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In a dark room, somewhere beneath the surface of the world, a faceless man sat in a chair and smiled.
The room had no windows and no natural light. The walls were lined with monitors... dozens of them, each one displaying a different feed. News broadcasts. Security cameras. Satellite imagery. Information flowing in from every corner of Japan.
One of the monitors showed the courtroom with the verdict. The cheering crowd. The boy in cuffs being kissed by a girl while three hundred people lost their minds.
The faceless man watched it all. But his smile never left his eyeless face.
"Hahahaha..." he laughed softly. "I never thought they would get involved this quickly."
Beside him, a short man in a white lab coat adjusted his glasses.
"True," the doctor said. "The AHSA's involvement was not anticipated at this stage. The Thunder Born's presence in Japan is... premature, by our projections."
He pulled up a tablet and scrolled through data.
"It's so annoying that the HPSC couldn't finish the job even after we gave everything to them on a silver plate."
He set the tablet down with more force than necessary.
"The Nomu modifications. The enhanced Muscular. The timing of the attack. The intelligence on the boy's quirk vulnerabilities. We handed them the weapon, we pointed it at the target, and they still managed to fumble it. Bureaucratic incompetence at its finest."
The faceless man's smile didn't change.
"Well, it's okay," he said in a light tone.
"After all... we always have many plans."
He turned his head — the featureless expanse of his face somehow conveying direction despite the absence of eyes — toward another monitor.
On the screen, a young man sat alone in a dark room. He was thin, pale, his hands scratching absently at his neck. His hair fell across his face in tangled strands.
Shigaraki Tomura was sitting in silence... staring at a hand.
The faceless man watched him the way a gardener watches a seed.
"Patience," he murmured. "Everything in its time."
***
The night had fallen over Japan.
Far away from the faceless man, at the Shuzenji estate, the lights were blazing.
Every window of the mansion was lit. Music drifted through the open doors... which was being played by a certain cat lover. Na, who had found a piano in the drawing room and was playing something lively while Xiaoqing clapped along. The sound mixed with laughter, conversation, and the occasional crash of something breakable meeting the floor, because when this many people celebrated in one house, casualties were inevitable.
The Shuzenji family, the Li family, and the Yaoyorozu family. All of them, together, have the time for their life.
In the main hall, Nia was running at full speed.
"NIA!! NIA, COME BACK HERE!!" Akira yelled, chasing her through the hallway, his bare feet slapping against the hardwood floor.
"NYAHAHAHA!! YOU CAN'T CATCH ME, DADDY!!" Nia screamed, banking around a corner at speed, her claws clicking against the floor as she took the turn.
"AKIRA!! DON'T LET HER NEAR THE KITCHEN!!" Momo appeared from a side corridor running after them. "She already ate three desserts!! If she gets a fourth, she won't sleep until NEXT WEEK!!"
"I'M TRYING!!" Akira yelled back, sliding around the corner and nearly crashing into a vase.
In the living room, Honoka and Reika sat together on a sofa, ignoring the chaos completely. Between them, spread across the coffee table and their laps, were photographs. Dozens of them. Baby photos. Childhood photos. School photos. The accumulated visual history of two children who were now teenagers running through a mansion chasing a cat.
"Look at this one," Honoka said, holding up a photograph of Akira at age four, sitting in a bathtub, covered in bubbles, his red hair plastered to his forehead, his expression one of absolute fury at whoever had decided bath time was necessary. "He used to scream every time I tried to wash his hair."
"Momo was the same!" Reika pulled out a photo of five-year-old Momo, sitting at a tiny desk, surrounded by books that were twice her size, her expression one of intense concentration. "She tried to read an encyclopedia when she was three. She cried because the words were too big."
Both mothers looked at the photos. Then at each other. Then at the hallway, where the sound of their children chasing a cat echoed through the house.
"They'll grow up one day," Honoka said softly. "And they'll forget about us."
"They will NOT," Reika said firmly, her eyes glistening. "They will call us every day. They will visit every weekend. They will bring their children to us and we will spoil them rotten and there is NOTHING they can do about it."
Honoka laughed. Then cried. Then laughed again. Reika joined her, and the two mothers sat on the sofa, crying and laughing simultaneously, holding baby photos of their children while the actual children ran past the doorway after a furball.
Across the room, Kiyomasa Yaoyorozu sat in an armchair. He watched the two women having a mental breakdown for no reason and sighed.
On the drawing room floor, Jian and his wives were dancing. Wei had claimed first dance rights — a slow waltz that Jian executed with surprising grace for a man who spent most of his time in boardrooms. Na cut in after two minutes, changing the tempo to something faster, making Jian spin until his glasses flew off. Xiaoqing abandoned the piano to steal the next dance, and what followed was a three-way competition for Jian's attention that he was losing spectacularly and enjoying completely.
Yu sat on the stairs, watching all of it with a glass of wine and a smile that said she was exactly where she wanted to be.
In the corner of the living room, away from the noise, Recovery Girl sat in a chair that was slightly too large for her. Nezu sat in the chair beside her, a teacup balanced on his knee.
They watched the celebration in silence.
Then Recovery Girl sighed.
"You sure they won't come after us again?"
Nezu took a sip of tea. "For the time being, the HPSC is occupied with their own hearing. The charges Justice Moriyama filed will keep Madam President and her legal team tied up for weeks. The operational logs we submitted are now public record — the media will ensure that every decision the Commission made during the Sports Festival is scrutinised."
He set his cup down.
"Trust me. The HPSC is going to have a very tough time."
Recovery Girl nodded slowly. "I hope so."
She looked up at the ceiling, her aged eyes tracking something that wasn't there.
"What about those two?" she asked.
Nezu followed her gaze toward the stairs, where Mirko and Indra had been sitting earlier before disappearing somewhere upward.
"Well, from what I know, they've known each other for quite a while," Nezu said. "Perhaps they want to talk about some personal matters."
Recovery Girl made a sound that was half-laugh, half-hum.
"I never thought Rumi would find a man," she said. "But I suppose I understand it. Only someone as strong and as calm-headed as Indra could deal with her without losing his mind."
"Hahahaha," Nezu laughed. "That I must agree with."
***
Meanwhile on top of the house, Indra sat on the edge of the roof.
His legs dangled over the side. His hands rested on the tiles beside him. The static charge that usually accompanied him had settled. This was just a man sitting on a rooftop looking at the moon.
The moon was full tonight. Hanging in the sky like a bulb.
Indra looked at the moon the way most people looked at photographs of people they missed.
"Hey."
The voice came from behind him. Softer than usual, a voice rarely used by Rumi.
"Didn't think you'd find me," Indra said without turning.
"Haha, you wish, Sparky. You've got a weird thing for staring at the moon. You always come to the highest point."
He heard her footsteps on the tiles. Careful. Which was unusual — Rumi was never careful with anything. But the tiles were old, and she was wearing something that required more caution than her usual boots.
Heurned around.
And stopped.
Rumi stood on the rooftop behind him. She was wearing a dress. A single piece — white, simple, falling to her knees. Just a white dress that moved with the night wind, her white hair loose around her shoulders, her rabbit ears catching the moonlight.
It wasn't much. But the fact that she had worn something like this was the shocking part.
"You look good," Indra said.
She froze.
For a full second, she just stood there.
"Th— Ahem." She cleared her throat. Her ears twitched. Both of them. Rapidly. "WHAT?? I KNOW I look good!! You don't have to tell me that!!!!!"
Indra watched her panic. The arms waving, her ears twitching, and her face blushing.
And he laughed.
Rumi stopped panicking.
She looked at him. At the face, he rarely ever made. At the laugh she rarely heard, the real one, the one he kept locked away behind layers of professionalism and composure and the weight of being one of the strongest people in the world.
She smiled.
It is good to see him laugh.
He calmed down. The laugh faded to a chuckle, then to silence. He turned back to the moon and patted the tiles beside him.
"Sit with me."
She didn't hesitate. Not for a second. She walked to the edge and sat beside him, her legs dangling next to his, her shoulder close enough to touch but not quite touching.
They sat in silence for a while. The moon above them. The celebration below them. The distance between their shoulders measured in centimetres and years.
Indra looked at her. Then back at the moon.
"You want to know why I like watching the moon?" he asked.
She nodded. She had always wondered. Every time they had been in the same place — at AHSA events, at international summits, during the brief, rare moments when their paths crossed — she had found him like this. On a rooftop, balcony or on whatever high point was available. Staring at the moon.
She had asked before, but he had always changed the subject.
He wasn't changing the subject now.
His smile disappeared, and Rumi could see the sadness filling his eyes.
"Because that day," Indra said, his voice heavy, "the moon looked the same."
The words landed in the space between them as a stone dropped into deep water.
The warmth of the evening vanished. The laughter from below faded to background noise. The celebration, the joy, the relief of the trial's outcome... all of it retreated, pushed aside by seven words and the memory they carried.
Rumi's smile was gone.
She knew what day he was talking about. She didn't need him to say the date, the location, the details. She knew, because she was there too.
Because that day was the reason "rivalry" and "friendship" had become something else. Because that day was the line that divided everything between them into "before" and "after."
The day she wished she could delete from her memory.
The moon hung above them, full and white and exactly the same as it had been on the worst night of their lives.
They sat on the rooftop.
Together.
In silence.
--<<>>--
Time for a short visit to the past....
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