It's still All Might's final battle.
He doesn't shrink down, or twist in a broken simulacrum of the man he was in his prime, but it's his last battle, even if only Suzume and Midoriya know it at the time.
The area is cleared, more by Yakuza than by heroes, but there's a tremulous truce between them.
The work needs to be done, no matter who does it, and they all know that. There's no time for fighting, there's no room for brawls. There are too many injured and too much at stake. Rio is rushing with every first responder in the city, and all of the heroes with medical training. They set up a triage center, and the worst of the injured were all dragged in according to lethality.
Most the people that Osachi brought with them are debtors, men and women who owe the Yakuza so steeply they couldn't deny the call. Others are members, people who Suzume has known her whole life, working to ensure the future.
It's dangerous, and thrust their organization into the public eye.
Dangerous, and brilliant as well.
They've picked the right time for it.
As faith in heroes is lost, the Yakuza step in, as they have in the past during nuclear disasters and natural horrors.
The world turns. Gravity and limelight shift.
And Suzume lets herself be dragged to the front of the line by Katsuki of all people, who's hand is wet with her own blood.
She tries to figure out when he'd touched her side, but everything felt like it was far away and distant. As the anger and adrenaline drains out of her, she's left feeling like her bones don't weigh anything and her hands aren't her own.
Katsuki ignores all of that, and pulls her to the front of the pack along with her brother, and his poor missing eye.
"They need a doctor," he says, loud and brooking no argument.
Someone still tries, but Rio appears behind them.
"Get them inside," she snaps as soon as she sees Kaname's face and the soaked patch on Suzume's borrowed black dress. "Are you an idiot?"
Suzume has never heard her speak to anyone like that, but she is her fathers daughter. She is her brother's sister.
The man, thoroughly cowed, ushers them into the make shift shelter. It's just a tent, but the walls are thick and it looks clean enough. They've already set up cots, and people lay still on them. Rio can't do everything on her own, her quirk only goes so far, but there are others working just as hard to heal and administer care.
Cleaning injuries, setting bones and splints, treating the most sever cases of shock.
It's nothing she can help with, even if she could get her thoughts to really focus on what was happening right in front of her, instead of everything around them. The battle, the media, the implications. All For One's still body laying in a crater outside. Still. Cold.
She doesn't know if he's dead. If it was anyone else she would say he is without a chance. But this is a man who survived having head head half blasted off. A man who took a punch that could change the very weather and lived.
She hopes he's dead.
She hopes he suffocated slowly while All Might beat him into the ground and Kai slammed stone into him every chance he got.
It's... disquieting. To know that she hopes that she has just killed a man. Just shot him to death as surely as her sister once had stabbed her to her own end.
But she does.
Rio cups Kaname's cheek, and with a flash of light his face reforms, time twisting backwards and drawing damaged flesh and a popped organ back into place.
Katsuki goes pale, but Suzume doesn't even blink.
Then Rio touches her side.
"They hurt you in there?" There's something dark in her tone that almost makes Suzume smile. She would, if her brain felt like mole asses.
Molasses.
And now she wanted gingerbread.
"Not really. They were fine. I got bitten once. It messed up my shirt."
"Suzy, it looks like you got stabbed."
"Oh. Yeah, that's fine."
"That's- Kono Suzume!"
Suzume blinks, and stands a little straighter. Like an American kid that just got called their full name.
Suzanna Elizabeth-Juniper Hemmings!
Rio taps her injured side, and the wound heals itself in a second. The woman looks tired, but resolute and sure.
Something metallic and bloody falls into her hand.
Shrapnel.
Katsuki sucks in a sharp breath.
Suzume doesn't.
"I'm fine," she says firmly, shaking her head and trying to shake the dust that is starting to settle on her brain.
"You're fine because I made you fine," Rio says impatiently. She waves the bloody shrapnel around in front of Suzume's eyes, and she tracks it automatically. At least she knows she's not concussed. Just in mild shock.
Probably.
It's not even because she was injured. Or kidnapped. It's because the fucking Yakuza is here, outside, running a triage tent after beating the hell out of one of the most dangerous men to ever live. A man who spent the entirety of the last two centuries trying to bend the world to his own devices.
Suzume blinks again.
She needs to tell someone about the doctor.
Fuck.
What was his name again?
Gary? Gaki?
Kyu-something?
She wants to bang her head against the table to knock the answers out of her skull. She should have written everything down while she could still remember it all, but she'd been so sad, and then so busy, and she just. Hadn't.
She had a good memory, but it wasn't picture perfect, and the creepy doctor hadn't come in until later. And even then she didn't remember remembering his name very well. Just some weird controversy over the name itself.
"Yes," Suzume agrees when she realizes that her sister-in-law is still waiting for an answer. "I'm fine because of you."
"But you very easily could have not been. You know good and well that if this hit your liver you could have bled to death faster than anyone but the teleporting guy could have gotten you help. Did you tell them you were injured? Did you demand treatment?"
"We were busy," Suzume defends, "And it wasn't in my liver. The liver is deeper than that, that didn't even pass my ribs!"
"I swear, you're so-"
Rio has the look on her face that Suzume recognizes well from all her older siblings. Infuriation brought on by concern. "You, little miss, are going to sit on this cot, and not. Move. Do you understand me?"
Suzume presses her lips into a thin line.
"Suzume."
"Yes," she says at last, and plops down on the cot.
Rio rounds on the three young men.
"You too. Sit with her, and don't do anything stupid. You just got rescued, we don't need anyone getting lost again. Kaname, don't let them wander off or the next time you lose an eye you can figure out how to get it back yourself."
"Yes, ma'am."
Kaname is looking at Rio about the same way Suzume expects she is.
They've never seen her act like this before, not in all the time they've known her. She's been the sweet young healer leaving the Yakuza. She's been the worried mother forced to give her daughter over to someone who helps her better with her quirk. But she's never, ever, been this stern or brazen.
Suzume wonders if this was how she was when she was still part of the Yakuza itself.
She moved like a woman who was used to being obeyed, and directed people like there was no doubt in her mind that they would obey everything that she said.
Which, to her credit, they did.
It was a wonder to watch her work, and a little bit scary if Suzume was being totally honest. This brand new side of Rio only helped to emphasize something that had been bothering her since yesterday.
Her parents.
There was something about them, something about her whole family history, that she didn't know.
"Hey, Kaname?" she asked suddenly, drawing her brother's newly mended eye to her.
"Yeah?"
"How did our parents meet?"
"Our... parents," he repeats, eying her. "Is this really the time?"
"Probably not. But humor me."
Kaname takes a deep breath and tilts his head back towards the sealing. He runs his tongue across his teeth, licking the blood off his fangs. They aren't dripping venom anymore, thankfully.
His fingers drum on the cot, and bother of her fellow kidnapping victims are watching him too. Katsuki is oddly quiet. Hitoshi is never a huge talker, but he looks more exhausted than any of them.
He had the least amount of experience, she reminded herself. He wasn't with them for the USJ, when the rest of her class realized exactly how dangerous the world was, and how little they could afford not to take it seriously.
She leaned over, and bumped her shoulder against his.
Kaname ripped a few holes on the cot before he stopped himself and finally looked at her little sister.
"I'm actually not sure. Their anniversary is in April, and they always left the house and had Shisui watch us for the second weekend of October. But I don't think they ever said how they met. Why?"
"I've just been thinking about it. Dad's name carries weight, it turns out. And also, how does a french woman meet an underground handy man in the first place?"
She shakes her head, and starts turning her scrunchy around on her wrist restlessly. She fingers the lock picks in the clothe, and her mind spins. All the answers are there, but she refuses to piece them together. Not her parents. Not her family. She can't stand the idea of distancing herself from them, of making herself an outsider to their lives, someone just looking in from a window to see what they're doing and what they're going to do. The very idea makes her sick.
She loves her family. She doesn't want to cleave herself from them.
Certainly not for something like this.
"And then," she goes on, "There's Rio. She's the boss's daughter. How did she and Takahiro even meet? They should be worlds apart."
"That's... Huh. I think I heard someone mention that they went to the same daycare, and then school, but you're right," Kaname looks after Rio, his brows furrowing, before he shakes his head.
"It's not important right now," he decides. "What's important is that we got you back. Goddamn, Suzume, do you have any idea how worried everyone was? Mom's been freaking out, and the other guys are losing it too. Shisui's even flying in."
Suzume stares at him.
"Shisui is?!"
"Yes! Why are you so surprised?"
She can only shrug.
"He's just always so distant. I don't know. How else am I supposed to feel? He barely talks to any of us since he left for college, he left as soon as he could, he hasn't come back for holidays or birthdays or... anything."
"This is a little more important than a holiday or a birthday," Kaname says flatly. "And just because he's... Shisui. Doesn't mean he doesn't care about you. You're too young to remember it, but when they brought you home from the hospital he would spend hours sitting by your crib, watching you. You were so quiet it scared the hell out of everyone, but he insisted you were fine."
Kaname shakes his head. " 'She's just getting used to life', he told our parents when they said they were taking you to the doctor. 'It's scary to become'."
"He said that?"
"Yeah. He's just weird," Kaname shrugs, and Suzume falls quiet.
'It's scary to become'.
He wasn't wrong. Babies went from being in what was essentially a sensory deprivation chamber to being exposed to a million new sights, sounds, smells, textures, everything.
Suzume leans against Kaname, and closes her eyes for a few minutes.
Or, maybe a few hours.
Days?