Good morning! Sorry for the unexpected break, I've reached the end of chapters I wrote during my last Haitus, but I still had two more I wanted to publish for this 'season'. They're just bite sized ones, but I feel like they're important. This one involving Suzume's ripples, and the next one will return to Suzume and her family.
I'll be putting up the poll to vote on what the 2,500 review reward should be in my tumblr today. Cast your votes either there if you have an account, here in the comment section, or through my tumblr messaging directly. Check tumblr or AO3 for more info on each option. Voting ends next friday, 12/8/2023.
Options are ;
1) A non canonical chapter featuring Suzume and another character.
2) A full prequel chapter feat. Taka, Rio, and Shu, including his death.
3) One chapter read aloud by myself including music/sound effects.
4) A one off canon mystery from the life of Suzanna Hemmings.
5) A one off, non canonical mystery taking place in universe.
6) Other. If you have something you'd like to see, but don't see it on the list, drop it in the comments and maybe other people will agree with you enough for it to win! Or, if I like it enough, I might do it for fun later.
Touya clicks his tongue as he looks over the landscape.
He hates forests.
So of course the place that that horror show that dropped them was in the middle of one.
Bad enough the training camp they'd snatched those kids out of had been in one, now he was in another, who knew how far from civilization, with a bunch of injured people and only two working cell phones.
His, and Compress'. And he wouldn't be using his own for any of this work. That phone was reserved very specifically for Chisaki and no one else.
When he'd heard about the League of Villains forming, a group of people who followed the ideology of that serial killer Stain, he'd mostly been curious.
Stain wasn't wrong, after all. The heroes that took up the big screen all the time and made the tops of the charts were all wastes of space, figure heads at best and over glorified cops at worse, complete with the family abusing statistics.
The difference was, Stain believed there were heroes at all. That there could be heroes if they just got rid of the fake ones.
Touya knew better than to believe that. There weren't any true heroes at all.
Anywhere.
Better to just burn the whole institution to the ground.
(Without his bidding, his thoughts drifted to two high schoolers. A boy with a scar over one eye, and his companion. Not heroes, no. Kids.
But a step up from the idiot adults that were poisoning the public and defending shitty parents)
So he'd marched his crispy ass down to the bar where they were supposedly meeting recruits, and almost roasted the leader alive within five minutes.
The guy was temperamental, annoying, and flighty at best.
Touya had been going to just go back to the tattoo parlor. He had good work with the Shie Hessaikai, even if they weren't as prominent then as they'd once been, but something had stopped him.
He'd stayed, and when he heard where they were attacking, well…
He had gone back to the parlor, and called up the young master himself.
No one had known the details at first, so he'd inserted himself in, and by the time the attack on the camp was underway his only orders were clear.
Chisaki didn't give a rats left tit about the hero students, but Touya was not to let any harm come to Kono Suzume.
So, when she was the target for the attack (one of three) he had pushed the conversation away from immediate mayhem and into something more discreet. He couldn't stop it completely, and they didn't get the location of the camp until it was time to move, and the names and photos of their targets barely before then, so he couldn't get the Shie Hessaikai to intervene beforehand either.
So it came down to Compress.
His quirk was literally perfect for kidnapping.
It could snatch the kids up, keep them in a safe little bubble, and then pop them back out with no harm done.
Although, snatching kids up was probably not the best way to think of what they did. Even if it was technically true. It just had too many creepy vibes.
Touya tapped his heel on the bark of the tree he was lounging in. The others were sitting around beneath him, while he had been elected to keep watch. Their injuries were shoddily patched, but no one was at deaths door.
No.
They had all made it out alive.
And now Touya had a choice.
He glanced down at the others. They'd huddled around a fire, and Shigaraki was methodically, almost frantically, dissolving sticks and stones between his fingers until they made a pile the size of the his head between his knees.
Laid out beside him was Kurogiri. Still unconscious, but he had a pulse. The poison they'd all been laid out with had mostly worn off, but it was taking the misty man longer to recover than any of them. Maybe he'd gotten a bigger dose. Maybe he reacted poorly to it. Maybe the smack on his head made it worse.
Touya didn't know.
He shouldn't care either. These people were just his coworkers. Even if he vibed with them better than he had the yakuza.
What a goddamn mess.
Touya was not a people person. Period. End of story. People were useful or they were useless. Most were the latter. The League of Villains was tentatively the former. Maybe? He wasn't sure yet.
The Yakuza had been the former for years. They were his supply of money, housing, food, and bare essentials. But up until a couple of teenagers had walked into a tattoo parlor he wouldn't have called any of them useful for his over all goals.
He still wouldn't.
They were in hiding, and they were too… broad? Small? It was complicated. On one hand, they had lost most of the power they had had before the era of quirks, when their name was feared the world over and respected in every shadow of existence.
On the other hand, they did have goals and they'd just shaken the world. But their goals weren't 'change all of society' or 'destroy heroes'. It was to regain their power and influence. Which was all well and good, but Touya didn't care about their power and influence beyond its ability to help him destroy Endeavor.
Which.
It really didn't.
But the League of Villains…
They were set firmly against heroes themselves. Against all of hero society. And who was a bigger symbol of that society than the top ranked heroes in the country?
Touya had no love for All Might, and Shigaraki hated him.
He didn't see a reason why they couldn't destroy the two top ranked heroes…
He could use the League of Villains, and he didn't even have to be very covert about it. Set their shared goal and get to it. Ad to that that the Shie Hessaikai now owed him a favor for helping them get back their girl, and he had more cards now than he'd had in years, and someone unknowingly on his side.
Yusada Suzume herself.
Kono Suzume.
He had no doubt that she was the reason articles had been running lately about cover ups and injured bystanders around Endeavor, or the renewed wrongful death and property damage suits. She was steadily chipping away his standing. Killing his reputation.
He'd seen his own picture in the paper last week.
Not the one he had now, not the wanted poster.
But a white haired, blue eyed boy with a strained smile and a dead stare.
Someone had run an article on Todoroki Touya, Endeavor's eldest, and deadest, child.
It wasn't justice. Not yet.
But a foundation was being laid now.
It was a start.
Toshinori hadn't left the coroner's office in almost a day.
He could justify it. Say it was because he didn't trust the man on the cold slab to stay dead, say it was for everyone's safety really.
But that wasn't the truth, and when he'd tried to lie to Tsukauchi the man had just give him A Look. The kind he recognized when his old friend was calling him on his bullshit.
The detective didn't even need his quirk to do it, they'd been friends for so long. He knew Toshinori like he knew his own trench coat.
He knew that it wasn't just caution that prompted him to sit in the office chair, staring through a little window in the door at the morgue beyond.
At the cold, still body beyond.
He just.
He couldn't believe it.
All For One was the pinnacle of evil. He was the root of villainy, the rot that permeated the underworld and spread like an unseen fungus to bloom and spread spoors of decay and despair wherever it reached. He had been a pinnacle of the horrors that dotted Toshinori's childhood, and the destructive days where cities could be leveled in a single battle.
All For One and his ilk were the reason his parents had died.
They were the reason his mentor was cold in the ground.
The reason Nana's grandson was on such a dark, horrible path.
And he laid on the metal table, pale, and cleaned of mutilated blood.
Dead.
His chest didn't rise and fall. His fingers didn't twitch. His head didn't beat.
All For One was really, truly dead. And this time Toshinori had his body to prove it.
There should have been catharsis to it. There was certainly relief. A lifting of the despair he'd felt when he realized that he'd failed to end the reign of terror all those years ago.
There wasn't.
It was just like the first time he'd put him down. The world was safer, but Nana was still dead. His only memory of his family was still a vague one, just birthday candles illuminating pale faces during a black out while explosions rumbled outside their too-thin walls.
The hollow place in his heart where they had once been sat just as snuggly as the hollow place where his stomach had once been.
Relief was there.
Catharsis wasn't.
They were still dead. There was no changing that.
There was still changing the future.
The children were safe. The world was better now.
Toshinori knew he was going to have to retire. He'd nearly died during the battle, with his injuries so horrifically exacerbated by pushing himself to his absolute limits. It was only the timely intervention of the Yakuza, of all people, and their healer that had saved him from a potential coma.
Never in his life had it occurred to him that they might get involved, although he should have known. Kono Suzume was there. The fact that Kono Sanjiro hadn't made an appearance himself had been a bigger shock than the fact that the boss of the entire Shie Hessaikai was present. When they'd spoken, he'd been dedicated to nothing more than his family.
It had been surreal. Like something out of a fever dream, to have criminals and thugs holding a bubble of unyielding protection around his battle with the ultimate evil. Never mind the hole in All For One's stomach that they had dealt themselves.
They were all under arrest, of course. The ones that had still been there when the police showed up to finally start restoring order had been taken into custody. The ones that fled had warrants out for their arrests.
Toshinori had the strangest feeling that they were going to be found not guilty of whatever they were charged with.
That could be dealt with later.
Will All For One finally, finally dead maybe they had a little bit of time…
Maybe the kids could grow up, come into themselves, without any more run ins with true evil. Maybe they could just be kids. Maybe…