Glory To The Vindictive Chapter 54: Time moves forwards (right?), a my hero academia/僕のヒーローアカデミア fanfic

Alright! One more quick little chapter before we finally get on to the training arc, and then back to UA for all the nonesense going on there.

If you'd like to see some spoilers without context in the form of truly rough ink sketches, I'll be posting those in Kono family pics.

Seeing Yusada Suzume march up the driveway was like watching an angry badger target him, and Shouta wasn't sure if he was mildly worried, or amused.

He was going to go with amused, even though he personally thought that Yusada would shatter his knee caps if she thought he was a threat to her mother.

What does it say that the kid from the yakuza family has a better family relationship than half of the other kids in my class?

He watched her power walk up to her mother from the living room window, and physically felt it when her dark eyes snapped to him through the sheer curtain that offered only the smallest margin of privacy.

Yusada Chiasa cupped her daughter's face between her hands, and said something that Shouta couldn't hear. Her eyes were soft and sad, and Suzume's brows furrowed. She put her hands on Chiasa's wrists and gently pulled them down away from her cheeks.

Shouta wouldn't pretend to know the specifics of the conversation, but the way Suzume's mouth thinned and her jaw relaxed told him what he needed to know.

She was a smart girl. Maybe not as book smart as some people in the business course, and maybe not as technically intelligent as some of the people in the support course, but when it comes to making practical decisions and seeing choices to their end? When it comes to strategic thinking and planning?

He'd be willing to put Suzume up against just about anyone shy of the principal himself.

Shouta was aware of her family's connection to organized crime. Almost all of the staff was.

When he thought about what it would have been like if she'd gone down that route, and poured her dogged passions into building an empire from the sands of what was lost…

He wasn't sure he liked that idea, actually.

In fact he liked that even less than he liked seeing her upset or injured or doing something very, very reckless the way she was prone to.

Which.

For someone so smart, she took a lot more risks that he, as her teacher, was strictly comfortable with.

The USJ had been a risky time for all of his students, when they'd stepped up in ways that had impressed him more than he could properly articulate to this day. But Yusada had been only a few steps behind Midoriya, Todoroki, and Bakugou in terms of reckless abandon in the face of evil at their doorsteps.

She was a complicated problem child, that was for sure.

And now he was going to be seeing even more of her.

Much more.

Of all the parents he'd spoken to so far today, Yusada Chiasa was the one he had least expected to see shed tears at the idea of her child going to what was essentially going to be a boarding school from now on.

It was a foolish mistake, in retrospect. Just because most of her other kids were already out of the house, and just because she was no stranger to a life led in the shadow of violence, didn't mean that she was any more ready to let go of her daughter than the others.

If anything, she should be less ready. She knew the kind of things villains did.

She'd married a murderer, after all.

Shouta watched Suzume hug her mother, and say something that made the older woman laugh wetly and dab at her eyes. The neighbors could probably see all of it.

But did that really matter?

Suzume at last pulled back, and Chiasa gathered herself.

Hizashi looked extremely uncomfortable sitting on the couch beside him in his civvies, with his hair tied back and his glass hanging lower on the bridge of his nose.

"Still think she's a traitor?" Shouta asked, looking at his old friend.

The blond man shot him a look. "She still could be."

"If she is, it's not for the League of Villains. You know that."

Despite what was apparently popular belief, Hizashi was also wicked smart. He held together three jobs, he had his masters in English, his teaching license, and his hero license, plus everything he did on his radio show.

Normally, Shouta trusted his judgment implicitly.

But this time, while he'd drawn a logical conclusion, it was Shouta who was going for the more illogical answer.

He didn't think Suzume was a spy. If she was, it was the worst spy they could have picked. Too obvious, and she didn't have the heart for it. Every inch of her being was dedicated to tell the rest of the world to go fuck itself.

There were worse reasons to become a hero.

The pair of Yusada's finally came inside, and the door shut with a click behind them. Suzume slipped her shoes off and set them aside, and walked into the room to look at the teachers now sitting on her couch. All Might was going to tag along to most of the meetings, but given his less-than-stellar track record with Yusada, he was skipping this one.

"So," Yusada drawled. She turned the scrunchy she wore on her wrist at all times around a few times. "You want me to come live on campus."

"Not just you," Shouta corrected. "All of the students are going to be moved to on campus housing, for your own safety and peace of mind."

"Right. Because you guys did such a wonderful job protecting us already. UA's been broken into twice, and summer camp was assaulted."

Shouta tried not to wince.

She wasn't wrong.

"This will be different. We're making the campus more secure, and ensuring safety as much as we can. It will definitely be safer than living here."

Suzume arched her brows.

"You know my brother single handedly kicked the absolute shit out of the people who raided your camp and kidnapped three people?"

"Suzume!" Chiasa scolded, but her mouth was twitching.

"Your brother is almost grown. He won't be here forever, anymore than you will. He has his own school, and internship. We will be dedicated to keeping the campus secured, along with top notch security systems."

"Then when are you guys going to get days off? If you don't have any, I'm pretty sure that's a labor law violation."

Shouta paused, thrown off.

Hizashi picked up for him.

"We'll trade off days now and then, once a week. But hero work is usually a full time job, we've just pivoted our focus."

Suzume leaned back on the couch with a long, drawn out sigh.

"Well… I guess I'll just have to behave."

"You had better behave. Or I'll hear about it," Chiasa shot her daughter a sideways look, and this time it was Suzume who struggled to keep a straight face.

"Yes mother. Of course mother. Do forgive me mother."

"Don't think two heroes will stop me from putting you over my knee."

Suzume broke, and a startled laugh exploded out of her. She covered her mouth and shot her mother a shocked stare.

"You've never spanked me in my life!"

"Don't make me start when you're fifteen."

"I'm almost sixteen , Mama."

"... hush now."

Shouta watches the back and forth like a table tennis match. He's never seen Suzume so relaxed before. It's kind of incredible.

He mentally marks off the Yusada's on his mental list of families he'll need to speak to today.

The clock wasn't ticking right.

It kept pressing forwards, against the 12, before ticking back again. Then it skipped forwards to 2 minutes after twelve, and back again.

Perhaps if it was only one analog clock that could be excused. Gears did strange things when they got old, and weights could break and chains grow weak. The cuckoo hadn't come out of that clock for years, and everyone knew it. Everyone knew it because the owner never shut up about how annoying it was to have cuckoo clock that didn't cuckoo when it was supposed to.

It wasn't.

Not only was the analog clock, that horrible thing stuck to the wall, not ticking forwards the way it was supposed to. But the watch faces were doing the same thing. Ticking. Backing up. Ticking. Not ticking. Forwards. Backwards. Nowhere.

The digital clock on his phone was doing the same thing.

5:00

5:02

5:00.

Over.

And over.

And over again.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tock. Tick. Tick.

He stared from one clock to the other.

He could hear it. The whispers outside. The echoes of the Implanted and the Silence of the Empty.

It swept through him like air swept through the lava tubes. The base of his skull itched. Shigeru Murota didn't have to deal with the Silence . He heard everything.

He heard only the echoes. Not the Silence . He sometimes missed the Silence . At times like this, when something was roiling in the Silence , he wished he was still part of it.

But he wasn't.

He'd made his choice, made his choice for himself and his wife and his children. And all the Empties just had to deal with the luck of the draw.

There something in the Silence today.

There was something in the time today.

The clocks were wrong. And things were too quiet.

He scratched the base of his skull and got up to go find Murota.

Even though she'd been anticipating the need to move everything ever since she got home, the actual packing up of her bedroom took Suzume longer than she was expecting.

They went to a grocery store, just her and her mother, and managed to get as many boxes from the bakery and produce departments as they could. They even got banana boxes! Score.

Suzume already had her bag packed for her trip to see Shihan Yuzo's master, but by the time she returned they would be short on time to get everything packed away for her move into the new UA dorms.

She was excited.

She was terrified.

It was going to be the first time she'd been away from Chiasa for a long time in nearly sixteen years.

She had no idea how to do this. She had forgotten.

Before, Suzanne was distant from her family. She had left them. And even then, she had never been as attached to her mother as she was to Chiasa.

The idea of leaving her gave her a sickly excited feeling.

Obviously she would have to eventually. That was just how it worked. Suzume would grow up, and move out, and then Chiasa would really be an empty nester.

But this felt so soon.

She didn't think she was prepared, but what else could she do?

So she stayed glued to her mothers side as they wrapped her delicate possessions in newspaper and packed them carefully in the boxes. Suzume folded the paper, Chiasa taped it and lay them strategically in the banana box in yet more newspapers.

Her books went into another box, and all of her weapons, their polish, oil, and clean rags and equipment went in another. She packed up her comforter and her sheets and vacuumed the bag flat, and repeated that for her clothes as well.

Between the two of them, they got the most important stuff finished by late that night.

Suzume followed Chiasa to her bedroom that night, and climbed up into it with her mother.

Kaname appeared even later that night, smelling faintly of gun smoke and salt water, and slumped to sleep behind them. Suzume spent one last night sandwiched between her mother and her brother.