Izuku wakes up, and the world feels off-kilter. He's—somewhere, sitting on something... When his fingers feel around a little, he finds he's on a mattress of sorts. Or a couch? When the fog in his head clears a little more and everything feels a little less underwater, Izuku looks at everything in front of him again. Yes, he's on a blue couch, his body covered by a blanket and at an uncomfortable angle that has him laying down more than anything, he's in Gran Torino's living room(?), and it smells like taiyaki and coffee.

Izuku scrunches his nose, recollecting his scattered memories and thinking back a little.

...Oh.

Oh, that's so embarrassing—

"No getting up for you, kid!" Gran Torino orders from somewhere to Izuku's side before he can even do anything besides flush. He startles, head whipping towards the noise, and it takes him a little longer to process that Gran Torino's eating. ...Again? Wasn't he getting lunch when he...

Izuku scrambles up only to get whacked lightly by the end of Gran Torino's cane. He winces but holds himself up determinedly, craning his neck to the side painfully with his eyes focusing on his mentor. His cheeks are still flaming, too, and God, all of this is no-good and bad and horrible. "How—How long was I o-out?" A few minutes, please?

"A day or two," Gran Torino says casually, and Izuku recoils like he's been physically struck, swallowing what probably would've been a quiet cry. That's so much time wasted! Izuku has to—he can't reach whatever limits Gran Torino wants to see at this rate, he—"villains don't wait," he'd said, but here they are, doing nothing because Izuku couldn't handle—

Gran Torino pushes his neck with his cane. Limply, Izuku lets his head fall, now staring up at the ceiling. With a burst of air, the hero's looking down at him, face darkened by shadows. "Health first, always," he states. "'Health' includes mental health, too. Think about it like this: what use are you if you do that—dissociation thing on the battlefield? What will you do if your mental state dips mid-fight? No use is what you'll be, 'specially when you're handling One for All and your limits. You need to be in the right headspace."

Mutely, Izuku nods, sighing silently when a tray of dango is set on his chest. He shifts himself so that his upper body's sitting up, biting into the skewered rice dumpling. Gran Torino hops off the couch and sets a glass of water on the table, too.

After Izuku gulps down some water, he slumps, feeling a sudden, faint heaviness weighing on him. This calmer atmosphere... Izuku can't handle it. There's nothing to focus on besides the remaining dango and water, but his mind is always running, always thinking, so it'll only be a matter of time until he thinks of All Mi—

"So wha-what's going to happen now?" Izuku blurts out, tucking away his rage and numbness. He's still wearing his costume so he picks at its sleeves, fingers trailing along its neon-green stripes. "I-I'm... Is this... a break? Are we n-not gonna be training today?"

Gran Torino, eating the last of his beloved taiyaki, pauses, chewing thoughtfully. "Well," he starts, partially distorted, "you'll be taking as long as you need to feel decent again. Then, afterwards... I guess you can train a little, keep it light." He swallows, drinks some water from his own glass. "Outside, there's an abandoned area down a few roads. So, we'll either go there or to the dump to figure out whatever you can truly do. But that's only when you've recovered!"

Izuku grimaces. "But I'm alri—"

In a burst of air, Gran Torino launches at him. Izuku flinches, hard, before clumsily pressing into the back of the couch to dodge. His hair stands on end, a sudden chill spreading near his shoulder from where Gran Torino aimed his sudden kick. That could've been dislocated, or worse, fractured.

And that attack was... slower. In fact, Gran Torino's able to slow himself down gradually instead of in a sharp burst, gracefully landing on his feet somewhere in front of Izuku. Nothing gets destroyed, only grazed by a soft breeze.

The retired hero scoffs at him. "Are you, now."

"Okay," Izuku concedes, going back to his previous position with a miserable sigh. "Okay. I-I see what you mean." There's a pause, and then, "So... what do I do in the meantime?"

Gran Torino taps his foot in thought. "How about we go out a little into the city, eh?" He says. "Let you get a grip of things, do some PR, see what to look for and how other heroes do things, yada yada." Gran Torino smiles. "You're gonna watch the real horrors of heroism; that is, the attention."

Despite his words, the retired hero's smile isn't a deadly or sadistic thing. It has the edges of mirth tucked into its corners. And inexplicably, Izuku relaxes just a margin and thinks that things might actually be alright for now.

===

Tommy is so, so fucking tired right now, but he's also never felt more alive.

Somewhere around this mess of shrapnel and soot, Hatsume laughs maniacally, with a faint scrape like flint-and-steel being struck following soon after. A boom rattles the support department's testing area a little, startling some of the other students here, but there's no sound since Hatsume's long developed a silencer for these new babies of hers.

(He doesn't think it's a coincidence that there's no intentional or accidental loud explosions anymore, especially when Hatsume introduces him to hundreds of thousands of nanomachines that cover the walls and "suck any loud sounds" out of the room. Specifically because they were not there when he first entered. Did she just—have those nanomachines on-hand, or somewhere in storage? Or did she develop them in one night? Tommy fears both of those options.)

Her babies? Oh, those are just the fireworks that were in Tommy's server but Hatsume version. That thud that's followed this test round was not normal, though, and it has him sitting up, agitating the goggles around his eyes and the grime plastering his skin. His hands, shaking after hours of being surprisingly stead, set down his tools on the workbench delicately, barely careful in not messing with any wiring he was working on while he gets up.

Tommy doesn't need to call out for Hatsume or anything, though. She bursts out the training room herself, colored smoke and embers wafting through the open door, and practically runs to him like an animal. Her dreadlocks are their own canvas, spurts of random colors she'd put into the rockets, and—oh, Prime, why are her teeth stained a little?

"It worked!" She squeals, having skid to a stop like right in front of Tommy. Her hands wave around, going from reaching to him to tugging on her hair. Her entire body is giving Tommy an energy boost. "It worked it worked it worked it worked, Tim-Tom!"

Hatsume picked that nickname up after one of her caffeine highs, and hasn't stopped using it since. Tommy abhors it. "The fuck're you on about?" He asks with a genuine yet incredulous smile.

"The—y'know, the enhancements! The boosts! The—I slammed into the roof!" She says it all with far too much excitement.

"Hatsume." Tommy half-bemoans, half-laughs, entirely surprised-but-not. "Hatsume."

"I told you to call me Mei, Tims! It doesn't hurt anyway! I cushioned the floor and the roof, don't worry! That's one of my other babies I haven't shown you yet: my perfect Pillow Plushies! But never mind that, Tim-Tom; I was able to hit the roof! That's like—oh I have no idea, but the room's, like, as tall as a cathedral, so that's something!"

"That—" Tommy sputters. "Okay, one, we've only known each other for, what, a few days? Two, you being cushioned doesn't fucking make things better because it was hard enough to make a thud even I could hear in this room? Are you alright? You've been in there for hours."

Hatsume huffs, crossing her arms petulantly. "Call me by my first name and I'll tell you."

Tommy smirks, mimicking her pose. "Answer my fuckin' question and I won't tell Maijima that you're stalling to get help."

That gets her standing ramrod straight, eyes locking onto him in a panic. "You wouldn't."

"I fucking would and you know it."

Hatsume sighs, defeated, while Tommy grins triumphantly. "Okay, okay! I... may have been a tad careless in excitement. Just a tad, just by a smidge; it's nothing serious! I was wearing my protective clothes, too! Just, I... Fireworks are hot, right, and the AC wasn't fast enough, and if I manually decreased the temperature there could've been a huge reaction between the fireworks' heat and the sudden cold like with Todoroki during the Sports Festival and... okay, that might also be an excuse but—but the point is that it was hot! So I kind of... rolled up my sleeves, and got a small burn there?"

Tommy's smile falls. "A 'small' burn?"

"A small burn," Hatsume repeats. She pulls up her sleeve to reveal a patch of inflamed skin that sprawls over her forearm, stark against her usual tanned tone. It's nothing extremely serious, thankfully (maybe that's what she meant by "small"), but it's large and still something to worry about. Tommy stares at it with pursed lips, and then at her with an "are-you-shitting-me" expression before moving to get the med-kit usually stored nearby. Fortunately, it's in its usual spot, so he takes it out, hearing Hatsume shuffle herself with an audible pout so that he can bandage her "small burn."

As Tommy prepares a wet cloth from a nearby sink, Hatsume starts talking again. "The fireworks as they are now can probably boost our prototype elytra hundreds of meters in the air at best, I'd think," she says. "Still has lots of room to improve, of course, but our progress is banging so far." Tommy falters at the slang, looking at her with a stifled giggle, before putting his focus back on her arm. "And! A shipment of ripstop nylon's come in, so I'll have Hana infuse that with some other nylons plus Kevlar, some polyesters... She might be able to make it look like 'elytra wings,' too. Veiny, thin, basically like dragonflies, right? Also, how's the body going?"

What the fuck's a dragonfly? ...Oh, he'll figure it out later; Tommy nods along. He's lightly tapped a wet towel on her burn, already applying a thin sheen of aloe vera just in case. "Elytras are just way fucking cooler," he states, wiping the excess plant paste on his hands. He'll wash it off soon. "And the frame's doing fine. 'Ve been sealin' up some of the, uh—the scales? Whatever those fucking curved sheets are. Anyway, I've been sealing the gaps between those with that tool you taught me to use. Y'know, that small hot iron thing."

("A welder," Hatsume says. Tommy waves her off.)

"I think I've got like, thirty percent of it done? The main frame, that is; the wings, not at all. Was moving the wires around for the LEDs and the jetpack mechanics earlier." Tommy unrolls the bandages, wrapping the end around her forearm before winding the fabric up Hatsume's arm. "Fuckin' sucks that I can't, like, craft meticulous shit like all of that, but whatever. Anyway, you sure that the metal's resistant enough to take anything?" He'd have said netherite, but Hatsume hadn't known what that was.

"Positive!" She chirps. "Power Loader let me blast a makeshift rocket launcher I made at it once, before he melted it. I also had Snipe shoot at it with all sorts of guns, too. Whenever Michi's involved in metalwork, he doesn't half-ass anything. Thanks, Timmy-Tom!"

Tommy finishes her bandages with a bow. "That's fucking poggers," he says, watching Hatsume immediately start moving her arm around. "Nothing less for an elytra. And don't fucking hurt yourself again." With a distracted nod, she bounds off, a grin plastered on her face like usual.

Tommy sighs, leaning back. Without something to do, his fingers latch onto his sleeves, fiddling with the now-fraying ends. He kind of wants to keep melding the elytra frame an' shit, but he also hasn't taken a break in Prime knows how fucking long, besides for eating and sleeping and whatever else.

His eye darts to where he knows his communicator is latched to his hip.

In the length of the internships thus far, Tommy's texted Izuku a fair (well, a shit ton) of times. And, well, so far... he hasn't gotten a response. None of his messages have been seen, either, which gives him more fear than anything, because what if Izuku can see Tommy's messages on his phone? Either something's really, really wrong, or he's just busy. Or he—left.

...Izuku wouldn't. He thinks. (But how would Tommy know?)

Yeah, Izuku wouldn't.

It's fine, it's all fine. It is. It is, it is, it is. They've been friends for over a year(!!!), and last time this shit happened, Izuku was—close to death. But he's with heroes, and all the danger his gut screamed about is centered on Iida. It—it's probably shitty that Tommy's being glad about that, but he is because it means Izuku's safe. Tommy should stop being a fucking wuss. (That does little to discourage the sorrow building on his shoulders.)

Tommy is the Biggest Man Ever, and Tommy wasn't defeated by Dream, and Tommy's survived isolation and exile and war. This—this attachment, this dependency—he can't be defeated by something like this. Like something as small as who leaves him. He should be used to it anyway. It's not going to hurt. (It's going to gut him.)

So Tommy texts Izuku a quick message, something like "we're doing the coolest fucking shit here" that's plenty open-ended, sets his communicator back on his hip, and goes back to working on the mechanized elytra frame.

===

Momo's gotten accustomed to feeling quite insignificant over her time at U.A. Not that U.A. is the cause of it, no, just... intensified it. And it's not her classmates' faults, or her teachers', or anyone's, really—just her.

Yes, her Quirk is strong, but she hasn't achieved much with it besides in the USJ. Sure, with the training Aizawa's given her and what she's observed from Tommy, Momo can put up a better fight than most. But she hasn't... done anything, besides protect her friends in a life-or-death situation. Like what everyone else was doing.

Momo just—she wants to do more. And with the hero internships, she thought she could.

But here she is, Kendo Itsuka next to her, watching their supposed "mentor" do the second photoshoot scheduled today. Or third? When Momo looks down at the clipboard again, she nods to herself; this is Uwabani's second. These photoshoots all feel the same.

Because honestly? PR is mostly what they've been doing the entire week thus far, and though she still holds optimism, Momo finds it fading, and fast. Going back and forth between buildings, taking pictures, watching Uwabami model constantly... she teaches them more about holding appearances than actual training. Wasn't that the whole purpose of the internships, to become better heroes?

...Momo winces at the bitterness of her thoughts. She doesn't mean to be! It's just, she's tired of doing the same thing, and Kendo is, too, because they're both restless and Kendo keeps looking outside as if it'll suddenly be the next day and they're going to do something.

Maybe this'll prepare her if she's famous...? Or if she doesn't know how to—she doesn't know, increase her fame?

Fiddling with the fabric of her improved costume*, Momo looks up, locking gazes with Kendo. The other shakes her head, muttering, "The photographer wants a few more pictures." Silently, Momo sighs, looking at Uwabami who's posing with a seductive expression. Kendo pats her shoulder in sympathy.

Looking at her mentor's little-to-no hesitation in switching poses, it makes Momo think. Is it—is the point of going to all of these photoshoots centered around their appearance? As in, their reputation? Does Momo have to use her appearance to her benefit? Is this a vital part of being a, a developed female hero, to—to flaunt herself so... so sexually for the sake of profit? Surely it can't be, that isn't logical.

But then, why is Uwabami spending more time posing than helping others? Why is Midnight's outfit the way it is? Why does Mount Lady act as she does? ...Why was Momo's first costume even permitted, what with how thin the fabric was or the way it was designed?

...She sighs again. Kendo looks at her worriedly, but Momo just smiles at her reassuringly. Hopefully it looks reassuring, anyway. She gets another comforting hand on her shoulder regardless, and this time, it stays.

There's worth, being here. There has to be. Momo only has to wait. (And if nothing happens, if she and Kendo are stuck as dolls for Uwabami to prance around with, well. Momo has Aizawa and Tommy for the year, if not until 3-A—she'll learn how to train herself and Kendo when push comes to shove.)

===

When Tsukauchi leaves, Toshinori deflates from his stronger form, rushes to the bathroom, and hurls. His blood stains the white toilet and the clear water and the white tile floors a vibrant yet dark red, as if it's holding all of his rage. He'd hurled soon after he first defeated All for One, too, and it was just like this except his gut was—

As if reminding him it still exists, Toshinori's wound writhes and pulses like a parasite. He coughs, shaking, hunching further in.

Toshinori thought that man was dead. Toshinori thought he had more time if he wasn't. But—now, of all times, when his relationship with his student is so... fragile?

"Nana," he whispers. "Oh, Nana. I'm so, so sorry."

===

Manual's gaze pinned Tenya down like a butterfly with bolts in its wings. It had a façade of nonchalance in it, as if he were just talking about the weather. But the question he just asked—no, the accusation he stated—rings in Tenya's head with no malice: "You're looking for the hero killer, aren't you."

Are Tenya's plans so obvious that Manual's already figured him out?

Tenya clenches his teeth underneath his helmet, thankful that Manual can't see his eyes as the hero goes on a monologue. Tenya tunes out part of what he says in favor of quiet his anger down. It bubbles up constantly when he's able to recognize bits and pieces of this speech because of how frustratingly ignorant Manual is.

Manual is so utterly carefree about it all that it drives Tenya mad. How can he just—dismiss his rightful anger like this? Tensei, his brother, is in the hospital, paralyzed, needles in his skin and just barely living, and Manual has the audacity to tell him to do nothing?! Tenya can't possibly stand by, even if Manual says there's regulations and rules for a reason. For once, people are right when they say that some rules are meant to be broken.

(And what is he supposed to do with his sorrow? Tenya is a legacy, so he cannot show open vulnerability. But this rage, it courses through his veins like a storm, lightning electrifying his nerves, dragging all it can into its wrath. It charges his blood to where he might explode, yet underlying it, all that is there is just—pain.

How does one deal with pain of this magnitude? How does one deal with grief for someone who isn't gone? [There is no "yet" there, and will never be one so long as Tenya breathes.]

How can anyone just make it all so simple and move on?)