"I have a brother now, you know," Izuku said, slowly approaching the cell where Arashiro awaited

her transfer to a permanent prison camp. She sat on the cot, a book open on her lap.

Her head snapped up revealing the bandages about her throat and the book slammed closed. "Fuck

you, Mihara Izuho." She spat his fake name like a curse, her voice hoarse from choking.

Izuku didn't have the energy to feel anything more than gloom. He needed to do this though, face her and tie up the last loose thread of Izuho's life before he turned his eyes to Izuku's. "Both of his parents were murdered by the PLF because they were quirkless. My mom adopted him, and it's Midoriya. Midoriya Izuku is my actual name." Arashiro turned her chin sharply away, face to the wall. "I feel like I owe you... well, my full story at least, the parts I'm allowed to talk about anyway." No reply. He didn't expect one.

"When I was a middle school student I was kidnapped. I don't remember much of it. I came back with some nasty scars and some new skills and some trauma, and memories that weren't mine." She graced him with a glance at that, a bit of shock showing through before she schooled her expression. "I decided I wanted to help other people like me, the disappeared people, so when I made it to UA I joined the undercover hero track. My best friend was going to be frontline.

"It went alright I guess, up until Kamino Ward... everything spiraled after that. I was at Gunga Mountain at the very start of the war. I watched my classmate Tokoyami Fumikage and his companion quirk Dark Shadow attack Dabi. They were Hawks' interns and never believed he was guilty of the murder he'd been accused of. It turned out they were right in the end, not that it mattered. Being right never seems to matter, does it?

"I stepped in, held everyone at gunpoint. I told Hawks and Dabi to leave, go, have a good honeymoon... and then my best friend found us. He was furious with Hawks over what happened to Best Jeanist... and I watched everything go to hell and I couldn't fix it and in the end my best friend was sent away on a stretcher, I was sent away in a prison wagon to Angband for no reason, and everyone else was sent away in a body bag."

Arashiro glanced at him again and this time there was a touch of horrified sympathy on her face. She simply couldn't hide it, hard as she tried to disguise the emotion. "The backstory I exchanged with our squad was true for the most part. Anyway, plenty of bad things had happened to me before. I'd seen friends nearly murdered in front of me." Monoma. "I'd seen the mangled bodies of people I cared about." Kuma. "I'd been shot. I'd shot somebody else." Moonfish. "I'd been nearly mauled to death by a werewolf, but this was something else. I was so helpless, so miserable and angry and it was all so pointless and then I was in prison and there was nothing I could do about it.

"And then the PLF came. I'm very lucky I wasn't marched out into the dark and shot that night. Everybody, all my friends and family, thought I was, though." Arashiro jerked in place as if he'd slapped her. Something had finally cut clear through her armor. "Yeah, everybody here thought I was dead. It's not really a surprise is it? You know the kinds of things that the PLF does. They murdered hundreds of people the night they raided Angband.

"I slipped through the dragnet because I could honestly tell the lie detectors that I was an MLA fanatic... and the idiots assumed that the PLF and the MLA were the same. They're not. Camie was more right than she ever knew. I wish I'd been able to tell her... she didn't deserve to die like that. She didn't deserve to be there in the first place." Izuku shook his head, trying to get his dead friend's defiant face out of his head. "I suppose that's beside the point.

"I didn't really have a choice but to become a spy, at least for a little while, and once I slotted myself into place in the PLF I felt obligated to stay. I had my duty, like you had yours."

"You killed Wakiya," Arashiro snarled, glaring at him from behind unkempt bangs.

"Yeah. Sort of. I broke into the basement of the Citadel and I discovered that the PLF had stolen the body of my classmate Tokoyami Fumikage and made him into a nomu. With his companion quirk still fully conscious." The snarl fell away from Arashiro's lips and she paled. "That horrifies you and you don't know a thing about either of them except their names. Can you really blame me for letting him free? Can you really blame him for rampaging like he did?" She didn't say anything, turning to the wall again, but he'd seen the shame as it crept up her chalky face.

She spoke quietly, still facing away from him so that he strained to make out the words. "You could be lying. You're good at that."

"Maybe. But you know perfectly well that the PLF did things at least as bad as what I'm saying they did. You're not blind. You know you were on the wrong side, but you couldn't leave because you cared too much about your squadmates, and about the idea of the PLF rather than the reality, or something like that anyway."

"You don't know me." That was a blatant lie. "And I'm not on the wrong side," she sounded like a child insisting she hadn't spilled her drink--pay no attention to that fresh juice stain--and her glass was empty because she'd just drunk it all very quickly.

"There's no shame in choosing wrong because you don't understand the situation fully or because you simply can't get away."

"I'm not ashamed." Only one of them was a good liar.

"The kid Nagant murdered in Hosu was Camie's class president at Shiketsu. Apparently he was the only one who tried to stay in touch with her after she was expelled, the only one who made it clear he believed her over the bullshit excuse that was given for tossing her out. Can you imagine that? If it were your only advocate, your final friend, who was marched out and brutally murdered and then dissolved in a pool of acid so there wasn't anything left to bury? And for what?"

Her jaw clenched as the prisoner fought not to react. "Nagant marched him out and murdered him as a show of force, revenge for what she claimed was a war crime but, in fact, wasn't. Twice leveled my neighborhood, you know. I went looking for my old house. There's nothing left, nothing but a crater. There was no stopping that mad man without killing him. They killed Camie's friend just to show that they were ruthless bastards willing to do anything to win. They killed him to make a point, to show that the Chain should be terrified of them. That was it. They killed him just to show how mean they are. What they did to Tokoyami and Dark Shadow was just more of the same."

"Shut up!"

"I really should have killed you." Her lip curled and her eyes narrowed, but it wasn't fury on her face, was it? No, this was something else, too difficult to place. "It would have been much safer for me, but I couldn't do it, no matter how hard I tried I couldn't do it. I care about you too much. I couldn't have killed Wakiya or Nishida myself, either, and I was heartbroken when Wakiya got caught in the crossfire with Dark Shadow. The others... well, at some point in war you have to draw a line between the lives you care about and the lives you don't. It's sick. It's twisted. I'm sorry it has to be this way. Civil wars shouldn't happen. Everything about them is wrong.

"You have every right to hate me. I'd hate me, too, but... I know you'll think about what I said. You won't be able to help yourself. Maybe in a few years, when this is all over, we can talk again. I miss you."

"Get out of here, Midoriya," she tried to hiss, but there wasn't much heat in it, more exhaustion than rage. He could relate.

"Goodbye, Arashiro." He was certainly exhausted, too, but not defeated at least. That was something.

The curtains were tightly drawn, the classwork neatly stowed in cardboard boxes, and the bedclothes tightly rolled up. They hadn't touched his bookshelf. All of his hero analysis journals stood proudly in a line. Looking at them, thinking about all the things that almost were and then suddenly weren't, all of those things thrown away because of All For One and Shigaraki and the idiots at the HPSC, ached as if a python were tightening coils about his heart.

He turned from the books and ran his hand along his old desk. A thin layer of dust tainted his fingers, particles flaring up in a flurry that circulated through the whole room. This is what Izuku left behind, the empty space into which his life once fit. Here it was in dust and cardboard boxes, in an empty bed and curtains that remained closed day after day. This space was his to inhabit, to adapt, to fill... but could he really fit this space again? It might be like trying to force a square peg into a round hole. It had been a lifetime since he lived here, a long, bitter, cold lifetime. He fit neither his old face nor his old room.

Obviously he should stay with his mom for now regardless of how he felt about his place in the dorms. She deserved to keep him close after the nightmare she'd been put through and he deserved

to keep her close. He deserved the time to come to feel all the things he'd been missing, the time to sate those needs and desires he had repressed out of necessity. There was no telling what the future would hold for him. He might continue as a UA student in... some capacity, but who knew what that would look like next month let alone the next year? What did it even look like now ? The students of UA were frontline soldiers, not just the heroics students but many support students and perhaps some in gen ed or even business as well. This was a military encampment by necessity, although Nedzu would certainly try to keep lessons in session in whatever form possible.

There was no point in planning further than a few days ahead but thoughts of the far future allowed him to procrastinate in his current tasks and were thus more than welcome. He was about to have the most challenging conversation of his life, more likely than not. Talking to Arashiro had been fairly easy once he worked up the courage to actually walk down to the holding cells to see her. The words came easily. This would probably not be like that.

"What?" a shrill voice shrieked from the hallway, neatly informing Izuku of the exact moment Aizawa told Kacchan who was waiting in the spy's old room. Fast arguing, muffled but heavily tainted with outrage, followed, then a knock on the door.

"Come in," Izuku refused to allow himself to delay this any further.

The door swung open slowly. Katsuki stared at him, shoulders slack, eyes wide, nearly in tears. He stepped forward like a zombie, feet haphazardly swung in front of him as he took each step. "Hello, Kacchan," Izuku said as the door closed.

"Hey nerd," the blonde said, strangled. A terrible, fresh scar arced across his cheek. The cut had barely missed his eye. His friend's normally fluffy hair had been shorn short, likely to hide that it had burned nearly to the scalp on the left side. Katsuki stared at the spy, mostly at his face and hair. Izuku shifted nervously under the scrutiny.

Katuski's expression cycled like a slot machine--rage then astonishment then joy then outrage then utter misery then--

The blonde collapsed to his knees as if his strings were cut. "Izuku I'm so sorry," he half sobbed, punching the floor repeatedly so that Izuku darted forward to catch his friend's wrist to keep him from tearing skin... or breaking the floor.

"Kacchan stop!"

"Everything I do ruins your life!" "I'm--what?"

"I'm the reason you got kidnapped in middle school! I was the reason you died--and then you weren't dead and then I was the reason you got snatched by the HPSC, the reason you died again! Everything I, everything--why are you even talking to me? I just ruin you!"

"Kacchan. Kacchan. Stop," Izuku grasped his friend's hand firmly. He'd known this conversation was going to be difficult but it hadn't occurred to him that it would turn into a such a violent redux of his final exchange with Dark Shadow the moment the door closed.

"It was all my fault!" the blonde sobbed. "I know it wasn't all my fault but also it was all my fault!" It would be nonsensical if the sentiment weren't so achingly familiar, and so expected.

"We all feel that way," Izuku told his friend, dragging the uncooperative blonde into a firm hug. "Huh?"

"I had this conversation with Dark Shadow, too, in the Citadel."

Katsuki coughed. "What?" he shrieked, so shocked by that revelation that he forgot the overwhelming emotions that had pushed him beyond the realm of rational conversation. Good. That had been the hope when bringing it up.

"I broke into one of the nomu labs, a place where they kept the failures. Dark Shadow was there. Tokoyami was dead but they'd brought Dark Shadow back." Katsuki's face twisted into a mask of revolted horror. "He blamed himself for everything that happened at Gunga Mountain. And so did I, so do I even though I know it doesn't make any sense. And so do you. That's just how it is."

"It really was my fault," Katsuki choked out, head hanging almost to his chest. "If I hadn't showed up when I did--"

"Look, you made a crappy decision to get involved in that fight," the blonde hung his head further, and that hadn't seemed possible, "and if you hadn't maybe things would have worked out much better, maybe not, but that doesn't really matter. What you did ended badly but given what you knew and could see at the time and that you had no time to think, it just wasn't that bad a decision. They were the enemy. Attacking the enemy is what we do."

Fossa had never really considered this before because he knew that Katsuki's motivation in attacking Dabi was almost solely revenge , because he knew that Dabi and Hawks were deserters. Hindsight, as always, painted mildly foolish decisions in the darkest light. Attacking an enemy in retreat, especially an enemy as dangerous as Dabi or Hawks, wasn't typically a good decision, but how was Katsuki to know that Dabi and Hawks were eloping rather than, say, activating some kind of defensive weapon or otherwise engaging in some nefarious scheme that needed to be stopped at all costs? There were plenty of circumstances in which Katsuki might have arrived to a standoff, Hawks and Dabi against Fossa, Dark Shadow and Tokoyami, where not immediately attacking Dabi or Hawks would have been a huge mistake.

"I'll tell you the same thing I told Dark Shadow: you didn't throw the fireball, so it's not your fault. That's all on Dabi."

"What happened to him? Dark Shadow..."

"Killed Re-Destro and then died in a fight with Shigaraki. He had his revenge, some of it anyway. I got the rest of it for him I guess."

"Oh," the blonde wilted. "I thought... I was hoping... I wish I could say..." He'd been hoping for a chance to apologize to the familiar.

"Dark Shadow didn't blame you. He didn't even consider blaming you. You had nothing to apologize for, as far as he was concerned. He was only mad at himself and Dabi... and the PLF for taking him away from his partner."

"Idiot. He should've been mad at me."

"Were you mad at him?"

"What?"

"Were you mad at Tokoyami and Dark Shadow?" "What? No! Of course not."

"If they hadn't gone chasing after Hawks, would you have chased after them? Would you have had any idea where to find Hawks without Tokoyami finding him from the air first?"

"Well... no."

"So it was their fault and what happened to them and what happened to me and you should be furious with them."

Katsuki's lip curled as his expression turned from confusion to outrage. "Don't think I don't see what ya' did there."

"The point was for you to see it, Kacchan." The blonde sniffed. "Same old nerd."

The spy winced. "Well... not really. I've done... I've murdered people in cold blood," Fossa told his old friend. "And it was easy by the end. It's not even hard to admit to it. I'm not... I'm not the person you used to know." They'd finished their last conversation on a similar note, hadn't they? Izuku couldn't quite recall their last words to each other beyond a general sense of bitterness.

"You think you're the only one?" Katsuki laugh-scoffed. "Hah! There's nobody in this class, except I think maybe Todoroki and Shinsou--he, uh, he took Tokoyami's seat--who hasn't killed somebody. I don't even know how many people I've... we've all fought the war, Izuku. The Battle of UA... they tried to keep the kids away from the front after Gunga Mountain and it just, well, it didn't work even before the attack on UA but then--and there was a day when Yaoyorozu told me to bring down a building and I did because that was the order and she's the boss and there were like thirty people in that building, Izuku, and... she said it was on her, because it was her call, told me again and again just to keep me from freaking out I think because--" he shook his head vigorously, trying to pull free of a flashback perhaps. "Everybody here has done terrible things, Izuku. Nobody's the same."

"Of course not," Izuku mumbled weakly. Somehow it hadn't occurred to him that everyone would be so different, everyone would be twisted and blackened and charred by the ravenous furnace of the war. It wasn't just Fossa who had thrown morals aside in favor of necessity when his back was against the wall. "I once told one of my PLF squadmates that I couldn't go home because it wasn't there anymore, and I didn't mean that the place was gone... I meant that the spirit of the place was gone."

"Hey, nerd," Katsuki grasped the spy's chin and lifted his head. "We're different, yeah, you, too, but we're still a class. We're still a school, when we're not off fighting a war. This is still home."

"Or if it isn't it can be again," Izuku agreed, pushing any hesitance aside.

"That's the spirit." Katsuki swiped away stray tear, probably just leftover from the earlier outburst rather than spawned anew from a discussion of home. "I don't want to pry, but the face...?"

"Oh," it was surprising how long it had taken for that to come up. "After the Angband raid, the PLF was killing anybody they thought was a threat and there was a man giving permanent disguises away to anybody who asked. He didn't have to. He's not a hero, almost a villain, really, but he could. So he did. I really hope he got out okay because he deserved to."

"Some guy," Katsuki agreed. "With a quirk like that, though, I'm sure he made it," well, maybe. "So it's permanent?"

"Yeah. I wouldn't feel right going back to my old face, anyway. I've had this one so long... and

I've been through so much since I got it."

Katsuki nodded. "I get it, I think. Like I wouldn't want to erase my scars," he fingered the new one across his cheek. It was a similar idea, perhaps. "Though, you do kind of look like a girl a little." Izuku snorted at that. "When are you going to go see the rest of the class?"

"As soon as I can work up the courage. Thanks for reminding me that everyone's been through some of the same because it'll be easier to go down and face everybody without... having it in my head that I'm facing my old hero class that would be appalled by the idea that I slit somebody's throat just because he was in my way."

"If it makes you feel any better, Uraraka dropped a tank on a guy's head last week."

"Uh... I don't think that makes me feel any better, actually." It might make him feel much worse, in fact.

"Bastard deserved it," Katsuki snarled, lip curled.

It reminded him too much of Fossa's face when he beat Nagant to death. "What kind of people have we become?"

Katsuki shrugged and shook his head, hands open helplessly.

Perhaps the rest of his classmates didn't have the exact same struggle, didn't have an Izuku and an Izuho and a Fossa to wrestle with, analyze, and reconcile, but the same general problem, that of maintaining an identity and morals even as cruel circumstances beyond anyone's control pushed everyone to their limits, was common to all of them.

There had been some similar struggles in the PLF. Arashiro, of course, could never quite fit her kind soul to the shape required by the horrors surrounding her, but talking about these things to PLF squadmates wasn't remotely the same as talking about these things to UA classmates. Fossa had to guard his heart, hide his ideals and morals so deeply that nobody could sniff them out, spot an incongruity and discover the spy's treachery. Here Izuku had dozens of peers all going through the same thing, all understanding, and many of them would be willing to help him and be helped by him. They could pull each other along, find the way forward together.

None of this had occurred to him, not until this moment. "I've been alone too long, haven't I?"