-d-doing?"

"I'm alright, Deku." Kirishima said, and tried to smile.

"Had quite a day yesterday, I see," Kaminari said. Thunder rumbled behind his voice. Neither the overhead light nor the bedside lamp was on in Kirishima's room, and all of them seemed to fade in and out of the bruised light. Kirishima thought of that light all over Irusu right now, lying long and still across Ukiyo Park, falling through the holes in the roof of the Kissing Bridge in smudged lackadaisical rays, making the Shibui look like smoky glass as it cut its broad shallow path through the Barrens; he thought of seesaws standing at dead angles behind Irusu Elementary as the thunderheads piled up and up; he thought of this thundery yellow light, and the stillness, as if the whole town had fallen asleep... or died.

"Yes," he said. "It was quite a day."

"My puh-parents are g-going out to a muh-muh-movie the night a-a-after n-next," Deku said. "When a-all the nuh-new one's are a-added. We're g-going to m-make them then. The suh-suh-suh-"

"-Silver balls," Bakugo said.

"I thought-"

"-It's better this way," Sero said quietly. "I still think we could have made the bullets, but thinking isn't good enough. If we were grownups-"

"-Everything would be so much easier if we were grownups," Todoroki said. "Grownups can make anything they want, can't they? Grownups can do anything they want, and it always comes out right." he sighed, sounding even more distressed than he had that day he'd told him, Sero, and Iida about the blood and voices coming out of the drain. "Deku wants me to shoot It. Can you believe that, Ejirou? I've only know you all for a month and he's asking me to shoot a monster..."

"I don't know what you're talking about," Kirishima said, but he thought he did- he was getting some kind of picture, anyway.

Sero explained. They would melt down one of his silver dollars and make two silver balls a little smaller than ball-bearings. And then, if there really was a werewolf residing at 29 Neibolt Street, Todoroki would put a silver ball into Its head with Deku's Bullseye slingshot. Goodbye werewolf. And if they were right about one creature who wore many faces, goodbye It.

There must have been some sort of expression on Kirishima's face, because Kaminari laughed and nodded.

"I know how you feel, man. I thought Deku must have lost his few remaining marbles when he started talking about using his slingshot instead of his dads gun. But this afternoon-" He stopped and cleared his throat. 'This afternoon after your mom screamed our ears off' was how he had been about to start, and that obviously wouldn't go over well. "...This afternoon we went down to the dump. Deku brought his Bullseye. Look." He looked, almost excitedly, over at Bakugo, and urged him with his animated and fast arm gestures to do- something.

Looking quite annoyed by Kaminari's seemingly never ending energy, Bakugo reached into his back pocket and took out a flattened can which had once held cherry pie filling that Kaminari, his mother, and Sero had made in the Kaminari's farm kitchen the weekend before. There was a ragged hole about two inches in diameter through the middle of it. "Half and half did that with a rock. He was about twenty feet away. Looks like a .38 to me. Even I was fucking impressed. And when I admit to being impressed by something, you know it's gotta be insane."

"Killing cans is one thing," Todoroki said quietly. "If it was something else... something alive... Deku, you should be the one. Really. I mean... with the... history... between you and It-"

"-N-no," Deku said. "We a-a-all t-took turns. You suh-suh-saw how it w-w-went."

"How did it go?" Kirishima asked.

Deku explained, slowly and haltingly, while Todoroki looked out the window with his lips pressed so tightly together they were white. He was, for reasons he could not explain even to himself, more than afraid: he was deeply embarrassed by what had happened today. On the way over here tonight he had argued again, passionately, that they should try to make the bullets after all... not because he was any more sure than Deku, Bakugo, or Sero that they would actually work when the time came, but because- if something did happen out at that house- the weapon would be in-

(Deku's)

-someone else's hands.

But facts were facts. They had each taken ten rocks and shot the Bullseye at ten cans set up twenty feet away. Iida had gotten one out of ten (and his one hit was really only a nick), Kaminari had gotten two, Deku and Bakugo four, Sero five...

...Todoroki, shooting almost casually and not appearing to aim at all, had banged nine of the ten cans dead center. The tenth fell over when the rock he fired bounced off the rim.

"But first w-w-w-we g-gotta make the uh-uh-ammo."

"Night after next? I should be out by then," Kirishima said. His mother would protest that... but he didn't think she would protest too much. Not after this afternoon.

"Does your arm hurt?" Todoroki asked. He was wearing white shorts (not the shorts he had seen in his dream; perhaps he had worn those that afternoon, when his mother had sent them away) on which he had embroidered small, blue, snowflakes on his right pocket. He looked very adult but also somehow very childlike, like a child playing dress-up. His expression was blank but his eyes were warm. Kirishima thought: 'I bet his laugh is really pretty.' And felt his cheeks heat up a bit.

"Not too much," Kirishima said.

They talked for awhile, their voices punctuated by thunder. Kirishima did not ask them about what had happened when they came to the hospital earlier that day, and none of them mentioned it other than Bakugo's earlier outburst. Kirishima slipped his good hand into Bakugo's right, and Bakugo sat down in the chair his mother had occupied earlier and rested his chin on Kirishima's shoulder. The action made them both flush. None of their friends said anything (well, Kaminari snickered, but Iida berated him like a loving father)

Conversation lagged, and in one of the pauses there was a brief click that made Kirishima look around. Deku had something in his hand, and for a moment Kirishima felt his heart speed up in alarm. For that brief moment he thought it was a knife. But then Iida turned on the room's overhead, dispelling the gloom, and he saw it was only a ballpoint pen. In the light they all looked natural again, real, only his friends.

"I thought we ought to sign your cast," Deku said. His eyes met Kirishima's- they were cool, calculated- almost mischievous.

'But that's not it,' Kirishima thought with sudden and alarming clarity. 'It's a contract. It's a contract, Deku, isn't it? or the closest we'll ever get to one...' He was frightened... and then ashamed and angry at himself. If he had broken his arm the year before, who would have signed the cast? Anyone besides his mother, and perhaps Dr. Sunada? His aunts?

These were his friends, and his mother was wrong: they weren't bad friends. 'Maybe,' he thought, 'there aren't any such things as good friends or bad friends- maybe there are just friends, people who stand by you when you're hurt and who help you feel not so lonely. Maybe they're always worth being scared for, and hoping for, and living for. Maybe worth dying for, too, if that's what has to be. No good friends. No bad friends. Only people you want, no, need to be with; people who build their houses in your heart.'

Home is where the heart is- that was the saying, wasn't it? Well- Kirishima felt with a fierce certainty that he had found his home- that they all had found their home.

"Okay," Kirishima said, a little hoarsely. "Okay, that'd be real good, Deku."

So Deku leaned solemnly over his bed and wrote his name ("Izuku" not "Deku") on the cherry-red plaster that encased Kirishima's mending arm, the letters small and only some-what messy. Bakugo signed his name, very large, and in the direct center- even his lettering somehow managing to come across as aggressive- looking almost jagged with much thicker lines than anyone else's. Sero's handwriting was as narrow as he was, and slanted slightly backwards. He ended it with a smiley face, so it looked like 'Hanta (:'. Kaminari's handwriting was messy, nearly illegible, and he turned the 'D' in 'Denki' into an open mouthed smile. He signed above Kirishima's elbow. Todoroki's writing, though neat and loopy, was a little larger and awkwarder than Todoroki would have liked it to be because Todoroki was left handed and the angle was bad for him. Iida came last, and wrote his name in tight-packed little letters by Kirishima's wrist.

They all stepped back then, as if aware of what they had just done- the contract they had just signed. Outside, thunder muttered heavily again. Lightning washed the hospital's wooden exterior in brief stuttering light.

"That's it?" Kirishima asked.

Deku nodded. "C-C-Come oh-oh-over to my h-house a-after suh-hupper day a-a-after t-tomorrow if you c-c-can, o-okay?"

Kirishima nodded, and the subject was closed.

There was another period of tepid, almost aimless, conversation. Some of it was about the dominant topic in Irusu that July- the trial of Iishi Zen for the bludgeon-murder of his daughter Mai, and the disappearance of Mai's older step-sister, Jirou Kyoka. Iishi would not break down and confess, weeping, on the witness stand for another two days, but the Losers were in agreement that Iishi probably had nothing to do with Jirou's disappearance. Their female peer had either run away... or It had gotten her.

They left around quarter of seven, and the rain still had not fallen. It continued to threaten until long after Kirishima's mom had come, had her visit, and gone home again (she had been horrified at the signatures on Kirishima's cast, and even more horrified at his determination to leave the hospital the following day- she had been envisioning a stay of a week or more in absolute quiet, so that the ends of the break could "set together," as she said).

Eventually the stormclouds broke apart and drifted away. Not so much as a drop of rain had fallen in Irusu. The humidity remained, and people slept on porches and on lawns and in sleeping bags in back fields that night.

The rain came the next day, not long after Todoroki Shouto saw something terrible happen to Toga Himiko.