This seems like a good time to remind everyone that Suzume can be an unreliable narrator. Everything from her point of view is colored by her opinions on people.
That said I might have to write a version of this chapter from All Might's perspective. Just to be fair to him.
It's much harder than Suzume expected to keep a straight face when All Might introduces himself as 'Yagi Toshinori, I work at Might Productions second secretarial offices'. It comes with a small smile and the presentation of a business card of all things.
He's scrawny. Bent over like someone's shoved a ten ton weight on his shoulders, and his blue-on-black eyes are sunk deep into his angular skull. His hair floats like a dandelion and his smile is… real, of all things.
It's more genuine than anything Suzume has ever seen on All Might himself, at least. It's not huge and forced and meant to be comforting. It just. Is.
It's disconcerting to realize that she might actually like who All Might actually is, this genuinely kind looking man is such a polar opposite of the hulking, brilliant creature that people trust their lives to on the reg. She could like him.
If he wasn't such a douche wagon.
Without a quirk, you'll be hard pressed to keep up with the demands. And when you get older, you may decide that this was a mistake. You could get injured, even crippled in the field. What happened with the crowd during the sport festival was just-
She pulls his words out of the little box she had. The tinderbox where she keeps every cruel word, every note of discouragement, every warning to give up and give in, is a place she can always trust to stoke the fires of her determination. And to remind her of exactly who she was talking to.
So she nods at him, but keeps at a distance. No need to get too close. She won't like him and on top of that she doesn't want to slip up and call him by the wrong name.
Not like that would be easy. He's so different from All Might that if Suzume didn't know better she would never believe that they're the same person at all.
All of them are waiting for their respective planes to I island. Thanks to Suzume's letter she, Bakugou, Shinsou, and one guest of their choice are all on their way to the island instead of just Suzume. She and Bakugou had both voted for Kirishima, and Shinsou had reluctantly agreed. He didn't have anyone to bring anyways. Not from his class or from his real life.
Suzume had offered the spot first to Kaname, but he had his work study with Gang Orca this week, so it wasn't going to happen.
They were being sent a private plane to take them to the island. When arrangements had first started that plane was supposed to leave early that morning, but with the added two boys they had changed the schedule. Now they would take off closer to noon.
Which was how they ended up in a terminal with Midoriya and Yagi, waiting for their respective planes to be taxied in. All Might apparently had his own.
Suzume ignored Midoriya's stumbled attempts at explaining why he'd been invited in the first place and why he was traveling with Yagi, as if half their class hadn't already figured out that All Might was tutoring Midoriya in some way shape or form.
No one but her and Bakugou knew the full truth, but that was beside the point.
Midoriya was also a very terrible liar.
It was sort of cute. He talks with his hands all the time but when he's flustered his cheeks go red and she can count a few more freckles than she's used to.
When their planes are taxi'd they'll all be escorted out onto the tarmac to board. Until then, they were stuck killing time in the terminal.
Suzume takes a seat between Shinsou and Bakugou, pulling out a notebook to scribble a few noir stories from her past life in it. She was seriously considering taking Mirio's advice and starting a podcast, or at least publishing the things. Apparently to everyone who wasn't her they were pretty entertaining.
To each their own, she supposed.
...So there I was, on the docks of Westchase East Canals, watching the Hail Mairy go up in flames for the third time in as many days.
With any luck this would be the last time anyone saw the cursed thing ever again. It's seats were blood soaked by now, and the entire canal was starting to smell like cooked meat and burning metal. Oil slid out of the boat and burned crimson on the surface of the water, casting a horror of a glow on the night-black water.
The case of the Devereaux Diamonds was heavy in my hands and Escatel lay panting beside me, gasping for breath desperately and hacking out sea water and perfluorohexane. The broken cuffs on his wrists are covered in blood that looks more like rust. Already I can feel the salt starting to dry in my hair, sharpening into crystals. I can't imagine how much it must burn on his wrists where he'd broken his skin trying to break his chains.
Somewhere in that big ball of flaming yacht is Mairy Scott and her son, cooked birds the same way they tried to cook Escatel'. The same way they'd cooked half a dozen maids when no one was looking and no one would check.
It's a pattern.
It's the pattern of the world.
That the strong will always target the weak, the people without the means to protect themselves, without the security to think that anyone would come for them, that anyone would find them or fight for them.
The poor. The vulnerable. The frightened.
My gun is heavy in my holster. Unfired, still, but god was I close this time.
I could have left them there, I could have prevented this fire.
But I let the consequences of their actions catch up to them instead. I let Escatel find his own justice. Justice for himself and justice for his mother, no more than charred bones sunk to the bottom of the bay.
After a while Yagi wandered off so he could pick up some sodas from them.
Of course that's when it happens.
There's not a lot of places Suzume can think of that would be better for a heist than an airport.
The whole place was crawling with people going to and fro with nearly identical luggage bags, all of them dressed in everything from three piece suits to military fatigues to pajamas. And, everyone is laden with their own clothes and it's not odd enough to see someone changing clothes that it would be remarked on if someone switched into a disguise or something to the effect. Anything that's valuable is kept on one's person, wallets are kept in easy reach for checks at security terminals, and people are constantly packed in like sardines.
And airport security is all very well and good, but they're looking for terrorists with weird bags. Not thieves sprinting down the hallways. So many people go sprinting for their planes a day, why would you even blink at the sight of another?
So it makes sense, Suzume figures, that no one else notices the lift that happens right in front of them.
She sits upright from her place sandwiched between Bakugou and Shinso, breaking through their conversation on underground trains vs notebook closes with a snap.
There are still payphones in the airport, of all things, and charging stations attached to them. But this one is devoid of most people. There's just a woman on her cell phone, standing tall but looking every which way. There's sweat on her brow and her eyes are huge, her breathing is fast and there's a small tremble in her hands. Sitting at her feet is a lunch box.
She's nervous. Scared.
She hangs up the phone, looks down at the screen, and someone passes her. Between one footstep and the next her lunch box is slipped into the men's roller bag, and is gone.
The man himself is in a suite, with sleeves long enough to hide no only his wrists but also a few inches of his hands. His hair is shaved close to his head, his jaw is tight but he's not very distinct looking.
His shoes.
His shoes are black boots with thick tread. Boots made for running.
Suzume waits until he turns a corner before she stands, old flickers of Suzanna Hemmings burning to life in her veins.
She ignores Bakugoug's grumbling question, and makes her way over to the payphones.
She slips her own phone out and plugs it in, to keep up the illusions that nothing is wrong.
Out of the corner of her eyes she watches the woman frantically refresh a messaging app.
The kind that delete messages as soon as they're read.
"That was a pretty smooth lift," she says offhandedly, watching the woman's face crumple in the corner of her eye. This close she can see that the woman is wearing black scrubs under her jacket.
Suzume, who's always thought Airports and movie theaters are insanely cold, slips her hands in her pockets of her own long black reefer coat.
"I liked the trick suit case. But, you don't look like you did. You don't look like you wanted to be involved in that at all."
Her voice is calm and steady, and low enough that no one will overhear them.
"So. Why were you doing it?"
"I-I can't," the woman shakes her head. "I can't I just-"
"I can help." Suzume interrupts, easy and smooth. Like they have all the time in the world for this, and not like she's watching the man walk away in one of the store windows. Towards the gates.
"You're a child!"
"I'm a teenager. And I can help. My friends and I," she nods back to the boys. Shinsou, Bakugou, and Kirishima. "Are heroes in training."
"They said if I went to the authorities-"
"We aren't. So come tell us what happened."
It takes a little more coaxing, but eventually she gets the woman to come sit with her. 'Woman' is a bit of a stretch. She can't be more then twenty five.
Bakugou balks when he sees a woman in tears following Suzume. His red eyes snap to hers.
"What did you do, wasp girl?"
"Nothing, yet," she folds her hands in front of her and sits , forcing Shinsou to scooch down to make room for their new guest. "Now. Tell us about that lift."
"lift?" Yagi appears at the edge of their row of seats, holding a sack of sodas. He looks over them with wide blue-on-black eyes.
Suzume nods to the woman.
"I didn't have a choice." The woman dabs uselessly at her eyes. "They have my daughter."
Shinsou sucks in a sharp breath. Yagi tenses under his oversized shirt.
"They kidnapped her?"
The woman nods miserably.
"You're a doctor," Suzume nods to her clothes. "Doctor…"
"Doctor Hijikata."
"What did they want from you? Organs? Drugs?'
"A-a bone."
"A… bone?"
"What, were they a dog?" Bakugou scoffs. Kirishima elbows him.
"No, no, it's not a regular bone. It's a quirked bone. You know how white blood cells originate in the bone marrow?"
"Yes," says Suzume.
"No," chorus the boys.
"Well, they do. And this particular bone came from an individual with an intensely effective quirk that affected his immune system. He never got sick, he was immune to poisons and venom, and infections. It purged everything out of him that wasn't supposed to be there."
"If it was such a great quirk, how did he die?" Bakugou asks, crossing his arms over his chest.
"Kacchan!" Midoriya cried, horrified by his crassness.
"I don't know if you kids have ever heard of Trigger, but its a quirk enhancing drug. But high doses can cause a quirk to go out of control. The drug itself is used for more than just enhancing quirks. It can treat baldness or erectile dysfunction, it does plenty and its actually relatively commonly prescribed. But when he was given it it caused his quirk to start attacking not only foreign bacteria and cells, but his own too."
"It created an instant autoimmune disorder," Suzume realizes with no small degree of horror.
"Yeah. It attacked everything from the bacteria in his guts to his pancreas. After he died his body was donated to science. The hospital I work in has an experimental lab in it that was trying to work out how his quirk could be applied to medicine, along with one other. There was a fire in the lab where his body was initially stored in Jaku, and after it all that was left was what was in the lab at the time. What is left now is that one bone."
"Vertebrae or rib?" Suzume asks.
"What?" Shinsou looks at her, pale.
"Most marrow is found in the vertebrae, ribs, and pelvis," she tells him absently.
"Exactly. Vertebrae."
"So they took a bone with marrow that could revolutionize medical science. And they were willing to kidnap a kid and blackmail you to do it? Who would do something like that?"
Suzume barely looks at Kirishima.
"Literally any pharmaceutical company on the planet. They might not even want it to use it to make medicine. If the lab the main body was stored in was destroyed I wouldn't be surprised if they want to make sure that no one ever reproduce this mans quirk."
"But why would they do that? They could fix so many illnesses!"
"People pay for a cure once. They pay for treatment who knows how many times," Suzume tells him.
"Okay. We need to get her daughter back."
"We should call the police, or tell the airport security," Yagi says.
"No!" The doctor cries, grabbing his arm. "They said that if I went to the authorities they would kill her!"
"And they probably will, too," Suzume muses, twisting her scrunchy around her wrist. "Any sign that she's alerted the police or security and they'll go to ground. We'll never find her daughter, or the bone."
"We? We're just hero students! We could get in a lot of trouble for acting. And Yagi isn't a hero either, so-"
"You'll only get in trouble if you use your quirks," Suzume says bluntly. "And I won't get in trouble at all. Miss, what proof of life did they give you?"
"They- they sent me a picture," she fishes in her pocket for her phone. Yagi looks distraught when she lets go of his arm. Why wouldn't he? He has no control over this situation.
"They'll keep the girl close, they want you on a short leash and once the drop is finished they'll want you and her near one another so they can tie up all the loose ends at once."
"Loose ends?" Midoriya repeats, looking ill.
Suzume ignores him. Her mind is already rushing.
"Kirishima, Bakugou, the man who took the bone had a shaved head, tan skin, hard jaw and black eyes. He's wearing a long suit and he's probably carrying some kind of weapon under his sleeves, they're too long for a regular suit, and he's wearing combat boots," she says quickly. "He went down the left hand side of the terminal to our right. He has a black suitcase, fourteen inches by eighteen, that rolls. Find him and text me when you do, I'll let you know when we've secured the girl."
"Right."
"Don't tell me what to do."
Despite Bakugou's objections, they leave anyway. Suzume is too caught up in her old games to notice the looks they both shoot her over their shoulders, or the way Bakugou's red eyes linger on her and then Yagi.
Yagi bends down, whispering rapidly to Suzume.
"You can't do this. This is a dangerous situation, and you're all students without any kind of license, or a pro on the scene. It would be smarter to alert someone."
"So that they can get the girl killed? We're on a time limit here. Unless you're about to pull All Might out of your ass and hope he's subtle enough that he doesn't tip everyone off with his sun impression, this is our only option," she hisses viciously. She barely feels like Kono Suzume anymore. This isn't about proving anything to anyone. This is about hunting down people who were willing to hurt a little girl all for a bag of bones.
She feels like Suzanna Hemmings with the hunt singing in her blood.
Suzume stands and grabs Yagi's tie, dragging him down to eye level. He stiffens under her touch, and tries to take a step back.
Coward.
(In fairness to All Might, it was a bit like having your tie grabbed by an angry badger, an animal that fears neither god nor man, and realizing that your face was now within biting distance.)
"We don't have another option here. So you can either get on board, or get out of the way."
She lets go of him and turns to see the woman staring at them.
"The phone, Dr. Hijikata."
The woman slowly hands it over.
Over the years Suzume has discovered that if you speak like there is no question that you'll be obeyed, people tend to listen to you.
This is the case here, as well.
Suzume looks at the picture.
It's a girl, maybe eight or nine. Her eyes are big, scared. Her t-shirt doesn't reveal any bruises though and her face isn't swollen. No split lips either.
She hasn't been beaten.
Good.
What's more, there are windows behind her and she's sitting at a bar pressed up against it.
Suzume zooms in on the planes outside the window, notes the company, and pulls up a map of the airport.
"Okay. They've got her in a restaurant down that corridor, one that serves cocktails. Midoriya, Shinsou, let's go get her."
"But, Yagi," Midoriya looks between her or him.
Suzume hands Dr. Hijikata back her phone.
"Come or stay, but I'm going to get that girl. Shinsou, I need you to get her captor's attention for a minute, can you get them talking?"
Shinsou takes a deep breath and squares his shoulders. "Sure, easy."
"Let's go."
Suzume walks forwards with purpose, slipping through people and turning the opposite way that Kirishima and Bakugou had gone. Midoriya and Yagi talk frantically behind them.
The restaurant is open, and in the back corner is Dr. Hijikata's daughter, and two men.
Suzume eyes them. One of them is in a t- shirt. The other is in a loose jacket. From here she can just barely see a bump along his ribs.
"Watch the one in the jacket. He's armed."
"How-?"
"Plastic gun won't show up on a security scan. These guys are well funded."
Shinsou swallows audibly, but he collects himself.
They move in.
"Hey," Shinsou calls, drawing their attention to him. There's only the employees in the restaurant other than them. Thankfully.
The man in the jacket eyed him distrustfully.
"What do you want, boy?"
"Did you see a rat run by here?"
"A rat?" T Shirt repeats, looking disgusted.
"Yeah. My sister's pet, it's her 'emotional support rat' or something and it got out of its cage. You can't miss it, it's about two feet long-"
"Two feet?!"
"Yeah, white with these black eyes and a splotch on the tail. You know rat rails, how long and naked they are…"
While Shinsou described the rat in detail, including how it likes to run between ankles and sit on peoples shoes until they gave it a treat, Suzume slowly made her way around the walls. Both men looked down at the floor and she moved.
Suzume caught them by their hair and smashed their heads together once, twice.
T Shirt dropped and Jacket reached in to grab his gun.
Suzume smashes her elbow on the back of his head and he drops.
Her phone goes off.
Kirishima : We found the guy
He sent her a picture of their target.
Suzume : Don't let him run, we have the girl safe
She turns to Yagi and Midoriya, who are gaping at her. The fight was barely thirty seconds long.
"Now we can call security."
"Hisana!"
Dr. Hijikata throws herself at her daughter, who breaks into sobs and hugs her mother fiercely.
"There," Suzume claps her hands together. "The bad guys are stopped, the kid is safe, and no one used their quirks."
She crouches down and takes the kidnappers' phones and gun to set them aside, then uses a few flimsy ties from their own pockets to hobble them.
When airport security shows up and distracts the others, she also takes the liberty of cloning their phones. Just in case.
Thank you Kai for the phone that does all sorts of illegal things.
"So that's it? We stopped it?"
Midoriya looks relieved, even while Yagi is still frowning.
Suzume shrugs.
"We stopped it for now, sure."
Midoriya and Yagi just watched and twiddled their thumbs.
The green haired boy winces and looks away. He goes pale under his freckles.
"...what do you mean for now?"
"I mean, these guys are just a couple of local thugs. They were probably hired to snatch up Hisana over there and hold her. They're well paid, but not well trained, and their accent is local too. Someone with resources got them that plastic gun, and someone with resources knew who to target to get the bones. The ones who will really know who was behind this, a person or a corporation, will be the curriours themselves. The ones Bakugou and Kirishima are holding at the gate."
And if they're professionals, they won't talk under any circumstances.
When they show up Suzume makes quick work of explaining everything that happened to the TSA agents. She saves mention of Kirishima, Bakugou and their own captive for the very end of her explanation.
It means that when the officers take off at a sprint down the corridors, she has a reason to chase after them, and time to watch them taze the man she saw before down to his knees.
He recovers too fast, tries to run, and she slams her fist into his gut before he can get any further.
Then, while he's being tied up, she subtly clones his phone too.
She has the feeling she'll need it later on.
This isn't over, and she doesn't know that she trusts the authorities to find who set this all up in the first place.
That's not true.
She definitely doesn't.
The fact that they get on their plane on time and without further incident is, as far as Suzume is concerned, a miracle.
"Our class is cursed," she tells the boys as they settled into the nice seats on the small plane.
This is also why she insisted on arriving hours early. Because it seems to her that something odd happens to her a lot. She's a trouble magnet or something. Even when she's not looking to get into a scrap, she still does and there's nothing she can do about it.
So she just goes with it now, as best as she can.
If she didn't know that the class got in plenty of trouble without her she would just assume that she was the one who was cursed.
I might still be cursed, and that's why i'm in 1-A in the first place.
And isn't that a somewhat terrifying thought?
It would explain more than it doesn't. Trouble finds her whether she's looking for it or not and it always has in this life and the one she had before.
Kono Suzume and Suzanna Hemmings, a curse that dredges its way through whole lifetimes.
Will it progress into her next life?
What will that one be like?
She's lived in a normal world. Now she lives in a future filled with heroes and villains. Will her next life see her in a past full of knights and wizards?
Suzume thinks briefly of the sanitary conditions in the dark ages and nearly throws up.
I'd rather die than live with that long term.
She's not even a huge fan of camping if she's being honest. Not have any toilets or showers for her entire life?
No, no thank you.
It would also make her work harder.
She knows when she's right, but it takes evidence to back all of that up in a court. Evidence that's hard to come by when it comes to time before DNA and fingerprint registries, social media, and so on.
Even not all of that was infallible. More than once she's seen DNA used to prove that someone was killer who was absolutely not.
Today, DNA was important for something very different.
Those bones.
Dr. Hijikata had been escorted out of the airport by police officers who had sworn to protect her from people who would kill for the DNA in those bones.
The question still remained.
Who had ordered their retrieval in the first place?
Someone with resources. Someone with money. Someone who knew that the bones had been acquired by Dr. Hijikata's lab in the first place.
It's easy for her to imagine a villain doing it. Even All For One deciding he wants yet another healing factor thrown into his quirky cocktail makes sense. But like she told the boy, corporations are just as likely to pull kind of insane shit. If they hadn't been there no one would have noticed. Dr. Hijikata and Hisana would have disappeared and no one would have ever noticed.
All Might of all people was in the airport, but he hadn't noticed and then he hadn't done anything about what was happening.
He'd wanted to alert the TSA officers, and that would have very definitely gotten Hisana killed.
Being subtle was definitely not his forte.
Could he even throw a punch when he was all scrawny skeleton? Or was he only useful as a hero when he was relying entirely on a quirk that was no longer his to carry?
Suzume twists her scrunchy around her wrist. The lock picks inside looked close enough to bobby pins on the metal detector that security hadn't paid them too much attention. Or maybe other countries were just less intense in their airport security than the US had been a lifetime ago.
She runs her calloused fingertips over the lock picks, counting each one as she goes over what she knows about the bones and what she knows about pharmaceutical companies.
Not enough.
She doesn't have near enough information.
She hasn't even seen the scene that Hisana was kidnapped from, so how is she supposed to figure out who decided to take her in the first place?
Suzume leans her head back on her seat and watches waves pass them by outside the window.
Far in the distance she can just barely see where the horizon line glows white between the sky and the sea.
Shinsou looks at her, away from a game he'd been playing on his phone since they got on the plane.
"Hey."
"Hmm?" she asks, not looking away from a flock of puffy clouds that stretch their fingers across the pale blue sky. The trip to I island isn't a long one, she wants to relish flying while she can, even in a small plane that seems a little bumpy.
"How did you see that?"
"See what?"
"The lift."
"You mean the drop?" she finally turns from the window to look at Shinsou.
He nods at her. Suzume considers her answer before she shrugs.
"I saw it."
"No one else did."
"No one else was looking for it."
"So you what, knew it was going to happen?"
"No! Not at all," she shakes her head.
Shinsou frowns deeper.
"Then how did you know to look for it?"
"Well… I'm always looking for stuff like that I guess. It's just a threat assessment that I have going on in the back of my head. Like background programs on a computer."
She doesn't tell him that she's been tamping those instincts down for a while now, but she's working against its bringing back old, half abandoned habits.
"You're always looking for people to do horrible stuff?" he asks, horrified.
What is she supposed to say to that?
"I don't know. Something like that. I just… see details. If I really try, if I really let myself, I can pick apart the people around me and figure out their motivations and predict what they're likely to do next."
"How?!"
"I just do! It's something I've learned how to do."
Something she's shut off as best as she can for a long time.
"So you do that to us?" he asks, leaning back from her minutely.
Suzume scowls.
"No. Not usually. Looking for the worst in people, figuring out whatever awful thing they're libel to do if pushed a few degrees, it's not. Great."
She twists her scrunchy more aggressively.
"It's the opposite actually. It's isolating. Like I'm on the outside of the whole world looking in, watching the future unfold without participating, seeing every impulse and sin inked on someone's expression, in their posture, in their callouses. If you pick apart every ingredient in a pie, you'll never taste the pie itself, you know? To be that in someone's head you have to be completely disconnected from them personally."
It's a struggle to explain it.
"If you do that, there's no way to make friends. No way to get close to someone because you're always watching from a distance. The world is like a play and you're just not in it. But there's no audience either just. You. Alone in the seats."
"So no. I don't constantly analyze any of you. What happened in the airport was just an environmental awareness and attention to details, okay?"
Slowly, his violet eyes wide, Shinsou nods. Kirishima and Bakugou are watching them from across the aisle, two sets of red eyes.
"Okay."
They're silent for the rest of the flight.