Even as the teachers burst onto the scene, Shigaraki went straight for her throat. Suzume loathed to leave Aizawa on the ground, his arm crushed and one of his legs bleeding along with his head, but she didn't have a choice.

She had to dodge, bouncing outside of Shigaraki's guard and aiming a hard kick at his ribs.

She had to yank her leg back just as fast and dart away when he almost caught her ankle. Half her attention was on Aizawa, trying to keep from stepping on him and leading Shigaraki away if she could.

"Nomu!" Shigaraki hissed, but before the mammoth could interfere a wall of cement erupted between them and him, cutting the pair off from view. She did hear the very distinct 'I Am Here!"

First time in my life I'm glad to see All Might.

"What?!" his head snapped towards the new wall, Suzume slipped behind him and kicked him between the legs as hard as she could, but her angle was wrong and he was already moving. Her blow was hard enough that he stumbled and hissed, but he didn't collapse.

Shame.

"Vicious bitch," he snapped, rounding on her again. His red eyes blazed.

"You are literally trying to murder children, handsome," she drawled, side stepping a lash of his open palm. It missed her by several inches. His other hand swept up from the side and she knocked it up and away before she twisted around his side and pulled her staff out once more.

He stumbled in shock.

"Hands-what?!"

"Hand-some," she repeated, motioned like she was going to put her hand on her face in a mockery of Father. "Duh. Aren't you supposed to be the mastermind?"

Shigaraki swung for her again, growling curses under his breath. Suzume snickered at him, grinning crookedly. He was way too easy to rile up. She spun elegantly past his attack, and a tree bit the dust behind her, falling to left over pieces of wood and rotten leaves. She smacked the right side of his head, then the left with her staff.

This, at least, was easy. She didn't have to worry about grading or any one else's judgment. She just had to fight. She's always had to fight.

She tapped him between his shoulder blades, and ducked when he swung around. She slipped under his arm and elbowed him hard in the ribs on her way back behind him.

"Yusada!" Kirishima shouted, running towards her with Bakugou. Kurogiri erupted between them, a wall of black mist, but this time Bakugou was ready, and aimed for the metal collar in his misty body.

"You shouldn't look away!" Shigaraki's rough hiss came.

She was only distracted for a second, but it was long enough to feel her clothes loosen under the pressure of his hand and cold air rushed onto her side. She shouted, caught the wrist attached to the hand on her ribs, and twisted to launch Shigaraki into a tree. It cracked under the force of his body.

He grunted, and stumbled at her again. He was scrawny, and not particularly fast or strong. On top of that, he was distracted and pissed. He still managed to land a hit.

The remnants of her armor sloughed to the ground, and her belt hung looser around her hips.

She swore, and brought up her staff to slam it roughly into his guts, a few inches left from dead center. There was a crack where one of his fake ribs must have given way under the force. His fingers closed around her weapon and it cracked, hissed with ash, and crumbled to pieces.

Suzume's stomach dropped. Ryuhei had given her that!

She didn't have time to mourn her lost staff.

When he reached again for her body, staying low to protect his ribs, she leaned back and let his hand come close to her face. She caught his wrist, cupped it in one hand, and slammed a chop into the opposite side with her other hand.

He howled as the bone gave way under her blow, and swung at her with his other hand, but she was already behind him, sweeping his legs out from under him.

Shigaraki spat insults at her, and kept coming. She danced around him, waiting for another opening. Say what you would, but he had a truly insane pain tolerance, even if he did clutch his broken arm carefully to his chest.

That tolerance didn't do him any good when pale mist spread across their battlefield, and swept up over the both of them. It tasted like chlorine. Suzume stumbled, the world growing hazy, and a careful hand touched her back.

She swung and Midnight blocked the elbow she threw over her shoulder with a kind smile.

"Sorry," she said mildly, "You got caught up. Try to hold your breath, okay?"

Suzume blinked heavily at her, a haze rolling through her mind. She tried to listen, honest she did. But in the end she dropped against a soft chest.

When she came too, she had been set outside, under the sun, and a paramedic was looking her over and telling her how lucky she was to be alive, with decay coming so close to her lungs.

It sent a shiver through her spine.

After an hour Suzume sits alone outside the USJ, her hands hanging limp between her knees. Her hood is back, and her black hair is down around her shoulders, and the sun shines on her face. It's warm and soft.

A little ways away, Aizawa is being tended to by Recovery Girl and a group of paramedics. His elbow was broken, and he's definitely concussed, but all in all it wasn't too bad. Especially not compared to what it could have been. Her classmates float around her, moving from police officers to heroes, filing in details about what happened and helping to write and sign reports on it all.

Suzume, who had spent far too much time in her past life forced to spell things out for people, hadn't had to make any addendums to her own once it was all written out. Now she was just waiting for the bus, or for someone to call her mom.

She hopes that they don't.

Chiasa will worry enough, it's best she hears the whole story from Suzume first.

There's a thump, and she realizes that Kirishima has plopped himself down next to her. On his other side is Bakugou, who's being weirdly quiet. He looks… shaken.

She doesn't remember him being all that freaked out by this, but it's been a long, long time, and what just happened was definitely traumatic for these kids.

Hell, it was kind of traumatic for her.

She doesn't want to die. But more than that, she doesn't want people she likes to die. Kirishima and Aizawa make that list.

"Man, that was… intense," Kirishima says after a long minute. He tilts his face up towards the sky, his red eyes far off. "Who knew this was gonna happen?"

"The villains?" Suzume offer's.

He rolls his eyes at her. She watches Recovery Girl finally leave the unconscious Aizawa behind so she can go see Ojiro, who apparently took a knife to the tail during the fighting.

"Okay, yeah, the villains knew what was gonna happen. Although I don't think they were expecting you to go crazy like that."

"Me?" she looks offended. "You were fighting too!"

"Yeah, but you shot that weird bird thing in the eye! How did you know it has a healing quirk?"

Suzume bites her lip. Kirishima looks at her, his eyes huge.

"Yusada. You did know, right?"

"We-ell…"

"Oh my god."

"I reacted, okay! Aizawa - sensei was in danger, and I had my grappling gun, and physical strikes were useless on it, so I shot. I wasn't gonna stand there and do nothing. Christ, Kirishima. If we hesitated, we would have died."

He cringes. "I wasn't trying to scold you, but that's a lot! You could have-"

Killed it.

She sighs. "Yeah."

She still doesn't regret it. The Nomu is fine, relatively. All Might beat the hell out of it, and the rest of the staff rounded up all the villains, including Kurogiri and Shigaraki.

Although without Aizawa around to cancel out Warp Gate, she doubts they'll be held for very long.

A group of officers lead the last of the villains out of the USJ facility, carried on stretchers. They bear the marks of Bakugou and Kirishima, and herself as well. She almost feels bad for just how hard she went on some of them. Broken bones, shattered joints, concussions.

Honestly, she could have killed them if she was just a little less careful.

Meanwhile, she's barely scratched.

It's really pathetic. She thinks she should feel worse about the damage she did, she should regret at least a little bit. But…

"If we look back, we're lost. If we hesitate, we'll die. All that's left is to fight."

She doesn't remember where that's from, but it makes her think of swords and shadows.

"I guess so. That was pretty fucked up though," Kirishima gestures to her side. The armor that had once stretched from her ribs to nearly her knee is disintegrated, and there's a hole in her body suit over her ribs. She can just barely see the edge of her purple bra. It had been a very near thing. Worse, the staff Ryuhei had given her was now fractured pieces on the ground of the USJ.

"I shouldn't have let him touch me. He wasn't very fast, or very strong. He relied entirely on his quirk."

"Is that how you stayed behind him that whole time? Doing that weird spinning stuff?"

"Baguazhang," she corrects mildly, "And yeah. It's pretty useful. It's uh… circle walking, basically. The whole idea is to get behind your opponent, and use whatever weapons you have on you to take them down. It's pretty well used against multiple people."

But she messed it up. She got cocky. She could have died.

Fuck.

Detective Tsukauchi and Sansa come and collect them, ushering towards the bus that Present Mic has taken over. If he recognizes Suzume at all, he doesn't show any signs of it. Maybe he's forgotten her, maybe he doesn't know who she is. Maybe he's just that good of an actor. Either way she's not upset to be away from him. The burner phone, turned off now, is heavy in her pocket. If she turns it back on now it'll get a signal that could potentially be tracked.

She needs to find a good way to dispose of it.

Present Mic looks a little rattled. There's a furrow in his brow, worry for his friend, but he manages a smile for the kids in his care.

"Alright! Let's get you guys back to school, okay?"

They all mumble something in agreement. The day has wiped out the entire class. Even the most chatty are subdued. Not broken, just quiet. Tired.

It's worrying. Suzume knows that they'll all bounce back, one way or another, but they're just kids. They shouldn't have been put in this situation in the first place.

Fuck.

Fuck everything.

She lets her head thump back against the glass of the window.

All she wants to do is go home and get a decent night's sleep.

Fortunately when they get back to school there's a familiar motorcycle parked out front, one painted black with yellow stripes along the sides. The headlights slant back along the front like snake eyes. It's sleek and modern.

And on top of it sits her brother, in a dark brown leather jacket.

She makes it two steps off the bus before he spots her, and stands up slowly.

Something inside her breaks, and she takes off at a dead sprint.

Kaname catches her as soon as she's close enough and yanks her hard into a hug. His gloved fingers tangle in her hair and she presses her face into his chest, clinging for all she's worth.

She's not Suzanna Hemmings, she's not a dead detective, or a vengeful spirit of powerlessness.

She's Suzume, and she almost died and lost her entire world again. And he is her brother, her constant protector.

She hugs him as tight as she can. She halfway expects to start crying, but the tears never do come.

He squeezes her tight before pushing her away so he can take stock. She's not hurt, just a few bruises and missing parts of her outfit, but there's no blood under the gap in her costume for him to fuss over. Even if there was, it would be gone by now. Recovery Girl was very good at her job.

"Holy hell, Suze. You're lucky I was the one who was home to answer the phone. Mom would have flipped if she got that call."

Suzume cringes. "You're right. Better she hears it straight from me than from my teachers or the news, right?"

"Right.. You're okay?"

She nods quickly. "I'm not hurt. Well. Nothing major. I was just… I dunno. I've never actually fought for my life before?"

His mouth thins into a line.

"Where were your teachers?"

Suzume punches his side. "Also fighting for my life. He got hurt way worse than I did, so don't even think about trying to foist blame on him, got it?"

Kaname huffs at her. "Fine. Got it. Do you need to sign out of school or…?"

She shakes her head.

"No, class is over for the day. They said we were all free to go home now."

"Good. I'm not eighteen yet, so I probably couldn't sign you out anyways," he picks a helmet out of his saddle bag thing and presses it into her hands. "Put this on. Let's go home."

Suzume shoves the helmet onto her head and climbs on the back of the bike with Kaname. It had been a gift from his mentor, one Gang Orca, who Chiasa was still trying to badger into coming over for dinner so she could properly threaten him into taking care of her baby boy.

It's fast, and she knows there's some tricks hidden inside of it, but all she really cares about is her brother in her arms and the fact that they are going home.

If Midoriya doesn't stop staring at her, she's going to fucking lose it.

She really, really is.

He's been doing it ever since their first training day, when she'd taken down Bakugou (Something she was still a little bit proud of) and it had only gotten worse after the disaster at the USJ.

He would just. Stare at her. For way too long, way too often, but every time she looked back at him he would squeak like a mouse and shove himself back in his notebooks before he started sweating. Or while he was sweating.

That kid needed to carry a towel around.

He keeps staring at her but he doesn't talk to her and she's starting to get really irritated by the whole thing.

Not that she storms over to him and confronts him about how low key creepy behavior. She wouldn't do something like that. That's not her style.

But it's still getting on her nerves.

Her mother is also getting on her nerves.

After the USJ incident Chiasa had decided that Suzume needs to call her when she gets to school, at lunch, and once she leaves as well. It's not unreasonable, but its the most control Chiasa has taken over Suzume's life and the sudden change rankles her, especially when she just proved that she can handle herself in a dangerous situation. What's Chiasa gonna do if she texts her that the school blew up, come save her? He mom is great, but she's not a hero, or even Yakuza like her dad was.

If shit hit the fan she was more likely to text Kaname, or even Rio or Kai, who could actually do something to help with the situation.

And really, it's not like this is that much of a surprise. More so than most parents, Chiasa knew what her children were getting into when they decided to become heroes.

Kaname fought his first villain last year, after he got his provisional license, and ever since then he's been racking more and more up. Even before that he, and Suzume, have come home hurt worse than she had been at the USJ.

All the same, she does as she's told.

When lunch rolls around two days after the incident, just after Aizawa announces the sports festival, she ducks away from her classmates and the mob that's gathered to declare war on them and pulls out her phone.

She has the feeling that they're monitoring outgoing calls from the schools these days, but what are they gonna do? Tell her she can't call her own mother during her down time?

"Suzume, there you are. I was waiting."

"Hi Mom. I had to stay after class to help clean up. I'm fine."

"Good, good. How is it going? Did you learn anything interesting? How's that friend of yours, Kirihana?"

"Kirishima, and he's not my friend. I'm not here to make friends."

"Suzume," She can practically see the furrow in her mother's brow, and the displeased twist of her mouth. "No man is an island, and neither are you. You need to be friends with people your own age, especially heroes. It's not good for you to be so standoffish and asocial."

"Mo-om," Suzume purses her lips. "I'm fine. Honestly. I need to focus on class work, that's all. I'll make friends once I have my hero license."

Chiasa sighs on the other line. "One day, you'll find out that your mother was right. At least try to be friendly? Don't start fights with your classmates."

"I don't start fights," Suzume grumbles. "I just finish them."

"Suzume."

"I know, I know. I'll do my best, okay?"

"I know you will. You always do. Make sure you're home on time tonight, Kai and Eri will be here, and Rio and Taka are trying to make dinner."

"Oh lord. Don't let them burn the house down."

"I won't. I love you baby."

"Love you too mom. Bye."

"Bye."

When she hangs up her phone and turns around she finds Midoriya standing at the end of the hallway. He freezes when he realizes that she's seen him, and starts looking frantically left and right for any kind of escape he might be able to get.

Suzume puts her hands on her hips, having finally had enough of him, and purses her lips. "Did you need something?" she demands, her voice sharper than she'd meant to be. Oh well, no taking it back now.

He jumps, like he had thought maybe she didn't know he was watching her, before he starts stammering something out too fast for her to fully understand.

She stalks over to him, her shoes clicking solidly across the the tile floor beneath her.

"What was that?"

"I- uh, well that is I just want to. To talk to you?" he waves his hands in front of his face.

She doesn't remember him being this much of a nervous wreck, but okay.

"Fine. Talk. What do you want?"

"I just wanted to- to tell you how cool it is that you're here!" He finally blurts out, his green eyes glittering. Suzume blinks at him.

"...in the hallway?"

"In U A!"

What is happening here?

"Uh huh. I'm glad you're at UA too?"

"No but- you don't have a quirk so it's great that, you know, that you got in here, even though you have that big disadvantage and you're weaker- well no, that's not right let me start again- uhm!"

Suzume is too fascinated watching Midoriya shovel his grave deeper and deeper to even be properly offended. He's steadily turning pink, his forehead beaded with sweat, and he waves his hands so fast she thinks she's going to have to duck. His voice trails off at last into a weird squeak.

"You know," Suzume says slowly, "I always thought you were cooler."

He stares at her, bewildered. "What?"

"...I'm going to lunch now," she decides, and leaves him to his confusion. Her memories are hazy at best, but if there's one thing she was absolutely certain was that Midoriya hadn't had a quirk. He'd gotten it from All Might before school started. So what the hell was trying to say, calling her weak and saying she's at a disadvantage? She beat Bakugou. She shot a Nomu.

Fucking christ.

"H-hey, wait, what?!"

She pauses, her foot raised, before she glances back at him. Because it's Midoriya, and only because it's him, she's willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

"Try again when you can talk without insulting me, okay?"

"O-oh, um, I didn't mean-"

She turns from him and goes to get her lunch, leaving Midoriya tripping over his own tongue again, staring at her back.

"Hey, Yusada! Over here!"

She looks to see Kirishima waving her over to a table already populated by him and Kaminari.

She considers ignoring him and sitting on her own. It's quieter that way. She still has a book she wants to finish reading.

But.

She's starting to get used to Kirishima's easy smiles and sturdy presence. And Kaminari isn't totally annoying. He's well meaning, if nothing else.

So, she relents and ends up spending her lunch listening to Kaminari chatter on about some TV show that she's never even heard of, and reluctantly she ends up admitting that she doesn't watch a lot of TV period.

It's nice. She wouldn't go so far as to call them friends, but they aren't bad company she supposes.

She doesn't say anything when Bakugou sits on the other end of the table, keeping Kaminari and Kirishima between the two of them.

"I'm home!"

Suzume drops her boots by the front door along with her backpack and pokes her head into the kitchen. She knows that that's where everyone will be, and she's right.

Taka and Rio sit together at the counter, while Chiasa works at the island, mixing dry peppermint, lemon skin, lavender, ginger, and camomile together in a good sized bowl. A box of empty bags sits next to it, along with smaller bowls of dandelion, milk thistle, and skullcap.

Chiasa has been making her own tea blends for Suzume's entire life.

Sitting beside her, with the same thick gloves that half of their family already wears, is little Eri. She can see Kai and Kurono sitting outside on the porch, chatting with Kaname. The gloves won't actually stop her quirk, but they're a placebo for the girl.

They're being watched. They all know it, there's a black car on the other side of the street that doesn't belong to any of their neighbors, and if they're being honest police have never been very subtle.

It's always the shoes, but they all drive the same type of 'nondescript' cars.

They would blend in easier if it was a bright red ferrari.

Dip shits.

It's nothing new. Police observation had nearly vanished with Sanjiro's arrest, but apparently they still follow Kai and Kurono around, waiting for a chance to prove what they're doing. Chances are the ones tailing them are already paid off, and if they aren't they've never born witness to anything more illegal than jaywalking.

The family dinner is a risk to both her and Kaname's careers, but Eri is worth it.

Suzume smiles sweetly at her, and Eri smiles back shyly and waves.

"Hey, what did I miss?" she asks, coming around behind them. She takes Eri's long, pale hair in her hands and starts brushing her fingers through it while her mom shows Eri how to hold the bag and a funnel.

"Nothing interesting. How was school?"

"Fine," she starts slowly braiding Eri's hair back. She looks the little girl over critically while she works, checking her arms for needle marks and her neck for bruises. Any sign at all that Kai isn't treating her right.

Eri is relaxed under her touch. She's a soft spoken child, and she's not very social, but she's also barely met anyone outside of the Shie Hassaikai that aren't a part of her own family. A little social awkwardness is to be expected. She doesn't flinch when people move too fast, or when voices rise. She's never shook in Kai's presence, even though the only way he has of stopping her quirk is incredibly painful.

The way Suzume sees it, that's the best evidence that he's treating her with his own brand of kindness that there could possibly be.

Good.

She would hate to have to kill him.

"Eri, what did you do this weekend?" Suzume asks. She pulls out her own hair tie to finish off Eri's long braid. It almost reaches her butt, and she looks adorable with it. Suzume wants to do pig tail braids next time.

Then Eri would look like a little farmer girl with her red overalls.

"I colored in the book Gran got me for my birthday," she says softly. "There was a dog in it."

"Are dogs your favorite?"

She shakes her head. "No, I like cats. The wrinkly ones."

"Sphinx cats? Those are pretty cool. You know they have to have a lot of lotion put on them?"

"Really?"

"Mhmm. Their skin dries out real easy."

Suzume takes a seat on Eri's other side, and ties off the tea bag that Eri finishes filling up. They start a little line, and the smell of lemon and ginger is a calm comfort. Taka and Rio watch them, holding hands. They look so much older these days. They're nearly thirty, but they look older than that. Taka is already getting grey temples.

Having to be away from Eri is hard on them.

The back door slides open and Kai, Kurono, and Kaname come tromping in. Suzume beams up at her old baby sitters.

"Hey!"

Kurono nods at her with a smile. "Hey kiddo. It's been a minute."

"That's still a stupid pun," she puffs at him, but it's ruined by a half a laugh.

"I've been telling him that for years," Kai says. He starts washing his hands. "He still hasn't stopped saying it."

"What a lo-er," she glances down at Eri, "Silly person."

Kurono turns around to hide a snort.

Kai glances over his shoulder at her. "She's heard the word 'loser' before."

"Well I don't know that!" Suzume puffs her cheeks out. Kai's mouth twitches.

"I already know all the bad words," Eri says helpfully.

Rio's brow twitches and she looks dangerously at her brother. "Is that so?"

"Yeah. Loser, crap, and cheese and rice!"

Suzume has to bite her lip hard to keep from laughing at the very serious child sitting next to her, nodding sagely like she'd just told them some terrible secret.

Rio's dark glower breaks and she chokes on a startled wheeze.

The idea of a bunch of yakuza running around yelling 'crap' and 'cheese and rice!' is almost enough to kill her.

Well I am the one who told them not to swear around children.

"Those are, uh, truly ter-terrible words," Taka coughs into his hand, struggling to keep a straight face.

Eri nods gravely. "I'm only s'posed to use them in a amergency. Like a bee sting, or an accident."

"Wash your hands," Kai orders Taka roughly before he looks at his charge again. "That's right, only if it's an emergency. And if you're in danger?"

"Scream really, really, really loud," she recites dutifully. "And kick anyone mean to me between the legs."

"Good girl."

Eri smiles sweetly at him.

"... so that's where I get it," Suzume shoots Kai a look.

"I think it's the other way around," Kurono says helpfully.

I can't tell if that makes me a bad influence or not.

"I'm strangely okay with that."

"You're a menace is what you are," Kaname rolls his eyes at her.

She looks him dead in the eye.

"Seen any frogs lately?"

The color drains from his face and he looks away quickly.

Chiasa looks between her youngest children while Taka snickers at their expense.

"I… don't want to know. Whatever you two are doing with frogs is your own business."

"I put a frog's leg back on it last week."

Suzume thinks it says a lot about their family that instead of being disturbed by the fact that Eri is apparently experimenting on frogs with her quirk, Rio and Taka are instead incredibly proud of her progress.

From the phantom curve of his mouth, Kai is proud of her too.

They pack up bags of tea and Eri tells them all about a movie she watched with Kurono the other day, happy to chat until the sky grows dim and the lightning bugs start to pop out. It's a little bit early for them to be out, the weather is still cool, but they float into existence in the back yard all the same. Kaname finds a few jars and pokes holes in them and sends Eri on an adventure to catch as many as she can while the adults (plus Suzume and Kaname) sit on the porch.

Once the little girl is running around and occupied, Kai looks at Suzume.

"So. I heard you fought your first villains."

Suzume makes a face.

"Ah. Yeah. That."

"You're okay?" Kurono asks, looking her over.

Suzume tries not to roll her eyes. His concern is touching, really. "Even if I wasn't, Rio would have fixed me up already. But yeah, I didn't get hurt very badly during the attack. Mostly it was. Well it was kind of terrifying?"

"I'll bet," Kaname sits at her side on the wicker couch. "I didn't see my first villains until my second year, when I started my work study with Gang Orca. And even then it was just a small time robbery. He kind of shoved me at them, I scratched their arm and it was over. It was nothing like that."

Being trapped in the USJ with no way out, surrounded by people who wanted to kill them.

Suzume shrugs, and looks down at her hands. She fiddles with her scrunchy, rolling her lock picks beneath the soft material back and forth.

"It sucked. But I lived, and I learned," she finally says. "Seeing our teachers in action… It was insane. All Might was crazy strong, but it's not like he's the only one. Present Mic, Cementoss, Midnight. All of them were nuts to watch. I knew they had to be good to be UA teachers, but knowing and seeing are two different things, ya know?"

"And your homeroom teacher, Eraserhead?" Chiasa frowns. It's a sharp contrast to Suzume's crooked smile.

"Craziest one of all. He didn't hesitate, he threw himself at a crowd of like fifty villains, and beat the hell out of most of them. We all got separated by this dude with a warp quirk…"

She fills them in on the incident, but doesn't tell them everything. She doesn't talk about the smell of blood or the taste of ash, or the fear that thrummed under her skin the entire time. She doesn't tell them how close, exactly, she came to dying.

Her mom still looks pissed when she mentions that she shot a freaky bird man in the face and played a horrifying version of tag with the leader of the LoV. Who has, predictably, escapes custody by now.

"I hate that you were in that situation."

"I know, mom, but I'm here. I survived, because you and dad let me learn how to fight."

"It's a testament to you that you did," Kai says, his eyes slanted in a way that betrays a frown under his mask. "If I remember right, the League of Villains is affiliated with All for One, or was before he went to ground. They started recruited small time villains a month or so ago. Guess we know why now, but the point is that they were very dangerous people."

Suzume doesn't have to fake her surprise. Kai knew who All for One was? The yakuza knew he was alive?

"Oh."

Taka sits back in the chair he and Rio are squeezed into. He hums, quietly.

"I know it was scary. But I think… I think that's just proof that you're doing the right thing, Suze."

Everyone looks at him, none more startled than Suzume herself. "Huh?"

"You said your instinct was to throw yourself into danger and protect your teacher, right?"

She nods, slowly.

"Well. There you have it. If you weren't a hero, you'd be a vigilante, and we all know it. So you're in the right school, in the right course. No matter what else, your heart was in that fight."

Suzume swallows thickly, her eyes stinging.

He's wrong. She's in the hero course out of anger, out of spite, because she wants to prove to the world that it's wrong about her.

She can't deny the warmth that curls in her chest at his words though.

Even if Kai, and Kurono, and all the others would prefer her to be a vigilante.

"We'll see," she clears her throat awkwardly and blinks the dust out of her eyes. "Oh, did I tell you that the sports festival is in a couple of weeks?"

She steers the conversation away from silly sentiment, and watches Eri catch fireflies. This will be one of the last time's that they can all get together. After this year, Kaname will graduate and become a hero, and Suzume is well on her own way now too.