Hawks foundered, throwing razor feathers in several directions at once, forcing Fossa to take cover behind a tree. Dabi was trying to kill Kacchan but wasn't sure how to do that without burning his lover. Tokoyami probably wanted to kill Dabi and protect Hawks but also foundered, resulting in Dark Shadow attacking everyone, wild, lashing wings of darkness mixing in with scarlet feathers.

Explosions, crimson feathers, living shadows, hellish smoke in the sky, blue fire eating up several trees, one of which was dead and probably dangerously unstable--

What was Fossa supposed to do? He flattened himself to the ground as a feather whizzed past his head with an arrow-like whistle. The greenette was more likely to hit one of his allies than one of his enemies if he tried to fire into this mess. Approaching to melee range would just be asking Dark Shadow to obliterate him--or offering Dabi the opportunity to fry him, or Hawks the opportunity to skewer him.

Katsuki managed to tackle Hawks to the ground, hand drawn back to pull the pin on his gauntlet as if planning to blow the ex-hero's head clean off. Dark Shadow mustered his strength and snatched Katsuki, bodily flinging the blonde into Dabi. The familiar shrieked in incoherent fury and clawed forward as if ready to slice bothprone combatants to pieces.

Fossa shot the shadow in the head ten times. Bullets couldn't really hurt the creature but the barrage distracted Dark Shadow for a moment, just long enough for Tokoyami to get his partner under control, and also long enough for Dabi and Bakugou to decide that since they were on the ground together they might as well try to strangle each other. They wrestled for a moment before Katsuki twisted out of Dabi's grasp and retreated away from a handful of face-aimed flames.

The pair traded fireballs and Katsuki's special laser-cutter supermove, setting still more underbrush alight.

Izuku aimed for Dabi's leg--a shot to incapacitate rather than kill--and then Hawks tackled him. "Stop it!" The former hero had the nerve to bite Fossa's ear as he hissed this.

"Get your love bird and get the hell out of here before someone gets killed!" Fossa growled between his teeth, heroically refusing to let his aching ear do anything more than irritate him.

The greenette abruptly flew several feet through the air, flailing like a rag doll, to land in a stunned heap on top of an unfortunate bush.

His aching ears rang like ten thousand church bells and every joint protested the impact despite the considerable protection offered by his equipment.

For a moment the greenette thought he had gone deaf. How could something, anything, possibly be so loud? Dragging himself to hands and knees, Fossa caught sight of the end result of the explosion. A stunned Katsuki--burned and bruised and notably missing both of his explosive gauntlets entirely--lay prone in the center of the clearing as two unstable trees began to topple. One fell backwards into a neighbor, taking that one down with it. The other fell forward across the clearing. There was a tremendous crash--audible even over the ringing in his ears--as Izuku's oldest friend disappeared beneath a smoldering blanket of brittle, green-brown leaves.

Alright. Alright, then. This was how things were. Kacchan was out. He might not even be alive. And that final explosion had weakened Dark Shadow tremendously, the familiar's black wings bleaching gray. What now? Someone might already be dead and more people were going to die if this didn't end soon. It was time to stop playing nice and start taking head shots.

Fossa dragged himself to his feet but even as he regained his equilibrium, Dabi--who had faired much better in the explosion than the greenette for whatever reason--grinned and hurled a huge mass of blue-hot flames at Tokoyami. The student's dazed familiar hugged his crouching partner's shoulders and hissed like a tiny, defiant snake, trying to urge his companion into motion.

"No! No don't--" Hawks threw himself at his student, stumbling and off-kilter and not nearly as fast as he should be.

It would have been perfect, the former hero redeeming himself by saving his student from certain doom, showing everyone that he was a good person no matter where his loyalties lay.

It didn't work out like that.

"No!" Dabi howled in horror as he caught both his enemy and his lover with the hottest flames he could summon. Hawks and Tokoyami both howled in agony, Dark Shadow whimpering then vanishing entirely, as the trio sprawled and rolled across the forest floor.

It looked like Fossa's classmate had caught the worst of it, feathers across his head and neck blazing like torches. Burning feathers smelled identical to burning hair. Fossa never needed to know that. The maimed pair landed about two meters apart, both writhing in attempts to stifle the flames.

Dabi's eyes grew wild and he howled in fury, reaching into the sky as if attempting to strangle some god. He turned to Fossa screaming, "you!" as if preparing to blame the greenette for the whole mess, then he spun back to Tokoyami. "You little bitch I'm going to incinerate you for that!"

What could Hawks possibly see in a person like Dabi? There must be something there, but it sure

wasn't evident in any of the villain's public actions. Maybe Hawks just had terrible taste? Maybe Hawks was so broken and abused from his HPSC upbringing that the slightest shred of kindness, the tiniest bit of requited love, was enough to capture his heart forever, or maybe there was really more to Dabi than met the eye. What did it matter, really? Katsuki might be dead. Tokoyami might be dead. They were hardly the only ones Dabi had destroyed, and the villain had the nerve to act like it was Tokoyami's fault that Dabi was a bloodthirsty maniac.

"You worthless bastard," Fossa hissed as a tiny flicker of rage surged through him like lightning, fading away into the mist of combat serenity as quickly as it had appeared. Fossa's first shot caught Dabi in the shoulder, the second in the throat, a crimson flower spattering from the latter impact. Fire died in Dabi's hand as the villain went down hard.

Suddenly the greenette's panting was the second loudest sound in the clearing. The loudest thing was that stupid squirrel from earlier still having a fit, although perhaps a fit was warranted now.

Hawks staggered to his feet. The ex-hero, ragged remains of burned wings drooping so they dragged on the forest floor, looked at Fossa, then at Dabi, then at Tokoyami. Shaking his head, Hawks whispered "no. No it can't end like this. This can't be." He stared at Fossa, eyes narrow with fury, "you," then lunged towards him.

"Back off!" Fossa roared, leveling the muzzle at him. "I don't want to hurt you, Hawks," and he didn't. Dabi he had wanted to hurt but Hawks... He didn't know what to think of Hawks but he didn't want shoot him.

Hawks darted towards him with speed that ought to be impossible for someone with so many serious burns, greater speed than that which had failed to rescue Tokoyami only seconds earlier. Two smaller feathers--singed but still intact--zipped towards the greenette, both aimed for his throat, aimed to kill by slitting the jugular.

Fossa dodged one and used the armor on his wrist to catch the other, wincing as the feather pierced to the skin and into his arm. That wasn't the last of the small feathers and Hawks still had one that was sword length and was also all of a meter away now--Fossa pulled the trigger. He'd meant to hit a leg but at that distance and in such a desperate situation chaos took effect. Fossa caught Hawks twice in the stomach instead.

The ex-hero stumbled, landing face first on the ground as Fossa fled to a safe distance. The handful of remaining feathers that had prepared to slash at the student wavered and plummeted to the forest floor.

Fossa panted. The squirrel chittered in rage. In the distance, the top floor of the PLF's villa collapsed as fire ate through the support beams, the ugly red glow bright enough to stain the whole mountain in blood.

He was surrounded by blood and bodies, some of which were probably dead and some of which probably weren't dead. A former hero. A committed villain. Three friends. How could he stand here in the middle of this circle and feel nothing at all? What kind of human being could shoot two people--three if you counted Dark Shadow earlier--watch another crushed by a tree and three seared like steak on a grill and feel nothing? This wasn't like Tartarus where nobody he really knew had been badly hurt. This wasn't like the riots where he had been confident that Monoma was going to survive. The violence that he himself had perpetrated and the violence perpetrated against himself and his close associates here was on an entirely different level.

Not only that, the fighting was over. There was no need to compartmentalize, no need to set things aside so that he could function in a dangerous situation, no need to keep emotion at bay.

He stood in the smoldering clearing, coughing on the smoke, and felt nothing. "Monster," he accused himself.

There were still things to do. He couldn't stand around all day waiting for his icy heart to melt.

First thing first, the thing most likely to murder them if it happened to regain consciousness. He staggered--still off balance from the explosion and a thousand little aches permeating every muscle--to Dabi's crumpled figure.

The villain's throat was a shattered, bloody mess. Fossa took a wrist instead. Dabi's eyes were closed. He almost looked like he were sleeping. How unsettling, because he was definitely dead, as if the static pool of blood beneath his neck didn't make it obvious that his heart had ceased to beat.

Fossa dropped the villain's lukewarm hand. It fell like a soggy rag. Kacchan next. He was--he was important. Kacchan had to be next.

The tree hadn't crushed him so much as it had trapped him, and as Izuku pushed aside some branches, calling for his friend, he got a groggy groan in reply. Fossa couldn't reach. He didn't have tools on him that could get this thing out of the way. There was nothing he could do for his friend at the moment.

Alright. Kacchan would have to wait. Tokoyami now.

His classmate was almost unrecognizable, feather crest seared away and skin beneath like the cracking aftermath of a volcanic eruption. Izuku tried not to look too closely at the wounds. Tokoyami didn't deserve to be remembered like that. Izuku looked closely for a pulse, however, although he'd known at a glance that he wouldn't find one. It was every bit as bad as Kuma's death, every bit as horrible and undeserved and gory; it was worse, in fact, because Kuma had at least been an adult when All For One mauled her to death for her quirk.

Now what? What was he... Tokoyami was dead. It wasn't like with Monoma, where the whole response was laid out for him like a computer program. There was nobody here to save. There wasn't anything he could do for Kacchan, either, other than hope the blonde would be alright until someone could move the tree.

"Is he okay?" a breathy, plaintive voice begged. Hawks. Right. Hawks was here, too.

The ex-hero, covered in horrific burns himself, crazed edge to his expression, had managed to prop himself up on an elbow and crawl a half meter or so closer to his former student. "He is dead," Izuku replied, succinct and serene.

Hawks collapsed back onto his side and wailed. The noise was inhuman, a long, keening cry like a dragon mourning a lost child. There. That was how Izuku ought to feel, pain and rage and misery, not this cold, dragging emptiness.

"No, no, no, I didn't mean for any of this!" Hawks gasped out. "I just wanted to leave! I just wanted to go now after I--after I told them--I just wanted--just--I did everything they ever told me to!" he scream-coughed. "I did it all! It's not fair. It's not fair! Why can't I ever have anything?"

Hawks had just tried to kill him... or had Hawks just tried to getFossa to kill Hawks? Was that an actual attempt on Izuku's life as revenge or just suicide by hero? It was sick either way.

Izuku sighed. He had glass pebbles with him. He would try to save Hawks with his quirk. It was hopeless, though. Fossa wouldn't be able to dredge up the kind of emotion necessary, the kind of

protective possessiveness, that had allowed him to use his quirk to its fullest capacity on Monoma. The student still couldn't feel anything at all, let alone anything... positive.

No, Fossa wouldn't be able to find that grasping feeling, not for Hawks, not after the man had attempted to kill him and been the indirect cause of Tokoyami's death, Bakugou's serious injury, and Fossa slaying another villain in a momentary fit of rage.

But that wasn't fair, was it? That was just scapegoating. This wasn't Hawks' fault, not really. As Hawks had said, all he'd wanted to do was leave and he had desperately tried to save his former student. The whole mess was far more Dabi's fault, but Izuku couldn't find any more anger for the dead man, and witnessing that death must have been a terrible thing for poor Hawks who, unlike Fossa still seemed to experience human emotions.

Izuku could forgive the ex-hero for flying into a fit of mad fury at the sight of his lover's dead body and his student's burned face. The greenette sank to his knees beside the battered hero. "You deserved better," he said.

"I'm sorry," Hawks whispered weakly. "But maybe not for... everything... you think I did." What did that mean?

Hawks did not speak again. Izuku knelt with glass pebbles cupped in his hands, seeking an elusive emotion, until the red-winged man stopped breathing.

Izuku sighed and lay down on his back, staring at the smoke-stained sky. "Still don't feel anything," he commented to nobody. "Monster," he tried insulting himself again, but the insult didn't bite. He didn't care. He didn't care about anything or anyone.

How could things possibly have gone so wrong so fast? What had it been, two minutes? Not even that, not even one minute for three people to be dead over nothing. Over nothing . Nothing.

If Katsuki hadn't showed up when he did... If Tokoyami hadn't chased after his mentor... If Hawks hadn't been grounded by a previous injury...

"Why?" Izuku asked nobody. Kacchan groaned, maybe in response to the greenette, maybe not.

He hadn't reported this. What was wrong with him? Beyond the obvious, anyway. He should have called this in the moment Hawks went down.

"Control this is Fossa," he spoke slowly, as if his tongue moved through molasses.

"Acknowledged, Fossa, go ahead," control still sounded frazzled but seemed less hostile now.

"Hawks and Dabi got into a fight with two hero students. I attempted to intervene. It didn't go well." That wasn't the important stuff. He was rambling. This was no way to make a report. "I'm sorry, I... Hawks, Dabi, and my classmate Tokoyami Fumikage are all dead at my location. My other classmate Bakugou Katsuki is semiconscious, pinned underneath a downed tree that I can't move. It's too heavy... he's definitely alive. I keep hearing him."

Control was silent for a moment. "What is your status, Fossa?"

"I..." he hadn't even thought about that. "Bruises, a few cuts from Hawks' feathers. A deep set of gouges on my shoulder, no idea how I got those..." he hadn't noticed them. "I do not require more medical attention than I can provide to myself," he finished.

Control was silent again. "Please confirm again the identities of the deceased individuals."

Why were they making him say it again? "Dabi. Hawks. Tokoyami Fumikage."

"Acknowledged, Fossa. Stand by and remain in your current position. A team will be dispatched as soon as one becomes available."

"Acknowledged, control."

Just like that. Like stepping on a butterfly, that easy, that casual, that horrible. They were all breathing and now they all weren't and now it was set in indelible stone. You couldn't run the tape backwards. The power of every hero on the planet couldn't change this. Everything, a million pathways, unlimited potential futures for four people, all gone just like--it was beyond understanding. Death. He'd seen it before many times. This was so different, though, so very different.

He didn't understand this. It didn't make sense. How could it be that he would never speak to Tokoyami again? How could he never again be subject to Dark Shadow's terrible jokes about Izuku's "dark, shadowy past" or play Truth or Dare and nominate the familiar to begin the game? Dark Shadow had seemed so happy to be included... and now he was dead so it didn't matter how happy he'd been.

It didn't make sense. It was like trying to add two and a clock radio. It was like trying to feed a laptop through a fax machine. The question didn't compute, let alone the answer.

Fossa stood vigil with semiconscious Kacchan--who he really couldn't reach, or even see well enough to assess--and kept an eye on the bodies.

The three of them looked so ugly, laying there in tattered heaps like old dresses left at the bottom of the closet for the moths to eat. That was unacceptable.

Fossa rolled Hawks onto his back, folding his wings carefully to the sides, crossing the man's arms over his chest and gently closing his raptor eyes. He arranged the tattered clothes to protect the ex- hero's modesty.

Dabi... Izuku placed him beside his lover, arms similarly crossed.

Tokoyami had died with his eyes open, like his mentor. Izuku closed them as best he could--the burns made it difficult--and placed him in a similar pose to the other two but a distance away. Dark Shadow had vanished without a trace, as if he had never existed.

"Why couldn't you have just let it go, Tokoyami? Why couldn't you have let him make his mistakes and pay for them himself?" Admiration? Kinship? Some kind of love? Hatred would have been hard pressed to do this kind of damage. "It's not fair. You didn't deserve this. You deserved so much better." Dabi... might have actually had it coming at this point. Hawks, though... "Whose side were you on, Hawks? Did you even know?"

The PLF's villa collapsed further, the heat of the flames finally gnawing through the last of the structural supports. The whole building turned into a hellish pit as the greenette watched, the rising black smoke thickening into sludge. A few trees still burned, but fortunately Dabi's fires in Izuku's clearing had all reduced to smoldering embers. Good. What would Fossa have done if the fire had spread with Katsuki still pinned beneath a tree?

It was hard to tell if the battle was still raging given the intensity of the fire standing between Fossa and the main event. Maybe the heroes were losing definitively and nobody would ever come to help Fossa free Kacchan. What would he do then? Well, he might be able to dig down under the

tree to get to Katsuki but it would be really hard given his own state. The injury on his shoulder-- which was probably from Dark Shadow although he couldn't recall ever being close enough to be mauled--was nothing to sneeze at. Izuku was also exhausted in every sense of the word, and just couldn't stop coughing--

His throat was raw, aching from smoke inhalation. Where was his water? There. Too bad he only had this little bottle.

He cleaned, stitched and bandaged the cuts on his shoulder for the sake of something to do.

How long had he waited here for someone to bring body bags? Was nobody coming? Had the heroes really lost? Was Fossa going to have to retrieve Kacchan himself and then vanish into the night like the surviving generals after Utapa, the two of them fugitive victims of a losing war? Would he have to leave Tokoyami here to rot? Should he bury his classmate now? He didn't trust the PLF to treat the body respectfully.

Control sounded in his ear just as Izuku was considering calling them back and demanding information. "Fossa, Eraserhead is on his way to your location with a team of EMTs."

Eraserhead. The teacher came to see his students, the dead one and the failures who couldn't save their classmate.

"Acknowledged, control," Izuku replied numbly.

It was only a few minutes later that Aizawa arrived. Izuku kept his weapon at the ready until the owners of the approaching feet materialized in full detail. "Hello, Eraserhead," Izuku said. The hero looked rather worse for the wear, covered in soot and no small amount of blood. He no longer had his capture scarf and much of his clothing was torn.

The teacher slowly took in the carnage as Izuku helped the rescuers begin to dismantle Katsuki's fibrous prison. One of those in attendance was a minor hero with a strength quirk who lifted the bulk of the trunk with a grunt and bade them hurry. The greenette helped keep branches out of the way as an EMT shimmied beneath the woody pillar and carefully retrieved the blonde.

"I presume you moved the bodies to be like this?" Aizawa asked wearily, staring down at Tokoyami, barely sparing the other dead a glance.

What would the other option be? They died posed like mummies? "I couldn't stand looking at them splayed out on the ground like broken marionettes." The look his teacher gave him... Aizawa blamed him for this. Fine. Whatever. Who cared? Tokoyami and Dark Shadow were dead. What did it matter whose fault it was or who thought what about that fault?

A barely conscious Katsuki was finally strapped to a stretcher. Izuku helped a woman with purple hair wrestle Hawks into a standard black bag not designed to accommodate a mutation quirk. If his wings had been more than ten percent intact it might have posed a real problem.

Izuku was never going to be able to zip a coat without thinking about this, about the black, rubbery fabric sealing away Hawks' burned face.

Aizawa moved Tokoyami, although it wasn't really necessary. Any of the responders could have done that.

The group trudged back to their original staging area. "Did we win?" Izuku asked after a time, walking beside Kacchan's stretcher. The greenette kept offering to carry one end but the EMTs always turned him down, frequently giving his injured shoulder pointed glances as they did so.

Carrying such weight would probably hurt, but it would be worth it to take care of the one friend he hadn't completely failed today.

"Nobody won," Aizawa sighed. "The PLF retreated. We caught a few of them, some of significant rank, but none of the lieutenants. Hawks and Dabi deserted in the middle of the fight." Deserted? Well, that fit with what Izuku had seen. "It's too bad they're dead. We might have learned something from them in exchange for amnesty." Aizawa glared at nothing.

"If you'd caught them," Fossa muttered.

"Anyway, most of the PLF got away, including the rest of the leadership, minus Gigantomachia, if he counts. Edgeshot killed him."

"Huh. That's probably a good thing." Aizawa gave him a concerned side-glance. Was that too morbid? Unheroic?

They heard the staging area long before they saw it. Triage tents dominated the parking lot, all non-ambulance vehicles having spread out along the adjacent road to make space. There must be more than a hundred people awaiting treatment and presumably there had been many more earlier.

Katsuki's stretcher was carried straight to one of the tents. The three body bags were taken to a refrigerated truck. Izuku caught a glimpse inside as the EMTs opened the door to deliver their miserable cargo--rows upon rows of black bags on shelves. Stacked like boxes in a delivery truck. Gods.

For just a moment, Izuku felt the barest edge of the emotions he ought to, pain and horror and revulsion and grief and despair. That was right. That was how he should be. He was almost tempted to walk right up to the van of death, step inside and stare straight at all of its concentrated horror until his body and mind started reacting properly.

However, that would be getting in the way and probably incredibly weird on a number of levels. He shouldn't.

"The rest of our class?" the greenette asked his teacher, strangled.

"No other UA students were killed," Aizawa said flatly. "I thought... I thought everyone made it until I got the call about you..." he shook his head. "There are a number of serious injuries. Iida Tenya," he had to specify given that Tensei was there, too, "almost lost his left arm but probably saved Kaminari's life. Mineta had his feet crushed." There was an implied "bones to paste" in that statement that sent a shudder through the greenette's body. "Midnight and Cementoss are both in critical condition. There's a student a year above you who will probably never be able to walk normally again, or maybe at all." Someone called for the teacher's attention and Eraserhead nodded to Fossa before turning away.

Aizawa vanished into the crowd, swallowed up by the chaotic currents. Izuku, suddenly dizzy, took a seat on one of the few unoccupied rocks of reasonable height and waited for someone to tell him what to do or where to go or how to exist as a human or whatever.

"Midoriya Izuku?" a rough voice asked. He looked up to find two HPSC officials glowering at him. They wore black suits and had visible earpieces. He'd never seen such an obvious pair of "agents."

"Yes?"

"Come with us, please."

Izuku looked for his teacher but couldn't find him--or anyone else familiar--in the crowd. "Now," the second agent said, voice cold. There was no room to protest, not unless he wanted to start another fight. There had already been enough of those for one day.

Huh. Izuku was being disappeared, wasn't he? On suspicion of being a traitor himself, perhaps, or just as a security risk.

He couldn't bring himself to care.