Izuku hated being right, especially when being right meant being assigned to a riot control team. The riots following All For One's death were worse than anything Japan had seen in recent memory; they were violent, pervasive and enduring.
It wasn't clear whether the majority of this belligerent crowd consisted of PLF members or merely angry, frightened citizens caught up in the self-contained fury storm that any violent group generated. Izuku, in his hero getup augmented with a large, clear shield, stood side by side with Jiro, Shouji, Hagakure, Shiozaki, Monoma and Present Mic as one section of a long, living barrier.
"This was supposed to be the calmest part of town," Present Mic muttered. Violent protests had broken out around city hall and the police station. UA's younger students, as well as several other teams, had been sent to discourage the comparatively peaceful crowds around lesser targets such as this fairly unimpressive judicial building. Everything had gone to plan for the first hour or so, the atmosphere hot but far from boiling. That was, however, likely to change shortly.
The sun had long since set and there was a curfew about to come into effect, but nobody seemed inclined to pay that law any mind. Attempting to force a crowd this size to disperse would not be advisable. There were hundreds of them compared to only a few dozen riot police and heroes--most of them students untrained for this kind of situation.
Something burned in the distance. The acrid, black smoke of structure fires drifted into the dark sky, search lights reflecting on it as if it were nothing more than a low-lying cloud. The dissonant murmurs of the crowd--slogans interspersed with casual conversations and insults--grew steadily louder.
"This is not going to end well," Fossa sighed.
"I think you're right," Present Mic admitted. Someone threw a water bottle. Izuku deflected it casually with his shield and did not react in the slightest to the provocation. It only takes one domino to knock down a whole table, after all, and Fossa was not going to be That Domino.
"Keep your eyes open," Present Mic directed his squad of students over coms, "if you cannot get into contact with me or the police sergeant, Fossa is in charge."
"I am?" Izuku asked the teacher.
"Nedzu said so," Present Mic shrugged. "Even if he hadn't said so, you're the logical choice." That was flattering if a bit terrifying.
One angry young man approached the heroes' line. Izuku watched out of the corner of his eye. He wasn't quite sure who threw the first punch, but the civilian was on the ground a moment later. There went That Domino. The crowd turned ugly, swelling forward even as Present Mic jumped on the trunk of a police car, illuminated in the red and blue of its flashing lights, and shouted. "Everyone, please! It's Thursday, everyone's exhausted, and what most of us wanted to do this evening was watch the new episode of Vanguard with a cup of hot cocoa! It's not too late. If we all head home now we'll only miss the opening credits. Come now, is this really how you'd like to spend Thursday night?"
Yamada was a charismatic public figure, well known as a hero but better known still as a radio host. None of the HPSC files had ever so much as suggested anything unpleasant about him, and his quirk was perfect for the situation. A good portion of the crowd visibly considered turning around and going home. Whether they were going to watch Vanguard or not was an open question for most of them--although one teenager right in front of Izuku looked at his watch, loudly swore, yelled, "I forgot to set it to record!" and started threading his way rapidly towards the edge of the crowd.
Yamada stepped down from the car, walked towards the fallen civilian, helped him to stand and, rather than arresting him, took his information and sternly sent him home. Or, at least, that was what Fossa would have done. They would likely have the instigator quietly arrested later when there was less chance of such an action setting off a powder keg.
Present Mic reclaimed his position on Fossa's left. Tension slowly eased. "Wasn't really expecting that to work," the hero muttered.
"It was amazingly well done," Izuku complimented, not that his teacher really needed a compliment from a student.
"Thank you." He cocked his head, listening to a private channel on coms. "I need to speak to the sergeant about backup. I'll be back in five minutes at most. Call me if anything changes over here." Fossa nodded.
It was about two minutes later that everything fell apart. Fossa hadn't the slightest clue what That Domino had been, but he was abruptly fending off rocks, chunks of concrete trash cans which the crowd had overturned to shatter, and water bottles all while ripping a nail-studded club out of a young woman's hand.
Wonderful. What a perfect end to a perfect day. Sharp cracks filled the air as rubber bullets fired into the surging crowd. One of the heroes present had, apparently, a decent quirk for crowd control, something similar to Midnight's power but inhaling the blue mist resulted in calm drowsiness. The bluish fog spread rapidly through the street, citizens yawning in its wake. Izuku could barely make out Present Mic's shouts echoing from the opposite side of the building.
Fossa caught sight of the blur of quirk-enhanced speed as a young woman darted towards Monoma. Izuku repelled another attacker of his own as his blonde friend rebuffed his first assailant with a shield. A man swung a punch at Fossa who side-stepped and kicked the attacker's leg out. He
punched someone else in the face at the same time and ignored the resounding curses about a broken nose. The greenette turned at Monoma's shout of pain.
He'd seen plenty of people stabbed in the chest before. Fossa abandoned his riot shield for the moment in favor of two hands as he stepped inside the guard of the woman who had dared try to kill his friend. He threaded his fingers between hers, getting a decent grip on the knife's hilt, even as he kicked her viciously between the legs. Her mouth flew open in silent pain and he pulled the knife from her limp hand, separating the assailant from her weapon while leaving the cold steel embedded between his friend's ribs. It was a long blade and Fossa would not have Monoma bleeding to death.
The young woman shakily raised her hand, ready to use an emitter quirk of some kind. Arms still busy with Monoma, Fossa swept the still agonized opponent's legs from beneath her then stomped on her chest hard enough to break ribs. She stopped trying to use her quirk.
Shouji, Fossa's abandoned shield in one hand and his original in another, moved to cover them as Izuku eased his blonde friend to the ground, careful not to jostle the blade. Monoma grit his teeth, breathing in fast pants, eyes wide with pain and fear. "Calm down if you can," Fossa said. Monoma mouthed curses, unable to speak then squeezed his eyes shut, forcing tears to spill down his cheeks. Red slowly seeped from the wound. Monoma did have an armor layer in his costume, but
it was soft armor designed to counter small caliber bullets, blunt force, or thermal attacks; it provided minimal protection against a forceful stab and didn't seem to have helped him at all.
Fossa wasn't skilled enough to say for certain what kind of damage had just been done. Certainly if the blade had struck his heart directly the blonde would be dead or unconscious already. Whether that meant he would live to be delivered to Recovery Girl was unclear. It was like Tsuge all over again. Objectively, Monoma dying was unacceptable; shouldn't Izuku be hysterical? Not... analytical or affronted or whatever this feeling was.
The dancing reds and yellows of a burning police car glinted off shards of shattered glass laying beside Fossa's armored palms, likely the remains of one of the water bottles thrown earlier. Convenient.
Monoma was his friend. Nobody had any right to take him away. Fossa was going to keep him and he didn't give a damn what the rest of the universe thought about it. Monoma. Was. His. Fossa scooped the glass shards into his hands and felt the power pool there, let the electricity and possessive passion surge through him in a hurricane. Light blossomed across his friend's prone body and Fossa stood up, a neat globe of glass clutched tightly in his hand. His. "You're a good teacher," he told Monoma quietly. "It will be alright." He might be lying but there was time for only a few comforting words and no time to assess their validity. Although, it really felt like everything would be fine. That might be the quirk-high thinking. God this felt great. This must be the feeling people in animated films had right before they started a comical bar fight and stole all the beer or whatever family friendly substitute while everyone else was smacking each other over the heads with chairs and stuffed deer and the piano played ragtime. Izuku was the master of this scene, maybe the master of this whole world. He could do whatever he wanted. Perhaps he should start his mastery small, though, with protecting his prize. Izuku tucked Monoma into one of his belt pouches.
The greenette rejoined Shouji, accepted back his offered riot shield, and promptly smacked someone in the face with it. "Wait, where's Monoma?" Shouji demanded, hiding the fright in his tone well but not nearly well enough.
"You didn't see?"
"I was a bit busy," Shouji emphasized this by rebuffing a drunk woman wielding what could only be the timing chain from a large truck. That was admittedly pretty weird. Some rioters attacking with quirks, that was expected. Some rioters breaking apart trashcans and benches for projectiles, that was expected. Some rioters having real weapons, that was expected, too. The improvised scrap metal was a surprise. As Izuku muzzily mused on these things, the crowd thinned a good deal, but there was no shortage of furious fools ready to strike at them.
"He's safe," was all Fossa decided to say about Monoma after a pause long enough to make Shouji frantic. "He'll probably be alright."
Present Mic reappeared from... wherever he had ended up and shouted, "disperse! Disperse! Go home! This has gone far enough!" Even standing behind his teacher with his ears well protected, Fossa was tempted to wince from the overwhelming volume.
The crowd began to thin, slowly at first, then the remains scattered all at once, the dregs suddenly realizing how exposed they were.
A few dozen individuals, either restrained or sporting serious injuries, remained. One of them was the girl who had stabbed Monoma and received broken ribs--maybe a punctured lung--in recompense. She had crawled a short distance before curling onto her side, panting, beside a garbage can. The garbage can in question was on fire. So was the police car that Present Mic had stood on earlier. There was plenty of blood on the concrete, but any of the sick iron scent of violence was overwhelmed. Everything smelled of disgusting, dirty waste smoke, as if the whole city had been transformed into a garbage incinerator.
Police warily moved to arrest the individuals who remained. "What happened to her?" one asked, approaching Monoma's assailant.
"She stabbed my schoolmate," Izuku replied. "I broke her ribs in the ensuing struggle." "Wait, who was stabbed?" Present Mic demanded whirling around.
"Monoma," Izuku replied.
"Where is he?" the teacher demanded, striding forward as Fossa motioned him closer.
"I have him. He's stable for the trip back to UA, or the nearest hospital," Izuku explained in a whisper as his teacher reached him. Well, the student was probably stable. If Monoma weren't stable, if the quirk hadn't worked properly, there was nothing that could be done about it.
"What...?"
"He was stabbed in the chest. Can Recovery Girl do chest surgery?"
"No," Present Mic shook his head rapidly. "She'll want to be present, but he needs to be taken to an actual level one trauma center. But what do you mean you have..." Fossa pulled the snow globe from his pocket, a tiny, blonde figure curled up at the bottom, "oh." Izuku grinned and winked.
The wink was a bit much. Fossa might still be high. "Alright. Let's get everyone together, um... how do you release him? Is it something only you can do?"
Izuku shook his head. "Anyone can do it. Just break the glass." Fossa handed over his friend and Present Mic surreptitiously slipped the globe into a shirt pocket.
The remaining UA students, all shocked but some more stoic than others, slowly gathered around Yamada. It would be many long hours before they finally made it back to UA.
"Aren't you going to bed?" Hagakure asked him. It was so late it was early. Only a few hours separated them from breakfast.
"No. I'm going to play video games for the rest of the night... morning. Whatever," Izuku replied. "You should at least try to get some sleep," Jiro frowned at him.
"I am much too high on adrenaline," and quirk endorphins, "for that," Izuku replied. And even if he weren't, he had a good idea of the kinds of dreams that would find him on a night like this. He'd seen enough blood for one day.
"Mind if I join you for a game?" Shouji asked. "Sure. We can do multiplayer."
Jiro and Hagakure exchanged glances before heading up the stairs. How much had they seen of what happened to their blonde year mate? Certainly not as much as Shouji.
The game was plenty distracting, if a bit too difficult for the greenette's current cognitive power following the inevitable adrenaline crash. Izuku drove his go-kart through a barrier and into the lava for the tenth time. Shouji had only done that eight times so far. "Still better than trying to sleep," Shouji said as Izuku waited for the game to arrange his rescue from a fiery grave.
"Yeah. No chance of decent sleep for us."
"It's weird," Shouji said quietly as the greenette started his restored go-kart and began a hopeless attempt to catch up with the game's AI racers. "You never really... I mean I knew it could happen it just... I never really expected it to. Someone I know getting really hurt I mean."
Izuku hummed. "Tsuge, one of the Tartarus guards, died right next to me," he admitted. "I didn't feel surprised. Tartarus should have been the most secure place in the country. There should have been no chance of that infiltration and yet... it happened. I barely felt anything at all."
"That's..." Shouji shook his head, thinking better of what he'd been about to say. "I'm glad you can handle everything so objectively. I saw what happened to Monoma just out of the corner of my eye and I was panicking. I didn't know what to do, I wasn't going to react in time, I was going to let her pull the knife out and maybe stab Monoma again before it even occurred to me that I could do something but you... you knew exactly what to do. You didn't hesitate even an instant. And when
I saw that you knew what to do and had everything under control like that, then I knew what to do and could... get a hold of myself and do it."
Izuku smiled wryly. "Thank you for covering us. I wouldn't have been able to do my part if people had kept attacking me."
"What did you do by the way?" Shouji asked. "Monoma was there... bleeding to death and then I was distracted and then he was gone."
"Now that's one hell of a long story," Izuku muttered bitterly. "And I... I don't know whether I'm allowed to tell you? Who cares... implying is probably fine. Nedzu might disapprove but you're a really good friend and Present Mic had to find out in order to... well, you know." Shouji raised an eyebrow. He did not know, after all. "I was born quirkless. Later I was kidnapped. You know that. The person that borrowed me got in a fight with All For One and came out on top somehow. That was forever ago now... turns out a lot more happened to me than I thought.
"Anyway, tonight Monoma was there and then he wasn't and I said he was fine and meant it. Make of that what you will but don't spread it around, please." If he implied this much to Shouji, he should probably imply as much to Ojiro and Kacchan as well, but... he had an excuse for why he had to say something to Shouji. If he didn't, Shouji would just keep pressing for answers about what had happened. With Ojiro and Katsuki, no such excuse existed.
Shouji stared at the greenette. The many armed student's go-kart plunged into lava for the ninth time. "All For One gave you a quirk? Like a teleportation quirk or a healing quirk or..."
"I can neither confirm nor deny this rumor but do ask that you not spread it around."
"Did you... no, you didn't know, did you? Not until that disaster at Tartarus. You were there to talk to All For One. That's when it came out, isn't it?"
"I can neither confirm--"
"Yeah, I understand. I won't say a word. I get the idea of how big a secret this is. You wouldn't have said anything to me if I hadn't caught you doing something inexplicable, I guess."
"Thanks."
"Wow, we are really bad at this game, aren't we?"
"Driving real cars is easier. And we'd be better if we weren't mostly asleep."
"Tomorrow is going to be a rough day."
Technically it was already tomorrow, long since in fact. "Not as rough as tonight would have been if we'd gone to sleep."
"I don't understand why Hagakure and Jirou are even trying, honestly."
"I don't think they saw nearly as much as you did. They heard Monoma got hurt but I don't think
they actually understand. Maybe they'll be able to get some sleep."
"Hope so, though there were plenty of other horrible things to see, not just that. He wasn't the only person left bleeding on the concrete..." Shouji shuddered. "But hopefully they can forget about it for now. There might was well be someone sleeping in this place. Are the other groups even back?"
"No idea and I don't plan on knocking on any doors to check." "No, that doesn't sound wise at all."
Izuku and Shouji made it most of the way to home room before a large group from class B appeared like a sudden lightning strike, blocking their way. Izuku didn't know many of them well. He knew Kendo at least. "Is it true?" she demanded.
"Uh... what?" Izuku squinted.
"That Monoma's dead," she demanded. Wait. What?
"Uh... not to my knowledge?" Shouji and Izuku exchanged glances. "Who said that?"
"The news," Shishida replied, arms crossed. "They said a UA student died last night and Monoma is the only one missing that I know of, and Shiozaki says you two were with him when he got hurt- -"
"I don't think Monoma is dead," the greenette interrupted. Could he have misjudged? Could the suspended animation effect have failed? It was supposed to keep creatures alive in stasis, even if they were very badly injured like the poor gecko Mamba. Well, Monoma could have died on the operating table but Izuku really didn't think that wound liable to be fatal with effectively instant medical attention. "You should ask Present Mic or Vlad King maybe. The news is wrong a lot lately. Or they could be right but it could have been a third year or something." Not that a dead third year would be a better thing.
"What happened?" Kendo demanded, teeth bared. Shiozaki laid a hand on the other girl's shoulder, shaking her head, although it was entirely unclear what that interaction meant.
"A rioter got lucky and managed to stab him. He was taken to the hospital by a police officer," Shouji replied.
"I was the one who rendered first aid," Izuku put in. "I really don't think he was going to die. I just don't."
"He didn't," Present Mic sighed, striding up to the group. Oh thank heavens. "The news isn't wrong. A UA student did die last night, but not a heroics student."
"What?" Kendo asked, floored.
"A third year general education student, Tone Yoshi, was out visiting a seriously ill relative. He was caught in an explosion while hurrying back to the school." Kendo's features twisted in relief and consternation. How was she supposed to feel? Her friend was alive but someone else's friend was dead. Relief would be in poor taste. How dare she place one life above another? But she couldn't help but feel relief. Others in her class seemed to be processing similar, conflicting emotions. Shiozaki started crying. Shishida shook his head as if he couldn't believe it. Izuku's similar feelings--far from novel for him--were muffled. "Now you need to let Midoriya and Shouji get to class. They've had a really rough night." Class B assented and slowly dispersed.
Present Mic turned to Izuku and Shouji. "Did you two get any sleep at all last night?" Izuku shook his head. Shouji replied, "we didn't even try."
The teacher nodded. "Fair. Nedzu has excused you from classes for the day."
"I think we'd both rather attend," the multiarmed student replied quietly.
"Also fair. I didn't get the chance to thank you last night so let me thank you now. Pro heroes couldn't have handled the situation better. Your year mate is alive because of you."
Shouji blushed at the praise but also grimaced, flattery and horror mixing in confusing proportions. Izuku just nodded.
"Alright... I suppose I should get to class, too," Present Mic considered after a glance at his watch.
Class A was quiet as a graveyard that morning. The handful of students who had made it back to
UA with the time and peace of mind required to sleep were infected by the subdued sorrow and exhaustion the rest of the class bled into the air about them.
Aizawa looked even more exhausted than usual. "Most of you have probably heard that Monoma was seriously injured last night. As UA will soon release in a statement, he is expected to make a full recovery and should be back at school in a few weeks. The rumors about a UA student being killed in the riots are true. He was a third year general education student." The teacher sighed. "I would like to give you some kind of inspiring speech about how to deal with these kinds of events but I just don't have it in me today. Anything I say right now would probably make it worse. You have a free period."