The shadow of a shadow hissed at him, clawing at the floor which already bore the marks of long abuse. How? How had they managed to get his classmate's body? They'd stolen it somehow, or had a defector steal it or--who knew? Had the PLF scientists got their grubby paws on Hawks and Dabi, too? If those two had been made into nomus, where were they? Certainly not here, not among the failures, and Izuho'd heard nothing of such powerful undead combatants returning to the field... Had the PLF been unwilling to put their own former generals through this dehumanizing horror or had the bodies of the generals simply been guarded more carefully by the Chain so that they could not be stolen at all?
Seeing this nomu, it felt like stepping through a door and finding himself back exactly where he'd started months ago. He could all but smell the smoke, hear Control in his ear, see Hawks lunging for his student--it was Tokoyami's death that began Izuku's sad excuse for a life spiraling out of control once and for all and this... this mockery... The rage overcame every bubble of bliss in his drugged blood and Fossa clenched his fists in fury. He didn't know how to fully comprehend this travesty. There was only so much emotion Fossa's body could contain when there was nobody immediately available to kill.
"Tokoyami?" Izuku asked, louder this time. There wasn't going to be an answer, was there? Eyes glowing with electric rage locked with his. "He's gone," a tortured voice roared.
Oh. Oh. "Dark Shadow." Dark Shadow and not Tokoyami, the quirk surviving, the human dead and gone. The spy's mind refused to process this as it wasn't clear whether Izuku or Fossa would be best equipped to handle it and so the revelation was set aside for the time being. Trying to wrap
his mind around this was like trying to make a purchase with a credit card that kept being declined. Oh, it felt so much like the aftermath of that fight on Gunga Mountain, trying to comprehend life turning to death, except now he tried to comprehend death turning to half-life.
The shadow of a shadow gazed at him, calculating and predatory. "Who are you?"
This was not a place to exchange names. How should he explain? "A slime mold," he said eventually. "The one you once said had a Dark, Shadowy past."
Dark Shadow cocked his head, fluffed up feathers relaxing into a shining, dark mane. "Even I know that you are dead."
"What? How could you possibly know that?"
"The disintegrator said so," Shigaraki, "he was curious. Thought I was interesting. A lone quirk, without a 'master.' Slavers don't understand partnership, only possession." That was... surprisingly insightful from a creature like Dark Shadow who was more prone to committing acts of gleeful chaos and talking with his talons than philosophizing. He had been left alone here with his thoughts far too long, hadn't he? "Disintegrator gloated. He hates you, despises you... I don't know why," but Izuku did. "He said the HPSC had you killed. He thought it was funny. Just hilarious," the familiar spat. Was that what the PLF really thought? How had they come to that conclusion? Had they seen transfer records and realized that Izuku would have been in Angband during the raid? The PLF could have determined, given that he was not found during the Angband raid, that Izuku had been killed by the HPSC while incarcerated. That could be it. Or had some PLF spy seen Fossa arrested at the end of the Gunga Mountain battle and assumed Izuku had been executed when he never resurfaced? "I told the disintegrator he'd get what was coming to him. For what he said about you. For what he did to me when he took me from my Fumikage. For everyone."
Using their cursed necromancy to bring back one partner, fully functional, trapped in a body he ought to have shared while his counterpart was gone forever... Even if the PLF had no idea that a companion quirk would work this way when subject to their "science," no clue of the torture they were about to inflict it was--was there anybody else to kill in this laboratory? No? He might need to rethink his coping methods; this was getting out of hand. But Izuku knew as well as Fossa that sometimes violence really was the answer.
"I'm sorry," he said without thinking. It seemed so... pale and stupid he could barely believe he said it. Someone ought to slap him.
"Hm?" the familiar asked, confused. "For their leader being a terrible person?"
"Well... yes..." Dark Shadow cocked his head, waiting for elaboration. "I'm sorry I couldn't save you, the two of you I mean," Izuku choked on the words. Hadn't he gotten over this? The biting cut of failure? The regret, the "if only I had"isms, hadn't he left these behind in Angband where he cried into his flat pillow and heard Kuma's words of hard-won experience?
"You're sorry?" Dark Shadow scoffed. "Hah! We both know... we both know... of all the people there you were the only sane one. We both know whose fault it was Fumikage and I died. We both know it was my fault!" The familiar shrieked like a banshee, tearing his beak into the already tattered feathers of his wrists, sending Fossa jerking backwards in shock.
How hadn't it occurred to him that he wasn't the only one who would blame himself for that mess, for the outcome of the horrific series of cataclysmic bad decisions that snowballed into a pile of corpses on the Gunga mountainside? He'd not spared much thought for how Kacchan must feel... The blonde probably thought he'd got Tokoyami, Dark Shadow, Hawks, Dabi and Izuku killed...
Oh god, poor Kacchan. Dark Shadow had thought much the same and look at how he tore himself apart, thrashing against the chains of soul-crushing regret. "Dark Shadow," Izuku whispered, "it wasn't your fault."
"Wasn't it?" the familiar hissed.
"If it was anybody's fault it was Dabi's," Izuku replied. "He could have just left, but he decided to be a petty, murderous bastard. They who run in the track of wolves... We all made bad decisions in that fight, or the best bad decisions that were available to us... a friend of mine pointed out that most of them look much worse in hindsight than they did at the time, but the only one responsible for killing you and your partner is the one that threw that fireball. And that wasn't you. It's not your fault."
Dark Shadow sighed, deflating like a balloon in a freezer. "I wish... I could believe you." "I know. I know how it is. I feel the same way."
The familiar started, feathers standing at attention again. "You... but you really were the only sane one!"
"Sane, whatever, what does that matter? I still failed in nearly every way. Kac--Bakugou, I'm sure he feels same. Feelings don't like making sense, do they?"
The familiar's feathers flattened down again as he digested this, then he walked slowly towards the glass at the front of his cell. "Fumikage is not here."
"He should be," because apologizing again seemed stupid but he had to say something to that.
"No. He should not be. He is in the Darkness, the Darkness where I should be. This second life that comes in a can," the familiar spat, "in a test tube, is a vile thing and nobody should give or take it."
"You want to die then?"
"I am already dead!" the familiar roared, voice thunderous with fury. He panted, shaking his head vigorously to regain composure, then continued quietly, "funny, isn't it, how the real monsters here aren't the things in cages but the things who carry those cages' keys? I am not a monster, not so cruel as to ask you to send me back to the Darkness. You don't have to. One of the generals upstairs will oblige, I'm sure, if I make enough fuss. I am no match for an army... but let me out. Oooh, yessss, let me out. And we'll see how many monsters I can take with me and how much damage I can do to their vile den."
"Do you think," Izuku whispered, "that Tokoyami would want you to go on for a while?" Izuku would release his old classmate, yes, but releasing Dark Shadow to a suicide run... a fight he had not the slightest intention of surviving... it felt so wrong, and he'd done a lot of wrong things lately so he should no.
"My Fumikage was never so selfish," the familiar huffed, "as to ask such a thing of me."
"Nobody knew him like you did. Once you're gone for good... nobody will really remember him anymore." Izuku shouldn't have said that. It was manipulative, far too Fossa-like for Izuku.
This seemed to give Dark Shadow pause. "You'll remember him."
"Not like you, and... if you do escape there are things that the Chain needs to know. You probably know even more about the research in progress than me, but the PLF are working on airborne
neurotoxins and they're also trying to build another, bigger portal in the basement here. It's in the testing phase."
Dark Shadow sighed. "You may be right. But I don't care. I don't want to be alone anymore."
No company but the woman nomu swearing up a storm, and she was at the far end of the room. It wasn't as if the two of them could have carried out a conversation, not really. Solitary confinement in a torturous slave pen for months on end... Even if he were not grieving the loss of one who was closer to him than a twin, even if he had ever spent a single moment alone before in his entire existence, that would have been enough to drive Dark Shadow to the edge of insanity. But it didn't have to be that way anymore. Dark Shadow didn't have to stay alone forever. Izuku wasn't the only one who cared for his classmate, regardless of what physical form he wore. "No matter what happens," Izuku promised, "you won't be alone anymore. There's nobody at UA who wouldn't be thrilled to see you again."
The familiar looked away. "I'll keep it in mind," Dark Shadow said eventually, soft like a smothering pillow.
Izuku was under no illusion as to the meaning. He would not change the familiar's mind. Dark Shadow's path ended with vengeance. All these nomus' paths ended that way. "I'll get you out now," Fossa sighed, resigned to yet another loss.
Dark Shadow laughed deep in his feathery throat. "I have been waiting for this." Fossa knew that face, even on a head with a beak. It was the face of a victim watching the perpetrator consigned to the hangman, the face of the rightful heir casting a usurper from the throne, the face of Fossa about to slay Major Nagant, the face one wore to a revenge fantasy come alive.
"Goodbye, Dark Shadow. I... there's a lot I wish I knew how to say," and this was probably his last chance and he couldn't take advantage of it because the words just wouldn't come. All those things he'd wanted to say to Dark Shadow, to Tokoyami... well, most of them were empty, stupid apologies of one kind or another. Perhaps it was best those remained unsaid.
"Less talking. More havoc."
Fossa swiped Hasegawa's credentials and, realizing that the controls to the cells were biometric, dragged the man's body into place, pressing his thumb and scanning the scientist's ID to unlock
the system. The spy switched the lights off after a bit of fumbling with the touch panel and, like a dry sponge swelling in water, Dark Shadow flared out black wings, a cascade of ethereal feathers enveloping his physical body and growing until the cell could barely contain it all. "I'm going to let you--"
Dark Shadow's talons surged forward like black lightning bolts and rent straight through the barriers of the cell to a savage shriek of twisting metal. "Uh... wow..." Izuku stared in amazement. Dark Shadow threw back his head and shrieked like a dragon as he gathered the darkness around him into a billowing, feathery cape of wings and tail and claws.
"Uh... o-okay," Izuku stuttered as Dark Shadow slashed through all the tanks of developing nomus in a single blow, noxious green liquid, reeking of rotten fish and eggs, cascading over the floor, the limp corpses within falling to the ground with an occasional twitch.
"They will rue the day they stole me from my Fumikage!" Dark Shadow screamed, voice so distorted it would have been incomprehensible out of context.
"Let me out! Let me out!" the human seeming nomu cried, bouncing up and down on her toes and
whooping. "Let us out! Yeah! Go! Go! Go!" Dark Shadow swiped for the other cells.
This was getting out of hand way faster than Fossa expected it to... okay. Now would be the time to run. "Goodbye Dark Shadow! Give them hell!" he yelled over the sound of ripping metal and shattering glass.
Fossa fumbled with a card to scan himself into the other section of the laboratory. If he had waited three seconds, he could have walked through the hole Dark Shadow carved out of the wall.
The hulking familiar hissed like a steam locomotive on a rampage, whipping his dark wings through the laboratory and sending bottles of chemicals shattering left and right before turning to the door to the hallway and ripping it off its hinges. The second door in the entrance airlock pair shared its sister's fate a moment later. Half a dozen nomu trailed Dark Shadow as he squeezed into the hallway... and as Fossa followed them, he pulled out his lighter and lobbed it backwards into a huge puddle of acetone. Or maybe isopropyl alcohol. Whatever. Exact chemical compositions were unimportant as long as the stuff burned.
Fire alarms began to blare, red lights flashing through the hallway. The sprinklers in the lab poured dirty, acrid water onto the conflagration, but it wasn't enough and the flames eagerly spread, licking hungry, blood-red tongues up the walls like hungry wolves tasting a meal.
It was a scene from a nightmare.
Fossa took off down the corridor, running from the nomus as fast as Switcher had once run from War Dog. He was not getting caught up in this fight. Dark Shadow had not been known for his self control before he became a tormented zombie.
Automatic weapon fire and screaming was mostly drowned by the fire alarm, but bad things were undoubtedly happening behind him.
The spy surged into one of the lesser used stairwells and nearly bowled over several guards heading downwards.
"What are you doing?" one demanded, looking at Fossa's sock mask suspiciously.
"There's nomus loose and the place is on fire! You'll need a mask for the smoke!" Fossa screamed so that his voice rang hoarse, unrecognizable. "They want me upstairs to report!" he explained, rushing up the steps. Wow, lying came so easily now.
Nobody tried to stop him. They probably would have if Dark Shadow had not chosen that moment to change the direction of his assault and come screaming down the hallway like an angel out of hell sent to drag deserving souls off to roast in the devil's palace. The familiar smashed the lights as he moved, gaining still more strength as the hallway faded towards pitch black, the flicker of flames and pittance of emergency lighting making little impact.
Fossa ran upstairs side by side with the non-traitorous guards, Dark Shadow screaming ravenous threats behind them and closing the distance rapidly. "Out here!" Fossa led his companions through an emergency exit to the ground floor. "Split up! It can't follow us all!" he suggested, sprinting for the cover of a neighboring apartment block and not looking back. Nobody tried to follow him.
Apparently it didn't matter how suspicious you were as long as enough things were exploding in the direct vicinity. He made it a good few blocks away without difficulty.
The city jolted awake to sirens and calls to arms. Fossa ditched his mask--and a few other
incriminating items--in a storm sewer then joined the crowd of PLF soldiers hurrying towards the Citadel proper, which was now billowing clouds of smoke, fire glowing in one of the ground floor windows. Hopefully that awful painting of Shigaraki on a horse would burn. Melting the Destro statue was too much to ask for but that would be nice, too.
In front of the building, Dark Shadow fought Re-Destro. The female nomu, whose quirk or quirks involved throwing lightning bolts, tussled with a number of lower ranking PLF officers. One already lay dead at her feet, covered in electrical burns from head to toe. The other nomus had made themselves busy as well, although they behaved more like fighting dogs, biting and scratching and throwing emitter quirks but moving in a chaotic swarm without thought.
Fossa stopped and stared, open mouthed, as Dark Shadow and Re-Destro traded blows. Nobody dared approach them. None of Re-Desto's strikes were landing on the nomu's body proper, merely glancing across the quirk's extended, umbral form. It was... so strange to see them fight because Dark Shadow's current abilities were a lot more like the original Destro's power than the power of Destro's supposed descendant.
A full fire crew arrived, quirks used alongside conventional hoses to quell the blaze--a nearby building had already caught, though, flames coiling up its side as stunned occupants clambered down fire escapes.
It was nearly impossible to follow the fights--Dark Shadow blending with the night--the other nomus dancing in and out of the firelight like flickering demons. Fossa caught the moment Re- Destro had his neck broken, though. That was hard to miss.
The incapacitated general sprawled out on the blood-stained asphalt of the square... and Dark Shadow turned his talons on the weaker combatants.
It was a slaughter.
It was odd how Izuku couldn't get himself to move. It felt just like the last time his classmate died in battle--dark buildings replacing sun-lit trees, a natural inferno replacing Dabi's flames, the Citadel burning like the Gunga Mountain Villa. What should Izuku even be... what should he do now? He'd gotten away with it all, hadn't he? Chances were nobody would know he had done this, that he had released these nomu to wreak havoc, that he had sent them to their final vengeance and... their final graves. He'd done his part.
There was nothing more he could do. All of the agency he had wrestled into his hands had evaporated as the situation escalated into brutal violence and chaos. He was a spy, an assassin, a spanner in the works and a joker in the deck. Setting things in motion, that he could do, but once they really got moving... rolling forward like a freight train at speed, then he was helpless.
Izuku didn't want to see this, and yet it would be cowardly and irresponsible to turn away, to deny the impact of the carnage he had wrought by refusing to watch it unfold.
Wait who was--? "Wakiya! No, run!" Fossa called out as his squad mate--who had still been on duty--stumbled out of the Citadel alongside two others, all of the guards obediently leveling their rifles to attack--Dark Shadow wheeled towards them and Wakiya flew thirty meters through the air, impacting an apartment building and falling to the ground in a heap. The other two fared even worse, Dark Shadow chopping them to pieces as if he were making oversized sushi. Most others in the square wisely drew back after that show of force.
Izuho was moving before any thoughts worked their way through his mind. "Wakiya! Wakiya!" Spotlights pierced through the night to strike Dark Shadow, some from helicopters, others from the
roofs of neighboring buildings where they often served to search the night sky for suspicious aircraft activity.
Izuho skidded to a stop beside his squad mate, blanching at the blood painted across Wakiya's forehead. The young man's eyes gazed unseeing into the dark. "No, no, I'm sorry," Izuku whimpered, gathering his limp squadmate into his arms as if that could make any difference.
He expected self-recrimination to hit instantly, like it had in the mess that had cost Dark Shadow his first life and Tokoyami his only life, but it didn't come. This was all according to plan, after all. Fossa had done an excellent job, achieved wild success. There was no miscalculation or failure to blame himself for. Self-recrimination might almost have been preferable to the alternative. The agony Izuku felt now was pure , untainted and unreasonable and completely unexpected. How could--how could he have--he never expected, it never even occurred to him that he might well seal the doom of one of his squadmates tonight, that he might kill Nishida or Arashiro or... Wakiya... How could it not have occurred to him? How could he be so unprepared? Izuku had known he could die. That had been obvious. This was obvious, too. How could this catch him unawares?
Izuku screamed, staring into the smoke-stained sky, unable to hold the pain at bay.
"You!" Shigaraki snarled, stepping out into the ruined square where Dark Shadow--last nomu standing after the nameless woman was felled--stood surrounded by a scattered ring of corpses.
"Me!" Dark Shadow roared.
"More trouble than you're worth you ungrateful filthy beast!" Shigaraki tugged off the two- fingered gloves that he wore when doing paperwork or other mundane activities that required objects nearby remain undisintegrated.
"Ungrateful!" Dark Shadow thundered so that the whole city must have heard. "Why you vile, blind, necromancer scum! I am far from the only vengeful ghost whose wrath you have brought down upon yourself and the miserable cowards who follow you!"
"We'll see about that!" It wasn't much of a comeback.
"Mark my words, man child," nice one, "the dead are rising and they are coming for your head! If I do not take it from your shoulders another will!" Fossa had the feeling that Dark Shadow was talking to Izuku as much as the PLF grand commander. Shigaraki thought Midoriya Izuku was dead, after all. The spy might qualify as another ghost "coming for Shigaraki's head."
Izuku cowered as a fuel tank on a delivery truck exploded, raining debris across the square and evoking a snarl of pain from Dark Shadow as more light ripped through his armor. The spy curled himself over the body of his squadmate heedless of the futility.
The last he saw of the fight was Dark Shadow poised above Shigaraki, beak open, talons curled and wings of darkness billowing back like flags to merge with the pillars of smoke.
Ashes to ashes, blood to blood, and Shadows to shadows. In the end, all things returned to their component pieces. It was the way of entropy, perhaps, from energy order, from order agency, from
agency chaos.