"Wakakuro wants to be there for the meeting," Hitoshi said.
"Is that a good idea?" Neito hedged.
Hitoshi sighed, eyes rolling up to the ceiling, unsure. "He always had a problem with me, but he never treated Isozan anything other than kindly, or Tohiro, for that matter. I don't think it'll be a problem."
"If it is, we can always have Kurogiri spirit him away!" Denki interjected, throwing himself across their laps.
"Well," Neito started, and Hitoshi shifted under Denki's weight, sure that whatever was going to come out next was going to be entertaining, "when Kurogiri warps someone, they don't just disappear, they go somewhere else, so depending on how atrocious the behavior is, he could end up on a tropical island vacation, or a hundred meters above an active volcano so that he at least has some time to think about what he's done."
"You would have been a great villain," Dabi said, breezing into the room, looking at Neito like he was a lost cause as a hero.
Neito smiled brightly and barely had time to chirp a thank you to Dabi before Denki was already saying, "maybe we should ask for him to be dropped higher than a hundred meters, though. Less than two seconds isn't exactly much time to think about anything other than 'oh, shit. I'm about to die from being warped above an active volcano.'"
Neito looked down at Denki on his lap, who looked back up at Neito, not understanding the surprise he saw on his soulmate's face. "You had such a hard time in school with math, and here you are doing advanced calculations in your head about gravity acceleration?" Neito pressed, clear awe in his voice.
Denki giggled. "No," he admitted, reaching up to run his fingers along Neito's jaw, amazed that Neito would think so highly of him instead of reaching the correct conclusion right away. "I just have used my lightning to blast myself into the sky so many times at varying heights that I know from experience how long it takes an average sized adult male to free fall from many different heights. Never underestimate the power of experience."
Slowly, the grins started growing on the soulmates' faces until the laughter burst free and could not be contained.
Denki's phone chimed with a new notification, and with tears in his eyes from his laughter, he looked, and he sobered quickly. Hitoshi and Neito noticed and looked down at him in concern as he stared at his phone screen with intense concentration, worrying his bottom lip between two teeth as he thought about what he saw there.
: ' P05itiv3R3volt Let's meet up? I'll send you the coordinates to a neutral location. No tricks—just a discussion and we all walk away at the end.'
"What's up, Denks?" Hitoshi prompted, squeezing a hip in comfort, rubbing his thumb over the skin of Denki's hip bone where the shirt rode up.
"Uh…" Denki sputtered, looking up from his phone in bewilderment. "The Hero Public Safety Commission wants to meet with me."
Neito barked out a laugh that lacked all humor. "Are they stupid?"
"I'm actually considering it," Denki said, deep in thought. "They haven't tried this, yet."
"What about when they sabotaged the Live television interview?" Neito was quick to argue.
"That was different. They weren't invited to that. This is an invitation to meet up directly and talk. It feels different," Denki said. "I'm not saying I'm going to do it. I'm saying I need to think this through. The public has shown their support. Other heroes have shown their support, including even working with the League when it benefits the public. Maybe the HPSC is finally catching up."
"Doubtful," Neito grumbled, but didn't argue further.
"Either way, he can just lightning zap away if things go south, right?" Hitoshi said.
"Not exactly," Neito said. "We thought so until Katsuki got the jump on him."
"Shit," Hitoshi swore under his breath. "I forgot about that. You think they'd try something like that?"
"Kacchan is sneaky! He had the advantage of knowing me so well, and the HPSC doesn't have that, so I don't know if they would try that, but I guess it depends on the coordinates they give," Denki said. "If it's some kind of warehouse, probably likely. If it's some kind of big empty field, I don't see how, and it would seem like they would be actively trying to make me feel more comfortable by ensuring big empty spaces and an empty sky to ensure clear take-off for if I did feel threatened at all. It all just depends on what happens when I accept."
"When you accept. Not if." Neito sighed. "Great. Fine, okay. But we're coming with you."
"Depends on what they say!" Denki said. "What if the neutral location is a submarine off the coast of Japan, ten thousand meters below the ocean's surface? We can't risk that!"
"Well, I wouldn't exactly call that neutral, Denki!" Neito argued, throwing his hands up in frustration.
Hitoshi smiled, watching his blonde soulmates argue, knowing that everything would work out. It always did.
It had to, or they would find a way to force it to.
-.-.-
"Hi, I'm Himiko Toga! What's your name, little cutie?" Toga introduced herself, crowding into Tohiro's personal space as she opened the door.
"Holy shit," Tohiro said. "Holy shit." She stared wide-eyed at the villain in front of her.
"Language, Tohiro! We've been over this! I swear I'm going to start a swear jar if—" Hanisu rambled as she rounded the corner, "—oh, shit," she said, when she saw who stood at her door, taking in the vision of her foster care worker, standing in the doorway sheepishly as Toga had forced her way past him to invade Tohiro's space past the threshold. Isozan, Uretori, Hitoshi, Denki, Neito, Shigaraki, and Dabi hovered behind, waiting to be out of sight of the street, even knowing that the majority of heroes were on their side, or at least neutral. It was still better to be safe than sorry, and the anxiety of being out and about in the daylight as a villain or right next to a villain didn't go away overnight.
Tohiro laughed, loudly and uninhibited. "If we're getting a swear jar, you'll be contributing to it just as much as I do! Maybe even more!" She grabbed Toga's hand and pulled her further into the house to free up the entryway to allow the other guests room for entry. "I'm Tohiro. Do you make it a habit of going around and introducing yourself? I'm pretty sure everyone already knows who you are."
"Then why'd you let me in?" Toga teased, flashing her a sharp smile as she plopped down onto the couch, dragging Tohiro down beside her.
"Anyone who's anyone is on the Fork Brigade!" Tohiro insisted. "And that doesn't just include Denki, you know? You're all a package deal, now."
"The Fork Brigade?" Toga repeated, utterly intrigued.
"Yeah! Well, it's a working title, not set in stone or anything. It's based off of the #GetForked movement that's represented by all the little forks popping up everywhere. There needs to be an official name for it, right? Don't you think, Toga?"
Wakakuro looked entirely uncomfortable and tried to gently interject multiple times as Toga and Tohiro chatted, trying to get down to business to get the villains out of the foster home as quickly as possible, but he was promptly ignored. He didn't have any better luck with trying to hurry along the conversation in the kitchen among Genori, Dabi, Shigaraki, Denki, and Neito.
Genori was cooking something on the stove, his back to the villains as he conversed, and Wakakuro could have had a heart attack at the man's lack of self-preservation. How he had survived with Hitoshi in the home, he'd never know! Wakakuro stopped himself in his thoughts, trying to reprogram the way he had thought about the purple-haired kid with the powerful quirk who had grown up to be a hero against all odds, but it was difficult. But if Isozan could learn to trust him, surely Wakakuro could, too.
When Denki complimented Genori's cooking and said it was better than Dabi's, Dabi demanded that Shigaraki get retribution for him, and Wakakuro about fainted when Shigaraki reached out toward Denki with his hand, murderous intent in his eyes.
Denki, laughing, rolled his eyes and teleported to the other side of the table in a flash-crack of lightning. He held his hands up in an appeasing manner, but it wasn't very convincing as he rolled his eyes again at the leader of the League of Villains, and told Dabi that it was fine because at least his cooking was better than Shigaraki's. Shigaraki lunged, and Denki disappeared in a flash of light again.
"Denki!" Genori scolded. "No lightning in the house!"
Denki laughed, using his lightning to stay out of reach again. "It's fine, sir! I already pre-paid!"
Genori looked over to a jar on the counter to see some bills stuffed into it, and just broke down into loud guffaws, unable to argue with that. "Just don't pass that helpful tidbit onto Tohiro if Hanisu finally gets her swear jar up and running!"
"No promises!" Denki said, scrunching up his nose in mischief as Shigaraki caught him.
Wakakuro winced and looked away, not ready to see Denki dissolve into a pile of ash on the floor, but when he dared to look back after hearing Denki's laughter instead of his screams, he saw Shigaraki aggressively ruffling his hair as Denki tried to wrestle his arm away from his blonde locks that were getting more and more disheveled, not even seeming concerned that one wrong slip would decay his scalp off.
"Hell, Wakakuro," Genori said, stirring the soup on the stove, startling Wakakuro after not being included in the conversation for so long. "If we knew this is what villains were like, we wouldn't have understood why you discouraged Hitoshi from becoming one so incessantly! This is great! What a lively bunch!"
Wakakuro quickly made his exit at that but didn't fare much better in the dining room among Hanisu, Uretori, Isozan, and Hitoshi, either.
Hitoshi with his former foster parents was something else. Adding Uretori and Isozan to the mix caused unexpected chaos that Wakakuro didn't foresee.
They're all laughing, tears falling down their faces. Hitoshi's hands are clenched in fists and he has his head buried in his arms on the table as he heaves, trying to catch his breath.
"And—and—and," Isozan wheezes through his laughter, "there I am, and I say—at the worst possible time—I say, Denki propositioned me first!"
They all howl with laughter. Hitoshi bangs his fist on the table as his mouth opens with soundless laughter. Uretori falls out of her seat and kicks her feet off of the tile floor, pressing her face against the cool tile to try to feel some relief for her heated face as she overheated from the intensity of the hilarity.
Wakakuro slowly backs out of the room, deciding that he would rather take his chances at getting struck by Denki's stray lightning or Shigaraki's flailing hands than deal with whatever that was.
-.-.-
"Come in," the president called.
Nato complied, walking in and shutting the heavy door behind him, looking up to see more than just the president of the Hero Public Safety Commission at the table, but also the ethics committee of the Japanese branch of the United Nations. Overall, not a good sign.
"We need a status report on why this Chargebolt and Hawks situation hasn't been handled, yet," the president demanded. "And why you were seen in a video with the two defected heroes in a recent TikTok video."
The video was brought up on the screen, various clips of Chargebolt with sometimes Hawks tagging along interacting with the public with the music of Everybody Loves Me playing overtop of what natural sound there might have been. Near the end, third clip from the last, is the incriminating clip of Nato getting an autograph and having a jovial conversation with Chargebolt and Hawks.
Oh. They were trying to make him the scapegoat, Nato realized.
"Of course," Nato said, more than happy to comply. "The public loves him, despite all attempts made by your agents to paint him in a bad light. Including my niece, so sue me for getting an autograph. At every turn, I have been ignored by your agents. My hands have been tied, and I have been given very limited corrective power to fix any of the mistakes made or punitive power to limit any more mistakes being made moving forward. My warnings go unheeded, and permission isn't asked, ideas aren't discussed before the agents take on their ideas of their own merit, acting of their own accord."
"So, you can't control those under your supervision," the president sneered.
"Under my supervision, maybe," Nato said, "but not under my control by any means. You'll recall if you revisit the contract you have me under that I have no power over the agents, and also no obligation to help. Everything I've done is out of my own goodwill, and I cannot be held accountable. It was a condition set when I was not to be granted any substantial power to change anything, if you'll recall."
The president's face reddened as the board members began to mumble among themselves.
"And what do you recommend to resolve these issues, now?"
"Now that you've allowed it to go on and make everything worse and worse? Recommend? No. We're past recommendations and gentle suggestions," Nato said, standing up and leering over the edge of the table, taking the time to look at each board member in the eyes. "If you don't want me to walk out here and now, here are my demands."
Nato walked back into the octagonal board room as one of the agents ranted, sitting down in his seat as the agent talked about how they should discredit Chargebolt and Hawks by setting up a scenario in which a civilian gets hurt, a paid actor of course.
"You're fired," Nato said, promptly cutting him off, and sounding bored while he was at it.
"Wha—?"
"You heard me. You're fired. The corner obviously has not taught you a damn thing. If I say no, you're just going to up and do it anyway. Security is on their way to help you pack up your belongings and escort you out."
"You don't have the authority to terminate anyone's employment—" the agent with the long nails objected, said long nails already tapping against the table in agitation.
"I do now, actually," Nato said. "Now that the government has seen what a mess everything is here, I've been given full control, and you're fired, too. You all are. Don't ask for a reference; it won't be kind."
The agents sat in stunned silence for a moment before security actually did show up and start to file them out. No one reached for Takaga, so he made to stand on his own.
"Where are you going?" Nato asked, tired eyes flickering to the agent in question.
"I'm fired…?" Takaga stated, but more as a question.
"Not exactly. You aren't an agent anymore, though."
"Just demoted, then?" Takaga asked, sitting back down and giving his attention to Nato instead of his phone for once.
"Promoted, actually. You're the new president," Nato said.
Takaga sputtered in disbelief. "What? Wait! That puts me above you, though!"
"No way in hell they're putting someone new in here in charge of me. I suggested you," Nato said, before shaking his head and correcting himself. "I demanded you or I was walking. They can't afford to have me walk or the Hero Public Safety Commission crumples. Hero society in Japan as we know it would fall. No one wants that, but I couldn't stand one more second trying to work with people who were only making things worse at every turn."
"You're not leaving, then?" Takaga asked.
"I'm not leaving my favorite agent to fend for himself!" Nato promised.
"That's Mr. President to you, Nato," Takaga snarked, kicking his feet up onto the table.
Nato laughed. "Let's do some damage control."
Takaga sighed in relief, a weight coming off of his shoulders. "Let's," he agreed, reaching for his phone.
"What are you thinking, Mr. President?" Nato asked, in a great mood already.
Takaga slid the phone across the table to Nato, and said, "if you can't beat them, join them?"
Nato read the typed-out comment on the screen, laughed at the handle, and hit submit.