Izuku didn't get far, not that he expected to.

His arm ached and hairs pricked on the back of his neck. He turned slowly to face his fate.

War Dog's ears lay loosely, relaxed, a twisted smile consuming her whole face, her eyes glittering with satisfaction. She was extremely pleased with herself and happy for Fossa to know it.

Well, being killed by War Dog would be better than being killed by Stain. The triple-S vigilante would make it quick. He'd never heard of her torturing anyone or drawing out a fight. She was a consummate professional underneath the berserker brutality. She didn't seem to be in a berserker rage now, though, not like the first time Izuku had met her, the terrifying night when she'd slaughtered her way through a whole building and chased him off a bridge.

"Aren't you a long, long way from home?" the werewolf hummed, stalking around Izuku in a sloppy oval. He swiveled to keep her in view, his hands hanging loosely at his sides, palms forward.

She waited. Wait, that wasn't a rhetorical question? "Yes," Izuku admitted. "A long way from home," infinitely far, perhaps.

"I'll let you get on your way then," she nodded to him as if they were merely passing each other by in the grocery store.

"You're--you're letting me go?"

She cocked her head and chuckled, a low, rolling noise. "Why wouldn't I? Yes, I'm letting you go, Midoriya Izuku," he jolted as if struck. How did she-- "The bite remembers me, and I remember the bite." Oh. That explained it. It was not an astounding coincidence that he'd found her out here, was it? He had been drawn here. "Now run along," she waved him off almost playfully. "We all

have work to do."

"War Dog," he called to her as she turned. She paused, tail swishing, impatience in every taught muscle. "Shigaraki got killed tonight," he blurted out.

"Oh really?" she grinned, all those glittering teeth shining hungrily in the silver light. "Was it your fault?" Where did she get that idea?

"Yes actually," and wasn't that an insane thought to put into words.

War Dog licked her lips. This really didn't surprise her, did it? How in the world had Fossa come by such a fearsome reputation? "Good show. Constant vigilance really has served you well."

It clicked, somehow, despite the fact that the exact words spoken at the auxiliary undercover licensing exam had long since slipped his mind. "It was you," he realized, "who interrogated me at the licensing exam." He shouldn't have said that. It must be the head injury making him so impulsive. Of course War Dog's civilian guise would feign quirklessness; she couldn't exactly register her real ability and faking one was too risky. Of course she worked for the HPSC handling undercover missions. It explained many of the files she had leaked. It wasn't such a leap to match the wolf and the woman, and perhaps someone else had figured this out already. Perhaps this was common knowledge to the Chain, but War Dog certainly wouldn't be happy that Izuku knew.

War Dog grinned wider. What would those teeth feel like on his throat? The bite on his arm had hurt more than anything even Switcher had ever felt in his long, long life. How much worse would a bite on the neck be in the moments before Izuku died? "Very good show, Midoriya." He jolted again. It was so shocking to hear a name other than Mihara. It felt like being slapped. "I'll keep your secrets. You keep mine."

War Dog vanished into the brush, her passage silent as the dozens of graves she would fill that night. "My secrets?" Izuku asked, "about Switcher?" Presumably, or about other particulars of his missing week escapades. It shouldn't be enough leverage to assure Izuku would keep his mouth shut, especially given that she knew Izuku didn't remember what had happened. He would keep his mouth shut, of course. He wouldn't burn another vaguely allied agent for any but the most pressing of reasons, but how could War Dog know that? Why would she risk it? Did she really not care that he knew?

Izuku stood, rooted to the spot, as the minutes ticked by. She would change her mind and come running back to rip him to pieces and he would much rather be standing still than running in terror when that happened. It would be easier this way, no hope of escape to be dashed to pieces by her return. Any minute now...

Except she didn't come back. In the distance--far distance, she must have been kilometers away by then--War Dog warbled out a heart-stopping howl. Izuku's immediate surrounding forest was decidedly werewolf-free.

Just like that? Stain was going to kill him and then War Dog was going to kill him and then...? That was it? He was free? He could... really leave the PLF for good?

He needed Stain's gun--except it would certainly be keyed to the man's biometric signature because he was a Krypteia agent. Fine, then he needed Stain's bike, and hence his keys.

The corpse was not far.

War Dog had left Stain exactly where he dropped, face down in a dark pool of congealing gore at

the side of the road. The vigilante's claws had torn through Stain's body armor like paper. She could probably slice and dice tungsten into snowflakes.

"You were a terrible person," Izuku told Stain's still corpse, grabbing the man's shoulder and rolling him over. Stain's head lulled to the side, his blank eyes staring off into the trees. The Hero Killer lacked chunks of his stomach as well as the entirety of his throat. Somehow Izuku couldn't look away, had to stare at the scarlet mess until he made out a white flash of bone."You, Misaki, Nagant, Shigaraki... I'm not sorry for what happened to any of you, but maybe..." there was a twinge of regret, not at the revenge but at the waste, "maybe I'm sorry that you became the kind of person who had to go out this way." Stain's life hadn't had to be a waste. The assassin had chosen to waste his life... that might be the hidden tragedy in this well-deserved demise.

Stain's keys were in a front pocket, hence soaked in blood.

Keys held gingerly with the tips of two fingers, Izuku trudged along the road. He had, indeed, cut off a switchback as he tumbled through the woods after the crash. The bike was a good distance back.

As his breathing calmed and the blessed adrenaline abandoned him, the spy's head and ribs ached more with every step. How much further could it be?

He nearly smashed into the waiting bike. The remains of Izuku's truck loomed in a ditch to the right. He saluted the smoldering silhouette. That car had served him well.

Influx and Cloud Viper liked bikes, and so did Switcher when borrowing their bodies. Izuku swung himself into the seat and set off into the night without a moment's thought. Even on a road this rough, he knew precisely how to move to keep the ride controlled and fairly smooth. It was too bad he didn't have a helmet to cut the cold wind, though, or a coat and all this bouncing around was really unpleasant given the state of his head and ribs. Well, the pain would keep him awake at least.

The road returned to pavement after... some amount of time. It could have been ten minutes, could have been hours. The ride was vaguely soothing after a while, just Izuku winding slowly along the twisting trails, not another soul to be seen kilometer after kilometer. This road probably had incredible views by day but all Izuku saw was one thin line of dirt and trees illuminated sharply by the headlamp as well as occasional hints of wide vistas.

Which way were the Chain lines? He didn't know which direction he was traveling let alone which direction he ought to travel. Well, so far there had been no options to turn so there was no point in worrying yet.

The road circled gradually down from the mountains, widening out and acquiring actual lane markers. At long last, Izuku came across an intersection.

The sun would rise soon. Izuku wanted nothing more than to throw himself down in the brush somewhere and sleep the day away. And why not do precisely that? Who was going to stop him now? He wasn't in the PLF anymore. He wasn't a hero student anymore. He didn't have anyone demanding he do anything. If he wanted to sleep all day--and that wasn't a bad idea in any event as it would keep Fossa's travels firmly off the radar--then he very well could.

His chosen accommodation was a leaf pile. It wasn't a particularly comfortable leaf pile, but it was well hidden and close enough to the road that dragging the motorcycle into hiding with him was no burden.

Fossa would probably have to ditch the bike soon, and his PLF uniform for that matter, and he really needed to do something about his hair. Long, green braids were very distinctive and Fossa was likely a widely wanted traitor. He'd have to interact with people again shortly, for food and gasoline if nothing else. He did have a balaclava, but wearing that in a store was liable to create more suspicion than it might ease. He would just soak his hair, make it look black, and tie it up.

Speaking of food... The spy fished around in a pocket for some beef jerky and a cereal bar. He'd got in the habit of carrying small snacks everywhere when he was on the frontlines and never stopped.

The sun crept up on him and the spy turned away, still munching on his jerky. Although many unpleasant things could be said about accommodations at the Citadel, the blackout curtains certainly kept the daylight at bay for the exhausted night shift. Izuku would love one of those curtains now, as a sunshield or a blanket for that matter.

The war was really over for him, huh? Fossa's only remaining job was getting himself back to UA. Izuku's only remaining job... was piecing himself back together in the aftermath.

God, everybody thought he was dead. They were going to be so mad when they stopped being elated. It was going to be awful in a way Izuku had never even imagined before. Katsuki would probably never forgive him. His mother might not forgive him, either.

Sunrise dyed the wispy clouds in bright hues forming a great conflagration in the sky. Once he would have found the sunrise enchanting. Now all he could think about, staring at those reds and oranges, was fire and death. Pretty clouds reminded him of death. What kind of person was he now? What kind of person would he bring back to his friends at UA? Fossa and Izuho were masks and yet they were so... he'd intentionally allowed them to become people in their own right, and as he allowed them more and more free reign, Izuku became a smaller and smaller piece of the whole.

It wasn't quite like his shattered mirror dream where different aspects of his personality haunted an inescapable corridor. It was like... what was it like? It was hard to find a way to think about this because he was thinking about the way he thought and that added an extra layer of complexity. It was as if his mind were a table which had been chopped up . His mind was a three legged stool, maybe, cut into thirds labeled "Izuku," "Fossa," and "Izuho," and, as the war went on, those thirds were dragged further and further apart until they ceased to be a coherent piece of furniture and were now completely separated by insurmountable gaps. They were still the same pieces of the original table they just weren't connected anymore, no longer functioning as a coherent whole. How hard would it be to nudge them back together?

Or was the metaphor slightly off? Were Fossa and Izuku each half of the table and was Izuho just the space in between them? An empty gap filled by imagination and deception? What part of him was really him? Maybe Izuku was the fake one, or maybe Fossa was fake, or maybe Fossa was the only part of him that was real. Maybe the spy was, at heart, a ruthless killer bound only by the laws of practicality with no shred of decency or empathy to draw on.

But not even War Dog was like that. She was practical. Efficient. Brutal. And, looking back on it in the light of day when the interaction was not colored by the terror of impending doom, the werewolf had let Izuku go without any indication that she considered hurting him despite the fact that it would probably have been in her best interest to enforce his silence about her identity.

So he probably wasn't just Fossa? Except Fossa, too, had decency and empathy to draw on. His most brutal actions--killing Misaki and Nagant--had been acts of revenge driven by empathy.

Perhaps Fossa was the real one, then.

He'd never had the time or the energy to worry about this tangled mess before, and even now he wasn't worrying per se, more musing . He was too tired to really work himself into a frenzy . The state of his head was a trivial concern, after all. What did it matter in the grand scheme of things? After so many months of constant stress and misery that he finally had the time to feel, the spy didn't have the energy for angst.

"Influx just embraced the crazy, didn't she?" Izuku asked nobody. "I guess I've been doing that, too, but I shouldn't have to anymore."

One thing seemed certain, though. Izuho, whether he had been a figment of imagination or a third of the metaphorical table of the mind, didn't exist anymore. There was no need to ever be Izuho again... He might as well be dead, might as well have died in that basement when Fossa broke his cover to summon Destro. Nobody would ever see Mihara Izuho again, heaven willing, and that was a good thing but somehow it didn't feel like a good thing. It might be like... how could he even process this? He needed something normal to compare it to, some way to understand the sharp pang in his heart when he thought about Nishida, Shimoda and Arashiro and their squadmates Wakiya and Mihara who were gone forever.

It was like... like when his favorite character had died in Vanguard. Yeah, it was like that. Izuho had never really been alive in the traditional sense, but he had been a simulated person, the idea of a person like a character on television, and then his part in the story had ended definitively and Izuho now existed only in memories.

Izuho had been a sweetheart, hadn't he? Despite everything, despite his questionable loyalties, Izuho hadn't been a bad person, no more than Arashiro. Good kids caught up in a terrible war, doing all the wrong things, thinking they had the right reasons.

"What to do with you, Arashiro?" Izuku hummed, taking out her globe and gazing at the fiery light glinting off the glass. "I feel bad taking you with me back to UA, but I can't leave you here, can I? You'd be safe in a prison camp. You'll hate me for it, but you'll hate me no matter what I do, and rightly so I guess. If I were you I'd hate me. If you're going to hate me, I might as well make sure you're safe at least."

The clerk at the little town's department-store-gas-station-hybrid, wherein only an eight of the shelves had anything stocked at all, was more than happy to forget all about Fossa's travel papers in return for a "tip." The spy--still in uniform as there had been no convenient clothes lines to raid-- dropped hints that he was traveling illicitly but made it out that he was a loyal son rushing to see a dying parent rather than a traitor fleeing back across the lines.

Gas, food, something akin to a reasonable traveling outfit with a thick hat to hide his hair, a sizeable blanket... a bicycle helmet and safety glasses--not quite the motorcycle helmet he was hoping for but better than expected--made a good haul. He would not need to stop again.

Izuku snagged a copy of The West River Review on his way out of the store even as he wrestled his hat on and forced his helmet on top of it. The paper was from two days ago. He tossed it in a bin. There was no need to read old news.

Just out of sight of town, Izuku stripped off his PLF uniform like a snake shedding its skin and

revealing an altogether different animal beneath. If he never had to wear the PLF uniform again it would be too soon.

As another night of travel drew to an end Izuku dragged himself and his bike a hundred meters or so off the road. He didn't really need to cross this set of mountains. It was out of his way, but it was out of everyone's way and that was the point. Nobody was going to bother him here. There were zero expectations. He was going to sleep the day away again, get up when he felt like it, and nobody was going to try to stop him. He could stay as long as he liked... or until the weather took a turn for the worse or he ran out of food.

It was incredibly tempting to do just that, to just stay and enjoy the quiet, or go to sleep here, alone and at peace, and never wake up again. Beyond leaves and the occasional bird passing through, this was a silent place. It had a pleasant view, straight across a broad valley with several rivers and lakes meandering between the trees. A good place to sleep eternity away... It wasn't a temptation to end his life, not at all, just an inescapable weariness that made an unending nap unduly appealing. Maybe it didn't need to be unending. A fifty year nap would do. There was some fairytale about that, wasn't there?

Too bad fairytale dreams always came with an unpleasant catch.

Izuku layered up, using his old uniform as insulation from the ground, rolled himself up in his blanket, and did nothing. For some time he did not even think, just stared blankly up at the clouds. As one might still an injured body part to let it heal so one might still an injured mind. There was no question that his mind was injured. That was probably true of nearly everyone in the country at this point. Certainly it was true of everyone who had seen real combat.

He could spend the next week here just staring at the sky and being still.

He would go back to UA, certainly, but why not wait a while? He could stay here, wait out the last days of the conflict, avoid all that drama. He had nothing left to offer to the Chain, his role as a spy finished and his role in regular combat easily filled by any of a thousand others...

But what if he waited out the war here and missed someone by a few days? The fact that the PLF was certainly doomed did not guarantee that the Chain would be immediately victorious, or that the Chain would manage to pull off their inevitable victory without heavy losses. What if Izuku made it back to UA, ready to see the people he had left behind, his mother, Ojiro, Katsuki, Shouji, Monoma, Todoroki... and found that one of them had been killed while he was taking his vacation?

The thought turned his stomach. It would be borderline unbearable, and the impending reunion was going to be hard enough in the best case scenario. No, he had to return now.

He still couldn't bring himself to hurry.

Crossing into Chain territory was anticlimactic. He wasn't even sure when it happened. His ballpark estimate was "between kilometer 10 and kilometer 60 on this winding fire road that nobody thinks is worth guarding." Izuku hadn't even had to abandon his bike as it didn't have official PLF plates or any other obvious indications of its previous owners. Would he be allowed to keep it? He'd become rather fond of the thing, ugly as the brown paint was. If he got to keep it, he'd paint it green to match his hair.

Izuku was over the lines. He was truly free, truly safe, but he didn't feel any different. Perhaps freedom and safety were a state of mind rather than a location, much like "home," that elusive place he had once told his squadmates he could never return to.

Izuku could not return home in the figurative sense because the version of Japan that he'd called home was gone now. Izuku could not return home in the literal sense because his whole town was an insurance write-off.

After Twice's rampage and desperate attempts to stop him, little remained of the battleground and no attempts at rebuilding had begun. It didn't seem that much cleanup had occurred, either.

Large sections of the city had burned. Aldera Junior high and everything within five blocks of it had been leveled. The grey, dusty maws of concrete foundations remained like tombstones. In places, the melted husks of cars, all the aluminum having drained out to puddle on the street while the tougher steel merely blackened, remained on the deserted streets.

Where had Izuku's house even been? Navigation was difficult without any landmarks at all, when all that remained was an occasional bombed or burned out husk surrounded by empty lots decorated with tenacious weeds. Not a single street sign had survived.

He backtracked to Aldera and stared at the few shreds of masonry that remained, remembering all the good--but mostly bad--times spent in the ex-building. Those days were so thoroughly, irreparably gone. The building was gone and the vesrion of Izuku who had attended school in that building was gone, too. Aldera could be rebuild, would be someday. Aldera's Izuku, though... he was gone in a more permanent sense, forever out of reach, nothing more than a memory that the current Izuku looked back upon with no small amount of derision. It wasn't fair to judge his past self based on his current knowledge and standards, but middle school Izuku was so foolish, so naive so thoroughly fooled, walking through life with his eyes closed. Maybe he was better off gone.

The spy traced his old path home from school, counting the lots along his street until he came, at last, to the place where he had lived nearly all his life. Katsuki's old house still boasted two standing walls. Izuku's had burned completely, nothing left but a concrete slab. Would it be worse to come back to a concrete slab or two walls? The walls invited hope that something of one's old life had survived, that something could be salvaged, but in the end that rotted, shredded remain would have to be torn down forcibly before rebuilding could begin. Perhaps it was best to purge everything neatly. That way there was no hope to quash and no second bout of pain that brought back the agony of the initial loss. Better a bang than a whimper.

He couldn't procrastinate anymore. It was time to return to UA. Why was this so hard? Facing War Dog had been easy in comparison to facing his family and friends, but it had to be done. There were many unflattering things that could be said about him after what he had done in the war, but no sane human could call Midoriya Izuku a coward.